B.J. Ward Quotes & Sayings

Leads to Bear Down
Bear Down
gives way to little crown
Crown concedes the Head
then Head produces All
Snip the fruity cord
little King begins to bawl
then grows bored
So begins his fall
— B.J. Ward

You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure — B.J. Ward

As children we learned our shadow
is a darkness we never totally shake
until we lie down, pull the shades,
draw the curtains, shut out the world,
and turn our own light out. — B.J. Ward

Will there be no more irises
in your garden tomorrow morning,
or perhaps any rainbows that covet
your roof will melt into Rorschach pastels
in your gutters and birdsongs in your windows
turn into shrill shriekings as you recall
how, for one moment, you were as brave
and equal to beauty as that which you feel?
Can't a world end gloriously? — B.J. Ward

A poem is a windy city, has broad shoulders
and insistent industry,
barrels into your brain, sticking
its steam-filled, swarmy head
into the delicate, empty bird cages
propped in the rooms of your imagination.
A poem can be rude, downright ignorant
of what you had been thinking about
and holding onto for too much of the day.
More than a city, a poem pushes its hemispheres
against your thoughts, knocking them out
of the windows of your ears.
Every good poem screams, 'Read me
because you're going to die someday! — B.J. Ward

The judge sentenced us to life
real, awake life
out of the jails we had been roaming in
life in prism
then started handing out fines
for parking too long. — B.J. Ward

I have nothing but duct-taped syntax to offer them
noise of jury-rigged verse, of entire days burned
by the focus of a foreman's glare, the labored breath
of an exhausted ride home
while she sings in a tiara and cape
to tuxedoed men and bespangled women.
Yet the world sounds most honest to me
when its timing chain is slightly off.
How it revs, how it almost sputters out
on any given evening after a long day of work. — B.J. Ward

I'd reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive - a rogue who'd refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down. — B.J. Ward

I wanted to shove her
away, thinking of my job, of headlines,
of how this kind of comfort was outside
the behavioral guidelines of my contract.
She began to sob more softly while holding me
tightly, and I let her. I let her have control
of me for that moment. I let her break
behavioral guidelines as more important ones
had been broken on her. And then we stopped
being student and teacher - just a couple people
at a loss when the powerful and unexpected
had been suddenly thrust upon us.
The principal and three students turned the corner
and stopped short. I knew it might be years
before I cleared my name, but far longer
for her to reclaim her life. — B.J. Ward

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly. — B.J. Ward

Above us all rose my mother's hand, dangling from the column shifter
like some battle-tattered flag for independence, surrounded
by the glass shards and quietude of a parking lot gone empty.
My beautiful mother, safer than ever before,
even in defection. ¼ tank of gas, fully empowered,
her car pointed in every direction. — B.J. Ward

These words are my mother's,
my father's, my brother's, my lender's, my garbage
man's - the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere. — B.J. Ward

Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us,
pressed by the sacred strangers
we will never touch. — B.J. Ward

My fist is her flag still furled. Take the cannoli and leave the tuxedo - This is my jackleg opera to the world. — B.J. Ward

As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from? — B.J. Ward

The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling? — B.J. Ward

Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed. — B.J. Ward

In that house I built
a bonfire that illuminated
the fecund earth around it.
And in that split-level
my friend Tommy, only eight
teeth left in his whole head,
dug a huge illegal grave
to bury his father's packhorse.
He marched that sumpter
into the dark study
and shot its head on the left
so it would fall right.
That night, as if to argue
with the day,
Karen and I made love
on the front lawn of the mansion
one cul-de-sac down,
four feet away
from what would be
a window cracked
open to allow the outside
in. — B.J. Ward

From ragbag, stumblebum, peripatetic lout
To bonfire of catnip that burns itself out
Bristled sack of hiss & claws
Cinched at the maw
— B.J. Ward

I am thinking of poets who haven't written well in years
but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago
Aren't they in their own kinds of prisons too? — B.J. Ward

Little bucktoothed alligator
ready to taste my bills.
Make something suffer.
Make something stick. — B.J. Ward