Bob Hicok Quotes & Sayings

I love how intimate I've become with failure. — Bob Hicok

When I say my name

I hear a burned-down church. — Bob Hicok

I will beg, will take to my knees, will listen to snow
stroking air, a sky of gasps, will open my mouth,
swallow, somewhere else the sky is falling,
somewhere else it gets back up. — Bob Hicok

In other languages,
you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone- picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hate
about stars is they're not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you
you're not those candles either, how often I realize
I'm not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I'd be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say. — Bob Hicok

Furiously and gorgeously write your ass off. — Bob Hicok

My heart/ is whatever temperature a heart is/ in a man who doesn't believe in heaven. — Bob Hicok

I can't prove this but i can't prove
you're a good person though i suspect you're a good person. — Bob Hicok

Making it in poetry
The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven't I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said. — Bob Hicok

I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two. — Bob Hicok

You might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door one day and the day walks in and stays for years. — Bob Hicok

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,
in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever — Bob Hicok

Then I felt up silence. Then silence and I went all the way. — Bob Hicok

I think clapping is how mourn. — Bob Hicok

Let us all be from somewhere. — Bob Hicok

I like the idea of different
theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. — Bob Hicok

The dead have no ears, no answering machines that we know of, still we call. — Bob Hicok

My life the only thing that has been with me my whole life — Bob Hicok