Kevin Young Quotes & Sayings

Love is strange & almost always too late. — Kevin Young

Deep Song
Belief is what
buries us - that
& the belief in belief
No longer
do I trust liltlessness
- leeward
is the world's
way - Go on
plunge in
- the lungs will
let us float.
Joy is the mile-
high ledge
the leap - a breath
above the lip of the abandoned
quarry - belief
the dark the deep. — Kevin Young

Love is strange & almost always too late. — Kevin Young

Darling, it is
your darkness
where I want
my body to be
buried. You burn me
at both ends, send
the geese bumping
within my skin. — Kevin Young

Like hot food
I love you
like warm
bread & cold
cuts, butter
sammiches
or, days later, after
Thanksgiving
when I want
whatever's left — Kevin Young

How humid the heart, its messy rooms! We eat spicy food, sweat like wood and smolder like the coal mine that caught fire decades ago, yet still smokes more than my great-uncle who will not quit- or go out- — Kevin Young

Letters
I've never sent.

This life
we're only renting.

Battered the world is -
bartered -
wander over it
the stars finding

us wanting. — Kevin Young

Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of *never again*.
Do not even write this poetry but find it, come across it, and step over it. The helpless ant that in the end can lift more than ten times its weight: that is a poetry. — Kevin Young

At night I count
not the stars
but the dark. — Kevin Young

To waste
this heart once more
& have you
here, not silent, only
quiet, as before. — Kevin Young

In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor — Kevin Young

Not the storm
but the calm
that slays me. — Kevin Young

Like God
Gumbo is hard
to get right
& I don't bother
asking for it outside
my mother's house.
Like life, there's no one
way to do it,
& a hundred ways,
from here to Sunday,
to get it dead wrong. — Kevin Young

what you must
understand is that
the herald & the horror
are the same. — Kevin Young

Daylight Savings
Like the money the light
doesn't go
as far these days — Kevin Young

Errata

Baby, give me just
one more hiss

We must lake it fast
morever

I want to cold you
in my harms

& never get lo

I live you so much
it perts!

Baby, jive me gust
one more bliss

Whisper your
neat nothings in my near

Can we hock each other
one tore mime?

All light wrong?

Baby give me just
one more briss

My won & homely

You wake me meek
in the needs

Mill you larry me?

Baby, hive me just
one more guess

With this sing
I'll thee shed — Kevin Young

It never ends, the bruise
of being — Kevin Young

Holding tight / to their pocketbooks / at the pearly gates / just in case. — Kevin Young

How I would sing

like a kettle to keep you — Kevin Young

I now know pain
is part of any journey-
that this is the opposite
of grief, but grief
the only way I know
to describe waiting
and waiting without
knowing, hoping one day
joy will arrive. — Kevin Young