Dorothea Lasky Quotes

“When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.”
― Dorothea Lasky

“I never noticed anything but you
But you but you
So that I couldn't sleep”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“And I go looking looking for you in the streets
And I never find you
I never find you at all”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“And forgot about me
You forgot about me

And what I meant to you
And then it was over”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“You were
Something or someone I loved
But I am a traveler
And I love no one
But the empty road”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I wrapped myself in leaden sheets
And sank deep into my own infernal ocean”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“In every scene I am waiting for you
To be with me in dreams”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“To get rejected so vehemently
Over and over again
Until some said it was the rejection I was after
No it wasn't
I wanted the intensity that you sometimes promised”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“The sugar the ice on planets and stars
The romance of the evening
Coated in ice from your dead flesh
Already rotting from within”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“There were things I wished I'd said
And done
But it is too late now
So I go
Heavy with my offering
This book, this book”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“You know, I loved you
I loved you
I was wrong”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“You are the kind of thing who takes from me
And never gives anything away

And when you call to me with your synchronicity
I can't help but run to you

You my horrible star
I can't help but run to you when you call for me”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“And I am so alone
And I am alone here
With the idea of ghosts
And the idea of humanity, which is a cruel idea”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“You will realize you love me
But it will be too late

You will cry out for me
I will be long gone

This is not a wish
But what I knew to be so”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Lilaced thing
The soft rustle of beetle wings
In air that is warm and grey
And is not strong”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“What is the dull river Lethe
I don't know, but I think it's evil
And when I drink of it I don't see stars
Instead I see the lime groves”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“My fear extends into the stars
Don't you know I never will”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Why? Because a demon is after me
And he she it has been
Since the day I was born”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I never knew what feeling was
I only felt the pain”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“But there is there to carry us past it”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“He has a box of things that are separate and strange
I think when he looks this way and that
That he is making a play for me
I think in so many ways he does it all for me”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Complainers

Some people don't want to die
Because you can't complain when you're dead
I hope heaven is just a bunch of men lying around
Ready to do what I say
Ready with dicks and some such
When I'm dead I won't be looking for a partner
As much as a heavenly creature
After all I was promised virgins
But I don't care about that as much
As the eyes looking into me in abandon
Like porn but better
Because there will be no screen
There will be no holy divider then
Between me and my brethren
And the smell of sunshine
Will emit from every brow
That's the kind of thing I expect from death
That's the kind of thing I'm waiting for”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“With them, it is all horrible
Like anything could happen”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“What is living
But fear”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I have disillusionment of all o'clocks”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I only felt the pain
The things the you inflicted on me”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“But a person can make a beautiful bed
And murder you in it
And that's what you did
And not fuck me in it”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“And that is what we do with a lover
And no you're not that
That you made sure”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Perverse obsessions
And it is only now
That I realize I am bleeding
Now no air now dead
And that it was your careful strike
That made it so”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“There have been times love has made my human
Instincts into animal ones. 
Once in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were shit
And I, in the light of the candles,
Pushed a sword into myself and fell over a cliff
Into a neverending ocean.
Once a man 5 years my younger
Loved me and then gave me up.
I raged around him like a bear.
I once cheated on a new boyfriend with an old boyfriend.
I cheated on an old boyfriend with a new one.
Love has the ability to make the world kind,
The specifics of one man always blends into another
And turns back into my mother’s kisses on my cheek.
It is I who loves, but it is in turn
The world that loves me back. The world loves
And I love back, the specifics of it
Once in tune. Once we kissed and I was 
Mesmerized by the blondness of his cheek
With the light on it and the sweet smell of the earth.
But still the light on the cheek is the desert lizards
Who will eat us in the afterworld and in the light of the moon
There is the exhaust of love falling over everything'
— In Order to Penetrate Character One Must Have Great Piety”
― Dorothea Lasky, Awe