Gay Poetry Quotes

Sleeping Wrestler

You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it's just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it's thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I'm one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you're going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler ~ Mutsuo Takahashi

Winter noon is on the rise. Weak suns yet alive
are as virtue to suns of that other day.
For the poor town dreams
of surrender, mother
never untender,
mother gallant
and gay. ~ Anne Carson

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You're in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore. ~ Richard Siken

To a Boy

Boy,
you are a hidden watering place under the trees
where, as the day darkens, gentle beasts with calm eyes
appear one after another.

Even if the sun drops flaming at the end of the fields where grass stirs greenly
and a wind pregnant with coolness and night-dew agitates your leafy bush,
it is only a premonition.

The tree of solitude that soars with ferocity,
crowned with a swirling night,
still continues in your dark place.

-Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato ~ Mutsuo Takahashi

The one that burned the hottest is the first to die. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

We thought it was drops
of dew and kissed
cold tears from the crossgrass. ~ Jonas Hallgrimsson

Life into death
Life's other shape,
No rupture,
Only crossing. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

You love too hard,"
he said.
"It's the only way to love,"
I replied.

I am tired of
every person coming my way
telling me that I am too
needy for love.
I am not needy
for love.
I just love. ~ Najwa Zebian

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness. ~ Thomas Moore

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody. ~ Abraham Verghese

West Hollywood blew my mind: gay men walking down the street, kissing and holding hands. I'd never imagined there was a place like that. ~ Shane McAnally

... in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world. ~ Wisława Szymborska

I belong with the trees,
the wind,
the earth beneath my feet.
I belong in the land of enchanting things.
But mostly,
I belong entwined in your kiss,
lost,
yet wild and free,
pure bliss,
like poetry. ~ Melody Lee

There is a strong connection between our ability to use our hands in useful work, and our ability to find happiness in daily life... daily repetitive tasks (are) the compulsive calmness that infuses our pedestrian chores with poetry. - Annie Modessitt ~ Lisa Grunwald

I have always been a fire, and everyone I loved walked away as ashes, until I met a phoenix who was born to love flames. ~ Jenim Dibie

Under star-dark seas and skies of gold
Live those Above and those Below
They sing and weep, both high and deep
While over and under the ocean rolls ~ Ally Condie

There are some griefs so loud
They could bring down the sky,
And there are griefs so still
None knows how deep they lie,
Endured, never expended.
There are old griefs so proud
They never speak a word;
They never can be mended.
And these nourish the will
And keep it iron-hard. ~ May Sarton

Magic, she was discovering, was like poetry. Once you understood the logic, the meter, the rhyme behind it, you could embellish upon it and make it your own. On ~ Elise Kova

Blackberry Beauty has all eyes on her.
She slowly raises her head and smiles at the onlookers.
Her walk is still graceful and delicate.
Her voice is still a whisper.

She says, "I am the beautiful Blackberry. I was made to be way too dark because I am ripe. My beauty comes from my blackberry skin and your ugliness comes from your unripe ones. ~ Sandra Proto

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness. ~ Billy Collins

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.'
'Prose and pudding?'
'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls. ~ John Fowles

I'm not naive to the fact that I'm an out gay actor. ~ Ellen Page

Don't be afraid to wake up your dream... give it a hard nudge, a toss of cold water... make it leap, make it fly. Dreams won't come to life without action. ~ Melody Lee

Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may. ~ Oscar Wilde

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. ~ Audre Lorde

Gay rights and body acceptance are two things I feel very passionately about. ~ Mary Lambert

Being brought up in a Christian home and still identifying as Christian, I get pretty annoyed with the Christian lobbies around the world who say gay marriage destroys the family and all that kind of rubbish. They claim to follow someone who always stood up for the oppressed and marginalised. ~ David Pocock

I hear you knocking but I can't let you in. The last time almost killed me.
Love,
My heart ~ Alfa Holden

Why Roses Crave Thorns"

Petals detach from a wilting bud - a single stem plucked before fully blossomed. They descend in hesitant swirls, too soft and limp to shatter like teardrops. One by one they light to blanket a single shadow below.

She is a rose, young and innocent, with beauty incomparable to shame all others. She has flowered enough to stop the observer in his tracks, awestruck. He is compelled to reach out and touch. The petals delight at a silken caress, her bud everything desirable but defenseless - without a sharp edge to make an admirer pause, to warn the intrusive hand. 'Stay back! Stay back!'

His fingers curl around the stem to tug, and suddenly the rose craves a thorn.

It is madness not to want her and yet madness to cut her down. Let the flower thrive and blush to someday flaunt layers of silken favors! But the world will not have it. A single stem is severed in a selfish moment of desire - a yearning to hold and possess.

Alone and forgotten her petals cry, raining in hesitant swirls where they accumulate to blanket her shadow below. Dry, withered, craving the thorns. Beautiful no more. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous mass
of post-human organic circuitry.
Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.
My love is a man-machine interface gun. ~ Yann Rousselot

Women who focus on style over substance usually find themselves in a big fucking hole, with other men who want to fuck the hole. Oh so smooth, and none sophistacted. Because, you know, how sophisticated can hole-fucking really be ~ Emilie Autumn

You don't believe in leprechauns.
A myth you say they be.
You don't believe in pots-o-gold,
or four-leaf-clover tea.

You don't believe the rainbow's end
alights on treasured finds.
They are illusions meant for fools
you say 'ave lost their minds.

You don't believe in whispering
your wishes to the wind,
where on St. Patrick's holiday
they blow t'wards Ireland.

You don't believe in magic spells
or longings coming true.
Yet, head-to-toe you dress in green
on Patty's Day, you do. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Fare well we call to hearth and hall
Though wind may blow and rain may fall
We must away ere break of day
Over the wood and mountain tall
To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell
In glades beneath the misty fell
Through moor and waste we ride in haste
And wither then we cannot tell
With foes ahead behind us dread
Beneath the sky shall be our bed
Until at last our toil be sped
Our journey done, our errand sped
We must away! We must away!
We ride before the break of day! ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The acute scenes were still on our eyes, immediate and clear in the passion; and there were moments, too, in which we were outsiders and could draw away, as if we were in a plane and rose far, to a high focus above that coast, those cities, and this sea, with sight and feelings sharper than before ~ The Life Of Poetry

Poetry is no less than this:
An unexpected workplace kiss
The brandy in the spirit cage
A salve upon our wounded age
That lustful swell, the secret damp
The yellow of the attic lamp
The drifting, smoky, hazel haze
Of wooded hills on autumn days
Between the thoughts of summer lost
And anvil of the winter frost ~ Martin Newell

It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways. ~ Eric Siblin

I write because…

I write because I love the art and the magic of Literature.

I write because it keeps me safe, sane, and connected to you.

I write because it takes me to the places I want to go and those who wish to join me in the journey; may grasp my hand and my heart; in this stroll through this moment of time.

I write because when no one was there, the word was there: The word has always been and always will be the preeminent being in my universe.

I write because it allows me; to allow you to be understood and we are joined for a moment in time.

I do not write because it comes from a place of grammatical perfection; free of line breaks in perfected poetry; for my history is one of line breaks and imperfections.

I do not come to you from a place of polished and perfected; educated and critiqued.

No! I come to you from a place of raw, real, gutsy, and riveting. What I give you is raw, real, gutsy and riveting; with all of its imperfections and inconsistencies.

You have been touched, you have been curious, and you have been intrigued; you have come back looking, longing, expecting or not…

But then suddenly you were surprised; surprised that you could be moved; surprised that your preconceived ideas had been shattered by one who writes because… ~ Suzanne Steele

The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it. ~ Mary Quant

He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush. ~ Li-Young Lee

You cannot demand your rights, civil or otherwise, if you are unwilling to say what you are. ~ Merle Miller

Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give you
a closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest,
never forgive a man who wants to save you. ~ Traci Brimhall

Pascal," said Dr. Meescham, "had it that since it could not be proven whether God existed, one might as well believe that he did, because there was everything to gain by believing and nothing to lose. This is how it is for me. What do I lose if I choose to believe? Nothing!"
"Take this squirrel, for instance. Ulysses. Do I believe he can type poetry? Sure, I do believe it. There is much more beauty in the world if I believe such a thing is possible. ~ Kate DiCamillo