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I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

Stephen Dunn

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Stephen Dunn
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: June 24
Died: 2021
Died: June 24
Engineer
Poet
Queens
New York
Desire
Facts
Everything
Many
Years
Becoming
Make
Worry
Stop
Fact

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A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.
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I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.
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Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?
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I love what's left after love has been tested.
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And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.
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Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
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A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.
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I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
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When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.
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Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.
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I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.
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Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.
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There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.
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exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.
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All good poems are victories over something.
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Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.
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