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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Afraid
Alone
Call
Friends
Might
Think
Phone
Thinking
Mad
Phones

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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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