My hope is they have the Ten Commandments in the schools all over the state of Alabama as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the historical documents that go with this country, that way, children will be able to see and ask, ‘What are these documents’ and a teacher can say, ‘Those are the Ten Commandments and they come from God and this is what they say.’.

Dean Young

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Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

oddities looks lobster

Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.

slaughterhouses enough sea

Just because you’ve had enough by Dean Young

Just because you’ve had enough

had-enough too-much mean

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus. by Dean Young

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

iron odd should

Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages. by Dean Young

Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.

cages bird

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

pages want sleep

Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.

dumbasses errors fall

There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.

ordinary feelings spring

I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

block writing believe

You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkn... by Dean Young

You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

life-is-hard darkness moving

but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud.

taken rain clouds

Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it.

pebbles heart way

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

dream sleep writing

Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.

errors mirrors mean

You want happy endings, read cookbooks. by Dean Young

You want happy endings, read cookbooks.

cookbook happy-endings want

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

coats song lying