travail of passion

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of earth-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.
-yeats

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes,
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness-
it's all over for him, he's like an old man.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open,
and everything that does happen will cheat him
Even you, my dear. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.
-rilke

Springsteen is a poet of the average american guy, a real lyric poet of the modern age. Perhaps the reason there are really no good poets currently writing is that the good ones are either writing lyrics or songs. Certainly Dylan and Young qualify as poets in their own right, and Robert Hunter.

Sometimes this town really just seems like a pathetic small little town.

Someone put down Buddhism by calling it "not even wrong." That's pretty bad, when not only are you not right, but you are "not even wrong."