Compelled by love of my birthplace, I gathered together the scattered leaves and returned them to him, who was already silent.

The essential core round which loves that have been lived through make and unmake their halo, that mysterious human being, loved in spite of himself and ourself, interchangeable and yet unchanging; scrutinized as though everything depended on what he is in himself and yet accidental, always the victim of doubt, that doubt which whispers in our ear that any being would have replaced him, if chance had disposed of him and us differently--has this essential core an existence of its own, or does its existence come from an illusion whose seat is inside us?

Write a page of standard prose, as fast as you can, about how you felt the first time you saw your loved one, how you felt the first time you knew you were in love, and how you feel right now about being together. These three moments in time will create the structure of your poem. Replace any weak verbs with stronger verbs and any pronouns with proper nouns. Words depicting the 5 senses work well for love poems. Reread your passage and pick a metaphor to tie the three moments together. Choosing a metaphor is the most fun part so be wild with it. An opening flower is a tried and true metaphor for love, but a cloud that looks like a heart might work even better. Rewrite your passage using the metaphor to describe the three moments. Read your page aloud, change things that sounds "off" to you. Make notes where you feel there's a pause in the flow.
Write the poem, putting a line breaks where you made the notes. Whether you type or write the poem consider framing your poem. Your loved one may want to keep the poem as a memento! Read the poem aloud to the person you love, or present it as a gift to them.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

the moon needs adjusting

Having cleaned his armor and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realized that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love; for the knight errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul. He said to himself:

Even if the girl does everything for your eyes, she must also do something for your mind's history.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

I have been a man and you haven't: This intelligence of ours only serves to replace those impressions which make you love and suffer by faint facsimiles which cause less grief and induce less tenderness. In the rare moments when I recapture all my affection, all my suffering, it's because my feelings have ceased to be based on these false ideas and reverted to something which is the same in you and in me. And that seems to me so superior to everything else that it's only when I've become a dog again, a poor little Zadig like you, that I begin to write and books that are written like that are the only books I like.

Diversity is therefore built into the most intimate experience that we enjoy in our souls, and we have no reason to look for or to require uniformity and stability outside ourselves and in the soul of others. 'I do not at all hate opinions contrary to mine. I am so far from being vexed to see discord between my judgments and others', and from making myself incompatible with the society of men because they are of a different sentiment and party from mine, that on the contrary, since variety is the most general fashion that nature has followed...I find it much rarer to see our humors and plans agree. And there were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

Outlined above are three easy vanishes, but as I said at the beginning, it is the reappearance that is important. One great reappearance that can be used for any vanishes is called "cough up." It involves a little patter and a flourish.

I take it as common cause that part of the human condition, if not the essential flame, is the process of imagining ourselves to be. We are who and what we are only in becoming. We survive, we live, because we try to conceive of the nature and the purpose of being. Our consciousness is the constant invention of what we may be, bounded by the possible.

Freud also asserts, however, that artists possess special abilities that differentiate them radically from the patently neurotic personality. The artistic person, for example, possesses to an especially high degree the power to sublimate (that is, to shift the instinctual drives from their original sexual goals to nonsexual "higher" goals, including the discipline of becoming proficient as an artist);