Lyrics Meme (Survey) - Getting to Know You

The original instructions say to answer these with song lyric quotes.  Some of these are appropriate for that, but some of them aren't.  Instead, I am substituting some poems.  I also edited out questions I had no immediate response to :). Make your own music.   

Who are you?

For I have known them all already, known them all:—Have known the

evenings, mornings, afternoons,    

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room. 

So how should I presume?

--- T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  

I am a smiling woman. 

I am only thirty. 

And like a cat I have nine times to die.

-- Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus." 

What place do you love best?

One thing I know

No matter where I go  

I keep my heart and soul 

In the boondocks.  

---  Little Big Town, "Boondocks"   

What do you look like?

I grow old … I grow old …    

       I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

-- T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

What’s your best quality?

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea,

Yet, never, in extremity,

  It asked a crumb of me.  

--- Emily Dickenson 

What’s your worst quality?

I want a red dress. 

I want it flimsy and cheap, 

I want it too tight, I want to wear it  

until someone tears it off me . . . 

 I want to walk like I'm the only 

woman on earth and I can have my pick. 

I want that red dress bad. 

I want it to confirm 

your worst fears about me . . . 

--- Kim Addonizio, "What Do Women Want?"  

Where do you see yourself in one year?

. . .This is the world, which is fuller

and more difficult to learn than I have said.

You are right to smudge it that way

with the red and then

the orange: the world burns. . .  

--- Margaret Atwood, "You Begin"  

What’s your secret?

So I never could tell where you 

Put your foot, your root, 

I never could talk to you.  

The tongue stuck in my jaw.  

It stuck in a barb wire snare.  

Ich,  ich, ich, ich, 

I could barely speak.  

--- Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"  

Something you like about yourself

. . .To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

--- T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  

What does love mean to you?

There's a blaze of light

In every word

It doesn't matter what you heard  

the holy or the broken Hallelujah.   

 --- Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah."  

and

 Well, maybe there's a god above

but all I've ever learned from love

was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.  

It's not a cry that you hear at night

It's not somebody who's seen the light  

It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah  

--- Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's, "Hallelujah"  

What makes you angry?

What makes you happy?

I do not know much about gods;

but I think that the river is a strong

brown god -- sullen, untamed and

intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first

recognized as a frontier;

Useful,  untrusthworthy,

as a conveyor of commerce; 

Then only a problem confronting the

builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god

is almost forgotten

By the  dwellers in cities -- ever, hoever, 

implacable.

Keeping his seasons, and rages,

destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget.  

Unhonored, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but  

waiting, watching and waiting.   

 --- T.S. Eliot, from Dry Salvages, Part of " The Four Quartets"

What makes you sad?

. . . Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench

where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.  

If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,

I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight.  We could

have a big time.   Danger, shoulder soft.

Do not lie or lean on me. I"m still trying to find a job

for a simple machine isn't better suited. . .  

-- C.D. Wright, "Personals"