In honor of National Poetry Month in the US, here is one from my T. S. Eliot phase. This phase did not last long, which was good for me, and good for poetry. 

I loved you as my destiny,
hoping to meet infinity
in giving self to self.
Now I am a book upon the shelf.

Human potentiality,
passes into tragedy,
the rending realization
of inhuman limitation:

All things must pass,
slipping through the broken glass,
meeting in conception, hurled,
the moment's destruction of the world.

Man corrupts alone, futilely
enduring, enclosed hopeless virility.

Photo courtesy of marcelabr on Pixabay.com

"I admit that my own experience, as a minor poet, may have jaundiced my outlook; that I am used to having cosmic significances, which I never suspected, extracted from my work (such as it is) by enthusiastic persons at a distance; and to being informed that something which I meant seriously is vers de société; and to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience; so that in consequence I am inclined to believe that people are mistaken about Shakespeare just in proportion to the relative superiority of Shakespeare to myself."

T. S. Eliot

Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca