I've always been moved by simplicity and depth.

Lately, I've been drawn back into the mad world of Richard Brautigan. Every now and then I revisit a collection of poems called Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, a book I come back to when I need to remember who I am.

My copy is from 1970. The only thing holding it together is the masking tape at the spine. Most of the pages are dog-eared from my pausing at them over the years, and coffee stained. A few have been torn out and I'm not sure where they are now.

I always wondered where it had been before becoming mine.

This book was my first introduction to Brautigan when I was 16. His writing is so simple and so deep that it totally captures you in a matter of seconds, then you're hooked. If you're lucky, you find things, like these poems, that move you for a lifetime.

Start here and don't stop until you own everything he's ever written.

If all girls had mouths
like yours I'd be done for.

from the poem Elegy Scale by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

How could that pair of lines not bring a sly smile to your face?

That's what happens after I read that poem -- hell, any poem -- from Calvocoressi's collection Apocalyptic Swing. I'm either smiling at a clever phrase, reveling in her choice of words, or utterly seduced by the story the lines of verse have whispered into my ear.

This is the best, most stirring collection of poems on boxing, jazz, religion, small towns, and big cities that I've read in a long time.

Check it:

Epistle From Her Daughter
           Yet to Be Consummated Back East

Love, you'll stick your finger into
anything. Sweet cream, valve oil, the mouth

of every damn baby that gargles.
You're insatiable, and that

city will screw you within an inch
of your life. Leave before the sun goes

down, before the cars start cruising
from Sunset to the canyons

and someone writes a song that goes
something like The city is burning

as the city startles and burns.
I've got no chance in the face of all

that starlight. Those boys on the beach?
All muscle and grass and nothing

but time. Come back. Pack your cheap bag
and get your ass on that bus.

Oh yeah. More, please.

Miguel Piñero was a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, actor, ex-con, ex-addict, and co-founder of the Nuyorican poetry movement.

Piñero's most well-known poem -- A Lower East Side Poem -- is an elegy to the gritty and depraved Lower East Side of Manhattan in the '70s and '80s. The first stanza:

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

And the last stanza:

I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don't wanna rest in long island cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying & new birth crying
so please when I die
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side.

That's just what his friend and fellow Nuyorican poetry movement co-founder Miguel Albarín did when Piñero died in 1988. Here is the story of that procession.

Another of Piñero's great poems is Seekin' The Cause.

he never gave his love to children
he never gave his heart to old people
& never did he ever give his soul to his people
he never gave his soul to his people
because he was busy seekin' a cause
busy
busy perfectin' his voice to harmonize the national anthem with spiro t agnew
busy perfectin' his jive talk so that his flunkiness wouldn't show
busy perfectin' his viva-la-policia speech
downtown, uptown, midtown, crosstown
his body was found all over town
seekin' a cause
seekin' the cause

Check out Piñero himself reading part of Seekin' The Cause in this video.

It's pretty powerful stuff.