So I had a wife – beautiful, like you, who tells me, I worry too much; who tells me, I ought to smile more; who gambles, and gets in deep with sharks.

One day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it!

I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars.
– The Joker (from The Dark Knight)

Linford Detweiler writes a good bit of the material for a band called Over the Rhine, which I recommend heartily. The short poem below is also his work. It appears on the band’s website here.

There’s a communion wafer moon
dissolving on the blue tongue of the sky

Sometimes the whole world is nothing
So much
As an altar inviting us
To kneel

Incidentally, the admired poetry idea is borrowed from the admired poet who writes at Agitation of Hands. Strength of Words

“That’s the trouble with you and me,
we always hit the bottom ‘fore we get set free
- I’m so far down, I’m beginning to breathe.”
- Over the Rhine