# Off-Topic Discussion > Artists' Corner >  >  Poem Findings

## Xox

Poems you like (not ones you wrote, ones by other people). I'll start off with something I discovered through stumbleupon yesterday..



I Met A Genius
*Charles Bukowski*

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train 
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it’s not pretty.

it was the first time I’d 
realized 
that.

----------


## AURON

Dreams
*Langston Hughes*

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

----------


## Siиdяed

Some general suggestions of favoured poets and works of particular note:

*T.S. Eliot* (_The Waste Land_, _The Hollow Men_)
Modernist awesomeness. Referential to the point of self-depricating, almost an attack on critique and interpretation. Crafts words like a fucking pro.
*Philip Larkin*
Misanthrope, death-fearing, womanizer. With irony everywhere.
*Robert Browning*
Sinister epics. Plus _Dark Tower_. I mean. _Dark_ damn _Tower_.
*Allen Ginsberg* (Anything from the _Howl_ collection)
That he's Beat generation is all you need to know. Goddamn the 50s were fine.
*W.H. Auden*
*Dylan Thomas*
*Stevie Smith* (_Waving Not Drowning_)
*John Betjeman* (_Slough_, _Narcissus_)
_Slough_ is just like. Real as fuck. Captures and critiques mundanity.
*W.B. Yeats*

If I had to pick some?

_The Second Coming_, *W.B. Yeats*

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

_Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night_, *Dylan Thomas*

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

----------


## Xox

When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be
*John Keats*

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

----------


## Siиdяed

Poem I ought to be discussing in a medieval lit seminar in an hour or so. But my eye is leaking and my nose is running and my head hurts and I feel like dying (or just sleeping through it and watching _Ponyo_ at the cinema afterwards).

*The Wanderer*

Worth checking the different translations. As a poem it has some very decent moments (you may recognise the 'Where is the horse now?' section, as Tolkien plays on it), though after several Anglo-Saxon works the general message of EARTHISSHITTHESEDAYSCAN'TWAITFORHEAVEN does get a little overdone.

And something outside the course:

_The Annihilation of Nothing_, *Thom Gunn*

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,
More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,
Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks - images burst with fire
Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided
Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.
Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
     Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

----------


## XeL

I was looking through my mom's huuuuuge collection of poetry books when i came across this Vietnamese folk poem:
*
A tiny bird*

A tiny bird with red feathers,
a tiny bird with black beak
drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
Perhaps I must leave you.

It's translated by John Balaban. Too bad I couldn't read the original text in vietnamese.

----------


## Xox

Stanzas
*Emily* (debatable, some say Charlotte) *Brontë* 

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

----------


## CanceledCzech

*my old man*, _by charles bukowski_

16 years old
during the depression
Id come home drunk
and all my clothing
shorts, shirts, stockings
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown out on the
front lawn and about the
street.

my mother would be
waiting behind a tree:
Henry, Henry, dont
go in . . .hell
kill you, hes read
your stories . . .

I can whip his
ass . . .

Henry, please take
this . . .and
find yourself a room.

but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so Id be back
again.

one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, this is
a great short story.
I said, o.k.,
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had observed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.

somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.

so I told him,
o.k., old man, you can
have it.

and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess thats
as close
as we ever got.

(Bukowski is a master)

----------


## acatalephobic

I shall do my best not to go overboard here. Restraint.



*Spoiler* for _XX. by Isel Rivero_: 



XX.

Numb the senses
cripple them
chill them in portions of ices
spread them everywhere
forget them
stuff them with food and alcohol and laugh
with quiet lighted orgies of the mind
let them sink deep inside
and fall away in a breath of anonymity





*Spoiler* for _Love Is A Parallax by Sylvia Plath_: 



Love Is A Parallax

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
    in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
    where wave pretends to drench real sky.' 

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
    or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
    is our life's whole nemesis. 

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
    about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
    implacably from twelve to one. 

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
    and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
    who insists his playmates run. 

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
    like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
    should inflame the sleeping town. 

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
    caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
    playing his prodigal charades. 

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
    blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
    graves all carol in reply. 

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
    brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
    while footlights flare and houselights dim. 

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
    the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
    joins his enemies' recruits. 

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
    there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
    an insight like the flight of birds: 

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
    some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
    cycling phoenix never stops. 

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
    and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
    away our rationed days and weeks. 

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
    in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
    the simple sum of heart plus heart.





*Spoiler* for _La Condition Humaine by Robert Lowell_: 



La Condition Humaine 
(for Harriet)

Should someone human, not just our machinery
firing on its fling, do for the world and us,
surely they'll say he chose the lesser evil;
our wars were better than their marriages,
ape on she-ape boozing down Saturday night--
home things can't stand up to the strain of the earth.
Now when I wake to their airs of steaks and Ives;
the fade-out classic still lifts my fell of hair--
David once lulled the dark nucleus of Saul--
as you at twelve must, at twenty, fifty, ninety, 
you in some summer that has lost my name;
no date I wish you will seem long enough,
if probability is tied to fact--
Only acid seafish think the air is fresh.





*Spoiler* for _You, You Only, Exist by Rainer Maria Rilke_: 





You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.

To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!

----------


## Siиdяed

_Ozymandias_, or, _On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below_, *Horace Smith*

    In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
    Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
    The only shadow that the Desert knows:
    "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
    "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
    "The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
    Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
    The site of this forgotten Babylon.
    We wonder, and some Hunter may express
    Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
    Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
    He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
    What powerful but unrecorded race
    Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

----------


## CanceledCzech

*Epitaph* _by Don Blanding_
Do not carve on stone or wood,
"He was honest" or "He was good."
Write in smoke on a passing breeze
Seven words… and the words are these,
Telling all that a volume could,
"He lived, he laughed and… he understood."


*Spoiler* for _XeL's Viet poem..._: 







> I was looking through my mom's huuuuuge collection of poetry books when i came across this Vietnamese folk poem:
> *
> A tiny bird*
> 
> A tiny bird with red feathers,
> a tiny bird with black beak
> drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
> Perhaps I must leave you.
> 
> It's translated by John Balaban. Too bad I couldn't read the original text in vietnamese.



;_; I wish I could too... you've stumbled upon another reason for my insatiable lust for languages.

----------


## Siиdяed

*The Cats*, _H. P. Lovecraft_

Babels of blocks to the high heavens towering
Flames of futility swirling below;
Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flowering,
Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.

Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,
Cobwebs of cable to nameless things spun;
Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers
Streams of live foetor that rots in the sun.

Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,
Shrieking and ringing and crawling insane,
Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,
Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.

Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal.
Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,
Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,
Yelling the Garden of Pluto's red rune.

Tall towers and pyramids ivy'd and crumbling,
Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber'd streets;
Bleak Arkham bridges o'er rivers whose rumbling
Joins with no voice as the thick horde retreats.

Belfries that buckle against the moon totter,
Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac'd,
And living to answer the wind and the water,
Only the lean cats that howl in the wastes.

----------


## acatalephobic

So much of that poem is reading it aloud.

----------


## CanceledCzech

Fucking amazing. Sinny has just shown me my new favorite poem.

----------


## Spenner

*anyone lived in a pretty how town by E. E. Cummings*

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain 


So surreal, almost hilariously so. I love e.e. cummings' poetry.

----------


## acatalephobic

When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done.
People did not like it here."

----------


## Siиdяed

This is. Easily a favourite. And nice to see e.e. about, Spenner.

_High Windows_, *Philip Larkin*

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, _That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds._ And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.


Hell, I'm in the mood for more. Here:

_In a Station of the Metro_, *Ezra Pound*

            IN A STATION OF THE METRO

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
    Petals on a wet, black bough. 

_On Poet-Ape_, *Ben Jonson*

Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
As we, the robbed, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own.
And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose 'twas first, and after-times
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool, as if half eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.

----------


## Spenner

I love the one by Ezra Pound especially-- last year I used it for a poetry analysis in English, and was surprised on how much one can elaborate on such a delicately compacted piece.

_A Dream Within A Dream_ by Edgar Allan Poe 

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

_the sky was_ by e.e. cummings




```
the sky was

the
      sky
            was
can    dy    lu
minous
          edible
spry
        pinks shy
lemons
greens    coo    l choc
olate
s.

  un    der,
  a    lo
co
mo
      tive      s      pout
                                ing
                                      vi
                                      o
                                      lets
```

----------


## Xox

_The Portrait_

Robert Graves

She speaks always in her own voice
Even to strangers; but those other women
Exercise their borrowed, or false, voices
Even on sons and daughters.

She can walk invisibly at noon
Along the high road; but those other women
Gleam phosphorescent -- broad hips and gross fingers --
Down every lampless alley.

She is wild and innocent, pledged to love
Through all disaster; but those other women
Decry her for a witch or a common drab
And glare back when she greets them.

Here is her portrait, gazing sidelong at me,
The hair in disarray, the young eyes pleading:
"And you, love? As unlike those other men
As I those other women?"

-

Spenner: That's one of my favourite poems of all time. _The Dream._

----------


## Xox

_We Wear the Mask_

Paul Laurence Dunbar 

WE wear the mask that grins and lies, 
    It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 
    This debt we pay to human guile; 
    With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, 
    And mouth with myriad subtleties.

    Why should the world be over-wise, 
    In counting all our tears and sighs? 
    Nay, let them only see us, while 
            We wear the mask.

    We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 
    To thee from tortured souls arise. 
    We sing, but oh the clay is vile 
    Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 
    But let the world dream otherwise, 
            We wear the mask!

----------


## CanceledCzech

I don't know if anyone else would consider this to be poetry; I do.


*Spoiler* for _The Most Beautiful Woman In Town_: 





The Most Beautiful Woman In Town
Charles Bukowski

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl
in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes
to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that
would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her
body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some
said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To
the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not.
And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it
came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men.
Her sisters accused her of misusing her beauty, of not using her mind enough, but Cass
had mind and spirit; she painted, she danced, she sang, she made things of clay, and when
people were hurt either in the spirit or the flesh, Cass felt a deep grieving for them.
Her mind was simply different; her mind was simply not practical. Her sisters were jealous
of her because she attracted their men, and they were angry because they felt she didn't
make the best use of them. She had a habit of being kind to the uglier ones; the so-called
handsome men revolted her- "No guts," she said, "no zap. They are riding on
their perfect little earlobes and well- shaped nostrils...all surface and no
insides..." She had a temper that came close to insanity, she had a temper that some
call insanity. Her father had died of alcohol and her mother had run off leaving the
girls alone. The girls went to a relative who placed them in a convent. The convent had
been an unhappy place, more for Cass than the sisters. The girls were jealous of Cass and
Cass fought most of them. She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending
herself in two fights. There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar
rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it. I met her at the West End
Bar several nights after her release from the convent. Being youngest, she was the last of
the sisters to be released. She simply came in and sat next to me. I was probably the
ugliest man in town and this might have had something to do with it.
"Drink?" I asked.
"Sure, why not?"
I don't suppose there was anything unusual in our conversation that night, it was
simply in the feeling Cass gave. She had chosen me and it was as simple as that. No
pressure. She liked her drinks and had a great number of them. She didn't seem quite of
age but they served he anyhow. Perhaps she had forged i.d., I don't know. Anyhow, each
time she came back from the restroom and sat down next to me, I did feel some pride. She
was not only the most beautiful woman in town but also one of the most beautiful I had
ever seen. I placed my arm about her waist and kissed her once.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.
"Yes, of course, but there's something else... there's more than your
looks..."
"People are always accusing me of being pretty. Do you really think I'm
pretty?"
"Pretty isn't the word, it hardly does you fair."
Cass reached into her handbag. I thought she was reaching for her handkerchief. She
came out with a long hatpin. Before I could stop her she had run this long hatpin through
her nose, sideways, just above the nostrils. I felt disgust and horror. She looked at me
and laughed, "Now do you think me pretty? What do you think now, man?" I pulled
the hatpin out and held my handkerchief over the bleeding. Several people, including the
bartender, had seen the act. The bartender came down:
"Look," he said to Cass, "you act up again and you're out. We don't need
your dramatics here."
"Oh, fuck you, man!" she said.
"Better keep her straight," the bartender said to me.
"She'll be all right," I said.
"It's my nose, I can do what I want with my nose."
"No," I said, "it hurts me."
"You mean it hurts you when I stick a pin in my nose?"
"Yes, it does, I mean it."
"All right, I won't do it again. Cheer up."
She kissed me, rather grinning through the kiss and holding the handkerchief to her
nose. We left for my place at closing time. I had some beer and we sat there talking. It
was then that I got the perception of her as a person full of kindness and caring. She
gave herself away without knowing it. At the same time she would leap back into areas of
wildness and incoherence. Schitzi. A beautiful and spiritual schitzi. Perhaps some man,
something, would ruin her forever. I hoped that it wouldn't be me. We went to bed and
after I turned out the lights Cass asked me,
"When do you want it? Now or in the morning?"
"In the morning," I said and turned my back.
In the morning I got up and made a couple of coffees, brought her one in bed. She
laughed.
"You're the first man who has turned it down at night."
"It's o.k.," I said, "we needn't do it at all."
"No, wait, I want to now. Let me freshen up a bit."
Cass went into the bathroom. She came out shortly, looking quite wonderful, her long
black hair glistening, her eyes and lips glistening, her glistening... She displayed her
body calmly, as a good thing. She got under the sheet.
"Come on, lover man."
I got in. She kissed with abandon but without haste. I let my hands run over her body,
through her hair. I mounted. It was hot, and tight. I began to stroke slowly, wanting to
make it last. Her eyes looked directly into mine.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"What the hell difference does it make?" she asked.
I laughed and went on ahead. Afterwards she dressed and I drove her back to the bar but
she was difficult to forget. I wasn't working and I slept until 2 p.m. then got up and
read the paper. I was in the bathtub when she came in with a large leaf- an elephant ear.
"I knew you'd be in the bathtub," she said, "so I brought you something
to cover that thing with, nature boy."
She threw the elephant leaf down on me in the bathtub.
"How did you know I'd be in the tub?"
"I knew."
Almost every day Cass arrived when I was in the tub. The times were different but she
seldom missed, and there was the elephant leaf. And then we'd make love. One or two nights
she phoned and I had to bail her out of jail for drunkenness and fighting.
"These sons of bitches," she said, "just because they buy you a few
drinks they think they can get into your pants."
"Once you accept a drink you create your own trouble."
"I thought they were interested in me, not just my body."
"I'm interested in you and your body. I doubt, though, that most men can see
beyond your body."
I left town for 6 months, bummed around, came back. I had never forgotten Cass, but
we'd had some type of argument and I felt like moving anyhow, and when I got back i
figured she'd be gone, but I had been sitting in the West End Bar about 30 minutes when
she walked in and sat down next to me.
"Well, bastard, I see you've come back."
I ordered her a drink. Then I looked at her. She had on a high- necked dress. I had
never seen her in one of those. And under each eye, driven in, were 2 pins with glass
heads. All you could see were the heads of the pins, but the pins were driven down into
her face.
"God damn you, still trying to destroy your beauty, eh?"
"No, it's the fad, you fool."
"You're crazy."
"I've missed you," she said.
"Is there anybody else?"
"No there isn't anybody else. Just you. But I'm hustling. It costs ten bucks. But
you get it free."
"Pull those pins out."
"No, it's the fad."
"It's making me very unhappy."
"Are you sure?"
"Hell yes, I'm sure."
Cass slowly pulled the pins out and put them back in her purse.
"Why do you haggle your beauty?" I asked. "Why don't you just live with
it?"
"Because people think it's all I have. Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You
don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you you know it's for
something else."
"O.k.," I said, "I'm lucky."
"I don't mean you're ugly. People just think you're ugly. You have a fascinating
face."
"Thanks."
We had another drink.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Nothing. I can't get on to anything. No interest."
"Me neither. If you were a woman you could hustle."
"I don't think I could ever make contact with that many strangers, it's
wearing."
"You're right, it's wearing, everything is wearing."
We left together. People still stared at Cass on the streets. She was a beautiful
woman, perhaps more beautiful than ever. We made it to my place and I opened a bottle of
wine and we talked. With Cass and I, it always came easy. She talked a while and I would
listen and then i would talk. Our conversation simply went along without strain. We seemed
to discover secrets together. When we discovered a good one Cass would laugh that laugh-
only the way she could. It was like joy out of fire. Through the talking we kissed and
moved closer together. We became quite heated and decided to go to bed. It was then that
Cass took off her high -necked dress and I saw it- the ugly jagged scar across her throat.
It was large and thick.
"God damn you, woman," I said from the bed, "god damn you, what have you
done?
"I tried it with a broken bottle one night. Don't you like me any more? Am I still
beautiful?"
I pulled her down on the bed and kissed her. She pushed away and laughed, "Some
men pay me ten and I undress and they don't want to do it. I keep the ten. It's very
funny."
"Yes," I said, "I can't stop laughing... Cass, bitch, I love you...stop
destroying yourself; you're the most alive woman I've ever met."
We kissed again. Cass was crying without sound. I could feel the tears. The long black
hair lay beside me like a flag of death. We enjoined and made slow and somber and
wonderful love. In the morning Cass was up making breakfast. She seemed quite calm and
happy. She was singing. I stayed in bed and enjoyed her happiness. Finally she came over
and shook me,
"Up, bastard! Throw some cold water on your face and pecker and come enjoy the
feast!"
I drove her to the beach that day. It was a weekday and not yet summer so things were
splendidly deserted. Beach bums in rags slept on the lawns above the sand. Others sat on
stone benches sharing a lone bottle. The gulls whirled about, mindless yet distracted. Old
ladies in their 70's and 80's sat on the benches and discussed selling real estate left
behind by husbands long ago killed by the pace and stupidity of survival. For it all,
there was peace in the air and we walked about and stretched on the lawns and didn't say
much. It simply felt good being together. I bought a couple of sandwiches, some chips and
drinks and we sat on the sand eating. Then I held Cass and we slept together about an
hour. It was somehow better than lovemaking. There was flowing together without tension.
When we awakened we drove back to my place and I cooked a dinner. After dinner I suggested
to Cass that we shack together. She waited a long time, looking at me, then she slowly
said, "No." I drove her back to the bar, bought her a drink and walked out. I
found a job as a parker in a factory the next day and the rest of the week went to
working. I was too tired to get about much but that Friday night I did get to the West End
Bar. I sat and waited for Cass. Hours went by . After I was fairly drunk the bartender
said to me, "I'm sorry about your girlfriend."
"What is it?" I asked.
"I'm sorry, didn't you know?"
"No."
"Suicide. She was buried yesterday."
"Buried?" I asked. It seemed as though she would walk through the doorway at
any moment. How could she be gone?
"Her sisters buried her."
"A suicide? Mind telling me how?"
"She cut her throat."
"I see. Give me another drink."
I drank until closing time. Cass was the most beautiful of 5 sisters, the most
beautiful in town. I managed to drive to my place and I kept thinking, I should have
insisted she stay with me instead of accepting that "no." Everything about her
had indicated that she had cared. I simply had been too offhand about it, lazy, too
unconcerned. I deserved my death and hers. I was a dog. No, why blame the dogs? I got up
and found a bottle of wine and drank from it heavily. Cass the most beautiful girl in town
was dead at 20. Outside somebody honked their automobile horn. They were very loud and
persistent. I sat the bottle down and screamed out: "GOD DAMN YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH
,SHUT UP!" The night kept coming and there was nothing I could do.

----------


## Spenner

*here's to opening and upward* - e.e. cummings

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

*a pretty a day* by e.e. cummings

a pretty a day
(and every fades)
is here and away
(but born are maids
to flower an hour
in all,all)

o yes to flower
until so blithe
a doer a wooer
some limber and lithe
some very fine mower
a tall;tall

some jerry so very
(and nellie and fan)
some handsomest harry
(and sally and nan
they tremble and cower
so pale:pale)

for betty was born
to never say nay
but lucy could learn
and lily could pray
and fewer were shyer
than doll. doll

He is by far my most favourable poet. Such a pleasure to let my eyes soak in when I'm relaxed and meditative.

----------


## Siиdяed

I hadn't realise Joyce wrote poetry as well. Initial impressions are a bit bland. Might try and give them a closer look later.

This is the best I found so far.

_Ecce Puer_, *James Joyce*

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

----------


## Siиdяed

Not a poem. But a good find and worth reading.

_Belief and Technique for Modern Prose_, *Jack Kerouac*

A list of thirty "essentials" for writing.

   1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
   2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
   3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
   4. Be in love with your life
   5. Something that you feel will find its own form
   6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
   7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
   8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
   9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You're a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

On a side note, I'd ignore 3. I know Kerouac didn't live by this rule, and given that he died young thanks to a life of excessive drinking, I wouldn't trust his advice on alcohol.

----------


## CanceledCzech

A few minutes ago, I wrote a poem of my own. First time I actually wrote something with the intent of working on it in a long time. I stumbled upon this a few minutes later, makes my poem look like the trite pissing of a child (which it is).

Absolutely Preposterous
_-QuietMan_

So, I walked into my bedroom and got
punched in the stomach when I realized
that you weren’t really there, on the bed
conspicuously eyeballing me and taking up
as much space as you possibly could; it was a
feline ability at which you eclipsed all others
and after fifteen years by my side, it’ll take
more than a couple weeks to get used
to the idea of never seeing you again;
except in the plastic- wrapped, plain
cardboard box with the yellow sticker
so starkly dominating in its finality and
reminding me how ridiculous it is
that you, of everyone, have been reduced to
the same residue that the rest of us
mere mortals will someday be reduced to.

From: http://www.redbubble.com/people/quie...y-preposterous

----------


## Xox

_I saw a man pursuing the horizon_
Stephen Crane

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never -"

"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

----------


## Siиdяed

I'm stuck as to whether I like that poem or not, Xox.

_Stuck_.

Realised there's a free poetry evening every Wednesday somewhere in the university. With alcohol served. I'll investigate, find some shit student pretentious poems, and share for you kids.

----------


## Siиdяed

In the meanwhile, have some New York poetry schooling.

_A Step Away From Them_, *Frank O'Hara*

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, e bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

----------


## Xox

I like, Sin. 
My latest and favourit-est. 


_Much Madness is divinest Sense_
Emily Dickinson 

Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --

----------


## Siиdяed

*Bowery Blues*, _Jack Kerouac_

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing

Saying

We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

----------


## acatalephobic

To see clearly without flinching,
without turning away,
this is agony, the eyes taped open
two inches from the sun.

----------


## acatalephobic

Just realized I didn't bother to include the rest.

It's here.

----------


## Xox

You Who Never Arrived - Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. 
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...

----------


## Tara

A Night With a Wolf

_High up on the lonely mountains,
Where the wild men watched and waited;
Wolves in the forest and bears in the bush,
And I on my path belated.

The rain and the night together
Came down, and the wind came after,
Bending the props of the pine tree roof,
And snapping many a rafter.

I crept along in the darkness,
Stunned, and bruised, and blinded;
Crept to a fir with thick set boughs
And a sheltering rock behind it.

There, from the blowing and raining,
Crouching, I sought to hide me.
Something rustled; two green eyes shone;
And a wolf lay down beside me!

His wet fur pressed against me;
Each of us warmed the other;
Each of us felt, in the stormy dark,
That beast and man were brother.

And when the falling forest
No longer crashed in warning,
Each of us went from our hiding place
Forth in the wild, wet morning._

and a million others but this is all I can remember right now.

----------


## khh

I've always been partial this German poem 

Der Erlkönig
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" 
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" 
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." 

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" 
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." 

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." 

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" 
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. "

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." 
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" 

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

----------


## Erii

I can't find the author because there is a lot of versions of this Dx but I love this one

Ladies and Gentlemen, skinny and stout,
I'll tell you a tale I know nothing about;
The Admission is free, so pay at the door,
Now pull up a chair and sit on the floor.

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight;
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.

A blind man came to watch fair play,
A mute man came to shout "Horray!"
A deaf policeman heard the noise and
Came to stop those two dead boys.

He lived on the corner in the middle of the block,
In a two-story house on a vacant lot;
A man with no legs came walking by,
and kicked the lawman in his thigh.

He crashed through a wall without making a sound,
into a dry creek bed and suddenly drowned;
The long black hearse came to cart him away,
But he ran for his life and is still gone today.

I watched from the corner of the big round table,
The only eyewitness to facts of my fable;
But if you doubt my lies are true,
Just ask the blind man, he saw it too.

----------


## Tara

The Turtle

_The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile._

----------


## saltyseedog

do songs count as poems??

(When this began)
I had nothing to say
And I get lost in the nothingness inside of me
(I was confused)
And I let it all out to find
That I’m not the only person with these things in mind
(Inside of me)
But all that they can see the words revealed
Is the only real thing that I’ve got left to feel
(Nothing to lose)
Just stuck, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

[Chorus]
I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain I’ve felt so long
(Erase all the pain till it’s gone)
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m close to something real
I wanna find something I’ve wanted all along
Somewhere I belong

And I’ve got nothing to say
I can’t believe I didn’t fall right down on my face
(I was confused)
Looking everywhere only to find
That it’s not the way I had imagined it all in my mind
(So what am I)
What do I have but negativity
’Cause I can’t justify the way, everyone is looking at me
(Nothing to lose)
Nothing to gain, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

[Repeat Chorus]

I will never know myself until I do this on my own
And I will never feel anything else, until my wounds are healed
I will never be anything till I break away from me
I will break away, I'll find myself today

[Repeat Chorus]

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m somewhere I belong
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I’m somewhere I belong
Somewhere I belong

----------


## sinemac

2 pages and no Blake? I will break the drought.

*A Poison Tree*

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree

----------


## Taosaur

Hello this thread  :smiley:  I could post here every day for years...

Today I have this:

Charles on Fire
by James Merrill

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual 
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

----------


## stormcrow

Percy Bysshe Shelley-Mutability

We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.




Walt Whitman- Song of the Universal

COME, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.

In this broad Earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed Perfection.

By every life a share, or more or less,
None born but it is born--conceal'd or unconceal'd, the seed is
waiting.


Lo! keen-eyed, towering Science! 10
As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking,
Successive, absolute fiats issuing.

Yet again, lo! the Soul--above all science;
For it, has History gather'd like a husk around the globe;
For it, the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.

In spiral roads, by long detours,
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
For it, the partial to the permanent flowing,
For it, the Real to the Ideal tends.

For it, the mystic evolution; 20
Not the right only justified--what we call evil also justified.

Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge, festering trunk--from craft and guile and tears,
Health to emerge, and joy--joy universal.

Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority--the varied, countless frauds of men and
States,

Electric, antiseptic yet--cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the good is universal.


Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow,
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, 30
High in the purer, happier air.

From imperfection's murkiest cloud,
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
One flash of Heaven's glory.

To fashion's, custom's discord,
To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
Soothing each lull, a strain is heard, just heard,
From some far shore, the final chorus sounding.


O the blest eyes! the happy hearts!
That see--that know the guiding thread so fine, 40
Along the mighty labyrinth!


And thou, America!
For the Scheme's culmination--its Thought, and its Reality,
For these, (not for thyself,) Thou hast arrived.

Thou too surroundest all;
Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, Thou too, by pathways broad and
new,
To the Ideal tendest.

The measur'd faiths of other lands--the grandeurs of the past,
Are not for Thee--but grandeurs of Thine own;
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all, 50
All eligible to all.

All, all for Immortality!
Love, like the light, silently wrapping all!
Nature's amelioration blessing all!
The blossoms, fruits of ages--orchards divine and certain;
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual Images ripening.


Give me, O God, to sing that thought!
Give me--give him or her I love, this quenchless faith
In Thy ensemble. Whatever else withheld, withhold not from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space; 60
Health, peace, salvation universal.

Is it a dream?
Nay, but the lack of it the dream,
And, failing it, life's lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.

----------


## DeletePlease

*Israfel*
_Edgar Allan Poe_

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamored moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings-
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.

But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty-
Where Love's a grown-up God-
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!

The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit-
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute-
Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely–flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.


*Alone*
_Edgar Allan Poe_

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
-----
I always liked Poe's writing style and his focus on the rhythm of his poems.

----------


## Taosaur

This may be my favorite poem, and one of two I can recite from memory. I found a pretty disappointing reading of it on youtube, so I uploaded my own (adequate at best, you've been warned).





The Language
BY ROBERT CREELEY
Locate _I
love you_ some-
where in

teeth and   
eyes, bite   
it but

take care not   
to hurt, you   
want so

much so   
little. Words   
say everything.

_I
love you_
again,

then what   
is emptiness   
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words   
and words full

of holes   
aching. Speech   
is a mouth.

----------


## FallenAwake

Children of the Night 
by Saul Williams

I can't embed links yet (I'm a nooblet) but I'll come back and embed the video soon.  Hearing and watching him doesn't really compare to the words on their own, but here is a piece of the poem.

"if you're serving the father
there's no son without mother
parent bodies discover
water bodies and drown

wade me in the water
'til Atlantis is found
on the sea floors of self
I'm starfish and unbound

heard that name of that
mound is stone mountain
underwater volcanoes erupt
water fountains of youth

let's us carnal the equation,
cancel out wind and truth
swirl me beyond sometimes
drench me water proof

let eve drop forever
rain sunsets on my roof
as I sit on the front porch of my sanity
deciphering hambones to
Van Gogh this vanity

oiled egos
canvased and framed
to be reborn unborn unburied unnamed
a reflection through a blood
stained glass window
of souls gone yellow around the edges"

----------


## FallenAwake

Sweet, I've come of forum age.  Here's that video. 

Children of the Night by Saul Williams:

----------


## Xox

In the night, I wish to speak with the angel
to find out if she recognizes my eyes
If she will ask me: do you see Eden?
And I’ll reply: Eden burns
I offer my lips to her, so cold,
As if she does not know desire
and the angel asks: do you feel life?
And I reply: life hurts.”
—	 Rainer Maria Rilke

----------


## Savy

A little poem by Margaret Atwood.

*You Fit into Me*

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

----------


## Wayfaerer

As I lay under the night sky
staring up into star strewn blackness

I

felt


my




mind








fall



into the vastness
that created me


And but for the
warp and weave
of space and time,
plastering my body
against this
dust mote of dust motes,
this earth,
my home


I would have followed

----------


## Taosaur

UNDER THE VULTURE-TREE

BY DAVID BOTTOMS

We have all seen them circling pastures,
have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,   
the fences of our own backyards, and have stood   
amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift.
But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds,   
every limb of the dead oak feathered black,

and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat   
and pull it toward the tree.
The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed   
red, ugly as a human heart.
Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time   
its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls
wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old   
who have grown to empathize with everything.

And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river,   
reluctant, looking back at their roost,   
calling them what I'd never called them, what they are,
those dwarfed transfiguring angels,
who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle
crushed on the shoulder of the road,
who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,
with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

----------


## stormcrow

John Keats- Last Sonnet

Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

----------


## Artelis

These are all excellent!

Here's one by Elizabeth Bishop

The Moose

For Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

----------


## Taosaur

I <3 villanelles. 

Practice, Practice, Practice
by William Matthews

Suburban feral children roam the mall
in lonely clumps. Their ambling, dreamy
private life is social, after all.

By window shopping they might learn to call
in love's or sex's voice. Maybe that's why
suburban feral children roam the mall:

they need to learn to shiver like a bell.
Who masturbates without a fantasy?
Private life is social. After all, 

the milky eyes, the roiling breath, the squall
that stains the sheets can briefly pacify
suburban feral children. Roam the mall

again tonight? They will. "Sweetie, you'll call
if you'll be late?" we ask them brightly.
Private life is social, despite all

our homage to the individual.
They aren't bored. If we but thought, we'd know why
suburban feral children roam the mall.
Private life is social, after all.

----------


## FallenAwake

Suburban feral children in lonely clumps.  That cracked me up!  Fantastic.  ::D:

----------


## Taosaur

Of course, you probably all know the ultimate villanelle:

The Waking
BY THEODORE ROETHKE

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   
God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   
To you and me; so take the lively air,   
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   
What falls away is always. And is near.   
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   
I learn by going where I have to go.

----------


## stormcrow

This is a poem by 0Thouartthat0 not mine.

----------


## Xox

You come and go. The doors swing closed 
ever more gently, almost without a shudder. 
Of all who move through the quiet houses, 
you are the quietest.


We become so accustomed to you, 
we no longer look up 
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading 
and makes it glow. For all things 
sing you: at times 
we just hear them more clearly.


Often when I imagine you 
your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 
You run like a herd of luminous deer 
and I am dark, I am forest.


You are a wheel at which I stand, 
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, 
resolve me nearer to the center. 
Then all the work I put my hand to 
widens from turn to turn.”


— Rainer Maria Rilke

----------


## FallenAwake

Every Day You Play

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Pablo Neruda

----------


## Wayfaerer

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

----------


## Lseadragon

So many. I did not know poetry had undone so many.

Can anybody recommend some sort of anthology or website that'd be a place to start in the world of poems? I truly have no knowledge of wherein to look.

In the meantime,
a *Rumi* piece from memory. I don't know if it has a title.





> Come to the orchard in spring. There is light and wine
> and sweethearts in the pomegrante flowers.
> If you do not come, these do not matter.
> If you do come, these do not matter.

----------


## acatalephobic

*Morning*
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then the night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best--
throwing off the light covers, 
feet on the cold floors, 
and buzzing around the house on espresso--

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins--
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary the windows--
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there, 
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.



*Spoiler* for _others_: 



*Days*
Each one is a gift, no doubt, 
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the day before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink. 


*Marginalia*Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say, 
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive--
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!"--
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely" they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page--
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil--
by a beautiful girl, I could tell, 
whom I would never meet--
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love." 


*Dancing Toward Bethlehem*
If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back
as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing.

----------


## Taosaur

Desire 

I remember how it used to be
at noon, springtime, the city streets
full of office workers like myself
let loose from the cold
glass buildings on Park and Lex,
the dull swaddling of winter cast off,
almost everyone wanting
everyone else. It was amazing
how most of us contained ourselves,
bringing desire back up
to the office where it existed anyway,
quiet, like a good engine.
I'd linger a bit
with the receptionist,
knock on someone else's open door,
ease myself, by increments,
into the seriousness they paid me for.
Desire was everywhere those years,
so enormous it couldn't be reduced
one person at a time.
I don't remember when it was,
though closer to now than then,
I walked the streets desireless,
my eyes fixed on destination alone.
The beautiful person across from me
on the bus or train
looked like effort, work.
I translated her into pain.
For months I had the clarity
the cynical survive with,
their world so safely small.
Today, walking 57th toward 3rd,
it's all come back,
the interesting, the various,
the conjured life suggested by a glance.
I praise how the body heals itself.
I praise how, finally, it never learns.

----------


## khh

*Til Ungdommen*
Nordahl Grieg
(English translation)

Kringsatt av Fiender,
 gå inn i din tid!
 Under en blodig storm -
 vi deg til strid!

Kanskje du spør i angst,
 udekket, åpen:
 hva skal jeg kjempe med
 hva er mitt våpen?

Her er ditt vern mot vold,
 her er ditt sverd:
 troen på livet vårt,
 menneskets verd.

For all vår fremtids skyld,
 søk det og dyrk det,
 dø om du må - men:
 øk det og styrk det!

Stilt går granatenes
 glidende bånd
 Stans deres drift mot død
 stans dem med ånd!

Krig er forakt for liv.
 Fred er å skape.
 Kast dine krefter inn:
 døden skal tape!

Elsk og berik med drøm
 alt stort som var!
 Gå mot det ukjente
 fravrist det svar.

Ubygde kraftverker,
 ukjente stjerner.
 Skap dem, med skånet livs
 dristige hjerner!

Edelt er mennesket,
 jorden er rik!
 Finnes her nød og sult
 skyldes det svik.

Knus det! I livets navn
 skal urett falle.
 Solskinn og brød og ånd
 eies av alle.

Da synker våpnene
 maktesløs ned!
 Skaper vi menneskeverd
 skaper vi fred.

Den som med høyre arm
 bærer en byrde,
 dyr og umistelig,
 kan ikke myrde.

Dette er løftet vårt
 fra bror til bror:
 vi vil bli gode mot
 menskenes jord.

Vi vil ta vare på
 skjønnheten, varmen
 som om vi bar et barn
 varsomt på armen!




I've always loved this one. Herborg Kråkevik sings it in the video linked below, but excluding paragraphs 7 - 10.

----------


## FallenAwake

This is a creature on fire with love, but it's still scary since most people think love only looks like one thing, instead of the whole world.
~Brian Andreas

(Art that for me is close enough to poetry.)

----------


## stormcrow

Part 2 of Howl by Allen Ginsberg

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open 
              their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- 
              nation? 
       Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob 
              tainable dollars! Children screaming under the 
              stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men 
              weeping in the parks! 
       Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the 
              loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy 
              judger of men! 
       Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the 
              crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of 
              sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! 
              Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- 
              ned governments! 
       Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose 
              blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers 
              are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni- 
              bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking 
              tomb! 
       Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! 
              Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long 
              streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- 
              tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose 
              smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! 
       Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch 
              whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch 
              whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch 
              whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 
              Moloch whose name is the Mind! 
       Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream 
              Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in 
              Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! 
       Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom 
              I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch 
              who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! 
              Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! 
              Light streaming out of the sky! 
       Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! 
              skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic 
              industries! spectral nations! invincible mad 
              houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! 
       They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- 
              ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to 
              Heaven which exists and is everywhere about 
              us! 
       Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! 
              gone down the American river! 
       Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole 
              boatload of sensitive bullshit! 
       Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! 
              gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De- 
              spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! 
              Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on 
              the rocks of Time! 
       Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the 
              wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! 
              They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! 
              carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the 
              street!

----------


## Taosaur

I swear my iPod used to have a thing for Ginsberg reading Howl! on shuffle. I prefer America. "When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?"

But today a different favorite:



The City Limits	  
by A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

----------


## Suena

I like this poem, though I find it more funny than anything else. 
It almost feels true sometimes, but hey, I'm just a woman, right?  :Cheeky:  

_The Lady's-Maid's Song_ By *John* Hollander

When Adam found his rib was gone
  He cursed and sighed and cried and swore
And looked with cold resentment on
  The creature God had used it for.
All love's delights were quickly spent
  And soon his sorrows multiplied:
He learned to blame his discontent
  On something stolen from his side.

And so in every age we find
  Each Jack, destroying every Joan,
Divides and conquers womankind
  In vengeance for his missing bone.
By day he spins out quaint conceits
  With gossip, flattery, and song,
But then at night, between the sheets,
  He wrongs the girl to right the wrong.

Though shoulder, bosom, lip, and knee
  Are praised in every kind of art.
Here is love's true anatomy:
  His rib is gone; he'll have her heart.
So women bear the debt alone
  And live eternally distressed,
For though we throw the dog his bone
  He wants it back with interest.

----------


## Septik

_The Stranger by Charles Baudelaire_

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?
" I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."
Your friends, then?
"You use a word that until now has had no meaning for me."
Your country?
"I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated."
Then Beauty?
"Her I would love willingly, goddess and immortal."
Gold?
"I hate it as you hate your God."
What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?
"I love the clouds the clouds that pass yonder the marvellous clouds."

----------


## Suena

Bless Your Eyes By Alex Grey

Your eyes are blessed openings,
Taking in whatever light brings.
Treat eyes kindly, feed them well,
They excitedly glisten and lovingly swell.
Show them the worst all over again,
They shrink into hollows of mortal skin.
Bathe your eyes in images Divine,
All Heaven unfolds, the opposites combine.
Your eyes become temple domes for the Pleiades,
Crystalline mandalas inhabited by Peities.
Blessing every moment you see
As glimpses of eternity.

Edit: had to add these...

Flying Crooked By Robert Graves

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has- who knows so well as I?--
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

A Man Said to the Universe By Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation." <33

----------


## Taosaur

I did a better job this time, I swears:

----------


## Xox

“everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.”
—	 Pablo Neruda

[awesome Tao!]

----------


## Taosaur

*In a Dark Time*

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. 
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

-Theodore Roethke

----------


## Savy

I like short poems.


*a total stranger one black day*

a total stranger one black day
knocked living the hell out of me-- 

who found forgiveness hard because
my(as it happened)self he was 

-but now that fiend and i are such
immortal friends the other's each

----- e.e. cummings

----------


## Taosaur

This is my favorite Yeats poem. He was a background figure of sorts in the Irish independence movement, acquainted socially with many of the leaders but distancing himself from (and generally discounting) their more violent plans. He is thought by some to have had a longstanding crush on "[t]hat woman" in part II. He was quite shocked when his friends followed through on their brave talk with the Easter Rising in 1916, which was brutally quashed by the English and its leaders executed, including Yeats' acquaintances elegized in this poem.

*EASTER 1916*
W.B. Yeats

I

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

II

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

III

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

IV

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

----------


## stormcrow

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

----------


## redisreddish

Hey look, more Dylan Thomas.  :smiley:  "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night". 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

----------


## Taosaur

*The Enigma: Rilke*

by Edward Hirsch

"It is not enough to have memories.
One must also be able to forget them."

It has taken centuries to discover

The heart is a pomegranate
Blistered with seeds, bruised and swollen
With secrets, too ripe for carving
But not for splitting its seams
Since the rind, too, has its ways
And seasons. My skin is me. We travel

Hard, vanishing inwards, learning 
How a red disc that throbs
In a cage of branches can become
An orange bulb lighting a barred window
In a monastery in Odessa, and the 
Monastery is really only a prison, and
The orange bulb is a violent lamp working

Inside of me. Showing an obscure thing:
How a monk in a white robe kneels
To the icon of a god he doesn't believe in,
Teaching himself to pray and not
To sing, although there's a voice buried
Somewhere in his ribs, and a pomegrantate is 
Tattooed to his sleeve. The window is open.
An orange bulb is showing through the trees. We

Are riding on horses with muzzled heads
Into the river, and like the river
We are pushing our sore bodies outwards
Against the skin. Like monks we kneel
On steel floors where we've always been.

Because I believe now that the heart
Is a pomegrantate consuming itself
And that even the secrets we disclose
Remain secrets, we deserve a great kindness.
We have wasted nothing, traveling through

Open spaces into ourselves.

----------


## Wayfaerer

*Nature*
by Ralf Waldo Emerson

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Natures throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west,
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.

----------


## Wayfaerer

*Nature*
by Ralf Waldo Emerson

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west,
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.

----------


## khh

*Antigonish*
Hughes Mearns

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasnt there
He wasnt there again today
I wish, I wish hed go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldnt see him there at all!
Go away, go away, dont you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please dont slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasnt there
He wasnt there again today
Oh, how I wish hed go away

----------


## Xox

Melting, by Douglas Woodsum

Being a glacier, I remember birth,
The waves of stars falling over the years:
White, six-pointed stars descending to form
My soul. On my birthday, it always snows.
Being the sea, you wait for everything
With motherly love. You eat continents
Of land, continents of ice. Your blue tongue
Catches snow. You taste like salt. You make sand.
I’m inland now, grinding the path that ends
At your door. I’ll pause for weeks on the shore
Before I let go. You will let me in
Then begin to melt me down as I float.
Months later, you’ll ask me, “Do you love me?”
I’ll answer you, “Does the sea love the sea?”

----------


## ooflendoodle

Don't know if this has been posted yet but it's my favorite

Annabel Lee




 	 It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea. 


Edgar Allan Poe

----------


## stormcrow

*Dawn by Arthur Rimbaud*

I have kissed the summer dawn. Before the palaces, nothing moved. The water lay dead. Battalions of shadows still kept the forest road.

I walked, walking warm and vital breath, While stones watched, and wings rose soundlessly.

My first adventure, in a path already gleaming With a clear pale light, Was a flower who told me its name.

I laughted at the blond Wasserfall That threw its hair across the pines: On the silvered summit, I came upon the goddess.

Then one by one, I lifted her veils. In the long walk, waving my arms.

Across the meadow, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the heart of town she fled among the steeples and domes, And I hunted her, scrambling like a beggar on marble wharves.

Above the road, near a thicket of laurel, I caught her in her gathered veils, And smelled the scent of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell together at the bottom of the wood.

When I awoke, it was noon.

----------


## stormcrow

*Ophelia by Arthur Rimbaud* 

On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily ;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils…
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.

For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters ;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.

The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her ;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings ;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia ! beautiful as snow !
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river !
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind ;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights ;

It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft ;
It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman
Who one April morning sate mute at your knees !

Heaven ! Love ! Freedom ! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl !
You melted to him as snow does to a fire ;
Your great visions strangled your words
- And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye !

III

- And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

*I forgot about this thread. I've been exposed to some amazing poetry thanks to you guys and xox!*

----------


## Wayfaerer

A friend showed me this excerpt from the poem Gravelly Run by A. R. Ammons which I really liked.

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it

----------


## 4chan

Do I contradict myself?	 
Very well, then, I contradict myself;	 
(I am largeI contain multitudes.)

----------


## Phion

> Love is so holy, so confusing.  
> It makes a man anxious, tormented.  
> Love, how can I define it?



-Gao Xingjian

----------


## Nivv

Good old Prufrock anyone?


*Spoiler* for _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_: 




_S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo._

Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherized upon a table; 
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, 
The muttering retreats 
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels 
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: 
Streets that follow like a tedious argument 
Of insidious intent 
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                              
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" 
Let us go and make our visit. 

  In the room the women come and go 
Talking of Michelangelo. 

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes 
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes 
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening 
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,                               
And seeing that it was a soft October night 
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. 

  And indeed there will be time 
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, 
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 
There will be time, there will be time 
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; 
There will be time to murder and create, 
And time for all the works and days of hands 
That lift and drop a question on your plate;                                
Time for you and time for me, 
And time yet for a hundred indecisions 
And for a hundred visions and revisions 
Before the taking of a toast and tea. 

  In the room the women come and go 
Talking of Michelangelo. 

  And indeed there will be time 
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" 
Time to turn back and descend the stair, 
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—                               
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"] 
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, 
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— 
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"] 
Do I dare 
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. 

  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? 

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, 
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, 
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, 
Then how should I begin 
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?                    
  And how should I presume? 

  And I have known the arms already, known them all— 
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare 
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] 
Is it perfume from a dress 
That makes me so digress? 
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. 
  And should I then presume? 
  And how should I begin?
        .     .     .     .     .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets             
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes 
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . . 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws 
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
        .     .     .     .     .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 
Smoothed by long fingers, 
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers, 
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. 
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, 
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?                  
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, 
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, 
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter; 
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 
And in short, I was afraid. 

  And would it have been worth it, after all, 
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, 
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, 
Would it have been worth while,                                             
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" 
If one, settling a pillow by her head, 
  Should say, "That is not what I meant at all. 
  That is not it, at all." 

  And would it have been worth it, after all, 
Would it have been worth while,                                           
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, 
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— 
And this, and so much more?— 
It is impossible to say just what I mean! 
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 
Would it have been worth while 
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, 
And turning toward the window, should say: 
  "That is not it at all, 
  That is not what I meant, at all."                                         
        .     .     .     .     .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; 
Am an attendant lord, one that will do 
To swell a progress, start a scene or two 
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, 
Deferential, glad to be of use, 
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; 
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; 
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— 
Almost, at times, the Fool. 

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .                                              
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. 

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? 
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. 

  I do not think they will sing to me. 

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves 
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back 
When the wind blows the water white and black. 

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown               
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.




By T.S. Eliot

----------


## whitedreams

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To sleep, perchance to dream of a thousand

worlds and a thousand faces.

Is the dream more real than the dreamer?

The dreamer, like a spider, spins the dream

in patterns beautiful from its own substance

and yet knows it not.

Remember oh dreamer that all dreams must

end with the coming of the dawn.

In the glow of dawn silken threads of dreams

become illumined and transparent.

Arise, awake, oh dreamer of dreams. The time

of sleeping has passed.

Rise fully into knowledge and glory eternal.

The dream was your own creation in the sleep

of unknowing. In the dawn of knowing, dreams

fade as shadows before the sun.

Arise, Awake, oh dreamer of dreams, the time

of sleeping has passed.


ANNOYNMOUS POEM not mine

----------


## acatalephobic

"Spring Giddiness"

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty 
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do. 
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep. 
You must ask for what you really want. 
Don't go back to sleep. 
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. 
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you. 
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting, 
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles 
and the one great turning, our souls 
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. 
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music, 
a quiet, bright 
reedsong.
If it fades, we fade.

- Rumi (translation by C. Barks)

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## jetta86s

Alone

Alone in the mornings i wake
Alone i sit and stare
Alone i think upon my thoughts
Alone i cry out but no one hears
Alone i pray to be loved
Alone i try to understand why
Alone in the darkness
Alone i feel afraid
Alone im unwanted
Alone i want to be someone else
Alone i share my secrets
Alone sing a sweet song
Alone i watch over my shadow
Alone i sit through the storm
Alone i wish for good things to come
Alone i hope for the bad to go away
Alone i wonder if this is how i will stay

~nikki addleton~

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## Arra

Promise

Those back roads traveled me all my life.
Time spent me in idleness, wasted me.

Small towns passed through me, the old
melodies put me on and played me,

and stars used me to reckon with.
Maybe the truth tried to find me out.

A little history learned me. Right away, it forgot. An odd dream, here and there,

understood me. The same old stories
told me over and over, and my soul

tried to save me, until
the day night walked off into me, alone,
when a promise broke me

- Judsom Mitcham

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## DrunkenArse



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## acatalephobic

From the mouth of Edna St.Vincent Millay:

*Intention to Escape from Him*

I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in
America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might
deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, strong to overflow its banks in spring, 
carrying away bridges
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear
narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—

Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast. 




*Spoiler* for _and two more, just because_: 




*Conscientious Objector*

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.


*Sonnet*

Time, that renews the tissues of this frame,
That built the child and hardened the soft bone,
Taught him to wail, to blink, to walk alone,
Stare, question, wonder, give the world a name,
Forget the watery darkness from whence he came,
Attends no less the boy to manhood grown,
Brings him new raiment, strips him of his own;
All skins are shed at length, remorse, even shame.
Such hope is mine, if this indeed be true,
I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear.




Thanks, Dad.  For renewing my faith in poetry without even realizing it. 
=}

That year he got me Miller, Rilke, Collins, Millay, "Poets Against The War", AND a B&N gift card.

I remember the first thing I bought with it was a used copy of  Little Birds.

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