# *Poem of the day thread



## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2002)

*Poem of the day thread*

Kind of similar to the Poetry Please thread, but not... 

One poem *only* per day, if it's a long one give a link (but bear in mind that people won't want to read pages and pages). No song lyrics or stuff you've written yourself (we can have other threads for those). Please do a search with the first line of your poem before you post it in case it's already been posted on the Poetry Please thread or elsewhere. Any more rules we should have? I think discussion should be permitted.

Anyone want to start?

Just to clarify that I mean one poem on this thread in total per day, not one poem per person, so that we can just check in and read the day's poem and feel pleasantly highbrow.


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## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2002)

Oh well, just found this one by browsing through the site vanityvehicle posted to, so you've all lost your chance for today 


Diving into the Wreck 
Adrienne Rich 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.


From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich.


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## moon (Aug 4, 2002)

Aww, I just spent ages searching for one, can we not have 2 to compare and contrast?  

A Rock, A River, A Tree 
Hosts to species long since departed, 
Marked the mastodon, 
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens 
Of their sojourn here 
On our planet floor, 
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom 
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. 

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, 
Come, you may stand upon my 
Back and face your distant destiny, 
But seek no haven in my shadow. 
I will give you no hiding place down here. 

You, created only a little lower than 
The angels, have crouched too long in 
The bruising darkness 
Have lain too long 
Face down in ignorance. 
Your mouths spilling words 

Armed for slaughter. 
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me, 
But do not hide your face. 

Across the wall of the world, 
A River sings a beautiful song. It says, 
Come, rest here by my side. 

Each of you, a bordered country, 
Delicate and strangely made proud, 
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. 
Your armed struggles for profit 
Have left collars of waste upon 
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. 

Yet today I call you to my riverside, 
If you will study war no more. Come, 
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs 
The Creator gave to me when I and the 
Tree and the rock were one. 
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your 
Brow and when you yet knew you still 
Knew nothing. 
The River sang and sings on. 


There is a true yearning to respond to 
The singing River and the wise Rock. 
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew 
The African, the Native American, the Sioux, 
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek 
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik, 
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, 
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. 
They hear. They all hear 
The speaking of the Tree. 

They hear the first and last of every Tree 
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River. 
Plant yourself beside the River. 

Each of you, descendant of some passed 
On traveller, has been paid for. 
You, who gave me my first name, you, 
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you 
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then 
Forced on bloody feet, 
Left me to the employment of 
Other seekers -- desperate for gain, 
Starving for gold. 

You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot, 
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought, 
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare 
Praying for a dream. 
Here, root yourselves beside me. 
I am that Tree planted by the River, 
Which will not be moved. 

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree 
I am yours -- your passages have been paid. 
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need 
For this bright morning dawning for you. 
History, despite its wrenching pain 
Cannot be unlived, but if faced 
With courage, need not be lived again. 

Lift up your eyes upon 
This day breaking for you. 
Give birth again 
To the dream.

Women, children, men, 
Take it into the palms of your hands, 
Mold it into the shape of your most 
Private need. Sculpt it into 
The image of your most public self. 
Lift up your hearts 
Each new hour holds new chances 
For a new beginning. 
Do not be wedded forever 
To fear, yoked eternally 
To brutishness. 

The horizon leans forward, 
Offering you space to place new steps of change. 
Here, on the pulse of this fine day 
You may have the courage 
To look up and out and upon me, the 
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country. 
No less to Midas than the mendicant. 
No less to you now than the mastodon then. 

Here, on the pulse of this new day 
You may have the grace to look up and out 
And into your sister's eyes, and into 
Your brother's face, your country 
And say simply 
Very simply 
With hope -- 
Good morning. 

_Maya Angelou's On the Pulse of Morning _


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## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2002)

Oi! Oh bugger, this isn't going to work unless I threaten to delete any poems but the first one, is it? If people have got other poems they want to post they can save them for another day, innit?

The point of making it one a day is partly to make it easier to digest, but I also just think that just reading one poem makes it stand out more, makes it more special sort of fing.

Right, after this I WILL delete any second or third or fourth poems after the first one of the day, no matter how good. People can put them back up another time.


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## moon (Aug 4, 2002)

Sorry boss  
Its just that I got really excited about that poem and realised that part of it has been used in a record, not sure which one, does anyone else know?

'Each new hour holds new chances 
For a new beginning.....Offering you space to place new steps of change''

I think it was The Orb.


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## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2002)

Well, I've got to live up to my new member status  Nice poem anyway! I bet it would sound great if she read it.

This bit rings bells for me too:



> History, despite its wrenching pain
> Cannot be unlived, but if faced
> With courage, need not be lived again.



At first I thought she might be quoting someone else, but actually I think this was quoted by someone in the UN referring to Bosnia.


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## nosos (Aug 5, 2002)

*Gerontion - T.S. Eliot*

Thou hast nor youth nor age
  But as it were an after dinner sleep
  Dreaming of both.


Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. 

                  I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces. 

Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign":
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger 

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob. 

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. 

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact? 

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner. 

                  Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.


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## vanityvehicle (Aug 5, 2002)

[argh, deleted! Sorry mate, I did say... I've saved the text in case you hadn't so you can put it up another day.

Rubes x]


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## bruise (Aug 5, 2002)

Everyone's put up really long poems. No fair. I love the choices, though. This could end up as an anthology...


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## Anna Key (Aug 6, 2002)

INCIDENT IN A SALOON BAR

Not because he was in any way remarkable 
In dress, physique, or conjunction of facial parts 
Did the rest of the customers feel such embarrassment 
And curious fear in their superstitious hearts. 

That all of them, to some degree, were so afflicted 
Was evident from the way their lips grew tight, 
And from the intensity with which they did not stare at him, 
Though each could have stated his colouring and height. 

Not because he was conspicuously intoxicated 
Or publishing uncouth sounds or venereal signs 
Did his presence so patently offend those stiff gentlemen 
Who, guardsmen of propriety, presented him their spines. 

Not because he was so quiet and unremarkable 
That they suspected that he might be spying 
Did they feel this hostility towards the lonely fellow 
But simply because he was quite quietly, crying. 


Vernon Scannell


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## ats (Aug 6, 2002)

I like that last poem, though I'm not sure I've got major thoughts about it.

If this thread is mean to be about talking about individual poems, perhaps people who post them up should say something about why they value them, to kick the discussion off.

(Trouble is, that poetry can sometimes take time to sink in.  Working out why you like something isn't always an easy process.  Are we allowed to come back to poems once the day has gone?)


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## RubyToogood (Aug 6, 2002)

I don't see why not, ats.


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## Jock_MacGrim (Aug 6, 2002)

Sorry old bean, it's one poem a day. I've saved your poem for you, just in case you can't find it again! (Though I'm sure you can!)


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## han (Aug 6, 2002)

It looks like if you want your chosen poem to be the poem of the day, you're going to have to rush to the 'puter at 12.00am on the dot!


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## Anna Key (Aug 6, 2002)

> _Originally posted by han _
> *... rush to the 'puter at 12.00am on the dot! *


He he


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## Anna Key (Aug 6, 2002)

Reply to Ats:

<Name dropping section>

Vernon Scannell was a drinking partner of my dad's when I was eight. They're about the same age and, at that time, loved their booze. They drank in a pub called the Rose and Crown in Trent (a village on the Dorset/Somerset border). I'd be parked on the grass verge with a coke and a packet of crisps. The ones with salt wrapped in blue paper.

My main memory is of Scannell's enormous hands. He's a large man and professional boxer turned poet. He was one of the last fairground boxers in Britain. His job was to strut about the ring at country fairs and fight any beered-up lout who challenged for the purse. His hands (to an eight year old) looked like five pound hammers.

<End of name dropping>

I like his poems because they embody a left wing, fighting, British patriotism. He fought in WW2 and I think went mad with battle fatigue and possibly AWOL. He spent time in military prison. 

He's a sort of left wing, working class, big hearted, Robert Graves. He also writes beautifully about love, children and drunks. His love poems sometimes draw the analogy between love  and boxing - he claims love hurts more than any punch in the boxing ring.

I like the quoted poem because it attacks British saloon bar culture: the culture that says "emotions bad!" It also pokes fun at cruel male culture. Those "stiff gentlemen" those "guardsmen of propriety" threatened by a weeping man and refusing to comfort the "lonely fellow." 

He also writes well on WW1:

Where fractured tree-trunks stand
And shells, exploding, open sudden fans
Of smoke and earth.
Blind murders scythe
The deathscape where the iron brambles writhe...

(Complete poem at http://www.aftermathww1.com/scannell.asp)


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## twinkle (Aug 7, 2002)

*Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper*

No novice
In those elaborate rituals
Which allay the malice
Of knotted table and crooked chair,
The new woman in the ward
Wears purple, steps carefully
Among her secret combinations of eggshells
And breakable hummingbirds,
Footing sallow as a mouse
Between the cabbage-roses
Which are slowly opening their furred petals
To devour and drag her down
Into the carpet's design.

With bid-quick eyed cocked askew
She can see in the nick of time
How perilous needles grain the floorboards
And outwit their brambled plan;
Now through her ambushed air,
Adazzle with bright shards
Of broken glass,
She edges with wary breath,
Fending off jag and tooth,
Until, turning sideways,
She lifts one webbed foot after the other
Into the still, sultry weather
Of the patients' dining room.

sylvia plath

i've spent more time studying plath's poetry than probably anyone else's put together and having written my dissertation comparing her biographers i've learnt a lot about her life.

while i don't think this poem is her best, or even particularly poignant perhaps, in terms of a reflection of her life or mind, i like it today. 
it was written when plath was actually staying in a psychiatric hospital and refers to a true person who she watched walk down the corridor. a momentary episode that maybe only lasted a few seconds but i can picture it clearly and it makes me smile.

i can empathise with that subconscious madness too - just picking out random things from everyday existance and turning them into something else.


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## vanityvehicle (Aug 7, 2002)

That's a great poem twinkle - I've never delved beyond the Sylvia Plath 'classics' but I think that's fantastic. I love





> the cabbage-roses
> Which are slowly opening their furred petals
> To devour and drag her down
> Into the carpet's design.


and the stumbling rythm of





> bid-quick eyed cocked askew


It's got that very 1950s/1960s spiky feel to it (I suppose the imagery is all about spikiness, so that's always going to be the case) - it reminds me of post-war avant-garde sculpture, all those sharp black iron forms, although with a sense of hope in it which those tend to lack.

Jeez, I've started waffling now.

[Rubes - I failed to understand your rules properly. But at midnight G'n'T I'll be rushing to my keyboard...]


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## RubyToogood (Aug 7, 2002)

@ vv

Nice one twinklev... I like that because it makes something beautiful out of what might be seen as a rather depressing scene..


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## vanityvehicle (Aug 8, 2002)

*Check the time on that!*

CORRESPONDANCES

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers 
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; 
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles 
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. 

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent 
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, 
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, 
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. 

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, 
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, 
- Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies, 
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens 
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

Charles Baudelaire

From Poetes, an excellent French poetry site.

I decided to go for something a little less misanthropic than 'Au Lecteur' (my original choice), although that _is_ a classic and worth the reading.

My poor translation follows below. Just use it to help you get round the French - with Baudelaire the sound of the words is often as important as the meaning:

Correspondances

Nature is a temple whose living pillars
Sometimes allow confused chatter to escape;
People pass by while crossing forests of symbols
Which they watch with a familiar gaze.

Like the long echoes which lose themselves far off
In a deep and gloomy unity,
Vast as the night and as clarity,
Perfumes, colours and sounds echo back.

Perfumes fresh as the skin of children,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows
- And others, corrupted, rich and triumphant
With the breadth of infinite things:
Amber, musk, styrax and incense
Which sing the reverie of the spirit and its senses.

OK, why do I like it? Well, the synaesthesetic imagery - the intense description of sense, mixing colours, sounds and textures - is fantastic. I was well into Baudelaire as a teenager and the opulence of the verse is overwhelming. But one of the things I like most is that it's all structured like a gourmet meal. He hits you with richness before drawing back with a freshness that cuts through the intensity. He actually seems to work the synaesthetic alchemy on the reader: for me the poem is more than just words, I can almost smell it and taste it and see its colours - and I don't have synaesthesia.

[note to Mrs M - sorry if you've just been translating 'Au Lecteur' - you can at least pick out my mistakes in this translation]

PS topic for debate - what to do about gender in translation? I've translated 'L'homme' as 'people', which I think remains true to the original without the exclusive masculinity of Baudelaire's word. But am I sacrificing the poetry for the sake of my 'political' ideas?


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## Mrs Magpie (Aug 8, 2002)

<Mrs M scurries off to unearth the Harrap>


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## Blind Lemon Magpie (Aug 8, 2002)

Translating a poem is something I've never thought of undertaking, so you're one up on me already, but I would have translated 'l'homme' as 'man' irrespective of any political considerations, merely because it is the right translation for the context and register of the poem. Whether or not oboe is the right rendition of hautbois, it sounds a bit funny . Mrs Magpie (the nearest thing to an early music specialist we have in the house, and a former bassoonist) reckons that oboe and hautbois are not quite the same either.

It's good that we are not being restricted to English poems, but nice to see a translation for those that don't speak other languages.....Mrs M is considering Der Panther by Rilke with a translation.....although her German is not good she reads it aloud to me reasonably well......(I'm a pronounciation pedant!)


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## ats (Aug 10, 2002)

> _(I'm a pronounciation pedant!) [/B]_


_

That should be 'pronunciation pedant'._


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## Mrs Magpie (Aug 10, 2002)

*Blind Lemon is likely to tease me mercilessly about this!*

Ha! Dictated by BLM but typed by Mrs M cos this home set-up ain't blind friendly yet and also keyboard here laid out slightly different from his work one so if himself types at home it's utter gibberish!


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## vanityvehicle (Aug 11, 2002)

> _Originally posted by Blind Lemon Magpie _
> *Whether or not oboe is the right rendition of hautbois, it sounds a bit funny . Mrs Magpie (the nearest thing to an early music specialist we have in the house, and a former bassoonist) reckons that oboe and hautbois are not quite the same either.*



I think in contemporary French speech hautbois is oboe, but you're right - apart from anything, oboes are more reedy and plaintive than 'doux'. A cor anglais would maybe be a better approximation but I couldn't bear to write the phrase 'cors anglaises'.


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## RubyToogood (Aug 11, 2002)

W.B. Yeats, 1899 

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven


HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,   
Enwrought with golden and silver light,   
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths   
Of night and light and the half light,   
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;   
I have spread my dreams under your feet;   
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


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## soulrebel (Aug 11, 2002)

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
> by George W. Bush
> 
> I think we all agree, the past is over.
> This is still a dangerous world.
> It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
> and potential mental losses.
> > >
> Rarely is the question asked
> Is our children learning?
> Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
> How many hands have I shaked?
> > >
> They misunderestimate me.
> I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
> I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
> Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.
> > >
> Put food on your family!
> Knock down the tollbooth!
> Vulcanize society!
> Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
> > >


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## vanityvehicle (Aug 12, 2002)

Ah that's one of my fave pomes, Rubes. The collection it's from, The Wind Among the Reeds, is one of my all-time favourite books of poetry, and it was all written as a sort of love-letter to Maud Gonne, his unrequited love. One of the tragic things about Yeats is that he was still writing poetry about her thirty years after this - after he had been repeatedly rejected by her, then rejected by her daughter Iseult (those fin-de-siecle Irish revolutionary types, eh?), and married someone else. Who he appeared never to wholly have fallen for - sometime I'll post up the extremely long 'Gift of Haroun al-Rashid' which he wrote in 1923ish in apparent attempt to reconcile himself to his marriage, which he seems to have enjoyed but regarded as 'second best'.

Anyway, love the odd use of repeating words to carry the rhyme. I think there's actually a tinge of the Baudelaire influence above in this, since he was certainly regarding himself as a Symbolist at this time and the incantatory sound, fixed on certain images - cloths, light, feet, dreams - is quite similar to the synaesthetic effect Baudelaire was trying to achieve in 'Correspondances'. I suppose there's also the fact that the rhyme-scheme of alternate lines ending in the same word follows the visual pattern of fabric - so that the poem itself imitates the 'embroidered cloths'; in fact, it's poems themselves which he has laid at her feet. The whole project was a desperate attempt, nearly a decade after first meeting her, to persuade her to fall in love with her (why do poets, who are so smart in lots of ways, seem to believe you can _persuade_ someone to fall in love?), and this poem came close to the end of the book. He's begging her to read the poems, take them in, and agree to love him; not to scorn the gift, 'because you tread on my dreams'. After this came 'He remembers his past greatness when part of the constellations of heaven', a more negative perspective on the situation, and 'The fiddler of Dooney', a folkish upbeat sendoff unrelated to his miserable love life. Poor bugger.


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## Donna Ferentes (Aug 12, 2002)

*Poem for today*

Engineers' Corner
by Wendy Cope

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Why isn't there an Engineers' Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we've always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint ... How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?_

-- advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council 



We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints --
That's why so many poets end up rich,
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch? 

Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It's always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day. 

Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering --
You're sure to need another job as well;
You'll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out. It must be hell. 

While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You'll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust. 

No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There's far too much encouragement for poets --
That's why this country's going down the drain.


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## Mrs Magpie (Aug 14, 2002)

*Reiner Maria Rilke*

Der Panther

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe 
so müde geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält. 
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe 
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt. 

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, 
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, 
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, 
in der betäubt ein grosser Wille steht. 

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille 
sich lautlos auf--. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, 
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille-- 
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. 



THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

               (translated by Stephen Mitchell)


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 14, 2002)

Aah, I like both those last two. The idea that you can adequately translate poetry always seems bizarre to me, but that Rilke is great (whether that's down to the originator or the translator!).


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Aug 14, 2002)

Both I think Ruby...that poem is one of Blind Lemons faves....he won a German poem reading competition for Devon reading that...well on the way to being a linguist even then.....I looked at a few translations first and that seemed the best.....


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 16, 2002)

Some brilliant poems on this thread so far, I especially like the Vernon Scannell one.


NACHTWACHE
'Watchman, what of the night?'
'I've heard the owl repeat
Its hollow prescient note,
The bat shriek at its hunting,
The water-snake rustle
Under the pond's soaked leaves.
I have heard vinous voices,
Stammering, angry, as I drowsed
In the tavern near the chapel.
I have heard lovers' whispers, laughter,
And the labored breathing of absolved longings,
Adolescents murmuring in their dreams,
Others tossing, sleepless from desire.
I've seen silent heat-lightning,
The terror every night
Of the girl who lost her way
And doesn't know bed from coffin.
I've heard the hoarse panting
Of a lonely old man struggling with death,
A woman torn in labor,
The cry of a just-born child.
Stretch out and sleep, citizen.
Everything is in order; this night is half over."

-Primo Levi


----------



## twinkle (Aug 16, 2002)

i always loved that mmm... genius


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 16, 2002)

Quando era criança
Vivi, sem saber,
So para hoje ter
Aquela lembranca.

E hole que sinto
Aquilo que fui.
Minha vida flui,
Feita do que minto.

Mas nesta prisão,
Livro unico, leio
O   sorriso alheio
De quem fui então.


When I was a child
I lived unknowing
In order now to own
This memory of then.

Today I sense
What then I was.
Now my life goes on,
Made of my pretences.

But in this prison,
My only book, I read
The smile of someone else,
Of who I was then.


(1933)

Fernando Pessoa

edited to say:
I know you say it's one per day, but the ninth had none so this is one for then, or for tomorrow if you prefer. Either way I am choosing to eschew the rules.


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 23, 2002)

Now look what you done, you eschewed the rules and killed the thread....
One of my favourites from the late Spike Milligan:


*On the Ning Nang Nong* 

On the Ning Nang Nong
On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So it's Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
Nong Ning Nang!
The mice go Clang!

What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!


----------



## vanityvehicle (Aug 23, 2002)

Yay! I was just thinking of resurrecting this thread...


----------



## twinkle (Aug 25, 2002)

*When you wake tomorrow*

I will give you a poem when you wake tomorrow.
It will be a peaceful poem.
It won't make you sad.
It won't make you miserable.
It will simply be a poem to give you
When you wake tomorrow.

It was not written by myself alone.
I cannot lay claim to it.
I found it in your body.
In your smile I found it.
Will you recognise it?

You will find it under your pillow.
When you open the cupboard it will be there.
You will blink in astonishment,
Shout out, how it trembles!
Its nakedness is startling! How fresh it tastes!
We will have it for breakfast;
On a table lit by loving,
At a place reserved for wonder.
We will give the world a kissing open
When we wake tomorrow.

We will offer it to the sad landlord out on the balcony.
To the dreamers at the window.
To the hand waving for no particular reason
We will offer it.
An amazing and most remarkable thing,
We will offer it to the whole human race
Which walks in us
When we wake tomorrow.

Brian Patten


----------



## inflatable jesus (Aug 26, 2002)

I am a fugitive, 
once I was born 
They locked me up inside of me 
But I left. 
My soul searches for me 
Through hills and valleys, 
I hope my soul 
Never finds me 

-Fernando Pessoa


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 26, 2002)

thank you Jaay-sus!

woo hoo! its turning into a Pessoa thread!

and interesting to see the similar theme of melancholic nostalgia (hmm, is that a tautology?) 

*sets alarm very early for tomorrow to post another*


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 27, 2002)

That's a lovely one, twinklev. Very romantic! So where IS this poem then, eh?


----------



## twinkle (Aug 27, 2002)

_tomorrow_ ruby tomorrow. ah the impatience of it all


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 27, 2002)

> ruby wrote:
> So where IS this poem then, eh?


 Oops, out too late, drinking too much to recall my previous promises, I returned home and made straight for rap music of ye olde school; dream warriors, public enemy, grandmaster flash and even - eek!- mc hammer (did i say i was drunk?) This morning a drowsy numbness pains my sense. Thumping bass is better left alone and headache pills are best washed down with a soothing poem..

FP writing under an assumed name.

*If, After I Die - Alberto Caeiro *

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
	mine.

I am easy to describe.
I lived like mad.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because
	I never went blind.
Even hearing was to me never more than an
	accompaniment of seeing.
I understood that things are real and all different from
	each other;
I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.
To understand it with thinking would be to find them
	all equal.

One day I felt sleepy like a child.
I closed my eyes and slept.
And by the way, I was only Nature poet.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 20, 2002)

*The Charge of the Light Brigade*

Alfred, Lord Tennyson 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.
Half a league, half a league,
 Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.


2.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
 Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.


3.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
 Rode the six hundred.


4.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
 All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
 Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
 Not the six hundred.


5.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
 Left of six hundred.


6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
 All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
 Noble six hundred.


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 25, 2002)

*A Vast Confusion * 
_Lawrence Ferlinghetti_

Long long I lay in the sands

Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life's voices lost in night
And the tape of it
someow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Sep 25, 2002)

*The Charge of the Light Brigade*



> _Originally posted by onemonkey _
> *Alfred, Lord Tennyson
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> ...



In my view this is one of the most appalling poems ever written - both in form and in sentiment.


----------



## jms (Sep 25, 2002)

*To be sung in a Luton Accent:*

colin

colin was a vandal
and when certain things were said
he'd fly off the andle and 'e'd bang you in the ead
'e went dahn the ospital 
to get it sor'ed aht
the doctor said good morning
and colin knocked im out

colin said I'm sorry doctor,
can you make me sane?
the doctor said I'll ave a go
and heeee took colins brain (cell)

When colin left the ospital
e was miserable
what was he to do instead of
banging people in the ead
and then one day he walked into
a lampost in the street,
and discovered self expression:
Aggravating Concrete!

Now Colin he's as right as rain
and he couldnt complain at all,
he got imself a little job
as a dem-o-lition baaall

Now Colin does a hard days work,
comes home at half past five,
says mum it's me I'm home and, 
I'm still alive
Then he runs into the living room 
Gets stuck into the wall
and his mum says show some consideration colin!
do it in the 'all!
and by the way your dinners in the safe 

John Hegley
(nutcase)


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Sep 26, 2002)

*Visits To St. Elizabeths
by Elizabeth Bishop*

This is the house of Bedlam.

This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the time 
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a sailor 
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the roadstead all of board
reached by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the old, brave man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

These are the years and the walls of the ward,
the winds and clouds of the sea of board
sailed by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the cranky man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
beyond the sailor
winding his watch
that tells the time
of the cruel man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a world of books gone flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
of the batty sailor
that winds his watch
that tells the time
of the busy man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is there, is flat,
for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
waltzing the length of a weaving board
by the silent sailor
that hears his watch
that ticks the time
of the tedious man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to feel if the world is there and flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances joyfully down the ward
into the parting seas of board
past the staring sailor
that shakes his watch
that tells the time
of the poet, the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board
with the crazy sailor
that shows his watch
that tells the time
of the wretched man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 26, 2002)

> _Originally posted by Justin _
> *In my view this is one of the most appalling poems ever written - both in form and in sentiment. *


why so? certainly it praises warriors, but it hardly glorifies war.
and it is one of the most famous examples there is of form and meter complimenting the subject matter. the thump of cannon and the rhythmical pounding of horses hooves.


----------



## twinkle (Sep 26, 2002)

*The Fly*

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life,
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
or if I die.

William Blake


----------



## Stobart Stopper (Sep 26, 2002)

Gray's Elegy In A Country Churchyard, I dare not post it though!


----------



## Razoredge (Sep 27, 2002)

Have enjoyed reading all the poems on this thread. It was great to be introduced to Pessoa - will definitely get  the book (or one of them)! Ruby - I have always loved Yeats and  Cloth of Heaven is a particular favourite.

Here is a poem which will always remind me of my first love. It is powerful and sad, encompassing the knowledge of both the beauty and pain of love.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which I have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be -
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me,
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

e e cummins 

(punctuation is author"s own)

There are still times, after so many years , that  i still hear that bird singing in the lost lands.


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 28, 2002)

*Pull My Daisy*

Pull my daisy 
tip my cup 
all my doors are open 
Cut my thoughts 
for coconuts 
all my eggs are broken 
Jack my Arden 
gate my shades 
woe my road is spoken 
Silk my garden 
rose my days 
now my prayers awaken 
Bone my shadow 
dove my dream 
start my halo bleeding 
Milk my mind & 
make me cream 
drink me when you're ready 
Hop my heart on 
harp my height 
seraphs hold me steady 
Hip my angel 
hype my light 
lay it on the needy 

Heal the raindrop 
sow the eye 
bust my dust again 
Woe the worm 
work the wise 
dig my spade the same 
Stop the hoax 
whats the hex 
where's the wake 
how's the hicks 
take my golden beam 

say my oops 
ope my shell 

Bite my naked nut 
Roll my bones 
ring my bell 
call my worm to sup 
Pope my parts 
pop my pot 
raise my daisy up 
Poke my pap 
pit my plum 
let my gap be shut 

- Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady


----------



## IntoStella (Sep 29, 2002)

*History Of The Night*

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

_Jorge Luis Borges_


----------



## Vixiha (Sep 29, 2002)

_Love Not Me _ 

Love not me for comely grace,
For my pleasing eye or face;
Nor for any outward part,
No, nor for my constant heart:
      For those may fail or turn to ill,
      So thou and I shall sever.
Keep therefore a true woman's eye,
And love me still, but know not why;
      So hast thou the same reason still
      To doat upon me ever.


----------



## jms (Sep 29, 2002)

This Is Just To Say
William Carlos Willaims (1883-1963)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


----------



## Cloo (Sep 30, 2002)

Now I can't remember who this was by, but I glanced at in whilst working at the Poetry Society one summer. Definitely the best (very) short poem I've read:


At least, he said,
you'll get a poem out of this.


----------



## Anna Key (Sep 30, 2002)

Here's another Scannell, also on the theme of first love, but with a twist.


Growing Pain 

The boy was barely five years old. 
We sent him to the little school 
And left him there to learn the names 
Of flowers in jam jars on the sill 
And learn to do as he was told.
He seemed quite happy there until 
Three weeks afterwards, at night,
The darkness whimpered in his room. 
I went upstairs, switched on his light, 
And found him wide awake, distraught, 
Sheets mangled and his eiderdown 
Untidy carpet on the floor. 
I said, 'Why can't you sleep? A pain?' 
He snuffled, gave a little moan, 
And then he spoke a single word: 
'Jessica.' The sound was blurred. 
'Jessica? What do you mean?' 
'A girl at school called Jessica. 
She hurts --' He touched himself between 
The heart and stomach '-- she has been 
Aching here and I can see her.' 
Nothing I had read or heard 
Instructed me in what to do. 
I covered him and stroked his head. 
'The pain will go, in time,' I said.

Vernon Scannell


----------



## IntoStella (Oct 3, 2002)

Ah. Bump.


----------



## HurryUpHarry (Oct 4, 2002)

*work of genius*

I really like this poem. 

I don't know why? 

HURRY UP HARRY
Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
We're going down the pub 
We're going down the pub 

Now listen here Harry 
If we're going down the pub 
You'd better tell your mum and dad 
And finish up your grub 
I wish you'd listen to me 
No, I don't want a cup of tea 

Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
We're going down the pub 
We're going down the pub 

You're telling me to grow up 
But Harry don't you see 
If I tried to act my age 
I wouldn't be me 
We never do anything 
So now's the time to begin 

Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
We're going down the pub 
We're going down the pub 

You don't have to tell me 
That the thing's I do are wrong 
But everything I do in life 
Is with us right or wrong 
Now I think I understand 
How to have some fun 

Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
Come on come on 
Hurry up Harry come on 
We're going down the pub 
We're going down the pub

Pursey: James: 1977


----------



## vimto (Oct 4, 2002)

That's not too bad btw HurryUp 

But my very favourite one was written by my niece Caitlin, then aged 10 and a bit.

THE SUN

The sun which shines ever so bright,
Comes out in the day and disappears in the night.
But where does it vanish to,
This bundle of light?

Time for the dark,
I get scared,
Shadows in the park,
Of figures which are feared.

The sun which shines ever so bright,
Comes out in the day and disappears in the night,
But where does it vanish to,
this bundle of light?

Some people say that it goes down under,
I wonder, I really do,
If it says hello to the kangaroos.

The sun which shines ever so bright,
Comes out in the day and disappears in the night,
But where does it vanish to,
_Do you know?_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Oct 5, 2002)

This is actually my favourite poem - *Allen Ginsberg's America*.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 
17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I 
need with my good looks? 
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not 
the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me. 
You made me want to be a saint. 
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back 
it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical 
joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday 
somebody goes on trial for murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid 
I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses 
in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. 
You should have seen me reading Marx. 
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 
I won't say the Lord's Prayer. 
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle 
Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by 
Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner 
candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business- 
men are serious. Movie producers are serious. 
Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again. 

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of 
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable 
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour 
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of 
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots 
under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers 
is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that 
I'm a Catholic. 
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly 
mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as 
individual as his automobiles more so they're 
all different sexes. 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 
down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Com- 
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a 
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and 
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin- 
cere you have no idea what a good thing the 
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand 
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me 
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody 
must have been a spy. 
America you don't really want to go to war. 
America it's them bad Russians. 
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. 
And them Russians. 
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power 
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our 
garages. 
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' 
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. 
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta- 
tions. 
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. 
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us 
all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 
America this is quite serious. 
America this is the impression I get from looking in 
the television set. 
America is this correct? 
I'd better get right down to the job. 
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes 
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and 
psychopathic anyway. 
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. 

- Berkeley, January 17, 1956


----------



## Yossarian (Oct 10, 2002)

*Snail Poem*

Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired
& handsome felt,
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at
blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
of rain dribble thru this layer
down to the roots that will tickle my ear.
Hay grave, my toes need cutting so file away
in sound curve or
Garbage grave, way above my head, blood will soon
trickle in my ear -
no choise but the grave, so cat & sheep are daisey
turned.
Train will tug my grave, my breath hueing gentil vapor
between weel & track.
So kitten string & ball, jumpe over this mound so
gently & cutely
So my toe can curl & become a snail & go curiously
on its way.

_Peter Orlovsky, 1958_


----------



## jms (Oct 10, 2002)

Walk every path
climb every mountain
until your knackered


Spike Milligan


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Oct 11, 2002)

..and here's my favourite first line in poetry. One to remember next time you're watching one of Jennie Bond's sycophantic reports.

No, say what you really think Percy, don't hold back...

*Sonnet: England in 1819* 

_An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,-- 
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who 
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,-- 
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, 
But leech-like to their fainting country cling, 
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,-- 
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,-- 
An army, which liberticide and prey 
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,-- 
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; 
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed; 
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,-- 
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may 
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. _

- Percy Bysshe Shelley


----------



## vindictive (Oct 11, 2002)

good poem


----------



## Anna Key (Oct 11, 2002)

Ah! Red Shelley. Warms the old cockles.


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## rorymac (Oct 11, 2002)

Load of ol shite.


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## Azrael (Oct 11, 2002)

_Modern Prayer_, by DH Lawrence. 

Almighty Mammon, make me rich! 
Make me rich quickly, with never a hitch 
in my fine prosperity! Kick those in the ditch 
Who hinder me, Mammon, great son of a bitch!


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## jms (Oct 12, 2002)

there once was a martian from space
who entered a three-legged race
He was not very fast 
in fact he came last
because he was a bag of oven-ready chips


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## drfranni (Oct 15, 2002)

To His Coy Mistress  Andrew Marvell. 1621–1678

HAD we but world enough, and time,   
This coyness, Lady, were no crime   
We would sit down and think which way   
To walk and pass our long love's day.   
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side          
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide   
Of Humber would complain. I would   
Love you ten years before the Flood,   
And you should, if you please, refuse   
Till the conversion of the Jews.   
My vegetable love should grow   
Vaster than empires, and more slow;   
An hundred years should go to praise   
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;   
Two hundred to adore each breast,    
But thirty thousand to the rest;   
An age at least to every part,   
And the last age should show your heart.   
For, Lady, you deserve this state,   
Nor would I love at lower rate.    
  But at my back I always hear   
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;   
And yonder all before us lie   
Deserts of vast eternity.   
Thy beauty shall no more be found,    
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound   
My echoing song: then worms shall try   
That long preserved virginity,   
And your quaint honour turn to dust,   
And into ashes all my lust:   
The grave 's a fine and private place,   
But none, I think, do there embrace.   
  Now therefore, while the youthful hue   
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,   
And while thy willing soul transpires   
At every pore with instant fires,   
Now let us sport us while we may,   
And now, like amorous birds of prey,   
Rather at once our time devour   
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.   
Let us roll all our strength and all   
Our sweetness up into one ball,   
And tear our pleasures with rough strife   
Thorough the iron gates of life:   
Thus, though we cannot make our sun   
Stand still, yet we will make him run. 


I love this poem - funny, sexy and beautiful language. The last six lines feel as if the poet is suddenly changing pace, putting the pressure on, whilst acknowledging to himself the transitory nature of pleasure/sex/life. It makes me smile everytime I read it


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## onemonkey (Oct 15, 2002)

do you reckon he got a shag out of it then?


----------



## drfranni (Oct 15, 2002)

Good question - difficult to say without seeing the object of his attentions.

I have advised my children that if anyone ever comes up with anything as lovely as this (Rather than "If you loved me you'd let me" bollox) then they should jump them ASAP. It won't happen often, if at all


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## Roadkill (Oct 15, 2002)

*Night Mail*

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

W.H. Auden


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## Roadkill (Oct 15, 2002)

Bugger.  Just remembered it was meant to be one poem per day.  Sorry!

  

(It's a great poem, though)


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## drfranni (Oct 16, 2002)

After the Lunch - Wendy Cope

On Waterloo bridge, where we said our goodbyes
The weather conditions brings tears to my eyes,
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I've fallen in love 

On Waterloo bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. You're high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?

On Waterloo bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.
The head does it's best, but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I'm halfway across


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## drfranni (Oct 17, 2002)

*Continuing the bridge theme......*

William Wordsworth


Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!


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## drfranni (Oct 17, 2002)

*For a more recent view.....*

On Westminster Bridge
--------------------------------

Matthew Williams

The Thames wears a khaki shirt
with red bridge braid to beat some coloured kid.
Cocaine smuggler, you don't know him.
Detained, deported, dead.

... ...Tugela! make an oyster of his heart.
... ...Calm Tugela! bear his opened body
... ...through the fields again.

The Thames wears black polyester track pants,
waxes hair back into a shine,
cuts its own sweet 4 a.m line,
calls a mini-cab.

... ...All bright and glittering in the smoked up room.
... ...A sight so touching, so beautiful,
... ...never saw, never felt so deep

(geographical note - Tugela - river in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)


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## drfranni (Oct 18, 2002)

*I know that some people have  to do her for GCSE BUT....*

.....doesn't mean she can't do some class verse (gedditt????)

Warming Her Pearls
Carol Ann Duffy

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I´ll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She´s beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit´s foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head.... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does.... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.


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## Roadkill (Oct 18, 2002)

Carol Ann Duffy was awarded an honourary doctorate by Hull Uni this year - I graduated from my MA at the same ceremony.  She read a wonderful poem as part of her acceptance speech, but I can't remember what it was called.


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## Azrael (Oct 18, 2002)

_To Whom It May Concern_, by Adrial Mitchell

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
            So stick my legs in plaster
            Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain, 
Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again
             So fill my ears with silver
             Stick my legs in plaster
             Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames
Made a marble phone book and I carved all the names
              So coat my eyes with butter
              Fill my ears with silver
              Stick my legs in plaster
              Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
              So stuff my nose with garlic
              Coat my eyes with butter
              Fill my ears with silver
              Stick my legs in plaster
              Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
              So chain my tongue with whisky
              Stuff my nose with garlic
              Coat my eyes with butter
              Fill my ears with silver
              Stick my legs in plaster
              Tell me lies about Vietnam.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
             So scrub my skin with women,
             Chain my tongue with whisky
             Stuff my nose with garlic
             Coat my eyes with butter
             Fill my ears with silver
             Stick my legs in plaster
             Tell me lies about Vietnam.


It was first read out in Trafalgar Square in 1964, and was read again Saturday 13 October 2001 at the Anti-War demonstration in London . 

Said Mitchell: "It is about Vietnam , But it is still relevant. It's about sitting faithfully in England while thousands of miles away terrible atrocities are being committed in our name.''


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## Yossarian (Oct 21, 2002)

Excellent anti-war poem there Azrael, I’ve never seen that one before.

*NAMES OF THE RIVER*

It's strange, like a dream: in the deep shadows of evening 
to tumble down into narrow lanes, and rest my eyes 
on the blind walls of darkness and search for black, leafless branches 
which the wind has pressed against the violet sky 
like characters in a strange alphabet - now it's blowing 
these signs into strands of smoke. 
The light from distant windows, reflections of stars and gleaming eyes 
slide slowly over the bark, shadows emerge from below, 
and the reflection runs along the bars and disappears 
in the depths of the lane - 
a trembling runs like a wave along the soft shades of sky 
torn at the bottom by the darkness of stone houses and poles 
flat as stage sets, sharp and unreal . . .
It's strange, like a dream, but somehow alive and painful 
to walk in evening lanes, looking at lights and shadows 
as at a traveling show, to be the wind and the branch 
pressed against the sky, to pass in shapes, and flow 
as on a river's tide, and each shape is a wave 
rising alone and alone silently falling. . .
And have only one body, like the current of a strange river 
rising in waves like a shadow, like a branch, like the wind, 
passing, lonely and mute, a brief flash 
on the stage set of events ... sleep and weariness come, 
a cold wind blows, the body trembles, lips grow pale 
and shapes are jumbled in dreams, everything is confused 
like the unfamiliar lines the wind 
slowly writes on the sky with the bare branches of trees.
It's strange: to walk through a lane and not recognize familiar 
shapes and the ordinary names of houses, street lamps, stones, 
and see faces of friends as through a sheet of water, 
clouded and indistinct. Mouths open in a stifled shout 
sink somewhere, flow down with the swaying wave 
and eyes gaze at me, expectant, 
swirl and blur in the spray of the shattered glass surface, 
burning with phosphorescent fire. The sky creases in waves, 
the hiss of electricity is like the quivering chord of a broken string. . . 
and again the branches of trees, and the reflection along iron bars 
and the writing falls in shadows, the names of the passing river.
It's strange, like a dream, but somehow alive, painful: 
to walk in evening lanes and not recognize familiar 
shapes and ordinary names, and forget the faces of friends 
to be only light and shadow, to have a lonely, mute body, 
and to be the wave of a strange river, passing on and on.

_Tadeusz Borowski_


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## drfranni (Oct 22, 2002)

*War poets - different war, same message*

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


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## drfranni (Oct 23, 2002)

*Don't know why I like this but....*

...but I do

A Psalm of Montreal 
Samuel Butler

STOWED away in a Montreal lumber room 
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; 
Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, 
Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth: 
O God! O Montreal! 

Beautiful by night and day, beautiful in summer and winter, 
Whole or maimed, always and alike beautiful - 
He preacheth gospel of grace to the skin of owls 
And to one who seasoneth the skins of Canadian owls: 
O God! O Montreal! 

When I saw him I was wroth and I said, 
"O Discobolus! Beautiful Discobolus, a Prince both among gods and men! 
What doest thou here, how camest thou hither, Discobolus, 
Preaching gospel in vain to the skins of owls?" 
O God! O Montreal! 

And I turned to the man of skins and said unto him, "O thou man of skins, 
Wherefore hast thou done thus to shame the beauty of the Discobolus?" 
But the Lord had hardened the heart of the man of skins 
And he answered, "My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon." 
O God! O Montreal! 

"The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar - 
He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs; 
I, Sir, am a person of most respectable connections - 
My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon." 
O God! O Montreal! 

Then I said, "O brother-in-law to Mr. Spurgeon's haberdasher, 
Who seasonest also the skins of Canadian owls, 
Thou callest trousers 'pants', whereas I call them 'trousers', 
Therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!" 
O God! O Montreal! 

"Preferrest thou the gospel of Montreal to the gospel of Hellas, 
The gospel of thy connection with Mr. Spurgeon's haberdashery to the gospel of Discobolus?" 
Yet none the less blasphemed he beauty saying, "The Discobolus hath no gospel, 
But my brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon." 
O God! O Montreal!

(A brief explanation of the origins of the poem:
"Butler had little patience for flummery. When he visited Canada, he came across a copy of a Greek statue depicting a discus thrower in a Montreal museum. The statue had been placed facing the wall in the corner of a taxidermist's work area in the attic. The taxidermist told Butler that the museum thought the nudity (Greek athletes always competed without clothes) disqualified the statue for Victorian viewing. To bolster his own claim to respectability, the taxidermist mentioned that his brother-in-law did most of the printing for a prominent Montreal clergyman, Mr. Spurgeon. 

Butler took these ingredients, changing them slightly (the printer becomes a haberdasher, mainly, I think, because Butler liked the sound of the word), and wrote today's poem A Psalm of Montreal.")

I sometimes start the day by deciding to get the phrase "My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr Spurgeon" into conversation


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## onemonkey (Oct 23, 2002)

*Don't know why I like this but....*



> _Originally posted by drfranni _
> *I sometimes start the day by deciding to get the phrase "My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr Spurgeon" into conversation *


do you ever succeed?!


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## drfranni (Oct 23, 2002)

Oh hell yes, it's easier for me because I like dressmaking and so I can often get the conversation round to bias-binding

From there it's a hop, skip and a jump to "In fact, my brother-in-law is...."

No one has EVER queried this, except one smartarse who knew the poem!


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## Donna Ferentes (Oct 23, 2002)

> _Originally posted by Yossarian _
> *Excellent anti-war poem there Azrael, I’ve never seen that one before.*


Which is odd, as I'm sure I posted that very poem on this very forum a couple of weeks ago.

What's more odd is that when I've searched for it, I can't find it...


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## Anna Key (Oct 25, 2002)

Time for some Larkin. The old git.


Vers de Société

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so _Dear Warlock-Williams: I'm afraid_ -

Funny how hard it is to be alone.
I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,
Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted
Over to catch the drivel of some bitch
Who's read nothing but _Which_;
Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled
With forks and faces, rather than repaid
Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,
And looking out to see the moon thinned
To an air-sharpened blade.
A life, and yet how sternly it's instilled

_All solitude is selfish_. No one now
Believes the hermit with his gown and dish
Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish
Is to have people nice to you, which means
Doing it back somehow.
_Virtue is social_. Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?
Something that bores us, something we don't do well
(Asking that ass about his fool research)
But try to feel, because, however crudely,
It shows us what should be?
Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering _Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course -_

Philip Larkin


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## J77 (Oct 25, 2002)

poem about where i come from (north norfolk):

The Garden of Sleep

by Clement Scott (1841 - 1904)


On the grass of the cliff, at the edge of the steep,
God planted a garden - a garden of sleep!
'Neath the blue of the sky, in the green of the corn,
It is there that the regal red poppies are born!
Brief days of desire, and long dreams of delight.
They are mine when my Poppyland cometh in sight.
In music of distance, with eyes that are wet,
It is there I remember, and there I forget!
O! heart of my heart! where the poppies are born.
I am waiting for thee, in the hush of the corn.
Sleep! Sleep! From the Cliff to the Deep!
Sleep, my Poppyland, Sleep!

In my garden of sleep, where red poppies are spread,
I wait for the living, alone with the dead!
For a tower in ruin stands guard o'er the deep,
At whose feet are green graves of dear women asleep!
Did they love as I love, when they lived by the sea?
Did they wait as I wait for the days that may be?
Was it hope or fulfilling that entered each breast,
Ere death gave release, and the poppies gave rest?
O! life of my life! on the cliffs by the sea,
By the graves in the grass, I am waiting for thee!
Sleep! Sleep! In the Dews by the Deep!
Sleep, my Poppyland. Sleep!


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## Yossarian (Oct 26, 2002)

*St Agnes' Eve*
_Kenneth Fearing_

the settings include a fly-specked monday evening,
a cigar store with stagnant windows,
two crooked streets;
the characters: six policemen and louie glatz.

subways rumble and mutter a remote portent
as louie glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out with

$14.92.

officer dolan notices something suspicious, it is supposed
and ordered him to halt,
but dangerous, handsome, cross-eyed louie the rat

spoke with his gat
rat-a-tat-tat
rat-a-tat-tat
and dolan was buried as quickly as possible.

but louie didn't give a god damn,
he ran like a crazy shadow on a shadowy street,
with five policemen called to the beat
hot on his trail, going blam! blam! blam!

while rat-a-tat-tat
rat-a-tat-tat
said louie's gat,
so loud that peter wendotti rolled away from his wife,
got out of bed to scratch his stomach and shiver on the cold floor
listening to the stammering syllables of instant death met on secret floors in the big galleries of the night.

then louie sagged and fell and ran.
with seven bullets through his caved-in skull and those feeble brains spilling out like soup,
he crawled behind a water hydrant and stood them off for another half minute.

"i'm not shot," he yelled. "i'm not shot," he screamed. "it isn't me they've shot in the head," he laughed "oh,
i don't give a damn!"

and rat-a-tat-tat
rat-a-tat-tat
stuttered the gat
of louie the rat
while the officers of the law went blam! blam! blam!

soft music, as the wind moans at curtained windows and shuttered doors.
the vibrant throats of steamships hoot a sad defiance at distance and nothing.
space lays its arm across the flat roofs and dreary streets.
bricks bulge and sag.

louie's soul arose through his mouth in the form of a derby hat that danced with cigarette butts and burned matches and specks of dust where louie sprawled.
close-up of dolan's widow. of louie's mother.
picture of the fly-specked monday evening, and fade out slow.


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## farmerbarleymow (Oct 27, 2002)

I am going to cheat, and post three poems that I like a lot.

*Leisure*

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, likes skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Willaim Henry Davies, 1871-1940


*This Be The Verse* 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, 1922-80


*The Daffodils*

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

Three poems to live life by I think.


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## Yossarian (Oct 29, 2002)

*Day for night*
_Richard Brautigan_

The cab takes me home
through the Tokyo dawn.
I have been awake all night.
I will be asleep before the sun
	rises.
I will sleep all day.
The cab is a pillow,
the streets are blankets,
the dawn is my bed.
The cab rests my head.
I’m on my way to dreams.


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## Yossarian (Oct 30, 2002)

One of Liverpool's (destined to be European City of Culture 2008) finest poets...

*TONIGHT AT NOON*
_Adrian Henri_

Tonight at noon
Supermarkets will advertise 3p extra on everything
Tonight at noon
Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home
Elephants will tell each other human jokes
America will declare peace on Russia
World War I generals will sell poppies on the street on November 11th
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees


Tonight at noon
Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing fields
A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool
Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton
And Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights
In front of the Black house
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein


Girls in bikinis are moonbathing
Folksongs are being sung by real folk
Art galleries are closed to people over 21
Poets get their poems in the Top 20
There's jobs for everybody and nobody wants them
In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing in broad daylight
In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly bury the living
          and
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon


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## twinkle (Oct 31, 2002)

*i know why the cages bird sings*

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind 
and floats downstream till the current ends 
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky. 
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage 
can seldom see through his bars of rage 
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. 
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill 
of things unknown but longed for still 
and his tune is heard on the distant hill 
for the caged bird sings of freedom. 
The free bird thinks of another breeze 
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees 
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own. 
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams 
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream 
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. 
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill 
of things unknown but longed for still 
and his tune is heard on the distant hill 
for the caged bird sings of freedom. 

maya angelou


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## Yossarian (Nov 1, 2002)

*When Caesar's mushroom is in season*
_Paul Reekie_

When Caesar's mushroom is in season
It is the reversal of the mushroom season
As Caesar's mushroom comes in March
The mushroom season is in September
Six months earlier
One half year
Equinoctal
Autumnal to vernal

Do you hope for more
Than a better balance
Between fear and desire
It'll only be the straying
That finds the path direct
Neither in the woods nor in the field
No robes, like Caesar's, trimmed with purple
Rather an entire street trimmed with purple
And every door in it
Wrapped in a different sort of christmas paper


The September mushroom of midnight
Show the rhythms of vision
Can't move for tripping over them
Wipe your tapes
Wipe your tapes with lightning


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## Stibs (Nov 1, 2002)

Ignoring all of the poems that are of great value, profound and life changing, my FAVOURITE poem is Lepanto by GK Chesterton.

It is horribly camp and ott and kitsch.  

But it reads like a Terry Gilliam filmLepanto


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## drfranni (Nov 5, 2002)

IF I SHOULD DIE

by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

IF I should die, 
And you should live, 
And time should gurgle on, 
And morn should beam, 
And noon should burn, 
As it has usual done; 
If birds should build as early, 
And bees as bustling go,-- 
One might depart at option 
From enterprise below! 
'Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand 
When we with daisies lie, 
That commerce will continue, 
And trades as briskly fly. 
It make the parting tranquil 
And keeps the soul serene, 
That gentlemen so sprightly 
Conduct the pleasing scene!


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## drfranni (Nov 6, 2002)

*I love this......*

.....not that I'm bitter or anything!

Rupert Brooke
A Channel Passage

The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing--you!
You, you alone could hold my fancy ever!
And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole.
Now there's a choice--heartache or tortured liver! 
A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!

Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The sobs and slobber of a last year's woe.
And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye,
To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.


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## Donna Ferentes (Nov 6, 2002)

_The Heart_

*In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."*

_- Stephen Crane_


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## drfranni (Nov 7, 2002)

*Must be feeling soppy today....*

Bus 

By Lacy David

I used to believe when I boarded the bus
Everyone riding with me
Would stay on for the whole, long journey
But right in the middle of a straight, flat road through a perfect yellow meadow
That bell always rings
And the Greyhound pulls over
To let someone I love get out.

 Sometimes we don’t even say goodbye.

Then the hard, blue seat next to me is empty
And I think no one will ever sit there again.
At the last stop, I fell into a frantic sleep
With my face against that icy window
Then I was bumped awake
To chocolate children in red berets
And nuns with shining blue eyes singing hymns
And a banker with a broken shoulder
Who offered to share his last apple with me.

We traded stories
And telephone numbers
And all the most beautiful sights to see
Then he took his luggage
And shook my hand
And went on with his own journey
On a different bus

While I missed him
And ached for more apples.

It is on each of us to stay on the bus

And keep moving ahead and ahead
Through the muddy, deep ruts, around the hot potholes
And over the smooth, new black top
When the headlights die and the night won’t stop
And the engine groans on the hard, steep grade.
Then a tire blows
But it gets repaired
Between the towns of Stuck and Scared
It gets repaired.
I envy people who travel in two’s
With Hartmann luggage and Ferragamo shoes
And a home to come home to when the cab pulls away
And the film is developed and they can say
We saw Yosemite
We went to Yellowstone
We walked through Shropshire  
Well, I was there, too.
I just wish I could be in the pictures with you.
I wish I could be in the pictures with you.
Now the driver is whistling
My bus is leaving
’m trying to smile as it pulls me away
And I shout through the window
“Be safe
Be happy
I’ll remember you.
Please remember me.”


----------



## twinkle (Nov 7, 2002)

like that a lot drf  
i've had Rudyard Kipling's If in my head all day for some reason. sure it's been posted before but here it is again in all it's beautiful glory. ..

If you can keep your head when all about you
		  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
		If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
		  But make allowance for their doubting too:
		If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
		  Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
		Or being hated don't give way to hating,
		  And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

		If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
		  If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
		If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
		  And treat those two impostors just the same:.
		If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
		  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
		Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
		  And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

		If you can make one heap of all your winnings
		  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
		And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
		  And never breathe a word about your loss:
		If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
		  To serve your turn long after they are gone,
		And so hold on when there is nothing in you
		  Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

		If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
		  Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
		If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
		  If all men count with you, but none too much:
		If you can fill the unforgiving minute
		  With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
		Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
		  And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!


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## Donna Ferentes (Nov 7, 2002)

Rather more in the genuine spirit of Empire was Hilaire Belloc's couplet:

*Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.*

(From _The Modern Traveller_.)


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## drfranni (Nov 8, 2002)

*Hee hee - Justin - brilliant!*

Seasonal poem as it looks as if we are just leaving this season...

AUTUMN 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 

Thou comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain,
  With banners, by great gales incessant fanned,
  Brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand,
  And stately oxen harnessed to thy wain!
Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne,
  Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
  Outstretched with benedictions o'er the land,
  Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended
  So long beneath the heaven's o'er-hanging eaves;
  Thy steps are by the farmer's prayers attended;
Like flames upon an altar shine the sheaves;
  And, following thee, in thy ovation splendid,
  Thine almoner, the wind, scatters the golden leaves!


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## drfranni (Nov 8, 2002)

*And one for sour people with toothache (aka me)*

Wishes of an Elderly Man

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one,

I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"


Always attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh but I doubt it, meself


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## Yossarian (Nov 10, 2002)

*Kubla Khan*
_Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place; as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 11, 2002)

*To the Warmongers*
_Seigfried Sassoon_

I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 12, 2002)

Another one against the British empire A traditional Irish one this time:

The Dunes

I walked today on the cold grey shore
where I watched when I was much younger
while they built the dunes upon the sand

for the dead from the Great Hunger
for the dead from the Great Hunger.

Although I was a doctor's son
I gazed in fear and wonder
as they perished from the raging plague
that came in from the Great Hunger
that came in from the Great Hunger.

When I watched at the age of four
in Eighteen Forty Seven
the mounds they built upon the shore.
They seemed to point to heaven
they seemed to point to heaven.

But the wind and the rain they have worked away.
Now the dunes are uneven
and the children kick the sand around
and the bones they are revealed then
and the bones they are revealed then.

My brothers and sisters died.
My mother only four and twenty
and I alone survived to see
the potatoes grow in plenty
the potatoes grow in plenty.

They stole our grain as we died in pain
to put upon their tables.
The dying covered the dead with sand
and danced while they were able
and danced while they were able.

While the fiddler played we drank poitin
and ate the last of the berries.
Then knelt and said the rosary
round the mounds of dead we'd buried
round the mounds of dead we'd buried.

I saw dark shadows rise up from the sand
and dance all around the dunes
and they danced the rattling dance of the dead
to a set of mournful tunes
to a set of mournful tunes.

A crack of lightening split the sky.
The rain on the dunes it poured.
I left them lying where I shot them down
the bailiff and the landlord.
Then I went for a drink in Westport.

I walked today on the cold grey shore
where I watched when I was much younger
while they built the dunes upon the sand
for the dead from the Great Hunger
for the dead from the Great Hunger.


----------



## inflatable jesus (Nov 12, 2002)

Nice one butchers  

It was this handsome chap that wrote it wasn't it?


----------



## Azrael (Nov 13, 2002)

_Ode to Spring_, by Robert Burns 

When maukin bucks, at early fucks,
 In dewy grass are seen, Sir,
And birds, on boughs, take off their mows 
 Among the leaves sae green, Sir;
Latona's sun looks liquorish on 
 Dame Nature's grand impetus 
Till his prick go rise, then westward flies 
 To roger Madame Thetis. 

Yon wandering rill that marks the hill,
 And glances o'er the brae, Sir,
Slides by a bower where many a flower 
 Sheds fragrance on the day, Sir;
There Damon lay, with Sylvia gay,
 To love they thought no crime, Sir:
The wild-birds sang, the echoes rang,
 While Damons arse beat time, Sir. - 

First with the thrush, his thrust and push 
 Had compass large and long, Sir;
The blackbird next, his tuneful text,
 Was bolder, clear and strong, Sir:
The linnet's lay then came in play,
 And the lark that soar'd aboon, Sir;
Till Damon fierce, mistimed his arse,
 And fucked quite out of tune, Sir.


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## drfranni (Nov 13, 2002)

Stephen Crane 

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved 
As you thrust a bare arm backward 
And made play with your hair 
And a comb a silly gilt comb 
Ah, God—that I should suffer 
Because of the way a little finger moved.


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## onemonkey (Nov 14, 2002)

*rubaiyat of omar khayyam*

XXXVIII

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
 One moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
   The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
 Starts for the dawn of Nothing--Oh, make haste!


rest is here


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## Yossarian (Nov 15, 2002)

*Last Night the Wind and Rain Together Blew*
_Li Yu_

Last night the wind and rain together blew,
The wall-curtains rustled in their autumn song.
The candle died, the water-clock was exhausted,
I rose and sat, but could not be at peace.
Man's affairs are like the flow of floodwater,
A life is just like floating in a dream.
I should more often go drunken through the country,
For otherwise I could not bear to live.


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## Azrael (Nov 18, 2002)

_V_, by Tony Harrison

_Of "get this filth off our screens Channel 4" 'Daily (hate) Mail' fame._

‘My father still reads the dictionary every day.  
He says your life depends on your power to master words.’
Arthur Scargill
Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead, 
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop 
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,

which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.
This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

Far-sighted for his family’s future dead,
but for his wife, this banker’s still alone
on his long obelisk, and doomed to head
a blackened dynasty of unclaimed stone,

now graffitied with a crude four-letter word.
His children and grandchildren went away
and never came back home to be interred,
so left a lot of space for skins to spray.

The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,
brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.
the opponent of last week, this week, or next,
and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses
on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.

Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,
dodging between tall family vaults and trees
like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,
fills every space he finds with versus Vs.
Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,
the sprayer master of his flourished tool,
get short-armed on the left like that red tick
they never marked his work with much at school.

Half this skinhead’s age but with approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

These Vs are all the versuses of life
From LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

Class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these fixtures are fought on’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)’s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

Which is, I grant, the word that springs to mind, 
when going to clear the weeds and rubbish thrown
on the family plot by football fans, I find
UNITED graffitied on my parents’ stone.
How many British graveyards now this May
are strewn with rubbish and choked up with weeds
since families and friends have gone away
for work or fuller lives, like me from Leeds?
When I first came here 40 years ago
with my dad to ‘see my grandma’ I was 7.
I helped dad with the flowers.  He let me know
she’d gone to join my grandad up in Heaven.

My dad who came each week to bring fresh flowers
came home with clay stains on his trouser knees.
Since my parents’ deaths I’ve spent 2 hours
made up of odd 10 minutes such as these.

Flying visits once or twice a year,
And though I’m horrified just who’s to blame
that I find instead of flowers cans of beer
and more than one grave sprayed with some skin’s name?

Where there were flower urns and troughs of water
And mesh receptacles for withered flowers
are the HARP tins of some skinhead Leeds supporter.
It isn’t all his fault though.  Much is ours.
5 kids, with one in goal, play 2-a-side.
When the ball bangs on the hawthorn that’s one post
and petals fall they hum _Here Comes the Bride_
though not so loud they’d want to rouse a ghost.
They boot the ball on purpose at the trunk
and make the tree shed showers of shrivelled may.
I look at this word graffitied by some drunk
and I’m in half a mind to let it stay.

(Though honesty demands that I say if
I’d wanted to take the necessary pains
to scrub the skin’s inscription off
I only had an hour between trains.

So the feelings that I had as I stood gazing
and the significance I saw could be a sham,
mere excuses for not patiently erasing
the word sprayed on the grave of dad and mam.)

This pen’s all I have of magic wand.
I know this world’s so torn but want no other
except for dad who’d hoped from ‘the beyond’
a better life than this one, with my mother.

Though I don’t believe in afterlife at all
and know it’s cheating it’s hard not to make
a sort of furtive prayer from this skin’s scrawl,
his UNITED mean ‘in Heaven’ for their sake,

an accident of meaning to redeem
an act intended as mere desecration
and make the thoughtless spraying of his team
apply to higher things, and to the nation.

Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs
to let the people know who’s forged their fetters
Like PRI  CE  O  WALES above West Yorkshire mines
(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!)

The big blue star for booze, tobacco ads,
the magnet’s monogram, the royal crest,
insignia in neon dwarf the lads
who spray a few odd FUCKS when they’re depressed.

Letters of transparent tubes and gas
in Düsseldorf are blue and flash out KRUPP.
Arms are hoisted for the British ruling class
and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up.

And there’s HARRISON on some Leeds building sites
I’ve taken in fun as blazoning my name,
which I’ve also seen on books, in Broadway lights,
so why can’t skins with spraycans do the same?
But why inscribe these graves with CUNT and SHIT?
Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure?
This pitman’s of last century daubed PAKI GIT,
this grocer Broadbent’s aerosolled with NIGGER?

They’re there to shock the living, not arouse
the dead from their deep peace to lend support
for the causes skinhead spraycans could espouse.
The dead would want their desecrators caught!

Jobless though they are how can these kids,
even though their team’s lost one more game,
believe that the ‘Pakis’, ‘Niggers’, even ‘Yids’
sprayed on the tombstones here should bear the blame?

What is it that these crude words are revealing?
What is it that this aggro act implies?
Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling
or  just a _cri-de-coeur_ because man dies?

_So what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can’t you speak
the language that yer mam spoke.  Think of ‘er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yourself with_ cri-de-coeur!
‘She didn’t talk like you do for a start!’
I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.
_She didn’t understand yer fucking ‘art’!
She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!_

I wish on this skin’s words deep aspirations,
first the prayer for my parents I can’t make,
then a call to Britain and to all nations
made in the name of love for peace’s sake.

_Aspirations, cunt!  Folk on t’fucking dole
‘ave got about as much scope to aspire
above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt, as coal
aspires to be chucked on t’fucking fire. _

‘OK, forget the aspirations.  Look, I know
United’s losing gets you fans incensed
and how far the HARP inside you makes you go
but all these Vs: against!  against!  against! 

_Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke.
It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did –
Butcher, publican and baker.  Me, I’ll croak
doing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid. 

‘ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed ‘er.
Death after life on t’dole won’t seem as ‘ard!
Look at this cunt, Wordsworth, organ builder,
This fucking ‘aberdasher Appleyard!

If mi mam’s up there, don’t want to meet ‘er
listening to me list mi dirty deeds,
and ‘ave to pipe up to St fucking Peter
ah’ve been on t’dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!

Then t’Alleluias stick in t’angels’ gobs.
When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void
What’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs?
The cunts who lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?

This lot worked at one job all life through.
Byron, ‘Tanner’, ‘Lieth ‘ere interred’.
They’ll chisel fucking poet when they do you
and that, yer cunt, ‘s a crude four-letter word. _

‘Listen, cunt!’ I said, ‘before you start your jeering
the reason why I want this in a book
‘s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!’
_A book, yer stupid cunt, ‘s not worth a fuck! _


----------



## Azrael (Nov 18, 2002)

‘The only reason why I write this poem at all
on yobs like you who do the dirt on death
‘s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’
_Don’t fucking bother, cunt!  Don’t waste your breath! _
‘You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn’t know
and it doesn’t fucking matter if you do,
the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud
but the autre that je est is fucking you.’

_Ah’ve told yer, no more Greek...That’s yer last warning!
Ah’ll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come.
They’ll find yer cold on t’grave tomorrer morning.
So don’t speak Greek.  Don’t treat me like I’m dumb. _
‘I’ve done my bits of mindless aggro too
not half a mile from where we’re standing now.’
_Yeah, ah bet yer wrote a poem, yer wanker you! _
‘No, shut yer gob a while.  Ah’ll tell yer ‘ow...’
‘Herman Darewski’s band played operetta
with a wobbly soprano warbling.  Just why
I made my mind up that I’d got to get her
with the fire hose I can’t say, but I’ll try.

It wasn’t just the singing angered me.
At the same time half a crowd was jeering
as  the smooth Hugh Gaitskill, our MP,
made promises the other half were cheering.

What I hated in those high soprano ranges
was uplift beyond all reason and control
and in a world where you say nothing changes
it seemed a sort of prick-tease of the soul.

I tell you when I heard high notes that rose
above Hugh Gaitskill’s cool electioneering
straight from the warbling throat right up my nose
I had all your aggro in _my_ jeering.

And I hit the fire extinguisher ON knob
and covered orchestra and audience with spray.
I could run as fast as you then.  A good job!
They yelled ‘damned vandal’ after me that day...’

_And then yer saw the light and up ‘eavy!
And knew a man’s not how much he can sup...
Yer reward for growing up’s this super-bevvy,
a meths and champagne punch ini t’FA Cup.

Ah’ve ‘eard all that from old farts past their prime.
‘ow now yer live wi’ all yer once detested...
Old farts with not much left’ll give me time.
Fuckers like that get folk like me arrested.

Covet not thy neighbour’s wife, thy neighbour’s riches.
Vicar and cop who say, to save our souls,
Get thee beHind me, Satan, drop their breeches
and get the Devil’s dick right up their ‘oles! _

It was more a _working_  marriage that I’d meant,
a blend of masculine and feminine.
Ignoring me, he started looking, bent
on some more aerosolling, for his tin.

‘It was more a working  marriage that I mean!’
_Fuck, and save mi soul, eh?  That suits me. _ 
Then as if I’d egged him on to be obscene
he added a middle slit to one daubed V.

_Don’t talk to me of fucking representing
the class yer were born into any more.
Yer going to get ‘urt and start resenting
it’s not poetry we need in this class war.

Yer’ve given yerself toffee, cunt.  Who needs
yer fucking poufy words.  Ah write mi own.
Ah’ve got mi work on show all ovver Leeds 
like this UNITED ‘ere on some sod’s stone. _

‘OK!’ (thinking I had him trapped) ‘OK!’
‘If you’re so proud of it, then sign your name
when next you’re full of HARP and armed with spray,
next time you take this short cut from the game.’

He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried
and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign
the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried.
He aerosolled his name.  And it was mine.

The boy footballers bawl _Here Comes the Bride_
and drifting blossoms fall onto my head.
One half of me’s alive but one half died
when the skin half sprayed my name among the dead.

Half versus half, the enemies within
the heart that can’t be whole till they unite.
As I stoop to grab the crushed HARP lager tin
the day’s already dusk, half dark, half light.

That UNITED that I’d wished onto the nation
or as reunion for dead parents soon recedes.
The word’s once more a mindless desecration
by some HARPoholic yob supporting Leeds.

Almost the time for ghosts I’d better scram.
Though not given much to fears of spooky scaring
I don’t fancy an encounter with mi mam
playing Hamlet with me for this swearing.
Though I’ve a train to catch my step is slow.
I walk on the grass and graves with wary tread
over these subsidences, these shifts below
the life of Leeds supported by the dead.

Further underneath’s that cavernous hollow
that makes the gravestones lean towards the town.
A matter of mere time and it will swallow
this place of rest and all the resters down.

I tell myself I’ve got, say, 30 years.
At 75 this place will suit me fine.
I’ve never feared the grave but what I fear’s
that great worked-out black hollow under mine.

Not train departure time, and not Town Hall
with the great white clock face I can see,
coal, that began, with no man here at all,
as 300 million-year-old plant debris.

5 kids still play at making blossoms fall
and humming as they do _Here Comes the Bride_.
They never seem to tire of their ball
though I hear a woman’s voice call one inside.

2 larking boys play bawdy bride and groom.
3 boys in Leeds strip la-la _Lohengrin_. 
I hear them as I go through growing gloom
still years away from being skald or skin.

The ground’s carpeted with petals as I throw
the aerosol, the HARP can, the cleared weeds
on top of dad’s dead daffodils, then go,
with not one glance behind, away from Leeds.

The bus to the station’s still the No. 1
but goes by routes that I don’t recognise.
I look out for known landmarks as the sun
reddens the swabs of cloud in darkening skies.


----------



## Azrael (Nov 18, 2002)

Home, home, home, to my woman as the red
darkens from a fresh blood to a dried.
Home, home to my woman, home to bed
where opposites seem sometimes unified.

A pensioner in turban taps his stick
along the pavement past the corner shop,
that sells samosas now, not beer on tick,
to the Kashmir Muslim Club that was the Co-op.

House after house FOR SALE where we’d played cricket
with white roses cut from flour-sacks on our caps,
with stumps chalked on the coal-grate for our wicket,
and every one bought now by ‘coloured chaps’,
dad’s most liberal label as he felt
squeezed by the unfamiliar, and fear
of foreign food and faces, when he smelt
curry in the shop where he’d bought beer.

And growing frailer, ‘wobbly on his pins’,
the shops he felt familiar with withdrew
which meant much longer tiring treks for tins
that had a label on them that he knew.

And as the shops that stocked his favourites receded 
whereas he’d fancied beans and popped next door,
he found that four long treks a week were needed
till he wondered what he bothered eating for.
The supermarket made him feel embarrassed.
Where people bought whole lambs for family freezers
he bought baked beans from check-out girls too harassed
to smile or swap a joke with sad old geezers.
But when he bought his cigs he’d have a chat,
his week’s one conversation, truth to tell,
but time also came and put a stop to that
when old Wattsy got bought out by M. Patel.

And there, ‘Time like an ever rolling stream”s 
What I once trilled behind that boarded front.
A 1000 ages made coal-bearing seams
and even more the hand that sprayed this CUNT

on both Methodist and C of E billboards
once divided in their fight for local souls.
Whichever house more truly was the Lord’s
both’s pews are filled with cut-price toilet rolls.

Home, home to my woman, never to return
till sexton or survivor has to cram
the bits of clinker scooped out of my urn
down through the rose-roots to my dad and mam.

Home, home to my woman, where the fire’s lit
these still chilly mid-May evenings, home to you,
and perished vegetation from the pit
escaping insubstantial up the flue.
Listening to _Lulu_, in our hearth we burn,
As we hear the high Cs rise in stereo,
what was lush swamp club-moss and tree-fern
at least 300 million years ago.

Shilbottle cobbles, Alban Berg high D
lifted from a source that bears your name,
the one we hear decay, the one we see,
the fern from the foetid forest, as brief flame.

This world, with far too many people in,
starts on the TV logo as a taw,
then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin
to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War.

As the coal with reddish dust cools in the grate
on the late-night national news we see
police v. pickets at a coke-plant grate,
old violence and old disunity.

The map that’s colour-coded Ulster/Eire’s
flashed on again as almost every night.
Behind a tiny coffin with two bearers
men in masks with arms show off their might.

The day’s last images recede to first a glow
and then a ball that shrinks back to a blank screen.
Turning to love, and sleep’s oblivion, I know
what the UNITED that the skin sprayed has to mean.
Hanging my clothes up, from my parka hood
may and apple petals, browned and creased,
fall onto the carpet and bring back the flood
of feelings their first falling had released.

I hear like ghosts from all Leeds matches humming
with one concerted voice the bride, the bride
I feel united to, my bride is coming
into the bedroom, naked, to my side.

The ones we choose to love become our anchor
when the hawser of the blood-tie’s hacked, or frays.
But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling: _Wanker! _ 
It’s the aerosolling skin I met today’s.
My _alter ego_ wouldn’t want to know it,
His aerosol vocab would baulk at LOVE,
the skin’s UNITED underwrites the poet,
the measures carved below the ones above.

I doubt if 30 years of bleak Leeds weather
and 30 falls of apple and of may
will erode the UNITED binding us together.
And now it’s your decision: does it stay?

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find out where I’m buried but I’m near
the grave of haberdasher Appleyard,
the pile of HARPs, or some new neonned beer.

Find Byron, Wordsworth, or turn left between 
one grave marked Broadbent, one marked Richardson.
Bring some solution with you that can clean
whatever new crude words have been sprayed on.
If love of art, or love, gives you affront
that the grave I’m in ‘s graffitied then, maybe, 
erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT
but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

Victory?  For vast, slow, coal-creating forces
that hew the body’s seams to get the soul.
Will earth run out of her ‘diurnal courses’
before repeating her creation of black coal?

If, having come this far, somebody reads
these verses, and he/she wants to understand,
face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,
and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

_Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind. _


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 19, 2002)

Can i have two as they're very short please? (keep up the good work everyone, except me - some great stuff here i wouldn't have heard of...ta).

*Rick's Pollution Poem*:

Pollution
All around
Sometimes up
And sometimes down
But always around
Pollution, are you coming to my town?
Or am I coming to yours ?
We're on different buses, Pollution
But we're both using petrol...bombs!


*Rick's Poem from Demolition*:

What are you doing, Neil ?
To make a meal, Neil ? (its surreal)
From totalitarian vegetables
How much does it cost, Neil .. ?

By Rik.


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## WasGeri (Nov 19, 2002)

Haven't got time to read this whole thread - running late for work!

Howl by Allen Ginsberg is mine. Will post it later if I remember (and it's not been posted already)


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## Hollis (Nov 20, 2002)

Jesus, is that 'Ode to Spring' really by Robert Burns. - Can't say I've read any of his stuff before, & it wasn't exactly what I was expecting.


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## Yossarian (Nov 21, 2002)

*The City*
_Constantine Cavafy_

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting."

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other —
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.


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## butchersapron (Nov 24, 2002)

*Revolutionary Consciousness*

He lost his hand in a bright new
automated punch press

Five digits now none
Taken by a digital computer
           Whitch
Lo and Behold
Makes mistakes just like human beans

Humanized computer
Computerized human
It's all the same
But it can't hold hands

Neither can he.
He took took his other five digits
and melted them down into a 
Fist.


Mr Toad (Martin Glaberman)


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## Azrael (Nov 24, 2002)

> _Originally posted by Hollis _
> *Jesus, is that 'Ode to Spring' really by Robert Burns. - Can't say I've read any of his stuff before, & it wasn't exactly what I  was expecting.  *


Indeed it is, it's from a collection called _The Merry Muses_, written in the late 18th century. Only two original copies survive, and it was surpressed for years because of it's very explicit content! 

A bit of the background to _Ode To Spring_, from here: A friend once bet Burns that he could not write an Ode to Spring "...on an original plan." (or in other words, something fresh and new of the same type) after they had read one written in the fasionable neo-classical English of the day. 

"I accepted" (the bet) Burns wrote, in a letter to George Thomson, "and pledged myself to bring in the verdant fields, -- the budding flowers, -- the chrystal streams, -- the melody of the groves, -- and a love story into the bargain, and yet be original. Here follows the piece, and wrote for music too!"


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## Yossarian (Nov 25, 2002)

*The Diameter of the Bomb*
_Yehuda Amichai_

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimetres 
and the diameter of its effective 
range—about seven metres. 
And in it four dead and eleven wounded. 
And around them in a greater circle 
of pain and time are scattered 
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was 
buried where she came from 
over a hundred kilometres away 
enlarges the circle greatly. 
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country 
includes the whole world in the circle. 
And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making 
the circle without end and without God.


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## Dubversion (Nov 25, 2002)

that's fucking great, Yoss.

im no poetry buff, but that makes me want to check out the rest of his stuff. thanks,.


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## Azrael (Nov 25, 2002)

That is indeed great; I think I'll also be doing some checking, adding that name to the others I've gleaned from this. 

Really great thread!


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## ats (Nov 26, 2002)

*And one for sour people with toothache (aka me)*



> _Originally posted by drfranni _
> *Always attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh but I doubt it, meself *



It is by Sir Walter Raleigh - but not the Elizabethan one.

This one was a 19th/20th Century minor poet.  (So minor I don't know if he wrote anything other than this.)

The poet's dates are 1861-1922.

(Information from Geoffrey Grigson's 'The Penguin Book of Unrespectable Verse'.)


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## ats (Nov 26, 2002)

R.I.P.

A girl in our village makes love in the churchyard.
She doesn’t care who, but it must be the churchyard.
They say she prefers the old part to the new.
Green granite chippings, maybe
Rankle.  Worn slabs welcome.
And after, in her bedroom,
She sees the mirror’s view
Of her shoulder, embossed
In Loving Memory

Ann, why do you do it, you’ve eight ‘O’ Levels?
Why not, Ann?  If  bones remember, you’ll give them joy.
It’s as good a place as any
Close by nave, rood screen and chapel at ease,
Peal of the bells,
Bob Singles and Grandsire Doubles,
And when you half close your eyes,
The horned gargoyles choose.

But it has to happen.
Oh, Ann, tonight you were levelled.
William Jones, late of this parish,
Was cold beneath you, and his great-great-grandson
Warm above; and you rose
Though your shoulder didn’t know it
In Glorious Expectation of the Life to Come

Alan Garner


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## Yossarian (Nov 27, 2002)

*On Living*
_Nazim Hikmet_
			       I

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
	           like a squirrel, for example—
         I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
	           I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
         that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
			              your back to the wall,
         or else in a laboratory
	           in your white coat and safety glasses,
	           you can die for people—
         even for people whose faces you've never seen,
         even though you know living
	           is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
         that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees 
         and not for your children, either,
         but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
         because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


     			       II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
		     from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
		     about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
		     for the latest newscast. . .
Let's say we're at the front—
	 for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	 we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
         but we'll still worry ourselves to death
         about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
	           before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind 
		   I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.


     			       III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
	and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	in pitch black space. . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
		 if you're going to say "I lived". . .


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## RubyToogood (Nov 28, 2002)

What a great poem! I like the sentiment - kind of anarchist in a way, ie the idea that people do things for the sake of the things themselves, or for people they've never met, or for the sake of an idea, and not just as the neo-liberals would have us believe for their own narrow benefit...

sorry to bring politics into it 

Interesting collection of non-European verse you're bringing us Yoss . Are you a long-time reader of it or are you just having a poetry phase?


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## Yossarian (Nov 28, 2002)

Cheers Ruby - I've always like foreign poetry, especially some of the classical Chinese poets, and since I've started using the internet it's a lot easier to find & read new poets.


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## butchersapron (Nov 28, 2002)

Here's another one by Nazim Hikmet (people might know it from it being covered/incorporated by the Byrds, the Fall or The Misunderstood):

*I Come and Stand at Every*

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play


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## Donna Ferentes (Nov 29, 2002)

> _Originally posted by butchersapron _
> *
> All that I need is that for peace
> You fight today you fight today
> ...


Christ, that's awful. It reads like something Boy George might have written. Is it just a bad translation?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2002)

Not sure - doesn't really match up to the rest of the poem does it? Probably sounds better in Turkish - it may even be an allusion to another poem, as apperently that was one of his traits.


----------



## Yossarian (Dec 4, 2002)

*Monday*
_Primo Levi_

Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it's supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There's nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man?  Isn't a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.


----------



## inflatable jesus (Dec 4, 2002)

*Lawrence’s Grave*

I didn’t know the boy, I want to make that clear.
We weren’t best mates.
We didn’t spend cosy evenings by the fire doing each others hair.

He was a face in the corridor,
a name in an anecdote.
But I heard things, you know?

You couldn’t help but hear things.

You heard how he was an amazingly gifted footballer.
You heard that he was going to play for Celtic. 
No doubt about it.

By now he should be on that pitch with the rest of the idols
Spending his free time snorting charlie off a supermodel’s thigh.
Living in some posh suburb of somewhere that isn’t Falkirk.

It should never have happened to him.

They say he was a good guy.
A laugh, a joker.
Well what else are they going to say?

He could have been the world’s biggest bastard
and they’d still say that.
He still wouldn’t have deserved what happened though.

They say that when they found him, he was unrecognisable.

They say that whoever done it,
had practically caved in his skull.
But that wasn’t the worst bit.

They had dragged him across the room,
put his feet in the fire,
And left them to burn.

They left his _fucking_ feet to _burn_

I remember the most amazing silence in school the day after.
Eight hundred faces, all not saying a word.
Whispers going round about a pupil getting murdered.

I remember that everyone got hauled into the assembly hall.
I remember Father Brian,
Fuck. I wish I didn’t.

He was with the boy in the hospital the whole night.

With tears streaming down his face,
he told us about Lawrence’s last pathetic struggle for life.
He told us that he never gave up fighting.

It was the look on the face of the preist 
that I remember most though.
I’d never seen a man look so utterly broken before. 

I wondered how his belief in God was holding up.

They didn’t bother trying to teach us anything that day.
We all waited anxiously for a girl to start crying 
Because the sound of her being comforted broke the white noise in the dead-air.

The press and their photographers started gathering outside the school.
We heard the teachers telling us not to say anything to them.
They said that the guys from the papers were all vultures.

There was always one or two that couldn’t resist their fifteen minutes of fame.

And then there was the funeral.
The school said to respect the family’s need for privacy
To stay away if you didn’t know him.

But there were a few hundred people
that didn’t go to school that day.
Every one of them had their reasons.

It makes you wonder who the real vultures were.

It was always the same ones that went, 
that would say it.
And it always really pissed me right off.

When swearing to the accuracy of anything and everything
When swearing on their mum and dad’s lives
had become so routine that it lost all meaning.

They swore on Lawrence’s Grave.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 6, 2002)

I'll keep doing these political ones if no one else is interested:

Here's one from the Spanish Revolution, by Phillip levine:

*On the Murder of Lieutenant Jose Del Castillo
by the Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 12, 1936*


When the Lieutenant of the Guardia de Asalto
heard the automatic go off, he turned
and took the second shot just above
the sternum, the third tore away
the right shoulder of his uniform,
the fourth perforated his cheek. As he
slid out of his comrade's hold
toward the gray cement of the Ramblas
he lost count and knew only
that he would not die and that the blue sky
smudged with clouds was not heaven
for heaven was nowhere and in his eyes
slowly filling with their own light.
The pigeons that spotted the cold floor
of Barcelona rose as he sank below
the waves of silence crashing
on the far shores of his legs, growing
faint and watery. His hands opened
a last time to receive the benedictions
of automobile exhaust and rain
and the rain of soot. His mouth,
that would never again say "I am afraid,"
closed on nothing. The old grandfather
hawking daisies at his stand pressed
a handkerchief against his lips
and turned his eyes away before they held
the eyes of a gunman. The shepherd dogs
on sale howled in their cages
and turned in circles. There is more
to be said, but by someone who has suffered
and died for his sister the earth
and his brothers the beasts and the trees.
The Lieutenant can hear it, the prayer
that comes on the voices of water, today
or yesterday, form Chicago or Valladolid,
and hands like smoke above this street
he won't walk as a man ever again.


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## butchersapron (Dec 7, 2002)

One for the 7th:

*FROM THE PARIS COMMUNE TO
THE KRONSTADT REBELLION*

Kenneth Rexroth 1936



Remember now there were others before this;
Now when the unwanted hours rise up,
And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,
And the constellations change places,
And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,
And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot.
Though the air is fetid, conscripted fathers,
With the black bloat of your dead faces;
Though men wander idling out of factories
Where turbine and hand are both freezing;
And the air clears at last above the chimneys;
Though mattresses curtain the windows;
And every hour hears the snarl of explosion;
Yet one shall rise up alone saying:
“I am one out of many, I have heard
Voices high in the air crying out commands;
Seen men’s bodies burst into torches;
Seen faun and maiden die in the night air raids;
Heard the watchwords exchanged in the alleys;
Felt hate speed the blood stream and fear curl the nerves.
I know too the last heavy maggot;
And know the trapped vertigo of impotence.
I have traveled prone and unwilling
In the dense processions through the shaken streets.
Shall we hang thus by taut navel strings
To this corrupt placenta till we’re flyblown;
Till our skulls are cracked by crow and kite
And our members become the business of ants,
Our teeth the collection of magpies?”
They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.


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## Yossarian (Dec 9, 2002)

Top poems there butchersapron.

I've been reading 'Justine' by Lawrence Durrell lately, set in Alexandria and he mentions Constantine Cavafy often.

*Finalities* 
_Constantine Cavafy_

Amid fear and suspicions,
with agitated mind and frightened eyes,
we melt and plan how to act
to avoid the certain
danger that so horribly threatens us.
And yet we err, this was not in our paths;
the messages were false
(or we did not hear, or fully understand them).
Another catastrophe, one we never imagined,
sudden, precipitous, falls upon us,
and unprepared -- there is no more time -- carries us off.


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## Razoredge (Dec 10, 2002)

*Butcher's* - from your taste in poetry I suspect that you may be a romantic in love with all the great lost causes - it  takes one to know one! Here's a slight change of subject but in the romantic mode

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom........
.... then laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e e cummings


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## Donna Ferentes (Dec 10, 2002)

*The Unknown Citizen*

(To JS/07 M 378 
This Marble Monument 
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

                                                                         - _WH Auden_


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## Mr Retro (Dec 10, 2002)

Surprised By Joy
by William Wordsworth

Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind - 
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss? - That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn,
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.


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## butchersapron (Dec 11, 2002)

Here's one to bring everyone down - best experienced live:

*Evidently Chicken Town*

the fucking cops are fucking keen 
to fucking keep it fucking clean
the fucking chief's a fucking swine
who fucking draws a fucking line
at fucking fun and fucking games
the fucking kids he fucking blames
are nowehere to be fucking found
anywhere in chicken town

the fucking scene is fucking sad 
the fucking news is fucking bad
the fucking weed is fucking turf
the fucking speed is fucking surf
the fucking folks are fucking daft
don't make me fucking laugh
it fucking hurts to look around
everywhere in chicken town

the fucking train is fucking late 
you fucking wait you fucking wait
you're fucking lost and fucking found
stuck in fucking chicken town

the fucking view is fucking vile 
for fucking miles and fucking miles
the fucking babies fucking cry
the fucking flowers fucking die
the fucking food is fucking muck
the fucking drains are fucking fucked
the colour scheme is fucking brown
everywhere in chicken town

the fucking pubs are fucking dull 
the fucking clubs are fucking full
of fucking girls and fucking guys
with fucking murder in their eyes
a fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
waiting for a fucking cab
you fucking stay at fucking home
the fucking neighbors fucking moan
keep the fucking racket down
this is fucking chicken town

the fucking train is fucking late 
you fucking wait you fucking wait
you're fucking lost and fucking found
stuck in fucking chicken town

the fucking pies are fucking old 
the fucking chips are fucking cold
the fucking beer is fucking flat
the fucking flats have fucking rats
the fucking clocks are fucking wrong
the fucking days are fucking long
it fucking gets you fucking down
evidently chicken town

_John Cooper Clarke_


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## Donna Ferentes (Dec 11, 2002)

Somewhat reminiscent of:

*Bloody Orkney*

This bloody town's a bloody cuss
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no-one cares for bloody us
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody roads are bloody bad,
The bloody folks are bloody mad,
They'd make the brightest bloody sad,
In bloody Orkney.

All bloody clouds and bloody rains,
No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains,
The Council's got no bloody brains,
In bloody Orkney.

Everything's so bloody dear,
A bloody bob for bloody beer,
And is it good? No bloody fear,
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody 'flicks' are bloody old,
The bloody seats are bloody cold,
You can't get in for bloody gold,
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody dances make you smile,
The bloody band is bloody vile,
It only cramps your bloody style,
In bloody Orkney.

No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun, the bloody dames
Won't even give their bloody names,
In bloody Orkney.

Best bloody place is bloody bed,
With bloody ice on bloody head,
Might as well be bloody dead,
In bloody Orkney.

- _Captain Hamish Blair_ (it says here)


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## Yossarian (Dec 11, 2002)

*this is fucking chicken town...*

Those are two of my favourite poems ever, nice one.
Up there with 'Kublai Khan' and 'On the Ning Nang Nong'...


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## jms (Dec 14, 2002)

*Steamed Pudding* 


at our school you had to have everything
and you had to eat everything
and for some years
I would slip my steamed pudding in my pocket
disposing of it later in the playground bin
but one day I decided I was too old to behave like this
and I put my hand up and said Please Miss
I can't eat this steamed pudding
and Misss said that I was mistaken
and I would have all lunch break
and after school if necessary
and possibky the rest of my life to prove it
she got back to her task of crossing out people's work
and left me with mine
it was slow-unpleasant
three quarters of an hour of held breath
and pretending to be anywhere but the present
but eventually there was no more steamed pudding to be seen
my bowl scraped as clean as someone who loved the stuff
neatly and quietly I put down my spoon
then she put down her pen
and smiled
not the smile she had when she was caning someone
but the smile of someone who has asked you
to demonstrate your love by doing the impossible
and unnaccountably
it has been done
a smile as if she understood
how I hated steamed pud
I want to give you something for doing that she said
those mouthfuls weren't enough to feed a little mouse!
and I imagined an outrageous benevolence
possibly the confiscations of another boy
possibly a million points for my house
probabl a joy beyond my imagining
she beckoned me close
and from out of her desk
she handed me
a second helping

John Hegley


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## chrissie (Dec 14, 2002)

These are from _Twenty-One Love Poems_  (A Dream of a Common Language.  Poems: 1974-79) by Adrienne Rich

I
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk…if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blunt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground.
No one has imagined us.  We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulphuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passions rooted in the city.

II
I wake up in your bed.  I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm clock broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours.  I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life.  But I hesitate,
and wake.  _I dreamed you were a poem,_
I say, _a poem I wanted to show someone…_
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity together, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

VI
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own –
only the thumb is larger, longer – in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power-tools or steering wheel
or touching a human face…Such hands could turn
the unborn child sideways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through ice-bergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like shreds of a great krater-cup
bearing on its sides
figures of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave –
such hands could carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limit of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.

IX
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It’s not my own face I see there, but others faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us –
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key…Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition.  I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life.  I’m waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.


And because I am not suggesting an actual poem for inclusion into the anthology, just offering the reading of a few poems, I'm going to be cheeky and put in this aural link to another poet.

Jackie Kay reading some of her poems


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## rorymac (Dec 15, 2002)

I never tire of this one...

Ode to a Nightingale..John Keats. 




MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains  
  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,  
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains  
  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:  
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,          
  But being too happy in thine happiness,—  
    That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,  
          In some melodious plot  
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,  
    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.         



O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been  
  Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,  
Tasting of Flora and the country green,  
  Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!  
O for a beaker full of the warm South,          
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,  
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,  
          And purple-stained mouth;  
  That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,  
    And with thee fade away into the forest dim:         



Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget  
  What thou among the leaves hast never known,  
The weariness, the fever, and the fret  
  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;  
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,         
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;  
    Where but to think is to be full of sorrow  
          And leaden-eyed despairs,  
  Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,  
    Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.         


Away! away! for I will fly to thee,  
  Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,  
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,  
  Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 
Already with thee! tender is the night,         
  And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,  
    Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;  
          But here there is no light,  
  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown  
    Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.         


I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,  
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,  
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet  
  Wherewith the seasonable month endows  
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;         
  White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;  
    Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;  
          And mid-May’s eldest child,  
  The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,  
    The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.         



Darkling I listen; and, for many a time  
  I have been half in love with easeful Death,  
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,  
  To take into the air my quiet breath;  
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,         
  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,  
    While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad  
          In such an ecstasy!  
  Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—  
    To thy high requiem become a sod.         



Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!  
  No hungry generations tread thee down;  
The voice I hear this passing night was heard  
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:  
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path         
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,  
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;  
          The same that oft-times hath  
  Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam  
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.         


Forlorn! the very word is like a bell  
  To toil me back from thee to my sole self!  
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well  
  As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.  
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades         
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,  
    Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep  
          In the next valley-glades:  
  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?  
    Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?


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## chrissie (Dec 16, 2002)

I just adore Keats.  Such fecund language.  Nice one rorymac.


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## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2002)

Late enty for the 16th:

*Norman Morrison*

_By Adrian Mitchell_

On November 2nd 1965
in the multi-coloured multi-minded
United beautiful states of terrible America
Norman Morrison set himself on fire
outside the Pentagon.
He was thirty-one, he was a Quaker,
and his wife (seen weeping in the newsreels)
and his three children
survive him as best they can.
He did it in Washington where everyone could see
because
people were being set on fire
in the dark corners of Vietnam where nobody could see.
Their names, ages, beleifes and loves
are not recorded.
This is what Norman Morrison did.
He poured petrol over himself.
He burned. He suffered.
He died.
That is what he did
in the white heat of Washington
where everybody could see.
He simply burned away his clothes,
his passport, his pink-tinted skin,
put on a new skin of flame
and became
Vietnamese.


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## h2o (Dec 17, 2002)

I'm afraid the translation of this poem doesn't really convey the anger and the grief that the Spanish does, but it's such a good poem that I'm goint to put it up anyway.


Explico Algunas Cosas
(I'm Explaining a Few Things)
por (by) Pablo Neruda


Preguntaréis: Y dónde están las lilas?
Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas?
Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba
sus palabras llenándolas
de agujeros y pájaros? 

Os voy a contar todo lo que me pasa. 

Yo vivía en un barrio
de Madrid, con campanas,
con relojes, con árboles. 

Desde allí se veía
el rostro seco de Castilla
como un océano de cuero.
           Mi casa era llamada
la casa de las flores, porque por todas partes
estallaban geranios: era
una bella casa
con perros y chiquillos.
             Raúl, te acuerdas?
Te acuerdas, Rafael?
       Federico, te acuerdas
debajo de la tierra,
te acuerdas de mi casa con balcones en donde
la luz de junio ahogaba flores en tu boca?
          Hermano, hermano!
Todo
eran grandes voces, sal de mercaderías,
aglomeraciones de pan palpitante,
mercados de mi barrio de Argüelles con su estatua
como un tintero pálido entre las merluzas:
el aceite llegaba a las cucharas,
un profundo latido
de pies y manos llenaba las calles,
metros, litros, esencia
aguda de la vida,
       pescados hacinados,
contextura de techos con sol frío en el cual
la flecha se fatiga,
delirante marfil fino de las patatas,
tomates repetidos hasta el mar. 

Y una mañana todo estaba ardiendo
y una mañana las hogueras
salían de la tierra
devorando seres,
y desde entonces fuego,
pólvora desde entonces,
y desde entonces sangre.
Bandidos con aviones y con moros,
bandidos con sortijas y duquesas,
bandidos con frailes negros bendiciendo
venían por el cielo a matar niños,
y por las calles la sangre de los niños
corría simplemente, como sangre de niños. 

Chacales que el chacal rechazaría,
piedras que el cardo seco mordería escupiendo,
víboras que las víboras odiaran! 

Frente a vosotros he visto la sangre
de España levantarse
para ahogaros en una sola ola
de orgullo y de cuchillos! 

Generales
traidores:
mirad mi casa muerta,
mirad España rota:
pero de cada casa muerta sale metal ardiendo
en vez de flores,
pero de cada hueco de España
sale España,
pero de cada niño muerto sale un fusil con ojos,
pero de cada crimen nacen balas
que os hallarán un día el sitio
del corazón. 

Preguntaréis por qué su poesía
no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas,
de los grandes volcanes de su país natal? 

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver
la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver la sangre
por las calles!  







You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds? 

I'll tell you all the news. 

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees. 

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
           My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
             Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel?
       Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
          Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
       stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea. 

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood. 

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate! 

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives! 

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts. 

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land? 

Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!


----------



## Gilchrist (Dec 18, 2002)

On the Closing of the Millom Ironworks
Norman Nicholson

Wandering by the heave of the town park, wondering
Which way the day will drift,
On the spur of a habit I turn to the feathered
Weathercock of the furnace chimneys.
But no grey smoke-tail
Pointers the mood of the wind. The hum
And blare that for a hundred years
Drummed at the town’s deaf ears
Now fills the air with the roar of its silence.
They’ll need no more to swill the slag-dust off the windows;
The curtains will be cleaner
And the grass plots greener
Round the Old Folk’s council flats. The tanged autumnal mist
Is filtered free of soot and sulphur,
And the wind blows in untainted.
It’s beautiful to breathe the sharp night air.
But, morning after morning, there
They stand, by the churchyard gate,
Hands in pockets, shoulders to the slag,
The men whose fathers stood there back in ’28,
When their sons were at school with me.
The town
Rolls round the century’s bleak orbit.
Down
On the ebb-tide sands, the five-funnelled
Battleship of the furnace lies beached and rusting;
Run aground, not foundered;
Not a crack in her hull;
Lacking but a loan to float her off.
The Market
Square is busy as the men file by
To sign on at the ‘Brew’. But not a face
Tilts upward, no-one enquires of the sky.
The smoke prognosticates no how
Or why of any practical tomorrow.
For what does it matter if it rains all day?
And what’s the good of knowing
Which way the wind is blowing
When whichever way it blows it’s a cold wind now.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2002)

Two good ones there, thanks to h2o and Gilchrist - Ronald Fraser compiled a great oral history of the Spanish Revolution/civil war called 'Blood of Spain' that i believe was named after that particular line in the Neruda poem.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Dec 19, 2002)

I suppose you really need to hear this one read out loud by its author, but the text will have to do for now.

Beasley Street

Far from crazy pavements
...the taste of silver spoons 
A clinical arrangement 
...on a dirty afternoon 
Where the fecal germs of Mr. Freud 
...are rendered obsolete 
the legal term is null and void 
in the case of... Beasley Street 

In the cheap seats where murder breeds 
somebody is out of breath 
Sleep is a luxury they don't need 
...a sneak preview of death 
Belladonna is your flower 
Manslaughter your meat 
Spend a year in a couple of hours 
on the edge of Beasley Street 

Where the action isn't 
that's where it is 
State your position 
vacancies exist 
In an x-certificate exercise 
ex-servicemen excrete 
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies 
in a box on Beasley Street 

From the boarding houses and the bedsits full of 
...accidents and fleas 
Somebody gets it 
where the missing persons freeze 
Wearing dead men's overcoats 
you can't see their feet 
A riff joint shuts - opens up 
right down on Beasley Street 

Cars collide, colours clash 
disaster movie stuff 
for a man with the fu manchu moustache 
revenge is not enough 
There's a dead canary on a swivel seat 
There's a rainbow in the road 
Meanwhile on Beasley Street 
silence is the code 

Hot beneath the collar 
...an inspector calls 
where the perishing stink of squalor 
...impregnates the walls 
The rats have all got rickets 
They spit through broken teeth 
The name of the game is not cricket 
Caught out on ...Beasley Street 

The hipster and his hired hat 
drive a borrowed car 
Yellow socks and a pink crevat 
Nothing la-di-dah 
OAP 
Mother-to-be 
Watch the three-piece suite 
When shitstopper drains 
and crocodile skis 
are seen on ...Beasley Street 

The kingdom of the blind 
...a one-eyed man is king 
Beauty problems are redefined 
...the doorbells do not ring 
A light bulb burst like a blister 
the only form of heat 
Where a fellow sells his sister 
...down the river on Beasley Street 

The boys are on the wagon 
The girls are on the shelf 
their common problem is 
...that they're not someone else 
The dirt blows out 
The dust blows in 
You can't keep it neat 
It's a fully furnished dustbin 
...sixteen Beasley Street 

Vince the ageing savage 
betrays no kind of life 
...but the smell of yesterday's cabbage 
and the ghost of last year's wife 
Through a constant haze 
of deodorant sprays 
he says ...retreat 
Alsatians dog the dirty days 
down the middle of Beasley Street 

People turn to poison 
quick as lager turns to piss 
Sweethearts are physically sick 
every time they kiss 
It's a sociologist's paradise 
Each day repeats 
Uneasy, cheasy, greasy, queasy 
...beastly, Beasley Street 

Eyes dead as vicious fish 
look around for laughs 
If I could have just one wish 
I would be a photograph 
On a permanent monday morning 
Get lost or fall asleep 
When the yellow cats are yawning 
around the back of Beasley Street

- John Cooper Clarke


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## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2002)

Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies 
in a box on Beasley Street 


What a fucking great line.


----------



## Roadkill (Dec 20, 2002)

*Anthem for Doomed Youth*

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.


What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen


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## Donna Ferentes (Dec 20, 2002)

Merry Xmas! Ho ho ho!


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## inflatable jesus (Dec 22, 2002)

This is actually the lyrics to a song by Tindersticks, but I first read it in a poetry anthology so I figure it counts as poetry.

My Sister 


Do you remember my sister? How many mistakes did she make with those never blinking eyes? I couldn't work it out. I swear she could read your mind, your life, the depths of your soul at one glance. Maybe she was stripping herself away, saying 

Here I am, this is me 
I am yours and everything about me, everything you see... 
If only you look hard enough 
I never could. 

Our life was a pillow-fight. We'd stand there on the quilt, our hands clenched ready. Her with her milky teeth, so late for her age, and a Stanley knife in her hand. She sliced the tyres on my bike and I couldn't forgive her.

She went blind at the age of five. We'd stand at the bedroom window and she'd get me to tell her what I saw. I'd describe the houses opposite, the little patch of grass next to the path, the gate with its rotten hinges forever wedged open that Dad was always going to fix. She'd stand there quiet for a moment. I 
thought she was trying to develop the images in her own head. Then she'd say: 


I can see little twinkly stars, like Christmas tree lights in faraway windows. Rings of brightly coloured rocks floating around orange and mustard planets. I can see huge tiger striped fishes chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes, all tails and fins and bubbles. 
I'd look at the grey house opposite, and close the curtains. 

She burned down the house when she was ten. I was away camping with the scouts. The fireman said she'd been smoking in bed - the old story, I thought. The cat and our mum died in the flames, so Dad took us to stay with our Aunt in the 
country. He went back to London to find us a new house. We never saw him again. 

On her thirteenth birthday she fell down the well in our Aunt's garden and broke her head. She'd been drinking heavily. On her recovery her sight returned, a fluke of nature everyone said. That's when she said she'd never blink again. I would tell her when she started at me, with her eyes wide and watery, that they reminded me of the well she fell into. She liked this, it 
made her laugh. 

She moved in with a gym teacher when she was fifteen, all muscles he was. He lost his job when it all came out, and couldn't get another one. Not in that kind of small town. Everybody knew everyone else's business. My sister would hold her head high, though. She said she was in love. They were together for 
five years until one day he lost his temper. He hit over the back of the neck with his bullworker. She lost the use of the right side of her body. He got three years and was out in fifteen months. We saw him a while later, he was coaching a non-league football team in a Cornwall seaside town. I don't think he recognized her. 

My sister had put on a lot of weight from being in a chair 
all the time. She'd get me to stick pins and stub out cigarettes in her right hand. She'd laugh like mad because it didn't hurt. Her left hand was pretty good though. We'd have arm wrestling matches, I'd have to use both arms and she'd still beat me. 

We buried her when she was 32. Me and my Aunt, the vicar, and the man who dug the hole. She said she didn't want to be cremated and wanted a cheap coffin so the worms could get to her quickly. She said she liked the idea of it, though I thought it was because of what happened to the cat, and our mum. 


(by David Boulter)


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## dwen (Dec 23, 2002)

*Blackberrying by Sylvia Plath*

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks ---
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.


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## Yossarian (Dec 27, 2002)

*To Various Persons Talked To All At Once*
_Kenneth Koch_

You have helped hold me together.
I'd like you to be still.
Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute.
No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes.
Tell me which walk to take over the hill.
Is there a bridge there? Will I want company?
Tell me about the old people who built the bridge.
What is "the Japanese economy"?
Where did you hide the doctor's bills?
How much I admire you!
Can you help me to take this off?
May I help you to take that off?
Are you finished with this item?
Who is the car salesman?
The canopy we had made for the dog.
I need some endless embracing.
The ocean's not really very far.
Did you come west in this weather?
I've been sitting at home with my shoes off.
You're wearing a cross!
That bench, look! Under it are some puppies!
Could I have just one little shot of Scotch?
I suppose I wanted to impress you.
It's snowing.
The Revlon Man has come from across the sea.
This racket is annoying.
We didn't want the baby to come here because of the hawk.
What are you reading?
In what style would you like the humidity to explain?
I care, but not much. You can smoke a cigar.
Genuineness isn't a word I'd ever use.
Say, what a short skirt! Do you have a camera?
The moon is a shellfish.
I can't talk to most people. They eat me alive.
Who are you, anyway?
I want to look at you all day long, because you are mine.
Might you crave a little visit to the Pizza Hut?
Thank you for telling me your sign.
I'm filled with joy by this sun!
The turtle is advancing but the lobster stays behind. Silence has won the game!
Well, just damn you and the thermometer!
I don't want to ask the doctor.
I didn't know what you meant when you said that to me.
It's getting cold, but I am feeling awfully lazy.
If you want to we can go over there
Where there's a little more light.


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## Yossarian (Dec 28, 2002)

*The Earth Falls Down*
_Anne Sexton_


If I could blame it all on the weather,
the snow like the cadaver's table,
the trees turned into knitting needles,
the ground as hard as a frozen haddock,
the pond wearing its mustache of frost.
If I could blame conditions on that,
if I could blame the hearts of strangers
striding muffled down the street,
or blame the dogs, every color,
sniffing each other
and pissing on the doorstep...
If I could blame the bosses
and the presidents for
their unpardonable songs...
If I could blame it on all
the mothers and fathers of the world,
they of the lessons, the pellets of power,
they of the love surrounding you like batter...
Blame it on God perhaps?
He of the first opening
that pushed us all into our first mistakes?
No, I'll blame it on Man
For Man is God
and man is eating the earth up
like a candy bar
and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean
for it is known he will gulp it all down.
The stars (possibly) are safe.
At least for the moment.
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.

Perhaps for a death.


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## wiskey (Dec 28, 2002)

> the trees turned into knitting needles,
> the ground as hard as a frozen haddock



i have always liked this poem and these two lines in particular.

Yoss you choose some interesting stuff. Its refreshing.


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## Yossarian (Dec 30, 2002)

cheers wiskey! 

*This Is A Photograph Of Me*
_Margaret Atwood_

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)


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## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2002)

*PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AS A YOUNG ANARCHIST*


1917-18-19,
While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was “bushwa.” We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for “bullshit.”
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.

_Kenneth Rexroth_

[1956]


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## wiskey (Jan 1, 2003)

*first one of 2003*

*Warning*

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples' gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Jenny Joseph (1932 - )


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## Donna Ferentes (Jan 2, 2003)

*Anyone for Eliot?*


   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 that 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.

_ - TS Eliot_


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## rorymac (Jan 2, 2003)

Fab poem.


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## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2003)

My first of the year - i wanted to do a James Clarence Mangan one, but couldn't find one optimistic enough - bloody junkies! Some might question whether the below is optimistic - i think it is.

*BLACK RAGE*

_Umar Bin Hassan/Abiodun Oyewole_

There are bombs standing
on the corners of the cities
waiting to explode
at the slightest touch
baggy shadow street boys
stand cocked ready to fire
their eyes are grenades
and the pin is about to be pulled
BOOM!
the Brother went off
pressure pulled the trigger
and the brother became a nigger
and no one could figure out
how it happened
what went wrong?
He had a chance
somebody even loved him
even told him that he was better
than most
but he went off
chains rattled inside his brain
and his sky was filled with clouds
that didn't even bring rain
but just the illusion
that something was coming
So he became a Gun
that he could hide in a jacket
and make believe he had an erection
all the time
he could penetrate anything
his tongue was a curse
his attitude was a bullet
and he'd shoot you down
without a second thought
He became G.I. Joe
killing his family
not the enemy
a human Gun made and manufactured
in the united snakes of amerika
There are bombs standing
on the corners of the cities
waiting to explode
at the slightest touch
baggy shadow street boys
stand cocked ready to fire
their eyes are grenades
They are warriors looking for
a Rite of Passage
They are young lions
enchanted by the sound of their roar
They are diamonds
treated like worthless stones
They are Rivers
with nowhere to run
They are dreams unfulfilled
desires buried in the remains
of an abandoned soul
they are the beauty of spring
blinded by the snow storms of winter
Soon they will see their Beauty
their Strength, their Love
and like Rivers flow into sea
they will unite as One
then our voice will be
more powerful than a Gun
and as we Speak
We'll get things Done.


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## Yossarian (Jan 5, 2003)

*Restaurant*
_Harold Pinter _

No, you're wrong.

Everyone is as beautiful
	as they can possibly be

Particularly at lunch
	in a laughing restaurant

Everyone is as beautiful
	as they can possibly be

And they are moved 
	by their own beauty

And they shed tears for it
	in the back of the taxi home


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## jms (Jan 6, 2003)

*Excalibur* 
_David Brent/Ricky Gervais_ 

I froze your tears and made a dagger
And stabbed it in my cock
forever
It stays there like Excalibur
Are you my Arthur?
Say you are
Take this cool dark steeled blade
Steal it, sheath it
In your lake
I drown with you to be together
Must you breathe?
Cos I need Heaven.


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## Mr Retro (Jan 6, 2003)

*Some more Yeats?*

The Fisherman 


 Although I can see him still,
 The freckled man who goes
 To a grey place on a hill
 In grey Connemara clothes
 At dawn to cast his flies,
 It's long since I began to call up to the eyes
 This wise and simple man.
 All day I'd looked in the face
 What I had hoped 'twould be
 To write for my own race
 And the reality;
 The living men that I hate,
 The dead man that I loved,
 The craven man in his seat
 The insolent unreproved,
 And no knave brought to book
 Who has won a drunken cheer,
 The witty man and his joke
 Aimed at the commonest ear,
 The clever man who cries
 the catch-cries of the clown,
 The beating down of the wise,
 And great Art beaten down.

 Maybe a twelvemonth since
 Suddenly I began,
 In scorn of this audience,
 Imagining a man,
 And his sun-freckled face,
 And grey Connemara cloth,
 Climbing up to a place
 Where stone is dark under froth,
 And the down-turn of his wrist
 When flies drop in the stream;
 A man who does not exist,
 A man who is but a dream;
 And cried, "Before I am old
 I shall have written him one
 Poem maybe as cold
 And passionate as the dawn."

Thanks for "The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock". I Hadn't read it since school. It was always gave me an image of what Soho would be like before I ever saw it. The reality wasn't quite what I imagined but some corners were.


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## jms (Jan 6, 2003)

> 06-01-2003 11:36 AM


 you



> 06-01-2003 10:48 AM


 me




> One poem only per day


  ruby


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## Donna Ferentes (Jan 7, 2003)

Be of good cheer, London-dwellers:

*London*

 I wandered through each chartered street,
   Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
 A mark in every face I meet,
   Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 In every cry of every man,
   In every infant's cry of fear,
 In every voice, in every ban,
   The mind-forged manacles I hear:

 How the chimney-sweeper's cry
   Every blackening church appals,
 And the hapless soldier's sigh
   Runs in blood down palace-walls.

 But most, through midnight streets I hear
   How the youthful harlot's curse
 Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
   And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

_- William Blake_


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## jms (Jan 8, 2003)

*Slough* 

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
Tinned minds, tinned breath. 

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown 
For twenty years. 

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win, 
Who washes his repulsive skin 
In women's tears: 

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell. 

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad, 
They've tasted Hell. 

It's not their fault they do not know 
The birdsong from the radio, 
It's not their fault they often go 
To Maidenhead 

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead. 

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails. 

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales. 

_John Betjeman _


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## Calico. (Jan 9, 2003)

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.

Dylan Thomas.


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## Donna Ferentes (Jan 9, 2003)

A good poem ruined by overuse at funerals (and by its employment, _every time_ a leading British luvvie dies, by one of the remainder).


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## Razoredge (Jan 10, 2003)

This is a lovely poem for a snowy evening by the fire:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost


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## chrissie (Jan 11, 2003)

MOURN NOT THE DEAD

  Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie--
  Dust unto dust--
  The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
  As all men must;

  Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell--
  Too strong to strive--
  Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
  Buried alive;

  But rather mourn the apathetic throng--
  The cowed and the meek--
  Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
  And dare not speak!

From _Bars and Shadows_ by Ralph Chaplin


Edit to add the link
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bars and Shadows, by Ralph Chaplin 

The poem are all written from prison.


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## butchersapron (Jan 11, 2003)

Nice one Chrissie - those famous lines used to be inscribed on the IWW Class War Prisoners banner back 80 or 90 years ago - along with a famous picture of a feller behind bars and the caption "They're in here for you - support Class War prisoners" - something which i wish more people did nowadays...


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## chrissie (Jan 12, 2003)

I didn't know that, butchersapron.  It adds a dimension to the poem knowing it was used in that way.

I hope no-one minds me stealing the thread for a second day but continuing the prison theme I was struck with this one.  Powerful, (but I will make it my last one on this theme).

NIGHT IN THE CELL HOUSE

  Tier over tier they rise to dizzy height--
  The cells of men who know the world no more.
  Silence intense from ceiling to the floor;
  While through the window gleams a lone blue light
  Which stabs the dark immensity of night.
  Felt shod and ghostly like a shade of yore,
  The guard comes shuffling down the corridor;
  His key-ring jingles . . . and he glides from sight.

  Oh, to forget the prison and its scars,
  And face the breeze where ocean meets the land;
  To watch the foam-crests dance with silver stars,
  While long green waves come tumbling on the sand . . .
  My brow is hot against the icy bars;
  There is the smell of iron on my hand.

Ralph Chaplin


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## Yossarian (Jan 13, 2003)

I like those Ralph Chaplin poems a lot Chrissie, I don't think I've ever read anything by him before.


*Hooray Say The Roses*
_Charles Bukowski_

hooray say the roses, today is blamesday
and we are red as blood.

hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday
and we bloom where soldiers fell
and lovers too,
and the snake at the word.

hooray say the roses, darkness comes
all at once, like lights gone out,
the sun leaves dark continents
and rows of stone.

hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,
birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday
the hand holding a medal out the window,
a moth going by, half a mile an hour,
hooray hooray
hooray say the roses
we have empires on our stems,
the sun moves the mouth:
hooray hooray hooray
and that is why you like us.


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## butchersapron (Jan 13, 2003)

Chaplin also wrote the words to 'Solidarity Forever' - and a biography called 'Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American radical' which i've found almost impossible to find.


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## Donna Ferentes (Jan 14, 2003)

A couple of poems by *Wendy Cope* on the theme of TS Eliot:

1. _A Nursery Rhyme_
      (as if it might have been written byT.S. Eliot)

Because time will not run backwards 
Because time 
Because time will not run 
_Hickory dickory _

In the last minute of the first hour 
I saw the mouse ascend the ancient timepiece, 
Claws whispering like wind in dry hyacinths. 

One o'clock, 
The street lamp said, 
'Remark the mouse that races toward the carpet.' 

And the unstilled wheel still turning 
_Hickory dickory 
                                                                 Hickory dickory 
dock_

2. _Waste Land Limericks _

I. 
In April one seldom feels cheerful; 
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful; 
Clairvoyants distress me, 
Commuters depress me-- 
Met Stetson and gave him an earful. 

II. 
She sat on a mighty fine chair, 
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair; 
She asks many questions, 
I make few suggestions-- 
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair! 

III. 
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep; 
Tiresias fancies a peep-- 
A typist is laid, 
A record is played-- 
Wei la la.  After this it gets deep. 

IV. 
A Phoenician called Phlebas forgot 
About birds and his business--the lot. 
Which is no surprise, 
Since he met his demise 
And was left in the ocean to rot. 

V. 
No water.  Dry rocks and dry throats. 
Then thunder, a shower of quotes! 
From The Sanskrit to Dante. 
Da. Damyata.  Shantih. 
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.


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## dwen (Jan 16, 2003)

Field of vision- Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.
Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits on the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate--
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars,where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 21, 2003)

A topical one  - it's supposed to be broken up like that.


*Leaflet*
If you've noticed that people have been acting
_______kind of nervous _____think 
        of whole nations
they are absolutely pathological
_______one day we were selling them
so much killing hardware
_______their governmental teeth
were eroding with the metallic grind
_______but their appetites increased
along with our economic delight when
_______we filled their commissaries
with our indigestible grain as well
_______as other stuff they'd once
grown themselves______ suddenly (it seemed
_______to them) we stopped and declared
them enemies (for what we called
_______geographically defensible
reasons) just when they considered us
_______a safe source of appetite ful-
filling ordinance ______without
_______notice ______even 
        everyday fighter planes
were withheld ______naturally they responded
_______with infantile rage and alarming
violence______ these countries
_______have to be put away for their 
        own
historic health ______put out of their
_______inflammable misery ______embraced
properly by our embargoes ______sanctions 
        etc.
_______it's a pity they act so crazy 
        ______look
how nervous you get when the weather changes

_Grace Paley_


----------



## chrissie (Jan 21, 2003)

Yeah!  Back on the 'real' thread! 

Should we copy the poems from the temporary thread onto here?  What do you think?

And a VERY topical poem.  Bush is 'losing patience' we gather!  Moron.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jan 22, 2003)

Chrissie, yes I do think people should copy their poems over!


----------



## wiskey (Jan 22, 2003)

*my two were -*

*17 Jan 03* 

By Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"


"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."


"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault at the door==
Pray, what is the reason for that?"


"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box--
Allow me to sell you a couple"


"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"


"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,"
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strenth, which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."


"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"


"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs;
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs.


----------



## wiskey (Jan 22, 2003)

*21 Jan 03*

Lines and Squares


Whenever I walk in a London street,
I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, "Bears,
Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"

And the little bears growl to each other, "He's mine,
As soon as he's silly and steps on a line."
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It's ever so portant how you walk.
And it's ever so jolly to call out, "Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares!"

Alan Alexander Milne 1882-1956


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 22, 2003)

*my two were...16/01/03*

*Bluebird*
_Charles Bukowski_

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.


there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 22, 2003)

*20/01/03*

(excellent poem by Harold Pinter in today's Guardian, coincidentally...)

*Don't Look*
_Harold Pinter_

Don't look.
The world's about to break.

Don't look.
The world's about to chuck out all its light
and stuff us in the chokepit of its dark,
That black and fat suffocated place
Where we will kill or die or dance or weep
Or scream or whine or squeak like mice
To renegotiate our starting price.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jan 22, 2003)

I quite liked the incomplete version of that Yoss, as though the world had ended before he managed to finish writing it... wondered whether it was meant to be like that at first .


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 22, 2003)

heh heh, Ruby, damn ezboards... 

Here's that poem I mentioned above :

*God Bless America*
_Harold Pinter_

Here they go again, 
The Yanks in their armoured parade 
Chanting their ballads of joy 
As they gallop across the big world 
Praising America's God. 

The gutters are clogged with the dead 
The ones who couldn't join in 
The others refusing to sing 
The ones who are losing their voice 
The ones who've forgotten the tune. 

The riders have whips which cut. 
Your head rolls onto the sand 
Your head is a pool in the dirt 
Your head is a stain in the dust 
Your eyes have gone out and your nose 
Sniffs only the pong of the dead 
And all the dead air is alive 
With the smell of America's God.


----------



## wiskey (Jan 23, 2003)

*The Owl and the Pussycat*

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
  In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money
  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
  And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
          You are,
          You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!" 

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!
  How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
  But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
  To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
          His nose,
          His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.   

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
  Your ring?"  Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
  By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
  Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
  They danced by the light of the moon,
          The moon,
          The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Edward Lear


----------



## isvicthere? (Jan 24, 2003)

*"good at football" by joe cairo*

good at football

my mate Frank had a trial for Charlton
he was good on the ball
and had two quick feet

my mate Jack had a trial for the Arsenal
he was strong in the air
and he tackled like a tank

my two mates
were good at football

me? i had a trial at the Elephant and Castle
i got a three year suspended sentence
and a fuckin' big fine

i was never any good at football
i was also a bad car thief

by Joe Cairo


----------



## child apollo (Jan 25, 2003)

*Two Sailors on the Beach - F. Garcia Lorca*

1.
He wears in his heart
a fish from the China Sea.

At times one sees it crossing,
diminished, in his eyes.

Being seaman he forgets
bars and oranges.

He looks at the water.



2.
He had a soapy tongue.
He washed his words and was still.

Level world, hilly sea,
a hundred stars and his ship.

He saw the balconies of the Pope
and the golden breasts of Cuban girls.

He looks at the water.
---------------------------------------------------

I love this one. So brief & serene.

(Hope I'm not posting a repeat.)


----------



## Loki (Jan 25, 2003)

Ozymandias - Shelly

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."


----------



## chrissie (Jan 25, 2003)

Mmn.   What a great and powerful poem.  Don't you just find yourself standing with legs akimbo and arms raised, reciting the words of power?

I cannot read this without becoming Ozymandias at his most majestic.   Yet to shrink to nothing because the sands of time (literally and metaphorically) have ground one down....

Ah!  The arrogance of those in power, who think they will last beyond themselves.

Rather a comforting thought to think they will come to no more than the least of us!


----------



## chegrimandi (Jan 26, 2003)

*Initial Illumination*

Tony Harrison - written at the time of first Gulf War, published in the Guardian.


Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks
shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea
The first bright weather here for many weeks
for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,
off to St Andrew's to record a reading,
doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,
and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding
my doubt extends to Dark Age Good Book too.
Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator
incorporated cormorants I'm seeing fly
round the same island thirteen centuries later
into the In principio's intial I.
Billfrith's begemmed and jewelled boards got looted
the sort of soldiery that's still recruited
to do today's dictators' dirty work,
but the initials in St John and in St Mark
graced with local cormorants in ages,
we of a darker still keep calling Dark,
survive in those illuminated pages.
The word of God so beautifully scripted
by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite
Pentagon conners have once again conscripted
to gloss the cross on the precision sight.
Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush
were all that Eadfrith had to beautify
the word of God much bandied by George Bush
whose word illuminated midnight sky
and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed
by bombs into believing day was dawning
and crowed his heart out at the deadly raid
and didn't live to greet the proper morning.
Now with nonday headlights in Kuwait
and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad
let them remember, all those who celebrate,
that their good news is someone else's bad
or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.
Is it open-armed at all that victory V,
that insular initial intertwined
with slack-necked cormorants from black laquered sea, 
with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing
for what men claim as victories in their wars,
with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing
who don't yet smell the dunghill at their claws?


----------



## chrissie (Jan 26, 2003)

*I meant to copy poems from the ezboard*

Deleted because I put up the wrong poems, and can't find the right ones now.  Doh!


----------



## jms (Jan 27, 2003)

With it being holocaust memorial day, I though Id post up something that isnt really related to it

Wait for me, and I'll return,
Only wait very hard.



Wait when you are filled with sorrow,
As you watch the yellow rain.
Wait when the winds sweep the snowdrifts,
Wait in the sweltering heat.
Wait when others have stopped waiting,
Forgetting their yesterdays.



Wait even when from afar no letters come to you.
Wait even when others are tired of waiting.
Wait event when my mother and son think I am no more.
And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory,
Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory, too.



Wait, for I'll return, 
Defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death,
You, with your waiting, saved me.



Only you and I will know how I survived.
Because you waited, as no one else did.


Russian Soldiers Poem


----------



## chrissie (Jan 28, 2003)

*e. e. cummings - hate blows a bubble of despair into *

hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young

pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing,itself hiding one)
life's only and true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin

comes here a man would have from madame death
nevertheless now and without winter spring?
she'll spin that spirit her own fingers with
and give him nothing (if he should not sing)

how much more than enough for both of us
darling.  And if i sing you are my voice,


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jan 31, 2003)

*Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken*

Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken,
Drei Ecken hat mein Hut.
Und hätt' er nicht drei Ecken,
So wär's auch nicht mein Hut.

_My hat, it has three corners,
Three corners has my hat,
And had it not three corners,
It would not be my hat._

It's not much, but it's the only German I know. Apart from _elfmeter_.


----------



## chrissie (Jan 31, 2003)

.


----------



## Ace (Feb 1, 2003)

"Ballade des Pendus (L'Epitaphe Villon)"

 Freres humains qui après nous vivez
 N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis
 Cas se pitié de nous povres avez
 Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.
 Vous nous voiez cy attachez cinq, six.
 Quant de la chair que trop avons nourrie,
 Elle est pieça devorée et pourrie,
 Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et pouldre.
 De nostre mal personne ne s'en rie
 Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

 Se freres vous clamons, pas n'en devez
 Avoir desdaing, quoy que fusmes occis
 Par justice. Toutesfois, vous sçavez
 Qua tous hommes n'ont pas bon sens rassis.
 Excusez nous, puis que sommes transsis,
 Envers le fils de la Vierge Marie
 Que sa grace ne soit pour nous tarie
 Nous sommes mors; ame ne nous harie
 Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

 La pluye nous a debuez et lavez
 Et le soleil dessechiez et noircis.
 Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez
 Et arrachié la barbe et les sourcis.
 Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis;
 Puis ça, puis la, comme le vent varie
 A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
 Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre.
 Ne soiez donc de nostre confrarie
 Mis priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

 Prince Jesus qui sur tous a maistrie
 Garde qu'Enfer n'ait de nous seigneurie.
 A luy n'ayons que faire ne que souldre.
 Hommes, icy n'a point de mocquerie;
 Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

	-- Francois Villon


----------



## apollo & co. (Feb 2, 2003)

*e.e. cummings*

i like my body when it is with your
body.   It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss,     i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric fur,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....and eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new.


----------



## jerseymonkey (Feb 3, 2003)

Five Ways To Kill A Man
Edwin Brock

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.


----------



## isvicthere? (Feb 4, 2003)

*the sick rose*

o rose thou art sick
the invisible worm 
which flies in the night
in the howling storm
has found out thy bed
of crimson joy
and his dark secret love
doth thy life destroy

by William Blake


----------



## vanityvehicle (Feb 6, 2003)

September 1, 1939 
W. H. Auden 


------------------------------------------------------------------------



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Feb 6, 2003)

Remembering that poem on a certain day about seventeen months ago (and I was far from the only one) had the additional virtue of inducing me to read Thucydides.


----------



## vanityvehicle (Feb 6, 2003)

Yup. Thought it might be a bit topical.


----------



## Yossarian (Feb 7, 2003)

*Last Words*
_Philip Levine_

If the shoe fell from the other foot 
who would hear? If the door 
opened onto a pure darkness 
and it was no dream? If your life 
ended the way a book ends 
with half a blank page and the survivors 
gone off to Africa or madness? 
If my life ended in late spring 
of 1964 while I walked alone 
back down the mountain road? 
I sing an old song to myself. I study 
the way the snow remains, gray 
and damp, in the deep shadows of the firs. 
I wonder if the bike is safe hidden 
just off the highway. Up ahead 
the road, black and winding, falls 
away, and there is the valley where 
I lived half of my life, spectral 
and calm. I sigh with gratitude, 
and then I feel an odd pain rising 
through the back of my head, 
and my eyes go dark. I bend forward 
and place my palms on something rough, 
the black asphalt or a field of stubble, 
and the movement is that of the penitent 
just before he stands to his full height 
with the knowledge of his enormity. 
For that moment which will survive 
the burning of all the small pockets 
of fat and oil that are the soul, 
I am the soul stretching into 
the furthest reaches of my fingers 
and beyond, glowing like ten candles 
in the vault of night for anyone 
who could see, even though it is 
12:40 in the afternoon and I 
have passed from darkness into sunlight 
so fierce the sweat streams down 
into my eyes. I did not rise. 
A wind or a stray animal or a group 
of kids dragged me to the side 
of the road and turned me over 
so that my open eyes could flood heaven. 
My clothes went skittering down 
the road without me, ballooning 
out into any shape, giddy 
with release. My coins, my rings, 
the keys to my house shattered 
like ice and fell into the mountain 
thorns and grasses, little bright points 
that make you think there is magic 
in everything you see. No, it can't 
be, you say, for someone is speaking 
calmly to you in a voice you know. 
Someone alive and confident has put 
each of these words down exactly 
as he wants them on the page. 
You have lived through years 
of denial, of public lies, of death 
falling like snow on any head 
it chooses. You're not a child. 
You know the real thing. I am 
here, as I always was, faithful 
to a need to speak even when all 
you hear is a light current of air 
tickling your ear. Perhaps. 
But what if that dried bundle 
of leaves and dirt were not dirt 
and leaves but the spent wafer 
of a desire to be human? Stop the car, 
turn off the engine, and stand 
in the silence above your life. See 
how the grass mirrors fire, how 
a wind rides up the hillside 
steadily toward you until it surges 
into your ears like breath coming 
and going, released from its bondage 
to blood or speech and denying nothing.


----------



## RubyToogood (Feb 7, 2003)

That really reminds me of a poem Mrs M posted once, about someone coming over the brow of a hill to see the place they grew up in. Can't remember what it was though, I think birds featured quite heavily in it .


----------



## wiskey (Feb 10, 2003)

Still I Rise 
Maya Angelou 



You may write me down in history 
With your bitter, twisted lies, 
You may trod me in the very dirt 
But still, like dust, I'll rise. 

Does my sassiness upset you? 
Why are you beset with gloom? 
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells 
Pumping in my living room. 

Just like moons and like suns, 
With the certainty of tides, 
Just like hopes springing high, 
Still I'll rise 

Did you want to see me broken? 
Bowed head and lowered eyes? 
Shoulders falling down like teardrops, 
Weakened by soulful cries. 

Does my haughtiness offend you? 
Don't you take it awful hard 
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines 
Diggin' in my own back yard. 

You may shoot me with your words, 
You may cut me with your eyes, 
You may kill me with your hatefulness, 
But still, like air, I'll rise. 

Does my sexiness upset you? 
Does it come as a surprise 
That I dance like I've got diamonds 
At the meeting of my thighs 

Out of the huts of history's shame 
I rise 
Up from a past thats rooted in pain 
I rise 
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, 
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. 
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear 
I rise 
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear 
I rise 
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, 
I am the dream and the hope of the slave. 
I rise 
I rise 
I rise. 


(from the maya angelou thread)


----------



## Jessiedog (Feb 10, 2003)

Nice one wisk!

*wanders off to find said thread*

 

Woof


----------



## Azrael (Feb 14, 2003)

_A Satyre on Charles II_, by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Writen circa 1673 ... and very little has changed since then!

I' th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown  
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
---Nor are his high desires above his strength:   
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.   
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,  
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
---To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.     
For though in her he settles well his tarse,
Yet his dull, graceless ballocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,  
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
---All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
---From the hector of France to the cully of Britain. 

This is the only site I can think of where I could possibly get away with posting this stuff!


----------



## RubyToogood (Feb 14, 2003)

Oh good, I was afraid it was going to be some stomach-churning Valentine's Day mush when I saw someone had posted on this thread...


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Feb 16, 2003)

Germaine Greer is a big fan of Rochester.


----------



## dwen (Feb 16, 2003)

Mirror by Sylvia Plath 


I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. 
What ever you see I swallow immediately 
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. 
I am not cruel, only truthful--- 
The eye of a little god, four-cornered. 
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. 
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long 
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. 
Faces and darkness separate us over and over. 
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, 
Searching my reaches for what she really is. 
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. 
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. 
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. 
I am important to her. She comes and goes. 
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. 
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman 
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


----------



## Azrael (Feb 16, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Justin _
> *Germaine Greer is a big fan of Rochester. *


The bitch! I'll never be able to read randy Rochy in the same way again.


----------



## RubyToogood (Feb 17, 2003)

Oh cheers, dwen, that's a really cheerful little offering  .

<goes off to look for grey hairs>


----------



## Calva dosser (Feb 17, 2003)

*Rochester again.*

If Germaine likes old Willy Wilmot, I wonder what she'd make of this feminist little ode:

Against the charms our bollocks have
How weak all human skill is
That they should make a man a slave
To such a bitch as Willis

A prostitute to all the town,
And yet with no man friends
she rails and scolds when she lies down
and curses when she spends.

Bawdy in thoughts
Precise in words
Ill-natured though a whore
Her belly is a bag of turds
Her cunt a common shore.

I don't like her.

(Actually, I think Mr Hegley had a hand in this )


----------



## Azrael (Feb 17, 2003)

_Song ..._ (Another feminist ode by Rochy) 

Love a woman? You're an ass.
'Tis a most insipid passion 
To choose out for your happiness
The idlest part of God's creation.

Let the porter and the groom,
Things designed for dirty slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelia's womb
To get supplies for age and graves.

Farewell, woman! I intend 
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.

Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wind,
And if busy Love intrenches,
There's a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Feb 20, 2003)

*In Westminster Abbey*

Let me take this other glove off
  As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
  Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
  Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
  We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered
  Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
  Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,
  Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
  Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
  I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
  Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
  Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
  Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

Now I feel a little better,
  What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
  Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

_- John Betjeman_


----------



## Wookey (Feb 20, 2003)

Wow. 

Cheers for that Just.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 21, 2003)

Edit 'cos i is a knob.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Feb 21, 2003)

It doesn't rhyme.


----------



## Pablo cuina (Feb 22, 2003)

Player Piano by tepe manrash

Play, Play, Play a piano
A piano play play
when I play
I play a piano
but Argon says
"Do not play piano music"


----------



## Yossarian (Feb 26, 2003)

*Shirt*
_Robert Pinsky_


The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


----------



## wiskey (Feb 27, 2003)

*Care*

All in the leafy darkness, when sleep had passed me by, 
I knew the surging of the sea-- 
Though never wave were nigh, 

All in the leafy darkness, unbroken by a star, 
There came the clamorous call of day, 
While yet the day was far. 

All in the leafy darkness, woven with hushes deep, 
I heard the vulture wings of Fear 
Above me tireless sweep; 

The sea of Doubt, the dread of day, upon me surged and swept 
All in the leafy darkness, 
And while the whole world slept. 

_Virginia Woodward Cloud (1861-1938)_


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## Donna Ferentes (Feb 27, 2003)

*A Man Said To The Universe*

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


_- Stephen Crane_


----------



## Pablo cuina (Feb 27, 2003)

Pablo Neruda   -    

Love Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## wiskey (Feb 27, 2003)

_**wonders if her poem was sub standard or summink _


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 27, 2003)

Sorry to say this but Pablo Neruda was a Stalinist fuck who personally stopped Spanish anarchists from getting on boats to Chile - his job was to check people at the port from records passed on from the Communist Party - he undoubtdly sent people to the camps. Fuck Him and fuck his nicely expressed humanity.

(Not a comment on you, Pablo cuina at all. On the person who called himself Pablo Neruda.)


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Mar 2, 2003)

Well, I earlier had *You Are Old, Father William* in this posting, giving as my motive the sloness and unreliability of my aging brain. Ironically, this was demonstrated by the fact that the poem had already been posted on this thread and I hadn't noticed, even though I actually compile the Index.

Bloody hell.

All right then.

*Not Waving But Drowning*

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning. 

_ - Stevie Smith_


----------



## wiskey (Mar 5, 2003)

_The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon _

There is an inn, a merry old inn
  beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
  one night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
  that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he saws his bow
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
  now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps a little dog
  that is mighty fond of jokes;
When there's good cheer among the guests,
He cocks an ear at all the jests
  and laughs until he chokes.

They also keep a hornéd cow
  as proud as any queen;
But music turns her head like ale,
And makes her wave her tufted tail
  and dance upon the green.

And O! the rows of silver dishes
  and the store of silver spoons!
For Sunday there's a special pair,
And these they polish up with care
  on Saturday afternoons.

The Man in the Moon was drinking deep,
  and the cat began to wail;
A dish and a spoon on the table danced,
The cow in the garden madly pranced
  and the little dog chased his tail.

The Man in the Moon took another mug,
  and then rolled beneath his chair;
And there he dozed and dreamed of ale,
Till in the sky the stars were pale,
  and dawn was in the air.

Then the ostler said to his tipsy cat:
  'The white horses of the Moon,
They neigh and champ their silver bits;
But their master's been and drowned his wits,
  and the Sun'll be rising soon!'

So the cat on the fiddle played hey-diddle-diddle,
  a jig that would wake the dead:
He squeaked and sawed and quickened the tune,
While the landlord shook the Man in the Moon:
  'It's after three!' he said.

They rolled the Man slowly up the hill
  and bundled him into the Moon,
While his horses galloped up in rear,
And the cow came capering like a deer,
  and a dish ran up with the spoon.

Now quicker the fiddle went deedle-dum-diddle;
  the dog began to roar,
The cow and the horses stood on their heads;
The guests all bounded from their beds
  and danced upon the floor.

With a ping and a pang the fiddle-strings broke!
  the cow jumped over the Moon,
And the little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Saturday dish went off at a run
  with the silver Sunday spoon.

The round Moon rolled behind the hill,
  as the Sun raised up her head.
She* hardly believed her fiery eyes;
For though it was day, to her surprise
  they all went back to bed!

	-- J. R. R. Tolkien


----------



## Celt (Mar 9, 2003)

Tiger - _Spike Milligan_ 

Tiger, tiger, in the night
How can you see without a light?
To seperate your foes from friendes
Are you wearing contact lenses
Remember, tho' , he's from the jungle -
 He once ate my Aunt and Ungle
Eating people isn't nice:
Wouldn't you rather have curry and rice?
So in your suit of striped pyjamas
promise you will never harm us
If you say you don't give ahoot, you
See, someone will have to shoot you!


----------



## sufilala (Mar 10, 2003)

*rumi*

Divan 637:1-5  

Ride on! ride on! do not remain behind.
Know this! know this! your situation is most clear.

Gallop! gallop! you are fast riders;

Be proud! be proud, you are among the beauties in the world. What do 

you have? what do you have? that the beloved does not have?

Bring that! bring that! whisper it in my ears.

The night before last, the night before last, what was the tavern like?

Tell me that! tell me that, if you are drunken wanderers of the night.

God has a wine, God has a wine hidden from all;

You and the world were created from a sip of that wine.

Jalal al-Din Rumi 1207 - 1273



Translated from Persian by Fatemeh Keshavarz,


----------



## sufilala (Mar 10, 2003)

ouch - you got to get up early to post poem of the day
hope rumi gives appropriate motivation for monday morning


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## teadrinker (Mar 12, 2003)

'Aubade' by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring 
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Mar 17, 2003)

*Thanksgiving For A National Victory 
*

Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks? 
To murder men and give God thanks! 
Desist, for shame! -- proceed no further; 
God won't accept your thanks for Murther!

_- Robert Burns_


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 18, 2003)

*Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down*
_Thomas Lux_


As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge,
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell-plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food traps,
fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts,
sand grains, pollen....And inside
these jagged falling islands
live more microlives,
which feed creatures
on the way down
and all the way down. And you,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you go down, too,
through this food-snow, these shards,
bits of planet, its flora
and flesh, you
slip straight down, unreeled,
until the bottom's oozy silt, the sucking
baby-soft muck,
welcomes you
to the deep sea's bed,
a million anvils per square inch
pressing on your skull.
How silent here, how much life,
few places deeper on earth,
none with more width.


----------



## dormouse (Mar 19, 2003)

*Hope this one hasn't been done already*

*The Second Coming* 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre 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? 

William Butler Yeats


----------



## wiskey (Mar 21, 2003)

*The Image of Corpses Lit Red, White and Blue (anti-war poem)*

The war plans painted are novel and new 
In the image of corpses lit red, white and blue. 
“Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Speech”, 
and the ribs of a dead ones in the desert to bleach. 

Once a year, at the State of Confusion 
Bush serves up war for Holy Communion. 
Something like this our guide had to tell, 
Breath offensive it wreaked of death’s smell. 

Shouting “God, God” from upon the Congress high 
As the Devil’s own Sabbath train whirled on by 
President, preacher, reverend, Dr. Death 
What are you high on, could it be crystal meth? 

He chooses his text in the book divine 
Tenth verse of the Preacher in Chapter Nine. 
All in attendance seemed to hold their breath 
Lest they lose the least word of dear Dr. Death. 

Whatever he preached, he gave you his word, 
the meaning was empty for all those who heard. 
Famous preachers there have been and be, 
But never one unconvincing as he. 

As for Saddam’s sins, Bush knows just whose 
But sinners are plenty, you selectively choose. 
War by tomorrow, a nervous nation he led, 
And we feared he was digging a trench for our bed. 

Throughout the great hall, 
Become a death ball 
The call for service world-wide was heard 
From the raspy throat of the little man nerd. 

Howling to congressional shapes as they pass 
Soon will be Arabs breaking like glass 
And you know who his real listeners be? 
People, who are frightened, just like you and me. 

As Bush rides on, the road grows strange, 
All the milestones into headstones change. 
The wreckage of war, so plain to see, 
Is endorsed by the son with an awful glee! 

_by Vince • Wednesday January 29, 2003 at 09:57 PM_


----------



## apollo & co. (Mar 21, 2003)

*RIDERS TO THE BLOOD-RED WRATH:  Gwendolyn Brooks*

My proper prudence toward his proper probe
Astonished their ancestral seemliness.
It was a not-nice risk, a wrought risk, was
An indelicate risk, they thought.  And an excess.
Howas I handled my discordances
And prides and apoplectic ice, howas
I reined my charger, channeled the fit fume
Of his most splendid and honorable jazz
Escaped the closing and averted sight
Waiving all witnesses except rotted flowers
Framed in maimed velvet.  That mad demi-art
Of ancient and irrevocable hours.
Waiving all witnesses except of dimness
From which extrude beloved and pennant arms
Of a renegade death impatient at his shrine
And keen to share the gases of his charms.
They veer to vintage.  Careening from tomorrows.
Blaring away at my just genesis.
They loot Last Night.  They hug old graves, root up
Decomposition, warm it with a kiss.

The National Anthem vampires at the blood.
I am a uniform.  Not brusque.  I bray
Through blur and blunder in a little voice!
This is a tender grandeur, a tied fray!
Under macabres, stratagem and fair
Fine smiles upon the face of holocaust,
My scream! unedited, unfrivolous.
My laboring unlatched braid of heat and frost.
I hurt.  _I keep that scream in at what pain :
At what repeal of salvage and eclipse.
Army unhonored, meriting the gold, I
Have sewn my guns inside my burning lips._*

Did they detect my parleys and replies?
My Revolution pushed his twin the mare,
The she-thing with the soft eyes that conspire
To lull off men, before him everywhere.
Perhaps they could not see what wheedling bent
Her various heart in mottles of submission
And sent her into a firm skirmish which
Has tickled out the enemy's sedition.

They do not see how deftly I endure.
Deep down the whirlwind of good rage I store
Commemorations in an utter thrall
Although I need not eat them anymore.

I remember kings.
A blossoming palace.  Silver. Ivory.
The conventional wealth of stalking Africa.
All bright, all Bestial.  Snarling marvelously.
I remember my right to roughly run and roar.
My right to raid the sun, consult the moon,
Nod to my princesses or split them open,
To flay my lions, eat blood with a spoon.
You never saw such running and such roaring!--
Nor heard a burgeoning heart so craze and pound!--
Nor sprang to such a happy rape of heaven!
Nor sanctioned such a kinship with the ground!

And I remember blazing dementias
Aboard such trade as maddens any man.
.  .  .  The mate and captain fragrantly reviewed
The fragrant hold and presently began
Their retching rampage among their luminous
Black pudding, among the guttural chained slime :
Half fainting from their love affairs with fetors
That pledged a haughty allegiance for all time.

I recollect the latter lease and lash
And labor that defiled bone, that thinned
My blood and blood-line.  All my climate my
Foster designers designed and disciplined.

But my detention and my massive strain,
And my distortion and my Calvary
I grind into a little light lorgnette
Most sly : to read man's inhumanity.
And I remark my matter is not all.
Man's chopped in China, in India indented.
From Israel what's Arab is resented.
Europe candies custody and war.

Behind my expose
I formalize my pity : "I shall cite,
Star, and esteem all that which is of woman,
Human and hardly human."

Democracy and Christianity
Recommence with me.

And I ride ride I ride on to the end--
Where glowers my continuing Calvary.
I,
My fellows, and those canny consorts of
Our spread hands in this contretemps-for-love
Ride into wrath, wraith, and menagerie

To fail, to flourish, to wither or to win.
We lurch, distribute, we extend, begin.

_______________________________________
This is a favorite poem of mine, a poem by one of my literary/journalistic influences, Black American Poet Gwendolyn Brooks.  The poem is a tribute to the Freedom Riders, protestors during the Civil Rights Movement here in the States.

*According to Collier's Encyclopedia, this section is where the speaker/writer declares her "ability to control emotion through technique."  Think Rosa Parks.


----------



## chrissie (Mar 22, 2003)

Are there children

Robert Priest

are there children somewhere
waiting for wounds
eager for the hiss of napalm
in their flesh –
the mutilating thump of shrapnel
do they long for amputation
and disfigurement
incinerate themselves in ovens
eagerly
are there some who try to sense
the focal points of bullets
or who sprawl on bomb grids
hopefully
do they still line up in queues
for noble deaths

i must ask:
are soul and flesh uneasy fusions
longing for the cut –
the bloody leap to ether
are all our words a shibboleth for silence –
a static crackle
to ignite the blood
and detonate the self-corroding
heart
does each man in his own way
plot a pogrom for the species
or are we all, always misled
to war

_from Blue Pyramids: 
New and Selected Poems (ECW Press 2002)_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Mar 24, 2003)

This appeared in the _Guardian_ a few weeks ago. It seemed apposite, but can anybody identify it?

*My country? Who says I've a country
I live in another man's flat
That hasn't as much as a door yard
And why should I battle for that?*


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 29, 2003)

*Prisoners*
_Yusef Komunyakaa_

Usually at the helipad
I see them stumble-dance
across the hot asphalt
with crokersacks over their heads,
moving toward the interrogation huts,
thin-framed as box kites
of sticks & black silk
anticipating a hard wind
that'll tug & snatch them
out into space. I think
some must be laughing
under their dust-colored hoods,
knowing rockets are aimed
at Chu Lai—that the water's
evaporating & soon the nail
will make contact with metal.
How can anyone anywhere love
these half-broken figures
bent under the sky's brightness?
The weight they carry
is the soil we tread night & day.
Who can cry for them?
I've heard the old ones
are the hardest to break.
An arm twist, a combat boot
against the skull, a .45
jabbed into the mouth, nothing
works. When they start talking
with ancestors faint as camphor
smoke in pagodas, you know
you'll have to kill them
to get an answer.
Sunlight throws
scythes against the afternoon.
Everything's a heat mirage; a river
tugs at their slow feet.
I stand alone & amazed,
with a pill-happy door gunner
signaling for me to board the Cobra.
I remember how one day
I almost bowed to such figures
walking toward me, under
a corporal's ironclad stare.
I can't say why.
From a half-mile away
trees huddle together,
& the prisoners look like
marionettes hooked to strings of light.


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 31, 2003)

*Me*
_Spike Milligan_ 

Born screaming small into this world-
Living I am.
Occupational therapy twixt birth and death-
What was I before?
What will I be next?
What am I now?
Cruel answer carried in the jesting mind
of a careless God
I will not bend and grovel
When I die. If He says my sins are myriad
I will ask why He made me so imperfect
And he will say 'My chisels were blunt'
I will say 'Then why did you make so
many of me'.


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 2, 2003)

Sonnet 17
  Who will believe my verse in time to come
  If it were filled with your most high deserts?
  Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
  Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:  
  If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
  And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
  The age to come would say this poet lies,
  Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.
  So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
  Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
  And your true rights be termed a poet's rage,
  And stretched metre of an antique song.
    But were some child of yours alive that time,
    You should live twice in it, and in my rhyme.


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 3, 2003)

Pater Noster - Jacques Prevert


Notre Pere qui etes aux cieux, 
Restez-y! 
Et nous nous resterons sur la terre 
Qui est quelquefois si jolie 
Avec ses mystères de New York 
Et puis ses mystères de Paris 
Qui valent bien celui de la Trinite 
Avec son petit canal de l'Ourcq 
Sa grande muraille de Chine 
Sa riviere de Morlaix 
Ses betises de Cambrai 
Avec son ocean Pacifique 
Et ses deux bassins aux Tuileries 
Avec ses bons enfants et ses mauvais sujets 
Avec toutes les merveilles du monde 
Qui sont là 
Simplement sur la terre 
Offertes a tout le monde 
Eparpillees 
Emerveillees elles-memes d'etre de telles merveilles 
Et qui n'osent se l'avouer 
Comme une jolie fille nue qui n'ose pas se montrer 
Avec les epouvantables malheurs du monde 
Qui sont legion 
Avec leurs legionnaires 
Avec leurs tortionnaires 
Avec les maitres de ce monde 
Les maitres avec leurs prêtres leurs traitres et leurs 
reitre 
Avec les saisons 
Avec les annees 
Avec les jolies filles et avec les vieux cons 
Avec la paille de la misere pourissant l'acier des 
canons. 

(Prevert, Jacques (1900-1977), poete, parolier et scenariste francais dont l'uvre, composee pour un large public, est une celebration des themes de la justice, de la liberte et du bonheur. )


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 3, 2003)

ha ha ha - two in a row!  i OWN this thread! 

<sets alarm for 12:01am>


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 4, 2003)

*The British*

Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors. 

Remove the Romans after approximately 400 years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously. 

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese. 

Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis, 
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat. 

Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians,
Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with some
Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese
And Palestinians 
Then add to the melting pot. 

Leave the ingredients to simmer. 

As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English. 

Allow time to be cool.

Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy. 

Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.

Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.

-
Benjamin Zephaniah


----------



## chrissie (Apr 4, 2003)

*onemonkey*

.


----------



## jms (Apr 6, 2003)

I'll strike you a strain
from a silver string

_I'll do you a dance_ 
_that's fit for a king_ 

I'll breath you an air
on a flute of gold

_I'll tell you a tale_ 
_That's wise and old_ 

I'll fiddle you a jig
that's wild and funny

_I'll find you an almond_ 
_Dipped in honey_ 

I'll tickle you a rhythm
on a magic drum

_I'll show you a taste_ 
_of a sugarplum_ 

I'll pipe you a tune
On a whistle of wood

_I'll bake you a cake_ 
_That's warm and good_ 

I'll sing my song
in a strong, clear voice

_I'll give you anything_ 
_Take your choice_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Apr 6, 2003)

If you want it catalogued, a title and author wouldn't hurt.


----------



## jms (Apr 6, 2003)

Tony Mitton, as far as I am aware, and its called The Minstrel and the Maid. There may be other versions, which is why I left it untitled. And a please wouldnt hurt.


----------



## triad (Apr 7, 2003)

Since no one else has posted I'll put this in, the shortest poem I've got on computer.  What I like about it is that it seems to be about finding beauty in anything.  It has a slightly ranty tone, too, which is good. 

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. 

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. 

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. 

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust-- 
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem 
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past-- 

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye-- 

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, 

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, 

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! 

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives, 

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown-- 

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these 

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! 

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! 

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? 

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? 

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! 

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! 

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, 

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen, 

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. 

Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Apr 8, 2003)

There's too much of this to cut and paste in its entirety - but here's the powerful opening section.

*As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw--
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.
*

_- The Masque Of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley_


----------



## aisle16boy (Apr 8, 2003)

Not a classic but amusing nonetheless.



Michael Eavis
is a 
greedy little c**t
but
then again
so is
Richard Branson.



Festival 
By _Ian McKenzie_


----------



## jms (Apr 9, 2003)

I saw this first on an OHP he had at a gig he did in Luton (without colour, and with narration, which was hillarious):








(The Dog Runs by John Hegley)


----------



## isvicthere? (Apr 10, 2003)

Fat birds are grateful

by Simon Monkhouse (1954-2001)

Fat birds are grateful
It's true if not P.C.
I've porked a few porkers in my time
So, mate, you can take it from me

I don't care if I'm misconstrued
Or sound rude, lewd or crude
But fuck the tact and just accept the fact
Fat birds exude gratitude

They make lots of noise 
With all their squealing and yelping
Which tells all the boys
They want a second helping

Fat birds are grateful
And a tongue 'twixt their meaty thighs
Comes in a close second
To a plate of juicy pies

Fat birds are grateful
They don't deny their appetite
Give 'em a right mouthful
and they'll give you one right back
Oh yeah, fat birds are grateful all right!

I'd far sooner jump someone plump
Than shag a stick insect
Given the choice between a fat or a bony twat
And I know which I'd select

Spotted dick, toad in the hole
Jumbo sausage, Arctic roll
Without doubt fat birds have tried 'em
For they're ready and willing
To accept a filling
Of something warm and substantial inside 'em

They don't agonise over the size of their hips
Or the number of calories passing their lips
Weight watching is not their credo
Though their bum may look big, fat birds don't care a fig
For it's totally eclipsed by their massive libido

So you can keep all your silly supermodels
For the preference I wish to state:
I can't get enough grateful fat birds
Cos, you see, I think fat birds are great.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 16, 2003)

*The Day Lady Died*
_Frank O'Hara_


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                              I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 18, 2003)

*Variation On The Word Sleep*
_Margaret Atwood_


I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.


----------



## chrissie (Apr 18, 2003)

That's a really tender poem Yossarian.


----------



## RubyToogood (Apr 20, 2003)

*Easter*

The air is like a butterfly
  With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
  And sings.


Joyce Kilmer


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 21, 2003)

Someone had to post this today:

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, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near to 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 they 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;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of it 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 murmer 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.


_September 25, 1916_


----------



## RubyToogood (Apr 21, 2003)

I did ponder that one, but it didn't fit my mood...


----------



## vanityvehicle (Apr 23, 2003)

The Lady's Dressing Room._
By Jonathan Swift.

Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void,
And Betty otherwise employed,
Stole in, and took a strict survey,
Of all the litter as it lay;
Whereof, to make the matter clear,
An inventory follows here.
And first a dirty smock appeared,
Beneath the armpits well besmeared.
Strephon, the rogue, displayed it wide,
And turned it round on every side.
On such a point few words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest,
But swears how damnably the men lie,
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces
The various combs for various uses,
Filled up with dirt so closely fixt,
No brush could force a way betwixt.
A paste of composition rare,
Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair;
A forehead cloth with oil upon't
To smooth the wrinkes on her front;
Here alum flower to stop the steams,
Exhaled from sour unsavory streams,
There night-gloves made of Tripsy's hide,
Bequeathed by Tripsy when she died,
With puppy water, beauty's help
Distilled from Tripsy's darling whelp;
Here gallpots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste,
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops.
Hard by a filthy basin stands,
Fouled with the scouring of her hands;
The basin takes whatever comes
The scrapings of her teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.
But oh! it turned poor Strephon's bowels,
When he beheld and smelled the towels,
Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed
With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed.
No object Strephon's eye escapes,
Here petticoats in frowzy heaps;
Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot
All varnished o'er with snuff and snot.
The stockings why should I expose,
Stained with the marks of stinking toes;
Or greasy coifs and pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a week in?
A pair of tweezers next he found
To pluck her brows in arches round,
Or hairs that sink the forehead low,
Or on her chin like bristles grow.
The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia's magnifying glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his eye on't
It showed visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose,
The smallest worm in Celia's nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.
Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the chest?
That careless wench! no creature warn her
To move it out from yonder corner;
But leave it standing full in sight
For you to exercise your spite.
In vain the workman showed his wit
With rings and hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this disguise
A cabinet to vulgar eyes;
For Strephon ventured to look in,
Resolved to go through thick and thin;
He lifts the lid, there needs no more,
He smelled it all the time before.
As from within Pandora's box,
When Epimetheus op'd the locks,
A sudden universal crew
Of human evils upwards flew;
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remained behind;
So Strephon lifting up the lid,
To view what in the chest was hid.
The vapors flew from out the vent,
But Strephon cautious never meant
The bottom of the pan to grope,
And foul his hands in search of Hope.
O never may such vile machine
Be once in Celia's chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
Those "secrets of the hoary deep!"
As mutton cutlets, prime of meat,
Which though with art you salt and beat
As laws of cookery require,
And toast them at the clearest fire;
If from adown the hopeful chops
The fat upon a cinder drops,
To stinking smoke it turns the flame
Pois'ning the flesh from whence it came,
And up exhales a greasy stench,
For which you curse the careless whench;
So things, which must not be expressed,
When plumped into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell.
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
But Vengeance, goddess never sleeping
Soon punished Strephon for his peeping;
His foul imagination links
Each Dame he sees with all her stinks:
And, if unsavory odors fly,
Conceives a lady standing by:
All women his description fits,
And both ideas jump like wits:
By vicious fancy coupled fast,
And still appearing in contrast.
I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind;
Should I the queen of love refuse,
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
To him that looks behind the scene,
Satira's but some pocky quean.
When Celia in her glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his nose
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout,
With which he makes so foul a rout)
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.

I think it's important to read this to the end. The low comedy and implied misogyny of the majority of the poem is, for me, redeemed by the way Swift broadens this out at the end to turn it into a parable about the paradox of humanity's imperfection and sublimity.____________________________________


----------



## vanityvehicle (Apr 23, 2003)

*Sorry - double post - just realised it's Shakespeare's birthday*

From Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5 Scene 1. Spoken by Theseus.

I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 23, 2003)

many happy returns WS!


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Apr 28, 2003)

*Thanksgiving*

a monstering horror swallows
this unworld me by you
as the god of our fathers' fathers bows
to a which that walks like a who

but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
"all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a"

suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"

she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN

"be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid"

uncle same shurgs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps "i'm busy right now"

so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)

_- ee cummings_


----------



## chrissie (May 3, 2003)

*a poem that is a little different*

This is an interactive poem with sound and visuals so you have to enter through the link (sorry if your computer can't manage it).

It seems a shame not to exploit the medium we are on.

The poem is aptly entitled:


After the Resurrection 


Enter through the parchment and click on the skulls to move the poem along.



If you are interested, a lot more interactive internet texts can be found at this site:
Electronic Literature Directory


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2003)

This isn't actually one i agree with but i'm offering it for obvious reasons:

*the american way*

he went to the masquerade as a worm.
crawling had become
a statement of belief.

Wilson Stapleton

Edit: bugger  - i thought Chrissie's was from yesterday - sorry all...


----------



## chrissie (May 3, 2003)

I am printing yours out to display, butchersapron!  It really tickled me.  (And perhaps mine counts as the day's before because I booted up the computer then?)


----------



## chrissie (May 5, 2003)

*to be read aloud*

DISOBEDIENCE







James James
Morrison  Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother", he said, said he;
"You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don't go down with me."

James James
Morrison's Mother
Put on a golden gown,
James James
Morrison's Mother
Drove to the end of the town.
James James
Morrison's Mother
Said to herself, said she:
"I can get right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea"

King John
Put up a notice,
"LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON'S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY;
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF THE TOWN - FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!

James James
Morrison Morrison
 (Commonly known as Jim)
Told his
Other relations
Not to go blaming _him_.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother", he said, said he:
"You must never go down to the end of the town with - out consulting me."

James James
Morrison's Mother
Hasn't been heard of since.
King John
Said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.
King John
 (Somebody told me)
Said to a man he knew:
"If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?"

(Now then, very softly)

J. J.
M. M.
W. G. Du P.
Took great
C/o his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J. J.
Said to his M*****
"M*****", he said, said he:
"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-if-you-don't-go-down-with-ME!"

A. A. Milne


----------



## teadrinker (May 6, 2003)

*Slough by John Betjeman*

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
Tinned minds, tinned breath. 

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown 
For twenty years. 

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win, 
Who washes his repulsive skin 
In women's tears: 

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell. 

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad, 
They've tasted Hell. 

It's not their fault they do not know 
The birdsong from the radio, 
It's not their fault they often go 
To Maidenhead 

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead. 

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails. 

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.


----------



## Yossarian (May 9, 2003)

*Chinamen Jump*
_Frank O'Hara_

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump
while in our willful way
we, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China's shoes.

The birds push apples through
grass the moon turns blue,

these apples roll beneath
our buttocks like a heath

full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China's bushes.

As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,

Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,

the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,

we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.


----------



## llantwit (May 10, 2003)

*As Bad as a Mile - Phillip Larkin*

This is one of my favourite poems. What do people think? Too bleak? I always smile at it... however low I'm feeling it just makes me feel a bit better. I can't help thinking that it's a parody of gloomy fatalism.  

As Bad as a Mile.


Watching the shied core 
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor, 
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more 

Of failure spreading back up the arm 
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm, 
The apple unbitten in the palm. 


Philip Larkin


----------



## soulrebel (May 14, 2003)

*Lemn Sissay - Immigration RSVP*

IMMIGRATION RSVP


The lemons you suck are from Spain 
And the orange you drink's from South Africa. 
Shoes you wear are made in Pakistan 
And your oil is from Saudi Arabia. 


You import your petrol from the Gulf States 
And your toys are made in Taiwan. 
Your coffee they send from Columbia And your cars are driven from Japan. 


You've flooded yourself with foreign good 
But foreigners you tell me are bad. 
You say you 're afraid that they 'll over run you 
But I 'm afraid they already have. 

_______________________________________

i am going to post some more Lemn Sissay, simply because he is one of the best poets working in britain today, and in fact i am surprised none of his stuff has been posted before... buy the anthology he edited called "The Fire People" if u can get hold of it...


----------



## soulrebel (May 14, 2003)

as noone posted any poems on the 11th, 12th or 13th, does that mean i can post another one today then?  

a somewhat obvious choice perhaps, but still as brilliant as it ever was:

Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus

I have done it again. 
One year in every ten 
I manage it----- 

A sort of walking miracle, my skin 
Bright as a Nazi lampshade, 
My right foot 

A paperweight, 
My featureless, fine 
Jew linen. 

Peel off the napkin 
O my enemy. 
Do I terrify?------- 

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? 
The sour breath 
Will vanish in a day. 

Soon, soon the flesh 
The grave cave ate will be 
At home on me 

And I a smiling woman. 
I am only thirty. 
And like the cat I have nine times to die. 

This is Number Three. 
What a trash 
To annihilate each decade. 

What a million filaments. 
The Peanut-crunching crowd 
Shoves in to see 

Them unwrap me hand in foot ------ 
The big strip tease. 
Gentleman , ladies 

These are my hands 
My knees. 
I may be skin and bone, 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. 
The first time it happened I was ten. 
It was an accident. 

The second time I meant 
To last it out and not come back at all. 
I rocked shut 

As a seashell. 
They had to call and call 
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. 

Dying 
Is an art, like everything else. 
I do it exceptionally well. 

I do it so it feels like hell. 
I do it so it feels real. 
I guess you could say I've a call. 

It's easy enough to do it in a cell. 
It's easy enough to do it and stay put. 
It's the theatrical 

Comeback in broad day 
To the same place, the same face, the same brute 
Amused shout: 

'A miracle!' 
That knocks me out. 
There is a charge 

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge 
For the hearing of my heart--- 
It really goes. 

And there is a charge, a very large charge 
For a word or a touch 
Or a bit of blood 

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes. 
So, so, Herr Doktor. 
So, Herr Enemy. 

I am your opus, 
I am your valuable, 
The pure gold baby 

That melts to a shriek. 
I turn and burn. 
Do not think I underestimate your great concern. 

Ash, ash--- 
You poke and stir. 
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- 

A cake of soap, 
A wedding ring, 
A gold filling. 

Herr God, Herr Lucifer 
Beware 
Beware. 

Out of the ash 
I rise with my red hair 
And I eat men like air.


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (May 19, 2003)

I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
     clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
     and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
     and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
     Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
     and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
     me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
     to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
     lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
     who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the
     world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
     voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.


Carl Sandburg


----------



## jms (May 20, 2003)

Electric Chair Poem, By John Hegley

The Volts
The Jolts
The End


----------



## chrissie (May 21, 2003)

*Follower*

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue. 

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck 

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly. 

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod. 

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm. 

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today 
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away. 

_Seamus Heaney_


----------



## RubyToogood (May 22, 2003)

Pam Ayres

Oh I wish I'd looked after my teeth 

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth,
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

I wish I'd been that much more willin'
When I had more tooth there than fillin'
To pass up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin'.

When I think of the lollies I licked,
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All that hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My Mother, she told me no end,
"If you got a tooth, you got a friend"
I was young then, and careless,
My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.

Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right,
I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin'
And pokin' and fussin'
Didn't seem worth the time... I could bite!

If I'd known I was paving the way,
To cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fiIlin's
Injections and drillin's
I'd have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine,
In these molars of mine,
"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

How I laughed at my Mother's false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath,
But now comes the reckonin'
It's me they are beckonin'
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.


----------



## charlotte (May 25, 2003)

one of only 2 or 3 positive poems in the fantastic antology 'the world's wife' by carol ann duffy = 

Anne Hathaway 
"Item 1 give unto my wife my second best bed" (shakespeare's will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme 
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun. 
Some nights, i dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
i hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

anne hathaway was shakespeare's wife btw


----------



## soulrebel (May 25, 2003)

*Roger Robinson - The Last Dance*

Yes i know one's already been posted today... but this one is so good i have to post it now while the book it's in (an anthology called _The Fire People_, published by Payback Press and edited by Lemn Sissay) is still in my bag...

*The Last Dance*

I step in the party and vibrate
from late night bassline therapy.
Left my stress at the coat room
I've come to dance a wounded mind
before it bleeds insanity lead me to a dancefloor
to nod thoughts to the tempo.

Satin skinned sisters
boogie curves to a beat,
as brothers seek solace
in sexy silhouettes
of hearts flowering in dark corners.

But back to my beat
Stylus sliding lyrics for my mind set,
grooves soothe the rest.
Ears suck soul notes for energy
Hi hats shift my hipbones
break beats shake my waistline
hearts and bass beats synchronize
and for four minute moments,
I am music

yeah,
I'm the ghetto lullaby
floating from towerblocks
caressing young faded heads
on the corner.

I'm the embraceable tune
of first time lovers
thumping funky rhythms
on a rickety bed.
Yeah, I am music
so I dance.

I dance steps
delicate as barefeet
on a broken glass mile.
Drowning in music
catching smiles and breaths on melody.

Dole queue blues drench my T-shirt
my dirty nikes stepping rhythm
from a month of tears.

DJ picks up the pace
and the place jumps and waves
hands swaying in the air
a testifying chorus of pain.
DJ flinging down commandments plastic.

Then music's spirit leaps
out the speakers
on a tidal bass
breaking on our faces.

Baptised reborn refreshed
I dance
I dance tears of sour sweet sweat
in slowly choreographed steps of death,
and the only thought I can hold is this tune
and if this party ends its too soon
so I dance, I dance
in clubs of dark damp grief
as hips of hurt sway some relief
I scream
I jump
I smoke
I drink
I groove
I dance
I dance
like this dance may be our last.


----------



## Yossarian (May 31, 2003)

*Selfish arrogant manipulative ruthless*
_James Farrell_


Selfish,arrogant, manipulative,ruthless
shotguns,flick knives, knuckle dusters,bats,
flash backs, car wrecks, break downs, Jesus,
Never being there when you need him,
blisters, ulcers, toothache, stress,
crack up, no back up, lack of, lonliness,
salvage, worthless, rubbish, despair,
pretending when there's nobody there,
fucker, wanker, twat, cunt , dickhead,
small things,
nothing surprises you much, you don't surprise anyone,
money, bills, build up, don't show up,
your own funeral, work's shit, it's boring, demeaning,
no one listens, deaf ears, falling, drowning,
denial, all your life, in a bathtub, bleeding,
not succeeding, dreaming, kid's, smoking,
on the streets, looking like chimney sweeps,
grafting, crafty liitle fucker, stealing,dealing,
no answers, left out, forgotten, bottles,
half empty, whisky, tepid, being sick,
on the carpet cos you can't handle it,
losing it, panic, limit, yourself,
to poison, when you're horny, fist fuck her, shut up ,
madly, deeply, hurt, under your fingernails,
it's hell, don't want to talk about it, pathos, catharsis,
Narcissus, creepy, homosexual, junky, 
outcast, not funny, coming down, paranoid,
I'm not paranoid,
hangover, life threatening, in debt , to yourself,
we'll work it out, it'll work itself out, work out,
twice a week, you're clever, meat and tatties, braindead,
bugs, thugs, derelict people, in your head,
it's chaos, not funny, scared to fall asleep, oh no,
in a dream, I'm running, bolting , horses, lightening,
striking, my skull, life's dull, when you''re lonely.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 2, 2003)

What a cracking poem, Yoss! I've never heard of James Farrell, got any more info?


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 3, 2003)

James Farrell's a good mate of mine from my days in Asia. He's originally from Yorkshire and was published in the UK a number of times in the mid to late '90s...I think he won some fairly prestigious 'Young Poet of the Year' award at some point around then.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 4, 2003)

Well if you've got any more knocking around like, bring it on!


----------



## dormouse (Jun 4, 2003)

*And while the thread's back...*

A True Maid

NO, no; for my virginity, 
When I lose that, says Rose, I'll die: 
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick, 
Rose, were you not extremely sick? 


Matthew Prior  (1664 - 1721) English Poet


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2003)

Here's one from Lorca on his birthday:

Gacela of the Dark Death 
_ 
I want to sleep the dream of the apples, 
to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries, 
I want to sleep the dream of that child 
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. 
_ 
I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood, 
that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water. 
I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass, 
nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth 
that labors before dawn. 
_ 
I want to sleep awhile, 
awhile, a minute, a century; 
but all must know that i have not died; 
that there is a stable of gold in my lips; 
that i am the small friend of the West wing; 
that i am the intense shadow of my tears. 
_ 
Cover me at dawn with a veil. 
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me. 
and wet with hard water my shoes 
so that the pincers of the scorpion slide. 
_ 
For i want to sleep the dream of the apples, 
to learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth; 
for i want to live with that dark child 
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.


----------



## pooka (Jun 5, 2003)

Here's summat Ted Hughes wrote as a young un in Mexborough.

The Zeet Saga or Pale tale I (Extract)

“On the prairie, in the sunshine
Nibbling cactus on the grass
Yesterday I met a man who
Barked, and wouldn’t let me pass.

  Holding up his pipe of sandstone,
Shouting loudly o’er the storm,
Bid me halt, and told a story
How to keep the lightning warm.

  With my fist I smote the mountains
Scooped a seat amid the shale
Checked my compass with the Plough
And sat to listen to his tale. 

 Then he rolled his sunshirt sleeves down,
Knocked his pipe out on the sea,
Toying casual with a bison,
This the tale he told to me:

 ‘In the wide Saharan desert
Lives a creature called the Zeet,
Lays its young in oblong boxes,
Stacked in barrows from the heat; . . .” 


 Times article here (password = asdf, user = asdf will let you in)


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jun 5, 2003)

Now, here's a funny thing.

What do this man:






and this man:






have to do with one another?

The answer is that both Ted Hughes and Billy Whitehurst came from Mexborough, apparently. I didn't know this until I read the previous post. It's a bit spooky though, because some time ago I wrote this parody of Hughes' poem _View Of A Pig_.

*View Of A Pig*

_The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.
Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.
I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves. But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.
It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.
Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.
Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me - how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.
Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.
Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse's -
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.
Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time.
They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep. 

- Ted Hughes_

*View Of A Real Pig*

_Billy Whitehurst's career is finally dead.
He weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Eyes closed, playing only in snatches
His lack of skill stuck out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in a player seemed not just bad,
It made him less than lifeless, further off
The ball, just like a sack of spuds.

I heckled him without feeling remorse
One feels guilty insulting the bad,
Making them worse. But Fat Billy
Did not seem able to play at all. 

He was too large. Just so much.
A poundage of lard and pork.
His talent had entirely gone.
He was indeed a figure of fun. 

Too bad to even pity.
I remember his poor play of old
No earthly use or pleasure there had been
False in his effort. He gained us no points. 

I'm deadly serious. His weight 
Obsessed me - how could he be moved?
No trouble in cutting him up
His use of elbows was shocking but pathetic. 

Once he ran half the pitch in the hope
Of catching his opponent
Who was faster and nimbler than he was
He squealed when Billy's tackle rended flesh.

Players must have hot blood, they have to run.
But Billy’s bite was worse than Vinny Jones’
He chopped another’s legs half off.
He spent his money down the dogs.

Distinctive, yes, but admiration no:
Billy Whitehurst was long ago finished.
I watched him for a long time. Expect to see him
Drunken and washed up on a doorstep.

- Justin Horton_


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 6, 2003)

So when did this turn into the "Four poems of the day thread" then? Eh?


----------



## Hollis (Jun 6, 2003)

Giving Potatoes


STRONG MAN: 

Mashed potatoes cannot hurt you , darling
Mashed potatoes mean no harm
I have brought you mashed potatoes
From my mashed potato farm

LADY:

Take away your mashed potatoes
Leave them in the desert to dry
Take away your mashed potatoes -
You look like shepherd's pie

BRASH MAN:

A packet of chips, a packet of chips,
Wrapped in the _Daily Mail_ 
Golden juicy and fried for a week
In the blubber of the Great White Whale

LADY:

Take away your fried potatoes
Use them to clean your ears
You can eat your fried potatoes
With birds-eye frozen tears

OLD MAN:

I have borne this baked potato
O'er the Generation Gap
Pray accept this baked potato
Let me lay it in your heated lap.

LADY:

Take away your baked potato
In your frusty musty van
Take away your baked potato
You potato-skinned old man

FRENCHMAN:

She rejected all potaoes
For a thousand nights and days
Till a Frenchman wooed and won her
With pommes de terre Lyonnaise.

LADY:

Oh my corrugated lover
So creamy and so brown
Lut us fly across to Lyons
And lay our tubers down.



Adrian Mitchell


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 6, 2003)

Lovely - and i'm glad to see the second (?) Mitchell poem on the thread.

(The chippies shut though)


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jun 6, 2003)

> _Originally posted by RubyToogood _
> *So when did this turn into the "Four poems of the day thread" then? Eh? *



Well, we were behind on our average.


----------



## dormouse (Jun 6, 2003)

*that's not fair!*

posting one at *12:21 a.m*... I was all set with one for this morning!


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 6, 2003)

I think ONE extra poem is allowable if there wasn't one the day before, but more than that is definitely OTT.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jun 6, 2003)

Well by all means delete them if you think they're excessive.


----------



## chrissie (Jun 7, 2003)

I spent all my summers for thirteen years in Mexborough with my grandparents until they emigrated to be with their eldest daughter.  A fact which may interest only myself and perhaps, but not likely, Ted Hughes.  (It is odd to think I probably met him and never knew - it was a small town and my Nana was a leading light in many ways.  However, I have no idea who the footballer is.)

It is good to allow more than one poem a day if this thread has been quiet.  But every now and again, maybe it is not so bad a thing to allow enough posts per day to _average_ out as one?  As long as we don't all do it, what do you think, RubyTooGood?  A good lover of poetry would let it go once and again, perhaps?  

The Wife of Bath might ask where we draw the line, of course.  dormouse2 should be more tenacious - go on, post your poem!

My Grandmother in India
unrolls a thin worn cotton pad on mud packed floor, 
and lies down to take her nind. 
A bony hand her only pillow. 
Black saree her only wrap. 

Sound asleep in seconds.

_Copyright ©2000, Jay Alagia_


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 9, 2003)

I think more than one is allowable if the thread's been quiet, but more than two is too much IMO. The point of the thread is to offer poetry in bite-sized pieces that don't overwhelm.


----------



## Guanabana (Jun 9, 2003)

*More Auden*

W. H. Auden: 
"The Two" (or "The Witnesses")


THE TWO 


You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock.
            The Two.
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
        We are watching you. 

Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
        To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
        And the unlucky rose.

Climb up the crane , learn the sailor's words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
        Come in.
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
        In the lighted inn.

But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
        At a glance. 
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
        I shouldn't dance.

We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
        For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain
        And it won't be flowers.

When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
        Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
        In deadly crescent.

The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
        ers' van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the woman in dark glasses and humpbacked surgeons
        And the scissors man.

This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
        Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
        Remember the Two.


----------



## chazegee (Jun 9, 2003)

[Sorry, I've deleted this because it's getting completely out of hand now. This thread isn't exactly short of posts at the moment, and if you want to post your own work then please start another thread for it. R2G]


----------



## Sasaferrato (Jun 10, 2003)

William Ernest Henley. 1849–1903 

7. Invictus 

OUT of the night that covers me,   
  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,   
I thank whatever gods may be   
  For my unconquerable soul.   

In the fell clutch of circumstance          5 
  I have not winced nor cried aloud.   
Under the bludgeonings of chance   
  My head is bloody, but unbowed.   

Beyond this place of wrath and tears   
  Looms but the Horror of the shade,   10 
And yet the menace of the years   
  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.   

It matters not how strait the gate,   
  How charged with punishments the scroll,   
I am the master of my fate:   15 
  I am the captain of my soul.


----------



## pooka (Jun 11, 2003)

> However, I have no idea who the footballer is.



That's probably because he came from Thurnscoe, about 5 miles away - a long way in the Dearne Valley!


----------



## Concrete Meadow (Jun 13, 2003)

on Friday the 13th and eve of the full moon -



To The Moon 

Art thou pale for weariness 
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, 
Wandering companionless 
Among the stars that have a different birth, - 
And ever - changing, like a joyless eye 
That finds no object worth its constancy? 

- Percy Bysshe Shelley


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## chrissie (Jun 14, 2003)

Poems and science don't seem natural bedfellows, but I like this one:

*The Mandelbrot Set*

 I zoom down in on more and more detail
On my computer screen, til late at night,
And marvel how those million swirls of light
Lie hidden in a scant equation's pale:

Variety that custom cannot stale,
As though whole planets full of creatures might
Be hidden in an egg--compressed as tight
As an age of fossils in an inch of shale.

If there's a God--though in my heart, I just
Cannot convince myself there is--She must,
I think, feel something of this same delight:

"Look here what swirling forms, what flowers, what jewels,
Snails, novas, Newton--from these simple rules:
Six quarks, four forces, evolution, light!"

*Raphael Carter*  (1994)


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## pooka (Jun 15, 2003)

If it's science and poetry you're after, here's one from Miroslav Holub, a Czech pathologist.

*Pathology*

Here in the Lords bosom rest
the tongues of beggars,
the lungs of generals,
the eyes of informers,
the skins of martyrs,

in the absolute of 
of the microscope lenses.

I leaf through Old Testament slices of liver,
in the white monuments of brain I read
the hieroglyphs 
of decay.

Behold, Christians,
Heaven, Hell and Paradise
in bottles.
And no wailing,
not even a sigh.
Only dust moans.
Dumb is history
Strained
through capillaries.

Equality dumb. Fraternity dumb.

And out of the tricolours of mortal suffering
we day after day
pull 
threads of wisdom

_Miroslav  Holub (1924 -1998)_


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## chrissie (Jun 15, 2003)

That last one seemed a bit gloomy at first but was quite optimistic in the end.

The quota has gone today but how about seeing who can post a poem about birth or parenthood in honour of Zee, CyberP's and Daisy, their new baby?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 16, 2003)

Here's one from Blakes 'Songs of ...' - this one is from the Innocence section, not sure if it's quite approriate though:

A Cradle Song

Sweet dreams form a shade
O'er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams

Sweet sleep with soft down,
Weave thy brows an infant crown.
Sweet sleep Angel mild,
Hover o'er my happy child.

Sweet smiles in the night,
Hover over my delight.
Sweet smiles Mothers smiles
All the livelong night beguiles.

Sweet moans, dovelike sighs,
Chase not slumber from thy eyes,
Sweet moans, sweeter smiles,
All the dovelike moans beguiles.

Sleep sleep happy child.
All creation slept and smil'd.
Sleep sleep, happy sleep,
While o'er thee thy mother weep

Sweet babe in thy face,
Holy image I can trace.
Sweet babe once like thee,
Thy maker lay and wept for me

Wept for me for thee for all,
When he was an infant small.
Thou his image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee.

Smiles on thee on me on all,
Who became an infant small,
Infant smiles are his own smiles,
Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.


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## RubyToogood (Jun 16, 2003)

I'm going to, ahem, break my own rule because I think that poem really needs its opposite number from the Songs of Experience. I like Blake's illustrations but I don't quite "get" some of his poems, like the one above. I just tend to think "what a load of twaddle". I'd be interested to hear Chrissie's (or anyone else's) views of Blake.

Cradle Song

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel,
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful light shall break.


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## butchersapron (Jun 16, 2003)

I was going to do that but thought i'd better not as  it breaks the rules and might be a bit of downer - plus in my version fro some reason the 2nd one is not included in the collection - despite it claiming to be complete.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 16, 2003)

PS I came across this poetry site which also has a poem of the day, and a random poem thingy.


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## RubyToogood (Jun 16, 2003)

I agree it's a bit of a downer, but I think you need one after that!


----------



## chrissie (Jun 16, 2003)

> _Originally posted by RubyToogood _
> *II'd be interested to hear Chrissie's (or anyone else's) views of Blake *



I am supposed to like him in case I am ever forced to teach him.  Some of his stuff _is_ wonderfully visual and rolls off the tongue, but a great deal of it sentimental codswallop.  Still, it made him happy as he say in his garden in the noddy!

I could well be shot for such heresy.

I like Keats the bestest - wonderfully fecund stuff!


----------



## Rua (Jun 17, 2003)

To keep on the childbirth theme, and to add in an Irish touch, seeing as it was Bloomsday yesterday, here's Louis MacNeice:

Louis MacNeice - Prayer before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
     club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
     with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
        on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
     to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
        in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
     when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
           my life when they murder by means of my
              hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
     old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
        frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
            waves call me to folly and the desert calls
              me to doom and the beggar refuses
                 my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
     come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
     humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
           one face, a thing, and against all those
              who would dissipate my entirety, would
                 blow me like thistledown hither and
                    thither or hither and thither
                       like water held in the
                          hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
---

Also a bit depressing, but still a great poem.


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## chrissie (Jun 17, 2003)

By gum!

Notwithstanding the greatness of the poetry in the current offerings, young Daisy could have trouble with some of these birth poems.

Anyone got a celebratory one?


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## Rua (Jun 18, 2003)

I was actually looking for "The Birth" by Paul Muldoon, but I couldn't find it on the internet and my book is in storage.  

So here is "The Cradle Song for Asher" also by Muldoon:

When they cut your birth cord yesterday
it was I who drifted away.
Now I hear your name (in Hebrew, "blest")
as yet another release of ballast
- and see, beyond your wicker
gondola, camp-fires, cities, whole continents flicker.


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## Concrete Meadow (Jun 19, 2003)

For *Aung San Suu Kyi*, on her 58th birthday today, the 19th  of June -


I had no time to hate, because  
The grave would hinder me,  
And life was not so ample I  
Could finish enmity.  

Nor had I time to love; but since         
Some industry must be,  
The little toil of love, I thought,  
Was large enough for me.  


- Emily Dickinson


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## chrissie (Jun 19, 2003)

I think Daisy will be happy with the flicker of whole continents!

Cheers.  I feel better too, now.

And so to move on to other subjects.....


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## Rua (Jun 20, 2003)

Here's one of my very favourite poems by the Palestinian poet, Mahmud Darwish.


*On this great journey, I love you more* 


On this great journey I love you more.  After a while
you will lock the city gates.  I have no heart in your hands, and no
road to carry me; on this great journey I love you more.

There is no milk for the pomegranate on our balcony since leaving your breast.
The date palm grows lighter, the weight of the hill
lighter, and lighter too our paths to the sunset.
The earth grew lighter as it waved goodbye to its land.  The words grew lighter
and the stories grew lighter on the steps of the night. 
But my heart is heavy.

So leave it here beside your house, howling and crying
for our beautiful time.
I have no homeland but my heart, 
on this great journey I love you more.

I have emptied my soul of all words: I love you more
On this journey the butterflies guide our souls, 
on this journey we remember the button of a shirt we had lost,
and forget the crown of our days; 
we remember the perfume of apricot liqueur, and forget
the dance of the horse on our wedding night.  

On this journey
we are equal to the birds, 
we are gentle with our days, and are content with little.
If it were from you, I would be content 
with a golden dagger dancing in my murdered heart.

So kill me at your leisure, that I might say: I love you more than
I said before this great journey. 
I love you. 
Nothing can hurt me now
Not the sky, not the water … 
Not the basil of your morning
Nor the lilac of your evening 
can hurt me after this great journey …


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## Thumper Browne (Jun 20, 2003)

A short poem by Spike Milligan......

Po.


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## Yossarian (Jun 23, 2003)

*I Want To Paint*
_Adrian Henri_


_Part One_
I want to paint
2000 dead birds crucified on a background of night
Thoughts that lie too deep for tears
Thoughts that lie too deep for queers
Thoughts that move at 186000 miles/second
The Entry of Christ into Liverpool in 1966
The Installation of Roger McGough to the Chair of Poetry at
    Oxford
Francis Bacon making the President's Speech at the Royal 
    Academy Dinner

I want to paint
50 life-sized nudes of Marianne Faithfull
(all of them painted from life)
Welsh Maids by Welsh Waterfalls
Heather Holden as Our Lady of Haslingden
A painting as big as Picadilly full of neon signs buses
Christmas decorations and beautiful girls with dark blonde 
    hair shading their faces

I want to paint 
The assassination of the entire Royal Family
Enormous pictures of every pavingstone in Canning Street
The Beatles composing a new National Anthem
Brian Patten writing poems with a flamethrower on disused
    ferryboats

A new cathedral 50 miles high made entirely of pram-wheels
An empty Woodbine packet covered in kisses
I want to paint
A picture made from the tears of dirty-faced children in
    Chatham Street
I want to paint
I LOVE YOU across the steps of St George's Hall
I want to paint
 pictures.


_Part Two_
I want to paint 
The Simultaneous and Historical Faces of Death
10000 shocking pink hearts with your name on
The phantom negro postmen who bring me money in my
    dreams
The first plastic daffodil of Spring pushing its way
through the OMO packets in the Supermarket
The portrait of every 6th Form schoolgirl in the country
A full-scale map of the World with YOU at the centre
An enormous lily-of-the-valley with every flower on a separate
    canvas

Lifesize jellybabies shaped like Hayley Mills
A black-and-red flag flying over Parliament
I want to paint
Every car crash on all the motorways of England
Pere Ubu drunk at 11 o'clock at night in Lime Street
A SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT OF ALL THE SENSES
In black running letters 50 miles high over Liverpool

I want to paint 
Pictures that children can play hopscotch on
Pictures that can be used as evidence at Murder trials
Pictures that can be used to advertise cornflakes
Pictures that can be used to frighten naughty children
Pictures worth their weight in money
Pictures that tramps can live in
Pictures that children would find in their stockings on
    Christmas morning
Pictures that teenage lovers can send each other
I want to paint
 pictures.


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## PearlySpencer (Jun 24, 2003)

Nice one yossarian - good stuff


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## PearlySpencer (Jun 24, 2003)

This is one of my favourites. Never fails to move me.

*The Terrible Things*

They will do terrible things
to your face-
wiping away the colours of dreaming
from your eyes
and forking your tongue's
innocent laughter


Storming the secret places
of your garden mind
where magic seeds your life with wonder,
they will prune and dig and hack
and leave a dreadful emptiness
where once jungles flowered.


When your body would bend
itself to earth's warm pulse
or drink the juices of the seasons
or paint the skies
with fierce imaginings
they will erect barriers and cages
around the wild creature
which is your soul.


And you will forget
that once you knew
the power of magic
and the joy of freedom
as you wither away
behind the terrible things
they have done to your face.



_Tina Morris_


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## PearlySpencer (Jun 25, 2003)

And on a lighter note 

*My cat and i*

Girls are simply the prettiest things
My cat and i believe
And we're always saddened
When it's time for them to leave


We watch them titivating
(that often takes a while)
And though they keep us waiting
My cat and i just smile


We like to see them to the door
Say how sad it couldn't last
Then my cat and i go back inside
And talk about the past.


_Roger McGough_


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## PearlySpencer (Jun 26, 2003)

*Beginnings*


Next year's echo calls:
life really can change
foul government falls
ideas re-arrange
leaders get rumbled
false prophets fade
the old order crumbles
we move out of the shade
walls will come down
the prisons are burning
under cold ground
warm worms are turning


_Jeff Cloves_


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## Wyn (Jun 27, 2003)

After Love 

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin


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## Mr Retro (Jun 30, 2003)

This is Mrs R's favorite sonnet. I don't much like it myself. What do you peeps think of it?

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; 
Coral is far more red than her lips' red; 
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; 
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, 
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 
And in some perfumes is there more delight 
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; 
I grant I never saw a goddess go; 
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. 
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 
As any she belied with false compare.


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## Donna Ferentes (Jul 1, 2003)

*Henry King

who chewed little bits of string, and was early cut off in dreadful agonies *

_The Chief Defect of Henry King 
Was chewing little bits of String. 
At last he swallowed some which tied 
Itself in ugly Knots inside. 

Physicians of the Utmost Fame 
Were called at once; but when they came 
They answered, as they took their Fees, 
"There is no Cure for this Disease. 

"Henry will very soon be dead.'' 
His Parents stood about his Bed 
Lamenting his Untimely Death, 
When Henry, with his Latest Breath, 

Cried, "Oh, my Friends, be warned by me, 
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea 
Are all the Human Frame requires...'' 
With that, the Wretched Child expires. _

- Hilaire Belloc


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## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2003)

THE TWO HOUR ASSASSINATION OF GOD 

At 4am she entered the brain of God 
& stumbled blindly through its convoluted 
swamps until reaching a clearing 
in which was reflected the image 
of everything that had ever happened 
to anyone anywhere in time & space.

We all got it right so long ago 
in that there’s no final answer 
or prior scheme of things but only 
a wild & unknown frenzy in 
which not even the anarchist treads water.

At 5am she piled her clothes 
into a heap & made a fire upon 
God’s grey mass which lit up 
the universe with a fierce bonfire 
& rained ashes over planet & star.

Few of us had figured that Buddha 
got in the way of Buddhism that 
Gods were better never thought up 
that every king leader guru chief 
was just another stone prison slab.

At 6am she clearly & directly saw 
a myriad living things manifest 
in joy & liberation upon the surface 
of a world which didn’t really change
except some skins & scales just dropped away.

_Dave Cunliffe_


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## Wyn (Jul 3, 2003)

*One Perfect Rose*

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet - 
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Dorothy Parker


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## butchersapron (Jul 4, 2003)

I'm sorry to jump in and do a late night steal, esp. as i posted the poem before last, but i think i'll be away from the pc for the next few days, and i really wanted to post one up for a mate of mine called Jock (Mike).

SONG FOR THE MARCH

Now on the night march 
now in the dark time you who have sung before 
give us a Song, now.

You are the voice of the dead 
you are the tongue, speak -
Sing with the numberless throat 
of the dead and the weak

Should that song once rise, 
and should they live again, 
a wind of voices will spring 
joined in my single voice

You have desired a song 
should we dare to sing 
though you kill all of us 
the song will go on.

This has goodness, breath,
a blade against history
a blow at the old lie
life in time of death

this has culture, grace
the conscript who disobeys
a prison roof in a blaze
a heel in a ruler’s face

this is our poetry 
every command that finds 
a hand that takes a hand 
voices like rising winds 

_Alex Comfort_


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## pooka (Jul 5, 2003)

*One for Jock MacGrim*

*The Fiddler of Dooney *

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

_W B Yeats_


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## Mr Retro (Jul 7, 2003)

We havn't had any Kananagh yet I think. He is one of the lesser known Irish poets and in my opinion a genius. 

Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin
by P. Kavanagh

'Erected to the Memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien'

O commemorate me where there is water, 
Canal water preferably, so stilly, 
Green at the heart of summer. Brother 
Commemorate me thus beautifully. 
Where by a lock Niagariously roars 
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence 
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose 
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands. 
A swan goes by head low with many apologies, 
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges- 
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy 
And other far-flung towns mythologies. 
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous 
Tomb-just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by. 

When he died a statue of him was erected sitting on a seat by the grand canal in Dublin


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## RubyToogood (Jul 8, 2003)

Some more William Blake:


Love's Secret

NEVER seek to tell thy love,  
  Love that never told can be;  
For the gentle wind doth move  
  Silently, invisibly.  

I told my love, I told my love,
  I told her all my heart,  
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.  
  Ah! she did depart!  

Soon after she was gone from me,  
  A traveller came by, 
Silently, invisibly:  
  He took her with a sigh.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 9, 2003)

This one is not because I think it's good but because it made me go "what the £$*%&? Are you on drugs Oscar?" 


A Fragment

Beautiful star with the crimson lips
And flagrant daffodil hair,
Come back, come back, in the shaking ships
O’er the much-overrated sea,
To the hearts that are sick for thee
With a woe worse than mal de mer-
O beautiful stars with the crimson lips
And the flagrant daffodil hair.

O ship that shakes on the desolate sea,
Neath the flag of the wan White Star,
Thou bringest a brighter star with thee
From the land of the Philistine,
Where Niagara’s reckoned fine
And Tupper is popular-
O ship that shakes on the desolate sea,
Neath the flag of the wan White Star.


Oscar Wilde


Any light anyone can shed as to what he's on about would be v welcome!


----------



## PearlySpencer (Jul 12, 2003)

*Hard Times*


When the sun can't melt
the ice coating our bones
nor thaw the blood
clogging our veins
We pace
We pace the city - your city, it's not ours
We don't call it "proud"


We walk the distance between here
and tomorrow - it's your future - not ours
We walk in the shadows of your corporate glory
We slip and slide down your
tried and tired ways
We cross streets named in your honour,
for your saints and heroes - not ours
We step on the cracks cursing
your grand plans
We circle monumental blocks of monied shops
the obscene repositories of your horded wealth
We flip through your twisted journals and read the news
and we mark these times as Hard Times and
Hard Times are your times - not ours


We're the ragged the haggard the worn and the weary
the sallow - skinned faces eyes bloodshot and bleary
We're the bawling the bleeding open sores leaking
the shadows in your dark the denizens of the car park
You file us away on sagging shelves til we fall off with
a crash and a scream for justice


We're the forgotten the forsaken
the one - in five barely alive the scavengers in front of you
on a Friday night
We're the upright drowsers toothless smilers blood salesmen
guinea pigs you play with
Pain? What pain? Colour us blind we're still on your screen
you can't zap us away
We're the howling broken pieces spit out of your machine
the rejects rejectable margins of acceptable loss
We're your canned laughter hysterical out of control
weeping bloody tears you'd never know


"You recognise me, sir? Spare a dollar, Sir? Spare a job? Wanna blow job?"


We're last night's garbage recycled each hour
We crawled out of the pit where you left us
faceless nameless creditcardless you couldn't care less
We're expendable forgettable victims of your excess
and we're fucking tired of these times
'cause these times are Hard Times and they're your times - not ours


Listen!
Our times are buzzin' round our brains
like mad bumblebees
Our times are fistfulls of exploding stars
clenched in your face
Our times are ticking softly under your pillow
within our reach
'cause our times are Rebel Times and
they're always 'round the corner


When we can spit out the fire burning in our bellies
When we can rip out the bricks you laid over our bones and
heave them through your windows your homes
When we can crack the codes that bind us
to a numbing blindness


When we can slice through your walls of fear and deceipt
like a hot knife straight from hell
When we can roll back your barbed wire with our bare hands
and haul each other across your wasteland to the mountains beyond
When we can overturn your Jags, Rolls and limos
and set them smoking in the midnight sun
When we can talk straight loud and clear with nothing to lose
When we can count angry hands razor minds and raging spirits
all together
your city will be ours and our times will begin
Our Times - a city where misery knows no home
where hunger knows no belly
where shame knows no soul
where our wildest dreams are your nightmare
Until then
We pace the city - your city
We don't call it "proud"


_Norman Nawrocki_


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## Ciara (Jul 13, 2003)

*Just think it's quite powerful*

*"Still I Rise" * 
by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset wtih gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

I'm sooo sorry - I did a first line check and it didn't come up so I just wanted to apologise for posting it twice but now it won't let me delete the post


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## Ciara (Jul 13, 2003)

*In an effort to redeem myself and apologies for disrupting the thread.....*

*Success* 

To laugh often and much 
to win the respect 
of intelligent people 
and the affection of children; 
to earn the appreciation 
of honest critics and endure 
the betrayal of false friends; 
to appreciate beauty, 
to find the best in others; 
to leave the world 
a bit better, whether 
by a healthy child, 
a garden patch 
or a redeemed social condition; 
to know even one life  
has breathed easier 
because you have lived. 
That is to have succeeded. 


_Ralph Waldo Emerson _


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## butchersapron (Jul 16, 2003)

You'll probably need to know a bit about Pound to follow this one:

*For Ezra Pound*

I have waited to ask you this
I could not ask you in prison
I waited until you were free

But why, why did you let them use 
Your name and your greatness
As so many pennies to put
Into the meters of their gas-machines?
You know what they did with their gas
Your gas, Ezra Pound
The crime was too big;
There are no extenuating circumstances
You should have known better

In Jerusalem i asked
The ancient Hebrew poets to forgive you;
And what would Walt Whitman have said
And Thomas Jefferson.

_Paul Potts_


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 17, 2003)

*A Visit*
_Margaret Atwood_

Gone are the days
when you could walk on water.
When you could walk.

The days are gone.
Only one day remains,
the one you're in.

The memory is no friend.
It can only tell you
what you no longer have:

a left hand you can use,
two feet that walk.
All the brain's gadgets.

Hello, hello.
The one hand that still works
grips, won't let go.

That is not a train.
There is no cricket.
Let's not panic.

Let's talk about axes,
which kinds are good,
the many names of wood.

This is how to build
a house, a boat, a tent.
No use; the toolbox

refuses to reveal its verbs;
the rasp, the plane, the awl,
revert to sullen metal.

Do you recognize anything? I said.
Anything familiar?
Yes, you said. The bed.

Better to watch the stream
that flows across the floor
and is made of sunlight,

the forest made of shadows;
better to watch the fireplace
which is now a beach.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jul 18, 2003)

*Haiku*

To convey one's mood
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic

_- John Cooper Clarke_


----------



## liampreston (Jul 18, 2003)

Silence; against me pushes a force, 
making me rehearse words of forgiveness
which don't mean a thing.

If the words from us do fall,
smash on the floor without a sound,
their shards will be a danger 
and a warning,
but will not mean a thing.



(my own, found in the bottom of my draw during a clear-out, must be about 6 or 7 years old.....I'm not passing judgement on it     It must have been at college or school.....anyway, here you go......


----------



## fanta (Jul 18, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Anna Key _
> *Reply to Ats:
> 
> <Name dropping section>
> ...



That is very interesting to hear. INCIDENT IN A SALOON BAR is remarkable. For some reason I had the author down as an American. Don't know why, perhaps his unpretentious and straightforward language.


----------



## fanta (Jul 18, 2003)

*The British*



> _Originally posted by onemonkey _
> *Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
> And let them settle,
> Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.
> ...



Brilliant. As Mr Z always is!


----------



## chrissie (Jul 18, 2003)

I have been unwell and so away except for the very occasional comment elsewhere.  Will I get blasted for self-indulgence for passing comment about some of the recent poems here? (Because I DO love this thread so much.)  

RubyTooGood will delete this if it OTT, eh? (Which absolves _me_ of responsibility   )

Pearly Spencer, why is ‘The Terrible Things’ a favourite?  It seems so dark, although it is a lovely poem in itself.  I have to say that your cat in that superb McGough poem is more loyal to its owner than the somewhat promiscuous cat from the TV drinks advert!!!  (Which I can no longer watch without thinking of the much nicer cat in the poem you posted above.)

Mr R, your Mrs is NOT of common stuff if she of this poem!  She must be something else, no?

Wynn, your ‘After Love’ poem make me smile.  It’s true, though, isn’t it?  Sex is something wonderful sometimes and I love that loss of boundaries and then afterwards you get your own boundaries back but in the meantime you have gained something from the other which is not easy to express…  until your poem, which is now on our bedroom wall.

I have problems with Justin’s posting style (which, when I told him, prompted him to tell me to ‘fuck off’ and I can’t really blame him - nor me to be honest), but he does know his ‘stuff’ and John Cooper Clarke’s Haiku is very witty.  I am putting that up on my classroom door.

Maybe Yossarian can help me understand Atwood better.  I’d like his take on the poem he posted.

Damn self-indulgent.  Sorry.  Life is a bit difficult at the mo’ and this thread and everyone who posts on it _really_ helps.  

My post is an extract from *Keat’s Eve of St Agnes*

XXX.

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.



The rest is at: Eve of St Agnes


----------



## PearlySpencer (Jul 20, 2003)

> _Originally posted by chrissie _
> *
> Pearly Spencer, why is ‘The Terrible Things’ a favourite?  It seems so dark, although it is a lovely poem in itself.  I have to say that your cat in that superb McGough poem is more loyal to its owner than the somewhat promiscuous cat from the TV drinks advert!!!  (Which I can no longer watch without thinking of the much nicer cat in the poem you posted above.)
> 
> *



Difficult to say why it's a favourite. It's a poem I read a couple of years ago and for some reason it's stayed with me. The author dedicates it to "Amber". Who's Amber? Daughter, friend, sister, mother, you or me? It is dark but personally I find it inspirational too. A world where we can realise the colours of our dreaming - worth fighting for I reckon 

McGough is superb. So here's another short one from him


*The Leader*


I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yipee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?


_Roger McGough_


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 23, 2003)

*BLIND*

I was born blind and
have never wanted to see

I sense
the secrets of the stars
and share
shadows with the moon

I have learned to calculate
the brightness of black
and am afraid of nothing
but the light

I have seen nothing
yet, I bear witness
the moon is full
on every night
and every night
is every day

no one smells the same
I know how to summon
the scent of my mother
from the stars and I can smell
the stars in all souls

I am not certain of the sun
I have never seen a shadow cast

yet, I have seen shadows
cast rainbows and mountains

I am blind
I have never wanted to see

I fear nothing but light
light is the shadow of truth: 
it sobers imagination and
leaves us drunk with perception 

I have seen nothing and am not
convinced of the clouds
my days are
as bright as my nights 

I am a star-gazer by day
and a fisherman by night
I cast my net under
the shadow of the moon
and I love the wind

I am blind
I have seen
all that there is to see 

I have planted
shadows on the wind
in an attempt
to breeze blackness
over the Earth 

this is a confession
you are guilty of light
repent and be reborn blind 

or forever see
nothing

_Saul Stacey Williams_


----------



## umi (Jul 23, 2003)

untitled

anyone can be a hoe...


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 24, 2003)

> _Originally posted by umi _
> *untitled
> 
> anyone can be a hoe... *


untitled _and_ unattributed...

justin isn't going to like that.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 24, 2003)

I don't like it either since it sounds like one of your own. Read the first post on this thread - you too liampreston!


----------



## Loki (Jul 24, 2003)

*More Blake*

*The Tyger*

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
On what wings dare he aspire? 
What the hand dare sieze the fire? 


And what shoulder, & what art. 
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
And when thy heart began to beat, 
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 


What the hammer? what the chain? 
In what furnace was thy brain? 
What the anvil? what dread grasp 
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 


When the stars threw down their spears, 
And watered heaven with their tears, 
Did he smile his work to see? 
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 


Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


----------



## liampreston (Jul 24, 2003)

> _Originally posted by RubyToogood _
> *I don't like it either since it sounds like one of your own. Read the first post on this thread - you too liampreston! *




  Sorry, I thought of putting it in without my name, then had a moment of honesty and put it up there.

And it's an awful poem in any case !


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 25, 2003)

*Let It Enfold You*
_Charles Bukowski_


either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite,I
leered at the 
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at,I had no male
friends,

I changed jobs and
cities,I hated holidays,
babies,history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color 
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.

peace an happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
an
addled
mind.

but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through
any number of 
women-it gradually
began to occur to
me
that I wasn't diffrent

from the
others, I was the same,

they were all fulsome
with hatred,
glossed over with petty
greivances,
the men I fought in
alleys had hearts of stone.
everybody was nudging,
inching, cheating for
some insignificant
advantage,
the lie was the
weapon and the
plot was
emptey,
darkness was the
dictator.

cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of 
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the 
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the 
dark.
the less I needed
the better I 
felt.

maybe the other life had worn me 
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had 
slipped away into 
sorrow.

I could never accept
life as it was,
I could never gobble 
down all its
poisons
but there were parts,
tenous magic parts
open for the
asking.

I re formulated
I don't know when,
date,time,all
that
but the change
occured.
something in me
relaxed, smoothed
out.
I no longer had to 
prove that I was a 
man,

I didn't have to prove
anything.

I began to see things:
coffee cups lined up
behind a counter in a 
cafe.
or a dog walking along
a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse
on my dresser top
stopped there
with its body,
its ears,
its nose,
it was fixed,
a bit of life
caught within itself
and its eyes looked 
at me
and they were
beautiful.
then- it was
gone.

I began to feel good,
I began to feel good
in the worst situations
and there were plenty
of those.
like say, the boss
behind his desk,
he is going to have
to fire me.

I've missed too many 
days.
he is dressed in a
suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, "I am going
to have to let you go"

"it's all right" I tell
him.

He must do what he
must do, he has a 
wife, a house, children.
expenses, most probably
a girlfriend.

I am sorry for him
he is caught.

I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporarily,
anyhow.

(the whole world is at the
throat of the world,
everybody feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
disillusioned)

I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.

I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels,breasts,
singing,the
works.

(dont get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems just for
the sake of
itself-
this is a shield and a 
sickness.)

The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the good
moments arrived
again
I didn't fight them off
like an alley 
adversary.
I let them take me,
I luxuriated in them,
I bade them welcome
home.
I even looked into
the mirror
once having thought
myself to be
ugly,
I now liked what
I saw,almost
handsome,yes,
a bit ripped and
ragged,
scares,lumps,
odd turns,
but all in all,
not too bad,
almost handsome,
better at least than
some of those movie
star faces
like the cheeks of
a babys
butt.

and finally I discovered
real feelings for
others,
unheralded,
like lately,
like this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
I saw my wife in bed,
just the 
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyramids,
Mozart dead
but his music still 
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the toteboard waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the 
covers.

I kissed her in the,
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the 
hill
past the houses
full and empty
of
people,
i saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me


----------



## Lollybelle (Jul 25, 2003)

Cheers for that one Yoss, it's made my day.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 26, 2003)

Time for another Adrian Mitchell one:

*The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry*

Back in the caveman days business was fair.
Used to turn up at Wookey Hole,
Plenty of action down the Hole
Nights when it wasn't raided.
They'd see my bear-gut harp
And the mess at the back of my eyes
And 'Right', they'd say, 'make poetry'.
So I'd slam away at the three basic chords
And go into the act ---
A story about sabre-toothed tigers with a comic hero;
A sexy one with an anti-wife-clubbing twist ---
Good progressive stuff mainly,
Get ready for the Bronze Age, all that,
And soon it would be 'Bring out the woad!'
Yeah, woad. We used to get high on woad.

The Vikings only wanted sagas
Full of gigantic deadheads cutting off each other's vitals
Or Beowulf Versus the Bog People.
The Romans weren't much better,
Under all that armour you could tell they were soft
With their central heating
And poets with names like Horace.

Under the Normans the language began to clear,
Became a pleasure to write in,
Yes, write in, by now everyone was starting
To write down poems.

Well, it saved memorizing and improvizing
And the peasants couldn't get hold of it.
Soon there were hundreds of us,
Most of us writing under the name
Of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Then suddenly we were knee-deep in sonnets.
Holinshed ran a headline:
BONANZA FOR BARDS.

It got fantastic ---
Looning around from the bear-pit te tho Globe,
All those freak-outs down the Mermaid,
Kit Marlowe coming on like Richard the Two,
A virgin queen in a ginger wig
And English poetry is full whatsit ---
Bloody fantastic, but I never found any time
To do any writing till Willy finally flipped ---
Smoking too much of the special stuff
Sir Walter Raleigh was pushing.

Cromwell's time I spent on cultural committees.

Then Charles the Second swung down from the trees
And it was sexual medley time
And the only verses they wanted
Were epigrams an Chloe's breasts
But I only got published on the back of her left knee-cap.
Next came Pope and Dryden
So I went underground.
Don't mess with the Mafia.

Then suddenly --- WOOMF ---
It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al
And it didn't matter how you wrote,
All the public wanted was a hairy great image.
Before they'd even print you
You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,
Fall in love with your sister
Or drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton).
My publisher said: 'I'll have to remainder you
Unless you go and live in a lake or something
Like this bloke Wordsworth'.

After that there were about
A thousand years of Tennyson
Who got so bored with himself
That he changed his name
To Kipling at half-time.

Strange that Tennyson should be
Remembered for his poems really,
We always thought of him
As a golfer.

There hasn't been much time
For poetry since the 'twenties
What with leaving the Communist Church
To join the Catholic Party
And explaining why in the C.I.A. Monthly.
Finally I was given the Chair of Comparative Ambiguity
At Armpit University, Java.
It didn't keep me busy,
But it kept me quiet.
It seemed like poetry had been safely tucked up for the night.

_Adrian Mitchell_


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 27, 2003)

*THE BAR BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD*

There are liquorless souls that follow paths
Where whiskey never ran -
Let me live in a bar by the side of the road
And drink from the old beer can.

Let me live in a bar by the side of the road,
When the race of man goes dry, 
The men who are "drys" and the men who are "wets"
(But none are so "wet" as I.)

I see from my bar by the side of the road,
A land with drouth accurst;
And men who press on with the ardour of beer,
And men who are faint with thirst.

I know there are bars in Old Mexico,
And schooners of glorious height.
That the booze splashes on throught the long afternoon,
And floods through the gutters of night.

But still I take gin when the travellers take gin,
And Scotch with the whiskey man,
Nor ever refuse a thirsty old soul 
A swig from my old beer can.

For why should I praise Prohibition's restraints,
Or love the revenue man?
Let me live in a bar by the side of the road,
And drink from the old beer can!

-Robert E Howard, 1906-1936


----------



## PearlySpencer (Jul 28, 2003)

*A Martian Sends a Postcard Home*


Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. and yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.


_Craig Raine_


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 29, 2003)

*Monkeyland  - Sandor Weores*

Monkeyland 

Oh for far-off monkeyland,
ripe monkeybread on baobabs,
and the wind strums out monkeytunes
from monkeywindow monkeybars.

Monkeyheroes rise and fight
in monkeyfield and monkeysquare,
And monkeysanatoriums
have monkeypatients crying there.

Monkeygirl monkeytaught
masters monkeyalphabet,
evil monkey pounds his thrawn
feet in monkeyprison yet.

Monkeymill is nearly made,
miles of monkeymayonnaise,
winningly unwinnable
winning monkeymind wins praise.

Monkeyking on monkeypole
harangues the crowd in monkeytongue,
monkeyheaven comes to some,
monkeyhell for those undone.

Macaque, gorilla, chimpanzee,
baboon, orangutan, each beast
reads his monkeynewssheet at
the end of each twilight repast.

With monkeysupper memories
the monkeyouthouse rumbles, hums,
monkeyswaddies start to march,
right turn, left turn, shoulder arms-

monkeymilitary fright
reflected in each monkeyface,
with monkeygun in monkeyfist
the monkeys' world the world we face.

SANDOR WEORES
From the Hungarian (trans. Edwin Morgan)

--
_because it's my birthday  
and because we are just a bunch of monkeys not that far down from the trees.  _


----------



## liampreston (Jul 29, 2003)

[deleted, never to return]


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 29, 2003)

You still haven't read the first post on this thread, have you liam? Not only have we already had a poem today, we've already had that poem on page 7, it's listed in Justin's index.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 30, 2003)

> *The Raven
> Edgar Allan Poe*


Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
                                        Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; -- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
                                        Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
                                        This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
                                        Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
                                        Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon I heard again a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
                                        'Tis the wind and nothing more!"

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
                                        Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
                                       Quoth the raven "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
                                       With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
                                       Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore --
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
                                       Of "Never -- nevermore."

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
                                       Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplght gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
                                        She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
                                        Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
                                        Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
                                        Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
                                       Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
                                        Shall be lifted -- nevermore!


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jul 30, 2003)

Well, it's nearly midnight and that's close enough. It's only a fragment anyway: part of a part. You might recognise it, as the poem which Christopher Lee speaks to Britt Ekland in _The Wicker Man_. I didn't know what it was when I first heard it, and I'd imagine most people don't, which makes it all the more effective as poetry (you may like also to consider the fragment from _Hamlet_ which Richard E Grant recites at the end of _Withnail & I_). It's from _Song of Myself_, which, as I understand it, is itself part of a much larger work, _Leaves of Grass_.

_I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth._

- Walt Whitman


----------



## Donald Twain (Jul 31, 2003)

I'm still new to U75 and just found this thread, it's fantastic and I'm looking forward to reading all the poems that have been posted. And see if the one I'd like to add has already gone   I've just skimmed through and dipped into a few so far.

I love the poem you posted Yossarian, it's gorgeous. Took me right into it and spat me out feeling lovely at the end!


----------



## PearlySpencer (Aug 1, 2003)

> _Originally posted by RubyToogood _
> *This one is not because I think it's good but because it made me go "what the £$*%&? Are you on drugs Oscar?"
> 
> Any light anyone can shed as to what he's on about would be v welcome! *



Not sure if this will be help or hinderance, the White Star Line was a shipping company, like the Blue Star Line, that was built up on the slave trade - I think he's subverting images of slavery.




 Or maybe he's just wasted on something as you said


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 3, 2003)

*Contemplating Hell*
_Bertolt Brecht_


Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that is
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Aug 4, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Yossarian _
> *
> Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
> My brother Shelley found it to be a place
> Much like the city of London*


Have you been reading my tagline?


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2003)

Happy first birthday to this thread! (Guess it's about time it was deleted to save server space then )

Haven't found a suitable birthday/anniversary poem but if anyone else can...


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 4, 2003)

Has it been a year?? 
I tried to find something upbeat for the occasion but it seemed like all the ones that weren't about love were about death...


*Let Me Die a Youngman's Death*
_Roger McGough_

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death.


----------



## liampreston (Aug 5, 2003)

From the always amusing "Worst Poetry on the Internet" web sites, a bit of fun from me today   

(and if this is breaking the rules, I'm packing up and going home) 

Drone 

 I am a pawn, a useless being 
 Controlled by simpletons of greater power 
 No will have I ; broken and beaten 
 A slug to follow the masters trail 

 Watch me as I grovel at your feet 
 Control my spineless whimpering body 
 Defeat my thoughts, my wishes and ideas 
 Punish me as I fall out of line 

 An empty shell, I am nothing 
 A slave 
 A drone 
 Your servant until death 
 You have destroyed my creative mind 
 to an empty 
 Barren 
 Wasteland 

 Forgotten.


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 5, 2003)

I'd like to take this opportunity (which I should have taken yesterday) to present Yoss with the RubyToogood award for services to the Poem of the Day thread, for consistently coming up with fantastic poetry I'd never read before and sheer dedication to the cause.







Actually that's the USSR Medal for the Restoration of Iron and Steel Industries of the South.


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 5, 2003)

Cheers Ruby!  

This more than makes up for the way the Soviets ignored all my valiant efforts to restore the iron and steel industries along the Volga...


----------



## wiskey (Aug 6, 2003)

well done Yoss 

*Irritable Vowel Syndrome* 

A
E
I
o
fuck U

by some bloke who hijacked me at glasto this year.


----------



## liampreston (Aug 7, 2003)

Frame, An Epistle


Most of the things you made for me — blanket-
chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker — I gave
away to friends who could use them and not
be reminded of the hours lost there,
not having been witness to those designs,
the tedious finishes. But I did keep
the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors,
most of these years it has been invisible,
part of the wall, or defined by reflection —
safe — because reflection, after all, does change.
I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed
yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.


Claudia Emerson
Poetry
Volume CLXXXII, Number 4
July 2003


----------



## liampreston (Aug 7, 2003)

You know, just going through some of the earlier posts on here, there's some excellent examples of poetry here. Would be a bugger to do, but an U75 Anthology would be an interesting read all told


----------



## liampreston (Aug 8, 2003)

*Reading Plato* 


I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched

into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle's bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat's call at dawn or the face

reflected on a coffee machine's chrome side,
the pencil's curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor's square

of afternoon light another page I couldn't know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover's wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn't so much light
I think about, but the back's skin cracking
to let each wing's nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.



Rick Barot
The Darker Fall
2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
Sarabande Books


----------



## PearlySpencer (Aug 10, 2003)

*REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #9*


Advocating
the overthrow of government is a crime
overthrowing it is something else
altogether. it is sometimes called
revolution
but don't kid yourself : government
is not where it's at : it's only
a good place to start :

1. kill head of Dow Chemical
2. destroy plant
3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM

to build again
ie., destroy the concept of money
as we know it, get rid of interest,
savings, inheritance
(Pound's money, as dated coupons that come in the mail
to everyone, and are void in 30 days
is still a good idea)
or, let's start with no money at all and invent it
if we need it
or, mimeograph it and everyone
print as much as they want
and see what happens


declare a moratorium on debt
the Continental Congress did
'on all debts public and private'


& no one 'owns' the land
it can be held
for use, no man holding more
than he can work, himself and family working


let no one work for another
except for love, and what you make
above your needs be given to the tribe
a Common-Wealth


None of us knows the answers, think about
these things
The day will come when we have to know
the answers.


_Diane Di Prima_


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 11, 2003)

I was really looking for a Grace Nichols poem that Mrs M quoted me a line of yesterday. Couldn't find it, but did find this one.

Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman's head while having a full bubble bath

Steatopygous sky
Steatopygous sea
Steatopygous waves
Steatopygous me

0 how I long to place my foot
on the head of anthropology

to swing my breasts
in the face of history

to scrub my back
with the dogma of theology

to put my soap
in the slimming industry's
profitsome spoke

Steatopygous sky
Steatopygous sea
Steatopygous waves
Steatopygous me


Grace Nichols

(note, according to dictionary.com, steatopygous = having fat buttocks)


----------



## wiskey (Aug 12, 2003)

please excuse the monster cut and paste.

***

_Ani DiFranco_
*Self Evident*

yes, 
us people are just poems 
we're 90% metaphor 
with a leanness of meaning 
approaching hyper-distillation 
and once upon a time 
we were moonshine 
rushing down the throat of a giraffe 
yes, rushing down the long hallway 
despite what the p.a. announcement says 
yes, rushing down the long stairs 
with the whiskey of eternity 
fermented and distilled 
to eighteen minutes 
burning down our throats 
down the hall 
down the stairs 
in a building so tall 
that it will always be there 
yes, it's part of a pair 
there on the bow of noah's ark 
the most prestigious couple 
just kickin back parked 
against a perfectly blue sky 
on a morning beatific 
in its indian summer breeze 
on the day that america 
fell to its knees 
after strutting around for a century 
without saying thank you 
or please 

and the shock was subsonic 
and the smoke was deafening 
between the setup and the punch line 
cuz we were all on time for work that day 
we all boarded that plane for to fly 
and then while the fires were raging 
we all climbed up on the windowsill 
and then we all held hands 
and jumped into the sky 

and every borough looked up when it heard the first blast 
and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed 
and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar 
looked more like war than anything i've seen so far 
so far 
so far 
so fierce and ingenious 
a poetic specter so far gone 
that every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling 
over 'oh my god' and 'this is unbelievable' and on and on 
and i'll tell you what, while we're at it 
you can keep the pentagon 
keep the propaganda 
keep each and every tv 
that's been trying to convince me 
to participate 
in some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution 
perpetuate retribution 
even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution 
is still hanging in the air 
and there's ash on our shoes 
and there's ash in our hair 
and there's a fine silt on every mantle 
from hell's kitchen to brooklyn 
and the streets are full of stories 
sudden twists and near misses 
and soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters 
with tales of narrowly averted disasters 
and the whiskey is flowin 
like never before 
as all over the country 
folks just shake their heads
and pour 

so here's a toast to all the folks who live in palestine 
afghanistan 
iraq 

el salvador 

here's a toast to the folks living on the pine ridge reservation 
under the stone cold gaze of mt. rushmore 

here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors 
who daily provide women with a choice 
who stand down a threat the size of oklahoma city 
just to listen to a young woman's voice 

here's a toast to all the folks on death row right now 
awaiting the executioner's guillotine 
who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads 
to find peace in the form of a dream 

cuz take away our playstations 
and we are a third world nation 
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son 
who stole the oval office and that phony election 
i mean 
it don't take a weatherman 
to look around and see the weather 
jeb said he'd deliver florida, folks 
and boy did he ever 

and we hold these truths to be self evident: 
#1 george w. bush is not president 
#2 america is not a true democracy 
#3 the media is not fooling me 
cuz i am a poem heeding hyper-distillation 
i've got no room for a lie so verbose 
i'm looking out over my whole human family 
and i'm raising my glass in a toast 

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels 
let us vow to get off of this sauce 
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes 
and find that train ticket we lost 
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river 
and peeked into all the backyards 
and the laundry was waving 
the graffiti was teasing us 
from brick walls and bridges 
we were rolling over ridges 
through valleys 
under stars 
i dream of touring like duke ellington 
in my own railroad car 
i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches 
in a grand station aglow with grace 
and then standing out on the platform
and feeling the air on my face 

give back the night its distant whistle 
give the darkness back its soul 
give the big oil companies the finger finally 
and relearn how to rock-n-roll 
yes, the lessons are all around us and a change is waiting there 
so it's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets 
and clear the air 
get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand 
of someone else's desert 
put it back in its pants 
and quit the hypocritical chants of 
freedom forever 

cuz when one lone phone rang 
in two thousand and one 
at ten after nine 
on nine one one 
which is the number we all called 
when that lone phone rang right off the wall 
right off our desk and down the long hall 
down the long stairs 
in a building so tall 
that the whole world turned 
just to watch it fall 


and while we're at it 
remember the first time around? 
the bomb? 
the ryder truck? 
the parking garage? 
the princess that didn't even feel the pea? 
remember joking around in our apartment on avenue D? 

can you imagine how many paper coffee cups would have to change their design 
following a fantastical reversal of the new york skyline?! 

it was a joke, of course 
it was a joke 
at the time 
and that was just a few years ago 
so let the record show 
that the FBI was all over that case 
that the plot was obvious and in everybody's face 
and scoping that scene 
religiously 
the CIA 
or is it KGB? 
committing countless crimes against humanity 
with this kind of eventuality 
as its excuse 
for abuse after expensive abuse 
and it didn't have a clue 
look, another window to see through 
way up here 
on the 104th floor 
look 
another key 
another door 
10% literal 
90% metaphor 
3000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day 
should be more than pawns 
in some asshole's passion play 
so now it's your job 
and it's my job 
to make it that way 
to make sure they didn't die in vain 
sshhhhhh.... 
baby listen 
hear the train?

***

performed at the New York anti war demo earlier this year. well worth downloading if you have the facilities.


----------



## soulrebel (Aug 13, 2003)

Yeah, that Ani DiFranco track is wicked, it's also on the "Peace Not War" CD available from Stop The War Coalition's website, and on a free CD on the cover of this month's New Internationalist...

Was looking for a Jean Binta Breeze poem called (i think) "Riddim Ravings" (the one that starts "when dem go kar mi fi Bellevue..."), but didn't find it, but found this one instead:

Dennis Scott
Apocalypse Dub

At first, there's a thin, bright Rider --
he doesn't stop at the supermarket, the cool
red meats are not to his taste.
He steals from the tin on the tenement table,
he munches seed from the land
where no rain has fallen, he feeds
in the gutter behind my house.
the bread is covered with sores
when he eats it; the children
have painted his face on their bellies

The second rides slowly, is visiting, watch him, he smiles
through the holes in the roof
of the cardboard houses.
His exhaust sprays pus on the sheets,
he touches the women and teaches them
fever, he puts eggs under the skin --
in the hot days insects will hatch and hide
in the old men's mouths,
in the bones of the children

And always, behind them, the iceman, quick,
with his shades, the calm oil of his eyes --
when he throttles, the engine
grunts like a killer.  I'm afraid,
you said.  Then you closed the window
and turned up the radio, the DJ said greetings
to all you lovely people.
But in the street the children coughed like guns.

In the blueblack evenings
they cruise in the corner
giggling.  Skenneng!  Skenneng!


----------



## PearlySpencer (Aug 17, 2003)

A tribute to Arthur Moyse - anarchist and poet. 

*The City Was Quiet Today*


Silent the city dressed in night
Absolves out stale collective sins
And in rented tombs we mouth through dreams
Locked in our street mapped catacombs


The watchman nods upon the hour
Bored lovers kiss and quickly part
Their final footsteps beat retreat
Night laps the town from bank to spire


The metered torches fixed in flame
Cut moveless shadows in their night
And in mute rotation mimes the light
In empty streets and carless drives


The news of distant wars must wait
With rancid gossip and the hymm
For the flaccid tongue and blinded eye
Obey the dark and ancient art


Only the homeless find no rest
For wind and rain and seeping cold
Deny the balm of sleep
As they patrol with rootless feet


Only the morning brings relief
The public grass a public bed
The homeless sleep within the crowd
And wear the city for a shroud.


_Arthur Moyse_


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 20, 2003)

*The Lost Pilot*
_James Tate_


Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 21, 2003)

SONG BY DESIGN

                       A crocus is edgy sentimental and

                       unfocused like a rainy night not

                       red and greasy like flowers brought

                       down to the house from the store:

                       sweetest fat valentines

                       with message previously attached yes

                       like the ocean don't turn your back or

                       a bracing fuck in a cold room we're

                       mapmakers who work and sing

hearts in the pine forest

indicated in green.

                               -- Peter Bushyeager


----------



## Loki (Aug 22, 2003)

The third worst poem in the galaxy IMO

*Vogon Poetry (Untitled)*

_Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me 
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. 
Groop I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes. 
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, 
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, 
see if I don't!_

- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

analysis here


----------



## pooka (Aug 23, 2003)

On a lighter note, caught on Radio 4 the other night - best read in a Lancashire accent.

*Bring on the rosy-cheeked girls* 

Bring on the rosy-cheeked girls,
Bring on the smiling ones, the light-footed dancers,                   
Those that sing with their eyes,
Those with the warm breasts and the soft hands,
Those that look deep in the eyes, and not at the garbage 
                            of garb.
Bring on the dark, the fair, the brown-as-a-berry, 

Bring them on, all of them, with their wet, laughing 
                            mouths,
The fat, the thin, the short and the lanky,
Let them be as full of life as a pod with peas,
Let them be as company-comfortable as an old friendly 
                            jacket, young or old,
But most of all. . . . let them be merry.


And then take all the others.
All the tight-lipped, crab-faced, mewling, mithering, 

Niggardly, sour-faced, crab-mouthed, cold-titted, 
                            tight-arsed,
Moaning, sullen, frozen-legs-together, money-grubbing 
                            bitches!
Take them and heap them all together
On some cold, bleary, dreary moor
In the howling sleet and moaning drizzle of November. 
                            . . .
and leave them there!
For it deserves them, and they each other.


Then bring on the lads, the smiling lads!
Open-handed, shoulder-to-the-wheel lads,
Lame-dogs-helped-over-stiles lads,
Take-a-pint, stand-a-round lads,
Good, laughing lads.
Lads with a quart of life in their hands
And eyes that look straight. . .
Bring on the tall, the short, the long,
The runners, the walkers,
Those that can hammer, those that can turn out a song, 

Bring on the fat, the thin, the bald and the hairy, 
                            young or old,
So long as they sup life by the gallon. . . .
So long as they're merry


Then take all the others.
All the sly-eyed, twisty-mouthed grabbers and fumblers, 

The shifty-faced, two-tongued, lead-swinging lizards, 

The snotty-nosed, mardy-arsed bullies and false friends. 
                            . . .
And stick them up to their necks in the foulest stinkpot 
                            of an old bog you can find. . . . Head Down!
And leave them there!


But for God's sake, not too near that moor with all 
                            the old whores. . .
If they meet up and breed. . . we're all buggered!


_Mike Harding_


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Aug 23, 2003)

Have you missed an 'ed' off the end of that, pooka?


----------



## pooka (Aug 23, 2003)

I had!


----------



## chrissie (Aug 23, 2003)

A poem on a lighter note than a Vogon poem, pooka?

Perhaps.  

I expect loki has read Adam's Dirk Gently's' books; most especially the one based upon The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (though I prefer the other - oddly enough in view of loki's tag, involving Norse gods).

Nice connections there, loki.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Aug 24, 2003)

*At Lord's*

_It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
And the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:-
Oh my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!_

- Francis Thompson


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Aug 28, 2003)

An old favourite this one - he's still performing it as far as I know.


*Contributory Negligence*

(_Intro:_A poem I wrote seventeen years ago, when I was living in Harlow in Essex, but which is, sadly, just as relevant today. A High Court Judge called Judge Richards said that a   woman who was hitch-hiking late at night and was picked up and raped was 'asking for it' and guilty of contributory negligence...)

_   Hitching up the M11
   coming back from an Upstarts gig
   got picked up 'bout half eleven
   by this bloke in a funny wig...
   Flash Mercedes, new and gleaming
   deep pile suits and deep seat piles
   I got in and sat there scheming
   while the dickhead flashed me smiles

   Told me he was back from sessions
   with a load of brain-dead hacks
   Told me he'd made no concessions
   to the bootboys and the blacks
   Said he thought that it was stupid
   fuss 'bout rapists on the news
   Bloke was only playing Cupid
   Girls like that they don't refuse

   Asked me if I thought him enemy
   Asked me if I bore a grudge
   Told me that he came from Henley
   Said he was a High Court judge
   I asked him to stop a second
   'Need a slash' that's what I said
   When he did the anger beckoned
   and I smacked him in the head

   Took his keys and took his money
   Crashed the car into a ditch
   Though he moaned 'they'll get you, sonny!'
   got away without a hitch
   I don't think they'll ever find me
   'cos I'm many miles away
   but if one day they're right behind me
   I know what I'm gonna say -

   HE ASKED FOR IT! He's rich and snobbish
   right wing, racist, sexist too
   Brain-dead, ugly, sick and slobbish
   Should be locked in London Zoo!
   He wanted me to beat him up -
   it was an open invitation!
   Late at night he picked me up -
   an act of open provocation!

   High Court Judges are a blight -
   they should stay home in nice warm beds
   and if they must drive late at night
   should never pick up Harlow Reds!
   A five pence fine is right and proper
   and to sum up my defence
   It was his fault he came a cropper -
   CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE!_

- Attila the Stockbroker


----------



## Dr. Christmas (Aug 28, 2003)

_Florins_ by Harry Smart

Let's keep a place in the digital
Decimal world for an honest word like _florin._
So much more solid and satisfying
Than _ten pee piece,_ so much more 
Suggestive of that thickly silver disc,
Hard, yet rubbed to congeniality
With flesh, smooth in the hand.
Florins, a handful of florins,
A man could be happy with a handful of florins.

Tonight I walked home through the town
With three florins tucked comfortably
Between my knuckles, just in case.


----------



## Dr. Christmas (Aug 28, 2003)

_The Weapon_ by Hugh MacDiarmid

Scots steel tempered wi' Irish fire
Is the weapon that I desire.


----------



## chrissie (Aug 29, 2003)

*The Keyboard and the Mouse*

I am myself and in my house
But if I had my way
I’d be the keyboard and the mouse
Under your hands all day.

I’d be the C prompt on the screen.
We could have had some fun
This morning, if I’d only been
Word Perfect 5.1.

I’d be your hard and floppy discs,
I’d be your laser jet,
Your ampersands and asterisks –
I’d be in Somerset

Rotating on your swivel chair.
The journey takes a while
But press return and I’ll be there.
Do not delete this file.

_Sophie Hannah_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Aug 29, 2003)

A bit early, but I'm not waiting for midnight! Let's have some more Johnny Clarke....

*Twat*

_Like a Night Club in the morning, you're the bitter end.
Like a recently disinfected shithouse, you're clean round the bend. 
You give me the horrors
too bad to be true 
All of my tomorrows
are lousy 'cause of you. 
You put the Shat in Shatter
Put the Pain in Spain
Your germs are splattered about
Your face is just a stain 

You're certainly no raver, commonly known as a drag.
Do us all a favour, here - wear this polythene bag. 

You're like a dose of scabies,
I've got you under my skin.
You make life a fairy tale... Grimm! 

People mention murder, the moment you arrive.
I'd consider killing you if I thought you were alive.
You’ve got this slippery quality,
it makes me think of phlegm,
and a dual personality -
I hate both of them. 

Your bad breath, vamps disease, destruction, and decay.
Please, please, please, please, take yourself away.
Like a death at a birthday party,
you ruin all the fun.
Like a sucked and spat out smartie,
you're no use to anyone.
Like the shadow of the guillotine
on a dead consumptive’s face.
Speaking as an outsider,
what do you think of the human race?

You went to a progressive psychiatrist - 
he recommended suicide
before scratching your bad name off his list,
and pointing the way outside. 

You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you want to fart.
You're heading for a breakdown,
better pull yourself apart. 

Your dirty name gets passed about when something goes amiss.
Your attitudes are platitudes,
just make me wanna piss. 

What kind of creature bore you
Was it some kind of bat?
They can’t find a good word for you,
but I can... 
TWAT! _

- John Cooper Clarke


----------



## Cautious Fred (Aug 30, 2003)

Second Glance at a Jaguar (Ted Hughes)

Skinful of bowl, he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle
Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,
Club-swinging, trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,
And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it
Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out, 
He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,
Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,
Showing his belly like a butterfly
At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it. His head 
Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,
His body is just the engine shoving it forward,
Lifting the air up and shoving on under,
The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,
Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look, 
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He's wearing himself to heavy ovals,
Muttering some mantrah, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin 
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the cain-brands,
Wearing the spots from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,
The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,
The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes
The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.


----------



## PearlySpencer (Aug 31, 2003)

*Jack Daw*


Jack Daw clawed his way from the grave
the man who took his land
no preacher could save
13 miles on a gravel road
he crawled on his belly
he crawled on his nose


_"Oh Lord forgive me and rest my soul
I'm a dead man cursed with what I know
I died in my sleep but the man who killed me
keeps hurtin' others and still goes free"_


That man was the agent
from the big bank in town
foreclosing farms for miles around
killing poor farmers stealing their dreams
Crimes of the banker heartless and mean


Jack Daw clawed his way from the grave
his heart wasn't beating but he was enraged
His eyes glowing white a ghastly sight
this dead man crawling
in the pale moon light


He reached the bank for opening time
Folks shrieked and fled he was first in line
A dead man crawling no banker'd ever seen
burst into his office cursing and mean


_"I've come a long way to claim what's my mine
I'm back from the dead I hope you don't mind
You killed me so you could balance your books
Now I'm here to balance mine
Take a good look!"_


With a crooked bony hand
Jack yanked him to the floor
then dragged the screaming banker out the door
He didn't stuggle long they say he died of fright
And old Jack Daw dragged him out of sight


Later they shut that cursed bank down
'cause every new bank worker
vanished from town
not a trace was left nothing could be found
But everyone knew
Yes everyone knew
Old Jack Daw had been around


_Norman Nawrocki_


----------



## Dr. Christmas (Aug 31, 2003)

_If You Can Call it Living_

In Wales there are 
no crocodiles, but the tears
continue to flow from
their slimed sources. Women
with white hair and strawberry
faces peer at you from behind
curtains;wobbling sopranos
split the chapels; the clerks undress
the secretaries with their lean eyes.
                                             Who will employ
the loafers at the street 
corners, choking over 
the joke's phlegm?
                                             Anything to
sell? cries the tourist
to the native rummaging among
the remnants of his self-respect.

_R.S. Thomas_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Sep 3, 2003)

*Casualty


I

He would drink by himself 
And raise a weathered thumb 
Towards the high shelf, 
Calling another rum 
And blackcurrant, without 
Having to raise his voice, 
Or order a quick stout 
By a lifting of the eyes 
And a discreet dumb-show 
Of pulling off the top; 
At closing time would go 
In waders and peaked cap 
Into the showery dark, 
A dole-kept breadwinner 
But a natural for work. 
I loved his whole manner, 
Sure-footed but too sly, 
His deadpan sidling tact, 
His fisherman's quick eye 
And turned observant back. 
Incomprehensible 
To him, my other life. 
Sometimes on the high stool, 
Too busy with his knife 
At a tobacco plug 
And not meeting my eye, 
In the pause after a slug 
He mentioned poetry. 
We would be on our own 
And, always politic 
And shy of condescension, 
I would manage by some trick 
To switch the talk to eels 
Or lore of the horse and cart 
Or the Provisionals. 
But my tentative art 
His turned back watches too: 
He was blown to bits 
Out drinking in a curfew 
Others obeyed, three nights 
After they shot dead 
The thirteen men in Derry. 
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, 
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday 
Everyone held 
His breath and trembled.



II 

It was a day of cold 
Raw silence, wind-blown 
Surplice and soutane: 
Rained-on, flower-laden 
Coffin after coffin 
Seemed to float from the door 
Of the packed cathedral 
Like blossoms on slow water. 
The common funeral 
Unrolled its swaddling band, 
Lapping, tightening 
Till we were braced and bound 
Like brothers in a ring. 


But he would not be held 
At home by his own crowd 
Whatever threats were phoned, 
Whatever black flags waved. 
I see him as he turned 
In that bombed offending place, 
Remorse fused with terror 
In his still knowable face, 
His cornered outfaced stare 
Blinding in the flash. 


He had gone miles away 
For he drank like a fish 
Nightly, naturally 
Swimming towards the lure 
Of warm lit-up places, 
The blurred mesh and murmur 
Drifting among glasses 
In the gregarious smoke. 
How culpable was he 
That last night when he broke 
Our tribe's complicity? 
'Now, you're supposed to be 
An educated man,' 
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me 
The right answer to that one.'



III 

I missed his funeral, 
Those quiet walkers 
And sideways talkers 
Shoaling out of his lane 
To the respectable 
Purring of the hearse... 
They move in equal pace 
With the habitual 
Slow consolation 
Of a dawdling engine, 
The line lifted, hand 
Over fist, cold sunshine 
On the water, the land 
Banked under fog: that morning 
I was taken in his boat, 
The screw purling, turning 
Indolent fathoms white, 
I tasted freedom with him. 
To get out early, haul 
Steadily off the bottom, 
Dispraise the catch, and smile 
As you find a rhythm 
Working you, slow mile by mile, 
Into your proper haunt 
Somewhere, well out, beyond... 


Dawn-sniffing revenant, 
Plodder through midnight rain, 
Question me again.*

_- Seamus Heaney_


----------



## Hollis (Sep 3, 2003)

On Hampstead Heath

I ask you what sort of tree 
we are sat underneath
and you tell me that it is a big one.
You ask me how I came by a scar on my knee
and I tell you that I hurt myself once.
A passer-by, possibly Austrian
and possibly a Christian,
points to a flourescent cycle clip in the grass
and wonders if I might have lost it.
I stand up and indicate that I am wearing shorts.

_- John Hegley_


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 4, 2003)

*Zeroing in*
_Denise Levertov_

I am a landscape," he said,
"a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
and plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths."
"I know," she said. "When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud."
"We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him to the vet's and destroy him."
"No one knows where it is," she said,
"and even by accident no one touches it:
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself--"
"--or flinch back
just in time."
                  "Yes, we learn that
It's not terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never."


----------



## PearlySpencer (Sep 5, 2003)

*NORETORP-NORETSYH*


Rainy, smoky Fall, clouds tower 
In the brilliant Pacific sky. 
In Golden Gate Park, the peacocks 
Scream, wandering through falling leaves. 
In clotting nights in smoking dark, 
The Kronstadt sailors are marching 
Through the streets of Budapest. The stones 
Of the barricades rise up and shiver 
Into form. They take the shapes 
Of the peasant armies of Makhno. 
The streets are lit with torches. 
The gasoline drenched bodies 
Of the Solovetsky anarchists 
Burn at every street corner. 
Kropotkin’s starved corpse is borne 
In state past the offices 
Of the cowering bureaucrats. 
In all the Politisolators 
Of Siberia the partisan dead are enlisting. 
Berneri, Andreas Nin, 
Are coming from Spain with a legion. 
Carlo Tresca is crossing 
The Atlantic with the Berkman Brigade. 
Bukharin has joined the Emergency 
Economic Council. Twenty million 
Dead Ukrainian peasants are sending wheat. 
Julia Poyntz is organizing American nurses. 
Gorky has written a manifesto 
“To the Intellectuals of the World!” 
Mayakofsky and Essenin 
Have collaborated on an ode, 
“Let Them Commit Suicide.” 
In the Hungarian night 
All the dead are speaking with one voice, 
As we bicycle through the green 
And sunspotted California 
November. I can hear that voice 
Clearer than the cry of the peacocks, 
In the falling afternoon. 
Like painted wings, the color 
Of all the leaves of Autumn, 
The circular tie-dyed skirt 
I made for you flares out in the wind, 
Over your incomparable thighs. 
Oh splendid butterfly of my imagination, 
Flying into reality more real 
Than all imagination, the evil 
Of the world covets your living flesh. 


_Kenneth Rexroth_


----------



## PearlySpencer (Sep 7, 2003)

Know it's only supposed to be one poem a day but these two are both short ones. A double-header from Brian Patten.


*Something That Was Not There Before*


Something that was not there before
has come through the mirror
into my room.


It is not such a simple creature
as at first I thought-
from somewhere it has brought a mischief


that troubles both silence and objects,
and now left alone here
I weave intricate reasons for its arrival.


They disintegrate. Today in January, with
the light frozen on my window, I hear outside
a million panicking birds, and know even out there


comfort is done with; it has shattered
even the stars, this creature
at last come home to me.



*A Talk with a Wood*


Moving through you one evening
when you offered shelter to
quiet things soaked in rain


I saw through your thinning branches
the beginnings of suburbs, and
frightened by the rain,


grey hares running upright in
distant fields; and quite alone there
I thought of nothing but my footprints


being filled, and love, distilled
of people, drifted free, then
the woods spoke with me.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 10, 2003)

*Ode to Autumn*

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,--
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?

- John Keats


----------



## PearlySpencer (Sep 11, 2003)

imho performance poetry at its best, another one from Norman Nawrocki


*Squat the City*


SQUAT the city! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


When that knock comes on the door
The monthly ransom's due once more
Do you pay? Do you squawk?


SQUAT the city! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


Who built the place you call your home?
Hammered the nails and laid the stone?
Who makes big bucks off others' work?
Collects the rent and stuffs his shirt?


Rent the roaches - what a deal!
He won't charge extra - he's no heel!
Crunch them in your cornflakes bowl
Stuff them in that gaping hole
why don't we


SQUAT the city! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


Twist his arm you need some heat
Twist his leg your stairs eat feet
On knee no cap a smile a wink
Beg my lord please fix the sink


Pennies fall it's a welfare check
They roll into your landlord's pocket
Will you eat? The cupboards bare
Watch him buy another gold locket
why don't we


SQUAT the City! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


Eviction notice time to move
Same old story now you're screwed
Pack your bags and move your ass
Add your name to the homeless mass


Tramp those streets a merry-go-around
Search for a place none are sound
Find one move in repair the floor
Ouch! A rent hike! You know the score


SQUAT the City! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


Speculators mortgage takers
Bank those bucks we pay for housing
Bank of Commerce, American Savings
Montrea-a-a-a-a-a-a-


All they do is mark up property
Steal your rent they're making money!
Holy fakers leeches robbers undertakers
Let's get smart


SQUAT the City! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


People in chains were masters' folk
But slaves those chains they finally broke
Now we're slaves to the working day
Slaving on 'cause there's rent to pay


Half our income down the drain
Pay for shelter? It's a pain
Tenants are _feudal_, landlords too
Time to rebel time for us to


SQUAT the City! FUCK the rent!
PAY no landlord! PAY no rent!


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Sep 15, 2003)

*Cremation Ecologue*

Pig pyres are crackling in the snow-flecked fields,
dawn bonfires next to cleaned out byres and folds.
I know my taxi driver. FMD,
the tragic traincrash (ten dead) yesterday
are what we talk about: Heddon-on-the-Wall
may be infected from untreated swill,
the micro virus and the cattle plague
that could cross borders between bloc and bloc
when the world was so divided, let alone
unpatrolled farm fences, ditch and lane.
The taxi's heater's fierce, we discuss
the icicles hanging from the underpass,
this zero morning as we track the Tyne
and follow the Station signposts towards town.

_I was in what was then Leningrad_

I say (as we rattle over a cattle grid
and then squelch across a disinfectant mat
not the first this morning that we've met)

_a falling icicle caused the death
of a man who was walking underneath
pole-axed as he sauntered with his wife
right through his fur hat of sleek grey wolf,
the sharp tip with its glossy shine
sticking through his badly shaven chin.
In Leningrad you couldn't buy a blade
you'd get a decent shave from and not bleed._

An ice-bolt from malicious gods
could chill the skull and slice the vocal chords
of this Geordie smoker here, under threat,
getting quick drags of smoke into his throat,
banished the bank so many times a day
increasing the odds that maybe he will die,
this ostracised, cold, street-drag Damocles
under the half-thawed bank roof icicles.
The frozen, furtive smoker in shirt sleeves
under icicle-hung gutterings and eves
puffs fast on his cupped fag and quickly stubs
half out among the scattered kerbside tabs.

I enter Dobson's elegant colonnade,
its Railway Age proportions just renewed,
aware of risk and how a roof-slate slid
only two days ago, a heavy slate,
off my front roof and cut the garden seat
where normally on warm days I'd've sat
and almost did that first bright day of March
when the sun woke up a solitary midge.
If the temperature had been two more degrees
I might have sat there and not cut my grass
so that the tile that weeks of gale winds loosed
missed me by metres and my skull's unsliced.

Yesterday ten passengers on this route died
which makes today's predictably subdued
like me, who's thinking did fate choose to spare
me from slate, and collision, as a kind of spur,
to go on doing what I do, that's look and write
as I've done since the Sixties on this route.

I remember all the great books that I've read
I'd never've started if I'd gone by road,
the poems, like this one, that I've written
some passable, and published, most though rotten.
I used to know the landmarks on this route
the industries of Britain left and right.
Once I'd know exactly where we were
from the shapes of spoil heaps and from winding gear
spinning their spokes and winching down a shift
miles deep into this sealed and filled-in shaft
and which bits of field you'd see a score
of rabbits in the passing train would scare,
which Yorkshire coal-dust-laquered black lagoon
had crested grebes on once but now long gone,
but once my own slack-blackened Hippocrene,
though the Pegasus would be more like that crane,
raising a replica of this coach, ripped and crushed
when yesterday's Newcastle-King's Cross crashed,
I see from a jerkily slow, jinxed British train
through snow, cremation smoke-clouds, quarantine.

If you still could get them open then I'd throw
these pages I've been scribbling, 1-2-3,
out of the window. All I've done so far
of 'Cremation Eclogue' floats towards the fire,
where choking piles of stiff-legged Friesians blaze,
their piebald blending, poem into place.

_- Tony Harrison_


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 15, 2003)

(I'm going to post this one up now because there were none for a few days and next mondays a whole week away....)

*MONDAYS*
_James Farrell_


Legless on Mondays

never stopping

waiting to catch a cancer 

or a broken back.

Who's that girl with the black hair?

Who's everybody looking?

There's always something wrong

it's never the beginning of a new week

it's the end.

Fall from my fostered state

always dropping

until Friday.

How much longer can we go on like this?

Until we die

or death lies to us.

There's ' If ' in the middle of  life

but there's ' Lie ' all over it.

To be honest I think I'll calm down

get married, have kids, buy a dog and watch it die.

Recede

through the cracks of a million closed doors

into your hands

and you'll never ever stop

chasing my ashes 

into the wind

pissed out of your mind

and you ask yourself why

you suffer on Mondays


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Sep 18, 2003)

*Spain*

Yesterday all the past.  The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses.  Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley.
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles.

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind.  But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greece,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen.  But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
  On the crag by the leaning tower:
'Oh my vision.  O send me the luck of the sailor.'

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
'But the lives of my friends.  I inquire. I inquire.'

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: 'Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river.'

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror;
'Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

'Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene.  O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.'

And the life, if it answers at all , replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city:
'O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you.  To you, I'm the

'Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily -duped;
I am whatever you do.  I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice.  I am your marriage.

'What's your proposal?  To build the just city?  I will.
I agree.  Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death?  Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision.  Yes, I am Spain.'

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman's islands
Or in the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes.  They came to present their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive.  For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad. And the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain -store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart.  Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future.  The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hours of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands.  But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings.  But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scarping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead.  The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

_- WH Auden_


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## PearlySpencer (Sep 19, 2003)

*UNFINISHED BUSINESS*


Night falls on the Burnley Mills
and a dead thick fog comes down
all the rich asleep at Bramham
all the foxes gone to ground


quietly through the Calder Valley
whispers in the wind
hear them where the Calder turns
and where the Spen begins


Luddites up from village graves
regrouping on the moors
Luddites down from York assizes
come to settle scores


And finally in the dead of night
they cross the River Aire
Luddites sworn to finishing
unfinished business there


they take their oaths and then
to Captain Ludd promise a toast
as with pikes they trash the presses
of the Yorkshire Evening Post


rushing through to City Square
to smash the statues down
torches lit to burn the Bond Street
Centre to the ground


up to Armley Prison
where they batter down the gates
saying "Justice comes to those who take it,
not to those who wait."


_BOFFO_


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## PearlySpencer (Sep 23, 2003)

*You Say Our Earth Is Out Of Bounds*


You say our earth is out of bounds
our lives and futures are out of our hands,
This earth is not yours to put boundaries around
we'll grow and get stronger and our voices resound.


_Dennis Gould_


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## Mrs Magpie (Sep 24, 2003)

*The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered
  by Clive James (1939-  )*

  The book of my enemy has been remaindered
  And I am pleased.
  In vast quantities it has been remaindered
  Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
  And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
  My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
  In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
  Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
  One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
  Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
  Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
  For behold, here is that book
  Among these ranks and banks of duds,
  These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
  Of complete stiffs.

  The book of my enemy has been remaindered
  And I rejoice.
  It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
  Beneath the yoke.
  What avail him now his awards and prizes,
  The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
  His individual new voice?
  Knocked into the middle of next week
  His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
  The sinkers, clinkers, dogs, and dregs,
  The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
  The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
  The unbudgeable turkeys.

  Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
  Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed _Hitler's War Machine_,
  His unmistakably individual new voice
  Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
  Of The _Kung-Fu Cookbook_,
  His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
  His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
  Is there with _Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots --
  One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment_,
  And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
  His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
  His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
  With _Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs_,
  A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
  "My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

  Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
  Though not to the monumental extent
  In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
  To the book of my enemy,
  Since in the case of my own book it will be due
  To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error --
  Nothing to do with merit.
  But just supposing that such an event should hold
  Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
  By the memory of this sweet moment.
  Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
  The book of my enemy has been remaindered
  And I am glad.


----------



## RubyToogood (Sep 24, 2003)

Lol, I do like that!


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## Mrs Magpie (Sep 25, 2003)

Rainforest

The forest drips and glows with green.
The tree-frog croaks his far-off song.
His voice is stillness, moss and rain
drunk from the forest ages long.

We cannot understand that call
unless we move into his dream,
where all is one and one is all
and frog and python are the same.

We with our quick dividing eyes
measure, distinguish and are gone.
The forest burns, the tree-frog dies,
Yet one is all and all are one.

Judith Wright (b. 1915)*


*I think Judith Wright died recently.......last year perhaps.......a favourite poet, along with Elizabeth Bishop.


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## little edge (Sep 25, 2003)

A wine-spotted waist
for the tavern-god
treading the wreckage of glasses, disheveling
dawn's glowing divisions
a moistening rose in the prostitute's wimper, 
where the wind spends the fevers of morning
in a windowpane's void,
and the gunman, still booted for vengeance, 
in a sour exhalation of pistols,
and a blue-eyed disaster, sleeps sound.

Sleeping Assassin
Pablo Neruda


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## Wyn (Sep 27, 2003)

This is for all those on the Contaception thread  

IF THE CAP FITS 

To the tune of Jingle Bells....

CHORUS
    Jingle pills
                 dangle coils,
                 condoms three a day,
                 oh what fun 
                 it is to risk 
                 your life for 
                 him this way.

Dashing from the clinic
with a bagful of supplies,
orthogel, nonoxyl nine
and a new cap tried for size.
Basking in the glow
of responsibility,
oh what fun it is to know 
you control your destiny.

CHORUS Oh Jingle pills ...etc.

The "Dalkon Shield" is out,
there's a compensation boom,
it caused infection and its
barbs got embedded in your womb.
Sponges made such a mess,
they never did catch on 
but there's a condom now for girls 
so all his worry's gone.

CHORUS Oh Jingle pills ...etc.

"Just a question, dear!"
the nurse shouts from the loo,
"Have you had your smear?"
The whole queue stares at you.
"A yes I have it here,
your notes say you're okay,
just inflammation, don't fret dear.
Will the next one come this way."

CHORUS Oh Jingle pills ...etc.

Dashing to the clinic 
to be the first in STD,
don't panic if it's gone too far
hysterectomies are free.
Legs up in the air,
do the gyne dance,
these are the steps of hetrosex,
skipped over in romance.

CHORUS Oh Jingle pills ...etc.

No one mentioned AIDS,
VD or NSU,
trichonomas was, you thought,
something magicians do.
Cancer can be screened 
and really you're not ill
with "side effects" like heart disease
from ten years on the pill.

CHORUS Oh Jingle pills ...etc.

Annie Blue


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## bcrocks (Sep 28, 2003)

*The Witnesses*

Is Ocean's wide domains,
   Half buried in the sands,
Like skeletons in chains,
   With shackled feet and hands,

Beyond the fall of dews, 
   Deeper than plummet lies,
Float ships with all their crews,
   No more to sing nor rise.

There the back Slave-ship swims,
   Freighted with human forms,
Whose fetter, fleshless limbs
   Are not the sport of storms.

These are the bones of Slaves;
   They gleam from the abyss;
They cry, from yawning waves,
   "We are the Witnesses!"

Within Earth's wide domains
   Are markets for men's lives;
Their necks are galled with chains,
   Their wrists are cramped with gyves.

Dead bodies, that the kite
   In deserts makes its prey;
Murders, that with affright
   Scare schoolboys from their play:

All evil thoughts and deeds;
   Anger, and lust, and pride;
The foulest, rankest weeds,
   That choke Life's groaning tide:

These are the woes of Slaves;
   They glare from the abyss;
They cry, from unkown graves,
  "We are the Witnesses!"

_ - Henry W Longfellow_


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## butchersapron (Sep 29, 2003)

In honour of the 101st anniversary of the death of famous Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall:

*The Famous Tay Whale*

'Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.

So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day,
And they resolved to catch him without delay.

When it came to be known a whale was seen in the Tay,
Some men began to talk and to say,
We must try and catch this monster of a whale,
So come on, brave boys, and never say fail.

Then the people together in crowds did run,
Resolved to capture the whale and to have some fun!
So small boats were launched on the silvery Tay,
While the monster of the deep did sport and play.

Oh! it was a most fearful and beautiful sight,
To see it lashing the water with its tail all its might,
And making the water ascend like a shower of hail,
With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail.

Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats;
But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale,
But the whale shook at them his tail.

Then the whale began to puff and to blow,
While the men and the boats after him did go,
Armed well with harpoons for the fray,
Which they fired at him without dismay.

And they laughed and grinned just like wild baboons,
While they fired at him their sharp harpoons:
But when struck with,the harpoons he dived below,
Which filled his pursuers' hearts with woe.

Because they guessed they had lost a prize,
Which caused the tears to well up in their eyes;
And in that their anticipations were only right,
Because he sped on to Stonehaven with all his might:

And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat
Which they thought was a big coble upturned afloat;
But when they drew near they saw it was a whale,
So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail.

So they got a rope from each boat tied round his tail,
And landed their burden at Stonehaven without fail;
And when the people saw it their voices they did raise,
Declaring that the brave fishermen deserved great praise.

And my opinion is that God sent the whale in time of need,
No matter what other people may think or what is their creed;
I know fishermen in general are often very poor,
And God in His goodness sent it drive poverty from their door.

So Mr John Wood has bought it for two hundred and twenty-six pound,
And has brought it to Dundee all safe and all sound;
Which measures 40 feet in length from the snout to the tail,
So I advise the people far and near to see it without fail.

Then hurrah! for the mighty monster whale,
Which has got 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail!
Which can be seen for a sixpence or a shilling,
That is to say, if the people all are willing.


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## mango5 (Oct 2, 2003)

*The Egg-Shell*

The wind took off with the sunset—
The fog came up with the tide,
When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell
With a little Blue Devil inside.
“Sink,” she said, “or swim,” she said,
“It’s all you will get from me.
And that is the finish of him!” she said,
And the Egg-shell went to sea. 
The wind fell dead with the midnight—
The fog shut down like a sheet,
When the Witch of the North heard the Egg-shell
Feeling by hand for a fleet.
“Get!” she said, “or you’re gone,” she said,
But the little Blue Devil said “No!”
“The sights are just coming on,” he said,
And he let the Whitehead go. 

The wind got up with the morning—
The fog blew off with the rain,
When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
And the little Blue Devil again.
“Did you swim?” she said. “Did you sink?” she said,
And the little Blue Devil replied:
“For myself I swam, but I think,” he said,
“There’s somebody sinking outside.” 

- Rudyard Kipling


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## Mrs Magpie (Oct 3, 2003)

I've posted this before, but on a long deleted thread....I love Wendell Berry. He's an organic farmer, and also a great poet. He's very old now too.


*Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Wendell Berry*

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head. 
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer. 

When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you 
to die for profit they will let you know. 
So, friends, every day do something 
that won't compute. Love the Lord. 
Love the world. Work for nothing. 
Take all that you have and be poor. 
Love someone who does not deserve it. 

Denounce the government and embrace 
the flag. Hope to live in that free 
republic for which it stands. 
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed. 

Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. 
Say that your main crop is the forest 
that you did not plant, 
that you will not live to harvest. 

Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. 
Put your faith in the two inches of humus 
that will build under the trees 
every thousand years. 

Listen to carrion -- put your ear 
close, and hear the faint chattering 
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful 
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men. 

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child? 
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth? 

Go with your love to the fields. 
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts. 

As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn't go. 

Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction. 
Practice resurrection.


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## PearlySpencer (Oct 3, 2003)

Great poem Mrs M. I like that a lot


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Oct 4, 2003)

*another Wendell Berry poem then.......*

"TESTAMENT"
by Wendell Berry
And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass... 

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord! 


3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.


4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.


----------



## PearlySpencer (Oct 5, 2003)

Nah  for some reason I don't like that one as much.


*Down By the River*


"The path of progress in psychiatry is circular, 
periodically returning to it's starting point."
Thomas Szasz, MD., _The Manufacture of Madness_

Here we are, ready
to plunge into this institution
by the river where everything
is the same and yet
so different. Another
state, an unknown set of rules,
and this new thing she's done,
this direct statement:
I do not want to live.

We are afraid and we do not want
know what it is we can or
can't do, but we agree on this:
no shock treatments, never again,
and home as soon as possible,
maybe today, if we talk loud
and fast enough
and do not listen to the
roaring in our heads.

Professor Ugo Cerletti, inventor
of electric shock therapy, recalling
the first time he used the treatment
on a human being, "When I saw the patients reaction, I thought to myself,
"This ought to be abolished!"

A mockingbird sings
from a low branch; we open
our mouths and gulp a last
lungful of free air. We are
three humans, flesh
against stone.

When we push through the door
to the lobby, we are immersed
in a deep channel of water.
Lost creatures slide by us.
We are almost to the front desk
before someone calls out,
smelling fear and pity
pouring off us like sweat.
We feel something inside
ourselves turn on its back,
belly to the ceiling.

We sign our individual names
and relationships, but we know
_we are family_
and we do not agree
to this place.
We walk past offices, empty,
unlit treatment rooms, incomprehensible
machines. We wonder where
the torture takes place
and know it is deliberately
kept from us.

We surprise ourselves.
How is it each of us has decided
not to play Judas?
When we kiss her this time,
we will be shouting welcome:

_Hello_ to the lost, lonely,
these heretics and modern-day witches,
the oppressed: our mother, our wife.

1851. Illinois commitment statute
enacted. 'Married women. . . may be 
entered or detained in the hospital
at the request of the husband
of the woman. . . without evidence
of insanity required in other cases.'

We are certain
if we turn away from her,
we turn away from our _selves_.

We are on the ward;
there she is;
a skinny old woman,
locked away and muttering
to herself. When she sees us,
her eyes flame.
She comes to us drugged,
rigid, begging to go home.
We sit with her, a temporary island, 
making conversation, trying
to ignore the swell and ripple
around us.

A man visits his wife.
The woman is too loud,
she says damn
and FUCK and smokes
cigarette after cigarette.
He is gawky,
not enough chin
and too much Adam's apple.
Her jeans hang on her body.
He is dressed in chinos
and a thin, cotton shirt.
He hands her a package.
She rips the wrapping off:
a picture of Jesus in the
Garden of Olives. She waves
his offering and shouts:
JEy-ZU-uS KRi-I-sST from K-Mart,
for 67 cents. The figure in the print
is kneeling, robed in purple
and alone.

From the bricked-in-garden
just off the ward,
a black man gestures to us.
He smiles. He is wearing
pajamas, a robe and slippers,
though it is well past noon
and lunch has been served.
He walks past us,
a living piece of flotsam
cast up by the river.
He is polite and tells us
his name is Richard.
This is our first clue
we have entered another landscape
where nothing is accidental.
We introduce him to the Richard
in our family. The black Richard
grins at the white Richard,
and leans over and asks my mother,
will she free him, too?
She clenches her fists
and hisses, "Yes!"

1955. Egas Moniz is awarded
the Nobel Prize for the treatment
of schizophrenia by prefontal
lobotomy.

I am caught by the drowned snags
of the river at last.
I walk to the nurses' station,
the territory marking the border
between the visitor's lobby and the ward.
I glance up
stare across a sudden expanse
of barbed wire,
into a woman's face.
She is walnut-skinned,
her eyes come at me
like deer.
Someone tells me
this is our Christina.
I nod. I know her.
My head hums. I ask her
where she lives
but I cannot understand
her dialect, her black rural
southern speech.
I wrap my arms
around her
with my eyes.

I want to throw my arms around
them all and shout:
we are locked in here
whether we are inside
these walls or not,
_when can we be free?_
I want to sing out:
let us go down
to the river
each and every one,
where we can walk
and run and move
our limbs in the ripe sun
and wait for the thunder, down
by the river flowing
out of the high green hills
to where the mockingbird sings.

We will listen
for the thunder
and pray the walls
crumble.


_Christina Pacosz_


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## Mrs Magpie (Oct 5, 2003)

> _Originally posted by PearlySpencer _
> *Nah  for some reason I don't like that one as much.*


Ah, but I'm a grandmother of five (six in February!) so I think of stuff like funerals and headstones more than you do.........plus I'm always being approached to be an executor of wills.......it must be my sensible shoes and brisk businesslike air........


----------



## PearlySpencer (Oct 5, 2003)

I think it takes a couple of reads to appreciate it. It's another good one Mrs. M 

And throw those sensible shoes in the bin


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## butchersapron (Oct 6, 2003)

Here's one from Lorca to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the Asturias uprising (a couple of days late actually):

The Weeping

I have shut my windows.
I do not want to hear the weeping.
But from behind the grey walls.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.

There are few angels that sing.
There are few dogs that bark.
A thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand.
But the weeping is an immense angel.
The weeping is an immense dog.
The weeping is an immense violin.
Tears strangle the wind.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.


----------



## Numbers (Oct 6, 2003)

Me
We

_Muhammad Ali_


----------



## Roadkill (Oct 7, 2003)

This is rather a long one and it'll take two posts.  

It's the tale of *Peter Grimes*, which is one of the poems in _The Borough_ by George Crabbe.

Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabined with him and his boy,
And seemed that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the Sabbath day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray;
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse;
His father's love he scorned, his power defied,
But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died. 
Yes! then he wept, and to his mind there came
Much of his conduct, and he felt the shame:
How he had oft the good old man reviled,
And never paid the duty of a child;
How, when the father in his Bible read,
He in contempt and anger left the shed; 
"It is the word of life," the parent cried;
"This is the life itself," the boy replied;
And while old Peter in amazement stood,
Gave the hot spirit to his boiling blood:
How he, with oath and furious speech, began
To prove his freedom and assert the man;
And when the parent checked his impious rage,
How he had cursed the tyranny of age—
Nay, once had dealt the sacrilegious blow
On his bare head, and laid his parent low:
The father groaned—"If thou art old," said he,
"And hast a son—thou wilt remember me;
Thy mother left me in a happy time,
Thou kill'dst not her—Heaven spares the double crime." 

On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
This he revolved, and drank for his relief.


Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarred
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! that he could not to his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend. 

With greedy eye he looked on all he saw,
He knew not justice, and he laughed at law;
On all he marked he stretched his ready hand;
He fished by water, and he filched by land.
Oft in the night has Peter dropped his oar,
Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;
Oft up the hedgerow glided, on his back
Bearing the orchard's produce in a sack,
Or farmyard load, tugged fiercely from the stack;
And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,
The more he looked on all men as his foes. 

He built a mud-walled hovel, where he kept
His various wealth, and there he ofttimes slept;
But no success could please his cruel soul,
He wished for one to trouble and control;
He wanted some obedient boy to stand
And bear the blow of his outrageous hand;
And hoped to find in some propitious hour
A feeling creature subject to his power. 

Peter had heard there were in London then—
Still have they being! — workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make. 

Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,
The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.
Some few in town observed in Peter's trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shivering in the winter's cold;
None put the question, "Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? — What, man! the lad must live.
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed."
None reasoned thus — and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, "Grimes is at his exercise." 

Pined, beaten, cold, pinched, threatened, and abused—
His efforts punished and his food refused—
Awake tormented—soon aroused from sleep—
Struck if he wept, and yet compelled to weep,
The trembling boy dropped down and strove to pray,
Received a blow, and trembling turned away,
Or sobbed and hid his piteous face; while he,
The savage master, grinned in horrid glee.
He'd now the power he ever loved to show,
A feeling being subject to his blow. 

Thus lived the lad, in hunger, peril, pain,
His tears despised, his supplications vain;
Compelled by fear to lie, by need to steal,
His bed uneasy and unblessed his meal,
For three sad years the boy his tortures bore,—
And then his pains and trials were no more. 

"How died he, Peter?" when the people said,
He growled — "I found him lifeless in his bed";
Then tried for softer tone, and sighed, "Poor Sam is dead.''
Yet murmurs were there, and some questions asked—
How he was fed, how punished, and how tasked?
Much they suspected, but they little proved,
And Peter passed untroubled and unmoved. 

Another boy with equal ease was found,
The money granted, and the victim bound;
And what his fate? One night it chanced he fell
From the boat's mast and perished in her well,
Where fish were living kept, and where the boy
(So reasoned men) could not himself destroy:— 

"Yes! so it was," said Peter, "in his play
(For he was idle both by night and day),
He climbed the mainmast and then fell below";
Then showed his corpse and pointed to the blow.
'What said the jury?" They were long in doubt,
But sturdy Peter faced the matter out.
So they dismissed him, saying at the time,
"Keep fast your hatchway when you've boys who climb."
This hit the conscience, and he colored more
Than for the closest questions put before. 

Thus all his fears the verdict set aside,
And at the slave shop Peter still applied. 

Then came a boy, of manners soft and mild—
Our seamen's wives with grief beheld the child;
All thought (the poor themselves) that he was one
Of gentle blood, some noble sinner's son,
Who hail, belike, deceived some humble maid,
Whom he had first seduced and then betrayed.
However this, he seemed a gracious lad,
In grief submissive and with patience sad. 

Passive he labored, till his slender frame
Bent with his loads, and he at length was lame:
Strange that a frame so weak could bear so long
The grossest insult and the foulest wrong;
But there were causes—in the town they gave
Fire, food, and comfort, to the gentle slave;
And though stern Peter, with a cruel hand,
And knotted rope, enforced the rude command,
Yet he considered what he'd lately felt,
And his vile blows with selfish pity dealt.


One day such draughts the cruel fisher made,
He could not vend them in his borough trade,
But sailed for London mart; the boy was ill,
But ever humbled to his master's will;
And on the river, where they smoothly sailed,
He strove with terror and awhile prevailed;
But new to danger on the angry sea,
He clung affrightened to his master's knee:
The boat grew leaky and the wind was strong,
Rough was the passage and the time was long;
His liquor failed, and Peter's wrath arose—
No more is known—the rest we must suppose,
Or learn of Peter—Peter says, he 'spied
The stripling's danger and for harbor tried;
Meantime the fish, and then th' apprentice died." 

The pitying women raised a clamor round,
And weeping said "Thou hast this Prentice drowned." 

Now the stern man was summoned to the hall,
To tell his tale before the burghers all:
He gave th' account; professed the lad he loved,
And kept his brazen features all unmoved. 

The mayor himself with tone severe replied,
"Thenceforth with thee shall never boy abide;
Hire thee a freeman, whom thou durst not beat,
But who, in thy despite, will sleep and eat;
Free thou art now! — again shouldst thou appear,
Thou'lt find thy sentence, like thy soul, severe." 

Alas! for Peter not a helping hand,
So was he hated, could he now command;
Alone he rowed his boat, alone he cast
His nets beside, or made his anchor fast;
To hold a rope or hear a curse was none—
He toiled and railed, he groaned and swore alone


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## Roadkill (Oct 7, 2003)

Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marshbank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sunburnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bankside stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by th' impeded boat. 

When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mudbanks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging goldeneye;
What time the sea birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bulrush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice,
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all presented to the eye or ear
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear. 

Besides these objects, there were places three,
Which Peter seemed with certain dread to see;
When he drew near them he would turn from each,
And loudly whistle till he passed the reach. 

A change of scene to him brought no relief;
In town, 'twas plain, men took him for a thief;
The sailors' wives would stop him in the street,
And say, "Now, Peter, thou'st no boy to beat";
Infants at play, when they perceived him, ran,
Warning each other, "That's the wicked man."
He growled an oath, and in an angry tone
Cursed the whole place and wished to be alone. 

Alone he was, the same dull scenes in view,
And still more gloomy in his sight they grew.
Though man he hated, yet employed alone
At bootless labor, he would swear and groan,
Cursing the shoals that glided by the spot,
And gulls that caught them when his arts could not. 

Cold nervous tremblings shook his sturdy frame,
And strange disease — he couldn't say the name;
Wild were his dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of horrors in the night—
Horrors that would the sternest minds amaze,
Horrors that demons might be proud to raise;
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all mankind apart;
Yet, if a man approached, in terrors he would start. 

A winter passed since Peter saw the town,
And summer lodgers were again come down;
These, idly curious, with their glasses spied
The ships in bay as anchored for the tide,
The river's craft, the bustle of the quay,
And seaport views, which landmen love to see. 

One, up the river, had a man and boat
Seen day by day, now anchored, now afloat;
Fisher he seemed, yet used no net nor hook;
Of seafowl swimming by, no heed he took,
But on the gliding waves still fixed his lazy look:
At certain stations he would view the stream,
As if he stood bewildered in a dream,
Or that some power had chained him for a time,
To feel a curse or meditate on crime. 

This known, some curious, some in pity went,
And others questioned, "Wretch, dost thou repent?"
He heard, he trembled, and in fear resigned
His boat; new terror filled his restless mind,
Furious he grew, and up the country ran,
And there they seized him — a distempered man.
Him we received, and to a parish-bed,
Followed and cursed, the groaning man was led. 

Here when they saw him, whom they used to shun,
A lost, lone man, so harassed and undone,
Our gentle females, ever prompt to feel,
Perceived compassion on their anger steal;
His crimes they could not from their memories blot,
But they were grieved, and trembled at his lot. 

A priest too came, to whom his words are told,
And all the signs they shuddered to behold. 

"Look! look!" they cried, "his limbs with horror shake,
And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make!
How glare his angry eyes, and yet he's not awake.
See! what cold drops upon his forehead stand,
And how he clenches that broad bony hand." 

The priest attending, found he spoke at times
As one alluding to his fears and crimes: "
It was the fall," he muttered, "I can show
The manner how — I never struck a blow."
And then aloud — "Unhand me, free my chain;
On oath, he fell — it struck him to the brain—
Why ask my father?—that old man will swear
Against my life; besides, he wasn't there—
What, all agreed? — Am I to die today? —
My Lord, in mercy, give me time to pray." 

Then as they watched him, calmer he became,
And grew so weak he couldn't move his frame,
But murmuring spake, while they could see and hear
The start of terror and the groan of fear;
See the large dew-beads on his forehead rise,
And the cold death-drop glaze his sunken eyes;
Nor yet he died, but with unwonted force
Seemed with some fancied being to discourse;
He knew not us, or with accustomed art
He hid the knowledge, yet exposed his heart;
"Twas part confession and the rest defense,
A madman's tale, with gleams of waking sense. 

'I'll tell you all," he said, "the very day
When the old man first placed them in my way:
My father's spirit — he who always tried
To give me trouble, when he lived and died —
When he was gone, he could not be content
To see my days in painful labor spent,
But would appoint his meetings, and he made
Me watch at these, and so neglect my trade. 

"Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene,
No living being had I lately seen;
I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get—
A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
To plague and torture thus an only son!
And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
But dream it was not; no! I fixed my eyes
On the mid-stream and saw the spirits rise;
I saw my father on the water stand,
And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
And there they glided ghastly on the top
Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;
I would have struck them, but they knew th' intent,
And smiled upon the oar, and down they went. 

"Now, from that day, whenever I began
To dip my net, there stood the hard old man—
He and those boys: I humbled me and prayed
They would be gone — they heeded not, but stayed.
Nor could I turn, nor would the boat go by,
But gazing on the spirits, there was I.
They bade me leap to death, but I was loath to die;
And every day, as sure as day arose,
Would these three spirits meet me ere the close;
To hear and mark them daily was my doom;
And 'Come,' they said, with weak, sad voices, 'come.'
To row away with all my strength I tried,
But there were they, hard by me in the tide,
The three unbodied forms — and 'Come,' still 'come,' they cried. 

"Fathers should pity — but this old man shook
His hoary locks, and froze me by a look.
Thrice, when I struck them, through the water came
A hollow groan, that weakened all my frame.
'Father!' said I, 'have mercy.'
He replied, I know not what — the angry spirit lied —
'Didst thou not draw thy knife?' said he. 'Twas true,
But I had pity and my arm withdrew;
He cried for mercy which I kindly gave,
But he has no compassion in his grave. 

"There were three places, where they ever rose—
The whole long river has not such as those—
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
He'll see the things which strike him to the brain;
And there they made me on my paddle lean,
And look at them for hours — accursed scene!
When they would glide to that smooth eddy-space,
Then bid me leap and join them in the place;
And at my groans each little villain sprite
Enjoyed my pains and vanished in delight. 

"In one fierce summer day, when my poor brain
Was burning hot and cruel was my pain,
Then came this father-foe, and there he stood
With his two boys again upon the flood;
There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee
In their pale faces when they glared at me;
Still did they force me on the oar to rest,
And when they saw me fainting and oppressed,
He, with his hand, the old man, scooped the flood,
And there came flame about him mixed with blood;
He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face;
Burning it blazed, and then I roared for pain,
I thought the demons would have turned my brain. 

"Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors — they cannot be told —
Where the flood opened, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt — no earthly tongue can speak:
'All days alike! for ever!' did they say, '
And unremitted torments every day' —
Yes, so they said." — But here he ceased and gazed
On all around, frightened and amazed;
And still he tried to speak, and looked in dread
Of frightened females gathering round his bed;
Then dropped exhausted and appeared at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possessed;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried, "
Again they come," and muttered as he died.


----------



## mango5 (Oct 9, 2003)

*Love and Sleep*

Lying asleep between the strokes of night 
I saw my love lean over my sad bed, 
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head, 
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite, 
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white, 
But perfect-coloured without white or red. 
And her lips opened amorously, and said - 
I wist not what, saving one word - Delight. 

And all her face was honey to my mouth, 
And all her body pasture to mine eyes; 
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire 
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south, 
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs 
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.

Algernon Charles Swinburne


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## Mrs Magpie (Oct 10, 2003)

*Age by Mary Wraith*

'You are old, my poor mother', the young man said,
'And your hair is exceedingly white,
Can you tell me - I really must ask you again,
How is it you sometimes judge right?' 

'In my youth,' the old woman replied with a smile,
'When I looked a much prettier sight,
I sometimes declared again and again
Black is black and white often is white. 

To keep my brain active I stood on my head
And asserted all manner of truth,
I balanced the facts on the end of my nose -
Oh, alas, for the days of my youth. 

But now that my body is not quite so lithe,
And my hair is exceedingly gray,
I have to accept the very strange fact
That I can't change the world in a day'. 

'I find to my sorrow', she said to her son,
'That I see neither black nor yet white,
But a rainbow of hues and all shades of gray,
Do you think I am losing my sight?'


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## Yossarian (Oct 11, 2003)

*October Sky*
_Taduesz Borowski_

October was beautiful. As if it were yesterday I remember 
the strangely clear, strangely deep sky 
shimmering in the noon heat as a leaf shimmers in the wind, 
empty and unreachable. I am oddly melancholy 
telling you about this, for what do words mean? 
I saw the lines of smoke the wind traced on the elusive sky 
and I waited for the moment 
when this unreachable sky would lean toward them 
to absorb them. After that there is nothing but 
the poet's sadness and a subject for a poem.

And once I saw the sky through window panes. 
We had just been ordered to open the windows in the blockhouse 
and walking by I saw the sky in the glass, 
unexpected and wonderful, as if it were 
a great camp. Posts stapled with wire, 
roads I know so well, were suspended in air 
and the grass sparkled in the glass of the window pane 
dark green, as from the bottom of a lake. A red flame moved 
across the sky and glistened on the grass in a russet stream. 
Above this sky, a sky covered with smoke, 
another sky hung clear and empty 
and the smoke of the first sky drowned in the second.

And I realized that I didn't know anything for certain, 
that the earth and all that happens around me 
are only a glass pane for someone else's eyes. 
Then someone blurred the picture and closed the window. 
A moment long gone. The earth is real, and now I know 
how real human suffering is. 
But as a wave to shore, a moment of doubt returns 
still, today, it still pierces me, 
and always when I look at the December clouds 
I see above them the October sky.


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## bertifrew (Oct 13, 2003)

Julie and Jim- t. in the park 2003

love story

T in the Park
What a spark
I met gem of a guy
Who immediatly caught my eye

I can hardly believe my luck
Although i know its so true
But....wholley fuck
My life is brand new

Life does have meaning, and purpose afterall
Love,care affection ect
Now i can stand so tall 
With you by my side, my darling soulmate
since T in the park
We follow fate!

Julie Mclinden, 2003


 

ahhhh, lovely


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## RubyToogood (Oct 14, 2003)

I didn't know anything about Borowski till I read that beautiful poem - I was just sharing it with a friend and we ended up looking up his (fascinating and politically eventful) biography on google. My reading of the poem was completely changed by finding out it was written about Auschwitz, where he was sent for being part of the underground Warsaw University (higher education was forbidden for Poles), along with his fiancee Maria. The gas chambers had a few weeks earlier been declared as only being for Jews, so he survived the last two years of the war there, and even managed to spend time with Maria for some of it, working as a roofer in the women's quarters (they married after the war).

Here's another poem of his from the Auschwitz period:


*The Sun of Auschwitz*

You remember the sun of Auschwitz 
and the green of the distant meadows, lightly 
lifted to the clouds by birds, 
no longer green in the clouds, 
but seagreen white. Together 
we stood looking into the distance and felt 
the far away green of the meadows and the clouds' 
seagreen white within us, 
as if the color of the distant meadows 
were our blood or the pulse 
beating within us, as if the world 
existed only through us and nothing changed 
as long as we were there. I remember 
your smile as elusive 
as a shade of the color of the wind, 
a leaf trembling on the edge 
of sun and shadow, fleeting 
yet always there. So you are 
for me today, in the seagreen 
sky, the greenery and 
the leaf-rustling wind. I feel you 
in every shadow, every movement, 
and you put the world around me 
like your arms. I feel the world 
as your body, you look into my eyes 
and call me with the whole world.


http://hunza1.tripod.com/borowski/index.html - well worth a look for some of the biographical stuff related to the poetry. He committed suicide by gassing himself in 1951. Possible factors cited by biographers include survivor's guilt, post traumatic stress disorder, the fact that he'd had an extra marital affair resulting in a child at the same time that Maria had a child, and severe doubts about his involvement with the Polish Communist Party and secret police when Stalin's atrocities were revealed.


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## ernestolynch (Oct 16, 2003)

Whoever wrote that last bit, Ruby, has an axe to grind, as the man died in 1951 - two years before Comrade JV Stalin, and FIVE years before the snake Khrushchev issued his denouncements in 1956. Either that or the biographer is talking out of his/her arse.


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## RubyToogood (Oct 17, 2003)

It's probably me who's talking out of my arse having read several biographies of him and probably muddled them up. I think this was the bit that I was thinking of:



> The beginning of the Cold War, the Polish government convinced Borowski that a revolution would prevent "... any more horrors like Auschwitz." He had joined the Polish secret police. When the Soviet prison camps and political purges in Poland were revealed, however, he began to feel that, "... he was part of a concentration camp system and complicit with the oppressors." He took his own life on July 1, 1951, when he was twenty-nine years old. Ironically, after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz, he took his life by breathing the gas from a gas stove.



http://cfcc.net/ghurley/262/borowski.html

I was also thinking of this



> A couple of weeks before the suicide an old friend was arrested, the same friend in whose apartment eight years earlier, in occupied Warsaw, Borowski had fallen into the trap set by the Germans while looking for his fiancŽe. At that time the friend was tortured by the Gestapo; now he was tortured in turn by Polish Security. Borowski interceded with the highest party officials and was told that the people's justice was never mistaken. This was after the denunciation of Tito by Stalin, and the Communists were then hunting down "traitors" with "rightist-nationalistic deviations". Borowski never lived to see his friend's trial.



http://www.radix.net/~dalila/lit/borowski.html

I have no idea what the significance of the Tito thing is, I'm not a historian.


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## mango5 (Oct 20, 2003)

*STRONGER LESSONS*

HAVE you learned lessons only of those who admired 
       you, and were tender with you, and stood aside 
       for you? 
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who 
       rejected you, and braced themselves against 
       you? or who treated you with contempt, or 
       disputed the passage with you?

*Walt Whitman*


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## RubyToogood (Oct 23, 2003)

Another October war poem (different war this time).


*Autumn*

OCTOBER’S bellowing anger breaks and cleaves   
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood   
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves   
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud   
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves 
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown   
Along the westering furnace flaring red.   
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,   
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.   

Siegfried Sassoon


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## RubyToogood (Oct 28, 2003)

And another Siegfried Sassoon:



Falling Asleep

VOICES moving about in the quiet house:   
Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors:   
Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert.   

Out in the night there’s autumn-smelling gloom   
Crowded with whispering trees; across the park
A hollow cry of hounds like lonely bells:   
And I know that the clouds are moving across the moon;   
The low, red, rising moon. Now herons call   
And wrangle by their pool; and hooting owls   
Sail from the wood above pale stooks of oats.

Waiting for sleep, I drift from thoughts like these;   
And where to-day was dream-like, build my dreams.   
Music ... there was a bright white room below,   
And someone singing a song about a soldier,   
One hour, two hours ago: and soon the song
Will be ‘last night’: but now the beauty swings   
Across my brain, ghost of remembered chords   
Which still can make such radiance in my dream   
That I can watch the marching of my soldiers,   
And count their faces; faces; sunlit faces.

Falling asleep ... the herons, and the hounds....   
September in the darkness; and the world   
I’ve known; all fading past me into peace


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## Yossarian (Nov 2, 2003)

*The Most*
_Charles Bukowski_ 


here comes the fishhead singing

here comes the baked potato in drag

here comes nothing to do all day long

here comes another night of no sleep

here comes the phone wringing the wrong tone

here comes a termite with a banjo

here comes a flagpole with blank eyes

here comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons

here comes a machine gun saying

here comes bacon burning in the pan

here comes a voice saying something dull

here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds

with flat brown beaks

here comes a cunt carrying a torch

a grenade

a deathly love

here comes a victory carrying

one bucket of blood

and stumbling over the berry bush

and the sheets hang out the windows

and the bombers head east west north south

get lost

get tossed like salad

as all the fish in the sea line up and form

one line

one long line

one very long thin line

the longest line you could ever imagine

and we get lost

walking past purple mountains

we walk lost

bare at last like the knife

having given

having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed

as the girl at the call service

screams over the phone:

"don't call back! you sound like a jerk!"


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## Ace (Nov 2, 2003)

*Appolinaire*

Automne malade
Automne malade et adoré
Tu mourras quand l'ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies
Quand il aura neigé
Dans les vergers

Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs
Au fond du ciel
Des éperviers planent
Sur les nixes nicettes aux cheveux verts et naines
Qui n'ont jamais aimé

Aux lisières lointaines
Les cerfs ont bramé

Et que j'aime ô saison que j'aime tes rumeurs
Les fruits tombant sans qu'on les cueille
Le vent et la forêt qui pleurent
Toutes leurs larmes en automne feuille à feuille
Les feuilles
Qu'on foule
Un train
Qui roule
La vie
S'écoule


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## invisibleplanet (Nov 2, 2003)

two poems from two of my favourite poets:

from the american poet, E.E.Cummings.

i like my body when it is with your 
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

from the french poet, Charles Baudelaire:

I prize the memory of the naked ages 
when Apollo relished gilding marble limbs 
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved 
with neither ecstasy, fraud nor fear 
and was nursed by companionable sky, 
enjoying the health of a sublime machine. 
Cybele than, abundant in her yield, 
did not regard her sons as burdensome, 
but, tender-hearted she-wolf, graciously 
suckled the universe as her brown dugs. 
Lithe and powerful, a man deserved 
his pride in beauties who called him their king- 
flawless fruit engendered without shame, 
whose ripened flash asked only to be tried! 
Today the poet eager to recall 
such human splendor, when visiting the sites 
where men and women show their nakedness 
must feel a cold revulsion in his soul 
at the display of flesh he contemplates. 
How these deformities cry out for clothes! 
-wretched bodies, regular grotesques, 
runty, paunchy, flabby, scrawny, lame, 
brats whom Utility, a pitiless god, 
has swaddled in his brazen diapers! 
Look at the women - pale as tallow, gnawed 
and nourished by debauch - the girls who bear 
the burden of their mothers' vice or wear 
the hideous stigmas of fecundity! 
True, in our corruption we possess 
beauties unrevealed to ancient times: 
countenances cankered by the heart 
and, so to speak, the charm of listlessness; 
but subtle thought they are, such artifacts 
of a belated muse will never keep 
our sickly race from offering to youth 
its truest homage; youth we worship still, 
its frank expression, its untroubled brow, 
its eyes as bright as water; sacred youth 
that shares - unconscious as a singing bird, 
a flower, or the blue sky's radiance - 
its song, its scent, its irresistible warmth!


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 3, 2003)

Allen Ginsberg  (1926-1997)

*Howl*  - For Carl Solomon 

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, 

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 3, 2003)

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,


who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination -

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time -

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 3, 2003)

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable 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 judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke 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! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! 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! Despairs! 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!


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 3, 2003)

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

         where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland 

         where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland 

         in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

_Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Nov 4, 2003)

> _Originally posted by invisibleplanet _
> *two poems from two of my favourite poets:
> 
> from the american poet, E.E.Cummings.
> ...


Very nice, but there it is already in the index - which directs us to page 9, wherein the poem can still be found.


----------



## mango5 (Nov 5, 2003)

*Wife to Husband*

Pardon the faults in me, 
For the love of years ago;
Good-bye.
I must drift across the sea, 
I must sink into the snow, 
I must die.

You can bask in this sun, 
You can drink wine and eat;
Good-bye.
I must gird myself and run,
Though with unready feet:
I must die.

Blank sea to sail upon, 
Cold bed to sleep in:
Good-bye.
While you clasp, I must be gone
For all your weeping:
I must die.

A kiss for one friend, 
And a word for two, -
Good-bye:-
A lock that you msut send, 
A kindness you must do:
I must die.

Not a word for you, 
Not a lock or kiss,
Good-bye.
We, one, must part in two;
Verily death is this:
I must die.

*Christina Rossetti*


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Nov 5, 2003)

*Let's all have a swoon*

_Christ_, how I hate Rossetti and her crowd. It reminds me of this:


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 5, 2003)

*Let's all have a swoon*



> _Originally posted by Justin _
> *Christ, how I hate Rossetti and her crowd. It reminds me of this:
> 
> 
> ...


 i hope yr not going to drown yrself, justin! not just cos of one poem...


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 6, 2003)

Another from Bukowski, I've been reading a lot of his work lately.



*The Aliens*
_Charles Bukowski_


you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed 
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep. 

you may not believe 
it 
but such people do
exist. 

but I am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one
of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of 
them 

but they are
there 

and I am 
here.


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 7, 2003)

there is something strangely echoic and enviable about his ignoble low life.


YOUNG IN NEW ORLEANS - Charles Bukowski

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the 
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke 
an unblinking
death.

women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.


that was plenty for 
me, that was
enough.


there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.


sitting up in my bed
the llights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats 
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.


being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way
undisturbed.


New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.


no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.


me and the 
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a 
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.


----------



## chrissie (Nov 8, 2003)

Some great games going on.  (The same cannot be said for poems about it, alas.)

*A rugby poem*

But it isn’t just the winning
Nor the scoring, nor the cheers,
It’s the friendship and the memories
That last you through the years.

It’s the camaraderie
That’s born of valour not of fame
It’s the sheer exhilaration
When you play the running game.

_Peter Fenton_


----------



## mango5 (Nov 10, 2003)

*The Objects in Japanese Novels*

Empty cages outline
the periphery of an unnamed thing.
Their emptiness shines
like lanterns on virgin snow.
A few flakes swirl up,
caught — as scenic views
are caught in parts of speech,
where wishes and schemes
grow gloomy as a shrine,
and hair is a kind of incense.
Here, even abundance is delicate
with a slender waist.
And sorrow, embarrassment, disgust
can be aestheticized too
if surrounded by the right things —
a refreshing breeze, a small drum.


*Elaine Equi*


----------



## Concrete Meadow (Nov 11, 2003)

*on veterans day u.s.a. 11 november 2003*

*Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream*

words and music by Ed McCurdy (1952)


Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed

And the people in the streets below
Were dancing 'round and 'round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Nov 12, 2003)

*Poem of the day thread*



> _Originally posted by RubyToogood _
> *No song lyrics *


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 24, 2003)

*The Plough Of Time*
_Lawrence Ferlinghetti_


Night closed my windows and
The sky became a crystal house
The crystal windows glowed
The moon
shown through them
through the whole house of crystal
A single star beamed down
its crystal cable
and drew a plough through the earth
unearthing bodies clasped together
couples embracing
around the earth
They clung together everywhere
emitting small cries
that did not reach the stars
The crystal earth turned
and the bodies with it
And the sky did not turn
nor the stars with it
The stars remained fixed
each with its crystal cable
beamed to earth
each attached to the immense plough
furrowing our lives


----------



## small town girl (Nov 25, 2003)

"Cynara", by Ernest Dowson

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt
her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow,Cynara! Thy
breath was shed
 Upon my soul between the kisses and 
the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old
passion,
Yeah, I was desolate and bowed my 
head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her
warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love
and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red
mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old
passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn
was grey:
Ihave been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone,
gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the 
throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out
of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old
passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance
was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for
stronger wine, 
But when the feast is finished and the
lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the
night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old
passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!
in my fashion.


----------



## onemonkey (Nov 27, 2003)

Today's choice has to be..

*Bought and Sold - Benjamin Zephaniah*

Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry
It's not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart. 

The ancestors would turn in graves
Those poor black folk that once were slaves would wonder
How our souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they've been told
They get their OBEs. 

Don't take my word, go check the verse
Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten your purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes. 

Take your prize, now write more,
Faster,
Fuck the truth
Now you're an actor do not fault your benefactor
Write, publish and review,
You look like a dreadlocks Rasta,
You look like a ghetto blaster,
But you can't diss your paymaster
And bite the hand that feeds you. 

What happened to the verse of fire
Cursing cool the empire
What happened to the soul rebel that Marley had in mind,
This bloodstained, stolen empire rewards you and you conspire,
(Yes Marley said that time will tell)
Now look they've gone and joined. 

We keep getting this beating
It's bad history repeating
It reminds me of those capitalists that say
'Look you have a choice,'
It's sick and self-defeating if our dispossessed keep weeping
And we give these awards meaning
But we end up with no voice. 

--

(and here's why )


----------



## small town girl (Dec 1, 2003)

Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?


----------



## Yossarian (Dec 4, 2003)

*One Train May Hide Another*
_Kenneth Koch_

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
     may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
     the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
     or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading 
    A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.


----------



## chrissie (Dec 7, 2003)

*The Incurable*

I have taken maidens
like pots of Vic
and rubbed them into myself
but was never cured
and so, the ailment stays;
I see it carried in each sauntering wench
and forever I seek the cure.
No alchemist has its measure,
no chemist its mix.
Till there comes the medicine
I'll make my own fix.
It may not cure
but it will not harm.
It will make magic
but not the balm
and when, in some minded loft we lay
I'll not only make a woman -
I will also, make hay.

_Spike Milligan_


----------



## PearlySpencer (Dec 9, 2003)

For Ruby whoever she might be 

*Some Winded, Wild Beast*


_"You worked hard, madame," said a man near her. "Yes," answered Madame DeFarge, I have a great deal to do."

"What do you make, Madame?"  "Many things."

"For instance --- "  " For instance,"
returned Madame DeFarge, composedly, "shrouds"_

A Tale of Two Cities, _Charles Dickens_


1.

Sorrow and Grief are the names
of two animals prowling inside of me,
breathing my breath, devouring
my food. They are grateful
when I lap cold water or plunge
this body we share into the icy salt
of the bay. Then they preen in the sun,
sleek bodies pressed with mine
against the hot sand.


They scale the cliff
when the eagle comes hunting,
when the osprey hovers above the surf,
when the sand chooses the serpent's shape.
Grief and Sorrow leap
from my mouth when the loon calls
and seal beckons. They snuffle
delight at heron's outraged
flight and their cramped legs twitch
with longing when the deer leaps.
When the raven calls, they howl and remember
wolf who stalked this forest.
When grey whale rubs its barnacled back 
on the sandbar, then Grief and Sorrow
shudder.


What we know of Sorrow fills
the whole world. What we know
of Grief runs a deep river
underground. At any step
we could drown.


2.

Teach me to knit, Madame. Make room
on the bench in the sun, or by the fire
when it rains. _Make me useful_.
Then when Sorrow and Grief
batter my throat, my hands will know
what to do, and the _click-click_ of needles
will lull the beast to sleep,
to dream.


3.

When Sorrow dreams, she builds a new world,
and every shroud writhes.

When Grief dreams, the skies fill
with a million mourning cloaks,
bright wings breathing.


_Christina V. Pacosz_


----------



## RubyToogood (Dec 11, 2003)

Erm, thanks... I think...


----------



## RubyToogood (Dec 11, 2003)

Here's an extract from TS Eliot's The Wasteland. The fogginess yesterday made me think of it.


Unreal City   
Under the brown fog of a winter noon   
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant   
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,   
Asked me in demotic French   
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel   
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.   

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back 
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits   
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,   
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,   
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see   
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,   
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights   
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.   
Out of the window perilously spread   
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, 
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)   
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.   
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs   
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—   
I too awaited the expected guest. 
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,   
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,   
One of the low on whom assurance sits   
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.   
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,   
Endeavours to engage her in caresses   
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.   
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;   
Exploring hands encounter no defence; 
His vanity requires no response,   
And makes a welcome of indifference.   
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all   
Enacted on this same divan or bed;   
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)   
Bestows one final patronising kiss,   
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...   

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,   
Hardly aware of her departed lover; 
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:   
'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'   
When lovely woman stoops to folly and   
Paces about her room again, alone,   
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, 
And puts a record on the gramophone.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 12, 2003)

i've just come to this thread for the first time and i've fallen in love!  some great poems that make me feel uneducated and shallow through my ignorance.

so heres my contribution today, another weathery one:


Wind - Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up --
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.


----------



## feyr (Dec 14, 2003)

Clown in the Moon 
_Dylan Thomas_ 

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream Clown in the Moon


----------



## mango5 (Dec 15, 2003)

*Tell Me Again*

Tell me again
bout de big island
an de small island,
bout de rich island
an de poor island,
how all we is one,
an how Cari-com
an Cari-gone,
tell me again.

Tell me again
how I love you
an you love me,
an how blood ticker dan water,
an how we is brudder
an we is sister
an yu won't cut me t'roat
cause we come on de same boat,
tell me again.

Tell me again
how oil don't spoil,
how we have plenty dollars
but no sense,
an how money is no problem
but de problem is no money,
tell me again.

Tell me again
bout psychology an biology,
bout modern technology,
how he goin by plane
an she goin by boat
an we goin by guess,
tell me again.

Tell me again
how weed don't kill
an yu cold smoke it still,
an how it good for yu eye-sight,
an is ah religious ting,
an yu is ah real rahtid rasta,
tell me again.

Tell me again
how she tell you
dat he tell she
dat dey tell dem
dat you tell me,
tell me again.

Tell me again
bout de sweet Caribbean,
bout palm tree an easy life,
bout Greenidge meantime
an Trinidad time,
an how is ah waste ah time,
tell me again.

Tell me again
bout your poetry
an my poetry,
and how I stupid
an you smart,
an how we is Douen,
an we 'fraid de light,
an how dialect cool
but not for school,
tell me again.


Tell me again
how we have plenty pitch,
an we fix Walter Raleigh boat,
but we can't fix de road,
how we invent steelband
an we love carnival,
an how ah should do like Starsky
an hush,
tell me again.

Tell me again
yu don't understan
when ah say,
'God gave me toots
an He tooks dem backs
dat's why
when I speaks
my spats flews,'
tell me again.

Tell me again
how de Redhouse red
an de 'Doc' well read
an we goin red
an better red dan dead,
tell me again.

Tell me again
how everybody
mus come home;
tell me again
loud an clear;
tell me again
let me cuff yu in yu damn mout'!

*Paul Keens-Douglas*


----------



## Yossarian (Dec 19, 2003)

*The History Of One Tough Motherfucker*
_Charles Bukowski_

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed 
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off..." 

I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom 
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to 
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough 

one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me. 

"you can make it," I said to him. 

he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up. 

you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left... 

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!" 

but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?" 

"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!" 

I shake the cat, hold him up in 
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows... 

it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together. 

he too knows it's bullshit but that somehow it all helps.


----------



## PearlySpencer (Dec 20, 2003)

*Jarrow*

Nothing is left to dig, little to make.
Night has engulfed both firelit hall and sparrow.
Wind and car-noise pours across the Slake.
Nothing is left to dig, little to make
A stream of rust where a great ship might grow.
And where a union-man was hung for show
Nothing is left to dig, little to make.
Night has engulfed both firelit hall and sparrow.

_Carol Rumens_


----------



## PearlySpencer (Dec 22, 2003)

A seasonal classic, because it's that time of year, the end of it.

*The Road Not Taken*


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could go
To where  it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverge in a wood, and I - 
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.


_Robert Frost_


----------



## PearlySpencer (Dec 26, 2003)

For Jane, for getting the fuck out of it.

*The Cry*

Don't think it was all hate
That grew there; love grew there, too,
Climbing by small tendrils where
The warmth fell from eyes' blue

Flame. Don't think even the dirt
And the brute ugliness reigned
Unchallenged. Among the fields
Sometimes the spirit, enchained

So long by the gross flesh, raised
Suddenly there its wild note of praise.

_R. S. Thomas_


----------



## PearlySpencer (Jan 5, 2004)

For Janine

*How the Sound of Freedom Dies*

''I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight do not hate,
Those that I guard do not love.......''
''An Irish Airman Foresees His Death''
William Butler Yeats

Oh, Billy - boy, it's a long way
from Pine Mountain, Kentucky
to Mount Ranier and the tall fir
of Puget Sound. An arduous journey
from those eroded ancient teeth
to these young crags, flashing
a sharp white bite at the sky.

_Christina Pacosz_



It's only the first bit, the whole piece is about a US pilot killed during the US invasion of Vietnam.


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 6, 2004)

*The Way Through The Woods - by Rudyard Kipling*

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.   .   .   .
But there is no road through the woods.


-----

an unsettling yet beautiful poem for a crap winter day.


----------



## stripysarah (Jan 9, 2004)

Did This Happen to Your Mother? 
Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?

_Alice Walker_ 

I love a man who is not worth
my love.
Did this happen to your mother?
Did your grandmother wake up
for no good reason
in the middle of the night?

I thought love could be controlled.
It cannot.
Only behavior can be controlled.
By biting your tongue purple
rather than speak.
Mauling your lips.
Obliterating his number
too thoroughly
to be able to phone.

Love has made me sick.

Did your sister throw up a lot?
Did your cousin complain
of a painful knot
in her back?
Did your aunt always
seem to have something else
troubling her mind?

I thought love would adapt itself
to my needs
But needs grow too fast;
they come up like weeds.
Through cracks in the conversation.
Through silences in the dark.
Through everything you thought was concrete.

Such needful love has to be chopped out
or forced to wilt back,
poisoned by disapproval
from it's own soil.

This is bad news, for the conservationist.

My hand shakes before this killing.
My stomach sits jumpy in my chest.
My chest is the Grand Canyon
sprawled empty
over the world.

Whoever he is, he is not worth all this.

And I will never
unclench my teeth long enough
to tell him so.


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 10, 2004)

*You Begin*
_ Margaret Atwood_ 

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like.  This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 16, 2004)

*Ann Arbor Variations*
_Frank O'Hara_

Wet heat drifts through the afternoon
like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost
waiting to stay home from football games.
The arches are empty clear to the sky.

Except for the leaves: those lashes of our
thinking and dreaming and drinking sight.
The spherical radiance, the Old English
look, the sum of our being, "hath perced

to the roote" all our springs and falls
and now rolls over our limpness, a daily
dragon. We lose our health in a love
of color, drown in a fountain of myriads,

as simply as children. It is too hot,
our birth was given up to screaming. Our
life on these street lawns seems silent.
The leaves chatter their comparisons

to the wind and the sky fills up
before we are out of bed. O infinite
our siestas! adobe effigies in a land
that is sick of us and our tanned flesh.

The wind blows towards us particularly
the sobbing of our dear friends on both
coasts. We are sick of living and afraid
that death will not be by water, o sea.

2
Along the walks and shaded ways
pregnant women look snidely at children.
Two weeks ago they were told, in these

selfsame pools of trefoil, "the market
for emeralds is collapsing," "chlorophyll
shines in your eyes," "the sea's misery

is progenitor of the dark moss which hides
on the north side of trees and cries."
What do they think of slim kids now?

and how, when the summer's gong of day
and night slithers towards their sweat
and towards the nest of their arms

and thighs, do they feel about children
whose hides are pearly with days of swimming?
Do they mistake these fresh drops for tears?

The wind works over these women constantly!
trying, perhaps, to curdle their milk
or make their spring unseasonably fearful,

season they face with dread and bright eyes,
The leaves, wrinkled or shiny like apples,
wave women courage and sigh, a void temperature.

3
The alternatives of summer do not remove
us from this place. The fainting into skies
from a diving board, the express train to
Detroit's damp bars, the excess of affection
on the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus
fire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all
are strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps
of cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre
of polite music. The classroon day of dozing
and grammar, the partial eclipse of the head
in the row in front of the head of poplars,
sweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay
of iron. Workmen loiter before urinals, stare
out windows at girders tightly strapped to clouds.
And in the morning we whimper as we cook
an egg, so far from fluttering sands and azure!

4
The violent No! of the sun
burns the forehead of hills.
Sand fleas arrive from Salt Lake
and most of the theatres close.

The leaves roll into cigars, or
it seems our eyes stick together
in sleep. O forest, o brook of
spice, o cool gaze of strangers!

the city tumbles towards autumn
in a convulsion of tourists
and teachers. We dance in the dark,
forget the anger of what we blame

on the day. Children toss and murmur
as a rumba blankets their trees and
beckons their stars closer, older, now.
We move o'er the world, being so much here.

It's as if Poseidon left off counting
his waters for a moment! In the fields
the silence is music like the moon.
The bullfrogs sleep in their hairy caves.

across the avenue a trefoil lamp
of the streets tosses luckily.
The leaves, finally, love us! and
moonrise! we die upon the sun.


----------



## audiollama (Jan 22, 2004)

*somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond*
_e.e. cummings_


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


----------



## onemonkey (Feb 3, 2004)

*The More Loving One* - _W. H. Auden_

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

--
this was really someone-elses poem for yesterday,
(and we readily admit, not a great one at that)
but i am thankful that she is still around to read it today. Cx


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## Mation (Feb 6, 2004)

*The Intensity of the Geranium* 
_Dinah Livingstone_ 

At seven when I wake the room is dark. 
Slowly on pink curtain the geranium is outlined, 
its upsprawling, pungent, jagged leaves defined 
by the returning light, precise and stark, 
its shape more present as the colour is still black, 
but now a rosy opalescence strokes my mind 
as through the chink a cloud-puffy kind 
of sunrise peeps with morning's hopeful ache. 
I have felt so futile and alone, 
pottered unproductively for days 
wondering if I'd done all I'd ever do. 
The geranium is quite still though it has grown 
huge and its intensity impresses this sunrise 
with its self-stress, promising mine back too.


----------



## Hollis (Feb 6, 2004)

Slough - John Betjeman

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
Tinned minds, tinned breath. 

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown 
For twenty years. 

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win, 
Who washes his repulsive skin 
In women's tears: 

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell. 

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad, 
They've tasted Hell. 

It's not their fault they do not know 
The birdsong from the radio, 
It's not their fault they often go 
To Maidenhead 

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead. 

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails. 

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.


----------



## RubyToogood (Feb 22, 2004)

*A Postcard From The Volcano*

_Wallace Stevens_

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls, 

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.


----------



## Clintons Cat (Feb 22, 2004)

*A Dream Within a Dream*

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?

_Edgar Allen Poe_


----------



## Jackdaw (Feb 25, 2004)

Excerpt from A Shropshire Lad. 

By A.E.Housman. 


INTO my heart on air that kills	
  From yon far country blows:	
What are those blue remembered hills,	
  What spires, what farms are those?	

That is the land of lost content,	        
  I see it shining plain,	
The happy highways where I went	
  And cannot come again.


----------



## Jackdaw (Feb 25, 2004)

Excerpt from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats. 

By Percy Bysshe Shelley.


Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.


----------



## Roadkill (Mar 5, 2004)

*Blame the Vicar*

When things go wrong it’s rather tame 
To find we are ourselves to blame, 
It gets the trouble over quicker 
To go and blame things on the Vicar. 
The Vicar, after all, is paid 
To keep us bright and undismayed. 
The Vicar is more virtuous too 
Than lay folks such as me and you. 
He never swears, he never drinks, 
He never should say what he thinks. 
His collar is the wrong way round, 
And that is why he‘s simply bound 
To be the sort of person who 
Has nothing very much to do 
But take the blame for what goes wrong 
And sing in tune at Evensong. 
For what‘s a Vicar really for 
Except to cheer us up? What’s more, 
He shouldn’t ever, ever tell 
If there is such a place as Hell, 
For if there is it's certain he 
Will go to it as well as we. 
The Vicar should be all pretence 
And never, never give offence. 
To preach on Sunday is his task 
And lend his mower when we ask 
And organize our village fetes 
And sing at Christmas with the waits 
And in his car to give us lifts 
And when we quarrel, heal the rifts. 
To keep his family alive 
He should industriously strive 
In that enormous house he gets, 
And he should always pay his debts, 
For he has quite six pounds a week, 
And when we‘re rude he should be meek 
And always turn the other cheek. 
He should be neat and nicely dressed 
With polished shoes and trousers pressed, 
For we look up to him as higher 
Than anyone, except the Squire. 
Dear People, who have read so far, 
I know how really kind you are, 
I hope that you are always seeing, 
Your Vicar as a human being, 
Making allowances when he 
Does things with which you don’t agree. 
But there are lots of people who 
Are not so kind to him as you. 
So in conclusion you shall hear 
About a parish somewhat near, 
Perhaps your own or maybe not, 
And of the Vicars that it got 
One parson came and people said, 
‘Alas! Our former Vicar’s dead! 
And this new man is far more ”Low” 
Than dear old Reverend So-and-so, 
And far too earnest in his preaching, 
We do not really like his teaching, 
He seems to think we‘re simply fools 
Who’ve never been to Sunday Schools’ 
That Vicar left, and by and by 
A new one came, ‘He's much too ”High”,’ 
The people said, ‘too like a saint, 
His incense makes our Mavis faint.’ 
So now he‘s left and they‘re alone 
Without a Vicar of their own. 
The living’s been amalgamated 
With one next door they‘ve always hated. 
Dear readers, from this rhyme take warning, 
And if you heard the bell this morning 
Your Vicar went to pray for you, 
A task the Prayer Book bids him do. 
‘Highness’ or ‘Lowness’ do not matter, 
You are the Church and must not scatter 
Cling to the Sacraments and pray 
And God be with you every day. 

John Betjeman 

(My Dad's been known to quote this poem at awkward parishioners   )


----------



## Wyn (Mar 11, 2004)

From: A Satirical Romance 

I can't hold you and I can't leave you, 
and sorting the reasons to leave you or hold you, 
I find an intangible one to love you, 
and many tangible ones to forgo you. 

As you won't change, nor let me forgo you, 
I shall give my heart a defense against you, 
so that half shall always be armed to abhor you, 
though the other half be ready to adore you. 

~Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz


----------



## onemonkey (Mar 23, 2004)

the 1st poem from *Knots - R.D.Laing* 


They are playing a game.

They are playing at not playing a game.

If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.


----------



## Ace (Mar 28, 2004)

The Circus Animals' Desertion
I 

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. 

II 

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride. 

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love. 

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of. 

III 

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.


----------



## onemonkey (Mar 28, 2004)

The Circus Animals' Desertion - _William Butler Yeats_


----------



## Wyn (Mar 29, 2004)

*Somewhere between Heaven and Woolworth's*

She keeps kingfishers in their cages
And goldfish in their bowls,
She is lovely and is afraid
Of such things as growing cold.

She's had enough men to please her
Though they were more cruel than kind
And their love an act in isolation,
A form of pantomime.

She says she has forgotten
The feelings that she shared
At various all night parties
Among the couples on the stairs,

For among the songs and dancing
She was once open wide,
A girl dressed in denim
With boys dressed in lies.

She's eating roses on toast with tulip butter,
Praying for her mirror to stay young;
On its no longer gilted surface
This message she has scrawled:

'O somewhere between Heaven and Woolworth's
I live I love I scold,
I keep kingfishers in their cages
And goldfish in their bowls.'

Brian Patten


----------



## Janine (Mar 30, 2004)

PearlySpencer said:
			
		

> For Janine
> 
> *How the Sound of Freedom Dies*
> 
> ...



I have no clue why PS would dedicate this to me.


----------



## Concrete Meadow (Apr 5, 2004)

*5 APRIL - Remembering Cobain - 10 Years After He Departed ...*

*COME AS YOU ARE*

Come, as you are. As you were.
As I want you to be. As a friend.
As a friend. As an old enemy. Take your time.
Hurry up. The choice is yours. Don't be late.
Take a rest. As a friend. As a old memory, memory, memory, memory.

Come. Dowsed in mud. Soaked in bleach.
As I want you to be. As a trend. As a friend.
As an old memory, memory, memory, memory.

And I swear that I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun.

Memory, memory, memory, memory (don't have a gun).

And I swear that I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun. Memory, memory...

- *Kurt Cobain*


----------



## Wyn (Apr 6, 2004)

Love Song 

If I could write words 
Like leaves on an Autumn forest floor 
What a bonfire my letters would make 

If I could speak words of water 
You would drown when I said 
'I love you'. 

Spike Milligan


----------



## white rabbit (Apr 6, 2004)

*Sailing to Byzantium*

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. 

_William Butler Yeats_


----------



## RubyToogood (Apr 6, 2004)

Concrete Meadow said:
			
		

> *COME AS YOU ARE*
> 
> ...
> - *Kurt Cobain*



I'm afraid there's a no song lyrics rule on this thread.


----------



## Concrete Meadow (Apr 6, 2004)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> I'm afraid there's a no song lyrics rule on this thread.


Sorry about that, Ruby. I was hoping for an exception to mark the 10th anniversary of a contemporary poet's untimely death.

Perhaps the following will do, as a reminder that Cobain lives in our hearts and minds -

* )when what hugs stopping earth than silent is*


  )when what hugs stopping earth than silent is
more silent than more than much more is or
total sun oceaning than any this
tear jumping from each most least eye of star

and without was if minus and shall be
immeasurable happenless unnow
shuts more than open could that every tree
or than all life more death begins to grow

end's ending then these dolls of joy and grief
these recent memories of future dream
these perhaps who have lost their shadows if
which did not do the losing spectres mime

until out of merely not nothing comes
only one snowflake(and we speak our names


- *ee cummings*


----------



## Ace (Apr 11, 2004)

The owl and the pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful peagreen boat
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The owl looked up to the stars above
And sang to a small guitar,
"O, lovely pussy, o pussy my love,
What a beautiful pussy you are, you are
What a beautiful pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing.
O, let us be married, too long we have tarried,
But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away for a year and a day
To the land where the Bongtree grows.
And there in a wood a Piggywig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose, his nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away and were married next day
By the turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince and slices of quince
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon, the moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.


----------



## dlx1 (Apr 11, 2004)

we had this for my Nan when she died.....


You can shed tears that she is gone
or you can smile because she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back
or you can open your eyes and see all she has left.

Your heart can be empty because you can't see her
or be full of the love you shared.

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember her and only that she's gone
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.

You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
or you can do what she'd want: 

Smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

============

was this about a Poem writen your self !


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 22, 2004)

*I Am Your Spy*
_Mordechai Vanunu_

I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver, whom they told, do this or do that.

Don't look to the right, to the left, don't eye the page. Don't look at the whole machine.

You are responsible for one bolt only. You are responsible for just one rubber-stamp. Concern yourself with one matter only. Don't bother with things that are above you. Don't think for us. Drive. Keep driving. On. On.

The great, the wise, those who understand our future, thought: There's nothing to worry about. No fear. Everything works, clicks.

Our little clerk is a diligent worker. He's a simple technician.

He's the little guy. Like all the low-ranking clerks, ears have they, but they hear not.

Eyes have they but they see not. We have a head; not the little guys.

Answer them, he thought to himself--just between him and himself-- the little citizen.But the man with the head is not little.

Who is the boss here, who knows where the train is headed? Where is our head? I too have a head. Why do I see the abyss? Does this train have an engineer?

The clerk-driver-technician-mechanic raised his head. Retreated a bit, saw a monster Unbelieving, returned, rubbed his eyes and indeed-- they're fine. I'm just fine. I really do see a monster.

I am part of the system I signed this form. And only now am I reading the text. This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me. How did I not see and how do others go on bolt-tightening. Who else knows? Who saw, who heard? The emperor is indeed naked.

I see him. Why me. This is not for me. It's to big for me. Rise up and cry out. Rise up and proclaim to this nation. You can. I the bolt, the mechanic, the technician. Yes you. You are the secret agent of this nation. You are the eyes of the state. Spy-agent, reveal what you've seen. Reveal to us what those who understand, the wise, hide from us.

If you are not with us, the void awaits us. A holocaust awaits us. You and only you sit at the wheel and see the void. I have no choice. I am a little guy, an ordinary citizen, one of the common folk, but I will fulfill my commitment. I have heard the voice of my conscience. And there's nowhere to run.

The world is small. Small compared to big brother. Here I am, on your mission. Here I am fulfilling my role. Take this from me. Come and judge. Lighten my load. Carry it along with me. Carry on my messenger-mission.

Stop the train. Get off the train. The next stop is nuclear holocaust. The next book, the next machine, no. There is no such thing.


----------



## Ace (Apr 22, 2004)

I'm sorry. 

I know it's probably rude to comment on other people's choices and Mr Vanunu is a good bloke an all that, but that is not poetry.


----------



## Wyn (Apr 23, 2004)

come back safely 

Even to say good-bye 
even if it's the last time 
even reluctantly 
even to hurt me again 
even with the harsh acid 
of sarcasm that stings 

even with a new kind of pain 
even fresh from the embrace 
of another. Come back, just come. 

Sylva Gaboudikan


----------



## RubberBuccaneer (Apr 23, 2004)

Ouch,
memories of love lost , that thankfully I've not experienced for a long time and hopefully never again.


----------



## Wanderer (Apr 24, 2004)

A bit cheeky posting me own poem, I know...


----------



## Jessiedog (Apr 27, 2004)

Wanderer said:
			
		

> A bit cheeky posting me own poem, I know...



Bloody good tho'!!



woof


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 29, 2004)

*From A German War Primer*
_Bertolt Brecht_

 AMONGST THE HIGHLY PLACED
It is considered low to talk about food.
The fact is:  they have
Already eaten.

The lowly must leave this earth
Without having tasted
Any good meat.

For wondering where they come from and
Where they are going
The fine evenings find them
Too exhausted.

They have not yet seen
The mountains and the great sea
When their time is already up.

If the lowly do not
Think about what's low
They will never rise.

THE BREAD OF THE HUNGRY HAS
ALL BEEN EATEN
Meat has become unknown.  Useless
The pouring out of the people's sweat.
The laurel groves have been
Lopped down.
From the chimneys of the arms factories
Rises smoke.

THE HOUSE-PAINTER SPEAKS OF
GREAT TIMES TO COME
The forests still grow.
The fields still bear
The cities still stand.
The people still breathe.

ON THE CALENDAR THE DAY IS NOT
YET SHOWN
Every month, every day
Lies open still.  One of those days
Is going to be marked with a cross.

THE WORKERS CRY OUT FOR BREAD
The merchants cry out for markets.
The unemployed were hungry.  The employed
Are hungry now.
The hands that lay folded are busy again.
They are making shells.

THOSE WHO TAKE THE MEAT FROM THE TABLE
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

WHEN THE LEADERS SPEAK OF PEACE
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY:  PEACE
AND WAR
Are of different substance.
But their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.

War grows from their peace
Like son from his mother
He bears
Her frightful features.

Their war kills
Whatever their peace
Has left over.

ON THE WALL WAS CHALKED:
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY:
This way to glory.
Those down below say:
This way to the grave.

THE WAR WHICH IS COMING
Is not the first one.  There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved.  Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY COMRADESHIP
Reigns in the army.
The truth of this is seen
In the cookhouse.
In their hearts should be
The selfsame courage.  But
On their plates
Are two kinds of rations.

WHEN IT COMES TO MARCHING MANY DO NOT
KNOW
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is their enemy's voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.

IT IS NIGHT
The married couples
Lie in their beds.  The young women
Will bear orphans.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.


----------



## Wyn (Apr 30, 2004)

'A blade of grass'

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.

	-- Brian Patten


----------



## Yossarian (May 6, 2004)

*Drive Through Hell*
_Charles Bukowski_

the people are weary, unhappy, frustrated, the people are
bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the
people are angry and uninventive
and I drive among them on the freeway and they project
what is left of themselves in their manner of driving-
some more hateful, more thwarted than others-
some don't like to be passed, some attempt to keep others
from passing
-some attempt to block lane changes
-some hate cars of a newer, more expensive model
-others in these cars hate the older cars.

the freeway is a circus of cheap and pretty emotions, it's
humanity on the move, most of them coming from someplace
     they
hated and going to another they hate just as much or
more.
the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and
most of the crashes and deaths are the collision
of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented
lives.
when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of
my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the
heart
away.


----------



## Biscuit Tin (May 6, 2004)

I like that Yoss.


----------



## RubyToogood (May 7, 2004)

*Birthday*

Spring flowers and autumn leaves,

will they never end?

How many things have happened?

In this little tower, last night,

the east wind blew once more.

Can I bear to look back at the old country

in the bright moon?



The carved hand-rails and marble steps

must still be there,

But not my youthful cheeks.

How much sadness can I bear?

As much as an eastward-flowing river filled with

spring water.


Li Yu


----------



## butchersapron (May 7, 2004)

Here's one to commemorate the day that the body of Camillo Baerneri was found in 1937:

*NORETORP-NORETSYH *

Rainy, smoky Fall, clouds tower 
In the brilliant Pacific sky. 
In Golden Gate Park, the peacocks 
Scream, wandering through falling leaves. 
In clotting nights in smoking dark, 
The Kronstadt sailors are marching 
Through the streets of Budapest. The stones 
Of the barricades rise up and shiver 
Into form. They take the shapes 
Of the peasant armies of Makhno. 
The streets are lit with torches. 
The gasoline drenched bodies 
Of the Solovetsky anarchists 
Burn at every street corner. 
Kropotkin?s starved corpse is borne 
In state past the offices 
Of the cowering bureaucrats. 
In all the Politisolators 
Of Siberia the partisan dead are enlisting. 
Berneri, Andreas Nin, 
Are coming from Spain with a legion. 
Carlo Tresca is crossing 
The Atlantic with the Berkman Brigade. 
Bukharin has joined the Emergency 
Economic Council. Twenty million 
Dead Ukrainian peasants are sending wheat. 
Julia Poyntz is organizing American nurses. 
Gorky has written a manifesto 
?To the Intellectuals of the World!? 
Mayakofsky and Essenin 
Have collaborated on an ode, 
?Let Them Commit Suicide.? 
In the Hungarian night 
All the dead are speaking with one voice, 
As we bicycle through the green 
And sunspotted California 
November. I can hear that voice 
Clearer than the cry of the peacocks, 
In the falling afternoon. 
Like painted wings, the color 
Of all the leaves of Autumn, 
The circular tie-dyed skirt 
I made for you flares out in the wind, 
Over your incomparable thighs. 
Oh splendid butterfly of my imagination, 
Flying into reality more real 
Than all imagination, the evil 
Of the world covets your living flesh. 

Kenneth Rexroth 56/57

Notes:

Noretorp-Noretsyh is a response to the Russian army's crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The title is an inversion of ?'hysteron-proteron' - the figure of speech in which the usual or logical order of terms is reversed. In the case of Hungary, the former revolutionary forces have evolved into a new force of oppression, making necessary a new rebellion. Rexroth imagines yet more turnabouts, with all the vanquished rebels of the past returning to carry on the struggle. The anarchist Camillo Berneri and the revolutionary Marxist Andrés Nin were both murdered by the Stalinists in Barcelona in May 1937; the radical Russian poets Mayakofsky and Essenin both committed suicide; etc.


----------



## RubyToogood (May 11, 2004)

For historical interest, because I'd heard the expression but never read the poem:

*The White Man's Burden*

_Rudyard Kipling_

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!


----------



## Yossarian (May 12, 2004)

*Nuremberg, U.S.A.*
_Bill Knott_

In this time and place, where "Bread and Circuses" has
become "Bread and Atrocities," to say 'I love you' is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase...'defoliation'...
'low yield blast'.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime.


----------



## RubyToogood (May 13, 2004)

*The Fish*
_Marianne Moore_

wade
through black jade.
       Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
       adjusting the ash-heaps;
              opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
       The barnacles which encrust the side
       of the wave, cannot hide
              there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
       glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
       into the crevices—
              in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
       of bodies. The water drives a wedge
       of iron throught the iron edge
              of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
       bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
       lilies, and submarine
              toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
       marks of abuse are present on this
       defiant edifice—
              all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
       of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
       hatchet strokes, these things stand
              out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
       evidence has proved that it can live
       on what can not revive
              its youth. The sea grows old in it.



(edit, damnit, can't get the spacing to come out right... it's meant to look like this http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Marianne_Moore/8125, anyone know how I can get it to behave?)


----------



## Citizen66 (May 18, 2004)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> No song lyrics or stuff you've written yourself .



Why not stuff written by yourself?   

I found this: 

_________________________


There's not a solitary star in our universe
that any satelite could undermine
without an infinite stream of radiance
there would never be a mankind

Existing in our ever-changing realities
ignoring all that it signifies
should we emulate true creation?
impossible,  but still one tries


By J.R.Hartley

_________________________


----------



## RubyToogood (May 19, 2004)

JR Hartley eh? He went on to publish a slim volume of poetry after his great masterpiece on fly fishing did he? 

The reason for no self-written poetry is that sometimes people post up really good interesting stuff they've written themselves but a lot of the time it's not that great. If people want to start threads for their own poetry there's nothing to stop them. There have been threads like this in the past. Actually I'd like to see more self-penned poetry, just not on this thread.


----------



## Citizen66 (May 19, 2004)

J.R.Hartley was a joke. Although I'm pleased you recognised it I'm slightly disapointed that you didn't laugh (or maybe you did?)

I actually found that poem in the back of a poetry book recently, there wasn't an author's name for it, so I used a well known advert in it's place.

If you see Sid, tell him.


----------



## Brainaddict (May 20, 2004)

It's an interesting exercise to read the White Man's Burden and imagine it coming out of the mouth of Bush. It feels horribly plausible, though he wouldn't say (even if he thought it) White Man's Burden but America's Burden I guess.


----------



## RubyToogood (May 20, 2004)

I think I'd vaguely thought that too, but you're right, if you read the whole thing in that way it's horribly relevant...


----------



## Yossarian (May 20, 2004)

*Melancholy Breakfast*
_Frank O'Hara_

Melancholy breakfast
blue overhead blue underneath

the silent egg thinks
and the toaster's electrical
          ear waits

the stars are in
"that cloud is hid"

the elements of disbelief are
  very strong in the morning


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 2, 2004)

*CIA Dope Calypso*
_Allen Ginsberg_

In nineteen hundred forty-nine
China was won by Mao Tse-tung
Chiang Kai-shek's army ran away
They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday

_Supported by the CIA
Pushing junk down Thailand way_

First they stole from the Meo Tribes
Up in the hills they started taking bribes
Then they sent their soldiers up to Shan
Collecting opium to send to The Man

_Pushing junk in Bangkok yesterday
Supported by the CIA_

Brought their jam on mule trains down
To Chiang Rai that's a railroad town
Sold it next to the police chief brain
He took it to town on the choochoo train

_Trafficking dope to Bangkok all day
Supported by the CIA_

The policeman's name was Mr. Phao
He peddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. A.I.D.

_The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA_

He got so sloppy & peddled so loose
He busted himself & cooked his own goose
Took the reward for an opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold

_Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA_

Touby Lyfong he worked for the French
A big fat man liked to dine & wench
Prince of the Meos he grew black mud
Till opium flowed through the land like a flood

_Communists came and chased the French away
So Touby took a job with the CIA_

The whole operation fell in to chaos
Till U.S. Intelligence came into Laos
I'll tell you no lie I'm a true American
Our big pusher there was Phoumi Nosovan

_All them Princes in a power play
But Phoumi was the man for the CIA_

And his best friend General Vang Pao
Ran the Meo army like a sacred cow
Helicopter smugglers filled Long Cheng's bars
In Xieng Quang province on the Plain of Jars

_It started in secret they were fighting yesterday
Clandestine secret army of the CIA_

All through the Sixties the Dope flew free
Thru Tan Son Nhut Saigon to Marshal Ky
Air America followed through
Transporting confiture for President Thieu

_All these Dealers were decades and yesterday
The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA_

Operation Haylift Offisir Wm. Colby
Saw Marshal Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me
Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks
"Hitchhiking" with dope pushers was how he got his fix

_Subsidizing traffickers to drive the Reds away
Till Colby was the head of the CIA_

- August 1972


----------



## chrissie (Jun 11, 2004)

Yossarian said:
			
		

> *Melancholy Breakfast*
> _Frank O'Hara_
> 
> Melancholy breakfast...........



Love that!  
Feel like I've been away too long.  
This thread should be a sticky.  

Anyway, here it is:


*‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’*

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, Like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived, 
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

*Emily Dickinson*


----------



## onemonkey (Jun 14, 2004)

*The Loch Ness Monster's Song*

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl -
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok-doplodovok-plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff ghaf?
Gombl mbl bl -
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

_Edwin Morgan (b. 1920) _


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 16, 2004)

*Advice From The Experts*
_Bill Knott_

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter's curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don't, don't jump.


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 21, 2004)

*Suspended Sentence*
_John Cooper Clarke_

Read the paper - humdrum
Henley Regatta - page one
Eat die - ho hum
Page three - big bum
Giving a lunatic a loaded gun
He walks - others run
Thirty dead - no fun
Foreigners feature as figures of fun
Do something destructive chum
Sit right down - write a letter to the Sun
Say... "Bring back hangin' for everyone" 
The took my advice - they brought it back
National costume was all-over-black
There were corpses in the avenues and cul-de-sacs
Piled up neatly in six-man stacks
Hanging from the traffic lights and specially made racks
They'd hang you for incontinence and fiddling your tax
Failure to hang yourself justified the axe
A deedely dee, a deedely dum
Looks like they brought back hangin' for everyone
The novelty's gone - it's hell
This place is a - death cell
The constant clang of the funeral bells
Those who aren't hanging are hanging someone else
The peoples pay - the paper sells
It's plug ugly - sub-animal yells
Death is unsightly - death smells
Swingin' Britain - don't put me on
They're gonna bring back the rope for everyone


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2004)

Bertolt Brecht

Questions from A Worker Who Reads 

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings. 
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? 
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War. Who
Else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill? 

So many reports.
So many questions.


----------



## lang rabbie (Jul 14, 2004)

*More Brecht...*

*The Solution * 
_by Bertolt Brecht_

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. 
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?


----------



## belboid (Jul 19, 2004)

We've had it before, but in the circumstances we're having it again.

In memory of Paul Foot:

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
'Thou art God, and Law, and King.

'We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our Purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.'

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering - 'Thou art Law and God.' -

Then all cried with one accord,
'Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!'

And Anarchy, the skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:

'My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me -
Misery, oh, Misery!'

Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses' feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:

Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,

It grew - a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper's scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.

On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.

With step as soft as wind it passed
O'er the heads of men - so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, - but all was empty air.

As flowers beneath May's footstep waken,
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

And the prostrate multitude
Looked - and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt - and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their own indignant Earth
Which gave the sons of England birth
Had felt their blood upon her brow,
And shuddering with a mother's throe

Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood, -
As if her heart had cried aloud:

'Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

'What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell,

'So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying whilst I speak.

'Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

'Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More that e'er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

'Paper coin - that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

'Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

'And at length when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain
'Tis to see the Tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you -
Blood is on the grass like dew.

'Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood - and wrong for wrong -
Do not thus when ye are strong.

'Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their wingèd quest
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
When storm and snow are in the air.

'Asses, swine, have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!

'This is slavery - savage men
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do -
But such ills they never knew.

'What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery:


----------



## belboid (Jul 19, 2004)

'Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

'For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.

'Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.

'To the rich thou art a check,
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.

'Thou art Justice - ne'er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold
As laws are in England - thou
Shield'st alike the high and low.

'Thou art Wisdom - Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which Priests make such ado.

'Thou art Peace - never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.

'What if English toil and blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood?
It availed, Oh, Liberty,
To dim, but not extinguish thee.

'Thou art Love - the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee,

'Or turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy belovèd sake
On wealth, and war, and fraud - whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

'Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

'Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou - let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.

'Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.

'Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.

'From the corners uttermost
Of the bounds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan,

'From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -

'From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -

'Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around

'Those prison halls of wealth and fashion,
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -

'Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold -

'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -

'Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

'Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses' heels.

'Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

'Let the horsemen's scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

'Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

'And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

'Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,

'The old laws of England - they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo - Liberty!

'On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

'And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, -
What they like, that let them do.

'With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

'Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

'Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand -
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

'And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

'And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'


Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Mask of Anarchy


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 19, 2004)

For Mr foot i presume? Nice one.


----------



## Citizen66 (Jul 19, 2004)

*The genius of the crowd*

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

Charles Bukowski


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 23, 2004)

*Swirl*

_Carl Sandburg_ 

A swirl in the air where your head was once, here.  
You walked under this tree, spoke to a moon for me  
I might almost stand here and believe you alive.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 24, 2004)

I think you may be getting a short Carl Sandburg season... I know 0 about him but I'm enjoying what I'm reading.


*Haze*

Keep a red heart of memories  
Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky,  
Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers.  
Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds;  
All starlights of cool memories on storm paths.          

Out of this prairie rise the faces of dead men.  
They speak to me. I can not tell you what they say.  

Other faces rise on the prairie.  
  They are the unborn. The future.  

Yesterday and to-morrow cross and mix on the skyline          
The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets. One waits.  

In the yellow dust of sunsets, in the meadows of vermilion eight o’clock June nights … the dead men and the unborn children speak to me … I can not tell you what they say … you listen and you know.  

I don’t care who you are, man:  
I know a woman is looking for you  
and her soul is a corn-tassel kissing a south-west wind.          
(The farm-boy whose face is the color of brick-dust, is calling the cows; he will form the letter X with crossed streams of milk from the teats; he will beat a tattoo on the bottom of a tin pail with X’s of milk.)  

I don’t care who you are, man:  
I know sons and daughters looking for you  
And they are gray dust working toward star paths  
And you see them from a garret window when you laugh          
At your luck and murmur, “I don’t care.”  

I don’t care who you are, woman:  
I know a man is looking for you  
And his soul is a south-west wind kissing a corn-tassel.  

(The kitchen girl on the farm is throwing oats to the chickens and the buff of their feathers says hello to the sunset’s late maroon.)          

I don’t care who you are, woman:  
I know sons and daughters looking for you  
And they are next year’s wheat or the year after hidden in the dark and loam.  

My love is a yellow hammer spinning circles in Ohio, Indiana. My love is a redbird shooting flights in straight lines in Kentucky and Tennessee. My love is an early robin flaming an ember of copper on her shoulders in March and April. My love is a graybird living in the eaves of a Michigan house all winter. Why is my love always a crying thing of wings?  

On the Indiana dunes, in the Mississippi marshes, I have asked: Is it only a fishbone on the beach?          
Is it only a dog’s jaw or a horse’s skull whitening in the sun? Is the red heart of man only ashes? Is the flame of it all a white light switched off and the power house wires cut?  

Why do the prairie roses answer every summer? Why do the changing repeating rains come back out of the salt sea wind-blown? Why do the stars keep their tracks? Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies?


----------



## chrissie (Jul 27, 2004)

*My First Bra*

A big brown bear 
is knocking at the door:

he wants to borrow a dress 
and matching knickers.

The smell of lilac
smothers me like wool:

Beyond the lawns
I hear my naked sister

crying in the nettles 
where I threw her:

_nobody else is having
my first bra._

Selima Hill


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 29, 2004)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

-As you like it II-7


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 29, 2004)

That's cheery...


----------



## Wyn (Aug 5, 2004)

Talking to myself 

It's all over - I told you 
and you said
- don't worry about it 
let go quietly 
learn how to look at the stopped clock 
with self-composure
be sensible 
realise it's not winding it needs
admit it - it's your life 
moving that way - 
and don't be fooled by occasional movements of the hands 
it's got nothing to do with you 
come on down 
dethrone yourself soberly 
you were only taking a chance 
at it 
forget about it - smile 

you had you say 

Kiki Dimoula


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 11, 2004)

*The Misunderstanding*
_Bill Knott_

I'm charmed yet chagrined by this misunderstanding-- 
As when, after a riot, my city's smashed-in stores appear all
Boarded up, billboarded over, with ads for wind-insurance. 
Similarly, swimmingly, I miss the point. You too?

And my misunderstanding doesn't stop there, it grows--soon
I can't see why that sudden influx of fugitives,
All the world's escapees, rubbing themselves lasciviously against the
       Berlin Wall.
They stick like placards to it. Like napalm. Like ads for--

And me, I haven't even bought my biodegradable genitalia yet! 
No. I was born slow, but picking up speed I run through 
Our burnt-out streets, screaming, refusing to buy a house. 
Finally, exasperated, the misunderstanding overtakes me, snatches
       up

Handcuffs. So now here I am, found with all you others
Impatiently craning, in this queue that rumors out of sight up ahead
       somewhere,
Clutching our cash eager to purchase whatever it is, nervous
As if bombs were about to practice land-reform upon our bodies,

Redistribution of eyes, toes, arms, here we stand. Then, some new
       Age starts.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 13, 2004)

One for those missed out:

FRANCISCO, I'LL BRING YOU RED CARNATIONS 

Here in the great cemetery 
behind the fortress of Barcelona 
I have come once more to see 
the graves of my fallen. 
Two ancient picnickers direct 
us down the hill. 'Durruti,'
says the man, 'I was on 
his side.' The woman hushes 
him. All the way down
this is a city of the dead, 
871,251 d~funtos. 
The poor packed in tenements 
a dozen high; the rich 
in splendid homes or temples. 
So nothing has changed 
except for the single 
unswerving fact: they are 
all dead. Here is the Plaza 
of Saint Jaime, here the Rambla 
of San Pedro, so every death 
still has a mailing address, 
but since this is Spain 
the mail never comes or
comes too late to be of use. 
Between the cemetery and 
the Protestant burial ground 
we find the three stones all in a row: Ferrer Guardia, 
B. Durruti, F. Ascaso, the names 
written with marking pens, 
and a few circled A's and tributes 
to the FAI and CNT. 
For two there are floral 
displays, but Ascaso faces 
eternity with only a stone. 
Maybe as it should be. He was 
a stone, a stone and a blade, 
the first grinding and sharpening 
the other. Half his 36
years were spent in prisons 
or on the run, and yet 
in that last photograph 
taken less than an hour before 
he died, he stands in a dark 
suit, smoking, a rifle slung 
behind his shoulder, and glances 
sideways at the camera 
half smiling. It is July 20, 
1936, and before the darkness 
falls a darkness will have 
fallen on him. While
the streets are echoing 
with victory and revolution, 
Francisco Ascaso will take up 
the hammered little blade 
of his spirit and enter for 
the last time the republics 
of death. I remember 
his words to a frightened 
comrade who questioned 
the wisdom of attack: 'We 
have gathered here to die, but we 
don?t have to die with dogs, 
so go.' Forty-one years 
ago, and now the city stretches 
as far as the eye can see, 
huge cement columns like nails 
pounded into the once green 
meadows of the Llobregat. 
Your Barcelona is gone, 
the old town swallowed 
in industrial filth and 
the burning mists of gasoline. 
Only the police remain, armed 
and arrogant, smiling masters 
of the boulevards, the police 
and your dream of the city 
of God, where every man 
and every woman gives 
and receives the gifts of work 
and care, and that dream 
goes on in spite of slums,

in spite of death clouds, 
the roar of trucks, the harbor 
staining the mother sea, 
it goes on in spite of all 
that mocks it. We have it here 
growing in our hearts, as 
your comrade said, and when 
we give it up with our last 
breaths someone will gasp 
it home to their lives. 
Francisco, stone, knife blade, 
single soldier still on 
the run down the darkest 
street of all, we will be back 
across an ocean and a continent 
to bring you red carnations, 
to celebrate the unbroken 
promise of your life that
once was frail and flesh.


_Phillip Levine_


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (Aug 13, 2004)

http://oblivio.com/archives/02100601.shtml


----------



## oisleep (Aug 14, 2004)

CUNTS

We like to fuck and shag, we're not into making love
But I hope that she'd admit that we've done all of the above.
I've got a cock or sometimes willy, I'm referred to as her bird,
And she's usually got a fanny, rarely any other word,
Though you might've heard a pie once, or a bum-not-back-but-front,
Or maybe the odd snatch, but never once a cunt.
She only uses that word when it's Scottish for amigo,
Or to punctuate a sentence when deflating my wee ego.

Aidan Moffat


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 18, 2004)

When man enters woman 
_Anne Sexton_

When man,
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth with pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashes their rivers.

This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
through God
in His perversity
unties the knot.

-1973


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 20, 2004)

*Thinking in the Moonlight of Vice-Prefect Ts'uei in Shan-yin*
_Wang Changling_

Lying on high seat in the south study,
We have lifted the curtain - and we see the rising moon
Brighten with pure light the water and the grove
And flow like a wave on our window and our door.
It will move through the cycle, full moon and then crescent again,
Calmly, beyond our wisdom, altering new to old.
. . . Our chosen one, our friend, is now by a limpid river -
Singing, perhaps, a plaintive eastern song.
He is far, far away from us, three hundred miles away.
And yet a breath of orchids comes along the wind


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 23, 2004)

*The Mad Yak*
_Gregory Corso_

I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his--
I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 24, 2004)

*In Harbor*
_Constantine Cavafy_

A young man, twenty eight years old, on a vessel from Tenos,
Emes arrived at this Syrian harbor
with the intention of learning the perfume trade.
But during the voyage he was taken ill. And as soon
as he disembarked, he died. His burial, the poorest,
took place here. A few hours before he died,
he whispered something about "home," about "very old parents."
But who these were nobody knew,
nor which his homeland in the vast panhellenic world.
Better so. For thus, although
he lies dead in this harbor,
his parents will always hope he is alive.


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 25, 2004)

*Wistful*
_Carl Sandburg_

Wishes left on your lips  
The mark of their wings.  
Regrets fly kites in your eyes.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 8, 2004)

So Does Everybody Else, Only Not So Much 
by Ogden Nash  

O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge, 
For I wish to be purged of an urge. 
It is an irksome urge, compounded of nettles and glue, 
And it is turning all my friends back into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into view. 
It is an indication that my mental buttery is butterless and my mental larder lardless, 
And it consists not of "Stop me if you've heard this one," but of "I know you've heard this one because I told it to you myself, but I'm going to tell it to you again regardless," 
Yes I fear I am living beyond my mental means. 
When I realize that it is not only anecdotes that I reiterate but what is far worse, summaries of radio programs and descriptions of caroons in newspapers and magazines. 
I want to resist but I cannot resist recounting the bright sayins of celebrities that everybody already is familiar with every word of; I want to refrain but cannot refrain from telling the same audience on two successive evenings the same little snatches of domestic gossip about people I used to know that they have never heard of. 
When I remember some titlating episode of my childhood I figure that if it's worth narrating once it's worth narrating twice, in spite of lackluster eyes and dropping jaws, 
And indeed I have now worked my way backward from titllating episodes in my own childhood to titillating episodes in the childhood of my parents or even my parents-in-laws, 
And what really turns my corpuscles to ice, 
I carry around clippings and read them to people twice. 
And I know what I am doing while I am doing it and I don't want to do it but I can't help doing it and I am just another Ancient Mariner, 
And the prospects for my future social life couldn't possibly be barrener. 
Did I tell you that the prospects for my future social life couldn't be barrener?


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 16, 2004)

*Long Life Not To Be Desired*
_Sophocles_

HO, loving life, hath sought 
To outrun the appointed span, 
Shall be arraigned before my thought 
For an infatuate man. 
Since the added years entail 
Much that is bitter; -- joy 
Flies out of ken, desire doth fail, 
The wished-for moments cloy. 
But when the troublous life, 
Be it less or more, is past, 
With power to end the strife 
Comes rescuing Death at last. 
Lo! the dark bridegroom waits! No festal choir 
Shall grace his destined hour, no dance, no lyre! 

Far best were ne'er to be; 
But, once he hath seen the day, 
Next best by far for each to flee 
As swiftly as each may, 
Yonder from whence he came; 
For let but Youth be there 
With her light fooleries, who shall name 
The unnumbered brood of Care? 
No trial spared, no fall! 
Feuds, battles, murders, rage, 
Envy, and last of all, 
Despised, dim, friendless age! 
Ay, there all evils, crowded in one room. 
Each at his worst of ill, augments of gloom. 

Such lot is mine, and round this man of woe, 
As some gray headland of a northward shore 
Bears buffets of all wintry winds that blow, 
Fresh storms of Fate are bursting evermore 
In thunderous billows, borne 
Some from the waning light, 
Some through mid-noon, some from the rising morn, 
Some from the stars of Night.


----------



## twinkle (Sep 18, 2004)

Map of a City

I stand upon a hill and see
A luminous country under me,
Through which at two the drunk must weave;
The transient's pause, the sailor's leave.

I notice, looking down the hill,
Arms braced upon a window sill;
And on the web of fire escapes
Move the potential, the grey shapes.

I hold the city here, complete:
And every shape defined by light
Is mine, or corresponds to mine,
Some flickering or some steady shine.

This map is ground of my delight.
Between the limits, night by night,
I watch a malady's advance,
I recognize my love of chance.

By the recurrent lights I see
Endless potentiality,
The crowded, broken, and unfinished!
I would not have the risk diminished.

Thom Gunn


----------



## Ace (Sep 19, 2004)

*A Larkin Poem for Iraq - The Less Deceived.*

Deceptions

"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning.  I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."

--Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding.  All the unhurried day,
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Slums, years, have buried you.  I would not dare
Console you if I could.  What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.


----------



## maya (Oct 3, 2004)

I AM THAT POEM   (nb: translated word-by word from the norwegian poem)

 I am that poem who noone wrote
 I am the always burnt letter.

 I am the unwalked path
 And the tone without melody.

 I am the mute lip's prayer.
 I am an unborn woman's son.

 A string that no hand has strung,
 A fire that has never been lit.

 Awake me! Redeem me! Lift me up
 From earth and mountain, of spirit and body!

 But nothing happens when i pray.
 I am the things that never happen.



                                   -- Inger Hagerup


----------



## fanta (Oct 3, 2004)

Wyn said:
			
		

> come back safely
> 
> Even to say good-bye
> even if it's the last time
> ...



Good!


----------



## fanta (Oct 3, 2004)

Wanderer said:
			
		

> Last edited by RubyToogood : 28-04-2004 at 01:05 AM. Reason: Not just cheeky - it's against the rules of the thread - Chazegee started another thread on this forum for self-written poetry, or start another if you like - sorry but it does say in the first post.



Silly!


----------



## Yossarian (Oct 18, 2004)

*In The North Pasture*
_Jared Carter_

 After we called the sheriff, they came
and hauled it away.  But there was
one interviewer who stayed behind,
to ask if we'd seen any strange lights
in the sky at night, or burnt places
in the pasture, or flocks of hippies
traveling through in their painted vans.

Nothing, we told him.  Only that pair
of buzzards floating over the north fork 
but never landing.  No signs, no tracks.  
Only the shaggy lump of the steer, 
with its tongue gone, ears cut off,
and eyes—cored out clean, like apples.
Nothing, no blood on the ground,
and no flies crawling anywhere.

"Natural predator," he said, closing
his book.  "That's how we'll write it up.
Now, I know what you're thinking:  
no bear, no mountain lion, no coyotes
in these parts for a hundred years.
And none of them make cuts like that
or leave that much good meat behind.
But something's coming back.  Natural
predator," he said again.  He tipped
his hat.  "You folks take care now."


----------



## Yossarian (Oct 20, 2004)

*Action Man*
_John Cooper Clarke_

give him scars and khaki to wear
remove his balls, he'll go anywhere
he doesn't speak, he doesn't dare
death sneaks, he isn't scared
minus balls, he doesn't care
jacks beware, action man. 

he can ack-ack Ackrington, bomb Berlin
reduce your car to a heap of tin
wage war, what's more - win
punctured skin means nothing to him
the human grenade minus pin
that's him, action man 

a chin with a thin Kirk Douglas cleft
squad by the bleeding left
don't shout he's deaf
head over heels in love with death
beware of the wrath of the man bereft
no marriage plans for action man.


----------



## oisleep (Oct 30, 2004)

on silver mount zion 
all buried in ruins 
we was dancing the hora 
until we vomited blood 
spinning like crazy 
Shoshanna i was jonesing 
the towers had fallen 
and the wind called out my grandfather's name 

let's kill first the banker 
with his professional demeanor 
let's televise and broadcast the raping of kings 
let our crowds be fed on tear gas and plate glass 
'cos the people united is a wonderful thing 

I know that you're dying 
and I know I'm unwell 
and together we sashay 
through variations of hell 

and as you walk through valleys of fear 
the lure of my past never near 

oh, don't be afraid, for the parade 
will not pass our way 
it's nobler to never get paid, 
than to bank on shit and dismay

Effrim and Thierry from a silver mount zion


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 24, 2004)

*Temporary Poem Of My Time*
_Yehuda Amichai_

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can't get rid of it.
They throw stones, throw stones at me
In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988,
Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites,
Evil men throw and just men throw,
Sinners throw and tempters throw,
Geologists throw and theologists throw,
Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw,
Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw,
Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone,
Stones shaped like a screaming mouth
And stones fitting your eyes
Like a pair of glasses,
The past throws stones at the future,
And all of them fall on the present.
Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones,
Even God in the Bible threw stones,
Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown
And got stuck in the beastplate of justice,
And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple.

Oh, the poem of stone sadness
Oh, the poem thrown on the stones
Oh, the poem of thrown stones.
Is there in this land
A stone that was never thrown
And never built and never overturned
And never uncovered and never discovered
And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders
And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers
And never turned into a cornerstone?

Please do not throw any more stones,
You are moving the land,
The holy, whole, open land,
You are moving it to the sea
And the sea doesn't want it
The sea says, not in me.

Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Dec 13, 2004)

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop


I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly -
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little,  but not 
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping 
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw 
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip -
grim, wet and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared 
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels - until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.


----------



## fanta (Dec 15, 2004)

There was a young girl from Mauritius
Who said 'that last ride was delicious!'
But, the next time you come
Do it up me bum
Because that scab on your cock looks suspicious.


----------



## jonny12 (Dec 16, 2004)

From a lovely collection called Out of Danger:- 

Hinterhof by James Fenton 

Stay near to me and I'll stay near to you, 
As near as you are dear to me will do, 
Near as the rainbow to the rain, 
The west wind to the windowpane, 
As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew. 

Stay true to me and I'll stay true to you, 
As true as you are new to me will do, 
New as the rainbow in the spray, 
Utterly new in every way, 
New in the way that what you say is true. 

Stay near to me, stay true to me. I'll stay 
As near, as true to you as heart could pray. 
Heart never hoped that one might be 
Half of the things you are to me, 
The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2004)

*The Cartridges*

You sleep weightless in my palm, the revolver
I smuggled across eleven borders
hidden in my raincoat, hidden from my wife
my children, myself. But now we are

alone with the radio and its cries 
in the off-season villa by the shore, 
so into this chapel of banalities 
I give you my hand, I give you my life.

Six little .22 long-rifle slugs 
golden-haloed like guardian angels, 
their glum faces grease-smeared, are on the table 
posed on a sheet of pure typing paper.

At home in California my rifle, 
closeted now and bandaged in a torn sheet, 
they would mean nothing, the final opening 
of a rabbit brain, the release of clichés,

the release of gases, animal pain, 
or the tearing of glass. Nothing at all. 
Here in my numbed fingers, one by one, 
I take them up and give them to their stations.

First you, my little American, you bring 
reports of everything I left behind, 
and you, the hope of middle age, the game 
I play with sleep when sleep is everything.

And you, stupid, are a black hole in the air 
and nothing more. I refuse to explain. 
And you, all of whose names are simply Spain, 
and every pure act I don?t dare.

This one has no name and no nation 
and has been with me from the start. And you, 
finally, you have a name I will not name, a face 
I cannot face, you could be music, you
could be the music of snow on the warm plain 
of Michigan, you could be my voice 
calling to me at last, calling me out of Spain, 
calling me home, home, home, at any price.

 Phillip Levine


----------



## fanta (Dec 23, 2004)

The Toys

MY little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'

By Coventry Patmore.


----------



## maya (Jan 4, 2005)

- This is my favourite poem, by one of my favourite UK poets, Lemn Sissay...
[EDIT: nice to see another poem posted by him earlier, he's one of the best working today, imo...!]
***

ARCHITECTURE

Each cloud wants to be a storm
My tap water wants to be a river
The match wants to be an explosive
Each reflection wants to be real

Each joker wants to be a comedian
Each breeze wants to be a hurricane
Each drizzled rain wants to be torrential
Each laugh wants to come from the belly instead of the throat
Each yawn wants to hug the sky

Each kiss wants to be penetrative
Each piss wants to be a water spurter
Each handshake wants to be a love hug

Dont’t you don’t you don’t you see
How close we are to torrents and explosions and all
things out of control

Each wave wants to be a smooth stroke on the forehead
Each cry wants to be a scream
Each carefully pressed suit wants to be creased
Each melting icicle wants to be a glacier

Each mad,midnight frost wants to be a snow-drift
Each mother wants to be a close friend
Each enemy wants to kill you and drink your blood
Each nighttime wants to strangle the day
Each scar wants to grow so you remember
Each broken piece of plate wants to lodge in the centre flesh of your knee

Don’t you don’t you don’t you see
Each wave wants to be tidal
Each subtext wants to be a title
Each winter wants to be the big freeze

Each summer wants to be a drought
Each autumn brown wants to be a burning cold
Each polite disagreement wants to be a vicious denial
Each diplomatic smile wants to be a one-fingered tribute to tactfulness

Don’t you don’t you don’t you see how close we are to
Torrents and explosions and all things out of control

***


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 11, 2005)

If Not, Not

They tell each other stories,
lies composed as dreams and
always in the colors of
dreams: rust, chrome yellow, coral,
chemical green. Of the dying
figures, loosely assembled, by a
riverbank.  The gatehouse.  A journey
by train through beautiful countryside,
indescribable countryside. I was there
cut in half, only to
survive. A young dancer, standing
at the third-floor window. Cobalt
blue, argentine, bone white. What
we called that hour in
those days. He means to
say that on that same
hill Goethe and Eckermann would
sometimes walk. "Always the old
story, always the old bed
of the sea!" He means
to say, The music of
moths, the small lamps. She
stares from the window on
the third floor, toward the
square below. He says, These
are yellow-hammers and sparrows, but
there are no larks. Come
Whitsuntide, the mockingbird and the
yellow thrush will arrive. Here
at the heart, a small
pond, stagnant in the shadow
of smoke. The late flowers.

_ Michael Palmer_ (from Four Kitaj Studies)

See this


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jan 12, 2005)

*Clerihew*

_Whenever Xantippe
Wasn't feeling too chippy
She would bawl at Socrates
"Why aren't you Harpocrates?"_

- WH Auden


----------



## Ace (Jan 17, 2005)

Green




 Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches  
 Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.  
 Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches  
 Et qu'à vos yeux si beaux l'humble présent soit doux.  

J'arrive tout couvert encore de rosée  
 Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front.  
 Souffrez que ma fatigue à vos pieds reposée  
 Rêve des chers instants qui la délasseront.  

 Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête   Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers  
 Laissez-la s'apaiser de la bonne tempête  
 Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.


----------



## Jelly (Jan 18, 2005)

My son's favourite. I think it's the rhythm that gets him, the faster you say it the wider he smiles.


From a Railway Carriage
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Faster than fairies, faster than witches, 
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; 
And charging along like troops in a battle, 
All through the meadows, the horses and cattle: 
All of the sights of the hill and the plain 
Fly as thick as driving rain; 
And ever again, in the wink of an eye, 
Painted stations whistle by. 

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles, 
All by himself and gathering brambles; 
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; 
And there is the green for stringing the daisies! 
Here is a cart run away on the road 
Lumping along with man and load; 
And here is a mill and there is a river: 
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!


----------



## Ace (Jan 20, 2005)

I love this poem, with the deep criss-crossing historical references; to Elizabeth I's recent illness; a lunar eclipse recently prophised by soothsayers as catastrophic, but which was benign, to the cresent moon formation of the illfated Spanish Armada, and the relief felt at the recently confirmed succession to James I. 

And yet Shakespeare seems to fit all this perfectly into a personal statement of enduring love and its seeming ability to "cheat" time and ultimately death; and ultimately the power of language and art in the face of constantly changing circumstances and natural decay. Balmy time refers to the anointed state of kings, which is quickly suceeded by the shifting  paradox of "love looking fresh" as "death to me subscribes." 

Of course its ironic as are the twisting inversions at the poems climax with turn "power" to "tryanny" and the earlier speechlessness of the prophetic soul to an impotent and dark silence, such as might reign in the "savage" lands the Elizabethan sailors were opening up. 

I would argue that the true subject and energy of this poem derives as much from the majesterial opening lines as it does in the more conventionally ascribed final appeal to the capacity of art to perserve human love. That's the mystery, the power and the tension; the delicate balance between historical cosmic and love elements that make this a very special poem in the Sonnets where the poet appears to be triumphant in his art but is in fact, by the sheer rush of the art, being overwhelmed by a colliding succession of cosmic force. 

I think. 

*Sonnet 107

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul  
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, 
Can yet the lease of my true love control, 
Supposed as forfeit to a confin'd doom. 
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,  
And the sad augurs mock their own presage; 
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 
Now with the drops of this most balmy time, 
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,  
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rime, 
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes: 
And thou in this shalt find thy monument* 

When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent


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## RubyToogood (Jan 31, 2005)

*Diougan Gwenc'hlan*
_(Gwenc'hlan's Prophecy)_


At the setting of the sun, when the sea swells,
I sing on the threshold of my door.

I have sung since the day I was born.

I sing night and day
But my heart is sad

It is not without reason that my head is low
And that my heart is sad

Not that I am afraid
I have no fear of being killed

Not that I am afraid
For I have lived enough

When they do not look for me, they will find me
When they look for me, they will not find me.

It matters little what is to come.
That which must be, will be

Everyone must die three times
Before finding peace.


__________________________

Gwenc'hlan was a fifth century Breton bard. A foreign prince pursued him, gouged out his eyes, and threw him into a dungeon where he died. The prince died shortly afterwards on the field of battle "by the blows of Bretons and the prophetic curse of Gwenc'hlan". He is said to have written the prophecy from his dungeon. (Trans badly by me from Breton via French - and if anyone can translate the French word "garderaisen" for me, I can translate the rest of it too <edit> sussed it - part two tomorrow, part three the next day.) Here's the original Breton of the above piece, just to look at:

Pa guzh an heol, pa goeñv ar mor
Me 'oar kanañ war dreuz ma dor

Pa oan yaouank me a gane
Pa 'z on deut kozh, me 'gan ivez.

Me 'gan en noz, me 'gan en deiz
Ha me keuziet bras koulskoude.

Mar d-eo ganin stouet ma beg,
Mar 'm eus keuz n'eo ket hep abeg

Evit aon me n'em eus ket,
'N eus ket aon da vout lazhet;

Evit aon me n'em eus ket,
Amzer a-walc'h ez on-me bet.

Pan n' vin ket klastet 'vin kavet;
Met pa'z on klastet ned on ket

Ne vern petra a c'oarvezo
Pezh a zo dleet a vezo:

Ret eo d'an holl mervel teir gwezh
Kent evit arzav en diwezh.


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## Ace (Jan 31, 2005)

Dat's lovely


----------



## RubyToogood (Jan 31, 2005)

You should hear it sung


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jan 31, 2005)

Ace said:
			
		

> Dat's lovely


What, "everyone must die three times before finding peace"? That's grim even by my standards.


----------



## dirtysanta (Jan 31, 2005)

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Ive got dyslexia
so shlum badr oooeescvv


----------



## RubyToogood (Jan 31, 2005)

There's always one.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Jan 31, 2005)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> if anyone can translate the French word "garderaisen" for me


Can't find my Larousse or my Hachette at the moment, but it's very close to the German for Horse Guard.....


----------



## RubyToogood (Jan 31, 2005)

No, it's ok, I figured it out: it's just (je) garderai (I will keep) with a surplus "sen" on it for no apparent reason. Actually looking at it again it's a misprint for "je garderai en".


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## RubyToogood (Feb 1, 2005)

*Gwenc’hlan’s Prophecy*

Part Two

I see the wild boar come out of the wood.
He limps low, his foot wounded,

His jaws open, full of blood,
His hair blanched with age.

Around him his young squeal with hunger.

I see the sea horse coming to him -
The shore trembles with fear.

A horse as white as snow;
Two silver horns shine on its forehead.

The flood boils beneath its hooves,
From its nostrils lightning flashes.

Other sea horses surround it,
As thickly as grass on the banks of a pond.

Hold fast, sea horse, hold fast!
Strike the head, strike hard!

Bare feet slip in the blood.
Harder, strike harder still!

I see a river of blood flowing,
Strike with all your strength, strike now, strike harder still!

I see the blood rising knee high.
I see a pool of blood.

Harder, strike harder still!

Strike the head, sea horse,
Strike with all your might!


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## RubyToogood (Feb 2, 2005)

*Gwenc’hlan’s Prophecy*

Part Three

As I found myself quietly sleeping in my cold tomb,
I heard the eagle cry in the middle of the night

Calling his eaglets and all the birds of the sky, telling them:
“Rise up! Fly quickly!

“It’s not the rotten flesh of dog or ewe,
It’s the flesh of a christian we must have!”

“Answer me, old crow of the sea,
What have you got there?”

“It’s the head of the chieftain!
I want to have his two red eyes

“I tear out his eyes
As he tore out yours.”

“And you, fox,
What have you taken?”

“I have taken his heart -
As cruel as mine -

“Which desired your death
And killed you long ago.”

“And you, toad, tell me:
What are you doing by the corner of his mouth?”

“I have stationed myself here
Because I am waiting for his soul on its passage.

“I will keep it inside me as long as I live,
In punishment of a crime he committed

“Against the bard who lived
Between the hill of Alarc’h and the red port.”


----------



## Ace (Feb 15, 2005)

*Of The Spirit*

I SIT here you know I just sit here wondering what to do an my belly goes and my nerves are really on edge and I don't know what the fuck I'm to do it's something to about I try to think about it while my head is going an sometimes this brings it back but only for a spell then suddenly I'm aware again of the feeling like a knife in the pit of my guts it's a worry I get worried about it because I know I should be doing things there are things needing doing I know I know I know it well but just can't bring myself to do them it isnt even as though thre is that something that I can bring myself to do for it that was true it would be there I would be there and not having to worry about it at this stage my muscles go altogether and there's aches downt the sides of my body they are actual aches and also under my arms at the shoulder my armpits there are aches and I think what I know about early warning signs the early-warning signal of the dickey heart is that it feels like that it is the warning about impending strokes and death because also my chest is like that the pains at each side and stretching from there down the sides of my body as if I am hunched right over the workbench with a case of the snapped digestion the kind that has dissolved from the centre but still is there round the edges and I try to take myself out of it I think about a hundred and one things all different things different sorts of things the sort of things you can think about as an average adult human being with an ordinary job and family the countless things and doing this can ease the aches for a time it can make me feel calm a bit as though things are coming under control due to thinking it all through really I am in control and able to consider things objectively as if I'm going daft or something but this is what it's like as if just my head's packed it in and I'm stranded there with this head full of nothing and with all that  sort of dithering it'd make you think about you've got it so that sometimes I wish my hands were clamps like the kind joiners use and I could fasten them onto the sides of my head and then apply the thumbscrews so everything starts squeezing and squeezing


I try not to think about it too much because that doesn't pay you don't have to tell me I know it far too well already then I wouldn't be bothering otherwise I wouldn't be bothering but just sitting here and not bothering but just with my head all screwed up and not a single idea or thought but just maybe the aches and pains, that physicality



James Kelman 1987


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## maya (Feb 17, 2005)

*!*

...Ruby, those "Breton bard"-poems are great!


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## Hollis (Feb 18, 2005)

ALWAYS EAT YOUR BOGIES by Andrew Collett

Always eat your bogies
don't wipe them on your clothes,
just gulp them down in one
as you pick them from your nose.

For they're full of crunchy goodness
they're best when green and long,
so always eat your bogies
and you'll grow up big and strong.


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## bmd (Feb 28, 2005)

James Kelman. Love his short stories.

I've searched the thread and haven't found this one so here it is. 

John Donne: For Whom The Bell Tolls.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.


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## articul8 (Mar 30, 2005)

Try this one, "Refuse Collection" by the legendary J.H. Prynne, written in response to Abu Ghraib:

http://www.geocities.com/barque_press/quid13.html 

Enjoy


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## Mrs Magpie (Apr 3, 2005)

*Two poems that belong together by Philip Larkin*

*TOADS*

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.


*TOADS REVISITED*


Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
Nor friends but empty chairs -

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.


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## Mrs Magpie (Apr 3, 2005)

I posted the two poems above for Missus Scott as we were discussing this theme in the loos at the editors birthday bash.


I know it's one poem a day, but I think it's important to read the two together....the first sees work as a curse, but the second (written much later) sees work in a mellower perspective.


----------



## ngeru (Apr 3, 2005)

Many thanks Mrs M!


----------



## Groucho (Apr 3, 2005)

*Stevie Smith*

Aloft 
In the loft
Sits Croft
He is soft


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## Donna Ferentes (Apr 10, 2005)

*Manet and Monet and Marx and Freud*

_In which all outstanding problems of art history are settled to everyone’s satisfaction._

What mattered more for Manet and Monet,
That Manet had money or Monet had manners?
Mattered to what, pray? Mattered to whom?
To Monet’s manner, or just Manet’s mother?
And what do you mean by that bad-mannered ‘just’?

What matters more to a man than his mother?
What matters more to a manner than money?
We know Monet’s manner was dependent on Manet,
Maybe even his manners; and his manners meant marriage,
And money for Manets and many things more.
So did Manet matter more to Monet than mother?
(I mean Monet’s mother, though Manet’s might do.)
It depends, does it not, on the meaning of ‘matter’,
And what money meant to a man without means.

We know Madame Monet was once painted by Manet
(The Madame I mean was the first Monet married,
The one without money, the one that died young);
She was shown with her son on the grass in the garden,
The proud mother of Monets, as Monet looked on;
And the picture was done in a manner like Monet’s,
Or a manner his mother would not have thought Manet’s,
A manner, indeed, she might have thought mad
(I mean Manet’s mother, though Monet’s might do).

Maybe maternity always is manifold,
And manners are matters that mothers decree,
In which case this painting’s not Manet’s or Monet’s,
But Madame’s or mother’s. (And what matters more
Than putting an end to that mad either/or?)
Better say simply he did it for Monet
(Though the market that moment had moved Monet’s way).

Marx would have said these are all money matters,
Freud would have said it depends what that means.
There is never an end to the meanings of money,
The madness of matter, the meanness of mothers,
Otherwise why would man ‘A’ be a Manet,
And man ‘B’ be a Monet, manner and all?

Manet and Monet may be nothing but manners,
But what manners! What Monets! What need there be more?
What’s money? What’s Manet? It’s Manets that matter:
The way that their matter is made to have meaning,
Manually, maddeningly, matter-of-factly.
What matters is manner. It’s manner that means.

_TJ Clark_


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 11, 2005)

On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.

I am told that you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher. 
After eight years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.

Empires collapse. Gang leaders
are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments. 

So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.

_Brecht_

(W.B of course being the Jewish Walter Benjamin who killed himself on the France-Spain border in 1940 when refused admittance to Spain and facing the Nazis).


----------



## qwerty777 (Apr 12, 2005)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


----------



## bluestreak (Apr 12, 2005)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> No song lyrics or stuff you've written yourself (we can have other threads for those).



but its quite interesting.  if you can get it to scan better and deal with the rhythmical flow so it kind of builds to the end point then you've got an interesting and entertaining bit of work there.


----------



## qwerty777 (Apr 12, 2005)

*Originally Posted by RubyToogood
No song lyrics or stuff you've written yourself (we can have other threads for those). * 

In that case i apologise and shall delete it forthwith.......


----------



## Derek Raymond (Apr 12, 2005)

*They Are All Gone into the World of Light!*

_They are all gone into the world of light!
    And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
    And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast
    Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dressed
  After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
    Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
    Mere glimmering and decays.

O holy hope! and high humility,
    High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have shown them me
    To kindle my cold love.

 Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just, 
      Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
    Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know
     At first sight if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
     That is to him unknown. 

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
    Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
    And into glory peep.

If a star were confined into a tomb,
     Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that locked her up gives room,
    She'll shine through all the sphere.

O Father of eternal life, and all
     Created glories under Thee!
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
    Into true liberty!

Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
     My perspective still as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
    Where I shall need no glass. _


This poem is by* Henry Vaughan* (1622 - 1695)

I am not at all religious and do not believe in the afterlife but still find these words intensely moving. The yearning to understand what cannot be understood, the sense of life passing without being aware of its meaning, the silence of the dead - I could go on...


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## circumspect (Apr 29, 2005)

this poem by UA Fanthopre is written in response to a painting by Uccello of a knight on horseback rescuing a damsel from a dragon. its from the p.o.v. of the 3 subjects in the painting. 

NOT MY BEST SIDE


I 

Not my best side, I'm afraid.
The artist didn't give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn't comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don't mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously. 

II 

It's hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It's nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn't much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon —
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl's got to think of her future. 

III 

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can't
Do better than me at the moment.
I'm qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don't you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don't
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don't you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You're in my way. 

U.A. Fanthorpe. 
the link to the painting is below - i hope it works, im  rubbish at this!
javascript:ViewImage('http://www.saltana.com.ar/1/docar/uccello_large.jpg',491,382,'Sant%20Jordi%20i%20el%20dragÛ,%20Uccello')


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Apr 29, 2005)

Couldn't get that to work....but here's another link to that pic...

http://www.doudou.org/images/uccello-georges1.jpg


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## circumspect (Apr 29, 2005)

Mrs Magpie said:
			
		

> Couldn't get that to work....but here's another link to that pic...
> 
> http://www.doudou.org/images/uccello-georges1.jpg



Thank you Mrs M!!


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## butchersapron (Jun 9, 2005)

*If We Must Die*

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accurséd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

_Claude McKay_


----------



## fanta (Jun 9, 2005)

Nice one butchers.

_Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen. It was during those days that the sonnet, "If We Must Die," exploded out of me..._

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mustdie.htm


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## onemonkey (Jun 15, 2005)

*The Destruction of Sennacherib - Byron*

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!


----------



## onemonkey (Jun 17, 2005)

Of course I love you
but if you love me,
marry a young woman!

I couldn't stand it
to live with a young
man, I being older

		Sappho
		tr. Barnard


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 18, 2005)

_Carl Sandburg_

Ready to Kill

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.	
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.	
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general	
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.	
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.	        
I put it straight to you,	
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,	
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,	
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us	
Something to eat and something to wear,	        
When they stack a few silhouettes	
        Against the sky	
        Here in the park,	
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,	
Then maybe I will stand here	        
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,	
And riding like hell on horseback	
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,	
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.


----------



## sacx (Jun 18, 2005)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> _Carl Sandburg_
> 
> Ready to Kill
> 
> ...



So good I quoted it.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 19, 2005)

I'm not sure if I think it's a particularly brilliant poem as a poem (although in a way its non-poeticness was probably quite radical for its time (1916)), but I appreciate its viewpoint, and I was very interested to realise that a poet I've come to like was a bit of a radical socialist before he got co-opted into the establishment, awarded the Pulitzer Prize etc. I did a bit of reading up on him earlier. He wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln in six volumes later in life. It was said "The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

General CS info
Stuff about his politics


----------



## onemonkey (Jun 20, 2005)

Grass - Carl Sandburg


Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work---
                    I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                    What place is this?
                    Where are we now?

                    I am the grass.
                    Let me work.






------
hmm, i see what you mean.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 21, 2005)

Oh well I quite liked that one myself.

He does say in one of his letters to Amy Lowell (in the article I linked to) "maybe I have struck a propaganda rather than a human note at times". The article takes that as evidence of him selling out but perhaps it's true. Is politics the enemy of poetry? Discuss.

Anyway.

Fog

THE FOG comes	
on little cat feet.	

It sits looking	
over harbor and city	
on silent haunches	        
and then moves on.

_Carl Sandburg again_


----------



## butterfly child (Jun 21, 2005)

onemonkey said:
			
		

> Grass - Carl Sandburg
> 
> 
> Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
> ...



I was rather moved by that one.


----------



## R.I.C.O. (Jun 21, 2005)

*...*

Girlfriend in a Coma - by Armando Ianucci

_Girlfriend In A Coma
With a face like Martina Naratilova
When She serves to stay in the match
Oh Yeah_


----------



## onemonkey (Jun 23, 2005)

*more grass!*

_A Unison  -	William Carlos Williams_

The grass is very green, my friend,
and tousled, like the head of ---
your grandson, yes? And the mountain,
the mountain we climbed
twenty years since for the last
time (I write this thinking
of you) is saw-horned as then
upon the sky's edge --- an old barn
is peaked there also, fatefully,
against the sky. And there it is
and we can't shift it or change
it or parse it or alter it
in any way. *Listen! Do you not hear
them? the singing?* There it is and
we'd better acknowledge it and
write it down, not otherwise.
Not twist the words to mean
what we should have said but to mean
--- what cannot be escaped: the
mountain riding the afternoon as
it does, the grass matted green,
green underfoot and the air ---
rotten wood. *Hear! Hear them!
the Undying.* The hill slopes away,
then rises in the middleground,
you remember, with a grove of gnarled
maples centering the bare pasture,
sacred, surely --- for what reason?
I cannot say? Idyllic!
a shrine cinctured there by
the trees, a certainty of music!
a unison and a dance, joined
at this death's festival: Something
of a shed snake's skin, the beginning
goldenrod. Or, best, a white stone,
you have seen it: *Mathilda Maria
Fox* --- and near the ground's lip,
all but undecipherable, *Aet Suae
Anno 9* --- still there, the grass
dripping of last night's rain --- and
welcome! The thin air, the near,
clear brook water! --- and could not,
and died, unable; to escape
what the air and the wet grass ---
through which, tomorrow, bejeweled,
the great sun will rise --- the
unchanging mountains, forced on them ---
and they received, willingly!
Stones, stones of a difference
joing the ohters, at pace. *Hear!
Hear the unison of their voices. . . .*


----------



## sacx (Jun 24, 2005)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> I'm not sure if I think it's a particularly brilliant poem as a poem (although in a way its non-poeticness was probably quite radical for its time (1916)), but I appreciate its viewpoint, and I was very interested to realise that a poet I've come to like was a bit of a radical socialist before he got co-opted into the establishment, awarded the Pulitzer Prize etc. I did a bit of reading up on him earlier. He wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln in six volumes later in life. It was said "The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."



I'm not really interested in poems as brilliant poems I'll leave all that to someone who prefers to ignore the words and instead concentrate on the structure. If the words move me in some way, stir up some kind of reaction, strike a chord through the banality of everyday life then it's poetry for me.


----------



## sacx (Jun 24, 2005)

Bread and Roses
By James Oppenheim
1882-1932 


As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, 
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray 
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, 
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses." 

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men -- 
For they are women's children, and we mother them again. 
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes -- 
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses. 

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead 
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread; 
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew -- 
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for Roses, too. 

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days -- 
The rising of the women means the rising of the race -- 
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes -- 
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.


----------



## black dwarf (Jun 25, 2005)

Ezra Pound - The Tree  

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.


----------



## _angel_ (Jun 26, 2005)

Got this in an email today. Apologies if you've seen it before:

Spell chequer
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

A soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long.
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh threw
My chequer tolled me sew.
anon


----------



## maya (Jun 26, 2005)

Maddalene said:
			
		

> Got this in an email today. Apologies if you've seen it before:
> 
> Spell chequer
> Eye halve a spelling chequer
> ...


..."spam poetry"??


----------



## onemonkey (Jun 29, 2005)

*third (and final ?) poem about grass!!!!*

_GRASS  - 		Walt Whitman_

A child said *What is the grass?* fetching to to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff
	woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name some way in the corners, that we may see and remark,
	and say *Whose?*
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the
	same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breats of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their
	mother's laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the off-spring taken soon out of
	their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to
	arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jun 30, 2005)

NO CHOICE

I think about you
in as many ways as rain comes.

(I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphors - their exactness
and their inadequacy.)

Sometimes these thoughts are
a moistness, hardly falling, than which
nothing is more gentle:
sometimes, a rattling shower, a
bustling Spring-cleaning of the mind:
sometimes, a drowning downpour.

I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphor,
to love gentleness,
to fear downpours.


Norman MacCaig


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2005)

Wanted to a long one today, to commemerate the death of Bakunin and to offer good luck to those going up the G8:

*THOU SHALT NOT KILL*

They are murdering all the young men.
For half a century now, every day,
They have hunted them down and killed them.
They are killing them now.
At this minute, all over the world,
The are killing the young men.
They know ten thousand ways to kill them.
Every year they invent new ones.
In the jungles of Africa,
In the marshes of Asia,
In the deserts of Asia,
In the slave pens of Siberia,
In the slums of Europe,
In the nightclubs of America,
The murderers are at work.

They are stoning Stephen,
They are casting him forth from every city in the world.
Under the Welcome sign,
Under the Rotary emblem,
On the highway in the suburbs,
His body lies under the hurling stones.
He was full of faith and power.
He did great wonders among the people.
They could not stand against his wisdom.
They could not bear that spirit with which he spoke.
He cried out in the name
Of the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness.
They were cut to the heart.
They gnashed against him with their teeth.
They cried out with a loud voice.
They stopped their ears.
They ran on him with one accord.
They cast him out of the city and stoned him,
The witnesses laid down their clothes
At the feet of the man whose name was your name-
You.

You are the murderer.
You are killing the young men.
You are broiling Lawrence on his gridiron.
When you demand he divulge
The hidden treasures of the spirit,
He showed you the poor.
You set your heart against him.
You seized him and bound him with rage.
You roasted him on a slow fire.
His fat dripped and spurted in the flame.
The smell was sweet to your nose.
He cried out,
"I am cooked on this side, 
turn me over and eat,
You
Eat of my flesh."

You are murdering the young men.
You are shooting Sebastian with arrows.
He kept the faithful steadfast under persecution.
First you shot him with arrows.
Then you beat him with rods.
Then you threw him in a sewer.
You fear nothing more then courage.
You who turn away your eyes
At the bravery of the young men.

You,
The hyena with polished face and bow tie,
In the office of a billion dollar
Corporation devoted to service;
The vulture dripping with carrion,
Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,
Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;
The jackal in double-breasted gabardine,
Barking by remote control,
In the United Nations;
The vampire bat seated at the couch head,
Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;
The autonomous, ambulatory cancer,
The superego in a thousand uniforms;
You, the finger man of behemoth,
The murderer of the young men.

         II

What happened to Robinson,
Who used to stagger down eighth Street,
Dizzy with solitary in?
Where is Masters, who crouched in
His law office for ruinous decades?
Where is Leonard who thought he was
A locomotive? And Lindsay,
Wise as a dove, innocent
As a serpent, where is he?
         Timor mortis conturbat me.

What became of Jim Oppenheim?
Lola Ridge alone in an
Icy unfurnished room? Orrick Johns,
Hopping into the surf on his
One leg? Elinor Wylie
Who leaped like Kierkegaard?
Sara Teasdale, where is she?
         Timor mortis conturbat me.

Where is George Sterling, that tame fawn?
Phelps Putnam who stole away?
Jack Wheelwright who couldn't cross the bridge?
Donald Evans with his cane and 
Monocle, where is he?
       Timor mortis conturbat me.

John Gould Fletcher who could not
Unbreak his powerful heart?
Bodenheim butchered in stinking
Squalor? Edna Millay who took
Her last straight whiskey? Genevieve
Who loved so much; where is she?
      Tomor mortis conturbat me.

Harry who didn't care at all?
Hart who went back to sea?
       Timor mortis conturbat me.

Where is Sol Funaroff?
What happened to Potamkin?
Isidor Schneider? Claude Mckay?
Countee Cullen? Clarence Weinstock?
Who animates their corpses today?
     Timor mortis conturbat me.

 Where is Ezra, that noisy man?
Where is Larsson whose poems were prayers?
Where is Charles Snider, that gentle
Bitter boy? Carnevali.
What became of him?
Carol who was so beautiful, where is she?
        Timor mortis conturbat me.

    III
Was their end noble and tragic,
Like the mask of a tyrant?
Like Agamemnon's secret golden face?
Indeed it was not. Up all night
In the fo'c'sle, bemused and beaten,
Bleeding at the rectum, in his
Pocket a review by the one
Colleague he respected, "If he
Really means what these poems
Pretend to say, he has only
One way out-." Into the
Hot acrid Caribbean sun,
Into the acrid, transparent,
Smoky sea. Or another, lice in his 
Armpits and crotch, garbage littered
On the floor, gray greasy rags on
The bed. "I killed them because they 
Were dirty stinking Communists.
I should get a medal." Again, 
Another Simenon foretold,
His end at a glance. "I dare you
To pull the trigger." She shut her eyes 
And spilled gin over her dress.
The pistol wobbled in his hand.
It took them hours to die.
Another threw herself downstairs,
And broke her back. I took her years.
Two put their heads under water
In the bath and filled their lungs.
Another threw himself under
The traffic of a crowded bridge.
Another, drunk, jumped from a 
Balcony and broke her neck.
Another soaked herself in
Gasoline and ran blazing
Into the street and lived on
In custody. One made love
Only once with a beggar woman,
He died years later of syphilis
Of the brain and spine. Fifteen
Years of pain and poverty,
while his mind leaked away.
One tried three times in twenty years
To drown himself. The last time
He succeeded. One turned on the gas
When she had no more food, no more
Money, and only half a lung.
One went up to Harlem, took on
Thirty men, came home and
Cut her throat. One sat up all night
Talking to H.L. Mencken and
Drowned himself in the morning.
How many stopped writing at thirty?
How many went to work for Time?
How many died of prefrontal
Lobotomies in the Communist party?
How many are lost in the back wards
Of provincial madhouses?
How many on the advice of
their psychoanalysts, decided
A business career was best after all?
How many are hopeless alcoholics?
Rene Crevel!
Antonin Riguad!
Antonin Artaud!
Mayakofsky!
Essenin!
Robert Desnos!
Saint Paul Roux!
Max Jacob!
All over the world
The same disembodies hand
Strikes us down.
Here is a mountain of death.
A hill of heads like the Khans piled up.
The first-born of a century
Slaughtered by Herod.
Three generations of infants
Stuffed down the maw of Moloch.

     IV
He is dead.
The birth of Rhiannon.
He is dead.
In the winter of the heart.
He is dead,
In the canyons of death,
They found him dumb at last,
In the blizzard of lies.
He never spoke again.
He died.
He is dead.
In their antiseptic hands,
He is dead.
The little spellbinder of Cader Idris.
He is dead.
The sparrow of Cardiff.
He is dead.
The canary of Swansea.
Who killed him?
Who killed the bright-headed bird?
You did, you son of a bitch.
You drowned him in you cocktail brain.
He fell down and died in your synthetic heart.
You killed him,
Oppenheimer the Million-Killer,
You killed him,
Einstein the Gray Eminence.
You killed him,
Havanahavana, with your Nobel Prize.
You killed him, General,
Through the proper channels.
You strangled him, Le Mouton,
With your mains entendues.
He confessed in open court to a pince-nezed skull.
You shot him in the back of the head
As he stumbled in the last cellar.
You killed him,
Benign Lady on the postage stamp.
He was found dead at a Liberal Weekly luncheon,
He was found dead on the cutting room floor.
He was found dead at a Time policy conference.
Henry Luce killed him with a telegram to the Pope.
Mademoiselle strangled him with a padded brassiere.
Old Possum sprinkled him with a tea ball.
After the wolves were done, the vaticides
Crawled off with his bowels to their classrooms 
      and quarterlies.
When the news came over the radio
You personally rose up shouting, "Give us Barabbas!"
In your lonely crowd you swept over him.
Your custom build brogans and your ballet slippers
Pummeled him to death in the gritty street.
You hit him with an album of Hindemith.
You stabbed him with stainless steel by Isamu Noguchi,
He is dead.
He is Dead.
Like Ignacio the bullfighter,
At four o'clock in the afternoon.
At precisely four o'clock.
I too do not want to hear it.
I too do not want to know it.
I want to run into the street 
Shouting, "Remember Vanzetti!"
I want to pour gasoline down your chimneys.
I want to blow up your galleries.
I want to burn down you editorial offices.
I want to slit the bellies of your frigid women.
I want to sink your sailboats and launches.
I want to strangle your children at their finger paintings.
I want to poison your afghans and poodles.
He is dead, the little drunken cherub.
He is dead,
The effulgent tub thumper,
He is dead.
The ever living birds are not singing
To the head of Bran.
The sea birds are still
Over Bardsey of Ten Thousand Saints,
The underground men are not singing
On their way to work.
There is a smell of blood
In the smell of turf smoke.
They have struck him down,
The son of David ap Gwilym.
They have murdered him,
The baby of Taliessin.
There he lies dead,
By the iceberg of the United Nations.
There he lies sandbagged,
At the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
The Gulf Stream smells of blood
As it breaks on the sand of Iona
And the blue rocks of Canarvon.
And all the birds of the deep sea rise up
Over the luxury liners and scream,
"You killed him! You killed him.
In your god damned Brooks Brothers suit,
You son of a bitch." 

_Kenneth Rexroth_


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 5, 2005)

_                        John Donne
                              The Ecstasy_

               Where, like a pillow on a bed,
                 A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
               The violet's reclining head,
                 Sat we two, one another's best.
               Our hands were firmly cemented
                 By a fast balm, which thence did spring;
               Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
                 Our eyes upon one double string;
               So t' entergraft our hands, as yet
                 Was all the means to make us one;
               And pictures in our eyes to get
                 Was all our propagation.
               As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
                 Suspends uncertain victory,
               Our souls (which to advance their state
                 Were gone out) hung 'twixt her, and me.
               And whilst our souls negotiate there,
                 We like sepulchral statues lay;
               All day, the same our postures were,
                 And we said nothing, all the day.
               If any, so by love refin'd,
                 That he soul's language understood,
               And by good love were grown all mind,
                 Within convenient distance stood,
               He (though he knew not which soul spake,
                 Because both meant, both spake the same)
               Might thence a new concoction take,
                 And part far purer than he came.
               This ecstasy doth unperplex
                 (We said) and tell us what we love;
               We see by this, it was not sex;
                 We see, we saw not what did move:
               But as all several souls contain
                 Mixture of things, they know not what,
               Love, these mix'd souls, doth mix again,
                 And makes both one, each this and that.
               A single violet transplant,
                 The strength, the colour, and the size
               (All which before was poor and scant
                 Redoubles still, and multiplies.
               When love with one another so
                 Interanimates two souls,
               That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
                 Defects of loneliness controls.
               We then, who are this new soul, know,
                 Of what we are compos'd, and made,
               For th'atomies of which we grow,
                 Are souls, whom no change can invade.
               But, O alas! so long, so far
                 Our bodies why do we forbear?
               They are ours, though not we; we are
                 Th'intelligences, they the sphere.
               We owe them thanks, because they thus
                 Did us, to us, at first convey,
               Yielded their senses' force to us,
                 Nor are dross to us, but allay.
               On man heaven's influence works not so,
                 But that it first imprints the air;
               For soul into the soul may flow,
                 Though it to body first repair.
               As our blood labours to beget
                 Spirits, as like souls as it can,
               Because such fingers need to knit
                 That subtle knot, which makes us man;
               So must pure lovers' souls descend
                 T' affections, and to faculties,
               Which sense may reach and apprehend,
                 Else a great prince in prison lies.
               To'our bodies turn we then, that so
                 Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
               Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
                 But yet the body is his book.
               And if some lover, such as we,
                 Have heard this dialogue of one,
               Let him still mark us, he shall see
                 Small change when we're to bodies gone.


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 6, 2005)

Sleep on horseback,
The far moon in a continuing dream,
Steam of roasting tea.

-Basho


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 8, 2005)

In these latter-day,
Degenerate times,
   Cherry-blossoms everywhere!

- Issa


----------



## lang rabbie (Jul 9, 2005)

Novelist Ian McEwan mentioned this poem, which I last read fifteen years ago, in his op-ed piece for yesterday's New York Times, 




			
				Ian McEwan said:
			
		

> In Auden's famous poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," the tragedy of Icarus falling from the sky is accompanied by life simply refusing to be disrupted. A plowman goes about his work, a ship "sailed calmly on," dogs keep on with "their doggy life."
> 
> In London yesterday, where crowds fumbling with mobile phones tried to find unimpeded ways across the city, there was much evidence of the truth of Auden's insight. While rescue workers searched for survivors and the dead in the smoke-filled blackness below, at pavement level men were loading vans, a woman sold umbrellas in her usual patch, the lunchtime sandwich makers were hard at work.


Who am I to disagree...

*Musee des Beaux Arts*

   About suffering they were never wrong, 
   The Old Masters; how well, they understood 
   Its human position; how it takes place 
   While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 
   How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 
   For the miraculous birth, there always must be 
   Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 
   On a pond at the edge of the wood: 
   They never forgot 
   That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 
   Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 
   Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 
   Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 


   In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away  
   Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may   
   Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,  
   But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone  
   As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green  
   Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen  
   Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,  
   had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 




   © estate of W.H. Auden


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 11, 2005)

*The Road not Taken - Robert Frost*

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood 
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
tow roads diverged in a wood, and I -- 
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 13, 2005)

*Mayakovsky*

An Attitude to Girls 


That evening decided  
why not be lovers factually?
it’s dark, so we shan’t be seen.
I leaned right over her actually
and actually,
as I,
leaned,
said to her,
like a good father : 
“Passion’s steep as a precipice –
please, I beg you,
stand back farther.
Farther still,
I beg you, please.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 14, 2005)

*Sappho Crosses the Dark River into Hades*

_Edna St. Vincent Millay_

Charon, indeed, your dreaded oar,
With what a peaceful sound it dips
Into the stream; how gently, too,
From the wet blade the water drips. 
I knew a ferryman before.
But he was not so old as you.
He spoke from unembittered lips,
With careless eyes on the bright sea
One day, such bitter words to me
As age and wisdom never knew. 

This was a man of meagre fame;
He ferried merchants from the shore
To Mitylene (whence I came)
On Lesbos; Phaon is his name. 

I hope that he will never die,
As I have done, and come to dwell
In this pale city we approach.
Not that, indeed, I wish him well,
(Though never have I wished him harm)
But rather that I hope to find
In some unechoing street of Hell
The peace I long have had in mind:
A peace whereon may not encroach
That supple back, the strong brown arm,
That curving mouth, the sunburned curls;
But rather that I would rely,
Having come so far, at such expense,
Upon some quiet lodging whence
I need not hear his voice go by
In scraps of talk with boys and girls.


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 15, 2005)

[ Mens sana in corpore mortuo ] by Petr Machan
_translated from the Hungarian by Gwendolyn Albert_

Bush repeats to himself at breakfast
Mens sana in corpore mortuo
he repeats as a mantra for calm
then he presses buttons
then he annihilates nations
corpore mortuo everywhere you look
"made in USA"
national interests
Mens sana in corpore mortuo
In a dead body a healthy spirit


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2005)

Can i book the august the 1st entry please?


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 15, 2005)

No.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2005)

I think the weight of 40 posts on this thread means i can. Or, you better be up late on the 31st


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 15, 2005)

I just like one monkey hogging this thread.  That is all butshersapron.

I have an ahkmatova poem I want to share, but just trying to wait my turn....It gets frustrating......  

40 posts on this thread.  Mmmmm, not  trying to throw your wieght around are you?  Squeezing out protest?  Very Stalin.....


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2005)

It's been going three years mate - 16.5 a year is hardy excessive. Post yours now if you like. I've got a reason for wanting that date though.


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 15, 2005)

I have to wait until tomorrow.  It wasn't as if I want the 1st of August.  I haven't got any complaints.

The 16th beckons


----------



## madamv (Jul 16, 2005)

*Love and Age  -  Thomas Love Peacock*

Sorry if you have had this before. x   My favourate poem

Love and Age

I PLAY'D with you 'mid cowslips blowing,
  When I was six and you were four;
When garlands weaving, flower-balls throwing,
  Were pleasures soon to please no more.
Through groves and meads, o'er grass and heather,
  With little playmates, to and fro,
We wander'd hand in hand together;
  But that was sixty years ago.

You grew a lovely roseate maiden,
  And still our early love was strong;
Still with no care our days were laden,
  They glided joyously along;
And I did love you very dearly,
  How dearly words want power to show;
I thought your heart was touch'd as nearly;
  But that was fifty years ago.

Then other lovers came around you,
  Your beauty grew from year to year,
And many a splendid circle found you
  The centre of its glimmering sphere.
I saw you then, first vows forsaking,
  On rank and wealth your hand bestow;
O, then I thought my heart was breaking!--
  But that was forty years ago.

And I lived on, to wed another:
  No cause she gave me to repine;
And when I heard you were a mother,
  I did not wish the children mine.
My own young flock, in fair progression,
  Made up a pleasant Christmas row:
My joy in them was past expression;
  But that was thirty years ago.

You grew a matron plump and comely,
  You dwelt in fashion's brightest blaze;
My earthly lot was far more homely;
  But I too had my festal days.
No merrier eyes have ever glisten'd
  Around the hearth-stone's wintry glow,
Than when my youngest child was christen'd;
  But that was twenty years ago.

Time pass'd. My eldest girl was married,
  And I am now a grandsire gray;
One pet of four years old I've carried
  Among the wild-flower'd meads to play.
In our old fields of childish pleasure,
  Where now, as then, the cowslips blow,
She fills her basket's ample measure;
  And that is not ten years ago.

But though first love's impassion'd blindness
  Has pass'd away in colder light,
I still have thought of you with kindness,
  And shall do, till our last good-night.
The ever-rolling silent hours
  Will bring a time we shall not know,
When our young days of gathering flowers
  Will be an hundred years ago.


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 16, 2005)

Lovely poem but damn you!!!!


----------



## madamv (Jul 16, 2005)

Ryazan said:
			
		

> Lovely poem but damn you!!!!


Sorry darling       Glad you like the poem.  Look forward to reading yours x


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 17, 2005)

A Widow in Black

A widow in black - the crying fall
Covers all hearts with a depressing cloud...
While her man's words are clearly recalled,
She will not stop her lamentations loud.
It will be so, until the snow puff
Will give a mercy to the pined and tired.
Forgetfulness of suffering and love -
Though paid by life - what more could be desired?

Anna Akhmatova


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 18, 2005)

Why?


I think I'm done with the sofa,
I think I'm done with the hall,
I think I'm done with the kitchen table, baby.

So my angel she says, don't you worry
'Bout the things they're saying, yeah.
Got no friends in high places
And the game that you gave away wasn't worth playing.

And yes, I've been bad
Doctor won't you do with me what you can.
You see I think about it all the time, twenty four seven, twenty four twenty four seven.

You say you want it, you got it.
I never really said it before.
there's nothing here but flesh and bone,
There's nothing more, nothing more, there's nothing more.

Let's go outside, let's go outside in the sunshine.
I know you want to but you can't say yes.
Let's go outside in the moonshine, take me to the places that I love best.
Back to nature just human nature getting on back to.....




Charlie Poole


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 18, 2005)

Ryazan said:
			
		

> I just like one monkey hogging this thread.  That is all butshersapron.


i generally wait till after lunch to give everyone else a chance 

you _don't_ have to get up very early in the day to outwit one monkey.. 

but glad there is a sense of competition on the poem thread again..


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 18, 2005)

It's OK.

Just messing around.


----------



## Badger Kitten (Jul 18, 2005)

*The Shield Of Achilles*

She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
  No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
  Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
  An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
  Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
  No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
  Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
  Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
  A crowd of ordinary decent folk
  Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
  That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
  And could not hope for help and no help came:
  What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
  Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
  That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
  Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
W.H. Auden


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 19, 2005)

To Shop Signs

Read those iron books!
To the flute of the gilded letter
Will sprout glamorous beetroot
And smoked sardines and salmon.

And once you turn joyous and pranky
among the constellations of 'Maggi',
a formidable undertaker
will sternly parade his sarcophagi.

And when, sullen and dismal,
the street has extinguished it's lamp-posts,
fall in love in the starlight of taverns 
with glittering poppies on teapots! 

Vladimir Mayakovsky


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 19, 2005)

Ryazan 19-07-2005, 07:01 AM 

Ryazan 18-07-2005 08:31 AM

Ryazan 17-07-2005 06:32 AM


so you _are _ getting up early to outwit us! 

i don't mind.. some good choices


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 19, 2005)

I get home early.

Who are _us_?


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 20, 2005)

everyone else who wants to post a poems


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 20, 2005)

But you seem to hog it.


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 20, 2005)

this thread:
User ------ Posts 
Yossarian ---- 70 
RubyToogood- 61 
Justin-------- 47 
onemonkey ---47 
butchersapron- 42 

i'm barely here 

*sets alarm for 6am*


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 20, 2005)

In July wiseass.....


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 20, 2005)

*Montjuich* 


"Hill of Jews," says one, 
named for a cemetery 
long gone."Hill of Jove," 
says another, and maybe 
Jove stalked here 
once or rests now 
where so many lie 
who felt God swell 
the earth and burn 
along the edges 
of their breath. 
Almost seventy years 
since a troop of cavalry 
jingled up the silent road, 
dismounted, and loaded 
their rifles to deliver 
the fusillade into 
the small, soft body 
of Ferrer, who would 
not beg God's help. 
Later, two carpenters 
came, carrying his pine 
coffin on their heads, 
two men out of movies 
not yet made, and near dark 
the body was unchained 
and fell a last time 
onto the stones. 
Four soldiers carried 
the box, sweating 
and resting by turns, 
to where the fresh hole 
waited, and the world went 
back to sleep. 
The sea, still dark 
as a blind eye, 
grumbles at dusk, 
the air deepens and a chill 
suddenly runs along 
my back. I have come 
foolishly bearing red roses 
for all those whose blood 
spotted the cold floors 
of these cells. If I 
could give a measure 
of my own for each 
endless moment of pain, 
well, what good 
would that do? You 
are asleep, brothers 
and sisters, and maybe 
that was all the God 
of this old hill could 
give you. It wasn't 
he who filled your 
lungs with the power 
to raise your voices 
against stone, steel, 
animal, against 
the pain exploding 
in your own skulls, 
against the unbreakable 
walls of the State. 
No, not he. That 
was the gift only 
the dying could hand 
from one of you 
to the other, a gift 
like these roses I fling 
off into the night. 
You chose no God 
but each other, head, 
belly, groin, heart, you 
chose the lonely road 
back down these hills 
empty handed, breath 
steaming in the cold 
March night, or worse, 
the wrong roads 
that led to black earth 
and the broken seed 
of your body. The sea 
spreads below, still 
as dark and heavy 
as oil. As I 
descend step by step 
a wind picks up and hums 
through the low trees 
along the way, like 
the heavens' last groan 
or a song being born.

_Philip Levine_

(Background here and here)


----------



## gawkrodger (Jul 20, 2005)

didn't he also write a poem about francisco ascaso?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 20, 2005)

Yep, i believe i posted it earlier on this thread as well - it's here though:
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/anarchistpoetry/levinedir/levine3.html


----------



## Badger Kitten (Jul 20, 2005)

*Has to be William Butler yeats today...now more than ever*

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre 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?


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 21, 2005)

I like Leda and the Swan. But here is Frances Driscoll.

Some Lucky Girls

We were so lucky to get them. Nobody else
appreciates them. Least of all the professionals who 
see this as symptom, wait for anger. But almost 
everybody in group agrees. And if some weeks later some 
of us stumble around saying I wish he'd killed me 
well, that's just a phase most of us live through 
and nobody's paying any attention anyway except 
the professionals who offer really good pastel 
drugs for both day and night. Of course Louise 
I guess basically she always just wanted 
to see hers neon flat dead but bleed bad first but 
I don't think she ever was really objective of course 
there was the matter of that vaginal tear and 
he did make her take that supervised bath afterward 
but he was so supportive, so sympathetic when 
she was getting all upset in the beginning as he 
watched her strip standing in her bedroom doorway 
he tried to help her through. Rape is never easy, he 
said. Caroline and I were crazy about our guys 
from the moment they left. My rapist was so nice, 
Caroline says. He wanted so very much to please 
me. What do you like, he said. I mean, he held a 
knife to my throat but he was so gentle. And, my
rapist, he was wonderful. Well, look at me. No 
visible scars. He let me live. He let me keep on 
my dress.


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 22, 2005)

_An untitled poem by Emily Bronte_


The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 25, 2005)

*another emily*

An untitled poem by Emily Dickinson

I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon the floor.


----------



## marty21 (Jul 25, 2005)

DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
by Edgar Allan Poe
1827

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?


----------



## onemonkey (Jul 25, 2005)

only one new poem per day, young man 

good poem though


----------



## maya (Jul 25, 2005)

THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER _by Lewis Carroll_

"The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done --
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun."

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead --
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
`If this were only cleared away,'
They said, `it would be grand!'

`If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
`That they could get it clear?'
`I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

`O Oysters, come and walk with us!'
The Walrus did beseech.
`A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.'

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head --
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat --
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more --
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

`The time has come,' the Walrus said,
`To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot --
And whether pigs have wings.'

`But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried,
`Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!'
`No hurry!' said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

`A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,
`Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed --
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.'

`But not on us!' the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
`After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!'
`The night is fine,' the Walrus said.
`Do you admire the view?

`It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
`Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf --
I've had to ask you twice!'

`It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,
`To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
`The butter's spread too thick!'

`I weep for you,' the Walrus said:
`I deeply sympathise.'
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

`O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,
`You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none --
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
***


----------



## marty21 (Jul 25, 2005)

onemonkey said:
			
		

> only one new poem per day, young man
> 
> good poem though



whoops

sorry


----------



## Dubversion (Jul 25, 2005)

onemonkey said:
			
		

> _An untitled poem by Emily Bronte_
> 
> 
> The night is darkening round me,
> ...




..which is one of the many poems which make up the 'wallpaper' in my toilet. along with Shelley, Keats and Byron. 

it's actually quite irritating


----------



## MightyAphrodite (Jul 26, 2005)

*Eloisa to Abelard-A. Pope*

Anybody that knows this poem, will know it's almost like a book, but this is the best bit.   

*How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day. *


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 27, 2005)

In lockets for a charm we do not wear it,
 In verse about its sorrows do not weep,
 With Eden's blissful vales do not compare it,
 Untroubled does it leave our bitter sleep.
 To traffic in it is a thought that never,
 Not even in our hearts, remote, takes root.
 Before our eyes its image does not hover,
 Though  we be beggared, sick, despairing, mute.
     It's the mud on our shoes, it is rubble,
     It's the sand on our teeth, it is slush,
     It's the pure, taintless dust that we crumble,
     That we  pound, that we mix, that we crush.
 But it's ours, our own, and will open one day
 To receive and embrace us and turn us to clay.

Anna Akhmatova


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jul 27, 2005)

There is, by the way, a new biography of Akhmatova just come out.


----------



## Ryazan (Jul 28, 2005)

I'm sure it's terrorific.


----------



## onemonkey (Aug 1, 2005)

butchersapron said:
			
		

> Can i book the august the 1st entry please?


*looks at watch*

*taps foot*


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2005)

Right, totally forgot about this and i've not typed up the one i had planned - but thanks to onemonkey i have a very fitting replacement. This one is in memory of Frank Little, lynched by the bosses goons on this date in 1917.

FRANK LITTLE AT CALVARY

I

He walked under the shadow of the Hill
Where men are fed into the fires
And walled apart...
Unarmed and alone,
He summoned his mates from the pit's mouth
Where tools rested on the floors
And great cranes swung
Unemptied, on the iron girders.
And they, who were the Lords of the Hill,
Were seized with a great fear,
When they heard out of the silence of wheels
The answer ringing
In endless reverberations
Under the mountain...

So they covered up their faces
And crept upon him as he slept...
Out of eye-holes in black cloth
They looked upon him who had flung
Between them and their ancient prey
The frail barricade of his life...
And when night - that has connived at so much - 
Was heavy with the unborn day,
They haled him from his bed...

Who might know of that wild ride?
Only the bleak Hill - 
The red Hill, vigilant,
Like a blood-shot eye
In the black mask of night - 
Dared watch them as they raced
By each blind-folded street
Godiva might have ridden down...
But when they stopped beside the Place,
I know he turned his face
Wistfully to the accessory night...

And when he saw - against the sky,
Sagged like a silken net
Under its load of stars - 
The black bridge poised
Like a gigantic spider motionless...
I know there was a silence in his heart,
As of a frozen sea,
Where some half lifted arm, mid-way
Wavers, and drops heavily...

I know he waved to life,
And that life signaled back, transcending space,
To each high-powered sense,
So that he missed no gesture of the wind
Drawing the shut leaves close...
So that he saw the light on comrades' faces
Of camp fires out of sight...
And the savor of meat and bread
Blew in his nostrils... and the breath
Of unrailed spaces
Where shut wild clover smelled as sweet
As a virgin in her bed.

I know he looked once at America,
Quiescent, with her great flanks on the globe,
And once at the skies whirling above him...
Then all that he had spoken against
And struck against and thrust against
Over the frail barricade of his life
Rushed between him and the stars...

II

Life thunders on...
Over the black bridge
The line of lighted cars
Creeps like a monstrous serpent
Spooring gold...

Watchman, what of the track?

Night... silence... stars...
All's Well!

III

Light...
(Breaking mists...
Hills gliding like hands out of a slipping hold...)
Light over the pit mouths,
Streaming in tenuous rays down the black gullets of the Hill...
(The copper, insensate, sleeping in the buried lode.)
Light...
Forcing the clogged windows of arsenals...
Probing with long sentient fingers in the copper chips...
Gleaming metallic and cold
In numberless slivers of steel...
Light over the trestles and the iron clips
Of the black bridge - poised like a gigantic spider motionless - 
Sweet inquisition of light, like a child's wonder...
Intrusive, innocently staring light
That nothing appals...

Light in the slow fumbling summer leaves,
Cooing and calling
All winged and avid things
Waking the early flies, keen to the scent...
Green-jeweled iridescent flies
Unerringly steering - 
Swarming over the blackened lips,
The young day sprays with indiscriminate gold...

Watchman, what of the Hill?

Wheels turn;
The laden cars
Go rumbling to the mill,
And Labor walks beside the mules...
All's Well with the Hill!

_Lola Ridge_


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 2, 2005)

*Untitled*
_James Farrell_

Draw a circle around your life, are you confined?
I hate this fucking bewitching lie, the one that tells you to stay in line.
Forget to remember, suffer last months surrender.
Call an aquaintance so you might dramatize the most banal memory.
invogorate the embers that stupify the questions; the ones that collect in your memory.
For all I know it's plain stupidity.
Lucidity of sublime neutrality.
Vague nebulous feelings and apathy.
Pity me, dark horse, black sheep, lost goat, trapeze artist farting around with ideas.
In a year will you really be parting with your fears, your lost tears?
Folded dreams.
It seems they are all looking in on the final scene.
In a car driving fast, passenger, pleasing, teasing.
Your life, the climate is easing the pest through your mind.
God knows no one knows.
Hold on to the sunlight while you can. 
Your eyes closed, but still exposed to the flash.
The car crash comes too late.
The forgetful fish contemplates the next three seconds of blind faith.


----------



## bluestreak (Aug 16, 2005)

this poppped in my inbox yesterday, and i thought i'd share...

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the bedding
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in--
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

Hilaire Belloc


----------



## ZWord (Aug 17, 2005)

*Kind of appropriate for the 666 spot.*

Nero's new bathroom | Words by: Anno, who died in a car crash November 2001. 

The eagle has landed, has
Branded itself the new emperor ... and it's
Beak is so vast and so vile that it can't hide the
Smile that it casts like a creek through that rag on a 
Rope, up a mast, that they've got up their arse, that they,
Hope is a flag but it's not, so they grasp for some
God, but He's dead or asleep, so instead they just
Grope at their guns, and they

Hop and they skip and they jump and they run and they
Leap to the edges of madness, and stop. At the
Ridges they wait, they throw bait to the wind and they
Wind themselves up and get hungry for something to 
Happen. The eagle, you see, needs a weapon, a 
Web round it's nest to prevent all the sun and the 
Flies getting through that might alter the hue of it's 
White, flightless son. Who 

Can't lift a finger without some machine like a trigger. The
Dragon however, and Bear disapprove, and they 
Whisper and move to get nasty. 
Both of them thirsty for power - they're cranking up 
Louder that song on the box with some guy going 
On about not having nothing and not having
Nothing to loose. But

Nero's new bathroom in Washington don't have no
Windows. It's sound-proof and Nero is napping.

The Bear now is snapping his teeth and rapping his
Thumbs on a sickle of pride - there's a trickle of
Blood running still from the wound in his side in the
Shape of a star and he bellows and barks out for 
Something like order. Or Honour. Or trust. But the 

Bird's got its head in some 
Bush, and it cushions its ears ... 
so it just doesn't hear shit. 

Near it the Dragon lies coiled and curious,
Oiled with furious cunning.
Running her ruby red tongue in vexed little circles,
Among her porcelain teeth.

Inside her a billion babies there wait to be born. 
Will George be sat mourning the 
Rangers while round him the White house turns red? 

Ah ... but the dangers can
Wait ‘till he's done with his pancakes and eggs.

His good brother Jeb cooked it 
Up real good and real glossy ... well my brother
Ned - he is only sixteen but he's wiser than 
All of your possy and cleaner than all of your
Knights in their nappies, with
Sight-seeing maps which they 
Bought because soon, well, they really
Ought to find chivalry.

Didn't you say that the moon was the only such compass?
Yes. But I think I was lying ... they 
Grow it in Texas these days.

Hurry up boys, they're invading through Mexico, 
Get to the borders, quick! Get to the Texaco
Stations and wait, for the truckloads to mosey on through ...
Then shoot the shit outta them.

They're giving out pills to the goons with the gold to
Prevent them from getting too old ... too abruptly. The
World should take Ned for example,
I do, and I've ample room for unrest in such resource.

Ha! The 
Lion of British nobility, more like a 
Kitten you see, she just tries to be cute with everyone. And 
Everyone get's rather pissed with opinion-less pissheads. So the
Bird and the Bear and the Lizard, they twist like a
Blizzard and turn upon me in my Lion suit, 
Mute in my wizards hat.
Trying to change or explain this or that.

Feeding my hospice of hope with another new joke ...
Every second I'm sat here. Is it
All just another false warning? Another fat
Fanciful wish of mine seeking admission to 
History's awning and binding me there ... where

If you go looking my name you'll be finding in 
Book number ten of the honourable dead. You
Said that the very front line seemed somewhat un-
Worthy of a life like mine own, funny then that
It should be me who is crying out loud, for per-
mission to be or be given death.


There in my dreams I lie shaking, trying as 
Hard as I can to take life from the rest of this
Can full of worms (that I love) and I burn in my 
Sleep and I mumble a prayer and I wake.

One day we will
Take it in turns to admit and to then be admitted,
into His arms. But my
Mother's fair name is the one that will float from my 
lips as I fade ... and eclipse beyond nothing


----------



## maya (Aug 29, 2005)

(_-NB! Badly translated from swedish,
so it doesn't rhyme and the rhytm disappears with english grammar_)
***


*REINCARNATED EXACTLY AS BEFORE*

Ran into wisdom with an old aunt
Saw on the T.V. about an elephant
Cut my finger on a paper edge
then I sang falsely
I promise it's true

Earlier the news was on then came a melody
Africa is shaking from a hard epidemic
Tasted a soup with carrots in it
Then I crawled under the blanket
in my periphery

I searched through books
to find a sensation
We watched a movie
it was worse than a turkey
We talked about money
and both lost our faith
Then I came home late at night
in bad shape

Smoke came from my mouth
like it does when there's frost
I saw a dot in the air
it was a UFO

I mailed a letter
tomorrow you'll get post
I felt a bit ill
I forgot to eat breakfast

At night night came
I wasn't surprised
You gave me a little reason
for the first time in a month
the neighbours had a party
(In the yard they burned torches)
We ate dinner by the tv
it was a show about riots

I stumbled in the hallway
On my way to make the coffee
Everything ran out with the sand
and Sweden missed the penalty
I fell asleep at half past eight 
Just like an old woman
I dreamt that I was real
and the dream became pleasant
and obscene...


_- B. Hund_


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 13, 2005)

*muttersprache 1972 /2: materialwiderstand*

_by Ulf Stolterfoht
translated by Joanne Burns
_
wörter fallen nicht vom himmel. historisch wachsen
sie heraus. das dauert. bis (unmündig aber selbstver-
schuldet hörig) zu den knöcheln im tier das sprießen
der geweihe tritt – ein magischer moment: der wolf

gerade dann heranrennt wenn man nennt – bleibts einem
engländer vergönnt »dem spekulativen begriffsgebäude
der scholastik den entscheidenden stoß zu versetzen«:
nichts stehe mehr für anderes! was marktkonform sofort

gedichtverknappung zeitigt. da aber hinterkopf reserve
»im« bald schwerer wiegt als heute wert papier gedanke
»auf« spricht manches für nicht nur: erzeugerseits be-
trieben. fast sicher künstlicher natur zeigt funktionalen

riecher. in ähnlich einprägsamer formung geht längst ein
unwort um an neckar spree und ruwer: von gegenstrebiger
vereinigung wie der des reihers mit dem rogen / in herge-
brachter sage: staatlich gestützter prosa-verstromung.

beginn des großen dichterdarbens. leicht für die wörter
mit dem wolf zu heulen. hysterisch schnüren sie heran.
gewaltverhältnisse ungeklärt. ihr gut verzahnter fang: erzeu-
gerzugewandt! zeigt sehr wahrscheinlich rißbereitschaft an.

_mother tongue 1972 / 2:
material resistance_

words do not drop out of the sky. they grow out of
the sky’s tongue like history. it’s time consuming.
until (through your own submissive fault) antlers
sprout from the animal’s ankles – magic: the wolf

runs up when its name is called. WOLF WOLF – it
remains for an Englishman ‘to deliver the decisive
blow to the speculative conceptual structure of
scholasticism’: nothing stands for anything anymore!

so in accordance with market economics there are
poetry cutbacks. but since the reserves in the
vault of the mind are soon more important than
today’s thoughts on paper securities, let the poet

keep working. however artificially they have a nose
for the job. in a similarly impressive form a taboo
word has been circulating on the neckar spree and ruwer
rivers: subverting tradition, mixing caviar with crow / like the
growing legend: state sponsored prose-electrification.

the great poet’s life runs into trouble. the words
find it easy to howl with the wolf. hysterically they
trot up. violence bothers the air. strong fangs point
towards their maker! waiting for the right moment to attack.


----------



## fanta (Sep 14, 2005)

*White Comedy by Benjamin Zephaniah*

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death. 

People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 15, 2005)

A Secret Life

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don't say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you've just made love
and feel you'd rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner 
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you're brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that's unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to. 
It becomes what you'd most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it's like a small fire
in a clearing, it's what
radiates and what can hurt 
if you get too close to it.
It's why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who'll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

Stephen Dunn


----------



## Wyn (Sep 16, 2005)

*Let me die a young man's death*

Let me die a young man's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns
burst in and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a young man's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

Roger McGough


----------



## fanta (Sep 16, 2005)

*Listening To Albatross*

This is not just smoked salmon
This is expensive smoked salmon

This is not just steak
This is out-of-my-league steak

This is not just Chardonay
This is a lot of money

There are not just summer berries
These are too rich for me

This is not just food
This is Marks and Spencers

And it costs a bloody bomb!
In fact it costs so much
You can only watch it on telly


Pam

Big Issue


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## onemonkey (Sep 19, 2005)

*My Philosophy of Life*

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude.I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him--not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between.He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on.Not a single idea emerges from it.It's enough
to disgust you with thought.But then you remember something
William James
wrote in some book of his you never read--it was fine, it had the
fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet
still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and
his alone.

It's fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler.Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again.Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought--
something's blocking it.Something I'm
not big enough to see over.Or maybe I'm frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise--I'll let
things be what they are, sort of.In the autumn I'll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won't be embarrassed by my friends' dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that's the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn't even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he's
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him--
this thing works both ways, you know. You can't always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time.That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don't know.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That's what they're made for!Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don't come along every day. Look out!There's a big one...

_John Ashbery _


----------



## rorymac (Sep 20, 2005)

Séamus Heaney - Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 22, 2005)

Drinking Wine
Tao Qian







I made my home amidst this human bustle,
Yet I hear no clamour from the carts and horses.
My friend, you ask me how this can be so?
A distant heart will tend towards like places.
From the eastern hedge, I pluck chrysanthemum flowers,
And idly look towards the southern hills.
The mountain air is beautiful day and night,
The birds fly back to roost with one another.
I know that this must have some deeper meaning,
I try to explain, but cannot find the words.


----------



## onemonkey (Sep 27, 2005)

_small bottle of whiskey_

a man passed me
eyes to the ground
clutching a small bottle of whiskey
a bottle of water
and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps

eager to tackle the short distance
between the shop and his flat

_--
Martin J Togher_


----------



## marty21 (Sep 27, 2005)

onemonkey said:
			
		

> _small bottle of whiskey_
> 
> a man passed me
> eyes to the ground
> ...




i thank you


----------



## fanta (Sep 27, 2005)

rorymac said:
			
		

> Séamus Heaney - Postscript
> 
> And some time make the time to drive out west
> Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
> ...



Seamus can really describe.


----------



## lang rabbie (Sep 27, 2005)

fanta said:
			
		

> Seamus can really describe.



Indeed, but that still doesn't justify a breach of the one poem a day  rule


----------



## fanta (Sep 28, 2005)

So sue me.


----------



## onemonkey (Oct 4, 2005)

i bought my first book for my phd today.. i love the fact it is called 'The Big Book of Concepts'  - what more propitious book could one begin with (not that i know much about it or it's content - but i've bought it which seems like a good first step 

but mindful of my supervisor's advice that i should be absorbing things more widely than such my particular specialisation (infants acquistion of concepts)  i treated myself to the complete poems of emily dickinson.. and i have decided that it is a perfect book to keep on my desk..

1775 of them in all.. nearly two a day for the course of my course 

here's one 

317

Just so -- Jesus -- raps --
He -- doesn't weary --
Last -- at the Knocker --
And first -- at the Bell.
Then -- on divinest tiptoe -- standing --
Might He but spy the lady's soul --
When He -- retires --
Chilled -- or weary --
It will be ample time for -- me --
Patient -- upon the steps -- until then --
Hears!  I am knocking -- low at thee.


----------



## onemonkey (Oct 6, 2005)

334

All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this --
Syllables of Velvet --
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee --
Play it were a Humming Bird --
And just sipped -- me --




(i warned you!)


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 7, 2005)

In honour of the 50th anniversary of the first public reading of Howl! here's another one of better length for the board:

America 

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? 
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me. 
You made me want to be a saint. 
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for 
murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. 
You should have seen me reading Marx. 
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 
I won't say the Lord's Prayer. 
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over 
from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie 
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals 
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and 
twentyfivethousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in 
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his 
automobiles more so they're all different sexes 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they 
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the 
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party 
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother 
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy. 
America you don're really want to go to war. 
America it's them bad Russians. 
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. 
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take 
our cars from out our garages. 
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our 
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. 
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. 
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 
America this is quite serious. 
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. 
America is this correct? 
I'd better get right down to the job. 
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts 
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. 
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


_Allen Ginsberg_


----------



## Ryazan (Oct 7, 2005)

My Communist momma wasn't so sincere about those that were sincere about them workers.


----------



## Ryazan (Oct 10, 2005)

A tribute to the hooligan poet of Moscow, the peasant prophet from Ryazan- Sergei Esenin.


You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere.
Emptiness...
Fly, cutting your way into starry dubiety.
No advances, no pubs for you there.
Sobriety.
No, Yessenin, this is not deridingly,-
in my throat not laughter but sorrow racks.
I see - your cut-open hand maddeningly,
swings your own bones like a sack.
Stop it, chuck it! Isn't it really absurd?
Allowing cheeks to flush with deathly hue?
You who could do such things with words,
that no one else on earth could do.
Why, for what? Perplexity appalls.
Critics mutter: "The main fault we find
there was hardly any working-class contact at all,
as a result of too much beer and wine."
So to say, if you had swopped bohemianism for class,
there'd have been no bust-up, 
                              class'd have influenced
                                                          your thinking.
But does class quench its thirst with kvass?
Class, too, is no fool when it comes to drinking.
They'd have attached to you someone from On Guard,
and the main accent would have been on content:
a hundred lines a day you'd have written hard,
as tedious and long-winded as Doronin's attempts.
Before I'd created such nonsensical stink,
I'd have choked my very own breath.
Better far to die of drink,
than be bored to death!
Neither the noose nor the penknife there
will reveal the true cause of this loss. But,
maybe, if there had been ink in the Angleterre,
there'd have been no reason for veins to be cut.
"Encore!" imitators coo in delight.
Over you almost a squad committed base jinks.
Why increase the number of suicides?
Better to increase the output of ink!
It's grievous and misplaced to be mystery-propagators.
For ever now your tongue by teeth's locked tight.
Of the people, the language-creators,
a sonorous apprentice-debauchee has died.
And, as condolences, poetic junk they gave,
unrehashed hangovers from funerals of the past.
Blunted rhymes are shoved in to exorcise your grave-
is that how a poet is honoured at the last?
A monument for you hasn't yet been cast-
where it is, bronze reverberant or granite grand? -
but there, already, by memory's bars
dedications and memoirs of rubbish stand.
Your name into handkerchiefs they're sniveling,
your words by Sobinov are slobberingly lisped there-
and they wind up under a dead birch tree quivering:
"Not a word, O my friend, not a wh-i-s-p-e-r,"
Eh, to a quite a different tune I'd switch
and just tell that Leonid Lohengrinich!
I'd rise up here a thundering scadalist:
"I won't allow poems to be mangled by mutts!
I'd deafen them with a double-barreled whistle.
They can stick 'em where the monkey stuck his nuts!"
And so disperse such talentless filth,
blowing away jacket-sails engendered darkness,
so that helter-skelter runs Kogan and his ilk,
mutilating oncomers with the spears of his moustaches.
The ranks of rubbish meanwhile haven't grown much thinner.
There's so much to do - just to catch up with things yet.
Life must be changed to begin with.
And having changed it - then one can sing it.
These days are difficult for the pen.
But tell me, you crooks and cripples wheezy,
which great ones ever choose- where and when?
a path already trodden smooth and easy?
The word - in the C-in-C of human powers.
Forward march! That time may whistle by as rockets flare.
So the wind shall carry to the past of ours
only the ruffling of our hair.
Our planet is poorly equipped for delight.
One must snatch gladness from the days that are.
In this life
              it's not difficult to die.
To make life
                  is more difficult by far.



V. Mayakovsky.


----------



## Firky (Oct 15, 2005)

read this thread a few times, and i'd like to post this one - largely because of the burroughs vs bukowski thread. it is one of my favourites by him:



Dinosauria, we - Charles Bukowski

born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this
walking and living through this
dying because of this
muted because of this
castrated
debauched
disinherited
because of this
fooled by this
used by this
pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this
made violent
made inhuman
by this

the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat
the gun
the knife
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

the fingers reach for the bottle
the pill
the powder

we are born into this sorrowful deadliness
we are born into a government 60 years in debt
that soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
and the banks will burn
money will be useless
there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
it will be guns and roving mobs
land will be useless
food will become a diminishing return
nuclear power will be taken over by the many
explosions will continually shake the earth
radiated robot men will stalk each other
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground

the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
trees will die
all vegetation will die
radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold

the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases

and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
the petering out of supplies
the natural effect of general decay

and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

born out of that.

the sun still hidden there

awaiting the next chapter.


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## vimto (Oct 15, 2005)

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Most poems rhyme
But this one doesn't

<I got the belt for that one at school>


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## onemonkey (Oct 18, 2005)

1914 IV: The Dead 

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, 
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. 
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, 
And sunset, and the colours of the earth. 
These had seen movement, and heard music; known 
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; 
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; 
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended. 

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter 
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after, 
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance 
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white 
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, 
A width, a shining peace, under the night. 

Rupert Brooke 

I get a poem a day in my inbox, often fairly orthodox choices but occasional gems.

sign up here:
http://www.poemhunter.com/promotion/lists/dailypoems.asp?or=10129


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## \\-(*o*)-// (Oct 22, 2005)

In lockets for a charm we do not wear it,
In verse about its sorrows do not weep,
With Eden's blissful vales do not compare it,
Untroubled does it leave our bitter sleep.
To traffic in it is a thought that never,
Not even in our hearts, remote, takes root.
Before our eyes its image does not hover,
Though we be beggared, sick, despairing, mute.
It's the mud on our shoes, it is rubble,
It's the sand on our teeth, it is slush,
It's the pure, taintless dust that we crumble,
That we pound, that we mix, that we crush.
But it's ours, our own, and will open one day
To receive and embrace us and turn us to clay.

*Anna Akhmatova (Gorenko)*


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## MightyAphrodite (Oct 24, 2005)

*The boys i mean are not refined :ee cummings*

For Little MsAphro Jr tonight...since i certainly cant read this _to_ her 

*the boys i mean are not refined
   they go with girls who buck and bite
   they do not give a fuck for luck
   they hump them thirteen times a night

   one hangs a hat upon her tit
   one carves a cross on her behind
   they do not give a shit for wit
   the boys i mean are not refined

   they come with girls who bite and buck
   who cannot read and cannot write
   who laugh like they would fall apart
   and masturbate with dynamite

   the boys i mean are not refined
   they cannot chat of that and this
   they do not give a fart for art
   they kill like you would take a piss

   they speak whatever's on their mind
   they do whatever's in their pants
   the boys i mean are not refined
   they shake the mountains when they dance*


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## Johnny Canuck3 (Oct 24, 2005)

MightyAphrodite said:
			
		

> For Little MsAphro Jr tonight...since i certainly cant read this _to_ her
> 
> *the boys i mean are not refined
> they go with girls who buck and bite
> ...



Never heard that one before.


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## rusalki (Oct 29, 2005)

*Sex Without Love*


  How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.


*Sharon Olds*


----------



## onemonkey (Oct 31, 2005)

*The Dream - George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron*

I

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, 
A boundary between the things misnamed 
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, 
And a wide realm of wild reality, 
And dreams in their development have breath, 
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; 
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, 
They take a weight from off waking toils, 
They do divide our being; they become 
A portion of ourselves as of our time, 
And look like heralds of eternity; 
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak 
Like sibyls of the future; they have power - 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain; 
They make us what we were not -what they will, 
And shake us with the vision that's gone by, 
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so? 
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they? 
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make 
Substances, and people planets of its own 
With beings brighter than have been, and give 
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. 
I would recall a vision which I dreamed 
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought, 
A slumbering thought, is capable of years, 
And curdles a long life into one hour. 

II 

I saw two beings in the hues of youth 
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill, 
Green and of mild declivity, the last 
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such, 
Save that there was no sea to lave its base, 
But a most living landscape, and the wave 
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men 
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke 
Arising from such rustic roofs: the hill 
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem 
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed, 
Not by the sport of nature, but of man: 
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there 
Gazing -the one on all that was beneath 
Fair as herself -but the boy gazed on her; 
And both were young, and one was beautiful: 
And both were young -yet not alike in youth. 
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge, 
The maid was on the eve of womanhood; 
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart 
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye 
There was but one beloved face on earth, 
And that was shining on him; he had looked 
Upon it till it could not pass away; 
He had no breath, no being, but in hers: 
She was his voice; he did not speak to her, 
But trembled on her words; she was his sight, 
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers, 
Which coloured all his objects; -he had ceased 
To live within himself: she was his life, 
The ocean to the river of his thoughts, 
Which terminated all; upon a tone, 
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow, 
And his cheek change tempestuously -his heart 
Unknowing of its cause of agony. 
But she in these fond feelings had no share: 
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was 
Even as a brother -but no more; 'twas much, 
For brotherless she was, save in the name 
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him; 
Herself the solitary scion left 
Of a time-honoured race. -It was a name 
Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not -and why? 
Time taught him a deep answer -when she loved 
Another; even now she loved another, 
And on the summit of that hill she stood 
Looking afar if yet her lover's steed 
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew. 

III 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
There was an ancient mansion, and before 
Its walls there was a steed caparisoned: 
Within an antique Oratory stood 
The Boy of whom I spake; -he was alone, 
And pale, and pacing to and fro: anon 
He sate him down, and seized a pen, and traced 
Words which I could not guess of; then he leaned 
His bowed head on his hands and shook, as 'twere 
With a convulsion -then rose again, 
And with his teeth and quivering hands did tear 
What he had written, but he shed no tears. 
And he did calm himself, and fix his brow 
Into a kind of quiet: as he paused, 
The Lady of his love re-entered there; 
She was serene and smiling then, and yet 
She knew she was by him beloved; she knew - 
For quickly comes such knowledge -that his heart 
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw 
That he was wretched, but she saw not all. 
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp 
He took her hand; a moment o'er his face 
A tablet of unutterable thoughts 
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came; 
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps 
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu, 
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed 
From out the massy gate of that old Hall, 
And mounting on his steed he went his way; 
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more. 

IV 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
The Boy was sprung to manhood: in the wilds 
Of fiery climes he made himself a home, 
And his Soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt 
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not 
Himself like what he had been; on the sea 
And on the shore he was a wanderer; 
There was a mass of many images 
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was 
A part of all; and in the last he lay 
Reposing from the noontide sultriness, 
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade 
Of ruined walls that had survived the names 
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side 
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds 
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man, 
Glad in a flowing garb, did watch the while, 
While many of his tribe slumbered around: 
And they were canopied by the blue sky, 
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful, 
That God alone was to be seen in heaven. 

V 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
The Lady of his love was wed with One 
Who did not love her better: in her home, 
A thousand leagues from his, -her native home, 
She dwelt, begirt with growing Infancy, 
Daughters and sons of Beauty, -but behold! 
Upon her face there was a tint of grief, 
The settled shadow of an inward strife, 
And an unquiet drooping of the eye, 
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears. 
What could her grief be? -she had all she loved, 
And he who had so loved her was not there 
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish, 
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts. 
What could her grief be? -she had loved him not, 
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved, 
Nor could he be a part of that which preyed 
Upon her mind -a spectre of the past. 

VI 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
The Wanderer was returned. -I saw him stand 
Before an altar -with a gentle bride; 
Her face was fair, but was not that which made 
The Starlight of his Boyhood; -as he stood 
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came 
The selfsame aspect and the quivering shock 
That in the antique Oratory shook 
His bosom in its solitude; and then - 
As in that hour -a moment o'er his face 
The tablet of unutterable thoughts 
Was traced -and then it faded as it came, 
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke 
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words, 
And all things reeled around him; he could see 
Not that which was, nor that which should have been - 
But the old mansion, and the accustomed hall, 
And the remembered chambers, and the place, 
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade, 
All things pertaining to that place and hour, 
And her who was his destiny, came back 
And thrust themselves between him and the light; 
What business had they there at such a time? 

VII 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
The Lady of his love; -Oh! she was changed, 
As by the sickness of the soul; her mind 
Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes, 
They had not their own lustre, but the look 
Which is not of the earth; she was become 
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts 
Were combinations of disjointed things; 
And forms impalpable and unperceived 
Of others' sight familiar were to hers. 
And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise 
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance 
Of melancholy is a fearful gift; 
What is it but the telescope of truth? 
Which strips the distance of its fantasies, 
And brings life near in utter nakedness, 
Making the cold reality too real! 

VIII 

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream. 
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore, 
The beings which surrounded him were gone, 
Or were at war with him; he was a mark 
For blight and desolation, compassed round 
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mixed 
In all which was served up to him, until, 
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, 
He fed on poisons, and they had no power, 
But were a kind of nutriment; he lived 
Through that which had been death to many men, 
And made him friends of mountains; with the stars 
And the quick Spirit of the Universe 
He held his dialogues: and they did teach 
To him the magic of their mysteries; 
To him the book of Night was opened wide, 
And voices from the deep abyss revealed 
A marvel and a secret. -Be it so. 

IX 

My dream is past; it had no further change. 
It was of a strange order, that the doom 
Of these two creatures should be thus traced out 
Almost like a reality -the one 
To end in madness -both in misery.


----------



## Firky (Nov 1, 2005)

*Orwell*

I only know of two poems Orwell wrote, this is one of them

* ROMANCE  * 

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said ‘For twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me.’

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five​


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## MightyAphrodite (Nov 3, 2005)

*2 little whos*

*2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree 

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here 

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who 

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)*


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## spacemonkey (Nov 8, 2005)

The Guy in the Glass

by Dale Wimbrow, (c) 1934



When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,

And the world makes you King for a day,

Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,

And see what that guy has to say.



For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,

Who judgement upon you must pass.

The feller whose verdict counts most in your life

Is the guy staring back from the glass.



He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,

For he's with you clear up to the end,

And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test

If the guy in the glass is your friend.



You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,

And think you're a wonderful guy,

But the man in the glass says you're only a bum

If you can't look him straight in the eye.



You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,

And get pats on the back as you pass,

But your final reward will be heartaches and tears

If you've cheated the guy in the glass.


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## small town girl (Nov 12, 2005)

DEATHFUGUE

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped

He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
stick your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
you aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers

He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise up as smoke to the sky
you'll then have a grave in the clouds where you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Paul Celan


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## MightyAphrodite (Nov 14, 2005)

*Inchjostru -Patrizia Gattaceca*

*Inchjostru sangue nostru
Sognu viaghju o segnu
Goccia à goccia piuvana
Acqua per la mio terra
Moru frombu di mare
Sale u vechju rimbeccu
Mughja l’anticu mostru
Cù la primiera notte
In chjostru
Avvene ch’ùn vi pare
Più vi risona l’eccu
Di u silenziu à la sarra
A sperenza ci và è
L’inchjostru ci si sparghje
In chjostru...*


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## Johnny Canuck3 (Nov 14, 2005)

There is lambswool under my naked feet.
The wool is soft and warm,
- gives off some kind of heat.
A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed.
Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid.
The fleas cling to the golden fleece,
Hoping they'll find peace.
Each thought and gesture are caught in celluloid.
There's no hiding in my memory.
There's no room to avoid.


The walls are painted in red ochre and are marked by strange insignia, some looking like a bulls-eye, others of birds and boats. Further down the corridor, he can see some people; all kneeling. With broken sighs and murmurs they struggle, in their slow motion to move towards a wooden door at the end. Having seen only the inanimate bodies in the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, Rael rushes to talk to them.

The crawlers cover the floor in the red ochre corridor.
For my second sight of people, they've more lifeblood than before.
They're moving in time to a heavy wooden door,
Where the needle's eye is winking, closing in on the poor.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out."


"What's going on?" he cries to a muttering monk, who conceals a yawn and replies "It's a long time yet before the dawn." A sphinx-like crawler calls his name saying "Don't ask him, the monk is drunk. Each one of us is trying to reach the top of the stairs, a way out will await us there." Not asking how he can move freely, our hero goes boldly through the door. Behind a table loaded with food, is a spiral staircase going up into the ceiling.

There's only one direction in the faces that I see;
It's upward to the ceiling, where the chamber's said to be.
Like the forest fight for sunlight, that takes root in every tree.
They are pulled up by the magnet, believing they're free.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out."

Mild mannered supermen are held in kryptonite,
And the wise and foolish virgins giggle with their bodies glowing
bright.
Through a door a harvest feast is lit by candlelight;
It's the bottom of a staircase that spirals out of sight.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out."

The porcelain mannikin with shattered skin fears attack.
The eager pack lift up their pitchers - they carry all they lack.
The liquid has congealed, which has seeped out through the crack,
And the tickler takes his stickleback.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out
We've got to get in to get out."


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## Derian (Nov 19, 2005)

*High Flight*

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.






Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941


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## wtfftw (Nov 20, 2005)

After the Lunch

On Waterloo Bridge, where we said our goodbyes,
The weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I’ve fallen in love.

On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. You’re high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?

On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You’re a fool. I don’t care.
The head does its best but the heart is the boss –
I admit it before I am halfway across.

By Wendy Cope


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## tastebud (Nov 24, 2005)

*Poem of MY day:*

as you ramble on through life, brother,
whatever be your goal,
keep your eye upon the doughnut,
and not upon the hole.


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## onemonkey (Dec 1, 2005)

welcome to the thread vixy


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## onemonkey (Dec 1, 2005)

*All Things will Die*

All Things will Die 

Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing 

Under my eye; 
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing 

Over the sky. 
One after another the white clouds are fleeting; 
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating 

Full merrily; 
Yet all things must die. 
The stream will cease to flow; 
The wind will cease to blow; 
The clouds will cease to fleet; 
The heart will cease to beat; 
For all things must die. 
All things must die. 
Spring will come never more. 
O, vanity! 
Death waits at the door. 
See! our friends are all forsaking 
The wine and the merrymaking. 
We are call’d–we must go. 
Laid low, very low, 
In the dark we must lie. 
The merry glees are still; 
The voice of the bird 
Shall no more be heard, 
Nor the wind on the hill. 
O, misery! 
Hark! death is calling 
While I speak to ye, 
The jaw is falling, 
The red cheek paling, 
The strong limbs failing; 
Ice with the warm blood mixing; 
The eyeballs fixing. 
Nine times goes the passing bell: 
Ye merry souls, farewell. 
The old earth 
Had a birth, 
As all men know, 
Long ago. 
And the old earth must die. 
So let the warm winds range, 
And the blue wave beat the shore; 
For even and morn 
Ye will never see 
Thro’ eternity. 
All things were born. 
Ye will come never more, 
For all things must die. 
_
Alfred, Lord Tennyson _


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## Valve (Dec 2, 2005)

a smile to remember
charles bukowski

we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, "be happy Henry!"
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week
     while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled


----------



## tom_craggs (Dec 7, 2005)

Not sure whether this has been previously posted, its a simple poem but I still love it.

'The trouble with snowmen,'
Said my father one year
'They are no sooner made
than they just disappear.

I'll build you a snowman
And I'll build it to last
Add sand and cement
And then have it cast.

And so every winter,'
He went on to explain
'You shall have a snowman
Be it sunshine or rain.'

And that snowman still stands
Though my father is gone
Out there in the garden
Like an unmarked gravestone.

Staring up at the house
Gross and misshapen
As if waiting for something
Bad to happen.

For as the years pass
And I grow older
When summers seem short
And winters colder.

The snowmen I envy
As I watch children play
Are the ones that are made
And then fade away. 

Roger McGough


----------



## Strumpet (Dec 10, 2005)

(dunno if this has been posted before but it's so relevant at the moment....)



    Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
    Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,    
    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

    Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
    Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
    Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
    Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

    He was my North, my South, my East and West,
    My working week and my Sunday rest,
    My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
    I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

    The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
    Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
    Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
    For nothing now can ever come to any good.

   W. H. Auden


----------



## Sweetpea (Dec 13, 2005)

*Oh bring back higher standards*

Oh bring back higher standards-
the pencil and the cane –
if we want education then we must have some pain.
Oh, bring us back all the gone days
Yes, bring back all the past…
let’s put them all in rows again – so we can tell who’s last.
Let’s label all the good ones
(the ones like you and me)
and make them into prefects – like prefects used to be.
We’ll put them on the honours board
…as honours ought to be,
and write their names in burnished script –
for all the world to see.
We’ll have them back in uniform,
we’ll have them doff their caps,
and learn what manners really are
…for decent kind of chaps!
…So let’s label all the good ones, 
we’ll call them ‘A’s and ‘B’s – 
and we’ll parcel up the useless ones 
and call them ‘C’s and ‘D’s.
…We’ll even have an ‘E’ lot! 
…an ‘F’ or ‘G’ maybe!!
…so they can know they’re useless,
…and not as good as me.
For we’ve got to have the stupid – 
And we’ve got to have the poor 
Because- 
if we don’t have them…
well… what are prefects for? 
Peter Dixon


----------



## tom_craggs (Dec 13, 2005)

Sweetpea said:
			
		

> bring back higher standards-



Thats a superb poem.


----------



## Here we go (Dec 22, 2005)

*Trio*

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening
a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights - 
The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,
the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,
and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.
And the three of them are laughing, their breath rises
in a cloud of happiness, and as they pass 
the boy says, "Wait till he sees this but!"
The chihuahua has a tiny Royal Stewart tartan coat like a teapot-holder,
the baby in its white shawl is all bright eyes and mouth like favours in a fresh sweet cake,
the guitar swells out under its milky plastic cover, tied at the neck with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe.
Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!
The vale of tears is powerless before you.
Whether Christ is born, or is not born, you
put paid to fate, it abdicates
                                              under the Christmas lights.
Monsters of the year go blank, are scattered back,
can't bear this march of three.

-And the three have passed, vanished in the crowd
(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind
the life of men and beasts, and music,
laughter ringing them round like a guard)
at the end of this winter's day.

Edwin Morgan


----------



## dada (Dec 22, 2005)

*Recycle me*

When I die please do not cry
I am but a fruit 
Those meat you have eaten
Sweet and juicy I released my pride
You may now cast my seeds in the dust
For I may live again in a rush

© Ank Steady


----------



## soulman (Jan 2, 2006)

AUGUST 22, 1939

_“. . . when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wildflowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the tranquillity of the mother-nature, and I am sure she will enjoy this very much, as you surely will be happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim; because they are your friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday, for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”_

_ —Nicola Sacco to his son Dante, Aug. 18, 1927.

    Angst und Gestalt und Gebet —Rilke_



What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
The centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
“For Christ’s sake take off your clothes and get into bed,
We are not going to live forever.”
“Petals fall from the rose,”
We fall from life,
Values fall from history like men from shellfire,
Only a minimum survives,
Only an unknown achievement.
They can put it all on the headstones,
In all the battlefields,
“Poor guy, he never knew what it was all about.”
Spectacled men will come with shovels in a thousand years,
Give lectures in universities on cultural advances, cultural lags.
A little more garlic in the soup,
A half-hour more in bed in the morning,
Some of them got it, some of them didn’t;
The things they dropped in their hurry
Are behind the glass cases of dusky museums.
This year we made four major ascents,
Camped for two weeks at timberline,
Watched Mars swim close to the earth,
Watched the black aurora of war
Spread over the sky of a decayed civilization.
These are the last terrible years of authority.
The disease has reached its crisis,
Ten thousand years of power,
The struggle of two laws,
The rule of iron and spilled blood,
The abiding solidarity of living blood and brain.
They are trapped, beleaguered, murderous,
If they line their cellars with cork
It is not to still the pistol shots,
It is to insulate the last words of the condemned.
“Liberty is the mother
Not the daughter of order.”
“Not the government of men
But the administration of things.”
“From each according to his ability,
Unto each according to his needs.”
We could still hear them,
Cutting steps in the blue ice of hanging glaciers,
Teetering along shattered arêtes.
The cold and cruel apathy of mountains
Has been subdued with a few strands of rope
And some flimsy iceaxes,
There are only a few peaks left.
Twenty-five years have gone since my first sweetheart.
Back from the mountains there is a letter waiting for me.
“I read your poem in the New Republic.
Do you remember the undertaker’s on the corner,
How we peeped in the basement window at a sheeted figure
And ran away screaming? Do you remember?
There is a filling station on the corner,
A parking lot where your house used to be,
Only ours and two other houses are left.
We stick it out in the noise and carbon monoxide.”
It was a poem of homesickness and exile,
Twenty-five years wandering around
In a world of noise and poison.
She stuck it out, I never went back,
But there are domestic as well as imported
Explosions and poison gases.
Dante was homesick, the Chinese made an art of it,
So was Ovid and many others,
Pound and Eliot amongst them,
Kropotkin dying of hunger,
Berkman by his own hand,
Fanny Baron biting her executioners,
Mahkno in the odor of calumny,
Trotsky, too, I suppose, passionately, after his fashion.
Do you remember?
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Do you remember the corpse in the basement?
What are we doing at the turn of our years,
Writers and readers of the liberal weeklies?

*Kennoth Rexroth - 1939*


----------



## Here we go (Jan 11, 2006)

*The Wild Geese*

"Oh, tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norlan' wind
As ye cam' blawin' frae the land that's niver frae my
mind? 
My feet they trayvel England, but I'm deein' for the 
north – "
_"My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth."_

"Aye, Wind, I ken them well eneuch, and fine they fa'
and rise,
And fain I'd feel the creepin' mist on yonder shore that
lies,
But tell me, ere ye passed them by, what saw ye on the
way?"
"_My man, I rocked the rovin' gulls that sail abune the Tay."_

"But saw ye naethin', leein' Wind, afore ye cam to Fife?
There's muckle lyin' yont the Tay that's mair to me nor
life."
_"My man, I swept the Angus braes ye haena trod for years – "_
"O wind, forgie a hameless loon that canna see for
tears! – "
_
"And far abune the Angus straths I saw the wild geese flee,
A lang, lang skein o' beatin' wings wi' their heids towards the
sea,
And aye their cryin' voices trailed ahint them on the air – "_
"O Wind, hae maircy, haud yer whisht, for I daurna
listen mair!"

Violet Jacob


----------



## babymoongeese (Jan 21, 2006)

Death of a Whale

When the mouse died, there was a sort of pity;
The tiny, delicate creature made for grief.
Yesterday, instead, the dead whale on the reef
Drew an excited multitude to the jetty.
How must a whale die to wring a tear?
Lugubrious death of a whale; the big
Feast for the gulls and sharks; the tug
Of the tide simulating life still there,
Until the air, polluted, swings this way
Like a door ajar from a slaughterhouse.
Pooh! pooh! spare us, give us the death of a mouse
By its tiny hole; not this in our lovely bay.
-- Sorry, we are, too, when a child dies:
But at the immolation of a race, who cries?

John Blight


----------



## onemonkey (Jan 27, 2006)

*Wordsworth on face perception and social cognition*

A Character 

I marvel how Nature could ever find space 
For so many strange contrasts in one human face: 
There's thought and no thought, and there's paleness and bloom 
And bustle and sluggishness, pleasure and gloom. 

There's weakness, and strength both redundant and vain; 
Such strength as, if ever affliction and pain 
Could pierce through a temper that's soft to disease, 
Would be rational peace--a philosopher's ease. 

There's indifference, alike when he fails or succeeds, 
And attention full ten times as much as there needs; 
Pride where there's no envy, there's so much of joy; 
And mildness, and spirit both forward and coy. 

There's freedom, and sometimes a diffident stare 
Of shame scarcely seeming to know that she's there, 
There's virtue, the title it surely may claim, 
Yet wants heaven knows what to be worthy the name. 

This picture from nature may seem to depart, 
Yet the Man would at once run away with your heart; 
And I for five centuries right gladly would be 
Such an odd such a kind happy creature as he. 

William Wordsworth


----------



## tastebud (Feb 2, 2006)

*Dover Beach*

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in. 
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. 

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold (1867)


----------



## Dubversion (Feb 3, 2006)

found this today after googling a Lorca quote from (of all things) a piece about Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.




> *Ballad of the Small Plaza*
> 
> Singing of children
> in the night silence:
> ...


----------



## Stanley Edwards (Feb 3, 2006)

Coincidentally I've just returned from a very nice vino y tapas session in 'Plaza de Lorca' - a small village square with a fountain and children and everything  

I'll probably go back on Monday and do it again with these words in mind.

--/

Actually, the more I think the more it begs to be given photographic treatment. Perhaps with a little Van Morrison to fill the air.


----------



## Here we go (Feb 13, 2006)

Lets have a few more poems folks!


----------



## onemonkey (Feb 13, 2006)

*here you go here we go*

_A Glimpse - Walt Whitman 
_
A GLIMPSE, through an interstice caught, 
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove, 
late of a winter night--And I unremark'd seated in a corner; 
Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and 
seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand; 
A long while, amid the noises of coming and going--of drinking and 
oath and smutty jest, 
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, 
perhaps not a word.


----------



## onemonkey (Feb 13, 2006)

Here we go said:
			
		

> Lets have a few more poems folks!


and you may post poems yourself.



but not your own


----------



## Here we go (Feb 13, 2006)

Yeah I know, I discover most of the poetry I like on this thread though


----------



## Wolfie (Feb 14, 2006)

well given today's date someone had to do it ....

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 18

Shakespeare


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## Dubversion (Feb 14, 2006)

one of about 4 poems i know off by heart, for some reason


----------



## LDR (Feb 14, 2006)

This is one of my favourite poems.


*Digging* by Seamus Heaney  

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


----------



## Wolfie (Feb 14, 2006)

Dubversion said:
			
		

> one of about 4 poems i know off by heart, for some reason



the only one I know (and I have to rack my brains to do it) is The Jabberwocky - I recited it for a competition at school once and it kind of stuck ...


----------



## Sesquipedalian (Feb 14, 2006)

*Dead Woman.*

Dead Woman - Pablo Neruda.
(Translation from Spanish - Brian Cole.)

If suddenly you do not exist,
If suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
If you die.

I shall live on.

For where a man has no voice,
There shall be my voice.

Where blacks are flogged and beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison,
I shall go with them.

When victory,
Not my victory,
But the great victory comes,
Even if i am dumb I must speak,
I shall see it coming even if i am blind.

No,forgive me,
If you no longer live,
If you,beloved,my love,
If you have died,
All the leaves will fall upon my breast,
It will rain on my soul night and day,
The snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,

My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,

But,
I shall stay alive,
Because above all things you wanted me indomitable,
And my love,
Because you know that i am not only a man but all mankind.


----------



## Here we go (Feb 20, 2006)

Studied this one at school:

*The Horses*

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
                                        And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

By Edwin Muir


----------



## onemonkey (Feb 22, 2006)

_When I Have Fears 
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 charactery, 
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.


----------



## Ryazan (Feb 25, 2006)

*To a Revolutionary Girl*

Violets peer out in streaks
On the covered ribs
Of hills, and meet the air
In a million trembling
Lips on fields throughout the world:
Stretch along the highways, 
Small and mighty in the drip of rain: 
Dot the base of mountains, 
Equal purpose in disguise: 
Signal friendship 
To the rocks, 
Take the darkness 
From cave-outlets 
And ravines – 

You are a girl, 
A revolutionist, a worker 
Sworn to give the last, undaunted jerk
Of your body and every atom 
Of your mind and heart 
To every other worker 
In the slow, hard fight 
That leads to barricade, to victory 
Against the ruling swine.
Yet, in the softer regions of your heart, 
The shut-off, personal, illogical 
Disturbance of your mind, 
You long for crumpled 'kerchiefs, notes 
Of nonsense understood 
Only by a lover.
Long for colors on your dresses, 
Ribboned sleeves, unnecessary buttons: 
Bits of laughter chased and never 
Dying: challenge of a hat 
Buoyant over hair.
Youth and sex, distinctions 
Still unmarred by centuries of pain, 
Will not be downed, survive 
In spite of hunger, strikes, and riot-guns, 
Sternness in the ranks.
We frown upon your sensitive demands: 

We do not like romance 
In our present time – to us 
It reeks of flowered screens
Over garbage-cans, of pretty words
Bringing hollowness, not flesh, 
To every skeleton.
It stamps the living death of Hollywood,
The tactics of a factory 
Shipped in boxes round, price-marked 
With lying sweetness, trivial 
Melodrama doping eyes and ears. 
And yet romance, expelled from actual life, 
Sneak back in middle age, 
Impossible in groan and taunt. 
Their gilt on top, mould underneath, Revolt us –

But you are a girl.
Your problem cannot be denied. 
In the Russia of the past
Women once pinned flowers 
To their shoulders, chained to lovers
Flogged by snarling guards
In the exile of Siberia, 
And in the Russia of today
Men and women, proud of working-hours,
Sturdy, far from blood-steeped tinsel, 
Take their summer vacations 
On the steppes, in cleaner games, 
In flowers, pledgers, loyalties,
Clear-growing, inevitable, 
Deepening in their youth. 
Steal, for an hour, now and then, 
To your time of violets, the hope 
Of less impeded tenderness 
In a freedom yet to come, 
Then fold it in your heart for unapparent, 
Secretly unyielding strength 
On every picket-line throughout the world, 
Revolutionary girl. 

Maxwell Bodenheim


----------



## jms (Feb 26, 2006)

I dont know if this has been posted before but I really like it:

*Inversnaid*

This darksome burn, horseback brown,  
His rollrock highroad roaring down,  
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam  
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.  

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth         
Turns and twindles over the broth  
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,  
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.  

Degged with dew, dappled with dew  
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,         
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,  
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.  

What would the world be, once bereft  
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,  
O let them be left, wildness and wet;         
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. 

_Gerard Manley Hopkins_


----------



## dark angel vikx (Feb 26, 2006)

About His Person (Simon Armatidge)

Five pounds fifty in change,exactly
a library card on its date of expiry.

A postcard,stamped,
unwritten,but franked,

a pocket-sized diary slashed with a pencil
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.

A brace of keys for a mortise lock,
an analogue watch, self winding,stopped.

A final demand
in his own hand,

a rolled-up note of explanation
planted there like a spray carnation

but beheaded,in his fist.
A shopping list.

A giveaway photograph stashed in his wallet,
a keepsake banked in the heart of a locket.

No gold or sliver,
but crowning one finger

a ring of white unweathered skin.
That was everything.



one of my fav poems has always seemed to stay in my mind....


----------



## 888 (Mar 2, 2006)

That's good. Has he just committed suicide though? I'm worried. The words seem to suggest it.


----------



## onemonkey (Mar 30, 2006)

_Drinking Alone _

I take my wine jug out among the flowers 
to drink alone, without friends. 

I raise my cup to entice the moon. 
That, and my shadow, makes us three. 

But the moon doesn't drink, 
and my shadow silently follows. 

I will travel with moon and shadow, 
happy to the end of spring. 

When I sing, the moon dances. 
When I dance, my shadow dances, too. 

We share life's joys when sober. 
Drunk, each goes a separate way. 

Constant friends, although we wander, 
we'll meet again in the Milky Way. 
_
Li T'ai-po 
tr. Hamil 
_


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Mar 31, 2006)

I've been reading _Little Gidding_ a lot recently. You may like to do the same.


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 2, 2006)

_To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough
_Robert Burns
1785

    Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
    O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
    Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
    Wi' bickering brattle!
    I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
    Wi' murd'ring pattle!

    I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
    Has broken nature's social union,
    An' justifies that ill opinion,
    Which makes thee startle
    At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
    An' fellow-mortal!

    I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
    What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
    A daimen icker in a thrave
    'S a sma' request;
    I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
    An' never miss't!

    Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
    It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
    An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
    O' foggage green!
    An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
    Baith snell an' keen!

    Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
    An' weary winter comin fast,
    An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
    Thou thought to dwell-
    Till crash! the cruel coulter past
    Out thro' thy cell.

    That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
    Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
    Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
    But house or hald,
    To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
    An' cranreuch cauld!

    But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
    In proving foresight may be vain;
    The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
    Gang aft agley,
    An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
    For promis'd joy!

    Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
    The present only toucheth thee:
    But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
    On prospects drear!
    An' forward, tho' I canna see,
    I guess an' fear!


----------



## roxyfoxy (Apr 3, 2006)

*My name is cocaine my chosen poem for today*

Found this poem a long time ago in someones bathroom. Thought i'd share it with you !  




"My Name Is Cocaine"
by Larry Jackson

My Name is Cocaine - call me Coke for short.
I entered this country without a passport.

Ever since then I've made lots of scum rich.
Some have been murdered and found in a ditch.

I'm more valued than diamonds, more treasured than gold.
Use me just once and you too will be sold.

I'll make a school boy forget his books.
I'll make a beauty queen forget her looks.

I'll take a renowned speaker and make him a bore.
I'll take your mother and make her a whore.

I'll make a teacher forget how to teach.
I'll make a preacher not want to preach.

I'll take all your rent money and you'll be evicted.
I'll murder your babies, or they'll be addicted.

I'll make you rob, and steal, and kill.
When you're under my power, you will have no will.

Remember, my friend, my name is "Big C".
If you try me one time, you may never be free.

I have destroyed many actors, politicians and heroes.
I've decreased bank accounts from millions to zero.

I'll make shootings and stabbing a common affair.
Once I take charge, you won't have a prayer.

Now that you know me, what will you do?
You'll have to decide - it's all up to you.

Listen to me, and please listen well,
When you ride with Cocaine, you're headed for hell.


----------



## tom_craggs (Apr 4, 2006)

A Million Marching Feet

I loved to watch the winder
Hauling the coal up from the mine
I stood and watched in wonder
To me a scene so fine.

At fourteen tender years if age
Seeking work for the very first time
I failed to connect that fairy tale cage
With the rigours of the mine.

But down below the scene was new
Damp and dark and cold
And in the eerie weird hue
A tunnel did unfold.

Along this tunnel I was led
To see a different world
It seemed my childhood I had shed
A new life had unfurled.

I saw a life of toil and stride
And dangers there were many
I saw men risk a precious life
To earn and honest penny.

Face to face with death and fright
And bodies mained and mangled
My schoolmate lost his hand in fight
With conveyor he had tangled.

With all the dangers imminent
And fighting for their right
Their humour seemed impertinent
Their comradeship was might.

Many of my memories
Lie in shallow grave
Victims of the lung disease
Their precious lives they gave.

In May of Nineteen Sixty Five
An explosion rocked the mine
Though rescue teams did sweat and strive
Thirty one lives did sad hearts pine.

Absent friends came to the fore
In older people's mind
For this had happened once before
When thirty three men died.

Count all the deaths involving pits
Since coal was first discovered
In this fair land alone. it fits
That tragedy be uncovered.

If we could raise up all the dead
And they march down your street
You would probably hear the heavy tread
Of a million marching feet.

Aneurin Owen


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 10, 2006)

_Outsider art
John Hegley_

As a bit of a break for Albert
from the hospital of the mind
I accompanied him to the park for a picnic
and a bit of crayoning enjoyment;
using just the one crayon
he liked to attend to a piece of paper
and meticulously obliterate the surface area.
Some time into the process
a couple who shared Albert's middle age
came sneaking a fascinated peek
over the shoulder of what they took to be
an amateur landscape artist
but found his interpretation of reality
just a little too modern.


----------



## roxyfoxy (Apr 15, 2006)

Desiderata

-- written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920s --
Not "Found in Old St. Paul's Church"! -- see below

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I keep this poem on my bathroom door !!!


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## redsnapper (Apr 15, 2006)

That's got something really special about it roxy but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's just a well put way of describing a good way of being. I like that.


----------



## roxyfoxy (Apr 15, 2006)

Yup ! had it for years i really like it x


----------



## muser (Apr 16, 2006)

I remember reading a poem years ago, it was called the lady's first song. Or a title to that effect. Could anyone please post it or give me a link to it.


----------



## soulthesaurus (Apr 16, 2006)

Only because i've just fallen in love again this is my favourite. 

Valentine


  The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like to successfully guess your weight and win you at a fte.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders, too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I’d like all your particulars in folders marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath) in rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work, on hinges.

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I’d like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I’d like to give you just the right amount and get some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you nod and hold a teacup. I like your legs when you unwind
them.
Even in trousers I don’t mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.
I like the little crease behind them.
I’d always know, without a recap, where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I’d like to cross two hemispheres and have you chase me.
I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt and cancelling other dates.
I’d like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I’d let you put insecticide into my wine.
I’d even like you if you were the Bride of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde.
I’d even like you as my Julian of Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of boolean mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I’d like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin. And see you grin.
I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin,
I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence.
I’d like to be your second look.
I’d like to let you try the French Defence and mate you with my rook.
I’d like to be your preference and hence
I’d like to be around when you unhook.
I’d like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book, your future tense


----------



## muser (Apr 18, 2006)

Sorry to post again, but did anyone find the poem, 'the lady's first song' or a title to that effect? Written at least 40 years ago, but I recall having read it 15 years ago. thank you in advance


----------



## onemonkey (Apr 18, 2006)

soulthesaurus   - you'd have to be in love to like that _thing_..

who's  responsible for it?


----------



## Leica (May 1, 2006)

G. Seferis, some fragments from _Thrush_

(i) The house near the sea

The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.

Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark
or the little wagtail
inscribing figures with his tail in the light;
I don’t know much about houses
I know they have their own nature, nothing else.
New at first, like babies
who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun.
they embroider colored shutters and shining doors
over the day.
When the architect’s finished, they change,
they frown or smile or even grow stubborn
with those who stayed behind, with those who went away
with others who’d come back if they could
or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become
an endless hotel.
[...]
Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily when you strip
them bare.
[...]

(iii) The wreck “Thrush”

“This wood that cooled my forehead
at times when noon burned my veins
will flower in other hands. Take it, I’m giving it to you;
look, it’s wood from a lemon-tree…”
I heard the voice
as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out
a ship they’d sunk there years ago;
it was called “Thrush,” a small wreck; the masts,
broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like
tentacles,
or the memory of dreams, marking the hull:
vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster
extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around.
[...]

The light

As the years go by
the judges who condemn you grow in number;
as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices,
you see the sun with different eyes:
you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you
the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance
that ends in nakedness.
It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway,
you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine,
eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes:
you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness.
[...]
And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms
struck the obstinate marathon runner
and he saw the track sail in blood,
the world empty like the moon,
the gardens of victory wither:
you see them in the sun, behind the sun.
[...]
whoever has never loved will love,
in the light:
and you find yourself
in a large house with many windows open
running from room to room, not knowing from where to
look out first,
because the pine-trees will vanish, and the mirrored moun-
tains, and the chirping of birds
the sea will drain dry, shattered glass, from north and south
your eyes will empty of daylight
the way the cicadas suddenly, all together, fall silent.

31 October 1946


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## soulman (May 1, 2006)

*For Mayday 2006 - International Workers Day*

FROM THE PARIS COMMUNE TO
THE KRONSTADT REBELLION

Remember now there were others before this;
Now when the unwanted hours rise up,
And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,
And the constellations change places,
And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,
And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot.
Though the air is fetid, conscripted fathers,
With the black bloat of your dead faces;
Though men wander idling out of factories
Where turbine and hand are both freezing;
And the air clears at last above the chimneys;
Though mattresses curtain the windows;
And every hour hears the snarl of explosion;
Yet one shall rise up alone saying:
“I am one out of many, I have heard
Voices high in the air crying out commands;
Seen men’s bodies burst into torches;
Seen faun and maiden die in the night air raids;
Heard the watchwords exchanged in the alleys;
Felt hate speed the blood stream and fear curl the nerves.
I know too the last heavy maggot;
And know the trapped vertigo of impotence.
I have traveled prone and unwilling
In the dense processions through the shaken streets.
Shall we hang thus by taut navel strings
To this corrupt placenta till we’re flyblown;
Till our skulls are cracked by crow and kite
And our members become the business of ants,
Our teeth the collection of magpies?”
They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.

_Kenneth Rexroth_


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## Leica (May 2, 2006)

It's near midnight, so...

Constantine Cavafis, _The God Abandons Antony_ (1911)

At midnight, when suddenly you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don't mourn them uselessly:
as one long prepared, and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.


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## muser (May 3, 2006)

*the lady's first song*

I found it. The lady's first song:

I turn round
Like a dumb beast in a show.
Neither know what I am
Nor where I go,
My language beaten
Into one name;
I am in love
And that is my shame.
What hurts the soul
My soul adores,
No better than a beast
Upon all fours.


----------



## muser (May 3, 2006)

*william Blake*

a sick rose

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm.
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.


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## onemonkey (May 4, 2006)

*The Dreams of My Heart
*_Sarah Teasdale _

The dreams of my heart and my mind pass, 
Nothing stays with me long, 
But I have had from a child 
The deep solace of song; 

If that should ever leave me, 
Let me find death and stay 
With things whose tunes are played out and forgotten 
Like the rain of yesterday.


----------



## siarc (May 12, 2006)

*The Wind Will Take Us*

In my small night, alas,
The wind has an appointment with the trees,
In my small night there is fear of devastation.

Listen.
Do you hear the dark wind whispering?
I look upon this bliss with alien eyes
I am addicted to my sorrow
Listen.
Do you hear the dark wind whispering?

Now something is happening in the night
The moon is red and agitated
And the roof may cave in at any moment.

The clouds have gathered like a bunch of mourners
And seem to be waiting for the moment of rain.

A moment
And after it, nothing.
Beyond this window the night trembles
And the earth
Will no longer turn.
Beyond this window an enigma worries for you and for me.

Oh you who are so verdant
Place your hands like a burning memory in my hands.
And leave your lips that are warm with life
To the loving caresses of my lips.
The wind will carry us away,
The wind will carry us away.

_Forugh Farrokhzad_


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## The Unseen (May 12, 2006)

Mid-Term Break
Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.


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## jms (May 12, 2006)

Another one from the anthology then


----------



## onemonkey (May 18, 2006)

_A Broken Appointment 
Thomas Hardy 
_
You did not come, 
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. 
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there 
Than that I thus found lacking in your make 
That high compassion which can overbear 
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake 
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, 
You did not come. 

You love me not, 
And love alone can lend you loyalty; 
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store 
Of human deeds divine in all but name, 
Was it not worth a little hour or more 
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came 
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be 
You love me not.


----------



## lynne8 (May 19, 2006)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> *Diougan Gwenc'hlan*
> _(Gwenc'hlan's Prophecy)_
> 
> 
> ...



my head hurts from reading 3 years of posting all at once, love this one!!


----------



## lynne8 (May 19, 2006)

RubyToogood said:
			
		

> NO CHOICE
> 
> I think about you
> in as many ways as rain comes.
> ...



ruby, you rock, another great one.


----------



## lynne8 (May 19, 2006)

I'm probably breaking all kind of rules posting this at this time, but, anyway...from my childhood.

The Pobble Who Has no Toes.

by Edward Lear

The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said "Some day you may lose them all;"
He replied "Fish, fiddle-de-dee!"
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said "The World in general knows
There's nothing so good for a Pobble's toes!"

The Pobble who has no toes
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set out he wrapped his nose
In a piece of scarlet flannel.
For his Aunt Jobiska said "No harm
Can come to his toes if his nose is warm;
And it's perfectly known that a Pobble's toes
Are safe, — provided he minds his nose!"

The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,
So that all the world could hear him.
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side -
"He has gone to fish for his Aunt Jobiska's
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!"

But before he touched the shore,
The shore of the Bristol Channel,
A sea-green porpoise carried away
His wrapper of scarlet flannel.
And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn,
On perceiving that all his toes were gone!

And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble's toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps, or crawfish grey,
Or crafty Mermaids stole them away -
Nobody knew: and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!

The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up
To his Aunt Jobiska's Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish, -
And she said "It's a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes!"


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## isvicthere? (May 19, 2006)

muser said:
			
		

> a sick rose
> 
> O Rose thou art sick.
> The invisible worm.
> ...



Last line should be: "Doth thy life destroy".


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## maya (May 20, 2006)

*Jabberwocky*

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

- Lewis Carroll


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## onemonkey (May 25, 2006)

_The Many Wines - Jalaluddin Rumi
_
    God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
    drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

    God has put into the form of hashish a power
    to deliver the taster from self-consciousness. 

    God has made sleep so
    that it erases every thought. 

    God made Majnun love Layla so much that
    just her dog would cause confusion in him.

     There are thousands of wines
    that can take over our minds.

    Don't think all ecstacies
    are the same!

    Jesus was lost in his love for God.
    His donkey was drunk with barley. 

    Drink from the presence of saints,
    not from those other jars. 

    Every object, every being,
    is a jar full of delight. 

    Be a conoisseur,
    and taste with caution. 

    Any wine will get you high.
    Judge like a king, and choose the purest, 

    the ones unadulterated with fear,
    or some urgency about "what's needed." 

    Drink the wine that moves you
    as a camel moves when it's been untied,

    and is just ambling about.


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## k_s (May 29, 2006)

*Rimbaud- sensation*

par les soirs bleu d'ete, j'irai dans les sentiers.
picote par les bles, foulers l'herbe menue:
reveur, j'en sentirai la fraicheur a mes pieds.
je laisserai le vent baigner ma tete nue.

je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'ame,
et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohemien,
par la nature, hereux comme avec une femme.

---------------------------------------------

On summer evenings i shall take the bridle-ways,
wheat pecking at my wrists, slim grass beneath my tread;
I'll feel its coolness penetrate my dreamy haze
and let the wind wash over my uncovered head.

I shall not speak, I shall not think of anything.
But through my soul will surge all love's infinity;
far, far away I'll go, a gypsy wandering
content in nature as in woman's company

(norman cameron's translation)


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## Leica (May 31, 2006)

(instead of a letter)
. . .
If you drive a bull to exhaustion
he will run away,
lay himself down in the cold waters.
Besides your love
I have
no ocean
and your love won't grant even a tearful plea for rest.
When a tired elephant wants peace
he lies down regally in the firebound sand.
Besides your love
I have
no sun,
but I don't even know where you are and with whom.
If you tortured a poet like this,
he
would berate his beloved for money and fame,
but for me
no sound is joyous
but the sound of your beloved name.
. . .
No blade
holds me transfixed
but your glance.
. . .

26 May 1916, Petrograd
Vladimir Mayakovsky, fragments from _Lilichka!_


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## siarc (Jun 2, 2006)

*To Angelique*

Now that heaven smiles in favor,
   Like a mute shall I still languish,—
I, who when unhappy, ever
   Sang so much about mine anguish?

Till a thousand striplings haunted
   By despair, my notes re-fluted,
And unto the woe I chanted.
   Greater evils still imputed. 

O the nightingales' sweet choir,
   That my bosom holds in capture,
Lift your joyous voices higher,
   Let the whole world hear your rapture! 

_Heine, trans Emma Lazarus_

there is a poem by heine (a lot better than this one) about his conversion (of expedience) to christianity, it's incredibly vituperative but i can't remember the name or even a line to search for?

mayakovsky is nice to see, i hardly know his poems but always thought he had the nicest name of all the poets (except maybe apollonaire)


----------



## Leica (Jun 2, 2006)

siarc said:
			
		

> mayakovsky is nice to see, i hardly know his poems but always thought he had the nicest name of all the poets (except maybe apollonaire)



The trouble with V.M. in English is that it is difficult to carry over the games of words and sounds that make his poems so innovative, and that few existing translations understand his point and choose the right words. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing because, the Russian language and the times V.M. lived in being unfashionable in the market nowadays, it means he is protected. He was great though, the greatest for me.

"Don't set in motion a huge factory just to make poetic cigarette lighters" (from his little book _How Are Verses Made?_).


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## roxyfoxy (Jun 2, 2006)

Jim 
by Hilaire Belloc 

Who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion 

There was a Boy whose name was Jim; 
His Friends were very good to him. 
They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam, 
And slices of delicious Ham, 
And Chocolate with pink inside 
And little Tricycles to ride, 
And read him Stories through and through, 
And even took him to the Zoo-- 
But there it was the dreadful Fate 
Befell him, which I now relate. 

You know--or at least you ought to know, 
For I have often told you so-- 
That Children never are allowed 
To leave their Nurses in a Crowd; 
Now this was Jim's especial Foible, 
He ran away when he was able, 
And on this inauspicious day 
He slipped his hand and ran away! 

He hadn't gone a yard when--Bang! 
With open Jaws, a lion sprang, 
And hungrily began to eat 
The Boy: beginning at his feet. 
Now, just imagine how it feels 
When first your toes and then your heels, 
And then by gradual degrees, 
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees, 
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit. 
No wonder Jim detested it! 
No wonder that he shouted ``Hi!'' 

The Honest Keeper heard his cry, 
Though very fat he almost ran 
To help the little gentleman. 
``Ponto!'' he ordered as he came 
(For Ponto was the Lion's name), 
``Ponto!'' he cried, with angry Frown, 
``Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!'' 
The Lion made a sudden stop, 
He let the Dainty Morsel drop, 
And slunk reluctant to his Cage, 
Snarling with Disappointed Rage. 
But when he bent him over Jim, 
The Honest Keeper's Eyes were dim. 
The Lion having reached his Head, 
The Miserable Boy was dead! 

When Nurse informed his Parents, they 
Were more Concerned than I can say:-- 
His Mother, as She dried her eyes, 
Said, ``Well--it gives me no surprise, 
He would not do as he was told!'' 
His Father, who was self-controlled, 
Bade all the children round attend 
To James's miserable end, 
And always keep a-hold of Nurse 
For fear of finding something worse. 


Can't wait to read this to my kid's used to sound so scary. I won a distinction reading this poem when i was 12 and got an English speaking board Certificate !!


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## ska invita (Jun 8, 2006)

*Lee Scratch Perry - Return of the Grim Reaper*

Who knows this one? 

Lee Scratch Perry - Return of the Grim Reaper  


> At last, Lee 'Scratch' Perry the Upsetter saying in a loud voice:
> REPENT MINISTERS OF CRIMES,
> REPENT GOVERNORS OF WRONGS,
> and this is my brand new song, coming from the sea and sun, Jamaica,
> ...


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## Sweetpea (Jun 24, 2006)

*Eldorado*

Gaily bedight, 
A gallant knight, 
In sunshine and in shadow, 
Had journeyed long, 
Singing a song, 
In search of Eldorado. 

But he grew old
This knight so bold
And o'er his heart a shadow 
Fell as he found 
No spot of ground 
That looked like Eldorado. 

And, as his strength 
Failed him at length, 
He met a pilgrim shadow
"Shadow," said he, 
"Where can it be
This land of Eldorado?" 

"Over the Mountains 
Of the Moon, 
Down the Valley of the Shadow, 
Ride, boldly ride," 
The shade replied
"If you seek for Eldorado!" 

_Edgar Allan Poe._


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## Iam (Jul 4, 2006)

**bump* and *sigh**

I need so much the quiet of your love 
   After the day's loud strife; 
I need your calm all other things above 
   After the stress of life. 

I crave the haven that in your dear heart lies, 
   After all toil is done; 
I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes, 
   After the day's great sun. 

"At Nightfall", Charles Hansen Towne


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## fudgefactorfive (Jul 12, 2006)

*The Fall of Rome*

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes _I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK_
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

	-- W.H. Auden


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## soulman (Aug 28, 2006)

*Again at Waldheim*

_“Light upon Waldheim”
    —Voltairine de Cleyre on the Haymarket martyrs_

How heavy the heart is now, and every heart
Save only the word drunk, power drunk
Hard capsule of the doomed. How distraught
Those things of pride, the wills nourished in the fat
Years, fed in the kindly twilight of the books
In gold and brown, the voices that had little
To live for, crying for something to die for.
The philosophers of history,
Of dim wit and foolish memory,
The giggling concubines of catastrophe —
Who forget so much — Boethius’ calm death,
More’s sweet speech, Rosa’s broken body —
Or you, tough, stubby recalcitrant
Of Fate.

             Now in Waldheim where the rain
Has fallen careless and unthinking
For all an evil century’s youth,
Where now the banks of dark roses lie,
What memory lasts, Emma, of you,
Or of the intrepid comrades of your grave,
Of Piotr, of “mutual aid,”
Against the iron clad flame throwing
Course of time?
                         Your stakes were on the turn
Of a card whose face you knew you would not see.

You knew that nothing could ever be
More desperate than truth; and when every voice
Was cowed, you spoke against the coalitions
For the duration of the emergency —
In the permanent emergency
You spoke for the irrefutable
Coalition of the blood of men.

_Kenneth Rexroth_


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## perplexis (Sep 1, 2006)

*Gloomy Sunday- Rezso Seress (translated from Hungarian, original title: Szomoru Vasarnap)*

It is autumn and the leaves are falling
All love has died on earth
The wind is weeping with sorrowful tears
My heart will never hope for a new spring again
My tears and my sorrows are all in vain
People are heartless, greedy and wicked...

Love has died!

The world ahs come to its end, hope has ceased to have a meaning
Cities are being wiped out, shrapnel is making music
Meadows are coloured red and human blood
There are dead people on the streets everywhere
I will say another quiet prayer:
People are sinners, Lord, they make mistakes...

The world has ended!


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## Mungy (Sep 2, 2006)

*Commuter Doggerel from Poems Not On The Underground*

Monday's train is completely packed,
Tuesday's train is equally stacked,
Wednesday's train is oh so slow,
Thursday's train mkaes you want to throw,
Friday's train is subject to strikes,
Saturday's train can do what it likes,
As can the train on the Sabbath day
Because you're not on either, hip hip hooray.


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## Dhimmi (Sep 7, 2006)

When Captain Beefheart was very very poor,
he took up selling vaccuum cleaners door to door,
when Huxley answered he couldn't believe his luck,
and pointed to one and said "Sir this thing sucks".


----------



## Badger Kitten (Sep 17, 2006)

Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)
                                   The Highwayman 

                                        PART ONE 

                                                 I 

    THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, 
    The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, 
    The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, 
    And the highwayman came riding— 
                      Riding—riding— 
    The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door. 

                                                 II 

    He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin, 
    A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin; 
    They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh! 
    And he rode with a jewelled twinkle, 
                      His pistol butts a-twinkle, 
    His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky. 

                                                 III 

    Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard, 
    And he tapped with his whip on the shuters, but all was locked and barred; 
    He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there 
    But the landlord's black-eyed daughter, 
                      Bess, the landlord's daughter, 
    Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. 

                                                 IV 

    And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked 
    Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked; 
    His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay, 
    But he loved the landlord's daughter, 
                      The landlord's red-lipped daughter, 
    Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say— 

                                                 V 

    "One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night, 
    But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light; 
    Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day, 
    Then look for me by moonlight, 
                      Watch for me by moonlight, 
    I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way." 

                                                 VI 

    He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand, 
    But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand 
    As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast; 
    And he kissed its waves in the moonlight, 
                      (Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!) 
    Then he tugged at his rein in the moonliglt, and galloped away to the West. 



                                        PART TWO 

                                                 I 

    He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon; 
    And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon, 
    When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor, 
    A red-coat troop came marching— 
                      Marching—marching— 
    King George's men came matching, up to the old inn-door. 

                                                 II 

    They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead, 
    But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed; 
    Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side! 
    There was death at every window; 
                      And hell at one dark window; 
    For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride. 

                                                 III 

    They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest; 
    They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast! 
    "Now, keep good watch!" and they kissed her. 
                      She heard the dead man say— 
    Look for me by moonlight; 
                      Watch for me by moonlight; 
    I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way! 

                                                 IV 

    She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good! 
    She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood! 
    They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years, 
    Till, now, on the stroke of midnight, 
                      Cold, on the stroke of midnight, 
    The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers! 

                                                 V 

    The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest! 
    Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast, 
    She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again; 
    For the road lay bare in the moonlight; 
                      Blank and bare in the moonlight; 
    And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain . 

                                                 VI 

        Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear; 
    Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear? 
    Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill, 
    The highwayman came riding, 
                      Riding, riding! 
    The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still! 

                                                 VII 

    Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night! 
    Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light! 
    Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath, 
    Then her finger moved in the moonlight, 
                      Her musket shattered the moonlight, 
    Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death. 

                                                 VIII 

    He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood 
    Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood! 
    Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear 
    How Bess, the landlord's daughter, 
                      The landlord's black-eyed daughter, 
    Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there. 

                                                 IX 

    Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky, 
    With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high! 
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat, 
    When they shot him down on the highway, 
                      Down like a dog on the highway, 
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat. 

                  *           *           *           *           *           * 

                                                 X 

_And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, 
    When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, 
    When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, 
    A highwayman comes riding— 
                      Riding—riding— 
    A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door. 

                                                 XI 

    Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard; 
    He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred; 
    He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there 
    But the landlord's black-eyed daughter, 
                      Bess, the landlord's daughter, 
    Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. _


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## lontok2005 (Sep 17, 2006)

by* A.E. Housman *(not sure of the title)

He would not stay for me and who's to wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze
I shook his hand and tore my heart asunder
And went with half my life about my ways.


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## ada (Sep 21, 2006)

*Against Coupling* _Fleur Adcock_

I write in praise of the solitary act:
of not feeling a trespassing tongue
forced into one's mouth, one's breath
smothered, nipples crushed against the 
rib-cage, and that metallic tingling
in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help-
such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
listening to the vegetal
rustle within her, as his gaze
stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.

There is much to be said for abandoning
this no longer novel excercise-
for now 'participating in
a total experience'-when
one feels like the lady in Leeds who
had seen The Sound Of Music eighty-six times;

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress
producing A Midsummer Night's Dream
for the seventh year running, with
yet another cast from 5B.
Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without
encumberance. No need to set the scene,
dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
enough-in the bath, or to fill
that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.


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## fanta (Sep 28, 2006)

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

Billy Collins.


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## Donna Ferentes (Sep 29, 2006)

_The rich feign wrath - a profitable plan
'Tis cheaper far to hate than help a man._

(Martial, adapted by Potts)


----------



## Hollis (Sep 29, 2006)

Describing Hitler's arrival in Hell..

_Untitled_

I can imagine when he came
And when his victims heard his name
They gathered round him not to miss
So good a chance to hoot and hiss

But those on earth may all agree
From torture he must not go free
That God Almighty has some plan
To punish such a naughty man


Herbert Brush, 1945


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## tastebud (Oct 7, 2006)

*Pablo Neruda - Flies Enter a Closed Mouth*

This was actually my poem of yesterday.



> Why, with these red fires, are the rubies ready to burst into flame?
> 
> Why is the heart of the topaz
> yellow with honeycombs?
> ...


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## fudgefactorfive (Oct 8, 2006)

I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse than usual fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman
And he's been dead since 1936

- Wendy Cope


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## tastebud (Oct 11, 2006)

the girl we found pantiless
on the sandbox monkey bars,
she wouldn't come down.
we laughed
gawked up at her crease
but the bare-bottomed hussy
kept climbing
pantiless & proud
to the very top
her spread legs, girders
holding together
her steel mountain.
it was we who fell
tumbled into her living room
plunged into the smell of grease, rank
unwashed or barely washed
clothes, a father snoring
drunk, drawn shades
its windows, closed mouths

she looked down at us
eyes hard as sand
only then did she return
to her living room.
leave us children
to our play.
she didn't look back, we lost her
at the edge of the building
we making war among the dunes
we with panties
mothers
and lighted livingrooms.

- Yvonne A. Jackson "Underwear"


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## girasol (Oct 11, 2006)

*On Children - Khalil Gibran*

On Children - Khalil Gibran - probably one of my favorites of all time



> And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, "Speak to us of Children."
> 
> And he said:
> 
> ...



I'm such a muppet!

Just pretend I posted it yesterday or something!   It's Vixen's fault for bumping up the thread


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## muser (Oct 11, 2006)

*Rudyard kipling - My boy Jack*

1914-18

Have you news of my boy Jack?"
  Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"
  Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.


"Has any one else had word of him?: "
  Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
  Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.


"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
  None this tide,
  Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind--
  Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.


Then hold your head up all the more,
  This tide,
  And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
  And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!


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## tastebud (Oct 11, 2006)

Iemanja said:
			
		

> I'm such a muppet!
> 
> Just pretend I posted it yesterday or something!   It's Vixen's fault for bumping up the thread


Don't worry, I don't think you're alone in making this mistake. 

Saying it's my fault though ... that really is clutching at straws.


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## Ceej (Nov 4, 2006)

Big favourite - ee says it all. Dedicated to my beautiful boy x


*i carry your heart with me.    e.e.cummings*

i carry your heart with me.
(i carry it in my heart)

i am never without it,
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant, 
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
 which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that is keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart. (i carry it in my heart)


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## madamv (Nov 19, 2006)

*The Boy With A Moon And Star On His Head   Cat Stevens*

A gardener's daughter stopped me on my way, on the day I was
to wed
It is you who I wish to share my body with she said
We'll find a dry place under the sky with a flower for a bed
And for my joy I will give you a boy with a moon and
star on his head.
Her silver hair flowed in the air laying waves across the sun
Her hands were like the white sands, and her eyes had
diamonds on.
We left the road and headed up to the top of the
Whisper Wood
And we walked 'till we came to where the holy magnolia stood.
And there we laid cool in the shade singing songs and
making love...
With the naked earth beneath us and the universe above.
The time was late my wedding wouldn't wait I was sad but
I had to go,
So while she was asleep I kissed her cheek for cheerio.
The wedding took place and people came from many
miles around
There was plenty merriment, cider and wine abound
But out of all that I recall I remembered the girl I met
'Cause she had given me something that my hear could not
forget.
A year had passed and everything was just as it was a year
before...
As if was a year before...
Until the gift that someone left, a basket by my door.
And in there lay the fairest little baby crying to be fed,
I got down on my knees and kissed the moon and star on
his head.
As years went by the boy grew high and the village looked
on in awe
They'd never seen anything like the boy with the moon and
star before.
And people would ride from far and wide just to seek the
word he spread
I'll tell you everything I've learned, and Love is all...he said.

I know its not strictly poetry, hope you'll not mind.  I just love it


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## tastebud (Nov 27, 2006)

*Chicks Up Front*

Before and After,
we stand separate,
stuck to the same beer-soaked floor,
fragranced, facing the same restroom mirror.
Adjusting loose hairs-
mine brown, hers purple.
Fumbling for lipsticks-
mine pink, hers black-
a colour I couldn’t wear anyway
since that convention of lines gathered around my mouth last
year and won’t leave.
We avoid eye contact,
both of us
are afraid of being carded.

Mature, I suppose, I should speak,
but what can I say to the kind of hostility
that turns hair purple and lips black?
Excuse me, I know I never pierced my nose,
but hey, I was revolting once too?
Back. Before I joined the PTA,
when wonder bras meant, “Where’d I put that”
I rebelled against the government system,
the male-female system,
the corporate system, you name it.
I marched, I chanted, I demonstrated.
And when shit got passed around,
I was there sweetheart, and I inhaled.
Does she know that tear gas
makes your nose run worse than your eyes?
Would she believe that I was a volunteer when they called
“chicks up front”, because no matter
what kind of hand-to-hand combat
the helmeted authoritarians may have been
engaged in at home,
they were still hesitant to hit girls
with batons in the streets.
“CHICKS UP FRONT!” and we marched and
we marched and we marched right back home.

Where we bore the children we were not going to bring into this
Mad world, and we
brought them home to the houses we were never going to 
wallpaper
in those Laura Ashley prints
and we took jobs with the corporate mongers,
we were not going to let supervise our lives,
where we sky rocketed to 
middle-management positions
accepting less money
than we were never going to take anyway
and spending it on the Barbie dolls
we were not going to buy for our daughters.

And after each party
for our comings and goings
we whisked the leftovers into dust pans,
debriefing and talking each other down
from the drugs and the men
as if they were different,
resuscitating one another as women do,
mouth to mouth

That some of those we put up front
really did get beaten down
and others now bathe themselves daily
in Prozac to maintain former freshness.
Should I explain what tedious work it is
putting role models together,
and how strategic pieces
sometimes get sucked up by this vacuum.
And while we intended to take
one giant leap for womankind,
I wound up taking one small step, alone

What can I say at that moment
when our eyes meet in the mirror,
which they will.
What do I say to black lips and purple hair
I say 

take care.

*Sara Holbrook*


----------



## ATOMIC SUPLEX (Nov 27, 2006)

wind 
sea
air 
water

DEATH


----------



## Greta (Nov 28, 2006)

*The Tao of Physics*

In the vast spaces of the subatomic world where
Matter has a tendency to exist
The lord of Life is breathing in and out,
Creating and destroying the universe
With each wave of his breath.

And my lord Siva dances in the city streets,
His body a fierce illusion of flesh, of energy,
The particles of light cast off from his hair
Invade the mighty night, the relative night, this dream.

Here where events have a tendency to occur
My chair and all its myriad inner worlds
Whirl around in the carousel of space, I hurl
Breathless poems against my lord
Death, send these Words, these words
Careening into the beautiful darkness.

Gwendolyn MacEwen


----------



## Error Gorilla (Jan 3, 2007)

When they closed the foundries
and the mills
You could have taken
to the hills
But you stayed

Might have given up the ghost
but instead
You took a deep breath
forged ahead
straight as a blade

I like this place
my son a student here
City of space
open skies and stars
Sheffield
Twinned with Mars

*Roger McGough*
Winter Gardens, Sheffield


----------



## onemonkey (Jan 10, 2007)

_The Boston Evening Transcript
TS Eliot_

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the blind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jan 12, 2007)

*Spain*

Yesterday all the past.  The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses.  Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley.
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles.

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind.  But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greece,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen.  But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
  On the crag by the leaning tower:
'Oh my vision.  O send me the luck of the sailor.'

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
'But the lives of my friends.  I inquire. I inquire.'

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: 'Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river.'

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror;
'Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

'Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene.  O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.'

And the life, if it answers at all , replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city:
'O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you.  To you, I'm the

'Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily -duped;
I am whatever you do.  I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice.  I am your marriage.

'What's your proposal?  To build the just city?  I will.
I agree.  Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death?  Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision.  Yes, I am Spain.'

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman's islands
Or in the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes.  They came to present their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive.  For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad. And the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain -store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart.  Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future.  The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hours of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands.  But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings.  But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scarping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead.  The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

_WH Auden_


Double post, I find...


----------



## Donna Ferentes (Jan 13, 2007)

My favourite poem sequence is TS Eliot's _Four Quartets_: I heard it read aloud a couple of years ago. It's bleak – possibly the bleakest of all great works of poetry. I love the way Eliot writes – complex in meaning but, most of the time, very plain in form, almost as if he were writing prose.

It is not, in general, a poetry of metaphor or metre: the poetry is in the choice of individual words and in the meaning of the phrases. It sounds inexact and casual, as does speech: but it is precise in its selection and therefore in its meaning. Which is strange, because so much of the cycle is about struggling for the right words, about struggling to obtain meaning.

I love it. It expresses so well my mood - and my attitude to words.

The last of the four poems is _Little Gidding_. It ends like this:

_What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one._

Goodnight.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 13, 2007)

Here's how you’ll get your thrills
From broken stems and smashed insects
Here’s how you’ll cloud it
With mirror sheen smiles
And hollow chuckles
And a thought of maybe
Here’s your life in Technicolor
A cracked parade
Of mirrored smiles
And empty postures
A thought of what was, raising a blush of shame
And a guilt ridden memory of what you did
A garden of tears and these stupid words
To vent your weeping and bottle it for retail
Hoping for some ideal of hope
When hope is outside your ken
Dying for a change
And hating the difference
Making blood and semen with the same mindless gasps
And playing the game, and wearing the masks
Shuffling zombie with programmed responses
Desperately seeking something that’s real
Smoking and drinking
From dive to dive
And telling yourself
‘I am alive’


----------



## Error Gorilla (Jan 15, 2007)

Health Fanatic by John Cooper Clarke.

Around the block, against the clock:
tick tock, tick tock, tick tock;
running out of breath, running out of socks;
rubber on the road; flippety flop;
non-skid agility; chop chop,
no time to hang about!
Work out, health fanatic, work out.

The crack of dawn, lifting weights;
a tell-tale heart reverberates;
high in polyunsaturates,
low in polysaturates;
a Duke of Edinburgh's award awaits.
It's a man's life;
he's a health fanatic; so was his wife.

A one-man war against decay.
Enjoys himself the hard way;
allows himself a Mars a day.
"How old am I? What do I weigh?
Punch me there! Does it hurt? No way!"
Running on the spot, don't get too hot;
he's a health fanatic, that's why not.

Peanut power; stay ahead,
running through the traffic jam taking in the lead.
Hyperactivity keeps him out of bed.
Deep down he'd like to kick it in the head.
They'll regret it when they're dead:
there's more to life than fun;
he's a health fanatic; he's got to run.

Beans, greens and tangerines
and low cholesterol margarines;
his limbs are loose, his teeth are clean;
he's a high octane fresh-air fiend.
You've got to admit he's keen.
What can you do but be impressed;
he's a health fanatic. Give it a rest!

Shadow-boxing; punch the wall;
One-a-side football;
"What's the score?" "One all."
Could have been a copper; too small.
Could have been a jockey; too tall.
Knees up, knees up! Head the ball!
Nervous energy makes him tick;
he's a health fanatic. He makes you sick!


----------



## lillia (Jan 18, 2007)

tastebud said:
			
		

> Where we bore the children we were not going to bring into this
> Mad world, and we
> brought them home to the houses we were never going to
> wallpaper
> ...



I've just realised I've whiled away hours reading this thread and never contributed. The above is beautiful... I sent it to my Mum, and she phoned me and cried (In a good way if that makes sense). 

Hope that you enjoy this contribution - it seemed to describe me and my girlfriend perfectly when we discovered it last summer, and takes me back there instantly.  Happy days!


Modern Love 

It is summer, and we are in a house 
That is not ours, sitting at a table 
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence, 
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull 
To sleep the under-tens and invalids, 
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass, 
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect. 
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better 
Happiness than this, not much to show for love 
But how we are, or how this evening is, 
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive 
In a domestic love, seemingly alone, 
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight, 
Looking forward to a visit from the cat. 

Douglas Dunn


----------



## tastebud (Jan 19, 2007)

lillia said:
			
		

> The above is beautiful... I sent it to my Mum, and she phoned me and cried (In a good way if that makes sense).


Ooh I'm glad!  It's great isn't it.


----------



## lillia (Jan 19, 2007)

tastebud said:
			
		

> Ooh I'm glad!  It's great isn't it.



Beautiful


----------



## Error Gorilla (Jan 20, 2007)

*Five-Car Family*

We're a five-car family
We got what it takes
Eight thousand cc
Four different makes

One each for the kids
I run two
One for the missus
When there's shopping to do

Cars are Japanese of course
Subaru and Mazda
And the Nissan that the missus takes
Nippin down to Asda

We're a load of noisy parkers
We never do it neat
Drive the neighbours crazy
When we take up half the street

Unleaded petrol?
That's gotta be a joke
Stepping on the gas we like
The smoke to make you choke

Carbon monoxide
Take a deep breath
Benzine dioxide
Automanic death

'Cos it's all about noise
And it's all about speed
And it's all about power
And it's all about greed

And it's all about fantasy
And it's all about dash
And it's all about machismo
And it's all about cash

And it's all about blood
And it's all about gore
And it's all about oil
And it's all about war

And it's all about money
And it's all about spend
And it's all about time
That it came to an end.

Roger McGough


----------



## madamv (Jan 21, 2007)

*The Quangle Wangle's Hat   - Edward Lear*

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody every could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

The Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, --
"Jam; and jelly; and bread;
"Are the best of food for me!
"But the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree
"The plainer than ever it seems to me
"That very few people come this way
"And that life on the whole is far from gay!"
Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.

But there came to the Crumpetty Tree,
Mr. and Mrs. Canary;
And they said, -- "Did every you see
"Any spot so charmingly airy?
"May we build a nest on your lovely Hat?
"Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
"O please let us come and build a nest
"Of whatever material suits you best,
"Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!".

And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree
Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;
The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee,
The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl;
(The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg
And all of them said, -- "We humbly beg,
"We may build out homes on your lovely Hat, --
"Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
"Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!".

And the Golden Grouse came there,
And the Pobble who has no toes, --
And the small Olympian bear, --
And the Dong with a luminous nose.
And the Blue Baboon, who played the Flute, --
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute, --
And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat, --
All came and built on the lovely Hat
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

And the Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, --
"When all these creatures move
"What a wonderful noise there'll be!"
And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon
They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon,
On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree,
And all were as happy as happy could be,
With the Quangle Wangle Quee.


----------



## madamv (Jan 21, 2007)

I learned this at five, in my first year at school.  The teacher was a very dramatic woman with black ringlets and hoop earings and hippy skirts.  She made a huge collage with us of the hat and encouraged us to ask at home for things to bring in to stick on the hat.

She did the same with Jaberwocky.

My first inspirational school teacher, thank you Miss Treadwell.


----------



## lillia (Feb 8, 2007)

madamv said:
			
		

> I learned this at five, in my first year at school.  The teacher was a very dramatic woman with black ringlets and hoop earings and hippy skirts.  She made a huge collage with us of the hat and encouraged us to ask at home for things to bring in to stick on the hat.
> 
> She did the same with Jaberwocky.
> 
> My first inspirational school teacher, thank you Miss Treadwell.


----------



## lillia (Feb 8, 2007)

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life.


----------



## Bernie Gunther (Feb 8, 2007)

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Yeats - Byzantium


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 14, 2007)

*Being a Human Being*

(for Mordechai Vanunu) 

not to be complicit 
not to accept everyone else is silent it must be alright 

not to keep one’s mouth shut to hold onto one’s job
not to accept public language as cover and decoy 

not to put friends and family before the rest of the world
not to say I am wrong when you know the government is wrong 

not to be just a bought behaviour pattern
to accept the moment and fact of choice 

I am a human being
and I exist 

a human being
and a citizen of the world 

responsible to that world
—and responsible for that world 

Tom Leonard


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 15, 2007)

*Untitled*

O paramour of New Hebrides
Beseech me not to deride thy trust.
Love's a strophe amid the bloom of lost Heavens.
Bring me the weal and the woe of scattered dreams.
My heart lusts for fin de siècle,
That vision of beleaguered days.
Want not, oh love! Look to the bastions!
Flee the scoundrel, grant mercy only to love,
And when the bounty is sated in reparation
Believe what is in my heart.

By Arturo Gabriel Bandini


----------



## BadlyDrawnGirl (Mar 15, 2007)

Oh fuck.

Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Oh, sodding fuck.


----------



## Final (Mar 15, 2007)

London Orbital
-------------

London London burning bright,
When seen from 'bove t'Earth by night,
So much power wasted I fear,
If you so clear I see from here.


----------



## heinous seamus (Apr 1, 2007)

*Absence*

My shadow -
I woke to a wind swirling the curtains light and dark
and the birds twittering on the roofs, I lay cold
in the early light in my room high over London.
What fear was it that made the wind sound like a fire
so that I got up and looked out half-asleep
at the calm rows of street-lights fading far below?
Without fire
Only the wind blew.
But in the dream I woke from, you
came running through the traffic, tugging me, clinging
to my elbow, your eyes spoke
what I could not grasp -
Nothing, if you were here!

The wind of the early quiet
merges slowly now with a thousand rolling wheels.
The lights are out, the air is loud.
It is an ordinary January day.
My shadow, do you hear the streets?
Are you at my heels? Are you here?
And I throw back the sheets.

Edwin Morgan


----------



## Iam (Apr 4, 2007)

*Blue Evening*

My restless blood now lies a-quiver,
Knowing that always, exquisitely,
This April twilight on the river
Stirs anguish in the heart of me.

For the fast world in that rare glimmer
Puts on the witchery of a dream,
The straight grey buildings, richly dimmer,
The fiery windows, and the stream

With willows leaning quietly over,
The still ecstatic fading skies...
And all these, like a waiting lover,
Murmur and gleam, lift lustrous eyes,

Drift close to me, and sideways bending
Whisper delicious words.
(But I)
Stretch terrible hands, uncomprehending,
Shaken with love; and laugh; and cry.

My agony made the willows quiver;
I heard the knocking of my heart
Die loudly down the windless river,
I heard the pale skies fall apart,

And the shrill stars' unmeaning laughter,
And my voice with the vocal trees
Weeping. And Hatred followed after,
Shrilling madly down the breeze.

In peace from the wild heart of clamour,
A flower in moonlight, she was there,
Was rippling down white ways of glamour
Quietly laid on wave and air.

Her passing left no leaf a-quiver.
Pale flowers wreathed her white, white brows.
Her feet were silence on the river;
And "Hush!" she said, between the boughs.

                 ~ Rupert Brooke


----------



## Final (Apr 4, 2007)

Wing and a Prayer
by KY
--------------------------------------

Poetry wi'uneven line and lack of rhyme?
What's that all about?, they ask,
Sounds like pretentious wank to me, they say,
I tend to agree, a philistine born'n'bred that's me,
Never tried this before, leaving saftey o'nursery,
Bound to fudge it, not well 'nuff read,
Chances or getting it working remote,
Between slim and none and that's if I'm lucky,
I'm on a wing and a prayer.


----------



## Final (Apr 5, 2007)

Zeitgeist
by KY
---------------

London's skyline soars with grace,
hardly a smile on any face.
Cosmopolitan beyond belief,
yet still the facists causing grief.
The finance sector flying high,
poverty's end still far from neigh.
Oylmpic success 2012? who knows?
John Bull paying through the nose.
Super heros climbing cranes,
Terrorists? Come on use your brains.
Museums now are free for all,
just the thing when the rain does fall.
The tube breaks down for any reason,
regardless of the day or season.
Drugs abound in every club,
and Ladettes drunk in every pub.
Eastern Europe pours in quickly,
whilst Labour spin the figures slickly.
Certain ethnics are not mixing?
or just MPs a-fight-a-fixing?
Chinatown's not "integrated",
but bellies are ingratiated.
Lavish lifestyles need a diet,
no doubt we'll see more may day riots.
Half of mayfair owned by one,
Life is pretty sweet for some.
Spontaneous protest, get arrested,
at least our streets are decongested!


----------



## heinous seamus (Apr 23, 2007)

*Drinking Alone By Moonlight*

Three Poems

I

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

II 

In the third month the town of Hsien-yang
Is thick-spread with a carpet of fallen flowers.
Who in Spring can bear to grieve alone?
Who, sober, look on sights like these?
Riches and Poverty, long or short life,
By the Maker of Things are portioned and disposed; 
But a cup of wine levels life and death
And a thousand things obstinately hard to prove.
When I am drunk, I lose Heaven and Earth, 
Motionless—I cleave to my lonely bed.
At last I forget that I exist at all,
And at that moment my joy is great indeed. 

III 

If high heaven had no love for wine, 
There would not be a Wine Star in the sky.
If Earth herself had no love for wine,
'There would not be a city called Wine Springs.
Since Heaven and Earth both love wine,
I can love wine, without shame before God.
Clear wine was once called a Saint; 
Thick wine was once called "a Sage." 

Of Saint and Sage I have long quaffed deep,
What need for me to study spirits and hsien? 
At the third cup I penetrate the Great Way;
A full gallon—Nature and I are one ...
But the things I feel when wine possesses my soul
I will never tell to those who are not drunk. 

Li Po


----------



## heinous seamus (Apr 26, 2007)

*Dinosauria, we*

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

By Charles Bukowski


----------



## Barking_Mad (Jul 5, 2007)

Diaper Bob

Flicking through the channels
for something to watch
flicking on to Jerry Springer

Jerry smiles, the audience goes wild
Jerry introduces 'Diaper Bob'
sat in a chair
wearing a nappy
Bob is 35 and has a beer belly
and a dodgy moustache

Like a two year old
with black boots on
with his diaper
the audience goes wild, again

Jerry asks Bob some questions
everyone laughs at Bob
Bob says he doesn't give a shit

After the break we get to see Bob
walking the streets of Chicago
in just his diaper
what a treat.

During the break i'm told to buy
'The Greatest present this Christmas'
-Pocket Sock
it's a pocket, in a sock
Apparently everyone is buying them
it's all the rage
you can even keep your credit card
in your 'pocket sock'
amazing.

Jerry returns to a thunder of applause
and Bob walks the streets of Chicago doing normal things:
buying a paper,
getting his boots shined,
in his diaper
apparently in summer he gets a bad diaper rash
and he wears a tu-tu
pretty in pink.

Back in the studio we get to meet Bob's Mum
she doesn't like Bob wearing diapers
and neither does the audience
"You're sick" screams his Mum
the audience pop collective blood vessels in agreement.

Bob's step-dad Sean likes Bob even less
Bob's step-dad has a long mullet,
almost as bad as wearing a diaper
He punches Bob in the face
SMACK!
two grown men
one in jeans and t-shirt
one in a diaper
rolling round on the studio floor.

Bob's ex-friend Pete comes on to the show
and says he gave Bob a place to stay
but claims he repaid him by waking him up
whilst standing over his bed
in just his diaper
Pete's girlfriend didn't appreciate this either.

After the next break Bob is going to eat....
dog food.
I consider rushing out to buy 'Pocket Sock'
but I want to see Bob chowing down
'Pocket Sock' will have to wait.

Bob tells Jerry he wants to sign his life away
to a dominatrix.
Jerry introduces Mistress Jade.
She walks out on stage with two men
on leather dog leashes
Jerry cracks a joke
the audience laugh
I laugh.

Mistress Jade orders Bob to eat the dog food
like the bitch that he is
Bob crawls on his hands and knees
and eats the dog food
he is one sick puppy.

Bob says he'd do anything for her
and suggests Jerry tries it
Jerry says he's a vegetarian
Everyone laughs
except Bob.

As Bob is about to sign his life away to Mistress Jade
his Mum, step-dad and ex-friend come back on stage
and tear up the contract
Bob is upset
he waves his arms
sticks out his pigeon-chest
shouting and swearing on national tv
eating dog food
wearing a diaper
no wonder he's angry.

It's obvious Bob needs help
so Jerry brings on a psychiatrist called Alan
The audience love Alan,
they chant his name
and pop another collective blood vessel.

Alan says Bob needs re-conditioning
to wear trousers
just like 'normal people'.
Bob throws the trousers away
Alan picks a girl from the audience
she's told to tell Bob how sexy he is,
"You're soooo sexy Bob"
Bob doesn't believe her
She tries again
but Bob is having none of it.

Jerry finishes the show by saying
Bob's ok to wear diapers
as long as he doesn't steal them
and that he should really find out what's wrong

The diapers are probably covering up
a bigger mess than we think.


----------



## heinous seamus (Jul 22, 2007)

*Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad!*

You sullen pig of a man 
you force me into the mud 
with your stinking ash-cart!

Brother! 
–if we were rich 
we’d stick our chests out 
and hold our heads high!

It is dreams that have destroyed us.

There is no more pride 
in horses or in rein holding. 
We sit hunched together brooding 
our fate.

Well– 
all things turn bitter in the end 
whether you choose the right or 
the left way 
and– 
dreams are not a bad thing.

William Carlos Williams


----------



## heinous seamus (Jul 23, 2007)

*Listen. Put on Morning.*

Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man's imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
And hear the virgin juries
Talk with his own breath
To the corner boys of his street.
And hear the Black Maria
Searching the town at night.
And hear the playropes caa
The sister Mary in.
And hear Willie and Davie
Among bracken of Narnain
Sing in a mist heavy
With myrtle and listeners.
And hear the higher town
Weep a petition of fears
At the poorhouse close upon
The public heartbeat.
And hear the children tig
And run with my own feet
Into the netting drag
Of a suiciding principle.
Listen. Put on lightbreak.
Waken into miracle.
The audience lies awake
Under the tenements
Under the sugar docks
Under the printed moments.
The centuries turn their locks
And open under the hill
Their inherited books and doors
All gathered to distil
Like happy berry pickers
One voice to talk to us.
Yes listen. It carries away
The second and the years
Till the heart's in a jacket of snow
And the head's in a helmet white
And the song sleeps to be wakened
By the morning ear bright.
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.


W.S. Graham


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 12, 2008)

A LOVE POEM
To Webb

He was a hillbilly 
           up from Alabama
           to work the chevy plant

He had a feel for things
          natural and mechanical
          their use
          and their fitness

He could rebuild an engine
Or kill and skin a 'coon
        matteroffactly
        to drive and to eat

(I was always in awe of his ability
          to handle grease
          with his hands
          or with his stomach
As if it was his destiny in life
To lubricate the world
And himself along with it)

He had a wife, two sons, intense pride
And deep inside he owed a
           sense of ignorance
                       mainly his own
Which he nurtured and reworked
           into a weapon
           that could stop an assembly line
           or harras a foreman

It was all the world gave him to work with
And he did the best he could
But it wasn't enough

So he expanded his consciousness
             and sustained his pride
             with whiskey

And with it
he washed away
          his wife
          his two sons
          his pride
          and his ignorance

Shit.

_Marty Glaberman_


----------



## Kenny Vermouth (Feb 12, 2008)

The hunter crouches in his blind
'Neath camouflage of every kind.
He conjures up a quacking noise
To lend allure to his decoys.
This grownup man, with pluck and luck
Is hoping to outwit a duck.

Ogden Nash


----------



## soulman (Feb 12, 2008)

More Ogden Nash

The Wasp

The wasp and all his numerous family
I look upon as a major calamity.
He throws open his nest with prodigality,
But I distrust his waspitality.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 12, 2008)

Only two people unable to read today. And what a classy pair.


----------



## soulman (Feb 12, 2008)

butchersapron said:


> Only two people unable to read today. And what a classy pair.



Shit poem!


----------



## Kenny Vermouth (Feb 13, 2008)

soulman said:


> More Ogden Nash
> 
> The Wasp
> 
> ...


I like poems that make me smirk.


----------



## soulman (Feb 17, 2008)

A double-header from McGough

_Posh_

Where I live is posh
 Sundays the lawns are mown
My neighbours drink papaya squash

Sushi is a favourite nosh
 Each six-year-old has a mobile phone
Where I live is posh

In spring each garden is awash
 with wisteria, pink and fully blown
My neighbours drink papaya squash

Radicchio thrives beneath the cloche
 Cannabis is home grown
Where I live is posh

Appliances by Miele and Bosch
 Sugar-free jam on wholemeal scone
My neighbours drink papaya squash

Birds hum and bees drone
 The paedophile is left alone
My neighbours drink papaya squash
Where I live is posh.



_Shite_

Where I live is shite
 An inner-city high rise shack
Social workers shoot on sight

The hospital's been set alight
 The fire brigade's under attack
Where I live is shite

Police hide under their beds at night
 Every road's a cul-de-sac
Social workers shoot on sight

Girls get pregnant just for spite
 My mate's a repo-maniac
Where I live is shite.

Newborn junkies scratch and bite
 Six-year olds swap sweets for crack
Social workers shoot on sight

Tatooed upon my granny's back
 A fading wrinkled Union Jack
Social workers shoot on sight
Where I live is shite.


----------



## Meltingpot (Feb 17, 2008)

soulman said:


> A double-header from McGough
> 
> _Posh_
> 
> ...



Great. If life was fair, Roger McGough would have been Poet Laureate (maybe with John Cooper Clarke a close second).

He has a weekly poetry programme on Radio 4 called Poetry Please! This one by Fleur Adcock, which featured last night, is chilling IMO;

http://www.arlindo-correia.com/080305.html#Advice_to_a_Discarded_


----------



## soulman (Feb 18, 2008)

McGough again

_Melting into the Foreground_

Head down and it's into the hangover.
Last night was a night best forgotten.
(Did you really kiss a strange man on the forehead?)

At first you were fine.
Melting into the foreground.
Unassuming. A good listener.

But listeners are speakers
Gagged by shyness
And soon the wine has
Pushed its velvet fingers down your throat.

You should have left then. Got your coat.
But no. You had the taste.
Your newfound gift of garbled tongue
Seemed far too good to waste.

Like a vacuum-cleaner on heat
You careered hither and thither
Sucking up the smithareens
Of half-digested chat.

When not providing the lulls in conversation
Your strangled banter
Stumbled on to disbelieving ears.

Girls braved your leering incoherences
Being too polite to mock
(Although your charm was halitoxic,
Your wit, wet sand in a sock).

When not fawning over the hostess
You were falling over the furniture
(Helped to your feet, I recall,
By the strange man with the forhead).

Gauche attempts to prise telephone numbers
From happily married ladies
Did not go unnoticed.

Nor did pocketing a bottle of Bacardi
When trying to leave
In the best coat you could find.

I'd lie low if were you.
Stay at home for a year or two.
Take up painting. Do something ceramic.
Failing that, emigrate to somewhere Islamic.

The best of luck whatever you do.
I'm baling out, you're on your own.
Cockpit blazing, out of control,
Into the hangover. Head down.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 18, 2008)

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
Tinned minds, tinned breath. 

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown 
For twenty years. 

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win, 
Who washes his repulsive skin 
In women's tears: 

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell. 

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad, 
They've tasted Hell. 

It's not their fault they do not know 
The birdsong from the radio, 
It's not their fault they often go 
To Maidenhead 

*And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead. *

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails. 

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales. 

good to see the provinces don't change that much.


----------



## Geri (Feb 18, 2008)

Ha! HA!
One a day 
cockbreath
ta for the bold
i would not have seen the bit you really really meant otherways.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 18, 2008)

Geri said:


> Ha! HA!
> One a day
> cockbreath
> ta for the bold
> i would not have seen the bit you really really meant otherways.



That's cos you're a moron.


----------



## danny la rouge (Feb 27, 2008)

*Toad*

Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
full of satisfaction, in a man's house?

You clamber towards me on your four corners —
right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.

I love you for being a toad,
for crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
and for not being frightened.

I put you in my purse hand, not shutting it,
and set you down outside directly under
every star.

A jewel in your head? Toad,
you've put one in mine,
a tiny radiance in a dark place.


Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)


----------



## Diamond (Feb 28, 2008)

The Quality Of Sprawl
Les Murray

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image. 

Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
that's idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds. 

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth. 

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl. 

Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them. 

Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don't include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl. 

Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours' best bed in spurs and oilskins,
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would thatit were more so. 

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.


----------



## soulman (Feb 28, 2008)

I like that poem, a lot. I'll be checking out some more of Les Murray's work.


----------



## Felina (Feb 28, 2008)

From the distance of our separation
I see the whole of which I was a part;
I see the way my temper tore your heart,
And then the love beneath the laceration.
I see the landscape shaping our relation:
Your fear that I might choose with little art,
My anger at the dreams you would impart,
The ancient paths that lead to confrontation.
But knowledge needn't linger in regret,
Nor wait upon some wind to clear its sky.
We are none the worse for what is gone.
The moments that I never will forget
Are those whose careless grace must make me cry,
Safe within a heart forever won


----------



## Felina (Feb 28, 2008)

Basically I'm thinkin of sending the above to my mum, it says what I've been feeling lately....Used to be a right nightmare teenager and put my parents through a lot of shit, but I don't know how to say it in my own words.


----------



## soulman (Mar 1, 2008)

A Les Murray 

_Performance_

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.


----------



## soulman (Mar 6, 2008)

This is a repeat, but fuck it, it makes sense to me at the moment:

Lewis Carroll

_You Are Old, Father William_

        "You are old, father William," the young man said,
           "And your hair has become very white;
        And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
           Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

        "In my youth," father William replied to his son,
           "I feared it might injure the brain;
        But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
           Why, I do it again and again."

        "You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
           And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
        Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
           Pray what is the reason for that?"

        "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
           "I kept all my limbs very supple
        By the use of this ointment - one shilling a box--
           Allow me to sell you a couple?"

        "You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
           For anything tougher than suet;
        Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
           Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

        "In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
           And argued each case with my wife;
        And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
           Has lasted the rest of my life."

        "You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
           That your eye was as steady as ever;
        Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
           What made you so awfully clever?"

        "I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
           Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
        Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
           Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.


----------



## Paulie Tandoori (Mar 6, 2008)

Have you ever been in love? 

Horrible isn't it? 

It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. 

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. 

I hate love.

i had to read this out loud recently and i was shaking by the end of it. neil gaiman btw from the sandman


----------



## lontok2005 (Mar 6, 2008)

'Love takes hostages' - I love that line 

But something cheerier:

*Postcards from the Hedgehog*

*i*
_Dear Mum_
Beautiful weather.
I saw a fox last night,
did as you always said
and rolled into a ball.
After a while it went away.
I was a bit scared all the same.
_love Simon_

*ii*
_Dear Mum_
Lovely weather today.
Just saw a pretty girl.
Not sure how to approach her.
She makes me really shy
but just all warm inside.
I rolled up into a ball.
Wish you were here,
_love Simon_

*iii*
_Dear Mum_
It's raining today. I ate a slug.
Wasn't as good as the ones
you used to give us.
Tomorrow I think I'll approach the girl.
Perhaps I'll take her a slug.
She makes me ever so nervous.
I rolled up into a ball.
Wish you were here,
_love Simon_

*iv*
_Dear Mum_
Sun's come out again.
This morning I was very brave
and I went to see her.
I edged up very carefully as you suggested,
but when I spoke to her
I discovered she was actually
a pine cone.
I felt very embarrassed.
I rolled into a ball.
Wish you were here,
_love Simon_



A.F.Harrold


----------



## janeb (Mar 7, 2008)

I've always loved the Raymond Carver poem, Late Fragment


And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.


Have only just found out that apparently he wrote this when he knew he was dying of lung cancer


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 14, 2008)

When I was a boy...



When I was a boy
a god would often rescue me
from the shouting and violence of humans.
Then, safe and well, I would play
with the meadow flowers,
and heaven's breezes
 would play with me.



And as you delight the heart
of plants, stretching their tender
arms toward you,
Father Helios,
so you delighted my heart,
and I was your beloved,
holy Luna, just like Endymion!


All you faithful
friendly gods!
I wish you knew
how my soul loved you!


Naturally I couldn't call you
by name then, nor did you use
mine, as humans do, as if
they really knew each other.


But I was better acquainted with you
than I ever was with humans.
I knew the stillness of the Aether:
I never understood the words of men.


The euphony of the rustling
meadow was my education;
among flowers I learned to love.


I grew up
in the arms of the gods. 

Friedrich Hölderlin


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 14, 2008)

The more I read it the more I enjoy it

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

II.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!


Browning ennit


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 14, 2008)

That's not bad. 
This was Friedrich's day, though


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 14, 2008)

I'm going to be a pretentious wanker and post this in French:

Sensation-

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue
Reveur, j'en sentirai la fraicheur a mes pieds
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien
Par la nature, hereux comme avec une femme

e2a: Jean-Arthur Rimbaud obviously.


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 15, 2008)

Ah Friedrich, no wonder you went mental.


----------



## soulman (Mar 16, 2008)

heinous seamus said:


> When I was a boy...
> Friedrich Hölderlin



That's wonderful, so poignant.


----------



## coccinelle (Mar 16, 2008)

My favourite poem is called 'The Undertaking' by Louise Gluck (a modern American poetess)

"The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck."


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 21, 2008)

SpookyFrank said:


> I'm going to be a pretentious wanker and post this in French:
> 
> Sensation-
> 
> ...



Aw c'mon you coulda gave us an english translation at least!


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 21, 2008)

Paulie Tandoori said:


> Have you ever been in love?
> 
> Horrible isn't it?
> 
> ...



This is good. Sums up how I feel right now to be honest!
Why were you reading it out loud?


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 21, 2008)

I have been reading Felix Dennis a lot lately, here are a couple of my current favourites
*Never go back*
Never go back. Never go back.
Never return to the haunts of your youth.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Memory holds all you need of the truth.

Never look back. Never look back.
Never succumb to the gorgon's stare.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.

Never go back. Never go back.
Never surrender the future you've earned.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Never return to the bridges you burned.

Never look back. Never look back.
Never retreat to the 'glorious past'.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Treat every day of your life as your last.

Never go back. Never go back.
Never acknowledge the ghost on the stair.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.

And this one which I love

*To A Beautiful Lady Of A Certain Age*
 Lady, lady do not weep -
What is gone is gone. Now sleep.
Turn your pillow, dry your tears,
Count thy sheep and not thy years.

Nothing good can come of this.
Time rules all, my dearest,'tis
But folly to be waging war
On one who never lost before.

Lady, this is all in vain,
Youth can never come again;
We have drunk the summer wine,
None can make a stitch in time.

Nip and tuck 'til crack of doom,
What is foretold in the womb
May not be forsworn with gold -
Nor may time be bought or sold.

Dearest, do I love thee less,
Do I shrink from thy caress?
Think you I could cease to care?
Never was there one so fair!

Lady, lady do not weep -
What is gone is gone. Now sleep.
Lean against me, calm your fears,
Count thy blessings, not thy years.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 23, 2008)

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, through but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
    Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
    And love is love, in beggars and in kings. 

Where waters smoothest run, there deepest are the fords,
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest faith is found in fewest words,
The turtles do not sing, and yet they love;
    True hearts have ears, and eyes, no tongues to speak;
    They hear, and see, and sign, and then they break

                                                           Sir Edward Dyer


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 24, 2008)

MY LOST YOUTH 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

I can see the shadowy lines of its trees,
And catch, in sudden gleams,
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams.
And the burden of that old song,
It murmurs and whispers still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

I remember the bulwarks by the shore,
And the fort upon the hill;
The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar,
The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er,
And the bugle wild and shrill.
And the music of that old song
Throbs in my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o'er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of that mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's Woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods.
And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the schoolboy's brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

*There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts*." 

Strange to me now are the forms I meet
When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet,
And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."


The bit in bold makes me shiver, it's beautiful.


----------



## heinous seamus (Mar 29, 2008)

*The Two by Philip Levine*

When he gets off work at Packard, they meet

outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,

a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion

on his own breath, he kisses her carefully

on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather

has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.

The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives

nothing away: the low clouds break here and there

and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.

The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided 

what to become. The traffic light at Linwood

goes from red to green and the trucks start up,

so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"

she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,

though spiced with things she cannot believe,

"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up 

late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired

of their morning meetings, but when he bows

from the waist and holds the door open

for her to enter the diner, and the thick 

odor of bacon frying and new potatoes

greets them both, and taking heart she enters

to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke

to the see if "their booth" is available.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no

second acts in America, but he knew neither

this man nor this woman and no one else

like them unless he stayed late at the office

to test his famous one liner, "We keep you clean

Muscatine," on the woman emptying

his waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote 

with someone present, except for this woman

in a gray uniform whose comings and goings

went unnoticed even on those December evenings

she worked late while the snow fell silently

on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights

blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.

Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered 

only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon

with the other, but what became of the two

when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,

who first said "I love you" and truly meant it,

and who misunderstood the words, so longed

for, and yet still so unexpected, and began

suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress

asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed

years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned

to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son

fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.

"And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.

Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,

a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume

of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices

of spent breath after eight hours of night work.

Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?

Why the two are more real than either you or me,

why I never returned to keep them in my life,

how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,

what any of this could mean, where you found

the patience to endure these truths and confessions?


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## heinous seamus (Apr 5, 2008)

*Happiness*

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
     me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
     thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
     I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
     the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
     their women and children and a keg of beer and an
     accordion.

Carl Sandburg


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## soulman (Apr 7, 2008)

_We rob their banks
We thin their ranks
And ask no thanks
For what we do._


----------



## soulman (Apr 8, 2008)

*The black flag*

When I die 
let the black rag fly 
raven falling 
from the sky. 

Let the black flag lie 
on bones and skin 
that long last night 
as I enter in. 

For out of black 
soul's night have stirred 
dawn's cold gleam, 
morning's singing bird. 

Let black day die, 
let black flag fall, 
let raven call, 
let new day dawn 
of black reborn.


----------



## heinous seamus (Apr 9, 2008)

The Dancers Inherit the Party

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy—
Not so when I have danced for an hour:
The dancers inherit the party
While the talkers wear themselves out and
sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay


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## maya (May 7, 2008)

*whoever finds a horseshoe*

We look at a forest and say:
Here is a forest for ships and masts,
Red pines,
Free to their tops of their shaggy burden,
To creak in the storm
In the furious forestless air;
The plumbline fastened to the dancing deck
Will hold out under the wind's salt heel.
And the sea-wanderer,
In his unbridled thirst for space,
Dragging through damp ruts a geometer's needle,
Collates the rough surface of the seas
With the attraction of the earth's lap.

But breathing the smell
Of resinous tears oozing through planks,
Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted
Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter but by that other-
Father of journeys, friend of seafarers-
We say:
These too stood the earth,
Awkward as a donkey's backbone,
Their crests forgetful of their roots,
On a celebrated mountain ridge;
And howled under the sweet cloud-burst,
Fruitlessly offering the sky their precious freight
For a pinch of salt.

Where shall we begin?
Everything pitches and splits,
The air quivers with comparisions,
No one word is better than another,
The earth hums with metaphors.
And light two-wheeled chariots,
Harnessed brightly to flocks of strenuous birds,
Explode,
Vying with the snorting favourites of the race-track.

Three times blest he who puts a name into song;
A song adorned with a name
Survives longer among the others,
Marked by a fillet
That frees it from forgetfulness and stupefying smells,
Whether proximity of man or the smell of a beast's pelt
Or simply a whiff of thyme rubbed between the palms.

The air dark like water, everything alive swims like fish,
Fins pushing aside the sphere
That's compact, resilient, hardly heated-
The crystal in which wheels move and horses shy,
The moist black-earth every night flung open anew
By pitchforks, tridents, hoes and ploughs.
The air is mixed as densely as the earth-
You can't get out, to get inside is arduous.

Rustling runs through the trees like a green ball-game;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.
Let us be grateful for what we had:
I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.
The era rang like a golden sphere,
Cast, hollow, supported by no one.
Touched, it answered _yes_ and _no_,
As a child will say:
_I'll give you an apple_, or: _I won't give you one_;
Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased.
The horse foams in the dust.
But the acute curve of his neck
Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs
When there were not four
But as many as the stones on the road,
Renewed in four shifts
As blazing hooves pushed off from the ground.

So,
Whoever finds a horseshoe
Blows away the dust,
Rubs it with wool till it shines,
Then
Hangs it over the treshold
To test,
So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint.
Human lips
which have nothing more to say
Preserve the form of the last word said.
And the arm retains the sense of weight
Though the jug
splashes half-empty
on the way home.

What I am saying at this moment is not being said by me
But is dug from the ground like grains of petrified wheat.
Some
on their coins depict a lion,
Others
a head;
Various tablets of brass, of gold and bronze
Lie with equal honour in the earth.
The century, trying to bite through them, left its teeth-marks
there.
Time pares me down like a coin,
And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

(- Osip Mandelshtam, 1923.)


----------



## maya (May 8, 2008)

Gacela of the Dark Death   	 
by Federico García Lorca


I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,

I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.

I want to sleep the sleep of that child

who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.



I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,

how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.

I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for

nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn

with its snakelike nose.



I want to sleep for half a second,

a second, a minute, a century,

but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,

that I have a golden manger inside my lips,

that I am the little friend of the west wind,

that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.



When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me

because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,

and pour a little hard water over my shoes

so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.



Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,

and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,

because I want to live with that shadowy child

who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.


----------



## maya (May 13, 2008)

Death Fugue
by Paul Celan

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime

we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night

we drink and drink

we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes

who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta 

he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near

whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand

he commands us to play for the dance



Black milk of morning we drink you at night

we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime

we drink and drink

There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes

who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta

your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play

he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue

jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance



Black milk of morning we drink you at night

we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime

we drink and drink

there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta

your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes



He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air

the scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie



Black milk of morning we drink you at night

we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink

Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue

he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true

there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta

he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky

he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland 



your golden hair Margareta

your ashen hair Shulamite


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## maya (May 15, 2008)

My First Memory (of Librarians)   	 
by Nikki Giovanni

This is my first memory:
A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky
       wood floor
A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center
Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply
       too short
              For me to sit in and read
So my first book was always big

In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided
To the left side the card catalogue
On the right newspapers draped over what looked like
       a quilt rack
Magazines face out from the wall

The welcoming smile of my librarian
The anticipation in my heart
All those books—another world—just waiting
At my fingertips.


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## Housmans (Jun 18, 2008)

By the People's poet

Oh, Cliff
     Sometimes it must be difficult not to feel as if
     You really are a Cliff
     When fascists keep trying to push you over it
     Are they the lemmings?
     Or are you Cliff?
     Or are you, Cliff?


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## Mrs Magpie (Nov 22, 2008)

A poem on a video. 

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQxSRiMKZU

This is the best poem I've heard in ages.


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## Hi-ASL (Nov 22, 2008)

dwen said:


> *Mirror by Sylvia Plath *
> ...
> 
> In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
> Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.



*Face Lift*

 You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask.  The nauseous vault
Boomed wild bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
The mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that.  Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.  He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.  At the count of two
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard...
I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.  I grow backward.  I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or whither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.


----------



## Hi-ASL (Nov 22, 2008)

*Aubade*

 I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. 
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. 
In time the curtain-edges will grow light. 
Till then I see what's really always there: 
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, 
Making all thought impossible but how 
And where and when I shall myself die. 
Arid interrogation: yet the dread 
Of dying, and being dead, 
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse 
- The good not done, the love not given, time 
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 
An only life can take so long to climb 
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; 
But at the total emptiness for ever, 
The sure extinction that we travel to 
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, 
Not to be anywhere, 
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 

This is a special way of being afraid 
No trick dispels. Religion used to try, 
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade 
Created to pretend we never die, 
And specious stuff that says No rational being 
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing 
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, 
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, 
Nothing to love or link with, 
The anasthetic from which none come round. 

And so it stays just on the edge of vision, 
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill 
That slows each impulse down to indecision. 
Most things may never happen: this one will, 
And realisation of it rages out 
In furnace-fear when we are caught without 
People or drink. Courage is no good: 
It means not scaring others. Being brave 
Lets no one off the grave. 
Death is no different whined at than withstood. 

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. 
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, 
Have always known, know that we can't escape, 
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. 
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring 
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring 
Intricate rented world begins to rouse. 
The sky is white as clay, with no sun. 
Work has to be done. 
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

*Philip Larkin*


Oh well. Worth posting twice..


----------



## ebay sex moomin (Nov 23, 2008)

fantastic, thanks for posting. I always meant to immerse myself in Larkin's verse- somehow it hasn't come about yet.


----------



## Hi-ASL (Nov 23, 2008)

*Green Groweth the Holly*​ 

1 Green groweth the holly, 
2 So doth the ivy. 
3 Though winter blasts blow never so high, 
4 Green groweth the holly. ​ 
5 As the holly groweth green
6 And never changeth hue, 
7 So I am, ever hath been, 
8 Unto my lady true. ​ 
9 As the holly groweth green
10 With ivy all alone
11 When flowers cannot be seen
12 And greenwood leaves be gone, ​ 
13 Now unto my lady
14 Promise to her I make, 
15 From all other only
16 To her I me betake. ​ 
17 Adieu, mine own lady, 
18 Adieu, my special
19 Who hath my heart truly
20 Be sure, and ever shall. ​ 
*Henry VIII, King of England *​


----------



## lang rabbie (Dec 8, 2008)

*Happy 400th Birthday, Citizen Milton*

Sadly, only the workshy would have a chance to work through _"Paradise Lost"_ if I suggested it as Poem of the Day.   

I've decided on this one instead.  



> "[Wordsworth] asked me what I thought the finest, elegiac composition in the language; and, when I diffidently suggested Lycidas, he replied, 'You are not far wrong."





*Lycidas*

_In this Monody the Author bewails a
learned Friend, unfortunatly drown'd in his Passage
from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by
occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted
Clergy then in their height._​

YET once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. 
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew 
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not flote upon his watry bear
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of som melodious tear. 

Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well, 
That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,
Begin, and somwhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse,
So may som gentle Muse
With lucky words favour my destin'd Urn, 
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shrowd.
For we were nurst upon the self-same hill,
Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill. 

Together both, ere the high Lawns appear'd 
Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,
We drove a field, and both together heard
What time the Gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the Star that rose, at Ev'ning, bright 
Toward Heav'ns descent had slop'd his westering wheel.
Mean while the Rural ditties were not mute,
Temper'd to th' Oaten Flute,
Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel,
From the glad sound would not be absent long, 
And old Damœtas lov'd to hear our song. 

But O the heavy change, now thou art gon,
Now thou art gon, and never must return!
Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves,
With wilde Thyme and the gadding Vine o'regrown, 
And all their echoes mourn.
The Willows, and the Hazle Copses green,
Shall now no more be seen,
Fanning their joyous Leaves to thy soft layes.
As killing as the Canker to the Rose, 
Or Taint-worm to the weanling Herds that graze,
Or Frost to Flowers, that their gay wardrop wear,
When first the White thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to Shepherds ear. 

Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep 
Clos'd o're the head of your lov'd Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old Bards, the famous Druids ly,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wisard stream: 
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye bin there — for what could that have don?
What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore,
The Muse her self, for her inchanting son
Whom Universal nature did lament, 
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His goary visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. 

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade, 
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, 
And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise,
Phœbus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumour lies, 
But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfet witnes of all judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed. 

O Fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, 
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocall reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood:
But now my Oate proceeds,
And listens to the Herald of the Sea
That came in Neptune's plea, 
He ask'd the Waves, and ask'd the Fellon winds,
What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?
And question'd every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked Promontory,
They knew not of his story,
And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd,
The Ayr was calm, and on the level brine,
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd.
It was that fatall and perfidious Bark 
Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. 

Next Camus, reverend Sire, went footing slow,
His Mantle hairy, and his Bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge 
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
Ah! Who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came, and last did go,
The Pilot of the Galilean lake,
Two massy Keyes he bore of metals twain, 
(The Golden opes, the Iron shuts amain)
He shook his Miter'd locks, and stern bespake,
How well could I have spar'd for thee young swain,
Anow of such as for their bellies sake,
Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold? 
Of other care they little reck'ning make,
Then how to scramble at the shearers feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, 
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,
But that two-handed engine at the door, 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. 

Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bels, and Flourets of a thousand hues. 
Ye valleys low where the milde whispers use,
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameld eyes,
That on the green terf suck the honied showres,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowres.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies.
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jasmine,
The white Pink, and the Pansie freakt with jeat,
The glowing Violet.
The Musk-rose, and the well attir'd Woodbine,
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive hed,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears, 
To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, 
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, 
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the haples youth. 

Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more, 
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore, 
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves;
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With Nectar pure his oozy Lock's he laves, 
And hears the unexpressive nuptiall Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move, 
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now Lycidas the Shepherds weep no more;
Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.  

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th' Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray,
He touch'd the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills, 
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. 


Version with hyperlinked footnotes 

Citizen Milton at the Bodleian Library, Oxford


----------



## narcodollars (Dec 10, 2008)

*"Novel" by Arthur Rimbaud (Translated by Wyatt Mason)*

I.

No one's serious at seventeen.
--On beautiful nights when beer and lemonade
And loud, blinding cafés are the last thing you need
--You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade.

Lindens smell fine on fine June nights!
Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes;
The wind brings sounds--the town is near--
And carries scents of vineyards and beer. . .

II.

--Over there, framed by a branch
You can see a little patch of dark blue
Stung by a sinister star that fades
With faint quiverings, so small and white. . .

June nights! Seventeen!--Drink it in.
Sap is champagne, it goes to your head. . .
The mind wanders, you feel a kiss
On your lips, quivering like a living thing. . .

III.

The wild heart Crusoes through a thousand novels
--And when a young girl walks alluringly
Through a streetlamp's pale light, beneath the ominous shadow
Of her father's starched collar. . .

Because as she passes by, boot heels tapping,
She turns on a dime, eyes wide, 
Finding you too sweet to resist. . .
--And cavatinas die on your lips.

IV.

You're in love. Off the market till August.
You're in love.--Your sonnets make Her laugh.
Your friends are gone, you're bad news.
--Then, one night, your beloved, writes. . .!

That night. . .you return to the blinding cafés;
You order beer or lemonade. . .
--No one's serious at seventeen 
When lindens line the promenade.


29 September 1870


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## narcodollars (Dec 11, 2008)

*Daffy Duck In Hollywood - John Ashbery*

Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of "I Thought about You" or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything--a mint-condition can
Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock--to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland
Fling Terrace. He promised he'd get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he's 
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug's attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit
Are its lineaments--fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist's
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you'd call
Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky
Over the Fudds' garage, reducing it--drastically--
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don't want to go back inside any more. You meet
Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island--no,
Not people, comings and goings, more: mutterings, splatterings,
The bizarrely but effectively equipped infantries of 
   happy-go-nutty
Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little
White cardboard castle over the mill run. "Up
The lazy river, how happy we could be?"
How will it end? That geranium glow
Over Anaheim's had the riot act read to it by the
Etna-size firecracker that exploded last minute into
A carte du Tendre in whose lower right-hand corner
(Hard by the jock-itch sand-trap that skirts
The asparagus patch of algolagnic nuits blanches) Amadis
Is cozening the Princesse de Cleves into a midnight 
   micturition spree
On the Tamigi with the Wallets (Walt, Blossom, and little
Sleezix) on a lamé barge "borrowed" from Ollie
Of the Movies' dread mistress of the robes. Wait!
I have an announcement! This wide, tepidly meandering, 
Civilized Lethe (one can barely make out the maypoles
And châlets de nécessitê on its sedgy shore) 
   leads to Tophet, that
Landfill-haunted, not-so-residential resort from which
Some travellers return! This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep. Farewell bocages,
Tanneries, water-meadows. The allegory comes unsnarled
Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is 
About all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I have
Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live
Which is like thinking in another language. Everything
Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.
That this is a fabulation, and that those "other times"
Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in 
Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.
Prodigies of timing may be arranged to convince them
We live in one dimension, they in ours. While I
Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all, think in that language: its 
Grammar, though tortured, offers pavillions
At each new parting of the ways. Pastel
Ambulances scoop up the quick and hie them to hospitals.
"It's all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing
Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?"
Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Sélysette: "If his
Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others, 
What's keeping us here? Why not leave at once?
I have to stay here while they sit in there,
Laugh, drink, have fine time. In my day
One lay under the tough green leaves,
Pretending not to notice how they bled into
The sky's aqua, the wafted-away no-color of regions supposed
Not to concern us. And so we too
Came where the others came: nights of physical endurance,
Or if, by day, our behavior was anarchically
Correct, at least by New Brutalism standards, all then
Grew taciturn by previous agreement. We were spirited 
Away en bateau, under cover of fudge dark.
It's not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness
Of the finished product. True, to ask less were folly, yet
If he is the result of himself, how much the better 
For him we ought to be! And how little, finally, 
We take this into account! Is the puckered garance satin
Of a case that once held a brace of dueling pistols our 
Only acknowledging of that color? I like not this,
Methinks, yet this disappointing sequel to ourselves
Has been applauded in London and St. Petersburg. Somewhere
Ravens pray for us." The storm finished brewing. And thus
She questioned all who came in at the great gate, but none
She found who ever heard of Amadis,
Nor of stern Aureng-Zebe, his first love. Some
They were to whom this mattered not a jot: since all
By definition is completeness (so
In utter darkness they reasoned), why not
Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when
Low skyscrapers from lower-hanging clouds reveal
A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here, and last perhaps
The pattern that may carry the sense, but
Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination. 
Not what we see but how we see it matters; all's
Alike, the same, and we greet him who announces
The change as we would greet the change itself. 
All life is but a figment; conversely, the tiny
Tome that slips from your hand is not perhaps the 
Missing link in this invisible picnic whose leverage
Shrouds our sense of it. Therefore bivouac we 
On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by
Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is
Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up
Over the horizon like a boy
On a fishing expedition. No one really knows
Or cares whether this is the whole of which parts
Were vouchsafed--once--but to be ambling on's
The tradition more than the safekeeping of it. This mulch for
Play keeps them interested and busy while the big,
Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants--what maps, what
Model cities, how much waste space. Life, our
Life anyway, is between. We don't mind 
Or notice any more that the sky is green, a parrot
One, but have our earnest where it chances on us, 
Disingenuous, intrigued, inviting more,
Always invoking the echo, a summer's day.


----------



## narcodollars (Dec 12, 2008)

*A Supermarket in California - Allen Ginsberg*

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked 
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking 
at the full moon.
  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
  What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families shopping at 
night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?    
What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy 
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the 
cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
  Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a 
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?


----------



## MightyAphrodite (Dec 30, 2008)

*They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.*

_Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse_


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## Dillinger4 (Jan 25, 2009)

Homage to Government.

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

1969

Philip Larkin.


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## Roadkill (Jan 27, 2009)

*Innocents' Song*

Who's that knocking on the window,
Who's that standing at the door,
What are all those presents
Laying on the kitchen floor?

Who is the smiling stranger
With hair as white as gin,
What is he doing with the children
And who could have let him in?

Why has he rubies on his fingers,
A cold, cold crown on his head,
Why, when he caws his carol,
Does the salty snow run red?

Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?

Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?

Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:

Herod is his name.

(Charles Causley)

Slightly unseasonal, I know, but good all the same.  Steve Knightley's setting of it to music is rather beautiful too.


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## MightyAphrodite (Mar 23, 2009)

*this be the verse*

for sylvia plaths son nicholas who commited suicide by hanging himself earlier...

*
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.*

_Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse_

RIP.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 9, 2009)

I don't believe in omens or fear
    Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
    Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
    Everyone's immortal. Everything is too.
    No point in fearing death at seventeen,
    Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light;
    Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
    We're all already on the seashore;
    I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets
    When a shoal of immortality swims by.

by Arseny Tarkovsky.


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## heinous seamus (Apr 9, 2009)

Not bad that.


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## story (Apr 10, 2009)

The War Works Hard

How magnificent the war is
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places
swings corpses through the air
rolls stretchers to the wounded
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins
some are lifeless and glistening
others are pale and still throbbing
it produces the most questions
in the minds of children
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters
urges families to emigrate
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(while the poor remain
with one hand in the searing fire).
The war continues working, day and night
it inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer
and killed
teaches lovers to write letters
accustoms young women to waiting
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures
builds new houses
for the orphans
invigorates the coffin makers
and gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
paints a smile on the leader’s face.
It works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.



–Dunya Mikhail
Translated by Liz Winslow


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## Azrael (Jun 11, 2009)

For all tempted by the gods of the marketplace, _The Gods of the Copybook Headings_ by Rudyard Kipling. 

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." 

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 13, 2009)

STELLA MARIS

Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo. 
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay, 
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell, 
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.


----------



## Azrael (Jun 13, 2009)

Beautiful poem, will have to read some more of Symons' work.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 14, 2009)

I liked The War Works Hard. Very good.


*Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes*
She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 14, 2009)

Azrael said:


> Beautiful poem, will have to read some more of Symons' work.


NON SUM QUALIS ERAM BONAE SUB REGNO CYNARAE

by: Ernest Dowson

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bow'd my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fasion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish'd and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 14, 2009)

Pickman'sModel said:


> NON SUM QUALIS ERAM BONAE SUB REGNO CYNARAE
> 
> by: Ernest Dowson



One of my favourite poems.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2009)

Pickman'sModel said:


> <<snip>>




One a day, you know the rules.


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## Pickman's model (Jun 15, 2009)

*Song of Wandering Aengus*

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

— William Butler Yeats


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 15, 2009)

butchersapron said:


> One a day, you know the rules.


i only posted one poem a day


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2009)

**


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 15, 2009)

*Timothy Winters by Charles Causley*

Timothy Winters comes to school
with eyes as wide as a football-pool,
ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
a blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark,
and his hair is an exclamation-mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
and through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks he won't hear a word
and he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
he licks the patterns off his plate
and he's not even heard of the Welfare State.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
and he lives in a house on Suez Street,
he sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
and they say there aren't boys like him anymore.

Old Man Winters likes his beer
and his missus ran off with a bombardier,
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
and Timothy's dosed with an aspirin.

The Welfare Worker lies awake
but the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
so Timothy Winters drinks his cup
and slowly goes on growing up.

At morning prayers the Master helves
for children less fortunate than ourselves,
and the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars 'Amen!'

So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says 'Amen
amen amen amen amen.'
Timothy Winters, Lord.   Amen.


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2009)

One a day! :X


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 15, 2009)

butchersapron said:


> One a day! :X


butchers, heal thyself


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 15, 2009)

Pickman'sModel said:


> i only posted one poem a day



^this


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2009)

Not one each - one full stop


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 15, 2009)

RubyToogood said:


> Just to clarify that I mean one poem on this thread in total per day, not one poem per person, so that we can just check in and read the day's poem and feel pleasantly highbrow.



oh 

edited to add: actually butchers, didn't you post one after PM today? hmm? does that not make you a big hypocrite?
anarchy on the poetry thread.


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2009)

I bloody did too, you're right! Poem rescinded


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 15, 2009)

YES!!!
my first urban victory! 
would you go so far as to say you were pwned? ah go on...


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2009)

I'd say that you humiliated me in front of the world. Which i think is some sort of pwned yes.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 15, 2009)

Hurrah!


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## phildwyer (Jun 16, 2009)

"Jesu"

Jesu is in my heart, his sacred name
Is deeply carved there: but th’other week
A great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces: which I went to seek:
And first I found the corner, where was J,
After, where ES, and next where U was graved,
When I had got these parcels, instantly
I sat me down to spell them, and perceived
That to my broken heart he was I ease you,
                                And to the whole is J E S U.

      -- George Herbert


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## phildwyer (Jun 17, 2009)

What if this present were the worlds last night?	 
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,	 
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell	 
Whether that countenance can thee affright,	 
Teares in his eyes quench the amasing light,	         
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.	 
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,	 
Which pray'd forgivenesse for his foes fierce spight?	 
No, no; but as in my idolatrie	 
I said to all my profane mistresses,	  
Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is	 
A signe of rigour: so I say to thee,	 
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd,	 
This beauteous forme assures a pitious minde.

 -- John Donne


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## Pickman's model (Jun 18, 2009)

THE FATAL SISTERS - AN ODE
Thos. Gray, Esq.

Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepare.)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darken'd air.

Glitt'ring lances are the loom,
Where the dusky warp we strain,
Weaving many a soldier's doom,
Orkney's woe, and Randver's bane.

See the grisly texture grow,
('Tis of human entrails made,)
And the weights, that play below,
Each a gasping warrior's head.

Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore,
Shoot the trembling cords along.
Sword, that once a monarch bore,
Keep the tissue close and strong.

Mista black, terrific maid,
Sangrida, and Hilda see,
Join the wayward work to aid:
Tis the woof of victory.

Ere the ruddy sun be set,
Pikes must shiver, javelins sing,
Blade with clatt'ring buckler meet,
Hauberk crash, and helmet ring.

(Weave the crimson web of war)
Let us go, and let us fly,
Where our friends the conflict share,
Where they triumph, where they die.

As the paths of fate we tread,
Wading thro' th' ensanguin'd field:
Gondula, and Geira, spread
O'er the youthful king your shield.

We the reins to slaughter give,
Ours to kill, and ours to spare:
Spite of danger he shall live.
(Weave the crimson web of war.)

They, whom once the desert-beach
Pent within its bleak domain,
Soon their ample sway shall stretch
O'er the plenty of the plain.

Low the dauntless earl is laid
Gor'd with many a gaping wound:
Fate demands a nobler head;
Soon a king shall bite the ground.

Long his loss shall Erin weep,
Ne'er again his likeness see;
Long her strains in sorrow steep,
Strains of immortality.

Horror covers all the heath,
Clouds of carnage blot the sun.
Sisters, weave the web of death;
Sisters, cease, the work is done.

Hail the task, and hail the hands!
Songs of joy and triumph sing!
Joy to the victorious bands;
Triumph to the younger king.

Mortal, thou that hear'st the tale,
Learn the tenor of our song.
Scotland thro' each winding vale
   Far and wide the notes prolong.

Sisters, hence with spurs of speed:
Each her thund'ring falchion wield;
Each bestride her sable steed.
Hurry, hurry to the field.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 19, 2009)

*I like Marvell*

To his Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

        But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.


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## Pickman's model (Jun 19, 2009)

one poem a day please 
[/butchers]


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## Pickman's model (Jun 19, 2009)

* Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
        Thomas Gray*

             'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
            Where China's gayest art had dyed
                The azure flowers that blow;
            Demurest of the tabby kind,
            The pensive Selima, reclined,
                Gazed on the lake below.

            Her conscious tail her joy declared;
            The fair round face, the snowy beard,
                The velvet of her paws,
            Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
            Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
                She saw: and purred applause.

            Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
            Two angel forms were seen to glide,
                The Genii of the stream;
            Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
            Thro' richest purple to the view
                Betrayed a golden gleam.

            The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
            A whisker first and then a claw,
                With many an ardent wish,
            She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
            What female heart can gold despise?
                What cat's averse to fish?

            Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
            Again she stretched, again she bent,
                Nor knew the gulf between.
            (Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
            The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
                She tumbled headlong in.

            Eight times emerging from the flood
            She mewed to every watery god,
                Some speedy aid to send.
            No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
            Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
                A favorite has no friend!

            From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
            Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
                And be with caution bold.
            Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
            And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
                Nor all, that glisters, gold.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 19, 2009)

Pickman'sModel said:


> one poem a day please
> [/butchers]



Turn-coat 
Actually, if you look closely Pickman'sModel you will see that my poem was posted on the 19th making it the true poem of the day. Yours was too late my friend. nah nah nah na na


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## Pickman's model (Jun 19, 2009)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> Turn-coat
> Actually, if you look closely Pickman'sModel you will see that my poem was posted on the 19th making it the true poem of the day. Yours was too late my friend. nah nah nah na na


bloody computers  when i posted earlier the computer i was using *then* had you down as putting up your message at fucking 2358, ie on 18/6


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 19, 2009)

have i pwned you too? i could get used to this


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## Pickman's model (Jun 19, 2009)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> have i pwned you too? i could get used to this


you could? well don't


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## phildwyer (Jun 20, 2009)

THE POOL PLAYERS: SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

 -- Gwendolyn Brooks


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## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2009)

phildwyer said:


> THE POOL PLAYERS: SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
> 
> We real cool. We
> Left school. We
> ...



I like. Simple, powerful.

I'll post something of Swift's cos I like his work and it is a complete opposite  to the sparse simplicity of Gwendolyn.








Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void
And Betty otherwise employed,
Stole in and took a strict survey
Of all the litter as it lay;
Whereof, to make the matter clear,
An inventory follows here.
And first a dirty smock appeared,
Beneath the arm-pits well besmeared.
Strephon, the rogue, displayed it wide
And turned it round on every side.
On such a point few words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest;
And swears how damnably the men lie
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces
The various combs for various uses,
Filled up with dirt so closely fixt,
No brush could force a way betwixt.
A paste of composition rare,
Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair;
A forehead cloth with oil upon't
To smooth the wrinkles on her front.
Here alum flower to stop the steams
Exhaled from sour unsavory streams;
There night-gloves made of Tripsy's hide,
Bequeath'd by Tripsy when she died,
With puppy water, beauty's help,
Distilled from Tripsy's darling whelp;
Here gallypots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste,
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops.
Hard by a filthy basin stands,
Fouled with the scouring of her hands;
The basin takes whatever comes,
The scrapings of her teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.
But oh! it turned poor Strephon's bowels,
When he beheld and smelt the towels,
Begummed, besmattered, and beslimed
With dirt, and sweat, and ear-wax grimed.
No object Strephon's eye escapes:
Here petticoats in frowzy heaps;
Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot
All varnished o'er with snuff and snot.
The stockings, why should I expose,
Stained with the marks of stinking toes;
Or greasy coifs and pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a week in?
A pair of tweezers next he found
To pluck her brows in arches round,
Or hairs that sink the forehead low,
Or on her chin like bristles grow.
The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia's magnifying glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his eye on't
It shewed the visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose
The smallest worm in Celia's nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
(For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.)
Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the chest?
That careless wench! no creature warn her
To move it out from yonder corner;
But leave it standing full in sight
For you to exercise your spite.
In vain, the workman shewed his wit
With rings and hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this disguise
A cabinet to vulgar eyes;
For Strephon ventured to look in,
Resolved to go through thick and thin;
He lifts the lid, there needs no more:
He smelt it all the time before.
As from within Pandora's box,
When Epimetheus oped the locks,
A sudden universal crew
Of humane evils upwards flew,
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remained behind;
So Strephon lifting up the lid
To view what in the chest was hid,
The vapours flew from out the vent.
But Strephon cautious never meant
The bottom of the pan to grope
And foul his hands in search of Hope.
O never may such vile machine
Be once in Celia's chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
"Those secrets of the hoary deep"!
As mutton cutlets, prime of meat,
Which, though with art you salt and beat
As laws of cookery require
And toast them at the clearest fire,
If from adown the hopeful chops
The fat upon the cinder drops,
To stinking smoke it turns the flame
Poisoning the flesh from whence it came;
And up exhales a greasy stench
For which you curse the careless wench;
So things which must not be exprest,
When plumpt into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell,
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
But vengeance, Goddess never sleeping,
Soon punished Strephon for his peeping:
His foul Imagination links
Each dame he see with all her stinks;
And, if unsavory odors fly,
Conceives a lady standing by.
All women his description fits,
And both ideas jump like wits
By vicious fancy coupled fast,
And still appearing in contrast.
I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind.
Should I the Queen of Love refuse
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
To him that looks behind the scene
Satira's but some pocky queen.
When Celia in her glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his nose
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout
With which he makes so foul a rout),
He soon would learn to think like me
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.


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## quimcunx (Jun 20, 2009)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> To his Coy Mistress
> 
> Thy beauty shall no more be found,
> Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
> ...



I remember doing this at school.  Bit of a charmer, ain't 'e? 

Put out love, or you'll get old and no one will want you and the worms'll get your cherry. 



And have I mentioned blue balls?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2009)

very GCSE, probably bindun many times, but I love this. By god the old man could handle a spade



Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


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## phildwyer (Jun 20, 2009)

It seems that the "one poem a day" rule is more honored in the breach than the observance.  I wonder if we should change it?  I ask out purely out of altruism, because I have the time-zone advantage and am thus positioned to dominate this thread on my own.  But I wouldn't want to do that, naturally.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2009)

oh have I broken a rule?

shit. I'll go away

take that, authority


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## Annierak (Jun 20, 2009)

Like a Night Club in the morning, you’re the bitter end. 
Like a recently disinfected shit-house, you’re clean round the bend. 
You give me the horrors
too bad to be true 
All of my tomorrow’s
are lousy coz of you. 
You put the Shat in Shatter
Put the Pain in Spain
Your germs are splattered about
Your face is just a stain 

You’re certainly no raver, commonly known as a drag.
Do us all a favour, here... wear this polythene bag. 

You’re like a dose of scabies,
I’ve got you under my skin.
You make life a fairy tale... Grimm! 

People mention murder, the moment you arrive.
I’d consider killing you if I thought you were alive.
You’ve got this slippery quality,
it makes me think of phlegm,
and a dual personality
I hate both of them. 

Your bad breath, vamps disease, destruction, and decay.
Please, please, please, please, take yourself away.
Like a death a birthday party,
you ruin all the fun.
Like a sucked and spat our smartie,
you’re no use to anyone.
Like the shadow of the guillotine
on a dead consumptive’s face.
Speaking as an outsider,
what do you think of the human race 

You went to a progressive psychiatrist.
He recommended suicide...
before scratching your bad name off his list,
and pointing the way outside. 

You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you want to fart.
You’re heading for a breakdown,
better pull yourself apart. 

Your dirty name gets passed about when something goes amiss.
Your attitudes are platitudes,
just make me wanna piss. 

What kind of creature bore you
Was is some kind of bat
They can’t find a good word for you,
but I can... 
Twat.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 20, 2009)

Annierak said:


> Twat.



i like that one 

one from me then seen as we're flouting the one a day rule

After so long an absence 
At last we meet agin: 
Does the meeting give us pleasure, 
Or does it give us pain? 

The tree of life has been shaken, 
And but few of us linger now, 
Like the prophets two or three berries 
In the top of the uppermost bough. 

We cordially greet each other 
In the old, familiar tone; 
And we think, though we do not say it, 
How old and gray he is grown! 

We speak of a Merry Christmas 
And many a Happy New Year; 
But each in his heart is thinking 
Of those that are not here. 

We speak of friends and their fortunes, 
And of what they did and said, 
Till the dead alone seem living, 
And the living alone seem dead. 

And at last we hardly distinguish 
Between the ghosts and the guests; 
And a mist and shadow of sadness 
Steals over our merriest jests


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## Pickman's model (Jun 20, 2009)

THE ONE BLACK STAIN - Robert E Howard
(Sir Thomas Doughty, executed at St. Julian's Bay, 1578)

They carried him out on the barren sand
where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand
as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land
wail to the lonely tide.

Drake faced them all like a lion at bay,
with his lion head upflung:
"Dare ye my word of law defy,
to say this traitor shall not die?"
And his captains dared not meet his eye
but each man held his tongue.

Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of sober face:
"Worthy of death he may well be,
but the trial ye held was mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where justice hid her face.

"More of the man had ye been, on deck
your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of the law."

Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake.
"Puritan knave!" swore he.
"Headsman! Give him the axe instead!
He shall strike off yon traitor's head!"
Solomon folded his arms and said,
darkly and somberly:

"I am no slave for your butcher's work."
"Bind him with triple strands!"
Drake roared and the men obeyed,
Hesitantly, as if afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade
and pinioned his iron hands.

They bent the doomed man over to his knees,
the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend,
one last long look they saw him send,
At Drake his judge and his one time friend
who dared not meet his eye.

The axe flashed silver in the sun,
a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear,
and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near
above the lonely strand.

"This be every traitor's end!"
Drake cried, and yet again.
Slowly his captains turned and went
and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent
in the eyes of Solomon Kane.

Night fell on the crawling waves;
the admiral's door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold;
his irons clashed as the ship rolled.
And his guard, grown weary and overbold,
lay down his pipe and dozed.

He woke with a hand at his corded throat
that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key,
and the somber Puritan stood free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously
with the wrath that is slow to rise.

Unseen, to the admiral's door,
went Solomon Kane from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship,
the guard's keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip
through the door unbarred.

Drake at the table sat alone,
his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping --
but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping,
death's swiftly flowing sands.

He reached no hand for gun or blade
to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see,
lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery,
and bitter, cankering pain.

A moment Solomon Kane stood there,
the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird,
and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred
And Kane went forth without a word
and closed the cabin door.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 21, 2009)

THE RAVEN
Edgar Allen Poe

	 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 22, 2009)

"The Vulture"  

Once upon a midnight chilling, as I held my feet unwilling
O'er a tub of scalding water, at a heat of ninety-four;
Nervously a toe in dipping, dripping, slipping, then out-skipping,
Suddenly there came a ripping whipping, at my chamber's door.
"'Tis the second-floor," I muttered, "flipping at my chamber's door--
Wants a light--and nothing more!"

Ah! distinctly I remember, it was in the chill November,
And each cuticle and member was with influenza sore;
Falt'ringly I stirred the gruel, steaming, creaming o'er the fuel,
And anon removed the jewel that each frosted nostril bore,
Wiped away the trembling jewel that each reddened nostril bore,
Nameless here for evermore!

And I recollect a certain draught that fanned the window curtain
Chilled me, filled me with a horror of two steps across the floor,
And, besides, I'd got my feet in, and a most refreshing heat in,
To myself I sat repeating--"If I answer to the door--
Rise to let the ruffian in who seems to want to burst the door,
I'll be [damned]" that and something more.

Presently the row grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Really, Mr. Johnson, blow it!--your forgiveness I implore
Such an observation letting slip, but when a man's just getting
Into bed, you come upsetting nerves and posts of chambers' door,
Making such a row, forgetting"--Spoke a voice beyond the door:
'It isn't Johnson"--nothing more! 

Quick a perspiration clammy bathed me, and I uttered "Dammy!"
(Observation wrested from me, like the one I made before)
Back upon the cushions sinking, hopelessly my eyes, like winking,
On some stout for private drinking, ranged in rows upon the floor,
Fixed--and on an oyster barrel (full) beside them on the floor,
Looked and groaned, and nothing more.

Open then was flung the portal, and in stepped a hated mortal,
By the moderns called a VULTURE (known as Sponge in days of yore),
Well I knew his reputation! cause of all my agitation-
Scarce a nod or salutation changed, he pounced upon the floor;
Coolly lifted up the oysters and some stout from off the floor,
Helped himself, and took some more!

Then this hungry beast untiring fixed his gaze with fond admiring
On a piece of cold boiled beef I meant to last a week or more,
Quick he set to work devouring--plates, in quick succession, scouring--
Stout with every mouthful showering--made me ask, to see it pour,
'If he quite enjoyed his supper, as I watched the liquid pour;
Said the Vulture, "Never more."

Much disgusted at the spacious vacuum by this brute voracious
Excavated in the beef--(he'd eaten quite enough for four)--
Still I felt relief surprising when at length I saw him rising,
That he meant to go surmising, said I, glancing at the door--
"Going? well, I won't detain you--mind the stairs and shut the door--"
--"Leave you, Tompkins! never more." 

Startled by an answer dropping hints that he intended stopping
All his life--I knew him equal to it if he liked, or more--
Half in dismal earnest, half in joke, with an attempt at laughing,
I remarked that he was chaffing, and demanded of the bore,
Asked what this disgusting, nasty, greedy, vile intrusive bore,
Meant in cloaking "Never more."

But the Vulture not replying, took my bunch of keys and trying
Sev'ral, found at length the one to fit my private cupboard door;
Took the gin out, filled the kettle; and with a sang froid to nettle
Any saint, began to settle calmly down the grate before,
Really as he meant departing at the date I named before,
Of never, never more! 

Then I sat engaged in guessing what this circumstance distressing
Would be likely to result in, for I knew that long before
Once (it served me right for drinking) I had told him that if sinking
In the world, my fortunes linking to his own, he'd find my door
Always open to receive him, and it struck me now that door
He would pass, perhaps never more!

Suddenly the air was clouded, all the furniture enshrouded
With the smoke of vile tobacco--this was worse than all before;
"Smith!" I cried (in not offensive tones, it might have been expensive,
For he knew the art defensive, and could coster-mongers floor);
"Recollect it's after midnight, are you going?--mind the floor."
Quoth the Vulture, "Never more."

"Smith!" I cried (the gin was going down his throat in rivers flowing),
"If you want a bed, you know there's quite a nice
hotel next door,
Very cheap--I'm ill--and, joking set apart, your horrid smoking
Irritates my cough to choking. Having mentioned it before,
Really, you should not compel me--Will you mizzle--as before?"
Quoth the Vulture, "Never more."

Smith!" I cried, "that joke repeating merits little better treating
For you than a condemnation as a nuisance and a bore;
Drop it, pray, it isn't funny; I've to mix some rum and honey--
If you want a little money, take some and be off next door;
Run a bill up for me if you like, but do be off next door."
Quoth the Vulture, "Never more."

"Smith!" I shrieked--the accent humbler dropping, as another tumbler
I beheld him mix, "be off! you drive me mad--it's striking four.
Leave the house and something in it; if you go on at the gin, it
Won't hold out another minute. Leave the house and shut the door--
Take your beak from out my gin, and take your body through the door!
Quoth the Vulture, "Never more!"

And the Vulture never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,
Gulping down my stout by gallons, and my oysters by the score;
And the beast, with no more breeding than a heathen savage feeding,
The new carpet's tints unheeding, throws his shells upon the floor.
And his smoke from out my curtains, and his stains from out my floor,
Shall be sifted never more.

-- Anon


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 22, 2009)

pisspoor


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 22, 2009)

Pickman'sModel said:


> pisspoor



Only for one with a humor bypass, such as yourself.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2009)

Can i please book a day in whicb to post my poem that i rescinded last weeK? This is getting ridiculous. (And the topicality has passed, but still...)


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 22, 2009)

butchersapron said:


> Can i please book a day in whicb to post my poem that i rescinded last weeK? This is getting ridiculous. (And the topicality has passed, but still...)



Tomorrow belongs to you.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 23, 2009)

butchersapron said:


> Can i please book a day in whicb to post my poem that i rescinded last weeK? This is getting ridiculous. (And the topicality has passed, but still...)



tick tock, tick tock 
i tell you, some people


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## phildwyer (Jun 24, 2009)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> tick tock, tick tock
> i tell you, some people



Innit.  Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

   "The Ghost Of Roger Casement"	   	

O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his day,
The country thinks no end of him,
For he knows how to say,
At a beanfeast or a banquet,
That all must hang their trust
Upon the British Empire,
Upon the Church of Christ.

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there's no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.


  -- WB Yeats


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## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2009)

Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
~Ernest Dowson~

 Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake;
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world should fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.​


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## Pickman's model (Jun 26, 2009)

THE HARLOT'S HOUSE
O. Wilde

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,

Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.

Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.

Then, turning to my love, I said,
'The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.'

But she--she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.

Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.

And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.


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## Pickman's model (Jun 27, 2009)

The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 28, 2009)

*By Felix Dennis*

Ordure on the Farm
(To the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm)

All our MPs had a farm - spouting all day long,
And on that farm they had some pigs - let's all sing their song: 
With an oink-oink here , 
And a flip-flip there,
Here an oink, 
there a flip - now I own a second-home!
We all work so jolly hard - we've done nothing wrong.   
Hear hear!

Mr. Stinker ran the farm - shouting all day long,
Order! Order in the Sty - let's all sing our song: 
With an oink-oink here, 
And a nudge-nudge there, 
Here an oink, 
there a nudge - thicken up the whitewash!
We all work so jolly hard - we've done nothing wrong.   
Hear hear! 

Then the landlords of the farm - absent for so long,
Turfed those lazy piggies out - let's all sing their song: 
With an oink-oink here, 
And sob-sob there, 
Here an oink, there a sob - go and get a proper job!
We don't care how hard you work - learning right from wrong.   
Hear hear!   
Oink-oink!


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## Pickman's model (Jul 1, 2009)

Sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria 
Oscar Wilde


CHRIST, dost thou live indeed? or are thy bones	 
Still straightened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?	 
And was thy Rising only dreamed by Her	 
Whose love of thee for all her sin atones?	 
For here the air is horrid with men’s groans,	         
The priests who call upon thy name are slain,	 
Dost thou not hear the bitter wail of pain	 
From those whose children lie upon the stones?	 
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom	 
Curtains the land, and through the starless night	  
Over thy Cross the Crescent moon I see!	 
If thou in very truth didst burst the tomb	 
Come down, O Son of Man! and show thy might,	 
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!


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## Pickman's model (Jul 2, 2009)

SPLEEN

by: Charles Baudelaire

I'M like some king in whose corrupted veins
Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
Who flees good counsel to find weariness
Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
Whose weary face emotion moves no more
E'en when his people die before his door.
His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
To purge away the old corrupted strain,
His baths of blood, that in the days of old
The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
For green Lethean water fills his veins.


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## Pickman's model (Jul 3, 2009)

DANCE OF THE HANGED MEN
Rimbaud

On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.

Sir Beelzebub pulls by the scruff
His little black puppets who grin at the sky,
And with a backhander in the head like a kick,
Makes them dance, dance, to an old Carol-tune!

And the puppets, shaken about, entwine their thin arms:
Their breasts pierced with light, like black organ-pipes
Which once gentle ladies pressed to their own,
Jostle together protractedly in hideous love-making.

Hurray! the gay dancers, you whose bellies are gone!
You can cut capers on such a long stage!
Hop! never mind whether it's fighting or dancing!
- Beelzebub, maddened, saws on his fiddles!

Oh the hard heels, no one's pumps are wearing out!
And nearly all have taken of their shirts of skin;
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without shame.
On each skull the snow places a white hat:

The crow acts as a plume for these cracked brains,
A scrap of flesh clings to each lean chin:
You would say, to see them turning in their dark combats,
They were stiff knights clashing pasteboard armours.

Hurrah! the wind whistles at the skeletons' grand ball!
The black gallows moans like an organ of iron !
The wolves howl back from the violet forests:
And on the horizon the sky is hell-red...

Ho there, shake up those funereal braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!

Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse:
And, feeling the rope tight again round his neck,

Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountebank into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!

On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.


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## Pickman's model (Jul 4, 2009)

*A Satyre on Charles II*
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester


I' th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown	5	
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
---Nor are his high desires above his strength:	
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.	
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,	
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
---To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.	
For though in her he settles well his tarse,
Yet his dull, graceless ballocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
---All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
---From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jul 5, 2009)

A Smile to Remember
Charles Bukowski 

We had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “Be happy Henry!”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week
while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?“

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled


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## Pickman's model (Jul 7, 2009)

CALEF IN BOSTON
John Greenleaf Whittier

In the solemn days of old,
Two men met in Boston town,
One a tradesman frank and bold,
One a preacher of renown.
Cried the last, in bitter tone:
"Poisoner of the wells of truth!
Satan's hireling, thou hast sown
With his tares the heart of youth!"
Spake the simple tradesman then,
"God be judge 'twixt thee and me;
All thou knowed of truth hath been
Once a lie to men like thee.
"Falsehoods which we spurn to-day
Were the truths of long ago;
Let the dead boughs fall away,
Fresher shall the living grow.
"God is good and God is light,
In this faith I rest secure;
Evil can but serve the right,
Over all shall love endure.
"Of your spectral puppet play
I have traced the cunning wires;
Come what will, I needs must say,
God is true, and ye are liars."
When the thought of man is free,
Error fears its lightest tones;
So the priest cried, "Sadducee!"
And the people took up stones.
In the ancient burying-ground,
Side by side the twain now lie;
One with humble grassy mound,
One with marbles pale and high,
But the Lord hath blest the seed
Which that tradesman scattered then,
And the preacher's spectral creed
Chills no more the blood of men.
Let us trust, to one is known
Perfect love which casts out fear,
While the other's joys atone
For the wrong he suffered here


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## Helene (Jul 11, 2009)

*Come Away, my Love*

Come away, my love, from streets
Where unkind eyes divide,
And shop windows reflect our difference.
In the shelter of my faithful room rest.

There, safe from opinions, being behind
Myself, I can only see you;
And in my dark eyes your grey
Will dissolve.
	The candlelight throws
Two dark shadows on the wall
Which merge into one as I close beside you.

When at last the lights are out,
And I feel your hand in mine,
Two human breaths join in one,
And the piano weaves
It’s unchallenged harmony.

Joseph Kariuki


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## MightyAphrodite (Jul 27, 2009)

Two Look at Two
by: Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
'This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?'
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, 'Why don't you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can't.
I doubt if you're as living as you look."
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand -- and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed unscared along the wall.
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
'This must be all.' It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.


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## heinous seamus (Aug 18, 2009)

*Huesca*

Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.

The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.

On the last mile to Huesca,
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side.

And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don't forget my love.

John Cornford


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## Pickman's model (Aug 26, 2009)

Richard Le Gallienne. 1866–

52. A Ballad of London

AH, London! London! our delight,	 
Great flower that opens but at night,	 
Great City of the midnight sun,	 
Whose day begins when day is done.	 

Lamp after lamp against the sky	         5
Opens a sudden beaming eye,	 
Leaping alight on either hand,	 
The iron lilies of the Strand.	 

Like dragonflies, the hansoms hover,	 
With jeweled eyes, to catch the lover;	  10
The streets are full of lights and loves,	 
Soft gowns, and flutter of soiled doves.	 

The human moths about the light	 
Dash and cling close in dazed delight,	 
And burn and laugh, the world and wife,	  15
For this is London, this is life!	 

Upon thy petals butterflies,	 
But at thy root, some say, there lies,	 
A world of weeping trodden things,	 
Poor worms that have not eyes or wings.	  20

From out corruption of their woe	 
Springs this bright flower that charms us so,	 
Men die and rot deep out of sight	 
To keep this jungle-flower bright.	 

Paris and London, World-Flowers twain	  25
Wherewith the World-Tree blooms again,	 
Since Time hath gathered Babylon,	 
And withered Rome still withers on.	 

Sidon and Tyre were such as ye,	 
How bright they shone upon the tree!	  30
But Time hath gathered, both are gone,	 
And no man sails to Babylon.


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## lang rabbie (Sep 6, 2009)

*Fragmentary Blue*

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet. 


_Robert Frost_


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## ShiftyBagLady (Sep 16, 2009)

There is a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes, which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living; which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in the air,
As Atlas did the sky.


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## Zabo (Sep 21, 2009)

*The Animal & Insect Act*

Finally, in order to ensure
absolute national security

they passed the Animal & Insect

Emergency Control & DisciplineAct.

Under this new Act, buffaloes

cows and goats were prohibited

from grazing in herds of

more than three. 


Neither could birds flock, 

nor bees swarm .....

This constituted unlawfulassembly.

As they had not obtained prior

planning permission, mud-wasp

sand swallows were issued with

summary Notices to Quit. 

Theirhomes were declared subversive

extensions to private property.


Monkeys and mynahs

were warned to stop

relaying their noisy

morning orisons until an official

Broadcasting Licence was issued

by the appropriate Ministry.

Unmonitored publications &

broadcasts posed the gravestt

hreats in times of a National

Emergency.


Similarly, woodpeckers had

to stop tapping their morse-code 

messages from coconut

tree-top to chempaka tree.

All messages were subject

to a thorough pre-scrutiny

by the relevant authorities.

Java sparrows were arrested in

droves for rumour-mongering.


Cats (suspected of conspiracy)

had to be indoors by 9 o'clock

Cicadas and crickets received

notification to turn their amp-lifiers down.

Ducks could not

quack nor turkeys gobble during

restricted hours. 


Need I say,

all dogs -- alsatians, 

dachshunds,terriers, 

pointers and even

little chihuahuas -- were muzzled.

In the interests of security

penguins and zebras were

ordered to discard their

non-regulation uniforms.


The deer had to surrender

their dangerous antlers.

Tigers and all carnivores

with retracted claws were

sent directly to prison

for concealing lethal weapons.


And by virtue of ArticleFour, 

paragraph 2(b)sub-Subsection sixteen,

under no circumstances

were elephants allowed

to break wind between

the hours of six and six.

Their farts could easily

be interpreted as gunshot.

Might spark off a riot .....


A month after the Act

was properly gazetted

the birds and insects

started migrating south

the animals went north

and an eerie silence

handcuffed the forests.

There was now 

Total Security.

_Cecil Rajendra_


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## 8115 (Oct 29, 2009)

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100     
by Martín Espada  


for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, 
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher 
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the booming ice storm of glass from the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in
Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.


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## 8115 (Nov 3, 2009)

He Tells Her



He tells her that the Earth is flat -

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.


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## lang rabbie (Nov 3, 2009)

The poet who wrote "He Tells Her" is Wendy Cope

[but I am a bloke, and my assertions are not to be trusted!]


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## MightyAphrodite (Nov 4, 2009)

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile 


e. e. cummings


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## Disjecta Membra (Nov 4, 2009)

saul williams  

Untimely Meditations :

The fiery sun of my passions
Evaporates the love lakes of my soul
Clouds my thoughts and rains you into existence
As I take flight on bolts of lighting
Claiming chaos as my concubine and you as my me

I of the storm you of the sea
We of the moon land of the free
What have I done to deserve this? Am I happy?
Happiness is a mediocre sin set for a middle class existence

I see through smiles and smell truth in the distance
Beyond one dimensional smiles and laughter
Lies are hereafter where tears echo laughter
You'd have to do math to divide a smile

By a tear times fear equals mere truth
I simply delve in the air and if that's the case
All I have to breath and all else will follow
That's why drums are hollow, and I like drums, drums are good

But I can't think straight
I lack the attention span to meditate
My attention spans galaxies here and now are immense
Seconds are secular, moments are mine

Self is illusion, music's divine
Noosed by the strings of Jimmy's guitar
I swing Purple Hazed pendulum
Hypnotizing the part of I that never dies

Look into my eyes are the windows of the soul
It's fried chicken collies and cornbread
It's corn milk flour sour cream eggs and oil
It's the stolen blood of the earth

Used to make cars run and kill the fish
Who me? I play scales
The scales of dead fish of oil slicked seas
My sister blows wind through the hollows of fallen tress

And we are the echoes of eternity, echoes of eternity
Echoes of eternity maybe you heard of us
We do rebirths, revokes and resurrections
We threw basement parties in pyramids

I left my tag on the wall
The beats would echo of the stone
And solidify into the form of light bulbs
Destined to light of the heads of future generations

They're releasing it up in the form of OM
Maybe you heard of us
If not then you must be trying to hear us
In such cases we can't be heard

We remain in the darkness unseen
In the center of unpeeled bananas we exist uncolored by perception
Clothed to the naked eye
Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence

And that's the only fact
In fact there are no facts, fax me a fact and I'll telegram
I'll hologram, I'll telephone the Son Of Man and tell him he is done
Leave a message on his answering machine

Telling him there are none
God and I are one
Times moon times star times sun
The factor is me, you remember me

T slung amethyst rocks on Saturn blocks?
'Til I got caught up by Earthling cops
They wanted me for their army or whatever, picture me
I swirl like the wind tempting tomorrow to be today

Tiptoing the fine line between everything and everything else
I am simply Saturn swirling sevenths through sooth
The sole living air of air and I, and, and all else follows
Reverberating the space inside of drum hollows

Package and bottles and chips
And tomorrow then sold to the highest nigga
I swing from the tallest tree
Lynched by the lowest branches of me

Praying that my physical will set me free
'Cause I'm afraid that all else is vanity
Mere language is profanity
I'd rather hum or have my soul tattooed to my tongue

And let the scriptures be sung in gibberish
As words be simple fish in my soulquarium
And intellect can't swim so I stopped combing my mind
So my thoughts could lock

I'm tired of trying to understand
Perceptions are mangled matted and knotted anyway
Life is more than what meets the eye and I
So elevate I to the third and even that s*** seems absurd

And your thoughts leave you third isolated
No man is an island but I often feel alone
So I find peace through OHM


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## 8115 (Nov 5, 2009)

Gravy

No other word will do.  For that's what it was.Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman.  Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going.  And he was going
nowhere but down.  So he changed his ways
somehow.  He quit drinking!  And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head.  "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends.  "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected.  Pure Gravy.  And don't forget it."

                  RAYMOND CARVER
                   (1938-1988)


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## ShiftyBagLady (Nov 6, 2009)

ADIEU, adieu! my native shore 
Fades o'er the waters blue; 
The Night-winds sigh, the breakers roar, 
And shrieks the wild sea-mew. 
Yon Sun that sets upon the sea 
We follow in his flight; 
Farewell awhile to him and thee, 
My native Land -- Good Night!

'A few short hours and He will rise 
To give the Morrow birth; 
And I shall hail the main and skies, 
But not my mother Earth. 
Deserted is my own good hall, 
Its hearth is desolate; 
Wild weeds are gathering on the wall; 
My dog howls at the gate.

'Come hither, hither, my little page! 
Why dost thou weep and wail? 
Or dost thou dread the billows' rage, 
Or tremble at the gale? 
But dash the tear-drop from thine eye; 
Our ship is swift and strong, 
Our fleetest falcon scarce can fly 
More merrily along.' --

'Let winds be shrill, let waves roll high, 
I fear not wave nor wind; 
Yet marvel not, Sir Childe, that I 
Am sorrowful in mind; 
For I have from my father gone, 
A mother whom I love, 
And have no friend, save these alone, 
But thee -- and one above.

'My father bless'd be fervently, 
Yet did not much complain; 
But sorely will my mother sigh 
Till I come back again.' -- 
'Enough, enough, my little lad! 
Such tears become thine eye; 
If I thy guileless bosom had, 
Mine own would not be dry. --

'Come hither, hither, my staunch yeoman, 
Why dost thou look so pale? 
Or dost thou dread a French foeman? 
Or shiver at the gale?'-- 
'Deem'st thou I tremble for my life? 
Sir Childe, I'm not so weak; 
But thinking on an absent wife 
Will blanch a faithful cheek.

'My spouse and boys dwell near thy hall, 
Along the bordering lake, 
And when they on their father call, 
What answer shall she make?'-- 
'Enough, enough, my yeoman good, 
Thy grief let none gainsay; 
But I, who am of lighter mood, 
Will laugh to flee away.

'For who would trust the seeming sighs 
Of wife or paramour? 
Fresh feres will dry the bright blue eyes 
We late saw streaming o'er. 
For pleasures past I do not grieve, 
Nor perils gathering near; 
My greatest grief is that I leave 
No thing that claims a tear.

'And now I'm in the world alone, 
Upon the wide, wide sea; 
But why should I for others groan, 
When none will sigh for me? 
Perchance my dog will whine in vain, 
Till fed by stranger hands; 
But long ere I come back again 
He'd tear me where he stands.

'With thee, my bark, I'll swiftly go 
Athwart the foaming brine; 
Nor care what land thou bear'st me to, 
So not again to mine. 
Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves! 
And when you fail my sight, 
Welcome ye deserts, and ye caves! 
My native land -- Good Night!


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 7, 2009)

CHRISTABEL by SAMUEL COLERIDGE, junkie poet

PART I
'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock ;
Tu--whit !-- -- Tu--whoo !
And hark, again ! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch ;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour ;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud ;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

Is the night chilly and dark ?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full ;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray :
'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

The lovely lady, Christabel,
Whom her father loves so well,
What makes her in the wood so late,
A furlong from the castle gate ?
She had dreams all yesternight
Of her own betrothéd knight ;
And she in the midnight wood will pray
For the weal of her lover that's far away.

She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
And naught was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe :
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she.

The lady sprang up suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel !
It moaned as near, as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell.--
On the other side it seems to be,
Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

The night is chill ; the forest bare ;
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek--
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Hush, beating heart of Christabel !
Jesu, Maria, shield her well !
She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
And stole to the other side of the oak.
What sees she there ?
There she sees a damsel bright,
Dressed in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone :
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare ;
Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were ;
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess, 'twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she--
Beautiful exceedingly !
Mary mother, save me now !
(Said Christabel,) And who art thou ?

The lady strange made answer meet,
And her voice was faint and sweet :--
Have pity on my sore distress,
I scarce can speak for weariness :
Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear !
Said Christabel, How camest thou here ?
And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet,
Did thus pursue her answer meet :--

My sire is of a noble line,
And my name is Geraldine :
Five warriors seized me yestermorn,
Me, even me, a maid forlorn :
They choked my cries with force and fright,
And tied me on a palfrey white.
The palfrey was as fleet as wind,
And they rode furiously behind.
They spurred amain, their steeds were white :
And once we crossed the shade of night.
As sure as Heaven shall rescue me,
I have no thought what men they be ;
Nor do I know how long it is
(For I have lain entranced, I wis)
Since one, the tallest of the five,
Took me from the palfrey's back,
A weary woman, scarce alive.
Some muttered words his comrades spoke :
He placed me underneath this oak ;
He swore they would return with haste ;
Whither they went I cannot tell--
I thought I heard, some minutes past,
Sounds as of a castle bell.
Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she),
And help a wretched maid to flee.

Then Christabel stretched forth her hand,
And comforted fair Geraldine :
O well, bright dame ! may you command
The service of Sir Leoline ;
And gladly our stout chivalry
Will he send forth and friends withal
To guide and guard you safe and free
Home to your noble father's hall.

She rose : and forth with steps they passed
That strove to be, and were not, fast.
Her gracious stars the lady blest,
And thus spake on sweet Christabel :
All our household are at rest,
The hall is silent as the cell ;
Sir Leoline is weak in health,
And may not well awakened be,
But we will move as if in stealth,
And I beseech your courtesy,
This night, to share your couch with me.

They crossed the moat, and Christabel
Took the key that fitted well ;
A little door she opened straight,
All in the middle of the gate ;
The gate that was ironed within and without,
Where an army in battle array had marched out.
The lady sank, belike through pain,
And Christabel with might and main
Lifted her up, a weary weight,
Over the threshold of the gate :
Then the lady rose again,
And moved, as she were not in pain.

So free from danger, free from fear,
They crossed the court : right glad they were.
And Christabel devoutly cried
To the Lady by her side,
Praise we the Virgin all divine
Who hath rescued thee from thy distress !
Alas, alas ! said Geraldine,
I cannot speak for weariness.
So free from danger, free from fear,
They crossed the court : right glad they were.

Outside her kennel, the mastiff old
Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold.
The mastiff old did not awake,
Yet she an angry moan did make !
And what can ail the mastiff bitch ?
Never till now she uttered yell
Beneath the eye of Christabel.
Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch :
For what can aid the mastiff bitch ?

They passed the hall, that echoes still,
Pass as lightly as you will !
The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
Amid their own white ashes lying ;
But when the lady passed, there came
A tongue of light, a fit of flame ;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby,
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.
O softly tread, said Christabel,
My father seldom sleepeth well.

Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare,
And jealous of the listening air
They steal their way from stair to stair,
Now in glimmer, and now in gloom,
And now they pass the Baron's room,
As still as death, with stifled breath !
And now have reached her chamber door ;
And now doth Geraldine press down
The rushes of the chamber floor.

The moon shines dim in the open air,
And not a moonbeam enters here.
But they without its light can see
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain,
For a lady's chamber meet :
The lamp with twofold silver chain
Is fastened to an angel's feet.

The silver lamp burns dead and dim ;
But Christabel the lamp will trim.
She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright,
And left it swinging to and fro,
While Geraldine, in wretched plight,
Sank down upon the floor below.

O weary lady, Geraldine,
I pray you, drink this cordial wine !
It is a wine of virtuous powers ;
My mother made it of wild flowers.

And will your mother pity me,
Who am a maiden most forlorn ?
Christabel answered--Woe is me !
She died the hour that I was born.
I have heard the gray-haired friar tell
How on her death-bed she did say,
That she should hear the castle-bell
Strike twelve upon my wedding-day.
O mother dear ! that thou wert here !
I would, said Geraldine, she were !

But soon with altered voice, said she--
`Off, wandering mother ! Peak and pine !
I have power to bid thee flee.'
Alas ! what ails poor Geraldine ?
Why stares she with unsettled eye ?
Can she the bodiless dead espy ?
And why with hollow voice cries she,
`Off, woman, off ! this hour is mine--
Though thou her guardian spirit be,
Off, woman. off ! 'tis given to me.'

Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side,
And raised to heaven her eyes so blue--
Alas ! said she, this ghastly ride--
Dear lady ! it hath wildered you !
The lady wiped her moist cold brow,
And faintly said, `'Tis over now !'

Again the wild-flower wine she drank :
Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright,
And from the floor whereon she sank,
The lofty lady stood upright :
She was most beautiful to see,
Like a lady of a far countrée.

And thus the lofty lady spake--
`All they who live in the upper sky,
Do love you, holy Christabel !
And you love them, and for their sake
And for the good which me befel,
Even I in my degree will try,
Fair maiden, to requite you well.
But now unrobe yourself ; for I
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie.'

Quoth Christabel, So let it be !
And as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.

But through her brain of weal and woe
So many thoughts moved to and fro,
That vain it were her lids to close ;
So half-way from the bed she rose,
And on her elbow did recline
To look at the lady Geraldine.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around ;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast :
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold ! her bosom, and half her side-- --
A sight to dream of, not to tell !
O shield her ! shield sweet Christabel !

Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs ;
Ah ! what a stricken look was hers !
Deep from within she seems half-way
To lift some weight with sick assay,
And eyes the maid and seeks delay ;
Then suddenly as one defied
Collects herself in scorn and pride,
And lay down by the Maiden's side !--
And in her arms the maid she took,
Ah wel-a-day !
And with low voice and doleful look
These words did say :
`In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel !
Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow ;
But vainly thou warrest,
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare,
That in the dim forest
Thou heard'st a low moaning,
And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair ;
And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.'


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 7, 2009)

THE CONCLUSION TO PART I
It was a lovely sight to see
The lady Christabel, when she
Was praying at the old oak tree.
Amid the jaggéd shadows
Of mossy leafless boughs,
Kneeling in the moonlight,
To make her gentle vows ;
Her slender palms together prest,
Heaving sometimes on her breast ;
Her face resigned to bliss or bale--
Her face, oh call it fair not pale,
And both blue eyes more bright than clear.
Each about to have a tear.
With open eyes (ah, woe is me !)
Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,
Dreaming that alone, which is--
O sorrow and shame ! Can this be she,
The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree ?
And lo ! the worker of these harms,
That holds the maiden in her arms,
Seems to slumber still and mild,
As a mother with her child.

A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine ! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine ! one hour was thine--
Thou'st had thy will ! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,
From cliff and tower, tu--whoo ! tu--whoo !
Tu--whoo ! tu--whoo ! from wood and fell !

And see ! the lady Christabel
Gathers herself from out her trance ;
Her limbs relax, her countenance
Grows sad and soft ; the smooth thin lids
Close o'er her eyes ; and tears she sheds--
Large tears that leave the lashes bright !
And oft the while she seems to smile
As infants at a sudden light !

Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep,
Like a youthful hermitess,
Beauteous in a wilderness,
Who, praying always, prays in sleep.
And, if she move unquietly,
Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free
Comes back and tingles in her feet.
No doubt, she hath a vision sweet.
What if her guardian spirit 'twere,
What if she knew her mother near ?
But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call :
For the blue sky bends over all !

PART II
Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
Knells us back to a world of death.
These words Sir Leoline first said,
When he rose and found his lady dead :
These words Sir Leoline will say
Many a morn to his dying day !
And hence the custom and law began
That still at dawn the sacristan,
Who duly pulls the heavy bell,
Five and forty beads must tell
Between each stroke--a warning knell,
Which not a soul can choose but hear
From Bratha Head to Wyndermere.

Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell !
And let the drowsy sacristan
Still count as slowly as he can !
There is no lack of such, I ween,
As well fill up the space between.
In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair,
And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent,
With ropes of rock and bells of air
Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent,
Who all give back, one after t'other,
The death-note to their living brother ;
And oft too, by the knell offended,
Just as their one ! two ! three ! is ended,
The devil mocks the doleful tale
With a merry peal from Borrowdale.

The air is still ! through mist and cloud
That merry peal comes ringing loud ;
And Geraldine shakes off her dread,
And rises lightly from the bed ;
Puts on her silken vestments white,
And tricks her hair in lovely plight,
And nothing doubting of her spell
Awakens the lady Christabel.
`Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel ?
I trust that you have rested well.'

And Christabel awoke and spied
The same who lay down by her side--
O rather say, the same whom she
Raised up beneath the old oak tree !
Nay, fairer yet ! and yet more fair !
For she belike hath drunken deep
Of all the blessedness of sleep !
And while she spake, her looks, her air
Such gentle thankfulness declare,
That (so it seemed) her girded vests
Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts.
`Sure I have sinn'd !' said Christabel,
`Now heaven be praised if all be well !'
And in low faltering tones, yet sweet,
Did she the lofty lady greet
With such perplexity of mind
As dreams too lively leave behind.

So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed
Her maiden limbs, and having prayed
That He, who on the cross did groan,
Might wash away her sins unknown,
She forthwith led fair Geraldine
To meet her sire, Sir Leoline.

The lovely maid and the lady tall
Are pacing both into the hall,
And pacing on through page and groom,
Enter the Baron's presence-room.

The Baron rose, and while he prest
His gentle daughter to his breast,
With cheerful wonder in his eyes
The lady Geraldine espies,
And gave such welcome to the same,
As might beseem so bright a dame !

But when he heard the lady's tale,
And when she told her father's name,
Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
Murmuring o'er the name again,
Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine ?

Alas ! they had been friends in youth ;
But whispering tongues can poison truth ;
And constancy lives in realms above ;
And life is thorny ; and youth is vain ;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother :
They parted--ne'er to meet again !
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder ;
A dreary sea now flows between ;--
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

Sir Leoline, a moment's space,
Stood gazing on the damsel's face :
And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine
Came back upon his heart again.

O then the Baron forgot his age,
His noble heart swelled high with rage ;
He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side,
He would proclaim it far and wide
With trump and solemn heraldry,
That they, who thus had wronged the dame,
Were base as spotted infamy !
`And if they dare deny the same,
My herald shall appoint a week,
And let the recreant traitors seek
My tourney court--that there and then
I may dislodge their reptile souls
From the bodies and forms of men !'
He spake : his eye in lightning rolls !
For the lady was ruthlessly seized ; and he kenned
In the beautiful lady the child of his friend !

And now the tears were on his face,
And fondly in his arms he took
Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace,
Prolonging it with joyous look.
Which when she viewed, a vision fell
Upon the soul of Christabel,
The vision of fear, the touch and pain !
She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again--
(Ah, woe is me ! Was it for thee,
Thou gentle maid ! such sights to see ?)

Again she saw that bosom old,
Again she felt that bosom cold,
And drew in her breath with a hissing sound :
Whereat the Knight turned wildly round,
And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid
With eyes upraised, as one that prayed.

The touch, the sight, had passed away,
And in its stead that vision blest,
Which comforted her after-rest.
While in the lady's arms she lay,
Had put a rapture in her breast,
And on her lips and o'er her eyes
Spread smiles like light !
   With new surprise,
`What ails then my belovéd child ?'
The Baron said--His daughter mild
Made answer, `All will yet be well !'
I ween, she had no power to tell
Aught else : so mighty was the spell.
Yet he, who saw this Geraldine,
Had deemed her sure a thing divine :
Such sorrow with such grace she blended,
As if she feared she had offended
Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid !
And with such lowly tones she prayed,
She might be sent without delay
Home to her father's mansion.


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 7, 2009)

`Nay !
Nay, by my soul !' said Leoline.
`Ho ! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine !
Go thou, with music sweet and loud,
And take two steeds with trappings proud,
And take the youth whom thou lov'st best
To bear thy harp, and learn thy song,
And clothe you both in solemn vest,
And over the mountains haste along,
Lest wandering folk, that are abroad,
Detain you on the valley road.
`And when he has crossed the Irthing flood,
My merry bard ! he hastes, he hastes
Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood,
And reaches soon that castle good
Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes.

`Bard Bracy ! bard Bracy ! your horses are fleet,
Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,
More loud than your horses' echoing feet !
And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,
Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall !
Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free--
Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me !
He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array
And take thy lovely daughter home :
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array
White with their panting palfreys' foam :
And, by mine honour ! I will say,
That I repent me of the day
When I spake words of fierce disdain
To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine !--
--For since that evil hour hath flown,
Many a summer's sun hath shone ;
Yet ne'er found I a friend again
Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine.'

The lady fell, and clasped his knees,
Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing ;
And Bracy replied, with faltering voice,
His gracious hail on all bestowing !--
`Thy words, thou sire of Christabel,
Are sweeter than my harp can tell ;
Yet might I gain a boon of thee,
This day my journey should not be,
So strange a dream hath come to me,
That I had vowed with music loud
To clear yon wood from thing unblest,
Warned by a vision in my rest !
For in my sleep I saw that dove,
That gentle bird, whom thou dost love,
And call'st by thy own daughter's name--
Sir Leoline ! I saw the same
Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan,
Among the green herbs in the forest alone.
Which when I saw and when I heard,
I wonder'd what might ail the bird ;
For nothing near it could I see,
Save the grass and herbs underneath the old tree.

`And in my dream methought I went
To search out what might there be found ;
And what the sweet bird's trouble meant,
That thus lay fluttering on the ground.
I went and peered, and could descry
No cause for her distressful cry ;
But yet for her dear lady's sake
I stooped, methought, the dove to take,
When lo ! I saw a bright green snake
Coiled around its wings and neck.
Green as the herbs on which it couched,
Close by the dove's its head it crouched ;
And with the dove it heaves and stirs,
Swelling its neck as she swelled hers !
I woke ; it was the midnight hour,
The clock was echoing in the tower ;
But though my slumber was gone by,
This dream it would not pass away--
It seems to live upon my eye !
And thence I vowed this self-same day,
With music strong and saintly song
To wander through the forest bare,
Lest aught unholy loiter there.'

Thus Bracy said : the Baron, the while,
Half-listening heard him with a smile ;
Then turned to Lady Geraldine,
His eyes made up of wonder and love ;
And said in courtly accents fine,
`Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove,
With arms more strong than harp or song,
Thy sire and I will crush the snake !'
He kissed her forehead as he spake,
And Geraldine in maiden wise,
Casting down her large bright eyes,
With blushing cheek and courtesy fine
She turned her from Sir Leoline ;
Softly gathering up her train,
That o'er her right arm fell again ;
And folded her arms across her chest,
And couched her head upon her breast,
And looked askance at Christabel-- --
Jesu, Maria, shield her well !

A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy ;
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,
And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread,
At Christabel she looked askance !--
One moment--and the sight was fled !
But Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound ;
And Geraldine again turned round,
And like a thing, that sought relief,
Full of wonder and full of grief,
She rolled her large bright eyes divine
Wildly on Sir Leoline.

The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees--no sight but one !
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind :
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate !
And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,
Still picturing that look askance
With forced unconscious sympathy
Full before her father's view-- --
As far as such a look could be
In eyes so innocent and blue !

And when the trance was o'er, the maid
Paused awhile, and inly prayed :
Then falling at the Baron's feet,
`By my mother's soul do I entreat
That thou this woman send away !'
She said : and more she could not say :
For what she knew she could not tell,
O'er-mastered by the mighty spell.

Why is thy cheek so wan and wild,
Sir Leoline ? Thy only child
Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride,
So fair, so innocent, so mild ;
The same, for whom thy lady died !
O by the pangs of her dear mother
Think thou no evil of thy child !
For her, and thee, and for no other,
She prayed the moment ere she died :
Prayed that the babe for whom she died,
Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride !
That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled,
Sir Leoline !
And wouldst thou wrong thy only child,
Her child and thine ?
Within the Baron's heart and brain
If thoughts, like these, had any share,
They only swelled his rage and pain,
And did but work confusion there.
His heart was cleft with pain and rage,
His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild,
Dishonored thus in his old age ;
Dishonored by his only child,
And all his hospitality
To the wronged daughter of his friend
By more than woman's jealousy
Brought thus to a disgraceful end--
He rolled his eye with stern regard
Upon the gentle ministrel bard,
And said in tones abrupt, austere--
`Why, Bracy ! dost thou loiter here ?
I bade thee hence !' The bard obeyed ;
And turning from his own sweet maid,
The agéd knight, Sir Leoline,
Led forth the lady Geraldine !
THE CONCLUSION TO PART II
A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father's eyes with light ;
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.
Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other ;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And what, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true !)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it's most used to do.


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 7, 2009)

`Nay !
Nay, by my soul !' said Leoline.
`Ho ! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine !
Go thou, with music sweet and loud,
And take two steeds with trappings proud,
And take the youth whom thou lov'st best
To bear thy harp, and learn thy song,
And clothe you both in solemn vest,
And over the mountains haste along,
Lest wandering folk, that are abroad,
Detain you on the valley road.
`And when he has crossed the Irthing flood,
My merry bard ! he hastes, he hastes
Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood,
And reaches soon that castle good
Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes.

`Bard Bracy ! bard Bracy ! your horses are fleet,
Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,
More loud than your horses' echoing feet !
And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,
Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall !
Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free--
Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me !
He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array
And take thy lovely daughter home :
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array
White with their panting palfreys' foam :
And, by mine honour ! I will say,
That I repent me of the day
When I spake words of fierce disdain
To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine !--
--For since that evil hour hath flown,
Many a summer's sun hath shone ;
Yet ne'er found I a friend again
Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine.'

The lady fell, and clasped his knees,
Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing ;
And Bracy replied, with faltering voice,
His gracious hail on all bestowing !--
`Thy words, thou sire of Christabel,
Are sweeter than my harp can tell ;
Yet might I gain a boon of thee,
This day my journey should not be,
So strange a dream hath come to me,
That I had vowed with music loud
To clear yon wood from thing unblest,
Warned by a vision in my rest !
For in my sleep I saw that dove,
That gentle bird, whom thou dost love,
And call'st by thy own daughter's name--
Sir Leoline ! I saw the same
Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan,
Among the green herbs in the forest alone.
Which when I saw and when I heard,
I wonder'd what might ail the bird ;
For nothing near it could I see,
Save the grass and herbs underneath the old tree.

`And in my dream methought I went
To search out what might there be found ;
And what the sweet bird's trouble meant,
That thus lay fluttering on the ground.
I went and peered, and could descry
No cause for her distressful cry ;
But yet for her dear lady's sake
I stooped, methought, the dove to take,
When lo ! I saw a bright green snake
Coiled around its wings and neck.
Green as the herbs on which it couched,
Close by the dove's its head it crouched ;
And with the dove it heaves and stirs,
Swelling its neck as she swelled hers !
I woke ; it was the midnight hour,
The clock was echoing in the tower ;
But though my slumber was gone by,
This dream it would not pass away--
It seems to live upon my eye !
And thence I vowed this self-same day,
With music strong and saintly song
To wander through the forest bare,
Lest aught unholy loiter there.'

Thus Bracy said : the Baron, the while,
Half-listening heard him with a smile ;
Then turned to Lady Geraldine,
His eyes made up of wonder and love ;
And said in courtly accents fine,
`Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove,
With arms more strong than harp or song,
Thy sire and I will crush the snake !'
He kissed her forehead as he spake,
And Geraldine in maiden wise,
Casting down her large bright eyes,
With blushing cheek and courtesy fine
She turned her from Sir Leoline ;
Softly gathering up her train,
That o'er her right arm fell again ;
And folded her arms across her chest,
And couched her head upon her breast,
And looked askance at Christabel-- --
Jesu, Maria, shield her well !

A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy ;
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,
And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread,
At Christabel she looked askance !--
One moment--and the sight was fled !
But Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound ;
And Geraldine again turned round,
And like a thing, that sought relief,
Full of wonder and full of grief,
She rolled her large bright eyes divine
Wildly on Sir Leoline.

The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees--no sight but one !
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind :
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate !
And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,
Still picturing that look askance
With forced unconscious sympathy
Full before her father's view-- --
As far as such a look could be
In eyes so innocent and blue !

And when the trance was o'er, the maid
Paused awhile, and inly prayed :
Then falling at the Baron's feet,
`By my mother's soul do I entreat
That thou this woman send away !'
She said : and more she could not say :
For what she knew she could not tell,
O'er-mastered by the mighty spell.

Why is thy cheek so wan and wild,
Sir Leoline ? Thy only child
Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride,
So fair, so innocent, so mild ;
The same, for whom thy lady died !
O by the pangs of her dear mother
Think thou no evil of thy child !
For her, and thee, and for no other,
She prayed the moment ere she died :
Prayed that the babe for whom she died,
Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride !
That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled,
Sir Leoline !
And wouldst thou wrong thy only child,
Her child and thine ?
Within the Baron's heart and brain
If thoughts, like these, had any share,
They only swelled his rage and pain,
And did but work confusion there.
His heart was cleft with pain and rage,
His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild,
Dishonored thus in his old age ;
Dishonored by his only child,
And all his hospitality
To the wronged daughter of his friend
By more than woman's jealousy
Brought thus to a disgraceful end--
He rolled his eye with stern regard
Upon the gentle ministrel bard,
And said in tones abrupt, austere--
`Why, Bracy ! dost thou loiter here ?
I bade thee hence !' The bard obeyed ;
And turning from his own sweet maid,
The agéd knight, Sir Leoline,
Led forth the lady Geraldine !
THE CONCLUSION TO PART II
A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father's eyes with light ;
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.
Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other ;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And what, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true !)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it's most used to do.


----------



## 8115 (Nov 9, 2009)

A portion of "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)"

from MEN IN THE OFF HOURS by Anne Carson


saison qui chante saison rapide
je commence
Beginnings are hard. Sappho put it simply. Speaking of a young girl Sappho said, You burn me. Deneuve usually begins with herself and a girl together in a hotel room. This is mental. Meanwhile the body persists. Sweater buttoned almost to the neck, she sits at the head of the seminar table expounding aspects of Athenian monetary reform. It was Solon who introduced into Athens a coinage which had a forced currency. Citizens had to accept issues called drachmas, didrachmas, obols, etc. although these did not contain silver of that value. Token coinages. Money that lies about itself. Seminar students are writing everything down carefully, one is asleep, Deneuve continues to talk about money and surfaces. Little blues, little whites, little hotel taffetas. This is mental. Bell rings to mark the end of class. He has a foreskin but for fear of wearing it out he uses another man's when he copulates, is what Solon's enemies liked to say of him, Deneuve concludes. Fiscal metaphor. She buttons her top button and the seminar is over. 
Jours
If you asked her Deneuve would say Take these days away and pour them out on the ground in another country. 

Parts
Seminar meets MonWedFri. Parts of time fall on her and snow wanders slowly through the other afternoons. Deneuve sits in her office looking at the word irony on a page. Half-burnt. You have to wonder. Sappho, Sokrates, is it all mental? These people seem bathed in goodness, yet here come the beautiful dangerous white rapids beating onto them. Knife of boy. Knife of girl. Knife of the little knower. Where is the ironic work that picks threads back from that surface into another design underneath, holding rapids in place? Evening fills the room. Deneuve buttons her coat and closes the office door behind her. Staircase is dim and filthy, small dirty deposits on each step. She heads for the Metro. What would Sokrates say. Name the parts. Define each name. Deneuve is turning names and parts over in her mind when she realizes she has ridden the train four stops in the wrong direction. Climbs back up from the platform, stairs are filthy here too, must be a punishment. Hip slams hard into the metal arm of the turnstile. Red sign pasted on it says NO EXIT. Sound is far away. All around her strange lamps burn brightly and human tongues press the night. 

Weekends
Weekends are long and white. Snow drifts against the door. Distant threads from the piano downstairs. Deneuve washes her glassware. Dries it. Hours slide. In the hotel room it is dusk, a girl turns, I have to confess something. This is mental. Two parallel red lines of different lengths inch forward, not touching.


----------



## Fruitloop (Nov 9, 2009)

the Shield of Achilles: W. H. Auden.  

She looked over his shoulder
     For vines and olive trees,
  Marble well-governed cities
     And ships upon untamed seas,
  But there on the shining metal
     His hands had put instead
  An artificial wilderness
     And a sky like lead.

  A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
     No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
  Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
     Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

     An unintelligible multitude,
  A million eyes, a million boots in line,
  Without expression, waiting for a sign.
  Out of the air a voice without a face
     Proved by statistics that some cause was just
  In tones as dry and level as the place:
     No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
     Column by column in a cloud of dust
  They marched away enduring a belief
  Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

  She looked over his shoulder
     For ritual pieties,
  White flower-garlanded heifers,
     Libation and sacrifice,
  But there on the shining metal
     Where the altar should have been,
  She saw by his flickering forge-light
     Quite another scene.

  Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
     Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
  And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
     A crowd of ordinary decent folk
     Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
  As three pale figures were led forth and bound
  To three posts driven upright in the ground.

  The mass and majesty of this world, all
     That carries weight and always weighs the same
  Lay in the hands of others; they were small
     And could not hope for help and no help came:
     What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
  Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
  And died as men before their bodies died.

 She looked over his shoulder
     For athletes at their games, 
     Men and women in a dance
     Moving their sweet limbs
  Quick, quick, to music,
     But there on the shining shield
  His hands had set no dancing-floor
     But a weed-choked field.

  A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
     Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
  Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
     That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
     Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
  Of any world where promises were kept,
  Or one could weep because another wept.

  The thin-lipped armorer,
     Hephaestos, hobbled away,
  Thetis of the shining breasts
     Cried out in dismay
  At what the god had wrought
     To please her son, the strong
  Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
     Who would not live long.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 9, 2009)

For you 
I will be a ghetto jew 
and dance 
and put white stockings 
on my twisted limbs 
and poison wells 
across the town 
For you 
I will be an apostate jew 
and tell the Spanish priest 
of the blood vow 
in the Talmud 
and where the bones 
of the child are hid 
For you 
I will be a banker jew 
and bring to ruin 
a proud old hunting king 
and end his line 
For you 
I will be a Broadway jew 
and cry in theatres 
for my mother 
and sell bargain goods 
beneath the counter 
For you 
I will be a doctor jew 
and search 
in all the garbage cans for foreskins 
to sew back again 
For you 
I will be a Dachau jew 
and lie down in lime 
with twisted limbs 
and bloated pain 
no mind can understand


----------



## dolly's gal (Nov 13, 2009)

Pennies From Heaven _by Spike Milligan_

I put 10p in my Piggy Bank
To save for a rainy day.
It rained the *very next morning*!
Three Cheers, Hip Hip Hooray!


(for all the rainy mornings out there)


----------



## 8115 (Nov 15, 2009)

Crow Goes Hunting by Ted Hughes


Crow
Decided to try words. 


He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack-
Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained, 
With strong teeth. 
You could not find a better bred lot. 


He pointed out the hare and away went the words
Resounding. 
Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare? 


It converted itself to a concrete bunker. 
The words circled protesting, resounding. 


Crow turned the words into bombs-they blasted the bunker. 
The bits of bunker flew up-a flock of starlings. 


Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings. 
The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst. 


Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water. 
The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir. 


The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hill
Having eaten Crow's words. 


Crow gazed after the bounding hare
Speechless with admiration.


----------



## 8115 (Nov 18, 2009)

Shakespeare 
Sonnet 2

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held: 
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days; 
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.


----------



## 8115 (Nov 19, 2009)

This Room by Imtiaz Dharker

This room is breaking out
of itself, cracking through
its own walls
in search of space, light,
empty air.

The bed is lifting out of
its nightmares.
From dark corners, chairs
are rising up to crash through clouds.
This is the time and place
to be alive:
when the daily furniture of our lives
stirs, when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together
in celebration, clang
past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,
fly by the ceiling fan.
No one is looking for the door.

In all this excitement
I'm wondering where
I've left my feet, and why
my hands are outside, clapping.


----------



## 8115 (Nov 20, 2009)

The Thought-Fox


I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 
Something else is alive 
Beside the clock's loneliness 
And this blank page where my fingers move. 

Through the window I see no star: 
Something more near 
Though deeper within darkness 
Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 
Two eyes serve a movement, that now 
And again now, and now, and now 

Sets neat prints into the snow 
Between trees, and warily a lame 
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 
Of a body that is bold to come 

Across clearings, an eye, 
A widening deepening greenness, 
Brilliantly, concentratedly, 
Coming about its own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 
It enters the dark hole of the head. 
The window is starless still; the clock ticks, 
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes


----------



## 8115 (Nov 21, 2009)

Still Morning - WS Merwin


It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight


----------



## Helene (Nov 22, 2009)

*The Heart Of A Friend*
For René Gonzalez

It’s the heart of a friend; let us open the wall, 
and tear down the defences we have erected.
They were a necessary barrier to all 
of the hatred we have for so long suspected 
and the recipe of lies so well confected; 
but here now we are resurrected from our fall 
by the heart of a friend: let us open the wall.

Our enemies are big and we are only small; 
and they have hurt us with cruelty inflicted, 
seeking to cut us down before we grow too tall.
Our truth confronts their falsehood, that’s all conflicted 
against us, and their harsh command has evicted 
us from the garden of our innocence. Hopes stall.
But the heart of a friend lets us open the wall.

It is the chink in our armour; it is our heel 
of Achilles; it is our saving grace: to feel 
the balm of friendship that displaces disgraces 
in our heart, and occupies the holy spaces 
where we truly dwell; making us as strong as steel 
even though we are kept apart in dark places.
It is the heart of a friend that’s truly real.

Tony Walton


----------



## urbanite99 (Nov 23, 2009)

Here's a middle english poem I love;

Hier lieth beneth this marbill stone
Rich Allane the ballid man
Whether he be safe or noght
I reke never, for he ne roght.

Which means....

Here lies under this marble stone
Rich Alan, the bald man.
Whether he has been saved or not
I don't care, because he never did.

Interesting comment on medieval spiritual commitment, no?


----------



## 8115 (Nov 28, 2009)

Incredible
Simon Armitage

After the first phase, after the great fall 
between floorboards into the room below, 
the soft landing, then standing one-inch 
tall 
within the high temple of table legs, 
or one-inch long inside a matchbox bed . . . 
And after the well-documented wars: 
the tom-cat in its desert camouflage, 
the spider in its chariot of limbs, 
the sparrow in its single-seater plane . . . 
After that, a new dominion of scale. 
The earthrise of a final, human smile. 
The pure inconsequence of nakedness, 
the obsolescence then of flesh and bone. 
Every atom ballooned. Those molecules 
that rose as billiard balls went by as 
moons. 
Neutrinos dawned and bloomed, each 
needle's eye 
became the next cathedral door, flung 
wide. 
So yardsticks, like pit-props, buckled and 
failed. 
Lifetimes went past. With the critical mass 
of hardly more than the thought of a 
thought 
I kept on, headlong, to vanishing point. 
I looked for an end, for some dimension 
to hold hard and resist. But I still exist.

I really like this poem, but I can't work out what it's about.


----------



## bridgy45 (Nov 29, 2009)

Daddy's Poem 

---------------------- 

Her hair was up in a pony tail, 
Her favourite dress tied with a bow. 
Today was Daddy's Day at school, 
And she couldn't wait to go. 

But her mommy tried to tell her, 
That she probably should stay home. 
Why the kids might not understand, 
If she went to school alone. 

But she was not afraid; 
She knew just what to say. 
What to tell her classmates 
Of why he wasn't there today. 

But still her mother worried, 
For her to face this day alone. 
And that was why once again, 
She tried to keep her daughter home. 

But the little girl went to school 
Eager to tell them all. 
About a dad she never sees 
A dad who never calls. There were daddies along the wall & back, 
For everyone to meet. 
Children squirming impatiently, 
Anxious in their seats 

One by one the teacher called 
A student from the class. 
To introduce their daddy, 
As seconds slowly passed. 

At last the teacher called her name, 
Every child turned to stare. 
Each of them was searching, 
A man who wasn't there. 

'Where's her daddy at?' 
She heard a boy call out. 
'She probably doesn't have one,' 
Another student dared to shout. 

And from somewhere near the back, 
She heard a daddy say, 
'Looks like another deadbeat dad, 
Too busy to waste his day.' 

The words did not offend her, 
As she smiled up at her Mom. 
And looked back at her teacher, 
Who told her to go on. 
And with hands behind her back, 
Slowly she began to speak. 
And out from the mouth of a child, 
Came words incredibly unique. 

'My Daddy couldn't be here, 
Because he lives so far away. 
But I know he wishes he could be, 
Since this is such a special day. 

And though you cannot meet him, 
I wanted you to know. 
All about my daddy, 
And how much he loves me so. 

He loved to tell me stories 
He taught me to ride my bike. 
He surprised me with pink roses, 
And taught me to fly a kite. 

We used to share fudge sundaes, 
And ice cream in a cone. 
And though you cannot see him. 
I'm not standing here alone. 

'Cause my daddy's always with me, 
Even though we are apart 
I know because he told me, 
He'll forever be in my heart' 
With that, her little hand reached up, 
And lay across her chest,
Feeling her own heartbeat, 
Beneath her favorite dress. 

And from somewhere here in the crowd of dads, 

Her mother stood in tears, 
Proudly watching her daughter, 
Who was wise beyond her years. 

For she stood up for the love 
Of a man not in her life. 
Doing what was best for her, 
Doing what was right. 

And when she dropped her hand back down, 
Staring straight into the crowd. 
She finished with a voice so soft, 
But its message clear and loud. 

'I love my daddy very much, 
he's my shining star. 
And if he could, he'd be here, 
But heaven's just too far. 

You see he is a British soldier
And died just this past year 
When a roadside bomb hit his convoy 
And taught Britains' to fear. 
But sometimes when I close my eyes, 
it's like he never went away.' 
And then she closed her eyes, 
And saw him there that day. 

And to her mothers amazement, 
She witnessed with surprise. 
A room full of daddies and children, 
All starting to close their eyes. 

Who knows what they saw before them, 
Who knows what they felt inside. 
Perhaps for merely a second, 
They saw him at her side. 

'I know you're with me Daddy,' 
To the silence she called out. 
And what happened next made believers, 
Of those once filled with doubt. 

Not one in that room could explain it, 
For each of their eyes had been closed. 
But there on the desk beside her, 
Was a fragrant long-stemmed rose. 



And a child was blessed, if only for a moment, 
By the love of her shining star. 
And given the gift of believing, 
That heaven is never too far. 



Take the time...to live and love. 
Until eternity. God bless!


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 5, 2009)

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, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. 

Lord Byron


----------



## lang rabbie (Dec 6, 2009)

*Epiphany*

_For Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008)_​
Epiphany is not a blazing light. A blazing light
blazes when warplanes spread their demon’s wings
and drop their demon’s eggs over the city,
and the city burns like the eye of a screaming horse.

Epiphany is a comic book during the war.
A sailor on the convoy from New York to London
brought home bundles of American comics
that you studied like the scrolls of a world beyond the sun.
These were heroes who would never become a hand
waving goodbye from a pyramid of bricks.
The pages rolled: _Batman. Superman. Whit-Man._

_Whit-Man._ Whit-Man could not fly, yet he soared over mountains, seeing
the fur trapper and his native bride, the panther pacing in the branches.
He did not brawl with grinning villains, yet he was one of the roughs,
yanking doors off hinges, shouting about _the rights of them the others are down upon_,
as the auctioneer of shackled men and women cowered in his shadow.
He was far across the sea, yet he was there at the war hospital
unraveling the bandages, sponging clean the stump of an arm.
He was a shape-shifter with a wizard’s beard:
now the sailor in the crow’s nest, now the mutineer in jail,
now the runaway slave leaning on a fencepost, out of breath.
He spoke in a tongue called _barbaric yawp_, mesmerized
by a spear of grass, amazed at the machinery of a mouse.

Epiphany is not a blazing light. Epiphany is a boy asking: _Is Whit-Man real?_
Epiphany is the poem you wrote in a boy’s hand, the letters rising on shaky legs.
Epiphany is the poem you wrote to praise the great bell in the great singer’s chest.
Epiphany is the poem you splattered against the epiphanies of cathedrals.
Epiphany is the poem you sang a thousand times against the blazing light
of bombardment, still sung as armies wander through the desert, spitting sand.
Epiphany is the night you sat in jail for trespass at the gates of the naval base
and the cop who called you _sir_, listening to every word about the missiles.
Epiphany is the joy of your creature the ape-man howling his poems in the forest,
even after the other creatures told him that howling would never change the forest.
Epiphany is the chorus of rebels, beggars, lunatics bellowing with your voice,
the flickering revelation that the words of the song in my head are your words.

Martin Espada


----------



## dylans (Dec 6, 2009)

Annabel Lee. Edgar Allan Poe

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.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 6, 2009)

Dylans, that's cheating. It's one per day.
I will happily overlook that pernickety as Annabell Lee is one of my favourite poems ever.


----------



## 8115 (Dec 7, 2009)

The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the
         villagers-----
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
Thev will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted -
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished,
         why am I cold.


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## Azrael (Dec 9, 2009)

Wilfred Owen's _The Parable of the Old Man and the Young_. Great War poetry might have been done to death on the GCSE syllabus, but Owen's use of Biblical imagery, and that devastating final line, grab me every time. 

*                       *                       *

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him, thy son.

Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,

A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


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## Y_I_Otter (Dec 10, 2009)

Excerpt from _Nova_, by Peter Stampfel

How did primitive man survive?
Bound by lust, he couldn't count past five.
And in the hustle to stay alive,
He side-tracked.
He put on clothing and an ordered mind.
He left his instincts all far behind.
He dropped his rhythm and picked up time.
And now he's out there looking for a ride back.


----------



## mrfusion (Dec 10, 2009)

Ah, I think I just posted on the sticky thread (enjoying reading the poems here though).  Can anyone explain this thread to me?


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## cesare (Dec 10, 2009)

mrfusion said:


> Ah, I think I just posted on the sticky thread (enjoying reading the poems here though).  Can anyone explain this thread to me?



One poem a day. Whoever gets there first gets the slot. Y.I.Otter's poem is today's poem now.


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## mrfusion (Dec 11, 2009)

OK, well I'll post a poem then.  By my favourite poet, Edwin Morgan.  I don't know if he is on the school curriculum in England, so I don't know if you're sick of him or not.  But I mostly like his eclecticism - from sonnets to concrete poetry to sound poetry etc., always willing to experiment.  This is one of his more 'sci-fi' poems.  Or something.

On The Needle's Point

Of course it is not a point at all.
We live here, and we should know.
I doubt indeed if there can be a point
in created things: the finest honing
uncovers more rough.  Our ground stretches
for several miles, it is like living
on an asteroid, a bounded island
but with a bottomless core lost in mist
so far below and out of sight we feel
like pillar saints in earthly Syria.
The surface is slashed and pitted, greyish
with streaks of black and enigmatic
blue silver; spores of red lichen
gather and smoulder in crevices and caves.
At the edge it is very prodigious.
We have had some climbing over and down
with home-made crampons, disappearing,
perhaps making it to what we cannot imagine;
others fly off with fixed smiles,
vanish in their elation into violet haze.
But I like it on the point, good
is the dark cavern, good the craggy walls,
good the vertiginous bare brightness,
good the music, good the dance
when sometimes we join wings and drift
in interlinking circles, how many thousands
I could never tell, silent ourselves,
almost melting into light.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2009)

*Merry Christmas
*
Merry Christmas, China,	From the gun-boats in the river,
	Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
	And peace on earth forever.

	Merry Christmas, India,
	To Gandhi in his cell,
	From righteous Christian England,
	Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

	Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,
	From Cairo to the Cape!
	Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!
	(For murder and for rape.)

	Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!
	(And drown the voodoo drums—
	We'll rob you to the Christian hymns
	Until the next Christ comes.)

	Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!
	(While Yankee domination
	Keeps a nice fat president
	In a little half-starved nation.)

	And to you down-and-outers,
	("Due to economic laws")
	Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
	With a bread-line Santa Claus—

	While all the world hails Christmas,
	While all the church bells sway!
	While, better still, the Christian guns
	Proclaim this joyous day!

	While holy steel that makes us strong
	Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:
	SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!
	Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!


_Langston Hughes_


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 28, 2009)

*GODZILLA IN MEXICO*

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Roberto Bolano (translated from Spanish)


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 31, 2009)

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

    -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 3, 2010)

*Of Love*
by Robert Herrick 

How Love came in, I do not know, 
Whether by th’ eye, or eare, or no: 
Or whether with the soule it came 
(At first) infused with the same: 
Whether in part ‘tis here or there, 
Or, like the soule, whole every where: 
This troubles me: but as I well 
As any other, this can tell; 
That when from hence she does depart, 
The out-let then is from the heart.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 4, 2010)

Oh come on, am I the only one feeling poetic?
Just heard this on the radio, the plant mentioned is Artemisia absinthium (wormwood)


*Old Man *
By Edward Thomas

Old Man, or Lad's-love, -- in the name there's nothing
To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.


The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as some day the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps
Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs 
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.


As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.


I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 4, 2010)

I am loving your contributions to this thread shifty


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 4, 2010)

Gee thanks Dill


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 5, 2010)

someone post a poem....


----------



## 8115 (Jan 5, 2010)

Here you go:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1394

I've put the link because you can hear it being read there.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 7, 2010)

*The Busy Heart*
By Rupert Brooke 

Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;
And evening hush, broken by homing wings;
And Song's nobility, and Wisdom holy,
That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting a sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 7, 2010)

The more I read that one the more I like it


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 8, 2010)

Shall we rename this Shifty's self indulgent poetry thread?
I'm going to keep bumping this until somebody plays along


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 8, 2010)

I can go on for weeks you know....

*In Snow *
By William Allingham

O English mother, in the ruddy glow 
Hugging your baby closer when outside 
You see the silent, soft, and cruel snow 
Falling again, and think what ills betide 
Unshelter'd creatures,--your sad thoughts may go 
Where War and Winter now, two spectre-wolves, 
Hunt in the freezing vapour that involves 
Those Asian peaks of ice and gulfs below. 
Does this young Soldier heed the snow that fills 
His mouth and open eyes? or mind, in truth, 
To-night, his mother's parting syllables? 
Ha! is't a red coat?--Merely blood. Keep ruth 
For others; this is but an Afghan youth 
Shot by the stranger on his native hills.


----------



## Ceej (Jan 9, 2010)

Can I play?



*Gold*
By Anno Birkin

Steal me
Melt my gold centre
I enter through your dreams
Where you are weak
And I am free of inhibitions
I’m killing this body, this prison of flesh
The head and the heart that you loved, laid to rest
But I’ll see you in sleep
When I’m perfect


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 9, 2010)

Ceej said:


> Can I play?


YES!!!!






> *Gold*
> By Anno Birkin
> 
> Steal me
> ...



That's beautiful


----------



## lang rabbie (Jan 10, 2010)

*In Iowa* (from District and Circle: Poems)

In Iowa once, among the Mennonites
In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon
Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen
And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,

I saw, abandoned in the open gap
Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,
A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,
Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,

And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.
Verily I came forth from that wilderness
As one unbaptized who had known darkness
At the third hour and the veil in tatters.

In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss
Not of parted but as of rising waters.

_Seamus Heaney_


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 13, 2010)

*Variations on the Word Sleep* 
By Margaret Atwood 

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head.

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as beathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary. 

Margaret Atwood 


*sigh*
That's a good one


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2010)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> *sigh*
> That's a good one



Yes.


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## lang rabbie (Jan 14, 2010)

*Fire and Ice*

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

_Robert Frost_


----------



## lang rabbie (Jan 14, 2010)

BTW Thanks for the fabulous Margaret Atwood poem.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 18, 2010)

Taken from meditation 17, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."  

By John Donne


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## Pickman's model (Jan 19, 2010)

The Conqueror Worm
~Edgar Allen Poe~

   	  Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.


----------



## lang rabbie (Jan 20, 2010)

Holy Sonnet XIV

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.

Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

John Donne


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## dolly's gal (Jan 21, 2010)

A Scattering - Christopher Reid

late home one night, I found

she was not yet home herself.

So I got into bed and waited

under my blanket mound,

until I heard her come in

and hurry upstairs.

My back was to the door.

Without turning round,

I greeted her, but my voice

made only a hollow, parched-throated

k-, k-, k- sound,

which I could not convert into words

and which, anyway, lacked

the force to carry.

Nonplussed, but not distraught,

I listened to her undress,

then sidle along the far side

of our bed and lift the covers.

Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.

Adjusting my arm for the usual

cuddle and caress,

I felt mattress and bedboards

welcome her weight

as she rolled and settled towards me,

but, before I caught her,

it was already too late

and she’d wisped clean away.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2010)

That's a proper 3 am poem. One for red rimmed and starey eyes, and tired minds.

Thanks DG, sort of. That is a melancholy number


----------



## dolly's gal (Jan 21, 2010)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8460000/8460690.stm

sounds less melancholy when he reads it. more normal, matter of fact


----------



## London_Calling (Jan 21, 2010)

How 'bout that! Nice choice, dolly.


----------



## Ceej (Jan 22, 2010)

Go Now by Edward Thomas


Like the touch of rain she was
On a man's flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her 'Go now'.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again


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## Ceej (Jan 23, 2010)

Someone got out of the wrong side of the bed....

*The glass of beer by James Stephens*

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year. 
That parboiled imp, with the hardest jaw you will ever see
On virtue's path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,
Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,
And threw me out of the house on the back of my head. 

If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day;
But she with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.


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## Ceej (Jan 29, 2010)

Looks like I'm on my own here...cultural pygmies on these boards! 

I heard the author read this poem at an event..,beautifully...the guy next to me whispered 'Do you think he would give me a copy of that? I've got a hot date tonight and that might just do the trick!'. 


*Safeway by John Harvey.*

I like a woman who knows her way to Safeway
But will pack me off there anyway...
A list fixed to the refridgerator door
'Wonderful lettuce', 'big dill', 'great
tomatoes', 'serious bread'.
Who will be there when I get home
Closed inside her dark room, safe light glowing red.
And I will tiptoe to the kitchen 
Juggling misshapen bags and packages
Wallet, checked-off list and keys
To set each and every thing quietly in the place
Bestowed for it - as quietly as lollo rosso
Wrapped in cellophane will agree to go.
But a woman who will slide her hands
Across my eyes the instant I step through
the door, and have me turn towards her face
The soft grey vest across her breasts
Sweet and supple sweetness of her skin.
And after we have risen from the wreck 
of fallen groceries, either she or I will slide
a garlic basted chicken from its bag,
uncork a bottle of that Merlot
and take them both to bed,
sitting in the soon-to-be sweaty whiteness of sheets
breaking the chicken with our hands
aware of the joy in each other's
eyes, the juice that runs along our fingers
and gathers in the deft spaces inside
our arms and behind our knees, waiting
to be found there later, savoured, licked away.


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## London_Calling (Jan 29, 2010)

I really must go to Safeway more often.

Thanks for that Ceej!


----------



## Ceej (Jan 29, 2010)

London_Calling said:


> I really must go to Safeway more often.
> 
> Thanks for that Ceej!



Certainly makes it sound more appealing!


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## invisibleplanet (Jan 31, 2010)

*The Deserted Village*

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Admidst thy bow'rs the tyrant's hand is seen,
And defoliation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain; 
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges works it's weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow sounding bittern guards it's nest;
Admist thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries;
Sunk are they bow'rs in shapeless ruin all, 
And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,
Far, far away thy children leave the land. 

~ I came across this poem by Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), written in reaction to the Inclosure Acts of the mid 18th century.
This is just an excerpt: http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy... deserted village&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false


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## goldenecitrone (Jan 31, 2010)

Tides  

The evening advances, then withdraws again
Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.
We are drifting, you and I,
As far from another as the young heroes
Of these two novels we have just laid down.
For that is happiness: to wander alone
Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves,
Our distances, and what we leave behind.
The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light.
These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them.  

Hugo Williams.


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## goldenecitrone (Jan 31, 2010)

This is one of my favourite poems. 

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold.


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## Ceej (Feb 1, 2010)

goldenecitrone said:


> Tides
> 
> The evening advances, then withdraws again
> Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.
> ...



This is lovely.


----------



## Ceej (Feb 4, 2010)

The Ruined Maid by Thomas Hardy.

Always made me smile!


O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? 
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?"
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

"You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!"
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

-"At home in the barton you said 'thee' and 'thou,'
And 'thik oon,' and 'theäs oon,' and 't'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!"
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

"Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!"
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

"You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!"
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. 

"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!"
"My dear a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.


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## Diamond (Feb 4, 2010)

From a Shropshire Lad by Housman.

  XXXII

          From far, from eve and morning
           And yon twelve-winded sky,
          The stuff of life to knit me
           Blew hither: here am I.

          Now- for a breath I tarry
           Nor yet disperse apart-
          Take my hand quick and tell me,
           What have you in your heart.

          Speak now, and I will answer;
           How shall I help you, say;
          Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
           I take my endless way.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 7, 2010)

*For the Dead  *
By Adrienne Rich 

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight


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## goldenecitrone (Feb 8, 2010)

Mirror - Sylvia Plath


I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. 
What ever you see I swallow immediately 
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. 
I am not cruel, only truthful--- 
The eye of a little god, four-cornered. 
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. 
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long 
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. 
Faces and darkness separate us over and over. 
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, 
Searching my reaches for what she really is. 
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. 
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. 
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. 
I am important to her. She comes and goes. 
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. 
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman 
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


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## heinous seamus (Feb 14, 2010)

This is the 'proem' from James Thomson's long poem 'The City of Dreadful Night'

Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write
    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."
  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?             
  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
    And wail life's discords into careless ears?

  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,                
    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
  Because it gives some sense of power and passion
  In helpless innocence to try to fashion
    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.

  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,                   
    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
  Or such as pasture and grow fat among
    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
  Or pious spirits with a God above them
  To sanctify and glorify and love them,                      
    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.

  For none of these I write, and none of these
    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;
  So may they flourish in their due degrees,
    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.             
  If any cares for the weak words here written,
  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.

  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
    In that same city of tremendous night,                    
  Will understand the speech and feel a stir
    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."         

  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold
    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?
  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told
    To any who divined it not before:                         
  None uninitiate by many a presage
  Will comprehend the language of the message,
    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.

A nice cheery one for Valentines Day


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## heinous seamus (Feb 15, 2010)

*Out for a walk*

The margins of the forest are beautiful, 
as if painted onto the green slopes.
I walk around, and sweet peace 
rewards me for the thorns
in my heart, when the mind has grown 
dark, for right from the start
art and thinking have cost it pain.
There are lovely pictures in the valley, 
for example the gardens and trees, 
and the narrow footbridge, and the brook, 
hardly visible.  How beautifully 
the landscape shines, cheerfully distant, 
like a splendid picture, where I come 
to visit when the weather is mild.
A kindly divinity leads us on at first
with blue, then prepares clouds,
shaped like gray domes, with 
searing lightning and rolling thunder, 
then comes the loveliness of the fields,
and beauty wells forth from 
the source of the primal image.

By Freidrich Holderlin

Go on my son


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## Ceej (Feb 21, 2010)

Just a random favourite...



*On Eastnor Knoll
by John Masefield*

SILENT are the woods, and the dim green boughs are 
Hushed in the twilight: yonder, in the path through 
The apple orchard, is a tired plough-boy 
Calling the cows home. 

A bright white star blinks, the pale moon rounds, but 
Still the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset 
Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on 
The misty hill-tops. 

Ghostly it grows, and darker, the burning 
Fades into smoke, and now the gusty oaks are 
A silent army of phantoms thronging 
A land of shadows.


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## tastebud (Feb 24, 2010)

*This was an important one for me, yesterday*

Chosen by a father for a deceased son, read by a cousin/neice:

_Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
_
 /


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## MightyAphrodite (Feb 24, 2010)

thats lovely and sad at the same time tastebud.  

brought a tear to my eye.


----------



## Ceej (Feb 24, 2010)

MightyAphrodite said:


> thats lovely and sad at the same time tastebud.
> 
> brought a tear to my eye.



Ditto. Gorgeous poem.


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## lillia (Mar 12, 2010)

If I could write words – Spike Milligan

If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
“I love you.” 



_<sigh>_


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## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 13, 2010)

Being your slave what should I do but tend
Upon the hours, and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend;
Nor services to do, till you require. 
Nor dare I chide the world without end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

-Sonnet 57 by Shakespeare


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## London_Calling (Mar 14, 2010)

Heard this soppy shit on the radio  - for Muvers Day:

How can that be my baby?
How can that be my son?
Standing on a rugger field,
more than six foot one.
Steam rising from him,
his legs are streaked with blood,
and he wears a yellow mouthguard,
in a face that's black with mud.

How can that be my baby?
How can he look like that?
I used to sit him on my knee
and read him postman pat.
Those little ears with cotton buds
I kept in perfect shape
But now they're big and purple
and they're fastened back with tape.

How can that be my baby?
When did he reach that size?
What happened to his wellies
with the little froggy eyes?
His shirt is on one shoulder
but it's hanging off the other
and the little baffled person at his feet
is me: his mother.


- Pam Ayres


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Apr 18, 2010)

*Tube Station* 

The tube lift mounts,
sap in a stem,
And blossoms its load,
a black, untidy rose.

The fountain of the escalator
curls at the crest,
breaks and scatters
A winnow of men,
a sickle of dark spray. 


A. S. J. Tessimond


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 18, 2010)

I like that one Mrs M


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## Ceej (Apr 18, 2010)

Whenever I read a Pam Ayres poem, I hear it in a Pam Ayres voice - really irritating!


*Apples*.

My father is dying
He died nine years ago this June
They phoned from the hospital 
with the news. His face a cask
once used for storing living things.
A cup of tea, grown cold and orange
on the stand beside the bed.
Length of his fingers, nails like horn,
unclipped. Though dead
my father is still dying.
Oh, slowly, sure as the long fall of rain
I reach out again for his apple
and bite into its flesh
and hold him - bright and sharp,
safe inside the hollow of my mouth.

John Harvey.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 21, 2010)

*Come Into the Garden, Maud  *
Alfred Lord Tennyson 

Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, Night, has flown, 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate alone; 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
And the musk of the roses blown. 

For a breeze of morning moves, 
And the planet of Love is on high, 
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves 
On a bed of daffodil sky, 
To faint in the light of the sun she loves, 
To faint in his light, and to die. 

All night have the roses heard 
The flute, violin, bassoon; 
All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd 
To the dancers dancing in tune: 
Till a silence fell with the waking bird, 
And a hush with the setting moon. 

I said to the lily, "There is but one 
With whom she has heart to be gay. 
When will the dancers leave her alone? 
She is weary of dance and play." 
Now half to the setting moon are gone, 
And half to the rising day; 
Low on the sand and loud on the stone 
The last wheel echoes away. 

I said to the rose, "The brief night goes 
In babble and revel and wine. 
O young lordlover, what sighs are those 
For one that will never be thine? 
But mine, but mine," so I sware to the rose, 
"For ever and ever, mine." 

And the soul of the rose went into my blood, 
As the music clash'd in the hall; 
And long by the garden lake I stood, 
For I heard your rivulet fall 
From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, 
Our wood, that is dearer than all; 

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet 
That whenever a March-wind sighs 
He sets the jewelprint of your feet 
In violets blue as your eyes, 
To the woody hollows in which we meet 
And the valleys of Paradise. 

The slender acacia would not shake 
One long milk-bloom on the tree; 
The white lake-blossom fell into the lake, 
As the pimpernel dozed on the lea; 
But the rose was awake all night for your sake, 
Knowing your promise to me; 
The lilies and roses were all awake, 
They sigh'd for the dawn and thee. 

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, 
Come hither, the dances are done, 
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, 
Queen lily and rose in one; 
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, 
To the flowers, and be their sun. 

There has fallen a splendid tear 
From the passion-flower at the gate. 
She is coming, my dove, my dear; 
She is coming, my life, my fate; 
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;" 
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;" 
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;" 
And the lily whispers, "I wait." 

She is coming, my own, my sweet; 
Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat, 
Were it earth in an earthy bed; 
My dust would hear her and beat, 
Had I lain for a century dead; 
Would start and tremble under her feet, 
And blossom in purple and red.


----------



## Clair De Lune (May 12, 2010)

Love and harmony combine,
And round our souls entwine
While thy branches mix with mine,
And our roots together join.

Joys upon our branches sit,
Chirping loud and singing sweet;
Like gentle streams beneath our feet
Innocence and virtue meet.

Thou the golden fruit dost bear,
I am clad in flowers fair;
Thy sweet boughs perfume the air,
And the turtle buildeth there.

There she sits and feeds her young,
Sweet I hear her mournful song;
And thy lovely leaves among,
There is love, I hear his tongue.

There his charming nest doth lay,
There he sleeps the night away;
There he sports along the day,
And doth among our branches play.


----------



## Ceej (May 15, 2010)

One for a reflective Friday at midnight...

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 24, 2010)

*Friendship IXX * 
By Khalil Gibran 

And a youth said, "Speak to us of Friendship." 

Your friend is your needs answered. 

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. 

And he is your board and your fireside. 

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. 

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay." 

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart; 

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. 

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; 

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain. 

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit. 

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught. 

And let your best be for your friend. 

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. 

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? 

Seek him always with hours to live. 

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. 

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. 

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.


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## ShiftyBagLady (May 24, 2010)

Ceej said:


> Wild Geese by Mary Oliver



Oh, I do love that poem. Haven't read it for a very long time though, thanks 

This is cheating but I couldn't decide between the poem above and this one so I thought I'd choose them both. I try to overlook the religious overtones of his work so I usually ignore the last line of this one. I'm sure he wouldn't mind...



*A Tear And A Smile* 
By Khalil Gibran 

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart 
For the joys of the multitude.
And I would not have the tears that sadness makes 
To flow from my every part turn into laughter. 

I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

A tear to purify my heart and give me understanding
Of life's secrets and hidden things. 
A smile to draw me nigh to the sons of my kind and 
To be a symbol of my glorification of the gods.

A tear to unite me with those of broken heart; 
A smile to be a sign of my joy in existence.

I would rather that I died in yearning and longing than that I live Weary and despairing.

I want the hunger for love and beauty to be in the 
Depths of my spirit,for I have seen those who are 
Satisfied the most wretched of people. 
I have heard the sigh of those in yearning and Longing, and it is sweeter than the sweetest melody.

With evening's coming the flower folds her petals 
And sleeps, embracingher longing. 
At morning's approach she opens her lips to meet 
The sun's kiss.

The life of a flower is longing and fulfilment.
A tear and a smile.

The waters of the sea become vapor and rise and come 
Together and area cloud.

And the cloud floats above the hills and valleys 
Until it meets the gentle breeze, then falls weeping 
To the fields and joins with brooks and rivers to Return to the sea, its home.

The life of clouds is a parting and a meeting. 
A tear and a smile.

And so does the spirit become separated from 
The greater spirit to move in the world of matter 
And pass as a cloud over the mountain of sorrow 
And the plains of joy to meet the breeze of death 
And return whence it came.

To the ocean of Love and Beauty----to God.


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## MightyAphrodite (May 25, 2010)

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.

And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."


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## Ceej (Jun 3, 2010)

Mighty Aphrodite, someone sent me that poem after my son died -  it still moves me. : indeed.


I'm feeling in need of something to stiffen the sinews today -  

Invictus by WE Henley.

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced, nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid

It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishments are the scroll
I am the Master of my fate
I am the Captain of my soul.


*puts shoulders back, lifts chin*


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## Ceej (Jun 6, 2010)

And me again....

*The Reading *by Wendy Cope, who I love....she's all about laughing instead of crying.

In crumpled, Bardic corduroy
The poet took the stage
And read aloud his deathless verse
Page by deathless page

I gazed at him as though intent
on every word, he said.
From time to time I'd close my eyes
And smile, and nod my head

He may have thought that every phase
Sent shivers down my spine
Perhaps I helped encourage him
To read till half past nine

Don't ask me what it was all about
I haven't got a clue
I spent a blissful evening, lost,
In carnal thoughts of you


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 6, 2010)

Invictus is another one of those poems that I found incredibly moving when I first read it. I love this thread


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## Ceej (Jun 6, 2010)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> Invictus is another one of those poems that I found incredibly moving when I first read it. I love this thread



Oh, me too!

Another one I love, for the joyous images it creates...

*High Flight*By Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee (Killed 11 December 1941)


Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 7, 2010)

That's a lovely one. I'm going to read it to ShiftyJnior later as we were watching a programme about fighter pilots the other day 

Ok. Here is another poem that really stuck in my head and every time I read it I am reminded of the time I first read it and how I though 'Oh my God, that's so true, that's precisely how I feel' 
I was a young teen, in hospital and developed a raging crush on my physiotherapist, he made my palms go sweaty and my voice go giggly and stuff  Fuck's sake...

*Love's Philosophy*
The fountains mingle with the river
 And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix forever
 With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
 All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
 Why not I with thine? -

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
 And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
 If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
 And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
 If thou kiss not me?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ah yes, I can still remember his fresh white uniform...


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 20, 2010)

Ok, I'm cheating but so what.

here's one by Raymond Carver

*Late Fragment * 
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.



And another by the same author



*What The Doctor Said  *
He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong


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## discokermit (Jun 20, 2010)

here's one i wrote last week, whilst going through my phone book and wondering about all the people i've lost contact with.

it's called 'mobile phone based reminiscences'

magda magda magda,
i wish i 'ad 'a' shag'da.


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## Steel Icarus (Jun 23, 2010)

*Considering the Snail * 

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain 
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.  

_~ Thom Gunn_


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## MightyAphrodite (Jun 23, 2010)

Ceej said:


> Mighty Aphrodite, someone sent me that poem after my son died -  it still moves me. : indeed.



ive just seen this Ceej...it is moving isnt it....ive just had a read on here just now and am sobbing again...its not hard to do when i read this, i know its the same for you, i can only speak for me but obv ive always felt a connection to you and its not hard to see why, i almost feel like i know you, and im glad..xxxxx


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## dynamicbaddog (Jun 30, 2010)

dog​

a single dog
walking along on a hot sidewalk of
summer
appears to have the power
of ten thousand gods.

why is this?

- _Charles Bukowski_


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## lontok09 (Jul 4, 2010)

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.

A.E.Housman


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## Ceej (Jul 4, 2010)

I know we've already had one for today, but this is for Mighty Aphrodite...to read when it all gets a bit too heavy. x

*Reflexions by Max Ehrmann* 

Let me do my work each day;
and if the darkened hours
of despair overcome me, may I
Not forget the strength
that comforted me in the 
desolation of other times. May I
still remember the bright hours that found me walking
over the silent hills of my
childhood, or dreaming on the 
margin of the quiet river,
when a light glowed within me,
and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the 
tempests of the changing years.

Spare me from bitterness
and from the sharp passions of 
unguarded moments. May
I not forget that poverty and 
riches are of the spirit. 

Though the world know me not,
may my thoughts and actions
be such as shall keep me friendly
with myself. Lift my eyes
from the earth, and let me not
forget the uses of the stars.

Forbid that I should judge others
lest I condemn myself.

Let me not follow the clamour of
the world, but walk calmly
in my path. Give me few friends
who will love me for what
I am; and keep ever burning
before my vagrant steps
the kindly light of hope. And
though age and infirmity overtake
me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams,
teach me still to be thankful
for life, and for time's olden
memories that are good and
sweet; and may the evening's
twilight find me gentle still.


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## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2010)

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).  The Wild Swans at Coole.  1919.

1. The Wild Swans at Coole


THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,	 
The woodland paths are dry,	 
Under the October twilight the water	 
Mirrors a still sky;	 
Upon the brimming water among the stones	         
Are nine and fifty swans.	 

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me	 
Since I first made my count;	 
I saw, before I had well finished,	 
All suddenly mount	  
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings	 
Upon their clamorous wings.	 

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,	 
And now my heart is sore.	 
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,	  
The first time on this shore,	 
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,	 
Trod with a lighter tread.	 

Unwearied still, lover by lover,	 
They paddle in the cold,	 
Companionable streams or climb the air;	 
Their hearts have not grown old;	 
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,	 
Attend upon them still.	 

But now they drift on the still water	 
Mysterious, beautiful;	 
Among what rushes will they build,	 
By what lake’s edge or pool	 
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day	 
To find they have flown away?


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## Ceej (Jul 7, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).  The Wild Swans at Coole.  1919.



That's lovely - a brand new one for me!


Not quite the same thing, but I was given some photos today that I hadn't seen before... 



*A Short Film by Ted Hughes *

It was not meant to hurt. 
It had been made for happy remembering 
By people who were still too young 
To have learned about memory.

Now it is a dangerous weapon, a time-bomb. 
Which is a kind of body-bomb, long-term, too. 
Only film, a few frames of you skipping, a few seconds.
You aged about ten there, skipping and still skipping.

Not very clear grey, made out of mist and smudge. 
This thing has a fine fuse, less a fuse 
Than a wavelength attuned, an electronic detonator
To what lies in your grave inside us.

And how that explosion would hurt 
Is not just an idea of horror but a flash of fine sweat 
Over the skin-surface, a bracing of nerves 
For something that has already happened.


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## heinous seamus (Jul 9, 2010)

*The Fly*

Little Fly, 
Thy summer's play 
My thoughtless hand 
Has brushed away.

Am not I 
A fly like thee? 
Or art not thou 
A man like me?

For I dance 
And drink, and sing, 
Till some blind hand 
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life 
And strength and breath 
And the want 
Of thought is death;

Then am I 
A happy fly, 
If I live, 
Or if I die.

William Blake


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## Ceej (Jul 10, 2010)

I do love Blake - his poems are deceptively simple. He's not a bad painter either!

My nephew is reading a poetry book where children have written poems inspired by other poems. How cool is this one, inspired by 'Stop all the Clocks' -  WH Auden. 

Muffle the wind
Silence the clock
Muzzle the mice
Curb the small talk
Cure the hinge squeak
Banish the thunder
Let me sit silent
Let me wonder.


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## lontok09 (Jul 13, 2010)

*A Martian Sends a Postcard Home*

Craig Raine, 1979

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings 
and some are treasured for their markings-- 

they cause the eyes to melt 
or the body to shriek without pain. 

I have never seen one fly, but 
sometimes they perch on the hand. 

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight 
and rests its soft machine on the ground: 

then the world is dim and bookish 
like engravings under tissue paper. 

Rain is when the earth is television. 
It has the properites of making colours darker. 

Model T is a room with the lock inside -- 
a key is turned to free the world 

for movement, so quick there is a film 
to watch for anything missed. 

But time is tied to the wrist 
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. 

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, 
that snores when you pick it up. 

If the ghost cries, they carry it 
to their lips and soothe it to sleep 

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up 
deliberately, by tickling with a finger. 

Only the young are allowed to suffer 
openly. Adults go to a punishment room 

with water but nothing to eat. 
They lock the door and suffer the noises 

alone. No one is exempt 
and everyone's pain has a different smell. 

At night, when all the colours die, 
they hide in pairs 

and read about themselves -- 
in colour, with their eyelids shut.


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## silver (Jul 14, 2010)

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley


The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single:
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?


----------



## lillia (Jul 15, 2010)

“I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.”


Roy Croft



A little cheesy tbh, but pretty nonetheless!


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## lontok09 (Jul 18, 2010)

The More Loving One (Auden)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell, 
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return? 
If equal affection cannot be, 
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, 
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime, 
Though this might take me a little time.


And here he is reading it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7474255


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## butchersapron (Jul 19, 2010)

A bed for the night

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by.

It won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don't put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

_Bertolt Brecht_


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## Ceej (Jul 21, 2010)

A perfect poem for all of us who love poetry. 



*Words by Ann Sexton*.

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises. 

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 23, 2010)

One for Nick Clegg, you giant amongst men - you'll get there one day:

*The Hand That Signed the Paper*

 The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow. 

_Dylan Thomas_


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## Ceej (Jul 27, 2010)

I found this in a collection of poems called Soft Keys. This fella is a new one on me...never heard of him personally, but he seems to be fairly well-known, having won a Whitbread Poetry Award, and shortlisted for lots of other awards! Gorgeous poem, though.



ANGEL OF THE PERFUMES by Michael Symmons Roberts

From the night-shift cement works,
dust built on fields, seeped
into buildings, coughed me awake.

It fused with fallen rain
to make a crust so thin one heel
could break the landscape open.

I held my breath
the sheet pulled up across my face,
afraid my lungs would set.

When you awoke the dust 
cleared, I heard dawn crack
smelt on your hands burst

Fruit. Old skins, bruised black,
you split with thumbnails, found
seeds of new bodies, inside intact.


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## Ceej (Jul 28, 2010)

OWL by Alice Oswald

last night at the joint of dawn, 
an owl’s call opened the darkness 

miles away, more than a world beyond this room 

and immediately I was in the woods again, 
poised, seeing my eyes seen, 
hearing my listening heard 

under a huge tree improvised by fear 

dead brush falling then a star 
straight through to God 
founded and fixed the wood 

then out, until it touched the town’s lights, 
an owl elsewhere swelled and questioned 
twice, like you light lean and strike 
two matches in the wind.


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## Brubricker (Aug 6, 2010)

The God Who Loves You

by Carl Dennis



It must be troubling for the god who loves you   
To ponder how much happier you’d be today   
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. 
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings   
Driving home from the office, content with your week— 
Three fine houses sold to deserving families— 
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened   
Had you gone to your second choice for college,   
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted   
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music   
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.   
A life thirty points above the life you’re living   
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point   
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.   
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you 
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments   
So she can save her empathy for the children.   
And would you want this god to compare your wife   
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?   
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation   
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight   
Than the conversation you’re used to. 
And think how this loving god would feel   
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife   
Would have pleased her more than you ever will   
Even on your best days, when you really try.   
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that 
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives   
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is 
And what could have been will remain alive for him   
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill   
Running out in the snow for the morning paper, 
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you   
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene   
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him   
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend   
No closer than the actual friend you made at college, 
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight   
And write him about the life you can talk about   
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,   
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.


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## Brubricker (Aug 6, 2010)

Openness

by Wyslawa Szymborska



Here we are, naked lovers,
beautiful to each other—and that's enough.
The leaves of our eyelids our only covers,
we're lying amidst deep night.

But they know about us, they know,
the four corners, and the chairs nearby us.
Discerning shadows also know,
and even the table keeps quiet.

Our teacups know full well
why the tea is getting cold.
And old Swift can surely tell 
that his book's been put on hold.

Even the birds are in the know:
I saw them writing in the sky
brazenly and openly
the very name I call you by.

The trees? Could you explain to me
their unrelenting whispering?
The wind may know, you say to me,
but how is just a mystery.

A moth surprised us through the blinds,
its wings in fuzzy flutter.
Its silent path—see how it winds
in a stubborn holding pattern.

Maybe it sees where our eyes fail
with an insect's inborn sharpness.
I never sensed, nor could you tell
that our hearts were aglow in the darkness.


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## Brubricker (Aug 8, 2010)

Kitchen Fable

by Eleanor Ross Taylor



The fork lived with the knife
     and found it hard — for years
took nicks and scratches,
     not to mention cuts.

She who took tedium by the ears:
     nonforthcoming pickles,
defiant stretched-out lettuce,
     sauce-gooed particles.

He who came down whack.
His conversation, even, edged.

Lying beside him in the drawer
     she formed a crazy patina.
The seasons stacked — 
     melons, succeeded by cured pork.

He dulled; he was a dull knife,
while she was, after all, a fork.


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## Brubricker (Aug 9, 2010)

Turtle

by Kay Ryan



Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging 
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.


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## Brubricker (Aug 10, 2010)

Abandoned Farmhouse

by Ted Kooser



He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house; 
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.


A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.


Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Aug 11, 2010)

*The Crunch*

too much too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or
tears

haters
lovers

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.

an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.

I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be.

but sometimes I think about
it.

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody

more haters than lovers.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.

there must be a way.

surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of.

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.

it will not say
"no."

Charles Bukowski


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 12, 2010)

Mrs Lazarus

by Carol Ann Duffy



I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day
over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in
from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed
at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched
his name over and over again, dead, dead.

Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, 
widow, one empty glove, white femur
in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits
into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes, 
noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck, 

gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt
the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face
in each bleak frame; but all those months
he was going away from me, dwindling
to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going, 

going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell
for his face. The last hair on his head
floated out from a book. His scent went from the house.
The will was read. See, he was vanishing
to the small zero held by the gold of my ring.

Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; 
my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock
of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat-
along the hedgerows. But I was faithful
for as long as it took. Until he was memory.

So I could stand that evening in the field
in a shawl of fine air, healed, able
to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky
and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice
the village men running towards me, shouting, 

behind them the women and children, barking dogs, 
and I knew. I knew by the sly light
on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes
of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me
into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.

He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, 
moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, 
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 13, 2010)

Brooding Grief

by D.H. Lawrence



A yellow leaf from the darkness 
Hops like a frog before me. 
Why should I start and stand still? 

I was watching the woman that bore me 
Stretched in the brindled darkness
Of the sick-room, rigid with will 
To die: and the quick leaf tore me 
Back to this rainy swill 
Of leaves and lamps and traffic mingled before me.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 14, 2010)

To Be In Love  

by Gwendolyn Brooks



To be in love 
Is to touch with a lighter hand. 
In yourself you stretch, you are well. 
You look at things 
Through his eyes. 
A cardinal is red. 
A sky is blue. 
Suddenly you know he knows too. 
He is not there but 
You know you are tasting together 
The winter, or a light spring weather. 
His hand to take your hand is overmuch. 
Too much to bear. 
You cannot look in his eyes 
Because your pulse must not say 
What must not be said. 
When he 
Shuts a door- 
Is not there
Your arms are water. 
And you are free 
With a ghastly freedom. 
You are the beautiful half 
Of a golden hurt. 
You remember and covet his mouth 
To touch, to whisper on. 
Oh when to declare 
Is certain Death! 
Oh when to apprize 
Is to mesmerize, 
To see fall down, the Column of Gold, 
Into the commonest ash.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 15, 2010)

Two Sonnets in Memory

by Edna St. Vincent Millay



(Nicola Sacco -- Bartolomeo Vanzetti)
Executed August 23, 1927


I
As men have loved their lovers in times past
And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace,
So have we loved sweet Justice to the last,
That now lies here in an unseemly place.
The child will quit the cradle and grow wise
And stare on beauty till his senses drown;
Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
Such beauty as here walked and here went down.
Like birds that hear the winter crying plain
Her courtiers leave to seek the clement south;
Many have praised her, we alone remain
To break a fist against the lying mouth
Of any man who says this was not so:
Though she be dead now, as indeed we know.

II
Where can the heart be hidden in the ground
And be at peace, and be at peace forever,
Under the world, untroubled by the sound
Of mortal tears, that cease from pouring never?
Well for the heart, by stern compassion harried,
If death be deeper than the churchmen say, --
Gone from this world indeed what's graveward carried,
And laid to rest indeed what's laid away.
Anguish enough while yet the indignant breather
Have blood to spurt upon the oppressor's hand;
Who would eternal be, and hang in ether
A stuffless ghost above his struggling land,
Retching in vain to render up the groan
That is not there, being aching dust's alone?


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 16, 2010)

To a Child Falling Asleep

by Robert Alden Sanborn 



Over the dim edge of sleep I lean, 
And in her eyes' illimitable grey distances, 
Look down into the shadow-tinted space, -- 
The cloudy air of sleep, -- 
To see the rose-lit petal of a Child's fair soul 
Seek dreamily the farther gloom, 
Where waking eyes may follow her no more. 

One more last time her lids are lifted, 
And in her look I read a wistful fare-thee-well; 
Her spirit waves a twinkling white hand, 
Her bark is out upon the sea of dream, -- 
The calm, grey sea, full and immovably established, 
That drinks the river of my love, without o'er flowing, 
Nor ever gives my image back to me. 

When o'er the sun-swept land 
Murmuring twilight spread her dusky tent, 
A Stranger passed before our friendly sun, -- 
Between the dark and dawn, -- 
A Stranger whom we love but never see. 
And as she came and cast her blue benignant shadow over all, 
She set a silver trumpet to her lips, 
And blew a note that thrilled in Children's hearts; 
Because in little hearts the echo-fairies love to play, 
Roaming the scented meadows there, 
Where Love has been and sown the amaranthine flowers, 
Out of whose pristine cups were born the singing stars. 
And as the first free rainbow bubble sailed, 
Launched by the Stranger with the silver pipe, 
Upon the listening air; 
As first the hollow note 
Kissed the sweet lips and died of happiness, 
The little Child unfurled her sails. 

I stood there on the very verge of sleep, 
And called to her, 
And Love's own self had deigned to wait within my heart, 
(Because I kept it always fit for Childish guests) 
And would have given welcome had she stayed. 
But then I saw the eyelids close, 
And knew that Azrael who championed her soul, 
Had shut the gates lest I should see 
More than my life could bear. 

Yet I had seen her go, 
And sight no more could hold of Beauty's wine. 
I had seen the fair face flush, 
As the soft curtains of the tinted west 
Are drawn before the temple of the Night, 
When the day-worn Sun has passed within; 
Had seen the little body, whitely gowned, 
Folded within its nest; 
Had caught the last light kiss 
Before the lips lay still; 
And I had looked into the cool grey deep, 
Where Sleep received the rose-leaf soul of her, 
And bore it out upon her gentle waters. 

Into the night I passed, 
Where on the mellow bosom of the west 
Floated the flame-lit shell of Hesperus; 
And as I stayed with hallowed breath 
The soul of fire fell over the rim of night: 
And then I knew the soul of her I loved 
Had heard the last clear call, 
The low Elysian chant of Hesperus, 
And loving me had borne the love I gave, 
Out and beyond and over the ends of earth, 
And where the altar flame of Venus burned, 
Had laid the gift and breathed her Childhood's prayer.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 17, 2010)

Mirrors

by John Agard



Switching from dress to dress
you face the truth of mirrors
with your woman’s dreams
and fragile human need
to stun the staring world

but when the face of mirrors
tells you that they lie
and the world’s fault-finding eye
does not see your private hurt

you will turn to find in me
a human mirror
for the hidden self
that others fail to hold or see


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 17, 2010)

I know it's one a day but no one can get one in you post every day in the middle of the night, i'm posting one anyway:

*Stone*

When the stone fall that morning out of the johncrow sky
it was not dark at first . that opening on to the red sea humming
but something in my mouth like feathers .  blue like bubbles
carrying signals & planets & the sliding curve of the
world like a water pic. ture in a raindrop when the pressure. drop



When the stone fall that morning out of the johncrow sky

I couldn't cry out because my mouth was full of beast & plunder
as if I was gnashing badwords among tombstones
as if the road up stony hill .  round the bend by the church
yard .  on the way to the post office .  was a bad bad dream

& the dream was like a snarl of broken copper wire zig
zagging its electric flashes up the hill & splitt.  ing spark & flow.
ers high.  er up the hill.  past the white houses & the ogogs bark.
ing all teeth & fur.  nace & my mother like she up.  like she up.


like she up.  side down up a tree like she was scream.
like she was scream.  like she was scream.  ing no & no.
body i could hear could hear a word i say. ing .  even though
there were so many poems left & the tape was switched on &

runn.  ing & runn.  ing &
the green light was red & they was stannin up there &
evva.  where in london & amsterdam & at unesco in paris &
in west berlin & clapp.  ing & clapp.  ing & clapp.  ing &

not a soul on stony hill to even say amen



& yet it was happening happening happening .
the fences begin to crack in i skull.
& there was a loud booodoooooooooooooooogs like
guns goin off  .  them ole time magnums .

or like a fireworks a dreadlocks was on fire .
& the gaps where the river comin down
inna the drei gully where my teeth use to be smilin .
& i tuff gong tongue that use to press against them & parade

pronunciation . now unannounce & like a black wick in i head & dead .
& it was like a heavy heavy riddim low down in i belly . bleedin dub .
& there was like this heavy heavy black dog thump.  in in i chest &
pump.  in

murdererrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

& i throat like dem tie.  like dem tie.  like dem tie a tight tie a.
round it.  twist.  ing my name quick crick.  quick crick .
& a nevva wear neck. tie yet .

& a hear when de big boot kick down i door . stump
in it foot pun a knot in de floor.  board .
a window slam shat at de back a mi heart .

de itch & ooze & damp a de yaaad
in mi sil. ver tam. bourines closer & closer .
st joseph marching bands crash.  ing & closer .

bom si. cai si. ca boom ship bell . bom si. cai si. ca boom ship bell
& a laughin more blood & spittin out

lawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwd

_Kamau Brathwaite - for Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill, Kingston 1954-1983_


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 18, 2010)

The Return Of Sir Richard Grenville
--Robert E Howard--

One slept beneath the branches dim,
Cloaked in the crawling mist,
And Richard Grenville came to him
And plucked him by the wrist.

No nightwind shook the forest deep
Where the shadows of Doom were spread,
And Solomon Kane awoke from sleep
And looked upon the dead.

He spake in wonder, not in fear:
"How walks a man who died?
"Friend of old times, what do ye here,
"Long fallen at my side?"

"Rise up, rise up," Sir Richard said,
"The hounds of doom are free;
"The slayers come to take your head
"To hang on the ju-ju tree.

"Swift feet press the jungle mud
"Where the shadows are grim and stark,
"And naked men who pant for blood
"Are racing through the dark."

And Solomon rose and bared his sword,
And swift as tongue could tell,
The dark spewed forth a painted horde
Like shadows out of Hell.

His pistols thundered in the night,
And in that burst of flame
He saw red eyes with hate alight,
And on the figures came.

His sword was like a cobra's stroke
And death hummed in its tune;
His arm was steel and knotted oak
Beneath the rising moon.

But by him sang another sword,
And a great form roared and thrust,
And dropped like leaves the screaming horde
To writhe in bloody dust.

Silent as death their charge had been,
Silent as night they fled;
And in the trampled glade was seen
Only the torn dead.

And Solomon turned with outstretched hand,
Then halted suddenly,
For no man stood with naked brand
Beneath the moon-lit tree.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Aug 18, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> I know it's one a day but no one can get one in you post every day in the middle of the night, i'm posting one anyway:
> 
> *Stone*
> 
> ...



I know his girlfriend of the time. Mikey Smith had mental health issues. That's why he was killed. It seems quite prevalent in JA. I know someone else who brought her autistic son to the UK as he'd been stoned a couple of times but rescued in the nick of time. Disability and difference can be a death sentence


----------



## heinous seamus (Aug 19, 2010)

I've just read that Edwin Morgan has passed away, aged 90, so I'd like to post a couple of poems in his honour. The first one is my favourite poem by him, I read it one day when I was waiting on the underground in Glasgow and I was completely blown away. The second one is more of a fun one I guess 

Trio

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening

a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights -

The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,

the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,

and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.

And the three of them are laughing, their breath rises

in a cloud of happiness, and as they pass

the boy says, "Wait till he sees this but!"

The chihuahua has a tiny Royal Stewart tartan coat like a teapot-

holder,

the baby in its white shawl is all bright eyes and mouth like

favours in a fresh sweet cake,

the guitar swells out under its milky plastic cover, tied at the neck

with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe.

Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!

The vale of tears is powerless before you.

Whether Christ is born, or is not born, you

put paid to fate, it abdicates

under the Christmas lights.

Monsters of the year

go blank, are scattered back,

can't bear this march of three.

And the three have passed, vanished in the crowd

(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind

the life of men and beasts, and music,

laughter ringing them round like a guard)

at the end of this winter's day.

The Loch Ness Monster's Song

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok – doplodovok – plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl –
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

Edwin Morgan


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## Brubricker (Aug 20, 2010)

methinx

by Jordie Albiston



wandering upon the suburban moors
I am cut to th' brains again    o! when
will th' moon shine through this poor
head?    _while you have your ransom 

let me have surgeons then_    let them
slice through th' mire for their piece
of th' pie let them operate ad infinitum
for my mind doth burst with its species 

of madness    & madness doth spill
from this mind    but while I'm alone
I am not short on shrapnel    & will
(if required) send forth stick & stone   

to combat th' front of this ill    _I stand
for nought_    o! edgar    I nothing am


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 23, 2010)

Far-Darting Apollo 

by Kathleen Raine



I saw the sun step like a gentleman
Dressed in black and proud as sin.
I saw the sun walk across London 
Like a young M. P., risen to the occasion.

His step was light, his tread was dancing,
His lips were smiling, his eyes glancing.
Over the Cenotaph in Whitehall
The sun took the wicket with my skull.

The sun plays tennis in the court of Geneva
With the guts of a Finn and the head of an Emperor.
The sun plays squash in a tomb of marble,
The horses of Apocalypse are in his stable.

The sun plays a game of darts in Spain
Three by three in flight formation.
The invincible wheels of his yellow car
Are the discs that kindle the Chinese war.

The sun shows the world to the world,
Turns its own ghost on the terrified crowd,
Then plunges all images into the ocean
Of the nightly mass emotion.

Games of chance and games of skill,
All his sports are games to kill.
I saw the murderer at evening lie
Bleeding on his death-bed sky.

His hyacinth breath, his laurel hair,
His blinding sight, his moving air,
My love, my grief, my weariness, my fears
Hid from me in a night of tears.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 25, 2010)

All Shall Be Restored

by Kay Ryan



The grains shall be collected
from the thousand shores
to which they found their way,
and the boulder restored,
and the boulder itself replaced
in the cliff, and likewise
the cliff shall rise
or subside until the plate of earth
is without fissure. Restoration
knows no half measure. It will
not stop when the treasured and lost
bronze horse remounts the steps.
Even this horse will founder backward
to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,
which themselves shall bubble and
drain back to green veins in stone.
And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, ever more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.


----------



## Ceej (Aug 26, 2010)

I love Mary Oliver -  the beauty of her words stay with me.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 27, 2010)

On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age 

by David Musgrave 



O Sting, where is thy death?


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 29, 2010)

The Farmer's Bride

by Charlotte Mew



Three Summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe – but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman–
More like a little, frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

“Out ‘mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
‘Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk stay away.
“Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.

Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low gray sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ‘Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh, my God! – the down,
The soft young down of her; the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 31, 2010)

Night Poem 

by Margaret Atwood



There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain

In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,

your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whispers.

You rock in the rain's arms,
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother,
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.


----------



## Brubricker (Aug 31, 2010)

Helas

by Oscar Wilde  



To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 7, 2010)

WHITE HELIOTROPE
~Arthur Symons~

The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half-open, where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread;

The mirror that has sucked your face
Into its secret deep of deeps,
And there mysteriously keeps
Forgotten memories of grace;

And you half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 9, 2010)

Rain Or Shine



  	the vultures at the zoo
(all three of them)
sit very quietly in their
caged tree
and below
on the ground
are chunks of rotten meat.
the vultures are over-full.
our taxes have fed them
well.

we move on to the next
cage.
a man is in there
sitting on the ground
eating
his own shit.
i recognize him as
our former mailman.
his favorite expression
had been:
"have a beautiful day."

that day i did.

Charles Bukowski


----------



## lillia (Sep 10, 2010)

"I am standing upon the seashore.  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength.  I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then some one at my side says: 'There, she is gone!'

'Gone where?'

Gone from my sight.  That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.  And just at the moment when some one at my side says: 'There, she is gone!' there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: 'Here she comes!'

--Henry Van Dyke


----------



## Ceej (Sep 11, 2010)

For MA.

*Touched by Anno Birkin *- another golden soul who left us much too soon.

I saw from this place at the foot of my grave
I gave myself in awe, to childish hope and promise;
The tomb was dug by those whom you know, and love, and trust
There's just enough room to put you in

And you fear that you lust
And you know what you love must be clean
And you fear what you've seen,
What you've touched, what you've been,
And I'm touched - I'm not naming anyone at all

I'm soon to return.
There's soon to be fire in my veins again,
I'm almost ready...
I'm almost home.


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (Sep 11, 2010)

you decided right as he smiled that he was it
the million before are irrelivant
this one's different- he likes to sing

just like the last was different- he likes to smoke
just like the last was different- he likes to act
just like the last was different- he likes to pretend

he talks to you and the world doesn't exist
but you're always talking so maybe it's you don't exist.
maybe your head is in the clouds
but you take it as a compliment

you've changed
but what else is new?
he's replaced every week.

he's an instant personality-
just add water.
guaranteed to last for days

and he's amazing, so that must mean you're amazing.

poem by braineater



another poem by braineater.


One day I cut my wrist.
It hurt so terribly bad.
I went to Mibba, crying and sad,
And wrote a poem about feeling pissed.

I wept, I bawled, I cut it some more.
I sat in my room, called mother a whore.
How dare she put a roof over my head,
The concert is dangerous, she said.

I am running out of rhymes,
So I will finish another times,
Brb, readers, I am going to cuts more.
Mother is a providing whore. 



Poem by Susan Musgrave.


You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money
all around you on the ground, remembering
how it felt when he put it in your hands.


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## i_got_poison (Sep 30, 2010)

i've been following newcomposition for several years now. he's truly, something else.

do we ever know what to do with ourselves
buzzing around looking for the sweetest hunny
there's nothing but space between the glances we toss
but my ego's all ways been bigger then "the both of us"
working around the clock frantically trying to save these
seconds, so just like those first days of fall after a tremendous
summer... those soft mornings of Autumn fog the sky pours it'self into the
earth... and i blink wide with my morning eyes just trying to hold it all in
my busy ally sees alot of busy bodies, more then enough to enjoy the
dry cigarette on a rickaty stair and ponder the lives passing mine by
she sleeps now. the girl i love, in my life, on the couch i'm slacking to rebuild.
under a large moon, and the dark sweep the heat from the side streets of my concrete city
my life suits the news and the blues, and the stains on my white shirts,
she tells me to remember those times, those summers where she would come to visit
the hours stretched. adventures to unravel, defining the beauity thats lock away with in existance
in falling into her as if she was the earth. wishing death would only call in moments wrap in bliss
i wouldn't say it was ignorence. or maybe we had just decided to be soulmates but kept it on the low
and just as fast the mundane problems i bother myself with would resume it's almost natural order
but days i would lay questioning what to do with myself until the treasured i've freed
returns back to me, always another year to grow wiser, be more impressive, older
the same person with a different story to peddle,
she's been smiling for me all along. and all this long and
... she says ""you know when i used to come visit you?"
"....this time i'm not leaving.".....(and now i feel sappy)


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## i_got_poison (Oct 1, 2010)

another from NC. he hasn't uploaded in ages and now 2 in as many days.

sometimes i wish this beauty of thought were mine.


i feel distant from you,
like i'm writing from the past,searching for where i left you.
but how could you be misplaced
as if some day we would just be found,
face to face could taste tentions tearing from your skin
these seconds wore thin against silent clocks, the ticking's in my head
and then the sun i lift from bed, sheds light into the cracks into my soul
dreams lay dormant graced in heavy sleep
days seem swift rolling monotony to the daily shift
chips in these shoulders growing the knots in my back
i feel the miles in my muscles, and the weight my thoughts carry
shuffling my fingers, crafting words left to linger,
waiting until one of us fucking opens our eyes.
is this still putting stuff behind me or counting down to something big
stuck in today, sifting stray moments, compartmentalizing the grey,
and the hand full of ways witnessing brilliance cascades,
watching loosely this change, it begins, the illumination fades.
i feel distant from you.
like it's something i needed to say.


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## dynamicbaddog (Oct 21, 2010)

It's Ours



  	there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing

that
gentle pure
space

it's worth

centuries of
existence

say

just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch

that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all

ever.

Charles Bukowski


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## i_got_poison (Oct 29, 2010)

Love Is A Great Thing

Love is a great thing, yea, a great and thorough good.
By itself it makes that which is heavy light;
and it bears evenly all that is uneven.
It carries a burden which is no burden;
it will not be kept back by anything low and mean;
It desires to be free from all wordly affections,
and not to be entangled by any outward prosperity,
or by any adversity subdued.
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble,
attempts what is above its strength,
pleads no excuse of impossibility.
It is therefore able to undertake all things,
and it completes many things and warrants them to take effect,
where he who does not love would faint and lie down.
Though weary, it is not tired;
though pressed it is not straightened;
though alarmed, it is not confounded;
but as a living flame it forces itself upwards and securely passes through all.
Love is active and sincere, courageous, patient, faithful, prudent, and manly.

Thomas A Kempis


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## lontok09 (Nov 5, 2010)

A beautiful recitation of Black Ice and Rain, by Michael Donaghy:


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## vauxhallmum (Nov 6, 2010)

I love Kate Tempest


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## heinous seamus (Nov 15, 2010)

*The Fly*

She sat on a willow stem,
observing
a part of the battle of Crecy,
the roars,
the gasps,
the groans,
the trampling and falling.

During the fourteenth attack
of the French cavalry 
she mated 
with a brown-eyed male fly 
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
on a slit-open horse 
and pondered
on the immortality of flies.

Relieved she settled 
on the blue tongue 
of the Duke of Clairvaux. 

As silence settled 
and the whispers of decay
spread 
and only 
a few arms and legs 
twitched under the beech trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the one eye 
of Johann Uhr,
the King's Armourer.

And there she was pecked off
by a swift 
in flight 
from the flames of Estrees


Miroslav Holub


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## heinous seamus (Nov 16, 2010)

*Snake*

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, 
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, 
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth 
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough 
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, 
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, 
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, 
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, 
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone 
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, 
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

DH Lawrence


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## lang rabbie (Dec 5, 2010)

Just heard this for the first time in many years:

*Rising Damp*

_("A river can sometimes be diverted but is a very hard thing to lose altogether" - Paper to the Auctioneers Institute, 1907)
_
At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London
Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.
These are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.
They have gone under.

Boxed, like the magician's assistant.
Buried alive in earth.
Forgotten, like the dead.
They return spectrally after heavy rain,
Confounding suburban gardens. They infiltrate
Chronic bronchitis statistics. A silken
Slur haunts dwellings by shrouded
Watercourses, and is taken
For the footing of the dead.

Being of our world, they will return
(Westbourne, caged at Sloane Square,
Will jack from his box)
Will deluge cellars, detonate manholes,
Plant effluent on our faces,
Sink the city.

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
It is the other rivers that lie
Lower, that touch us only in dreams
That never surface. We feel their tug
As a dowser's rod bends to the surface below
Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx

U A Fanthorpe


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## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2011)

One for the Viennese fighters, 77 years ago this week

*There Is a Lesson*
_
"All Austrian schools, meanwhile, were closed for an indefinite period under a government decree issued to keep children off the hazardous streets" (15 February 1934, San Francisco Chronicle)._

Keep the children off the streets, 
    Dollfuss,
there is an alphabet written in blood 
    for them to learn, 
there is a lesson thundered by collapsed 
    books of bodies.

They might be riddled by the bullets
    of knowledge
. . .
there is a volume written with three 
    thousand bodies that can never 
    be hidden,
there is a sentence spelled by the 
    grim faces of bereaved women 
there is a message, inescapable, that 
    vibrates the air with voices of 
    heroes.

_Tillie Olsen _


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## invisibleplanet (Mar 6, 2011)

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 6, 2011)

Like You by Roque Dalton

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-
blue landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.


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## vauxhallmum (Mar 6, 2011)

BRIGHTON HOLIDAY 


The rooms seemed furnished for a pantomime,
Giant’s wardrobes, tables, chandeliers,
vast windows, winking over Brighton’s piers;
a hotel from a broader, gentler time.

And we’d go traipsing round the bleak shore line
our gumboots on and hats drawn over ears,
wind, waves and water tumbling like tears;
the hermit Sun too miserly to shine. 

Yet floating pebbles and a marbled sky
bore witness to your effervescent grace.
Moonwalking on the pier you’d both defy
the pull of gravity in bouncy castle space, 
then tickling the slot machines you’d try
to tease the pennies from their glassy place -
and I would laugh with you and kiss your face.


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## Ceej (Mar 6, 2011)

That's lovely, Vauxhallmum - who wrote it?


*Being Boring by Wendy Cope*

'May you live in interesting times.' Chinese curse

If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.

Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last,
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful.

A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you're after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.

I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don't need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.

Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I've found a safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.


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## butchersapron (Mar 6, 2011)

Sorry, one a day!! Not 4!!


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## Ceej (Mar 6, 2011)

But there haven't been any for_ weeks_! We're only halfway through January on that basis!


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## invisibleplanet (Mar 6, 2011)

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                    i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant 
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


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## butchersapron (Mar 6, 2011)

Yes, very funny.


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## vauxhallmum (Mar 8, 2011)

Ceej said:


> That's lovely, Vauxhallmum - who wrote it?
> 
> 
> It's a bit self indulgent of me, I know, but my mum wrote it recently for my sister who has terminal cancer.


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## Pickman's model (Mar 10, 2011)

*Villanelle Of Acheron
Ernest Dowson*

By the pale marge of Acheron,
Me thinks we shall pass restfully,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

There all men hie them one by one,
Far from the stress of earth and sea,
By the pale marge of Acheron.

'Tis well when life and love is done,
'Tis very well at last to be,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

No busy voices there shall stun
Our ears: the stream flows silently
By the pale marge of Acheron.

There is the crown of labour won,
The sleep of immortality,
Beyond the scope of any sun.

Life, of thy gifts I will have none,
My queen is that Persephone,
By the pale marge of Acheron,
Beyond the scope of any sun.


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## Paulie Tandoori (Mar 10, 2011)

*Boris Bike sonnet by me*

There’s only one bike at the bike stand, 
She said, 
As she stood there and looked up at me.
Yes, there’s only one bike at this bike stand, 
I said.
I could only nod and agree.
If there’s only one bike at this bike stand,
I thought,
Then I could be late for my work.
But if I take this bike from the bike stand, 
I thought.
Then she’ll think that I’m some kind of berk.

We looked at the bike, then each other.
She smiled and my heart skipped a beat.
Who cares about bikes at the bike stand,
 I thought?
I could easily just use my feet.
Why not stand aside like a true gent,
And then ask her out for a date?
Yet no words from my lips were forthcoming,
My thoughts were happening too late.

She smiled again, then she bolted she did.
She took the bars of the bike.
She smiled sweetly again, for the third time she did, 
As she rode away on my bike.
And I never found out her number, you know,
I never have knew what she’s like,
Cos we never rode out on my bike made for two,
Cos she rode away on my bike.


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## invisibleplanet (Mar 23, 2011)

.


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## invisibleplanet (Mar 23, 2011)

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger 
bitter with bread. The cave wants nothing to do

with the sun. This is dumb, the self- 
defeating way we've been. A gold mine is

calling us into its temple. Instead, we
bend and keep picking up rocks from the

ground. Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source! The

origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give. The bite of

scolding makes ecstasy more familiar. But
look, fish, you're already in the ocean:

just swimming there makes you friends with
glory. What are these grudges about? You

are Benjamin. Joseph has put a gold cup
in your grain sack and accused you of being

a thief. Now he draws you aside and says,
"You are my brother. I am a prayer. You're 

the amen." We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here. This is the

prayer of each: You are the source of my
life. You separate essence from mud. You

honor my soul. You bring rivers from the 
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes. The

wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.

Rumi


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 23, 2011)

Rumi: Americas favourite poet.


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## Ceej (Mar 24, 2011)

My Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes, which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living; He is my Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dry rotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in the air,
As my Atlas does to me. and the sky. 

UA Fanthorpe


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 28, 2011)

Life, Life by Arseny Tarkovsky

1 

I don't believe in omens or fear 
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander 
Nor from poison. Death does not exist. 
Everyone's immortal. Everything is too. 
No point in fearing death at seventeen, 
Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light; 
Neither death, nor darkness, exists. 
We're all already on the seashore; 
I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets 
When a shoal of immortality swims by. 


2 

If you live in a house - the house will not fall. 
I'll summon any of the centuries, 
Then enter one and build a house in it. 
That's why your children and your wives 
Sit with me at one table, - 
The same for ancestor and grandson: 
The future is being accomplished now, 
If I raise my hand a little, 
All five beams of light will stay with you. 
Each day I used my collar bones 
For shoring up the past, as though with timber, 
I measured time with geodetic chains 
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals. 


3 

I tailored the age to fit me. 
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe; 
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced, 
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied, 
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk. 
I strapped my fate to the saddle; 
And even now, in these coming times, 
I stand up in the stirrups like a child. 

I'm satisfied with deathlessness, 
For my blood to flow from age to age. 
Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on 
I'd willingly have given all my life, 
Whenever her flying needle 
Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.


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## oryx (Mar 29, 2011)

Welsh Incident by Robert Graves

'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
'What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
'Nothing at all of any things like that.'
'What were they, then?'
'All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.'
'Describe just one of them.'
'I am unable.'
'What were their colours?'
'Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.'
'Tell me, had they legs?'
'Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.'
'But did these things come out in any order?'
What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?'
'I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thrity-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail's pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognizably a something.'
'Well, what?'
'It made a noise.'
'A frightening noise?'
'No, no.'
'A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?'
'No, but a very loud, respectable noise ---
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.'
'What did the mayor do?'
'I was coming to that.'


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## Ceej (Apr 1, 2011)

I've had a rubbish week around rubbish people, grappling with stupidness... feeling in need of something to wash it all away.

*Say not the struggle naught availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough*

Say not the struggle naught availeth, 
     The labour and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
     And as things have been, things remain. 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
     It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, 
     And, but for you, possess the field. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
     Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back through creeks and inlets making 
     Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only, 
     When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
     But westward, look, the land is bright.


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## Ceej (Apr 2, 2011)

*Wearing the collar by Charles Bukowski*

I live with a lady and four cats
and some days we all get
along.

some days I have trouble with
one of the
cats.

other days I have trouble with
two of the
cats.

other days,
three.

some days I have trouble with
all four of the
cats

and the
lady:

ten eyes looking at me
as if I was a dog.


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## Steel Icarus (Apr 2, 2011)

*Happiness* ~ _Raymond Carver_

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 2, 2011)

I love this thread. Very much.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 2, 2011)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I love this thread. Very much.



Same.


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## Obnoxiousness (Apr 2, 2011)

In bails of fish and shoals of hay,
By waxing moon they mourned the day,
For wish of bone till crack of dawn,
The darksome creature spread its spawn,
To every place that was alive,
Life fell away as death arrived.


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## invisibleplanet (Apr 2, 2011)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I love this thread. Very much.


 
I love this thread. Very much
It takes me away from my self
Gives me glimpses of other ways
Of being, feeling and seeing
That originated elsewhere
I love this thread. Very much


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## Paulie Tandoori (Apr 2, 2011)

late at night.
damn.
i want to fight.
beer.
think its time for bed.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 2, 2011)

I've read some beautiful poems lately but I've had some classics running through my head insistently, like ear worms.
 "I wondered lonely as a cloud..." obviously because of the beautiful nodding daffodils around and this one which has been haunting my walks, my tooth brushing, tea stirring and bus rides:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth innit


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## Ceej (Apr 3, 2011)

I love this thread too!


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## invisibleplanet (Apr 3, 2011)

late at night
damn 
i want to fuck
not fight
make love
not war
have dreams
not illusions
it's nearly time for bed
i love this thread


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## Paulie Tandoori (Apr 4, 2011)

i love this thread
in my head
my head loves this thread
straight-up
gorgeous
all of you
poetry crew


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## Ceej (Apr 7, 2011)

Clever, gentle stuff by the Bard of Bolton, Richard MacFarlane aka Hovis Presley.

I RELY ON YOU

I rely on you
like a Skoda needs suspension
like the aged need a pension
like a trampoline needs tension
like a bungee jump needs apprehension

I rely on you
like a camera needs a shutter
like a gambler needs a flutter
like a golfer needs a putter
like a buttered scone involves some butter

I rely on you
like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve
like a hairpin needs a drastic curve
like an HGV needs endless derv
like an outside left needs a body swerve

I rely on you
like a handyman needs pliers
like an auctioneer needs buyers
like a laundromat needs driers
like The Good Life needed Richard Briers

I rely on you
like a water vole needs water
like a brick outhouse needs mortar
like a lemming to the slaughter
Ryan's just Ryan without his daughter

I rely on you.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 9, 2011)

Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they'll say that I
Am quite myself again.


     -AE Houseman


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## Pickman's model (Apr 10, 2011)

On With The Play / Robert E. Howard

Up with the curtain, lo, the stage is set;
The mimes come trooping for their destin'd parts,
The Devil swings his hand, the music starts;
But the main star has not arrived as yet,
And all the players wait and swear and fret.
He comes! The tambourine with empty clack
Greets the proud brow, the eye, the unbent back;
On with the play of broken dreams and sweat!

Aye, play their game if you would wish to rise,
Conform yourself to standard rote and rule,
But when you've reached the pinnacle of pelf
Some day take down an old book from the shelf,
And scanning pages, years, with curious eyes,
Remember one who signed himself -- A Fool.


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## Ceej (Apr 10, 2011)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> Oh, when I was in love with you,
> Then I was clean and brave,
> And miles around the wonder grew
> How well did I behave.
> ...


 
Nice!


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 13, 2011)

^makes me want to cry, that one 


*Comfort*

Comfort the sorrowful with watchful eyes
In silence, for the tongue cannot avail.
Vex not his wounds with rhetoric, nor the stale
Worn truths, that are but maddening mockeries
To him whose grief outmasters all replies.
Only watch near him gently; do but bring
The piteous help of silent ministering.
Watchful and tender. This alone is wise.

So shall thy presence and thine every motion,
The grateful knowledge of thy sad devotion
Melt out the passionate hardness of his grief,
And break the flood-gates of thy pent-up soul.
He shall bow down beneath thy mute control,
And take thine hands, and weep, and find relief. 

Archibald Lampman


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## Ceej (Apr 13, 2011)

And in similar vein to ShiftyBagLady's choice;


Symptom Recital by Dorothy Parker

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men....
I'm due to fall in love again.


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## Ceej (Apr 13, 2011)

Almost at the same time!


----------



## invisibleplanet (Apr 15, 2011)

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond 
by e. e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 15, 2011)

I've always liked this one, it's not terribly spohistaced or anything but I think I like it because I can picture myself on a train watching a woman walking along and I quite like that whoosig past people on a train and imagining their whole life in a few seconds.

*To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train*
– Frances Cornwell (1886-1960)

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?


And this one is great

*The Fat White Woman Speaks*
 -G.K. Chesterton

Why do you rush through the field in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves as such?
And how the devil can you be sure,
Guessing so much and so much,
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2011)

I have always had a soft spot for GK Chesterton.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 15, 2011)

And I don't care about rules, I'm posting another, it's probably been posted on here before too but I just don't care. So there

*Evolution * 

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And, oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auruch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And check by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet -

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish. 

Langdon Smith


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 15, 2011)

Dillinger4 said:


> I have always had a soft spot for GK Chesterton.


A recent discovery for me


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2011)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> A recent discovery for me



I like the way his mind works.  

You may or may not have already seen it, but I like him so much I quoted him on one of my *ahem* profiles



> To quote GK Chesterton (in a crtique of the world-view of Oscar Wilde):
> 
> "Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."


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## Ceej (Apr 16, 2011)

This is by a lovely gentleman of my acquaintance - I knew him for years before I knew he was a published poet as well as a retired vet, teacher, researcher and lecturer in animal anatomy. 

*Tarn Hows, Cumbria by Roy Batt*

Carry me across the water
Like sounds in the evening
that are made far off,
to fall among us, here.

Carry me beyond the far bank,
The fell, into the other land
Where time, its sand
Slips on away, and we are left
without a touch of fear.

Then lean to confer what part 
we take unto the earth's uttermost;
Speak low again and say we could
Return like sound over the waters
Each other, and the earth, held dear.


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## Ceej (Apr 20, 2011)

This has been all over the past few days....very American Mom but holds grains of truth..

*For my daughter, by Tine Fey*
First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her
When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short - a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day - And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.


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## turing test (Apr 20, 2011)

There once was a man from Carolina
Who posted with a sandy vagina.
He sucked up to mods
But what were the odds
That he'd finally die from angina.


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## Ceej (Apr 27, 2011)

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save


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## ShiftyBagLady (May 8, 2011)

*The Wanderlust by Robert William Service*

The Wanderlust has lured me to the seven lonely seas,
Has dumped me on the tailing-piles of dearth;
The Wanderlust has haled me from the morris chairs of ease,
Has hurled me to the ends of all the earth.
How bitterly I've cursed it, oh, the Painted Desert knows,
The wraithlike heights that hug the pallid plain,
The all-but-fluid silence, -- yet the longing grows and grows,
And I've got to glut the Wanderlust again.

Soldier, sailor, in what a plight I've been!
Tinker, tailor, oh what a sight I've seen!
And I'm hitting the trail in the morning, boys,
And you won't see my heels for dust;
For it's "all day" with you
When you answer the cue
Of the Wan-der-lust.

The Wanderlust has got me . . . by the belly-aching fire,
By the fever and the freezing and the pain;
By the darkness that just drowns you, by the wail of home desire,
I've tried to break the spell of it -- in vain.
Life might have been a feast for me, now there are only crumbs;
In rags and tatters, beggar-wise I sit;
Yet there's no rest or peace for me, imperious it drums,
The Wanderlust, and I must follow it.

Highway, by-way, many a mile I've done;
Rare way, fair way, many a height I've won;
But I'm pulling my freight in the morning, boys,
And it's over the hills or bust;
For there's never a cure
When you list to the lure
Of the Wan-der-lust.

The Wanderlust has taught me . . . it has whispered to my heart
Things all you stay-at-homes will never know.
The white man and the savage are but three short days apart,
Three days of cursing, crawling, doubt and woe.
Then it's down to chewing muclucs, to the water you can eat,
To fish you bolt with nose held in your hand.
When you get right down to cases, it's King's Grub that rules the races,
And the Wanderlust will help you understand.

Haunting, taunting, that is the spell of it;
Mocking, baulking, that is the hell of it;
But I'll shoulder my pack in the morning, boys,
And I'm going because I must;
For it's so-long to all
When you answer the call
Of the Wan-der-lust.

The Wanderlust has blest me . . . in a ragged blanket curled,
I've watched the gulf of Heaven foam with stars;
I've walked with eyes wide open to the wonder of the world,
I've seen God's flood of glory burst its bars.
I've seen the gold a-blinding in the riffles of the sky,
Till I fancied me a bloated plutocrat;
But I'm freedom's happy bond-slave, and I will be till I die,
And I've got to thank the Wanderlust for that.

Wild heart, child heart, all of the world your home.
Glad heart, mad heart, what can you do but roam?
Oh, I'll beat it once more in the morning, boys,
With a pinch of tea and a crust;
For you cannot deny
When you hark to the cry
Of the Wan-der-lust.

The Wanderlust will claim me at the finish for its own.
I'll turn my back on men and face the Pole.
Beyond the Arctic outposts I will venture all alone;
Some Never-never Land will be my goal.
Thank God! there's none will miss me, for I've been a bird of flight;
And in my moccasins I'll take my call;
For the Wanderlust has ruled me,
And the Wanderlust has schooled me,
And I'm ready for the darkest trail of all.

Grim land, dim land, oh, how the vastness calls!
Far land, star land, oh, how the stillness falls!
For you never can tell if it's heaven or hell,
And I'm taking the trail on trust;
But I haven't a doubt
That my soul will leap out
On its Wan-der-lust.


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## Brubricker (May 18, 2011)

Incident
by Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore, 
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, 
I saw a Baltimorean 
Keep looking straight at me. 
Now I was eight and very small, 
And he was no whit bigger, 
And so I smiled, but he poked out 
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” 

I saw the whole of Baltimore 
From May until December; 
Of all the things that happened there 
That’s all that I remember.


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## Ceej (May 19, 2011)

Long For This World by Sophie Hannah.

I settle for less than snow,
try to go gracefully like seasons go

which will regain their ground -
ditch, hill and field - when a new year comes round.

Now I know everything:
how winter leaves without resenting spring,

lives in a safe time frame,
gives up so much but knows he can reclaim

all titles that are his,
fall out for months and still be what he is.

I settle for less than snow:
high only once, then no way up from low,

then to be swept from drives.
Ten words I throw into your changing lives

fly like ten snowballs hurled:
I hope to be, and will, long for this world.


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## Ceej (Jul 28, 2011)

Wondered where this thread had gone....

I do like a bit of ecomony in a poem, sometimes....Connie Bensley specialises in the short, sharp and wry.

*Permissive Society*

Wake, for the dawn has put the stars to flight,
And in my bed, a stranger: so once more,
What seemed to be a good idea last night,
Appears, this morning, sober, rather poor.


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## maya (Oct 12, 2011)

*The Owls by Charles Baudelaire*

Under the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun’s last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.


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## butchersapron (Mar 29, 2012)

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
_Adrienne Rich_


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## Ceej (Aug 2, 2012)

Urgh, shopping today in Oxford Street - quite my least favourite activity. Put me in mind of this poem, so I thought I'd bump.....


Soothsayer
by Connie Bensley

I'm sure you will be very happy with this bra, Madam,
She said, her manicure seriously red as she tapped the till.
Of course I did not ask her how she knew.

Who is rude enough to challenge the clairvoyant,
the diagnostician, the prognosticator?
But she was right. As soon as she folded up

the lacy garmet - its ticket swinging insouciantly -
and handed it across the counter
in its raspberry-pink bag, my spirits rose.

Outside, traffic parted for me like the Red Sea:
the sun appeared and gilded passers-by
who nervously returned my random smiles.

THe days, the weeks, wore on in a numinous haze
of goodwill. Who knows why? Be cynical if you must:
I only record the sequence of events.


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## 8115 (Aug 24, 2012)

I've had this poem in my head for a while now.

Slough by John Betjeman

 Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
 It isn't fit for humans now, 
 There isn't grass to graze a cow. 
 Swarm over, Death!

 Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
 Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
 Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
 Tinned minds, tinned breath. 

 Mess up the mess they call a town-
 A house for ninety-seven down
 And once a week a half a crown 
 For twenty years. 

 And get that man with double chin
 Who'll always cheat and always win, 
 Who washes his repulsive skin 
 In women's tears: 

 And smash his desk of polished oak
 And smash his hands so used to stroke
 And stop his boring dirty joke
 And make him yell. 

 But spare the bald young clerks who add
 The profits of the stinking cad;
 It's not their fault that they are mad, 
 They've tasted Hell. 

 It's not their fault they do not know 
 The birdsong from the radio, 
 It's not their fault they often go 
 To Maidenhead 

 And talk of sport and makes of cars
 In various bogus-Tudor bars 
 And daren't look up and see the stars
 But belch instead. 

 In labour-saving homes, with care
 Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
 And dry it in synthetic air
 And paint their nails. 

 Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
 To get it ready for the plough.
 The cabbages are coming now;
 The earth exhales.


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## 8115 (Aug 25, 2012)

A poem I saw recently which I really like.

Asthma
Lizzy Dening

Between our houses:
two herons; a fistful of gulls.
At night it is still enough to hear a swan
tilling the river bed.

5am
the shape of you surfaces.
Your back muscles taut under a film of sweat.
Your lungs rattle against rib cage.
The third person in our relationship
is your breath.

Bitter oxygen gulped down like saltwater,
like the blood returning to a dead leg.

I touch the wound of your chest
with my fingertips.
Watch your mouth gape
fledgling-wide.
Fold you back to sleep 
beneath arms and feathered duvet.

After I leave, someone coughs in the supermarket,
and I turn around
as if they had called
my name.


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## Roadkill (Aug 25, 2012)

_Come To Sunny Prestatyn_
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand   
In tautened white satin.   
Behind her, a hunk of coast, a
Hotel with palms
Seemed to expand from her thighs and   
Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.   
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;   
Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space   
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed _Titch Thomas,_ while   
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through   
The moustached lips of her smile.   
She was too good for this life.   
Very soon, a great transverse tear   
Left only a hand and some blue.   
Now _Fight Cancer_ is there.
(Philip Larkin)


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## vauxhallmum (Oct 3, 2012)

I'm not that good on poetry 
I've been asked to find a poem that my half aunt (long story) can read at her mum's funeral but everything I google is the worst greeting card style schmaltz. I was thinking Stevie Smith but it all seems wrong...


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## 8115 (Oct 3, 2012)

I found these pages and quite liked some of them?

http://www.lastingpost.com/pa/pa_readings_db.php?page=/index
http://www.berwickchurch.org.uk/Funeral Poems.pdf

They're quite traditional though.


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## Greebo (Oct 3, 2012)

If I Should Go - Joyce Grenfell
(Often Called - If I Should Die)

If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known
Weep if you must
Parting is hell
But life goes on
So sing as well.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Oct 8, 2012)

Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.


----------



## Ceej (Oct 8, 2012)

vauxhallmum said:


> I'm not that good on poetry
> I've been asked to find a poem that my half aunt (long story) can read at her mum's funeral but everything I google is the worst greeting card style schmaltz. I was thinking Stevie Smith but it all seems wrong...


 
A few suggestions:

*The Black Flag by George Woodcock*.

When I die
let the black rag fly
raven falling
from the sky.

Let the black flag lie
on bones and skin
that long last night
as I enter in.

For out of black
soul's night have stirred
dawn's cold gleam,
morning's singing bird.

Let black day die,
let black flag fall,
let raven call,
let new day dawn
of black
reborn.

or:

*When Death Comes by Mary Oliver*
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world



or:
*The House Is Not The Same Since You Left by Henry Normal
*The cooker is angry - it blames me
The TV tries desperately to stay busy
but occasionally I catch it staring out the window
The washing-up's feeling sorry for itself again
it just sits there saying
"What's the point, what's the point?"
The curtains count the days
Nothing in the house will talk to me
I think your armchair's dead
The kettle tried to comfort me at first
but you know what it's attention span is like
I've not told the plants yet
They think you're still on holiday
The bathroom misses you
I hardly see it these days
It still can't believe you didn't take it with you
The bedroom won't even look at me
since you left it keeps it's eyes closed
all it wants to do is sleep, remembering better times
trying to lose itself in dreams
it seems like it's taken the easy way out
but at night I hear the pillows
weeping into the sheets


----------



## chazegee (Oct 9, 2012)

Millicent, you're sober!
waiting in the lounge
wrap your heels in brown paper bags 
naphthalene the gowns

wonder how long it's been
since garbling out of line
you said you'd learn the rules to break them
but jailor suits you fine

remember when you toyed a bit
vulcanised the game
reading highbrows in the yard
kissing in the flames

felt the future was our own
closer than a shave
throwing fivers in the wind
riding on your Knave

but now you toil for every word
and question every glance
the scarf you fluttered at the joust
got skewered on a lance

history repeats itself
slumping on the bar
as cruel hearts saunter off
smoking big cigars

looking out the window
puritan severe
you can go and fuck yourself
while I cut off my ear


----------



## Brubricker (Oct 15, 2012)

Flowers
by Wendy Cope

Some men never think of it.
You did. You'd come along
And say you'd nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.


----------



## chazegee (Oct 17, 2012)

Dirtysweet street

the road is littered with angel shit
and they're hauling giant twix from the chocolate pit
wont you pick a few carrots out that diamond sick
and pay your fare to Dirtysweet street

the dogs they all are barking Bach
and the bankers make art in the park
it goes without saying that the tarts have hearts
between the sheets of Dirtysweet street

the arguments all grin and wink
then pour themselves down the sink
they've even got a big ice-rink
down the clink of Dirtysweet street

the old are all in loving homes
and the skeletons are xylophones
the pinners all use they dictaphones
to call their keilanni on Dirtysweet street

the reality beats the dream hands down
the dream gets a day job, w/o even a frown
and every day, like tits falling out of a gown
it's okay on Dirtysweet street


----------



## Brubricker (Nov 18, 2012)

We, too, had known golden hours
by W.H. Auden

We, too, had known golden hours
When body and soul were in tune, 
Had danced with our true loves 
By the light of a full moon, 
And sat with the wise and good 
As tongues grew witty and gay 
Over some noble dish 
Out of Escoffier; 
Had felt the intrusive glory 
Which tears reserve apart, 
And would in the old grand manner 
Have sung from a resonant heart. 
But, pawed-at and gossiped-over 
By the promiscuous crowd, 
Concocted by editors 
Into spells to befuddle the crowd, 
All words like Peace and Love, 
All sane affirmative speech, 
Had been soiled, profaned, debased 
To a horrid mechanical screech. 
No civil style survived 
That pandaemonioum 
But the wry, the sotto-voce, 
Ironic and monochrome: 
And where should we find shelter 
For joy or mere content 
When little was left standing 

But the suburb of dissent?


----------



## mayotte (Nov 24, 2012)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away"


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Nov 25, 2012)

Tenebrae by Dnise Levertov

Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart. 
We are at war, 
bitterly, bitterly at war.

And the buying and selling 
buzzes at our heads, a swarm 
of busy flies, a kind of innocence.

Gowns of gold sequins are fitted, 
sharp-glinting. What harsh rustlings 
of silver moiré there are, 
to remind me of shrapnel splinters.

And weddings are held in full solemnity 
not of desire but of etiquette, 
the nuptial pomp of starched lace; 
a grim innocence.

And picnic parties return from the beaches 
burning with stored sun in the dusk; 
children promised a TV show when they get home 
fall asleep in the backs of a million station wagons, 
sand in their hair, the sound of waves 
quietly persistent at their ears. 
They are not listening.

Their parents at night 
dream and forget their dreams. 
They wake in the dark 
and make plans. Their sequin plans 
glitter into tomorrow. 
They buy, they sell.

They fill freezers with food. 
Neon signs flash their intentions 
into the years ahead.

And at their ears the sound 
of the war. They are 
not listening, not listening.


----------



## mao (Nov 25, 2012)

*16-bit Intel 8088 chip*

with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens. 
Charles Bukowski


----------



## Brubricker (Nov 28, 2012)

After The Trial
by Weldon Kees


Hearing the judges' well-considered sentence,
The prisoner saw long plateaus of guilt,
And thought of all the dismal furnished rooms
The past assembled, the eyes of parents
Staring through walls as though forever
To condemn and wound his innocence.

And if I raise my voice, protest my innocence,
The judges won't revoke their sentence.
I could stand screaming in this box forever,
Leaving them deaf to everything but guilt;
All the machinery of law devised by parents
Could not be stopped though fire swept the rooms.

Whenever my thoughts move to all those rooms
I sat alone in, capable of innocence,
I know now I was not alone, that parents
Always were there to speak the hideous sentence:
"You are our son; be good; we know your guilt;
We stare through walls and see your thoughts forever."

Sometimes I wished to go away forever;
I dreamt of strangers and of stranger rooms
Where every corner held the light of guilt.
Why do the judges stare?  I saw no innocence
In them when they pronounced the sentence;
I heard instead the believing voice of parents.

I can remember evenings when my parents,
Settling my future happily forever,
Would frown before they spoke the sentence:
"Someday the time will come to leave these rooms
Where, under our watchful eyes, you have been innocent;
Remember us before you seize the world of guilt."

Their eyes burn.  How can I deny my guilt
When I am guilty in the sight of parents?
I cannot think that even they were innocent.
At least I shall not have to wait forever
To be escorted to the silent rooms
Where darkness promises a final sentence.

We walk forever to the doors of guilt,
Pursued by our own sentences and eyes of parents,
Never to enter innocent and quiet rooms.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 12, 2012)

Pet Panther
A.R. Ammons

My attention is a wild
animal: it will if idle
make trouble where there
was no harm: it will

sniff and scratch at the
breath’s sills:
it will wind itself tight
around the pulse

or, undistracted by
verbal toys, pommel the
heart frantic: it will
pounce on a stalled riddle

and wrestle the mind numb:
attention, fierce animal
I cry, as it coughs in my
face, dislodges boulders

in my belly, lie down, be
still, have mercy, here
is song, coils of song, play
it out, run with it.


----------



## heinous seamus (Jan 9, 2013)

An old favourite. Never fails:

Trio

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening
a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights -
The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,
the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,
and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.
And the three of them are laughing, their breath rises
in a cloud of happiness, and as they pass
the boy says, "Wait till he sees this but!"
The chihuahua has a tiny Royal Stewart tartan coat like a teapot-
holder,
the baby in its white shawl is all bright eyes and mouth like
favours in a fresh sweet cake,
the guitar swells out under its milky plastic cover, tied at the neck
with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe.

Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!
The vale of tears is powerless before you.
Whether Christ is born, or is not born, you
put paid to fate, it abdicates
under the Christmas lights.
Monsters of the year
go blank, are scattered back,
can't bear this march of three.

And the three have passed, vanished in the crowd
(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind
the life of men and beasts, and music,
laughter ringing them round like a guard)
at the end of this winter's day.

Edwin Morgan


----------



## 8115 (Jan 20, 2013)

Haiku - Jack Kerouac

The windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction


----------



## Greebo (Jan 21, 2013)

A Riddle - On Snow   by James Parton

From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I'm bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.

Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.

My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.


----------



## 8115 (Feb 18, 2013)

You Don't Know What Love Is 
(an evening with Charles Bukowski) by Ramond Carver 

You don't know what love is Bukowski said 
I'm 51 years old look at me 
I'm in love with this young broad 
I got it bad but she's hung up too 
so it's all right man that's the way it should be 
I get in their blood and they can't get me out 
They try everything to get away from me 
but they all come back in the end 
They all came back to me except 
the one I planted 
I cried over that one 
but I cried easy in those days 
Don't let me get onto the hard stuff man 
I get mean then 
I could sit here and drink beer 
with you hippies all night 
I could drink ten quarts of this beer 
and nothing it's like water 
But let me get onto the hard stuff 
and I'll start throwing people out windows 
I'll throw anybody out the window 
I've done it 
But you don't know what love is 
You don't know because you've never 
been in love it's that simple 
I got this young broad see she's beautiful 
She calls me Bukowski 
Bukowski she says in this little voice 
and I say What 
But you don't know what love is 
I'm telling you what it is 
but you aren't listening 
There isn't one of you in this room 
would recognize love if it stepped up 
and buggered you in the ass 
I used to think poetry readings were a copout 
Look I'm 51 years old and I've been around 
I know they're a copout 
but I said to myself Bukowski 
starving is even more of a copout 
So there you are and nothing is like it should be 
That fellow what's his name Galway Kinnell 
I saw his picture in a magazine 
He has a handsome mug on him 
but he's a teacher 
Christ can you imagine 
But then you're teachers too 
here I am insulting you already 
No I haven't heard of him 
or him either 
They're all termites 
Maybe it's ego I don't read much anymore 
but these people w! ho build 
reputations on five or six books 
termites 
Bukowski she says 
Why do you listen to classical music all day 
Can't you hear her saying that 
Bukowski why do you listen to classical music all day 
That surprises you doesn't it 
You wouldn't think a crude bastard like me 
could listen to classical music all day 
Brahms Rachmaninoff Bartok Telemann 
Shit I couldn't write up here 
Too quiet up here too many trees 
I like the city that's the place for me 
I put on my classical music each morning 
and sit down in front of my typewriter 
I light a cigar and I smoke it like this see 
and I say Bukowski you're a lucky man 
Bukowski you've gone through it all 
and you're a lucky man 
and the blue smoke drifts across the table 
and I look out the window onto Delongpre Avenue 
and I see people walking up and down the sidewalk 
and I puff on the cigar like this 
and then I lay the cigar in the ashtray like this and take a deep breath 
and I begin to write 
Bukowski this is the life I say 
it's good to be poor it's good to have hemorrhoids 
it's good to be in love 
But you don't know what it's like 
You don't know what it's like to be in love 
If you could see her you'd know what I mean 
She thought I'd come up here and get laid 
She just knew it 
She told me she knew it 
Shit I'm 51 years old and she's 25 
and we're in love and she's jealous 
Jesus it's beautiful 
she said she'd claw my eyes out if I came up here 
and got laid 
Now that's love for you 
What do any of you know about it 
Let me tell you something 
I've met men in jail who had more style 
than the people who hang around colleges 
and go to poetry readings 
They're bloodsuckers who come to see 
if the poet's socks are dirty 
or if he smells under the arms 
Believe me I won't disappoint em 
But I want you to remember this 
there's only one poet in this room tonight 
only one poet in this town tonight 
maybe only one real poet in this country tonight 
and that's me 
What do any of you know about life 
What do any of you know about anything 
Which of you here has been fired from a job 
or else has beaten up your broad 
or else has been beaten up by your broad 
I was fired from Sears and Roebuck five times 
They'd fire me then hire me back again 
I was a stockboy for them when I was 35 
and then got canned for stealing cookies 
I know what's it like I've been there 
I'm 51 years old now and I'm in love 
This little broad she says 
Bukowski 
and I say What and she says 
I think you're full of shit 
and I say baby you understand me 
She's the only broad in the world 
man or woman 
I'd take that from 
But you don't know what love is 
They all came back to me in the end too 
every one of em came back 
except that one I told you about 
the one I planted We were together seven years 
We used to drink a lot 
I see a couple of typers in this room but 
I don't see any poets 
I'm not surprised 
You have to have been in love to write poetry 
and you don't know what it is to be in love 
that's your trouble 
Give me some of that stuff 
That's right no ice good 
That's good that's just fine 
So let's get this show on the road 
I know what I said but I'll have just one 
That tastes good 
Okay then let's go let's get this over with 
only afterwards don't anyone stand close 
to an open window


----------



## Boru (Feb 18, 2013)

*Gnome*

*“Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.” *


 ― Samuel Beckett


----------



## Greebo (Mar 30, 2013)

Indian Summer

In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.

― Dorothy Parker


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 30, 2013)

Act of Union by Seamus Heaney

I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse, 
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst, 
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain, 
The rending process in the colony, 
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again


----------



## secret squirrel (Mar 30, 2013)

Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare
Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep
In lax accompaniment through the air
Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep.

No sooner than they dump them on the floors
These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,
Feel great white wings go down like useless oars
And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!
How droll and ugly he that shone on high!
The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,
Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds
Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;
Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

L' Albatros-Charles Baudelaire


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 3, 2013)

One in memory of the 30 000 killed by south korean troops this day and the following weeks in 1948 after the jeju uprising:



> Officially 39,285 homes were demolished and more than half of the island’s villages destroyed, concentrated mostly around Halla Mountain. Of 400 villages, only 170 remained. According to a report by the National Commission on the Jeju April 3 Incident, 25,000 to 30,000 people were killed or simply vanished, with upwards of 4,000 more fleeing to Japan as the government sought to quell the uprising. As the island’s population was at most 300,000 at the time, the official toll was one-tenth of the inhabitants. However, some Jeju people claim that as many as 40,000 islanders were killed in the suppression. This clash led to many deaths of U.S. military personnel, Korean police and right-wing youth alliance members, as well as the guerillas and civilians who were branded as traitors and sympathizers.


 
*Yŏngbyŏn, Leaves of Reed*

On the day a new sanctuary was set up
at the tavern for right-wing extremists

On the day the gods of the old sanctuary
who had delivered the wine all at once disappeared

On the day the sun solemnly rose
like the dawn in the city
where the massacre was to begin

The day a priest who had lost speech and held his tongue aloft
as he wept by the trash at the roadside

Don't cry, child born peacefully,
don't cry, don't cry

Listen to the light
as mother sister distant Yŏngbyŏn,
the sound of water fallen on the reed leaves
open their flesh

- Huh Su-gyung


----------



## Ceej (Apr 4, 2013)

I bumped into someone today that I used to babysit for...and he's just become a grandparent. Bugger me, time flies.


WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep 
  And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; 

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
  And loved your beauty with love false or true; 
  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. 

And bending down beside the glowing bars, 
  Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled 
  And paced upon the mountains overhead, 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
*WB Yeats*​ 
​


----------



## tom_craggs (Apr 6, 2013)

Going to a friends funeral on Monday. This is a special poem. 

In Blackwater Woods ​​Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars​​of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,​​the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders​​of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is​​nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned​​in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side​​is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world​​you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it​​against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.​​~ Mary Oliver ~​


----------



## Greebo (Apr 9, 2013)

"How can I keep from singing?"
My life goes on in endless song
above earth's lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear it's music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
And though the darkness 'round me close,
songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
while to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
how can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble in their fear
and hear their death knell ringing,
when friends rejoice both far and near
how can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile
our thoughts to them are winging,
when friends by shame are undefiled
how can I keep from singing?


----------



## Brubricker (Apr 9, 2013)

The Timbered Choir
by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake 
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 9, 2013)

EASTER 1916
William Butler Yeats

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.

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, vainglorious 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.

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 they 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;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

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.


----------



## Ceej (Apr 10, 2013)

tom_craggs - I love Mary Oliver, that's a spectacular poem. I read her 'When Death Comes' poem at a funeral a few years ago. I'm sorry for your loss.


----------



## Ceej (Apr 11, 2013)

*Upper St *
Now the rain is falling
And the petals that have already fallen,
pink and white, float around us as we walk,
your smile suggesting how close you are to forgetting
the lover who so recently left you.
And so we continue, ducking into a corner pub,
and there, facing you, I catch myself doubting
if I will ever feel more closely drawn to you
and I can tell we are both wondering
about this dwindling distance between us
and how perilously a kiss would close that space.

*John Harvey*


----------



## Brubricker (Apr 11, 2013)

The Difference
by John Whitworth

_The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. _
_- G.W.F. Hegel_

Free men are Kings of men and women are their Queens,
It’s like poetry and daffodils, like sausages and beans,
But, when two ride out together, then there’s one must ride behind,
So, though Justice is a woman, she is blind, blind, blind.
_Men want cars and football. Women want romance._
_ Men are like animals. Women are like plants._

The King was in the counting house, counting out his money,
The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey.
The money buys the honey but it buys a whole lot more
For honey keeps a woman sweet and that’s what honey’s for.
_Men want sex and alcohol. Women want to dance._
_ Men are like animals. Women are like plants._

The King was on the battlefield directing all his battles.
The Queen was at the big parade, parading all his chattels.
The Queen was at the big parade applauding her applause:
HURRAH-HURRAH-HURRAH for all the boys who win the wars.
_Men want power and politics. Women want nuance._
_ Men are like animals. Women are like plants._

The King was in the bedroom telling fortunes to the Queen:
Big Men and Little Women that’s the way it’s always been.
The Big Men get to organise the Little Women’s lives
And machete-wielding persons kill their next-door neighbours’ wives.
_Men are in the driving seat, women in a trance._
_ Men are like animals. Women are like plants._

There’s history and herstory but they are not the same.
When the man is up and doing then the woman gets the blame.
She was poor but she was honest, victim of a rich man’s whim.
When the in-laws make the outlaws then the outlook’s pretty grim.
_Men want this and this and this. Women want a chance._
_ Men are like animals. Women are like plants._


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2013)

At first they go for the easiest prey,
With the fewest defenses erected;
With no powerful lobbies to fight for their rights,
People these days who live unprotected.

But you're not in this grouping, you've plenty to eat,
Don't frequent food banks at month's close;
So you figure, this really is quite sad, that's true,
But heck, it's no skin off my nose.

Then cuts in health care, for the aged, the poor,
But you're not yet old, nor quite poor;
So you shrug, figure maybe there's no other way,
And such cuts you can safely ignore

Next vets take their hits, college student aid falls,
And maybe you're getting to feel,
The axe is beginning to chop down your way,
This reality, though, ain't quite real.

Then finally it's your turn, to share in the pain,
To join with the gang on this queue;
In order the richest can more wealth pile on,
You'll pay for this trickle up, too.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 11, 2013)

The Ice-Cart 
  by Wilfred Gibson

Perched on my city office-stool,
I watched with envy, while a cool
And lucky carter handled ice. . . .
And I was wandering in a trice,
Far from the grey and grimy heat
Of that intolerable street,
O'er a sapphire berg and emerald floe,
Beneath the still, cold ruby glow
Of everlasting Polar night,
Bewildered by the queer half-light,
Until I stumbled, unawares,
Upon a creek where big white bears
Plunged headlong down with flourished heels
And floundered after shining seals
Through shivering seas of blinding blue.
And as I watched them, ere I knew,
I'd stripped, and I was swimming too,
Among the sea-pack, young and hale,
And thrusting on with threshing tail,
With twist and twirl and sudden leap
Through crackling ice and salty deep--
Diving and doubling with my kind,
Until, at last, we left behind
Those big, white, blundering bulks of death,
And lay, at length, with panting breath
Upon a far untravelled floe,
Beneath a gentle drift of snow--
Snow drifting gently, fine and white,
Out of the endless Polar night,
Falling and falling evermore
Upon that far untravelled shore,
Till I was buried fathoms deep
Beneath the cold white drifting sleep--
Sleep drifting deep,
Deep drifting sleep. . . .

The carter cracked a sudden whip:
I clutched my stool with startled grip.
Awakening to the grimy heat
Of that intolerable street.


----------



## tom_craggs (Apr 12, 2013)

Thanks Ceej...


----------



## Ceej (Apr 14, 2013)

*In a week when we've heard more euphemisms than we can shake a stick at.....*

*Sans pretension by Henry Normal *


We say 'cul de sac'
To make 'dead end' sound sunny.
We say 'nouveau riche'
Instead of working class with money.
We call art 'avant-garde'
When we don't understand it.
Jumble sales sell 'bric-a-brac'
Which must be French for shit.
Let's call a spud a spud,
No more lies or elaborate word contortions.
Chips are chips
Not pomme frites or french fries.
Why say 'haute cuisine' when you mean 'smaller portions'.
No more saying we had a 'tete a tete'
When you mean you've been nagging
Bragging or just chin wagging,
And no more calling it a 'menage a trois'
When you mean three people shagging.


----------



## secret squirrel (Apr 14, 2013)

Ceej said:


> *In a week when we've heard more euphemisms than we can shake a stick at.....*
> 
> *Sans pretension by Henry Normal *
> 
> ...


 
I think it is brilliant !


----------



## Sirena (Apr 16, 2013)

'The Undertaking' by Louise Gluck

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 17, 2013)

THE DERBY
-Henry Birtles-

Why do they come on that June afternoon
To the top of a hill, at the Capital’s edge
Why sit in traffic for half of the day
Why are they here; well they’ve gathered to pledge
An allegiance to one and for centuries they’ve come
To witness the run of the boy who’ll be king
Who’s name could be sung, for as long as men sing
Who’s proved that he holds all the aces you need
Assuming the mantle that greatness bestows
By placing himself at the head of his breed
To put to the sword the most worthy of foes
Why do the names of the victors stand tall
When a name as a name can mean nothing at all
Ask when you walk down your street or afar
Have you heard of Nijinsky, Mill Reef or Shergar
D’you know what I mean when I speak in hushed tones
D’you know what I mean when you can’t describe joy
D’you get what they get when one rises alone
Why the blood still runs fast at the mention of Troy
This is the Derby and this is the race
That the rest of the World, through its name find a place
For their own measurement, for their own litmus test
To find a Horse worthy of calling the best
And it all started here upon high Epsom Downs
Where the greatest still fight for the greatest of crowns
Where men stand as one, whether blue blood or red
Whether born of the street, or in purple are bred.
And they stand here to cheer and they stand here to call
And they stand to acclaim one who rose above all
This is the Derby and this is the race
This the Kingmaker; hold tight, take your place.


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## eatmorecheese (Apr 17, 2013)

*The Rebel (Bidrohi)*
(Only the last few stanzas, translation from Bengali)
Kazi Nazrul Islam


I'm mad, I'm mad!
I have realized myself,
all the barriers have crumbled away!!

I'm Parashuram's merciless axe.
I'll rid the world of all the war mongers*
and bring peace.
I'm the plough on Balaram's shoulders.
I'll uproot this subjugated world
in the joy of recreating it.
Weary of battles, I, the Great Rebel,
shall rest in peace only when
the anguished cry of the oppressed
shall no longer reverberate in the sky and the air,
and the tyrant's bloody sword
will no longer rattle in battlefields.
Only then shall I, the Rebel,
rest in peace.

I'm the Rebel Bhrigu,
I'll stamp my footprints on the chest of god
sleeping away indifferently, whimsically,
while the creation is suffering.
I'm the Rebel Bhrigu,
I'll stamp my footprints�
I'll tear apart the chest of the whimsical god!

I'm the eternal Rebel,
I have risen beyond this world, alone,
with my head ever held high!


----------



## secret squirrel (Apr 17, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> THE DERBY
> -Henry Birtles-
> 
> Why do they come on that June afternoon
> ...


 
I've stolen it


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## Pickman's model (Apr 18, 2013)

secret squirrel said:


> I've stolen it


Good


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## Greebo (Apr 18, 2013)

The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 
Something else is alive 
Beside the clock's loneliness 
And this blank page where my fingers move. 

Through the window I see no star: 
Something more near 
Though deeper within darkness 
Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 
Two eyes serve a movement, that now 
And again now, and now, and now 

Sets neat prints into the snow 
Between trees, and warily a lame 
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 
Of a body that is bold to come 

Across clearings, an eye, 
A widening deepening greenness, 
Brilliantly, concentratedly, 
Coming about its own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 
It enters the dark hole of the head. 
The window is starless still; the clock ticks, 
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes


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## seeformiles (Apr 18, 2013)

The cat went here and there And the moon spun round like a top, 
And the nearest kin of the moon, 
The creeping cat, looked up. 
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon, 
For, wander and wail as he would, 
The pure cold light in the sky 
Troubled his animal blood. 
Minnaloushe runs in the grass 
Lifting his delicate feet. 
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
 When two close kindred meet, 
What better than call a dance? 
Maybe the moon may learn, 
Tired of that courtly fashion, A new dance turn. 
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass 
From moonlit place to place, 
The sacred moon overhead 
Has taken a new phase. 
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils 
Will pass from change to change, 
And that from round to crescent, 
From crescent to round they range? 
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
 Alone, important and wise, 
And lifts to the changing moon 
His changing eyes.

WB Yeats


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

Various Portents by Alice Oswald

Various stars. Various kings.
Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights.

Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers,
Much cold, much overbearing darkness.

Various long midwinter Glooms.
Various Solitary and Terrible stars.
Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers.
Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.

More than one North star, more than one South star.
Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems.
Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thickness of Dark,
Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.
Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens,
All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes:
Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk,
Works of wonder and or water, snowflakes, stars of frost …

Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes,
Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness,
Various 5,000-year-old moon maps,
Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in Braille.

Various gods making beautiful works in bronze,
Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains,
Various crucifixes, all sorts of nightsky necklaces.
Many Wise Men remarking the irregular weather.

Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers,
Watchers of whisps of various glowing spindles,
Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac,
Seafarers tossing, tied to a star…

Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights.

Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall.
Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening
Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

Though you remain
Convinced
To be alive
You must have somewhere
To go
Your destination remains
Elusive.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

that one is "recollections" by Keorapetse Kgosisile


----------



## secret squirrel (Apr 18, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> that one is "recollections" by Keorapetse Kgosisile


 
Thanks  I was indeed wondering


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## eatmorecheese (Apr 19, 2013)

*Catford 1933*
Spike Milligan

The light creaks and escalates to rusty dawn 
The iron stove ignites the freezing room. 
Last night's dinner cast off popples in the embers. 

My mother lives in a steaming sink. Boiled haddock condenses on my plate
Its body cries for the sea
My father is shouldering his braces like a rifle,
and brushes the crumbling surface of his suit.

The Daily Herald lies jaundiced on the table.
'Jimmy Maxton speaks in Hyde Park',
My father places his unemployment cards in his wallet - there's plenty of room for them.
In greaseproof paper, my mother wraps my banana sandwiches

It's 5.40. Ten minutes to catch that last workman train.
Who's the last workman? Is it me? I might be famous.

My father and I walk out and are eaten alive by yellow freezing fog.
Somewhere, the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson are having morning tea in bed.
God Save the King.
But God help the rest of us.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 19, 2013)

April Love﻿
BY ERNEST DOWSON

We have walked in Love's land a little way,
We have learnt his lesson a little while,
And shall we not part at the end of day,
With a sigh, a smile?
A little while in the shine of the sun,
We were twined together, joined lips, forgot
How the shadows fall when the day is done,
And when Love is not.
We have made no vows--there will none be broke,
Our love was free as the wind on the hill,
There was no word said we need wish unspoke,
We have wrought no ill.
So shall we not part at the end of day,
Who have loved and lingered a little while,
Join lips for the last time, go our way,
With a sigh, a smile?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 19, 2013)

I love Ernest Dowson. I am stealing that one shifts


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 19, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> I love Ernest Dowson. I am stealing that one shifts


Me too, I was looking for Cynara (cant remember its full title) which is one of my top ten (maybe even top five) poems when I came across that one


----------



## Brubricker (Apr 20, 2013)

Faith Zone
by John Whitworth

We hurl the homosexuals from cliffs,
Being enjoined to do so by religion
That scours our souls of maybes and what ifs.
Such wanton decadence is not our pigeon.
The Word is firm and clear and unambiguous.
Knowing and doing at every point contiguous.

We flog the godless traffickers in booze.
We stone to death the vile adulteresses.
Our sisters shall not marry where they choose,
Nor flaunt themselves in lewd, immodest dresses.
Such conduct is displeasing to the Lord
Whose Truth is sharp and gleaming like a sword.

Forgive our carnal trespasses in youth.
(Boys will be boys — we meant no harm at all.)
That was before we heard the voice of Truth,
That was before we answered to the call,
That was before the blessed Scripture spoke
And told us who to spare and who to croak.

The knife, the lash, the scaffold and the jail
Prevent believers from behaving oddly.
The Holy Word shall everywhere prevail.
It drops from Heaven like manna to the godly.
Our singleness of Faith is true security.
Its flame shall burn in everlasting purity.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Apr 20, 2013)

8115 said:


> You Don't Know What Love Is
> (an evening with Charles Bukowski) by Ramond Carver
> <snip>


 
This is a bit cheeky but do you have a copy of the actual book this poem is from? I know it's in _All of us: The collected poems_ but I want to cite it in an essay and I'd prefer to cite the page number and publishing details rather than just linking to it.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 20, 2013)

London by Yang Lian

reality is part of my nature
spring has accepted the overflowing green of the dead again
streets accept more funerals which are blacker yet beneath the flowers
red phone boxes in the rain like a warning
time is part of the internal organs bird voices
open every rusting face on the benches
watching night’s eyes a prolonged flying accident
when yet another day is blotted out London

write out all my madness lick out all the brown beer’s froth
the bell’s toll in a little bird’s brain vibrates like a gloomy verse unemployed
the city is part of the word the most terrifying part of me
showing my insignificance accepting
blue mildewed sheepskin slip-cover outside the window
sheep meat’s memory diligently binding
its own death dying in the non-convulsing lens
when between two pages of newsprint is a grave behind the grave is the ocean

link


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## 8115 (Apr 20, 2013)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> This is a bit cheeky but do you have a copy of the actual book this poem is from? I know it's in _All of us: The collected poems_ but I want to cite it in an essay and I'd prefer to cite the page number and publishing details rather than just linking to it.


 
The book is Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories by Raymond Carver (Collins Harvill 1984 reprinted 1997 by The Harville Press) it's on page 75. Sorry for the messy reference, can't remember what you do about reprints for referencing.

Ask if you need to know anything else.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Apr 20, 2013)

8115 said:


> The book is Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories by Raymond Carver (Collins Harvill 1984 reprinted 1997 by The Harville Press) it's on page 75. Sorry for the messy reference, can't remember what you do about reprints for referencing.
> 
> Ask if you need to know anything else.


 

Oh thank you so much!


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 21, 2013)

First cicada:
life is
cruel, cruel, cruel.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 4, 2013)

fragment from Europe Europe by Allen Ginsburg

World world world
I sit in my room
imagine the future
sunlight falls on Paris
I am alone there is no
one whose love is perfect
man has been mad man’s
love is not perfect I
have not wept enough
my breast will be heavy
till death the cities
are specters of cranks
of war the cities are
work & brick & iron &
smoke of the furnace of
selfhood makes tearless
eyes red in London but
no eye meets the sun


----------



## Ceej (May 4, 2013)

This is long, but lovely - written to be read at his mothers funeral.

*What Me Mam Taught Me*
*by Mike Garry*

How to dream
That God is free
That love isn’t all you need
What Me Mam Taught Me

She taught me
That I lived in the greatest city on earth
How to show my value as well as my worth
Success only comes through hard work
What Me Mam Taught Me

She taught me
That my family will see me through 
Maureen Seamus Patricia Theresa Chris and Hugh
She said, “If you work with them, they’ll work with you”
What Me Mam Taught Me

She taught me
That charity begins at home
That it’s good to spend some time alone
Say something positive, don’t just moan
What Me Mam Taught Me

To Travel
To sail eight of the seven seas
That solitude is a dead good beach
That a caravan in wales isn’t all you need
What Me Mam Taught Me

To find beauty in the angry young man
To have as many kids as you can
To only have a Silver Cross Pram
What Me Mam Taught Me

She said that
Through reading and writing I would escape
That I could always have my say
To say a prayer every single day
What Me Mam Taught Me

She taught me
Drink too much & I’ll be depressed
If I take drugs I’ll be a mess
Eat too much food I’ll be obsessed (she really said obese but that wouldn’t have rhymed)
What Me Mam Taught Me


To swim
To dance
To show true precision
To have confidence in all my decisions
For everyday to be a mission
What Me Mam Taught Me

Don’t want to be in, it’s better to be out
A whisper can be louder than a shout
To put my brain in gear before I use my mouth (I’m still working on this one)
What Me Mam Taught Me

To take life slow don’t live too fast
To live each day as if your last
Abstain from meat and on Friday fast
What Me Mam Taught Me

If someone’s down, pick them up
If someone’s thirsty, give them your cup
If someone’s bored, give them a book
What Me Mam Taught Me

If someone’s homeless, take them in
That God will always forgive a sin
To put my litter in the bin
What Me Mam Taught Me

That Women’s Lib is nothing to do with burning bras
That if you believe in yourself you will go far
To always drive a Nissan car
What Me Mam Taught Me
She said
Michael, tell them not to cry
Because I have live such a fantastic life
And you can see me in all the children’s eyes

That a sunset is someone you love saying goodbye
Did you see the sunset on Thursday night?
So no sadness today, let’s celebrate her life
What Me Mam Taught Me


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 4, 2013)

Song of myself by Walt Whitman (section 32)


I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

His nostrils dilate ...my heels embrace him...
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure ...we race around and return.

I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 5, 2013)

great poem shifts. I was reading Walt Whitman just the other day


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 5, 2013)

I like most of it. Some of it is questionable and some is a little grandiose of ray liking but overall I reckon it is a good piece.


----------



## Brubricker (May 7, 2013)

All You Who Sleep Tonight
by Vikram Seth


All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 8, 2013)

In the Name of Greatness by Nicki Williams


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 9, 2013)

The West develops wonderful new skills 
In this as in so many other fields
Its submarines are crocodiles
Its bombers rain destruction from the skies
Its gasses so obscure the sky
They blind the sun's world-seeing eye. 
Dispatch this old fool to the West
To learn the art of killing fast – and best.

- Muhammed Iqbal


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2013)

Spring Dawn by Meng Haoran

I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn,
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
That night the sound of wind and rain had come,
Who knows how many petals then had fallen?


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 10, 2013)

Poetry of Departures (by Philip Bigot Larkin)

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if 
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 11, 2013)

Spring Sleep by Bai Juyi

The pillow's low, the quilt is warm, the body smooth and peaceful,
Sun shines on the door of the room, the curtain not yet open.
Still the youthful taste of spring remains in the air,
Often it will come to you even in your sleep.


----------



## Ceej (May 11, 2013)

I was babysitting for my cousin's baby last night.....*yawns*

*If you'll just go to sleep by Gabriella Mistral.*

The blood red rose I gathered yesterday,
and the fire and cinnamon of the carnation
Bread baked with anised and honey
and a fish in a bowl that makes a glow;

All this is yours, baby born of woman, if you'll _just_ go to sleep.

A rose, I say, I say a carnation, fruit, I say, and I say honey!
A fish that glitters, and more, I say....
If you will _only_ sleep till day.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 12, 2013)

Still to be Neat by Ben Jonson

Still to be neat, still to be drest,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powder'd, still perfum'd:
Lady, it is to be presum'd,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all th' adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 13, 2013)

Aurora borealis. Terrible dawn. As they open their eyes, they are almost transparent.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 13, 2013)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> Still to be Neat by Ben Jonson
> 
> Still to be neat, still to be drest,
> As you were going to a feast;
> ...


 
Stealing this one for my blog.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 15, 2013)

December in Yase by Gary Snyder

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange,
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.


----------



## Greebo (May 15, 2013)

Unfortunate Coincidence - Dorothy Parker

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.


----------



## Brubricker (May 16, 2013)

Marriage
by Wendell Berry


How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt. Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows. You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
And yet I am not quiet.
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you. I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.


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## Brubricker (May 18, 2013)

All Things Conspire
by Judith Wright


All things conspire to hold me from you –
even my love,
since that would mask you and unname you
till merely woman and man we live.
All men wear arms against the rebel –
and they are wise,
since the sound world they know and stable
is eaten away by lovers’ eyes.
All things conspire to stand between us –
even you and I,
who still command us, still unjoin us,
and drive us forward till we die.
Not till those fiery ghosts are laid
shall we be one.
Till then, they whet our double blade
and use the turning world for stone.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 19, 2013)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 1, 2013)

Up'ards by Marriott Edgar (1933)

'Twere getting dusk, one winter's night,
When up the clough there came in sight,
A lad who carried through the snow,
A banner with this 'ere motto...
'Uppards'

His face was glum as he did pass,
His eyes were shiny... just like glass,
And as he went upon his way,
He nobbut this 'ere word did say...
'Uppards'

And people sitting down to tea,
They heard him plain, as plain can be,
They thowt 'twere final football score,
As this 'ere word rang out once more...
'Uppards'

A policeman on his lonely beat,
He stopped the lad up t' end of t' street,
He said, "Where't going wi' that theer?"
The lad just whispered in his ear...
'Uppards'

"Don't go down t' clough." the policeman said,
"It's mucky road for thee to tread,
Canal's at bottom... deep and wide."
"That's not my road." the lad replied,
It's... 'Uppards'

A young lass stopped him further up,
She said "Come in wi' me, and sup."
He said, "I'm takin none o' yon,
Besides... I must be getting on...
'Uppards'"

Next day some lads had just begun,
To tak' their whippets for a run,
When dogs got scratching in the snow,
And found flag with this 'ere motto...
'Uppards'

That set them digging all around,
And 'twasn't long before they found,
A lad whose name they never learned,
Whose face was white, whose toes had turned...
'Uppards'

'Twas very plain for to behold,
The lad had ta'en his death o' cold,
He'd got his feet wet early on,
And from his feet the cold had gone...
'Uppards'

This story only goes to show,
That when the fields is white wi' snow,
It's inadvisable to go...
'Uppards'


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 6, 2013)

The man who marks or leaves with pages bent 
The volume that some trusting friend has lent, 
Or keeps it over long, or scruples not 
To let its due returning be forgot; 
The man who guards his books with miser's care, 
And does not joy to lend them, and to share; 
The man whose shelves are dust begrimed and few, 
Who reads when he has nothing else to do; 
The man who raves of classic writers, but 
Is found to keep them with their leaves uncut; 
The man who looks on literature as news, 
And gets his culture from the book reviews; 
Who loves not fair, clean type, and margins wide -- 
Or loves these better than the thought inside; 
Who buys his books to decorate the shelf, 
Or gives a book he has not read himself; 
Who reads from priggish motives, or for looks, 
Or any reason save the love of books. 
Great Lord, who judgest sins of all degrees, 
Is there no little private hell for these?

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/unknown/three_impostors.html


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 7, 2013)

Allen Ginsberg reads Wales Visitation to William F Buckley


----------



## 8115 (Jun 7, 2013)

‘The door was open and the house was dark’ by Seamus Heaney (from Human Chain)
_in memory of David Hammond_

The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hanger

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.


----------



## seeformiles (Jun 7, 2013)

( I had to learn this for O-level English - I can still recite it! Quite topical as well)
Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins






Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – 
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; 
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush 
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring 
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush 
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush 
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. 

What is all this juice and all this joy? 
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, 
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, 
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, 
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 9, 2013)

In Praise Of Learning by Bertolt Brecht

Learn the elementary things!
For those whose time has come
It is never too late!
Learn the ABC. It won’t be enough,
But learn it! Don’t be dismayed by it?
Begin! You must know everything.
You must lake over the leadership.

Learn, man in the asylum!
Learn, man in the prison!
Learn, woman in the kitchen!
Learn sixty year olds!
You must take over the leadership.
Seek out the school, you who are homeless!
Acquire knowledge, you who shiver!
You who are hungry, reach for the book:
it is a weapon.
You must take over the leadership.

Don’t be afraid to ask, comrade!
Don’t be talked into anything.
Check for yourself!
What you do not know yourself
you don’t know.
Scrutinize the bill,
it is you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item,
ask: how did this get there ?
You must take over the leadership.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 13, 2013)

Morning in Tunis by Keorapetse Kgotsitsile

Of the paradise and glory
Of the never-ever time
Of a place none can point at
No matter how many preachers are born
There will be no celebration of life
Except where memory collected and collective
From then now and then guides us

Now even though
My children have never known peace
I would like the children of the world
To see with their ear
And sing the sunrise in Tunis

It is heart-of-watermelon red
Mellow like an amber slice of moon
As it emerges from high rock and low cloud
Suspended near the blueless sky
A spectre between nothing and nothing
Without a single ray of light
As if to simply say
Don't you know the world is remarkable


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 16, 2013)

It's my birthday and I'm in a cheery mood...

Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke

The fucking cops are fucking keen
To fucking keep it fucking clean
The fucking chief's a fucking swine
Who fucking draws a fucking line
At fucking fun and fucking games
The fucking kids he fucking blames
Are nowehere to be fucking found
Anywhere in Chickentown

The fucking scene is fucking sad
The fucking news is fucking bad
The fucking weed is fucking turf
The fucking speed is fucking surf
The fucking folks are fucking daft
Don't make me fucking laugh
It fucking hurts to look around
Everywhere in Chickentown

The fucking train is fucking late
You fucking wait you fucking wait
You're fucking lost and fucking found
Stuck in fucking Chickentown

The fucking view is fucking vile
For fucking miles and fucking miles
The fucking babies fucking cry
The fucking flowers fucking die
The fucking food is fucking muck
The fucking drains are fucking fucked
The colour scheme is fucking brown
Everywhere in Chickentown

The fucking pubs are fucking dull
The fucking clubs are fucking full
Of fucking girls and fucking guys
With fucking murder in Their eyes
A fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
Waiting for a fucking cab
You fucking stay at fucking home
The fucking neighbors fucking moan
Keep The fucking racket down
This is fucking Chickentown

The fucking train is fucking late
You fucking wait you fucking wait
You're fucking lost and fucking found
Stuck in fucking Chickentown

The fucking pies are fucking old
The fucking chips are fucking cold
The fucking beer is fucking flat
The fucking flats have fucking rats
The fucking clocks are fucking wrong
The fucking days are fucking long
It fucking gets you fucking down
Evidently Chickentown


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 16, 2013)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 17, 2013)

not actually a poem, I am rewriting bits by Ulrike Meinhof and others for a longer poem I am writing. Here is a bit:

“But that is who we are,
that is where we come from. 
We are the offspring 
of metropolitan annihilation 
and destruction, 
of the war of all against all, 
of the conflict of each individual 
with every other individual, 
of a system governed by fear, 
of the compulsion to produce, 
of the profit of one to 
the detriment of others, 
of the division of people into men 
and women, young and old, 
sick and healthy, 
foreigners and Germans, 
and of the struggle for prestige. 

Where do we come from? 
From isolation in individual row-houses, 
from the suburban concrete cities, 
from prison cells, 
from the asylums and special units, 
from media brainwashing, 
from consumerism, 
from corporal punishment, 
from the ideology of nonviolence, 
from depression, 
from illness, 
from degradation, 
from humiliation, 
from the debasement 
of human beings, 
from all the people 
exploited 
by imperialism.”


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2013)

Sumer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb,
Cows after calves make moo;
Bullock stamps and deer champs,
Now shrilly sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo
Wild bird are you;
Be never still, cuckoo!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 23, 2013)

Like You by Roque Dalton

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-
blue landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.


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## Dillinger4 (Jul 2, 2013)

All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.


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## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2013)

*A letter to John Donne*

(NOTE: On 27 July 1617, Donne preached at the parish church at Sevenoaks, of which he was rector, and was entertained at Knole, then the country residence of Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset)

I understand you well enough, John Donne
First, that you were a man of ability
Eaten by lust and by the love of God
Then, that you crossed the Sevenoaks High Street
As rector of Saint Nicholas:
I am of that parish.

To be a man of ability is not much
You may see them on the Sevenoaks platform any day
Eager men with despatch cases
Whom Ambition drives as they drive the machine
Whom the certainty of meticulous operation
Pleasures as a morbid sex a heart of stone.

That you could have spent your time in the corruption of courts
As these in that of cities,
gives you no place among us:
Ability is not even the game of a fool
But the click of a computer operating in a waste
Your cleveness is dismissed from this suit
Bring out your genitals and your theology.

What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;
Lust is not what the rutting stag knows
It is to take Eve's apple and to lose
The stag's paradisal look:
The love of God comes readily
To those who have most need.

You brought body and soul to this church
Walking there through the park alive with deer
But now what animal has climbed into your pulpit?
One whose pretension is that the fear of God has heated him into a spirit
An evaporated man no physical ill can hurt.

Well might you hesitate at the Latin gate
Seeing such apes denying the church of God:
I am grateful particularly that you were not a saint
But extravagant whether in bed or in your shroud.
You would understand that in the presence of folly
I am not sanctified by angry.

Come down and speak to the men of ability
On the Sevenoaks platform and tell them
That at your Saint Nicholas the faith
Is not exclusive in the fools it chooses
That the vain, the ambitious and the highly sexed
Are the natural prey of the incarnate Christ.

C.H Sisson.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

The Suicide

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. These are the bills
In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act,
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact. 

Louis Macneice


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## Greebo (Jul 18, 2013)

(in the style of Pam Ayres but written by John Summers)
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY 

The missus bought a Paperback
Down Shepton Mallet way. 
I had a look inside her bag
'Twas Fifty Shades Of Grey
Well I just left her to it,
And at 10 I went to bed.
An hour later she appeared;
The sight filled me with dread...

In her left she held a rope;
And in her right a whip!
She threw them down upon the floor,
And then began to strip.

Well fifty years or so ago;
I might have had a peek;
But Mabel hasn't weathered well;
She's eighty four next week!!

Watching Mabel bump and grind;
Could not have been much grimmer.
And things then went from bad to worse;
She toppled off her Zimmer!

She struggled back upon her feet;
A couple minutes later;
She put her teeth back in and said
I am a dominater !!

Now if you knew our Mabel,
You'd see just why I spluttered,
I'd spent two months in traction
for the last complaint I'd uttered.

She stood there nude and naked
Bent forward just a bit
I went to hold her, sensual like
and stood on her left tit!

Mabel screamed, her teeth shot out;
My god what had I done!?
She moaned and groaned then shouted out:
"Step on the other one"!!

Well readers, I
can't tell no more;
About what occurred that day.
Suffice to say my jet black hair,
Turned fifty shades of grey.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 20, 2013)

The Wealthy Dolt

The wealthy dolt for wit and sense
Though college’d and begrammared
Just as a nail that never stirs
No further than it’s hammered
And when he’s made complete to act
Of wisdom’s face a farce on
In making nothing else the fact
Is that he’ll make a parson

John Clare.


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## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

Marsh-Bloom

Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Blood-red blossom of poison stem
Broken for Man,
Swamp-sunk leafage and dungeon-bloom,
Seeded bearer of royal doom,
What now is the ban?

What to thee is the island grave?
With desert wind and desolate wave
Will they silence Death?
Can they weight thee now with the heaviest stone?
Can they lay aught on thee with "Be alone,"
That hast conquered breath?

Lo, "it is finished"--a man for a king!
Mark you well who have done this thing:
The flower has roots;
Bitter and rank grow the things of the sea;
Ye shall know what sap ran thick in the tree
When ye pluck its fruits.

Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Sleep on, sleep on, accused of them
Who work our pain;
A wild Marsh-blossom shall blow again
From a buried root in the slime of men,
On the day of the Great Red Rain.

_Dedicated to Gaetano Bresci_

Voltairine de Cleyre


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 29, 2013)

*Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites* 
WB YEATS

Come gather round me, Parnellites,
And praise our chosen man,
Stand upright on your legs awhile,
Stand upright while you can,
For soon we lie where he is laid
And he is underground;
Come fill up all those glasses 
And pass the bottle round.

And here's a cogent reason
And I have many more,
He fought the might of Ireland
And saved the Irish poor,
Whatever good a farmer's got
He brought it all to pass;
And here's another reason, 
That Parnell loved a lass.

And here's a final reason,
He was of such a kind
Every man that sings a song
Keeps Parnell in his mind
For Parnell was a proud man,
No prouder trod the ground,
And a proud man's a lovely man
So pass the bottle round.

The Bishops and the Party
That tragic story made,
A husband that had sold his wife
And after that betrayed;
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.


----------



## maya (Jul 30, 2013)

​Me ​​We ​​​_-Muhammad Ali_​


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jul 31, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> Allen Ginsberg reads Wales Visitation to William F Buckley



That's beautiful. I think you should listen to it with your eyes closed once and then tach him read it. Watching him reading it at first was distracting, a charming distraction but a distraction nonetheless


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 31, 2013)

W B YEATS, THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?


----------



## cyprusclean (Aug 1, 2013)

*Mind, Beware!*

*by Bibhu Padhi *(August 2013)

_For Kunmun and Milmun _

Mind, watch yourself
carefully. Memories

are a crisscross of shame,
guilt, and disappointments,

of all those sins in default.
Mind:  Mind your steps.

Anytime, you might be
tricked by memories.

Mind: Watch yourself
carefully, with the heart’s

nightly, ancient intensities.
Remember?  Memories


----------



## maya (Aug 2, 2013)




----------



## butchersapron (Aug 5, 2013)

*I'll Die from a Cancer of the Spine*


I'll die of a cancer of the spinal column
It will happen on an awful evening
Clear, hot, perfumed and sensual
I'll die of the putrefaction
Of some little known cells
I'll die of a leg torn out
By a huge rat burst out from a huge hole
I'll die of a hundred of cuts
The sky will have fallen on me
That breaks like a heavy window
I'll die of a shriek
Running through my ears
I'll die of muffled wounds
Inflicted late in the night
By bald and wavering killers
I'll die without even knowing
That I'm dying, I'll die
Buried in the dry ruins
Of one thousand meters of collapsing cotton
I'll die drowned in dirty motor oil
Overridden by indifferent insects
And just after, by different ones
I'll die naked, or wrapped in a red cloth
Or sewed into a bag with razor blades
Maybe I'll die without worrying
And with nail polish on my toes
And my hands filled with tears
And my hands filled with tears
I'll die my eyelids torn off
Under a furious sun
When I am told, slowly
Cruel things in my ear
I'll die of seeing kids tortured
And men surprised and deathly pale
I'll die eaten alive by worms
I'll die my hands bound to a waterfall
I will die burnt into a sad fire
I'll die a bit, I'll die a lot,
I'll die without passion, but I'll die interested
And then, when everything's over
I'll die.

Boris Vian

(He actually died of a heart attack after trying to disrupt the first french showing of the Hollywood adaptation of his book I'll Spit on Your Graves. I was going to post The Deserter but i don't like the start or ending of it).


----------



## Ceej (Aug 5, 2013)

Having re-read Evidently Chickentown, and spent the day at work in school grappling with the lunacies of Gove's latest notions (I wouldn't grace them by calling them policies), JCC really does spring to mind.....


TWAT by John Cooper Clark

Like a Night Club in the morning, you're the bitter end
Like a recently disinfected shit-house, you're clean round the bend.
You give me the horrors
too bad to be true
All of my tomorrow's
are lousy coz of you.

You put the Shat in Shatter
Put the Pain in Spain
Your germs are splattered about
Your face is just a stain

You're certainly no raver, commonly known as a drag.
Do us all a favour, here... wear this polythene bag.

You're like a dose of scabies,
I’ve got you under my skin.
You make life a fairy tale... Grimm!
People mention murder, the moment you arrive.
I’d consider killing you if I thought you were alive.
You've got this slippery quality,
it makes me think of phlegm,
and a dual personality
I hate both of them.

Your bad breath, vamps disease, destruction, and decay.
Please, please, please, please, take yourself away.
Like a death in a birthday party,
you ruin all the fun.
Like a sucked and spat our Smartie,
you're no use to anyone.
like the shadow of the guillotine
on a dead consumptive's face.
Speaking as an outsider,
what do you think of the human race

You went to a progressive psychiatrist.
He recommended suicide...
before scratching your bad name off his list,
and pointing the way outside.

You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you want to fart.
You’re heading for a breakdown,
better pull yourself apart.
Your dirty name gets passed about when something goes amiss.
Your attitudes are platitudes,
just make me wanna piss.

What kind of creature bore you
Was is some kind of bat
They can’t find a good word for you,but I can...
*TWAT*


----------



## maya (Aug 10, 2013)

SEA SONG

You look different every time you come
From the foam-crested brine
Your skin shining softly in the moonlight
Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale

Am I yours? Are you mine to play with?
Joking apart, when you're drunk, you're terrific when you're drunk
I like you mostly late at night, you're quite alright
But I can't understand the different you in the morning

When it's time to play at being human for a while please smile
You'll be different in the spring, I know
You're a seasonal beast like the starfish that drift in with the tide
So until your your blood runs to meet the next full moon

Your madness fits in nicely with my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own, my very own
We're not alone

- Robert Wyatt


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Aug 18, 2013)

Ah yes, those sunny moments


Silent Noon, D G Rossetti

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,—
   The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
   Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
   Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge
   Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fiy
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
   So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
   When twofold silence was the song of love.


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## butchersapron (Aug 20, 2013)

Meant to post this yesterday on the anniversary of his murder by fascists:

City That Does Not Sleep

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the 
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day 
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention 
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Federico García Lorca


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## butchersapron (Aug 21, 2013)

How about one from cragface for the Czech fighters:

August 1968 

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Auden.


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## Idris2002 (Aug 21, 2013)

To the man in the street, whom I'm sorry to say,

Is a keen observer of life,

The word 'intellectual' suggests right away,

A man who's untrue to his wife.

Auden.


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## albionism (Aug 26, 2013)

Lol @ Guardian journalists,
Who think words like,
"Blud" "Wicked" and "Babylon"
Are new.
I was using them,
In my early teens,
Now I'm 42.


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## Greebo (Aug 26, 2013)

Uncertainty - Adam Mickiewicz, translated by Zarek Zawadzki
Away from thee I never weep nor sigh,
And lose I not my mind when thou art nigh.
But if for a while I have no word with thee,
There's something missing, someone I must see.
I wonder, yearning thus for days on end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?

When thou hast gone, I cannot in my mind
Recall thy face though gentle so and kind.
However, oft I feel, yet wish it not,
That it is somewhere really near my thought.
And all these doubts of mine may never end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?

I suffered much, but reckoned not, as yet,
To go and let thee know my sad regret.
With no idea where my feet should go,
How come I find thy house I do not know;
And neither at thy door my doubts may end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?

To save thy health, my life I would expend;
To grant thee peace, to Hell I would descend.
Though in my heart no bold desires I nest,
Do know that I would be thy health and rest.
But still these doubts of mine may never end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?

And when thy hand lies gently in my palm,
My mind grows quiet, and my soul is calm;
Meseems my life may in this sleep depart,
But wakes me up the beating of thy heart,
And thus return my doubts that know no end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?

Composing this my song for thee, my mind
Was not to any bardic mood inclined;
I am amazed myself, it baffles me
How I have found the thoughts and rhymes for thee,
To finally write these doubts that may not end:
Art thou my love or maybe just a friend?


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## maya (Aug 26, 2013)

*The Envoy of Mr Cogito* 
_  by Zbigniew Herbert_
                   Go where those others went to the dark boundary 
                   for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
                   go upright among those who are on their knees 
                   among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
                   you were saved not in order to live 
                   you have little time you must give testimony
                   be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous 
                   in the final account only this is important
                   and let your helpless Anger be like the sea 
                   whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
                   let you sister Scorn not leave you 
                   for the informers executioners cowards - they will win 
                   they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth 
                   the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
                   and do not forgive truly it is not in your power 
                   to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
                   beware however of unnecessary pride 
                   keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror 
                   repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I
                   beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring 
                   the bird with an unknown name the winter oak 
                   light on a wall the splendour of the sky 
                   they don't need your warm breath 
                   they are there to say: no one will console you
                   be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and 
                   go 
                   as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
                   repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends 
                   because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain 
                   repeat great words repeat them stubbornly 
                   like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
                   and they will reward you with what they have at hand 
                   with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
                   go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold 
                   skulls 
                   to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland 
                   the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
                   Be faithful Go


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## maya (Aug 26, 2013)

*Mr. Cogito and the Imagination*
_by Zbigniew Herbert_
1
Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination
the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him
he didn't appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing
he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors or dialectics
jungles of tangled images
were not his home
he would rarely soar
on the wings of a metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother
he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem
that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death
he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth
2
Mr. Cogito will be numbered
among the species _minores_
he will accept indifferently the verdict
of future scholars of the letter
he used the imagination
for entirely different purposes
he wanted to make it
an instrument of compassion
he wanted to understand to the very end
--Pascal's night
--the nature of a diamond
--the melancholy of the prophets
--Achilles' wrath
--the madness of those who kill
--the dreams of Mary Stuart
--Neanderthal fear
--the despair of the last Aztecs
--Nietzsche's long death throes
--the joy of the painter of Lascaux
--the rise and fall of an oak
--the rise and fall of Rome
and so to bring the dead back to life
to preserve the covenant
Mr. Cogito's imagination
has the motion of a pendulum
it crosses with precision
from suffering to suffering
there is no place in it
for the artificial fires of poetry
he would like to remain
faithful to uncertain clarity


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## Dillinger4 (Aug 29, 2013)

For the people of Syria

What I will by Suheir Hammad

I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin beak for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.


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## Dillinger4 (Aug 29, 2013)

Two poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini:

Stolen Days

We who are poor have little time
for youth and beauty:
you can do well without us.

Our birth enslaves us!
butterflies shorn of all beauty,
buried in the chrysalis of time.

The wealthy don't pay for our time:
those days stolen from beauty
possessed by our fathers and us.

Will time's hunger never die?

Mystery

Daring to lift my eyes
towards the dry treetops,
I don't see God, but his light
is immensely shining.

Of all the things I know
my heart feels only this:
I'm young, alive, alone,
my body consuming itself.

I briefly rest in the tall grasses
of a river bank, under bare
trees, then move along beneath
clouds to live out my young days.


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## butchersapron (Aug 30, 2013)

*Requiem for the Croppies*

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day: 
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry, 
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave. 

Seamus Heaney


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

O Night by Giuseppe Ungaretti

_Dall’ampia ansia dell’alba_

From the deep anxiety of dawn
the grove of trees unveils.
Sad awakenings.
Leaves, sister leaves,
I hear your lament.
Autumns,
moribund sweetness.
O youth,
the hour of growth is barely past.
High skies of youth
impetuous freedom.
And I am already desert.
Caught on this melancholy arc.
But night scatters distances.
Oceanic silences,
astral nests of illusion,
O night.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

Godzilla in Mexico by Roberto Bolano

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

London by Yang Lian

reality is part of my nature
spring has accepted the overflowing green of the dead again
streets     accept more funerals which are blacker yet beneath the flowers
red phone boxes in the rain like a warning
time is part of the internal organs bird voices
open every rusting face on the benches
watching night’s eyes a prolonged flying accident
when yet another day is blotted out      London

write out all my madness     lick out all the brown beer’s froth
the bell’s toll in a little bird’s brain vibrates like a gloomy verse unemployed
city is part of the word   the most terrifying part of me
showing my insignificance     accepting
blue mildewed sheepskin slip-cover outside the window
sheep meat’s memory diligently binding
its own death    dying      in the unconvulsing lens
when between two pages of newsprint is a grave     behind the grave is the ocean


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

Get yourself a friend
come to know a foe
Get yourself a foe
come to know a friend

What kind of game is this?


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

Himalayas by Ko Un

Recollection is short, fantasy long!
A place where I'd never been born,
must never be born—
the Himalayas.

On whose behalf
did I go there?
I went with all ten fingers trembling.

With so many kinds of foolishness left back home,
I gazed up toward a few peaks
brilliant at eight thousand meters, their golden blades piled high.
Before that, and after,
I could not help but be an orphan.

I had but one hope:
to stay as far from the Himalayas as humanly possible,
and from the world of troublesome questions.
Yes, that was it.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 5, 2013)

Stories by Ko Un

There are stories.
There are people telling stories
and people listening to them.

The room is full
of the breath of the stories.

That is enough.

Eight months of winter at minus 40.
A weaned baby froze to death;
the grieving did not last long.

Soon there are stories.
Between prayers and more prayers
between one meal and the next
there are stories.
This kind of state is a perfect state.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2013)

Autumn’s Gateway by Lorna Smithers

_‘All that is solid melts into air’ – Karl Marx_

Sun and rain and trickster wind
are dissolving summer’s certainty.
Geese fly in. Swallows abandon
the empty stables and telephone wires.
The birds know the ways between
the hot and cold places, how long to stay
and when to depart into the wind.
The world is leaving with the birds,
all that is solid is autumn’s gateway
beneath the sheltering boughs
of the gleaming oak. I stand within
redrawing the edges of my reality:
bark and beams, trembling leaves
preparing to fall. I do not know the ways
between the summer and winter places
yet must step through and walk them
blind in the sunshine, drenched in the rain
until I know the day and the secret of the gateway
and can melt like a swallow into the wind.

http://lornasmithers.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/autumns-gateway/

One of my favourite poetry blogs.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2013)

Be Kind by Michael Blumenthal

Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind—but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others, it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness  and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet  wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one,  so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.


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## butchersapron (Sep 9, 2013)

The People's Liberation Army Captures Nanking



> Over Chungshan swept a storm, headlong,
> Our mighty army, a million strong, has crossed the Great River.
> The City, a tiger crouching, a dragon curling, outshines its ancient glories;
> In heroic triumph heaven and earth have been overturned.
> ...



Mr Mao


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## maya (Sep 10, 2013)

*Canterbury Tales, Wife of Bath's Prologue [Excerpt]*
_by Geoffrey Chaucer_

  But now, sire,—lat me se—what I shal seyn?

A ha! by God, I have my tale ageyn.

  Whan that my fourthe housbonde was on beere,

I weep algate, and made sory cheere,

As wyves mooten, for it is usage,

And with my coverchief covered my visage;

But for that I was purveyed of a make,

I wepte but smal, and that I undertake!

  To chirche was myn housbonde born a morwe

With neighebores, that for hym maden sorwe,

And Jankyn, oure clerk, was oon of tho.

As help me God, whan that I saugh hym go

After the beere, me thoughte he hadde a paire

Of legges and of feet so clene and faire

That al myn herte I gaf unto his hoold.

He was, I trowe, a twenty wynter oold,

And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth;

But yet I hadde alwey a coltes tooth.

Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel,

I hadde the prente of seïnte Venus seel.

As help me God, I was a lusty oon,

And faire and riche, and yong, and wel bigon,

And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,

I hadde the beste quonyam myghte be.

For certes, I am al Venerien

In feelynge, and myn herte is Marcien;

Venus me gaf my lust, my likerousnesse,

And Mars gaf me my sturdy hardynesse.

Myn áscendent was Taur, and Mars therinne;

Allas, allas! that evere love was synne!

I folwed ay myn inclinacioun

By vertu of my constellacioun,

That made me I koude noght withdrawe

My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.

Yet have I Martes mark upon my face,

And also in another, privee, place.

For God so wys be my savacioun,

I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun,

But evere folwede myn appetit,—

Al were he short, or long, or blak, or whit;

I took no kep, so that he liked me,

How poore he was, ne eek of what degree.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Sep 10, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> Be Kind by Michael Blumenthal


This is new to me and i love it


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 11, 2013)

Clear in September Light

A man stands under a tree, looking at a small house not far away. He flaps his arms as if he were a bird, maybe signaling someone we cannot see. He could be yelling, but since we hear nothing, he probably is not. Now the wind sends a shiver through the tree, and flattens the grass. The man falls to his knees and pounds the ground with his fists. A dog comes and sits beside him, and the man stands, once again flapping his arms. What he does has nothing to do with me. His desperation is not my desperation. I do not stand under trees and look at small houses. I have no dog.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 11, 2013)

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 11, 2013)

Amnesiac by Jane Griffiths

The night fog's come down.
The known edge of the world unselved,
the white-out against the window

and the radio histing the full
atmospheric scale between stations
comprehensively out of tune.

Someone's talking out there
but the night fog's come down:
a car comes and goes out of nowhere,

lighting the invisible and its afterglow.
Off, there's a town: its solids,
its muted soundings below

the sudden broadsides and dark
enormity of the nightlife,
the near miss of the eyes,

below the rough selvage of road
or cloud where you are seeing the wood
through the trees the fog has made

ragged, open-ended. Somewhere
in your house there is a forest.
Someone is talking there.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 11, 2013)

loads of poems in poetry magazines here

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/


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## heinous seamus (Sep 13, 2013)

Philip Levine has just won a lifetime achievement award, with a prize of $100,000 

*The Two*
When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided 
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, 'Would you like to eat?'
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
'wooden Jew' and 'lucky meat.' He's been up 
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick 
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if 'their booth' is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, 'We keep you clean
Muscatine,' on the woman emptying
his waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote 
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered 
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
who first said 'I love you' and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for, and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
'And the lovers?' you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 13, 2013)




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## Greebo (Sep 19, 2013)

Song of the Ogres by W.H. Auden
Little fellow, you're amusing
Stop before you end by losing
Your shirt:
Run along to mother, Gus,
Those who interfere with us
Get hurt.

Honest virtue, old wives prattle,
Always wins the final battle.
Dear, Dear!
Life's exactly what it looks,
Love may triumph in the books,
Not here.

We're not joking, we assure you:
Those who rode this way before you
Died hard.
What? Still spoiling for a fight?
Well, you've asked for it all right:
On guard!

Always hopeful, aren't you? Don't be.
Night is falling and it won't be
Long now:
You will never see the dawn,
You will wish you'd not been born.
And how!


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 19, 2013)

Bible Study 71 BCE by Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling
nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day
of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his living dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 23, 2013)

This by Maitreyabandhu

There’s no law against my listening
to this thrush behind the barn,
the song so loud it echoes like a bell,
then it’s further off beyond the lawn.
Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.

There’s no law against this singing –
nesting I suppose – up in the silver birch,
even though we build a common hell,
have done, and will make it worse.
Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 23, 2013)

The Woodpigeon's Instruction by Maitreyabandhu

She’s been there so long,
a patch of ash grey on the bending branch,
head tucked in against the wind
as she rises and falls with it.

She steadies herself
as the smaller branches flick.

She says: _This is the time of disappointment. _

All the willows bow at once.
Rain pelts quietly into the soaking grass


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 23, 2013)

.


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## butchersapron (Sep 23, 2013)

I know it's supposed to be one a day but this one really needs to go up right now:

*This Earth, My Brother*

The dawn crack of sounds known
rending our air
shattering our temples toppling
raising earthwards our cathedrals of hope,
in demand of lives offered on those altars
for the cleansing that was done long ago.
Within the airwaves we carry
our hutted entrails; and we pray;
shrieks abandoned by lonely road-sides
as the gunmens boots tramp.
I lift up the chalice of hyssop and tears
to touch the lips of the thirsty
sky-wailing in a million spires
of hate and death; we pray
bearing the single hope to shine
burnishing in the destiny of my race
that glinting sword of salvation.
In time my orchestra plays my music
from potted herbs of anemone and nim
pour upon the festering wounds of my race,
to wash forever my absorbent radiance
as we search our granary for new corn.
There was that miracle we hoped for
that salvation we longed for
for which we said many prayers
offered many offerings.

In the seasons of burning feet
of bad harvest and disastrous marriages
there burns upon the glint edge of that sword
the replica of the paschal knife.
The sounds rounded our lonely skies
among the nims the dancers gather their cloths
stretching their new-shorn hides off offered cows
to build themselves new drums.
Sky-wailing from afar the distant tramp
of those feet in rhythm
miming underneath them violence.
Along the roads lined with mimosas
the mangled and manacled are dragged
to the cheers of us all.
We strew flowers at the feet of the conquerors
beg for remission of our sins…

…He will come out of the grave
His clothes thrown around him;
worms shall not have done their work.
His face shall beam the radiance of many suns.
His gait the bearing of a victor,
On his forehead shall shine a thousand stars
he will kneel after the revelation
and die on this same earth.

And I pray
That my hills shall be exalted
And he who washes me,
breathes me
shall die.
They led them across the vastness
As they walked they tottered
and rose again. They walked
across the grassland to the edge of the mound
and knelt down in silent prayer;
they rose again led to the mound,
they crouched
like worshipers of Muhammad.
Suddenly they rose again
stretching their hands to the crowd
in wasteful gestures of identity
Boos and shrieks greeted them
as they smiled and waved
as those on a big boat journey.
A sudden silence fell
as the crowd pushed and yelled
into the bright sharp morning of a shooting.

They led them unto the mound
In a game of blindman’s bluff
they tottered to lean on the sandbags
Their backs to the ocean
that will bear them away.
The crackling report of brens
and the falling down;
a shout greeted them
tossing them into the darkness.

and my mountains reel and roll
to the world’s end.

Kofi Awoonor (murdered in the Nairobi massacre).


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## butchersapron (Oct 2, 2013)

Here's one from good old church-robbing priest-killing François Villon:

The Ballad Of The Proverbs

So rough the goat will scratch, it cannot sleep.
So often goes the pot to the well that it breaks.
So long you heat iron, it will glow;
so heavily you hammer it, it shatters.
So good is the man as his praise;
so far he will go, and he's forgotten;
so bad he behaves, and he's despised.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.

So glib you talk, you end up in contradictions.
So good is your credit as the favors you got.
So much you promise that you will back out.
So doggedly you beg that your wish is granted;
so high climbs the price when you want a thing;
so much you want it that you pay the price;
so familiar it gets to you, you want it no more.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.

So, you love a dog. Then feed it!
So long a song will run that people learn it.
So long you keep the fruit, it will rot.
So hot the struggle for a spot that it is won;
so cool you keep your act that your spirit freezes;
so hurriedly you act that you run into bad luck;
so tight you embrace that your catch slips away.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.

So you scoff and laugh, and the fun is gone.
So you crave and spend, and lose your shirt.
So candid you are, no blow can be too low.
So good as a gift should a promise be.
So, if you love God, you obey the Church.
So, when you give much, you borrow much.
So, shifting winds turn to storm.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.

Prince, so long as a fool persists, he grows wiser;
so, round the world he goes, but return he will,
so humbled and beaten back into servility.
So loud you cry Christmas, it is here.


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## Ceej (Oct 3, 2013)

Happy Poetry Day everyone!


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## Ceej (Oct 3, 2013)

*Act of Union by Seamus Heaney*
I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again


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## maya (Oct 12, 2013)

*“Had Death Not Had Me in Tears” by Kofi Awoonor*

Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
on life’s stream sail.
I would have heard sorrow songs
in groves where the road was lost
long
where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints
By the road I wait
‘death is better, death is better’
came the song
I am by the roadside
looking for the road
death is better, death is much better
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
I would have found the road
and heard the sorrow songs.
The land wreathes in rhythm
with your soul, caressed by history
and cruel geography
landscape ineffable yet screaming
eloquent resonance like the drums
of after harvests.
We pile rocks on terracing love
Carry the pithy cloth
to cover the hearths of our mother.

Come now you lucky ones
come to the festival of corn and lamb
to the finest feast of this land
come, now,
your lovers have unfurled
their clothes
their thighs glistening like golden knives
ready for the plunging
for the plentiful loving time
To whom shall I turn
to what shall I tell my woes?
My kinsman, the desert tree
denied us sustenance
long before the drought.
To whom shall I turn
to whom shall I tell my woes?
Some say tell the mother goat
she too is kinswoman
elemental sister of your clan
But I cannot tell the mother goat
for she is not here


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## Brubricker (Oct 15, 2013)

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer
by Ogden Nash



This is a song to celebrate banks,
Because they are full of money and you go into them and all
you hear is clinks and clanks,
Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,
Which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills.
Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits
and discourage withdrawals,
And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe
betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless
they don't need it.
I know you, you cautious conservative banks!
If people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny
them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving
of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks;
Yes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must
look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the
jungle,
And tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had
better go get the money from their wife's aunt or ungle.
But suppose people come in and they have a million and they
want another million to pile on top of it,
Why, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you
urge them to accept every drop of it,
And you lend them the million so then they have two million
and this gives them the idea that they would be better off
with four,
So they already have two million as security so you have no
hesitation in lending them two more,
And all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm,
And the only question asked is do the borrowers want the
money sent or do they want to take it withm.
Because I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks,
the jackasses who go around saying that health and happi-
ness are everything and money isn't essential,
Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant
money to maintain their health and happiness they starve
to death so they can't go around any more sneering at good
old money, which is nothing short of providential.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2013)

You readers, who are of sound mind and memory,
Pay attention to the lessons woven into the fabric
Of these strange poetic lines


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## Greebo (Oct 23, 2013)

Some More Light Verse
Wendy Cope

You have to try. You see the shrink.
You learn a lot. You read. You think.
You struggle to improve your looks.
You meet some men. You write some books.
You eat good food. You give up junk.
You do not smoke. You don’t get drunk.
You take up yoga, walk and swim.
And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
You don’t know what to do. You cry.
You’re running out of things to try.

You blow your nose. You see the shrink.
You walk. You give up food and drink.
You fall in love. You make a plan.
You struggle to improve your man.
And nothing works. The outlooks grim.
You go to yoga, cry and swim.
You eat and drink. You give up looks.
You struggle to improve your books.
You cannot see the point. You sigh.
You do not smoke. You have to try.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 24, 2013)

October by Jean Sprackland

Skies, big skies, careening over in the wind
great shoals of cloud pitching and jostling
in their rush to be anywhere other than here

You hesitate on your doorstep, glance up
and something tugs in your chest, rips free like a leaf
and is sucked up and away. Everything’s

finished here: raw-boned sycamores,
fields scalped and sodden. The houses are shut
and dustbins roll in their own filth in the street

So you would take your chances, risk it all…
You stand for a moment with the keys in your hand
Feeling the hard pull of the sky and the moment passing


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## Brubricker (Oct 25, 2013)

Song-Day in Autumn
by D.H. Lawrence


When the autumn roses
Are heavy with dew,
Before the mist discloses
The leaf's brown hue,
You would, among the laughing hills
Of yesterday
Walk innocent in the daffodils,
Coiffing up your auburn hair
In a puritan fillet, a chaste white snare
To catch and keep me with you there
So far away.

When from the autumn roses
Trickles the dew,
When the blue mist uncloses
And the sun looks through,
You from those startled hills
Come away,
Out of the withering daffodils;
Thoughtful, and half afraid,
Plaiting a heavy, auburn braid
And coiling it round the wise brows of a maid
Who was scared in her play.

When in the autumn roses
Creeps a bee,
And a trembling flower encloses
His ecstasy,
You from your lonely walk
Turn away,
And leaning to me like a flower on its stalk,
Wait among the beeches
For your late bee who beseeches
To creep through your loosened hair till he reaches,
Your heart of dismay.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 25, 2013)

Today is St Crispins day. The battle of Agincourt was fought 598 years ago today. 

From _Henry V_ by William Shakespeare:

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 26, 2013)

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the
strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing
but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.


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## maya (Oct 26, 2013)

*'What I Believe' by J.G. Ballard*

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in pain.

I believe in despair.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 27, 2013)




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## Dillinger4 (Nov 1, 2013)

I just wrote a letter to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. I included this poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

If anybody wants to write to her the address and a generic letter can be found here


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## ShiftyBagLady (Nov 1, 2013)

Coming of Wisdom with Time.   WB Yeats.

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth


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## Greebo (Nov 2, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> I just wrote a letter to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. <snip>
> If anybody wants to write to her the address and a generic letter can be found here


Thanks for the link.


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## Miss-Shelf (Nov 2, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Some More Light Verse
> Wendy Cope
> 
> You struggle to improve your man.
> ...


ha ha   I think I'm at the bit in bold stage with less of a book


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## Brubricker (Nov 11, 2013)

Having it Out with Melancholy 
by Jane Kenyon 


_"If many remedies are prescribed
for an illness, you may be certain
that the illness has no cure."_
-- A. P. Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard


1 FROM THE NURSERY


When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.


And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad -- even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.


You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated."


I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours -- the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES


Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND


You wouldn't be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN


Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT


Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.


I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors -- those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few


moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.


Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT


The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life -- in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 

7 PARDON


A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.


We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO


Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.


Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can't 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can't sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can't read, or call 
for an appointment for help.


There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH


High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome


by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 5, 2013)

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.


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## Ceej (Dec 7, 2013)

The world and I are not friends, today 


*As It Was Written by Anne Sexton*
Earth, earth,
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots,
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
Your trees are twisted chairs.
Your flowers moan at their mirrors,
and cry for a sun that doesn't wear a mask.

Your clouds wear white,
trying to become nuns
and say novenas to the sky.
The sky is yellow with its jaundice,
and its veins spill into the rivers
where the fish kneel down
to swallow hair and goat's eyes.

All in all, I'd say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars.


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## Brubricker (Dec 7, 2013)

Flying
by Richard Wilbur


Treetops are not so high
Nor I so low
That I don't instinctively know
How it would be to fly

Through gaps that the wind makes, when
The leaves arouse
And there is a lifting of boughs
That settle and lift again.

Whatever my kind may be,
It is not absurd
To confuse myself with a bird
For the space of a reverie:

My species never flew,
But I somehow know
It is something that long ago
I almost adapted to.


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 8, 2013)

this is a quote from Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair. I rewrote it into this form. 

The secret of 
Roberto Bolano’s 
great literary project, 
beyond his 
physical disappearance 
at the optimum moment, 
and the spectral 
record of his movement, 
Chile through 
Mexico City 
to Spain, 
was this:

poetry is conspiracy. 
Poetry is a virus. Poets, 
sick with pride, 
chosen and cursed, 
habitués of the worst bars, 
the grimmest cafes, 
night-birds, 
defacers of notebooks, 
feed on the glamour of truth. 

Immortality postponed. 
They are owl heads, 
hawkers of mis-remembered 
quotations. 
Solitaries 
jealous of their hard 
won obscurity.


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 8, 2013)

This is a quote from The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray, again rewritten into this form by me

I stood back to 
watch the crowds, 
and as I looked, 
I felt sick to the gut. 

These weren't 
the shabby middle 
aged people I 
had assumed. 

They were all 
young men and women, 
in what should have been 
the prime of their youth - 

falling in love, 
wanting to hitch 
around South America, 
afire with new ideas - 

and here they were, 
shuffling along like 
tired old people, 
with the last bit of fight 
long kicked out of them.

Had they really known
that all of them, 
every single one, 
was going to die, 
they would have woken
up as though sluiced
with a bucket of cold water. 

They would have 
told their bosses 
to shove their 
stupid jobs. 
They would have
started to talk 
to each other from
their hearts, 

because nothing 
could be worse 
than to go on living like this.


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 8, 2013)

Same as above. 

During those brief 
periods when ordinary 
people seize power, 
the ego is the first 
thing out of the window. 

Not a demonstration, 
not a riot, not an occupation
that does not testify 
to the end of 
"isolating, self enclosing activity." 

Boundaries dissolve 
between people and 
their world. Read any 
eyewitness account of 
historic revolutions, 
and the first vast 
surge of collective 
energy is always 
characterized by 
the appearance of 
a radically different
ontology. 

Expressing it 
verbally may 
be difficult, 
but you can
sense it 
immediately 
in the streets. 

There's exuberance, 
magic in the air. 
Time dilates. 
People give things away. 
Friends and lovers meet. 
You do things for the hell of it...


----------



## Santino (Dec 8, 2013)

Please read the boards
for a while
before posting. Use
the search function
to see
if your topic has already been discussed
to save repeating
questions/threads that already exist.
Please note that these
are discussion boards
and not
a free resource for
journalists/students/market researchers.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 8, 2013)

Please read 
the boards
for a while
before posting. 

Use the search 
function to see
if your topic 
has already 
been discussed
to save repeating
questions/threads 
that already exist.

Please note 
that these
are discussion 
boards and not
a free resource 
for
journalists
students
market 
researchers.


----------



## Santino (Dec 8, 2013)

Mine is more effective. It steers a path between intimacy and vulnerability, while also demonstrating a rare absence of cliche.


----------



## maya (Dec 13, 2013)

*
A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day*

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run

- John Donne


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 17, 2013)

Dream Song 100: How this woman came by the courage 
by John Berryman

How this woman came by the courage, how she got
the courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot
night of the eight of July,
where it came from, did once the Lord frown down
upon her ancient cradle thinking 'This one
will do before she die

for two and seventy years of chipped indignities
at least,' and with his thunder clapped a promise?
In that far away town
who looky upon my mother with shame & rage
that any should endure such pilgrimage,
growled Henry sweating, grown

but not grown used to the goodness of this woman
in her great strength, in her hope superhuman,
no, no, not used at all.
I declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself,
of love, and took the bourbon from the shelf
and drank her a tall one, tall.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 17, 2013)

Your mother's name is tarnished, on the estate she's known as a slag
Your father wears her knickers, he walks about in drag
In the early hours of the morning they both go picking dimps up 
Outside the WMC
When most decent folks are tucked up
And snoring respectably.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 17, 2013)

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing by WB Yeats

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 17, 2013)

Some Trees by John Ashberry

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.


----------



## Ceej (Dec 17, 2013)

Love this one for Christmas....

*Advent 1955 by John Betjeman*

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out ‘Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.’
And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there -
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know -
They’d sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.
We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell’d go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 17, 2013)

Cosmopolitan Greetings by Allen Ginsberg

Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Freedom costs little in the U.S.
Asvise only myself.
Don’t drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
world (after Einstein).
The universe is subjective..
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside skull is vast as outside skull.
What’s in between thoughts?
Mind is outer space.
What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?
“First thought, best thought.”
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Move with rhythm, roll with vowels.
Consonants around vowels make sense.
Savour vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candour ends paranoia.


----------



## artyfarty (Dec 17, 2013)

Just found this thread. I'm glad to say.
Apologies if you've had this before:

ee cummings

Me up at does
Out of the floor
Quietly stare
A poisoned mouse
Still who alive
Is asking What
Have I done that
You wouldn’t have.


----------



## pennimania (Dec 18, 2013)

Ceej said:


> Love this one for Christmas....
> 
> *Advent 1955 by John Betjeman*
> 
> ...


Exce,,


Ceej said:


> Love this one for Christmas....
> 
> *Advent 1955 by John Betjeman*
> 
> ...




Excellent 

Made my day x


----------



## Greebo (Dec 18, 2013)

Not my Best Side
U. A. Fanthorpe

I

Not my best side, I'm afraid.
The artist didn't give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn't comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don't mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It's hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It's nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn't much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon--
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl's got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can't
Do better than me at the moment.
I'm qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don't you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don't
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don't you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You're in my way.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 19, 2013)

*Sonnet—To Science*
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
 Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
 Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
 Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
 Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
 And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
 Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 19, 2013)

Arkham

Drowsy and dull with age the houses blink
On aimless streets the rat-gnawed years forget -
But what inhuman figures leer and slink
Down the old alleys when the moon has set?

--Robert E. Howard


----------



## Greebo (Dec 22, 2013)

Clouds

I watched as they ruptured,
ash black and pallid I saw mountainous clouds
split and spew rain
for two hours.
Everywhere water, plants and rainwater,
a riot of green on the earth.
My lover's gone off 
to some foreign country,
sopping wet at our doorway
I watch the clouds rupture.
Mira says, nothing can harm him.
This passion has yet
to be slaked.

Mirabai


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

There is No Word by Tony Hoagland

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers
—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin
plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.
There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you
as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street
chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,
a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,
a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth
what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;
how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—
how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the
misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Solitude by Umberto Saba

The changing seasons, sunlight and darkness,
alter the world, which, in its sunny aspect
comforts us, and with its clouds brings sadness.

And I, who have looked with infinite
tenderness at so many of its guises,
don’t know whether I ought to be sad today

or gladly go on as if a test had been passed;
I’m sad, and yet the day is so beautiful;
only in my heart is there sun and rain.

I can transform a long winter into spring;
where the pathway in the sun is a ribbon
of gold, I bid myself  ”good evening.”

In me alone are my mists and fine weather,
as in me alone is that perfect love
for which I suffered so much and no longer mourn,

let my eyes suffice me, and my heart


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Spellbound by Emily Bronte

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

 Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Pastoral by William Carlos Williams

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.

		 No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Late Echo by John Ashberry

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 22, 2013)

Love by JH Prynne

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 24, 2013)

much against everyone's advice
I have decided to live the life
I want to read about and write it
not by visiting the graves of authors
or moving to london to hear
in my sleep its gothic lullaby
not by going for coastal walks
or being from the north and lathing
every line as an approach it's
way outmoded I run a bath turn
off the lights I think only of
lathering the pale arms of my wife
for now a girl who dreads weekends
then I guess I might as well teach
squandering so as not to squander
this marvellous opportunity right?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 26, 2013)

Resurrection by Roberto Bolano

Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
Poetry, braver than anyone,
slips in and sinks
like lead
through a lake infinite as Loch Ness
or tragic and turbid as Lake Balaton.
Consider it from below:
a diver
innocent
covered in feathers
of will.
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who’s dead
in the eyes of God.


----------



## 8115 (Dec 26, 2013)

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

—_The fear of long words_


On the first day of classes, I secretly beg

my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know

my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—

or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic

of too many consonants rubbed up

against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box

marked Instructor. You want something

to startle you? Try tapping the ball

of roots of a potted tomato plant

into your cupped hand one spring, only

to find a small black toad who kicks

and blinks his cold eye at you,

the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the x-rays

for your teeth or lung. Pray for no

dark spots. You may have

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:

coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing

across your face while you sleep on a sweet, fat couch.

But don’t be afraid of me, my last name, what language

I speak or what accent dulls itself on my molars.

I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam

of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will

lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full of tiny

dinoflagellates oozing green light when disturbed.

I promise dark gatherings of toadfish and comical shrimp

just when you think you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 26, 2013)

dinoflagellates 



> dinoflagellates (Greek δῖνος dinos "whirling" and Latin flagellum "whip, scourge")


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 26, 2013)

Zone Alta by Roberto Bolano

It's nighttime and I'm in the Zone Alta
in Barcelona and I've drunk
more than three cafés con leche
with some people I don't
know beneath a moon that sometimes
seems so miserable and other times
so alone and maybe it's neither
one nor the other and I
haven't drunk coffee but cognac and cognac
and cognac in a glass restaurant
in the Zona Alta and the people I
thought I was with really
don't exist or are faces floating
at the table next to mine
where I'm alone and drunk
spending my money on one edge
of the unknown university.


----------



## brogdale (Dec 27, 2013)

Heard James read this on R4...

 For years we fooled ourselves. Now we can tell
How everyone our age heads for the brink
Where they are drawn into the unplumbed well,
Not to be seen again. How sad, to think 
People we once loved will be with us there
And we not touch them, for it is nowhere.

Never to taste again her pretty mouth!
It’s been forever, though, since last we kissed.
Shadows evaporate as they go south,
Torn, by whatever longings still persist,
Into a tattered wisp, a streak of air,
And then not even that. They get nowhere.

But once inside, you will have no regrets.
You go where no one will remember you.
You go below the sun when the sun sets,
And there is nobody you ever knew
Still visible, nor even the most rare
Hint of a face to humanise nowhere.

Are you to welcome this? It welcomes you.
The only blessing of the void to come
Is that you can relax. Nothing to do,
No cruel dreams of subtracting from your sum
Of follies. About those, at last, you care:
But soon you need not, as you go nowhere.

Into the singularity we fly
After a stretch of time in which we leave
Our lives behind yet know that we will die
At any moment now. A pause to grieve,
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 29, 2013)

Now you walk alone along the piers
of Barcelona.
You smoke a black cigarette and for
a moment think it would be nice
if it rained.
The gods haven't granted you money
but they've granted you strange whims
Look up:
it's raining.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 30, 2013)

I have discovered Gregory Orr

*Trauma (Storm)*
BY GREGORY ORR
Hunkered down, nerve-numb,
in the carnal hut,
the cave of self,
while outside a storm
rages.
  Huddled there,
rubbing together
white sticks of
your own ribs,
praying for sparks
in that dark
where tinder is heart,
where tender is not.


*Self-Portrait at Twenty*
BY GREGORY ORR
I stood inside myself
like a dead tree or a tower.
I pulled the rope
of braided hair
and high above me
a bell of leaves tolled.

Because my hand
stabbed its brother,
I said: Make it stone.

Because my tongue
spoke harshly, I said:
Make it dust.
  And yet
it was not death, but
her body in its green dress
I longed for. That’s why
I stood for days in the field
until the grass turned black
and the rain came.

And, a note to end the day on http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/381


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 31, 2013)

Daybreak by Roberto Bolano

Trust me, I'm in the middle of my room
waiting for rain. I'm alone. I don't care
if I finish my poem or not. I wait for rain,
drinking coffee and through the window watching a beautiful
   landscape
of courtyards, with clothes hanging still,
silent marble clothes in the city, where wind
does not exist and far off you only hear the hum
of a color TV, watched by a family
who's also, at this hour, drinking coffee together around
a table: trust me: the yellow plastic tables
unfold into the horizon and beyond:
into the suburbs where they're building
apartments, and a boy of 16 atop a stack
of red bricks contemplates the machines' movement.
The sky in the boy's hour is an enormous
hollow screw the breeze plays with. And the boy
plays with ideas. With ideas and with frozen scenes.
Inertia is a heavy transparent mist
emerging from his eyes.
Trust me: it isn't love that's drawing near
but beauty with its store of dead dawns.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 1, 2014)

*Love-Letter-Burning by Daniel Hall*

The archivist in us shudders at such cold-
blooded destruction of the word, but since
we're only human, we commit our sins
to the flames. Sauve qui peut; fear makes us bold.

Tanka was bolder: when the weather turned
from fair to frigid, he saw his way clear
to build a sacrificial fire
in which a priceless temple Buddha burned.

(The pretext? Simple: what he sought
was legendary Essence in the ash.
But if it shows up only in the flesh—?
He grinned and said, Let's burn the lot!)

Believers in the afterlife perform
this purifying rite. At last
a match is struck: it's done. The past
will shed some light, but never keep us warm.


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (Jan 1, 2014)

I swear to God I'm tired of these fake ass niggas


 Smash off in the porsche like skurrr!
My nigga smoke kush no purp
If that puss got a bush I'm like NOPE
Hairy pussy bitch you the type that got herpes
I'm a 6 figure nigga you countin' no digits
Fuck a bitch and bust a nut in 4 minutes
Cause I ain't got time for pussy
Why you wish she on type and all kinds of pussy
You the type that hang with niggas you don't like
For the fame that's a shame you're like styleless all hype
I used to drive that all white bimmer
I had that the Porsche it was cleaner
Now I'm 'bout to throw 4's on that bitch
I'm in the party stumping checking 4's on that bitch
And if one fight then we all fight
Boom bap bing nigga on sight


 Nigga I'm a real 1
You do whatever for the fame
You make me wanna click clack bang!
Nigga I'm a real 1
I can't stand you niggas
I be wanting to backhand you niggas
Nigga I'm a real 1
Yeah, all my niggas bangers
Watch how I twist my fingers
Nigga I'm a real 1
If one fight then we all fight
Pop a pill fuck all night


 Rollie on the wrist, Louie on the belt
I'm 'bout call the IRS on myself
AMG benzes, porsches on 4's
Me and Mustard pull up, this a car show
Niggas getting mad but we just getting money
I can be your boothang not your hubby
All the bitches love me, all the bitches love me
If I had a hundred dicks I'd have all the bitches fuck me
New house, new whip, new year, new gold
Same nigga, same shit, same clique, same boss
Nigga I'm a real one
If I ain't got it then I'm steal one
Nigga, I never feel one
I eat the pussy on the first date
Then brush my teeth with colgate
I rather spend money before I spend time
Ask Drake he ain't tell you no lie


 Nigga I'm a real 1
You do whatever for the fame
You make me wanna click clack bang!
Nigga I'm a real 1
I can't stand you niggas
I be wanting to backhand you niggas
Nigga I'm a real 1
Yeah, all my niggas bangers
Watch how I twist my fingers
Nigga I'm a real 1
If one fight then we all fight
Pop a pill fuck all night

Shit nigga I'm a real one
You ain't a real till you kill one
Well click clack bow I'm a real one
Nigga
Can't no nigga tell me nothing 'bout me 
Nah nigga, not me


 Nigga I'm a real 1
You do whatever for the fame
You make me wanna click clack bang!
Nigga I'm a real 1
I can't stand you niggas
I be wanting to backhand you niggas
Nigga I'm a real 1
Yeah, all my niggas bangers
Watch how I twist my fingers
Nigga I'm a real 1
If one fight then we all fight
Pop a pill fuck all night


----------



## artyfarty (Jan 3, 2014)

*Love Song: I And Thou*
Nothing is plumb, level, or square: 
the studs are bowed, the joists 
are shaky by nature, no piece fits 
any other piece without a gap 
or pinch, and bent nails 
dance all over the surfacing 
like maggots. By Christ 
I am no carpenter. I built 
the roof for myself, the walls 
for myself, the floors 
for myself, and got 
hung up in it myself. I 
danced with a purple thumb 
at this house-warming, drunk 
with my prime whiskey: rage. 
Oh I spat rage’s nails 
into the frame-up of my work: 
it held. It settled plumb, 
level, solid, square and true 
for that great moment. Then 
it screamed and went on through, 
skewing as wrong the other way. 
God damned it. This is hell, 
but I planned it, I sawed it, 
I nailed it, and I 
will live in it until it kills me. 
I can nail my left palm 
to the left-hand crosspiece but 
I can’t do everything myself. 
1 need a hand to nail the right, 
a help, a love, a you, a wife. 

Alan Dugan


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## Pickman's model (Jan 4, 2014)

THE VICTORIA PARK SONG THRUSH



On a branch he sits and he warbles away
Bewitchingly sweet through the vernal day.
At dawn he opens his ravishing song,
And his melody rills in a stream along.



Ere the morning star has sunk to its rest
In the far-off mystical moonlit west,
He resumes his perch high up on a plane
And awakes the woodland echoes again.



In spite o' the wind, the rain, and the sleet,
This blithesome throstle clings still to his seat:
Still continues to sing his song of love
And to woo his mate from a bough above.



With music the morning air is fill'd,
And voices many are hush'd and still'd,
While listening ears with a zest devour
The enchanting lay of the twilight hour.



In the voice of a bird rare beauty abides,
In its magic tones a rare spirit resides,
A spirit whose force no man may define,
A spirit whose influence is divine.



'B'
_from a copy of the Shoreditch Observer from 1882_


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 5, 2014)

*THE YELLOW BITTERN

By Seamus Heaney*

*(Translated from An Bonnán Buí in the Irish
of Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna)*

Yellow bittern, there you are now, 
Skin and bone on the frozen shore. 
It wasn’t hunger but thirst for a mouthful 
That left you foundered and me heartsore. 
What odds is it now about Troy’s destruction 
With you on the flagstones upside down, 
Who never injured or hurt a creature 
And preferred bog water to any wine?



Bittern, bittern, your end was awful, 
Your perished skull there on the road, 
You that would call me every morning 
With your gargler’s song as you guzzled mud. 
And that’s what’s ahead of your brother Cathal 
(You know what they say about me and the stuff) 
But they’ve got it wrong and the truth is simple: 
A drop would have saved that croaker’s life.

I am saddened, bittern, and broken hearted 
To find you in scrags in the rushy tufts, 
And the big rats scampering down the rat paths 
To wake your carcass and have their fun. 
If you could have got word to me in time, bird, 
That you were in trouble and craved a sup, 
I’d have struck the fetters of those lough waters 
And wet your thrapple with the blow I struck.



Your common birds do not concern me, 
The blackbird, say, or the thrush or crane, 
But the yellow bittern, my heartsome namesake 
With my looks and locks, he’s the one I mourn. 
Constantly he was drinking, drinking, 
And by all accounts I’ve a name for it too, 
But every drop I get I’ll sink it 
For fear I might get my end from drouth.

The woman I love says to give it up now 
Or else I’ll go to an early grave, 
But I say no and keep resisting 
For taking drink’s what prolongs your days. 
You saw for yourself a while ago 
What happened to the bird when its throat went dry; 
So my friends and neighbours, let it flow: 
You’ll be stood no rounds in eternity.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 5, 2014)

I was unable to find an online version of the translation of that poem that I first read so I photographed it for your enjoyment


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 7, 2014)

Done
by Chery Moskowitz

Tonight I want to be read aloud to in bed.
I'm done with eyes and deciphering lines.
Done with looking too close,
that seeing thing.
FInished with the grip of the pen
or even being the teller of stories.
Leave that to others now -
tonight I will savour only your voice;
paperless, weightless
without permanence.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 8, 2014)

"Terence, this is stupid stuff"
AE Houseman

‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 10, 2014)

*Everything is Waiting for You*
*By David Whyte*

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.


----------



## Autochthonous1 (Jan 12, 2014)

Are we allowed to post ones we've written ourselves? Well, since there hasn't been one today, I'll go ahead.

I recently wrote it for my ex, RaverDrew .



*The Dubstep is Not the Same Without You*

*You took my bass away,
And it's wobble,
You arsehole.
Bass face deflated.
My waveform is flat.
Walls no longer shake.
Windows do not vibrate.
Since you departed,
My dub is broken hearted.


*​


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2014)

My grandma by Panayotis Skordos

My grandma died a month ago,
I'd like to miss her but I can't.
Her life suddenly has ended
all she has seen and felt and learned.

Years ago, deep in the marble,
a different sky, a different sand,
she told me stories, she kept my secrets,
she gave me food, she held my hand.

We surfed the years, my nose got longer,
the world expanded, we grew apart.
But in the cave the beast remains
a little jewel, a little spark.

Her times were magic, forever secret,
her parents, her tears, her dreams, her heart.
She breathes the twenties and lives the wars,
she was a girl and is no more.

Crystalline waters and sugary waves
bathe her island under the sun.
Her life has ended, her spirit remains,
another light has joined the sun.


----------



## yardbird (Jan 14, 2014)

Afterlife

I have found something for you to do, body, when you’ve stopped carrying me. Your loyal if short-lived service has moved me in so many ways. I didn’t want to leave

you with limited options; you’ve behaved so differently to others’ bodies. I honour that. I’ve written to the faculty and they’ve accepted you for a new role.

You will work with the students, opening out the secrets of how you and I lasted together as long as we did, in the circumstances. The lines you’ve rewritten with blood and bile,

the prose-purple of our shared organs. notches etched on the heart, will act as a text-book love-letter to the future. Body, know that I’m sad to leave.

Sara Nesbitt

This was read at The Hippocrates Prize awards 2013.
Written following the death of her mother who was the most important person in my life.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 14, 2014)

This made me smile very much 
*
THE NAMING OF CATS by TS Eliot*

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter 
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey –
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter –
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover –
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.


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## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2014)

For Jan Palach, a Name Drawn by Lot, on the Anniversary of His Death the Third Day after Attempted Self-Immolation in Protest of Communist Occupation of Czechoslovakia, January 19, 1969

I taught in your building once, 
the one renamed for you 
by the professors of philosophy, 
a beautiful four-square block 
of a building built to last centuries, 
facing west into the hills backing 
the great Vltava.

  Afternoons
in class, looking across the river 
through the wall-high windows, 
I could see the thousand-year-old 
crown of the Castle glittering, 
and at night, standing on the Charles,
celestial above the city.

	From here,
in the old ghetto, at the new century, 
it looked benign, like a blessing 
on your house and the half-dozen 
synagogues and dozen blocks
of dwellings brought back to life 
after your cold war imitation

of the bonze priests in Vietnam, 
who chose fighting fire with fire. 
You almost died, then did, writing, 
between life and death, that 
I do not want anyone to imitate me. 
The Soviets ignored you, though 
they were mortal too in twenty years.

If I’d written your name with the poets 
on the board, someone whose job it was 
would’ve come along and erased it, 
which is why pink marble and a plaque 
were mounted at the entrance
of the building, whose former name 
now no one can remember.

	The námêsti,
the square that bears your name, 
bore the names of soldiers 
of the young Red Army—until nineteen
eighty-nine, the year no one had to die, 
not God nor Kafka, for whom the fire 
to warm the icy world was words.

Stanley Plumly


----------



## Ceej (Jan 18, 2014)

*Sans pretension by Henry Normal*
We say 'cul de sac'
To make 'dead end' sound sunny.
We say 'nouveau riche'
Instead of working class with money.
We call art 'avant-garde'
When we don't understand it.
Jumble sales sell 'bric-a-brac'
Which must be French for shit.
Let's call a spud a spud,
No more lies or elaborate word contortions.
Chips are chips
Not pomme frites or french fries.
Why say 'haute cuisine' when you mean 'smaller portions'.
No more saying we had a 'tete a tete'
When you mean you've been nagging
Bragging or just chin wagging,
And no more calling it a 'menage a trois'
When you mean three people shagging.


----------



## Autochthonous1 (Jan 19, 2014)

I wrote another fucking poem, bitches. It's called:

*PANSEXUAL

I kiss a grill and I liked it,*
*I licked a pan,*
*It was saucy,*
*Frying*
*Pan*
*Sexual.*


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## Autochthonous1 (Jan 23, 2014)

*Sorry for calling you ''you bitches'' above, I was drunk when I wrote that.
*
The Beautiful Poem*

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.


3 A.M. January 15, 1967, Richard Brautigan.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 25, 2014)

Smokey the Bear Sutra by Gary Snyder

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a
seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning
Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

"In some future time, there will be a continent called
America. It will have great centers of power called
such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur,
Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels
such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon
The human race in that era will get into troubles all over
its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of
its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature."

"The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings
of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth.
My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and
granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that
future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure
the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger:
and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."

And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and
watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless
attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display -- indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;
Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a
civilization that claims to save but often destroys;
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the True Path of man on earth: all true paths lead through mountains --
With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of
those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;
Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and
totalitarianism;
Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes;
master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten
trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.
Wrathful but Calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will
Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or
slander him,
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana
Sphataya hum traka ham nam
"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND
BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED"
And he will protect those who love woods and rivers,
Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick
people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television,
or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out
with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.
Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.
AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.

thus have we heard.

_(may be reproduced free forever)_


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 25, 2014)

Tonight is Burns Night. I hope you have all prepared your Haggis.

I don't know much about Robert Burns. I have his complete poetical works, and I have read quite a few of them. The poems that I like the most are the ones I have heard as songs. 

*Now Westlin Winds*

Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring autumn's pleasant weather
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather
Now waving grain, wild o'er the plain
Delights the weary farmer
And the moon shines bright as I rove at night
To muse upon my charmer

The partridge loves the fruitful fells
The plover loves the mountain
The woodcock haunts the lonely dells
The soaring hern the fountain
Through lofty groves the cushat roves
The path of man to shun it
The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush
The spreading thorn the linnet

Thus every kind their pleasure find
The savage and the tender
Some social join and leagues combine
Some solitary wander
Avaunt! Away! the cruel sway,
Tyrannic man's dominion
The sportsman's joy, the murdering cry
The fluttering, gory pinion

But Peggy dear the evening's clear
Thick flies the skimming swallow
The sky is blue, the fields in view
All fading green and yellow
Come let us stray our gladsome way
And view the charms of nature
The rustling corn, the fruited thorn
And every happy creature

We'll gently walk and sweetly talk
Till the silent moon shines clearly
I'll grasp thy waist and, fondly pressed,
Swear how I love thee dearly
Not vernal showers to budding flowers
Not autumn to the farmer
So dear can be as thou to me
My fair, my lovely charmer

*Highland Widows Lament*

Oh I am come to the low Countrie,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Without a penny in my purse,
To buy a meal to me.

It was na sae in the Highland hills,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Nae woman in the Country wide,
Sae happy was as me.

For then I had a score o'kye,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Feeding on you hill sae high,
And giving milk to me.

And there I had three score o'yowes,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Skipping on yon bonie knowes,
And casting woo' to me.

I was the happiest of a' the Clan,
Sair, sair, may I repine;
For Donald was the brawest man,
And Donald he was mine.

Till Charlie Stewart cam at last,
Sae far to set us free;
My Donald's arm was wanted then,
For Scotland and for me.

Their waefu' fate what need I tell,
Right to the wrang did yield;
My Donald and his Country fell,
Upon Culloden field.

Oh I am come to the low Countrie,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Nae woman in the warld wide,
Sae wretched now as me.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 25, 2014)

He's great - i fnd him hard going on paper, and like you, seem to catch on more to the ones i have heard out loud or done as songs. Heard a brilliant night of his stuff read out/peformed in Bath a few years back. Cliched i know, but brought then to life. Some of them really angrily.


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## Santino (Jan 25, 2014)

*Five Hundred Mile*

When I awauken from my rest
I ken ye’ll be there at my breast
When I fare abroad, I ken that thee
Will fare abroad along wi’ me.
When rairin fou and in my cups
I ken ye’ll match me, sup for sup
And if I haver, and speak no matter,
It’s to ye, I’ll gab and yatter.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m sweitin wi’ ma trauchle,
It’s for thee that I strauchle.
And when I ha’ my penny-fee,
Near every penny goes to thee.
When hame-throu my journey tak me
If ye be there, then hame’ll dae me.
And if I come an eildit man,
I ken we’ll grow auld, hand in hand.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m on ma lane and lanesome,
It’s for want of ye I’m waesome.
When in ma bed I lie a-sleeping,
It’s days with ye that fill ma dreaming.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.


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## Superdupastupor (Jan 25, 2014)

wee sleekit cowerin timorous beastie


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jan 25, 2014)

Dillinger4 Might speel out 'such a parcel of rogues in a nation' to a confused crowd of euros tonight  
'the diel awa wi the exscise man' - 

t


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 25, 2014)

It's not Burns but it's tangentally related because I heard this the other day

And was quite taken with the lyric '..has a heart warm as a cup of tea'. so I looked it up and found the full thing which is a much less satisfying read. I was quite surprised by teh language as I had heard it sung by a plummy, well-to-do choir but it made me investigate the author a little bit and the American minstrel song writing.


*Nelly Bly*
By Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864)

NELLY BLY! Nelly Bly! bring de broom along,—
We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear, and hab a little song.
Poke de wood, my lady lub, and make de fire burn,
And while I take de banjo down, just gib de mush a turn.

Heigh! Nelly, Ho! Nelly,_ 5_
Listen, lub, to me;
I’ll sing for you, I’ll play for you,
A dulcem melody.
Nelly Bly hab a voice like de turtle dove,—
I hears it in de meadow and I hears it in de grove;_ 10_
Nelly Bly hab a heart warm as a cup ob tea,
And bigger dan de sweet potato down in Tennessee.

Nelly Bly shuts her eye when she goes to sleep;
When she wakens up again her eyeballs gin to peep;
De way she walks, she lifts her foot, and den she brings it down,_ 15_
And when it lights der’s music dah in dat part ob de town.

Nelly Bly! Nelly Bly! nebber, nebber sigh,—
Nebber bring de tear-drop to de corner ob your eye;
For de pie is made ob punkins, and de mush is made ob corn,
And der’s corn and punkins plenty, lub, lying in de barn._ 20_

Heigh! Nelly, Ho! Nelly,
Listen, lub, to me;
I’ll sing for you, I’ll play for you,
A dulcem melody.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 25, 2014)

I couldn't find it on t'internet but I liked this. I read it to ShiftyJunior and he said "He means love'


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## Autochthonous1 (Jan 25, 2014)

More by Brautigan.


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## Greebo (Jan 25, 2014)

A Man's A Man For A' That
by Robert Burns

Is there for honest Poverty 
That hings his head, an' a' that; 
The coward slave-we pass him by, 
We dare be poor for a' that! 
For a' that, an' a' that. 
Our toils obscure an' a' that, 
The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The Man's the gowd for a' that. 

What though on hamely fare we dine, 
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that; 
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; 
A Man's a Man for a' that: 
For a' that, and a' that, 
Their tinsel show, an' a' that; 
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 
Is king o' men for a' that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, 
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that; 
Tho' hundreds worship at his word, 
He's but a coof for a' that: 
For a' that, an' a' that, 
His ribband, star, an' a' that: 
The man o' independent mind 
He looks an' laughs at a' that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight, 
A marquis, duke, an' a' that; 
But an honest man's abon his might, 
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that! 
For a' that, an' a' that, 
Their dignities an' a' that; 
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, 
Are higher rank than a' that. 

Then let us pray that come it may, 
(As come it will for a' that,) 
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth, 
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that. 
For a' that, an' a' that, 
It's coming yet for a' that, 
That Man to Man, the world o'er, 
Shall brothers be for a' that.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 27, 2014)

"Who's Who"

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

	   -- W.H. Auden


----------



## Autochthonous1 (Jan 29, 2014)

*ADRENALIN MOTHER*

Adrenalin Mother,
with your dress of comets
and shoes of swift bird wings
and shadow of jumping fish,
thank you for touching,
understanding and loving my life.
Without you, I am dead.

Brautigan.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 29, 2014)

The Giveaway by Phyllis McGinley

Saint Brigid was
A problem child.
Although a lass
Demure and mild,
And one who strove
To please her dad,
Saint Brigid drove
The family mad.
For here's the fault in Brigid lay:
She WOULD give everything away.

To any soul
Whose luck was out
She'd give her bowl
Of stirabout;
She'd give her shawl,
Divide her purse
With one or all.
And what was worse,
When she ran out of things to give
She'd borrow from a relative.

Her father's gold,
Her grandsire's dinner,
She'd hand to cold
and hungry sinner;
Give wine, give meat,
No matter whose;
Take from her feet
The very shoes,
And when her shoes had gone to others,
Fetch forth her sister's and her mother's.

She could not quit.
She had to share;
Gave bit by bit
The silverware,
The barnyard geese,
The parlor rug,
Her little
niece's christening mug,
Even her bed to those in want,
And then the mattress of her aunt.

An easy touch
For poor and lowly,
She gave so much
And grew so holy
That when she died
Of years and fame,
The countryside
Put on her name,
And still the Isles of Erin fidget
With generous girls named Bride or Brigid.

Well, one must love her.
Nonetheless,
In thinking of her
Givingness,
There's no denial
She must have been
A sort of trial
Unto her kin.
The moral, too, seems rather quaint.
WHO had the patience of a saint,
From evidence presented here?
Saint Brigid? Or her near and dear?


----------



## Sirena (Jan 29, 2014)

*Gretel in Darkness*

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Louise Glück


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2014)

"September 1913"

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

 -- WB Yeats


----------



## Autochthonous1 (Jan 31, 2014)

*STARFUCKS IN STARBUCKS*

The queue was eight minutes long,
So I had plenty of time to look;
The back of her wavy silk hair,
Her most excellent hips and arse,  
Occasionally, the side of her face.
I knew her name; 
It was written on her cup,
Unless she's like me,
And says a different one each day,
Just for kicks.
Today I was Sandra.
But only because they got it wrong.
Maybe Hannah has identity issues too.

By Autochthonous1, October 2013


----------



## maya (Feb 3, 2014)

*The Hand That Signed The Paper*

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.


- _Dylan Thomas_


----------



## Greebo (Feb 8, 2014)

Mud

By candle light anger flickers 
Children raised by children fight 
To lift them selves from ashes 
Hopes and fears of a new life drive 

A revolution 
A rebellion 

Under velvet water chains drown 
Chewed free by desperation 
Every old habit dies hard 
All dreams are held down by something 

A miracle 
A spark 

Light your fires 
Let your eyes awake 
Everything cast a shadow 
Every shadow has a light 
There is no such thing as fear 
Only lack of adventure 
Let go 
Breathe 

Hot wind blows down dominance 
Your not needed to reach down 
Try to lift us up no more 
Raising our selves is what we’ve done 

Our hands 
Our will 

From the mud a smile shines bright 
Freedom playing in its new ears 
No shame have they learned, no hate 
New eyes search for ways to improve 

A life 
A love 

Light your fires 
Let your eyes awake 
Everything cast a shadow 
Every shadow has a light 
There is no such thing as fear 
Only lack of adventure 
Let go 
Breathe 

The flames still glare as a passion 
Chains still drown and hot winds swirl 
Mud is dirt and decay mixed with 
Pain and suffering, shoe imprints 
Sky water 

What’s left 
From the ashes 
From the dirt 
From the rain 

Comes mud

Azlynn Jane Andrews


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 10, 2014)

Mad Girl's Love Song
by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)


----------



## idumea (Feb 12, 2014)

*An Arundel Tomb*
Philip Larkin 

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd–
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainess of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor’s sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 12, 2014)

Unfastidious

I'd love to flirt/charm/be proactive,
I find you sweet/funny/attractive,
You're far too absent/distant/out of sight,
I wish you'd come over/call me/write.

Meghan Marie


----------



## dessiato (Feb 12, 2014)

This is one of my favourites, mainly for the last five lines, and for the lines about The Pirates.

*Steps*
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting's not so blue

where's Lana Turner
she's out eating
and Garbo's backstage at the Met
everyone's taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we're all winning
we're alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much 

Frank O'Hara


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## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 13, 2014)

*You would have understood me, had you waited*
_By Ernest Christopher Dowson_

You would have understood me, had you waited;
I could have loved you, dear! as well as he:
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated
Always to disagree.

What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
Shall I reproach you dead?

Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover
All the old anger, setting us apart:
Always, in all, in truth was I your lover;
Always, I held your heart.

I have met other women who were tender,
As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare.
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender,
I who had found you fair?

Had we been patient, dear! ah, had you waited,
I had fought death for you, better than he:
But from the very first, dear! we were fated
Always to disagree.

Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses
Love that in life was not to be our part:
On your low lying mound between the roses,
Sadly I cast my heart.

I would not waken you: nay! this is fitter;
Death and the darkness give you unto me;
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter,
Hardly can disagree.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 13, 2014)

*To A Lost Love*
_By Ernest Christopher Dowson_

I seek no more to bridge the gulf that lies
Betwixt our separate ways;
For vainly my heart prays,
Hope droops her head and dies;
I see the sad, tired answer in your eyes.

I did not heed, and yet the stars were clear;
Dreaming that love could mate
Lives grown so separate;--
But at the best, my dear,
I see we should not have been very near.

I knew the end before the end was nigh:
The stars have grown so plain;
Vainly I sigh, in vain
For things that come to some,
But unto you and me will never come.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 14, 2014)

Flirting with a Brick Wall

It's kind of like when you want something sweet
And all there is are a bunch of old bitter hard candies
Sitting in your grandma's rusted bowl
On the coffee table in the dim living room and
That candy probably isn't there for eating but just for
Decoration or something,
So you pick one out anyway and it's not all that great
Even though that's exactly what you'd expect

But that little part of you said 
"Maybe this won't be
another rock solid butterscotch chew"
Because you hoped this time would be different
But you thought wrong
And you'll probably end up eating another
Because it's
Better than nothing

uhhhhhhh


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 14, 2014)

The following remains one of my favourite poems. If I remember correctly, I read it here first. It was posted by pickmans model about five years ago. It was one of a few things that really ignited my love of poetry (the other being Roberto Bolano) from something that I passively enjoyed as much as any person who reads into a bit of an obsession (thanks a lot pickmans for ruining my life with poetry) The last verse has stuck with me ever since. It really moves me. It is keeping with the decadent poet theme of the last few poems posted by shiftybaglady. 

Stella Maris by Arthur Symons. 

Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo. 
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay, 
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell, 
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 14, 2014)

That's beautiful.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 16, 2014)

I am reading The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross:



> The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer Elisee Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.



Here's to the communards

Parisian War Song by Arthur Rimbaud

Spring is here, plain as day,
Thiers and Picard steal away
From what they stole: green Estates
With vernal splendours on display

May: a jubilee of nudity, asses on parade
Sevres, Meudon, Bagneux, Asnieries - 
New arrivals make their way, 
Sowing springtime everywhere.

They've got shakos, sabers, and tom-toms,
Not those useless old smouldering stakes
And skiffs "_that nev-nev-never did cut..."_
Through the reddening waters of the lakes.

Now more than ever we'll band together
When golden gems blow out our knees.
Watch as they burst on our crumbling heaps:
You've never seen dawns like these.

Thiers and Picard think they're artists
Painting Corots with gasoline.
They pick flowers from public gardens, 
Their tropes traipsing from seam to seam...

Their intimates of the Big Man, and Favre,
From the flowerbeds where he's sleeping,
Undams an aqeductal flow of tears: a pinch
of pepper prompts adequate weeping...

The stones of the city are hot, 
Despite all of your gasoline showers.
Doubtless an appropriate moment
To roust your kind from power...

And the Nouveau Riche lolling peacefully
Beneath the shade of ancient trees, 
Will hear the boughs break overhead:
Red Rustlings that won't be leaves!


----------



## Ceej (Feb 18, 2014)

*O sweet spontaneous by e.e cummings*

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)


----------



## sojourner (Feb 21, 2014)

*Beghilos*

4.31 am.
The gas demanded 50p.
“god’s in every calculator”
sighed Mr Leary,
quietly,
into his gin.

Silence.
Felt his words bend and reverse,
remembering the beginning.
In the
was the
_Word_
and the Word was _with_
and the Word _was_

ESSO
ShELLOIL
gEESE and
gOOLIES
hELLO
ShOES
or a
BOOBLESS gOOSE
but
	   not god.
	   No ‘d’, see.​
“Mr Leary?”

5.33 am, numb.
Rummaged for hexagonal warmth.
Mr Leary laughed, refused to be drawn.
I ruminated on numerological representations of entities we cannot conceive or conceptualise; on the transformation of text.

6.06 am.
First bus home.
Fingered ‘dog’ in condensation.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Feb 21, 2014)

*Poema XV de Pablo Neruda - 

Me gustas cuando callas... *

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente, 
y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca. 
Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado 
y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca. 

Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma 
emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía. 
Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma, 
y te pareces a la palabra melancolía. 

Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante. 
Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo. 
Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza: 
déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo. 

Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio 
claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo. 
Eres como la noche, callada y constelada. 
Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo. 

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente. 
Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto. 
Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan. 
Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.*


 Translation:

I like for you to be still. 
*
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent, 
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you. 
It seems as though your eyes had flown away 
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth. 

As all things are filled with my soul 
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul. 
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream, 
and you are like the word Melancholy. 

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away. 
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove. 
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you: 
Let me come to be still in your silence. 

And let me talk to you with your silence 
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring. 
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations. 
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid. 

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent, 
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died. 
One word then, one smile, is enough. 
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.*


*


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 21, 2014)

America by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, "Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 21, 2014)

Personal by Tony Hoagland

_Don’t take it personal_, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

_Enjoy it while you can_, they said of Happiness
_Think first_, they said of Talk

_Get over it_, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with _I’m-Sorries_

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.


----------



## sojourner (Feb 21, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> Personal by Tony Hoagland
> 
> _Don’t take it personal_, they said;
> but I did, I took it all quite personal—
> ...


 That's serious fucking quality that


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 22, 2014)

sojourner said:


> That's serious fucking quality that



init


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 22, 2014)

Morning by Maitreyabandhu

Every day I do nothing now -
light candles, drink tea, sit
in the old chair and watch
the usual slow-drift clouds.

Ash branches move together
in up-and-down beckoning
and the corner of a school
redbrick, pale brick, slate -

hums with children's voices.
Everyday I say to myself
Wait now, Gentle now... but
the carpet is a desert-place

of camels and palm trees
and someone comes in
with a message and a drink.
I should be doing nothing now -

undoing myself, waiting for
the pigeon flock of thought
to circle round the roof and
settle in the rafters of the house.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 22, 2014)

Late Fragment 

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver


----------



## Greebo (Feb 24, 2014)

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing. 

You know how this is: 
if I look 
at the crystal moon, at the red branch 
of the slow autumn at my window, 
if I touch 
near the fire 
the impalpable ash 
or the wrinkled body of the log, 
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. 

Well, now, 
if little by little you stop loving me 
I shall stop loving you little by little. 

If suddenly 
you forget me 
do not look for me, 
for I shall already have forgotten you. 

If you think it long and mad, 
the wind of banners 
that passes through my life, 
and you decide 
to leave me at the shore 
of the heart where I have roots, 
remember 
that on that day, 
at that hour, 
I shall lift my arms 
and my roots will set off 
to seek another land. 

But 
if each day, 
each hour, 
you feel that you are destined for me 
with implacable sweetness, 
if each day a flower 
climbs up to your lips to seek me, 
ah my love, ah my own, 
in me all that fire is repeated, 
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, 
my love feeds on your love, beloved, 
and as long as you live it will be in your arms 
without leaving mine. 

Pablo Neruda


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 25, 2014)

Happy birthday Ret Marut/B Traven/many other names:

When I die 
let the black rag fly 
raven falling 
from the sky.

Let the black flag lie 
on bones and skin 
that long last night 
as I enter in.

For out of black 
soul's night have stirred 
dawn's cold gleam, 
morning's singing bird.

Let black day die, 
let black flag fall, 
let raven call, 
let new day dawn 
of black reborn.

George Woodcock (Sir).


----------



## Ceej (Feb 25, 2014)

butchersapron said:


> Happy birthday Ret Marut/B Traven/many other names:
> George Woodcock (Sir).


 
One of my favourite favourites ever. First heard this spoken in a Welsh pub, looking at the black sky, the dark mountains and a spectacular moon.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 1, 2014)

‘Their Lonely Betters’ by W.H. Auden

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 1, 2014)

diwrnod yn hapus dewi sant

‘The Bright Field’ by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 3, 2014)

No, Nothing Happened There

No, nothing happened there between us two.
Confessions none, no secrets to reveal.
No obligations had we to pursue,
But for the springtide fancies so unreal;

But for the fragrances and colors bright
That floated freely in the mirthful air,
But for the singing groves by day or night,
And all the green and fragrant meadows there;

But for the brooks and waterfalls up high
That cheerfully sprinkled every gorge and dell,
But for the clouds and rainbows in the sky,
But for the nature’s of all sweetest spell.

But for the lucid fountains we did share,
Wherefrom our hearts would drink delights so true,
But for the primroses and bindweeds there,
No, nothing happened there between us two.

Adam Asnyk (trans. by Jarek Zawadzki)


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 4, 2014)

*Song: Rarely, rarely, comest thou*
*BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
*
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
 Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
 Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou are fled away.

How shall ever one like me
 Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
 Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
 Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismay'd;
 Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
 To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
 Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
 Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,
 And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
 Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
 Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
 And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good;
 Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love—though he has wings,
 And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
 Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! Oh come,
Make once more my heart thy home.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 5, 2014)

I can't find a copy and pastable text of this, so here: hear the man himself read it


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 5, 2014)

Die Stalin die

We Live, Not Feeling

We live, not feeling the country beneath us,
Our speech inaudible ten steps away,
But where they're up to half a conversation -
They'll speak of the Kremlin mountain man.

His thick fingers are fat like worms,
And his words certain as pound weights.
His cockroach whiskers laugh,
And the top of his boots glisten.

And all around his rabble of thick-skinned leaders,
He plays through services of half-people.
Some whistle, some meow, some snivel,
He alone merely caterwauls and prods.

Like horseshoes he forges decree after decree-
Some get it in the forehead, some in the brow,
some in the groin, and some in the eye.
Whatever the execution - it's a raspberry to him
And his Georgian chest is broad.

 Osip Mandelstam 

(other translations available)


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 5, 2014)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I can't find a copy and pastable text of this, so here: hear the man himself read it




Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,-a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea

77 dream songs here.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 5, 2014)




----------



## Greebo (Mar 5, 2014)




----------



## Greebo (Mar 6, 2014)

EVE TO THE SERPENT

I’m stretched on tiptoes, and I know
your eyes are flicking over me -
at my sex especially - and look,
I twist the stalk and snap -
I pluck the apple carefully,
because it is precious, 
green, unblemished,
and wrong. I want it 
more than I’ve ever wanted
anything. I wonder about the skin, 
how my teeth will puncture it 
and about the flesh, how hard
and white it will be, how sweet,
You told me, didn’t you? -
it would be the sweetest thing
I’d ever had in my mouth,
its juice would slide down my throat
like nectar, like ambrosia,
and do me so much good.
I could just stand here with it
in my hand and you could writhe
in your complicated skin, your tongue
darting and quivering. This could be
the longest afternoon of our lives.

Catherine Smith


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 6, 2014)

Introduced ShiftyJunior to Betjemen this evening

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.


----------



## Santino (Mar 6, 2014)

Betjeman was a bit of a dick, wasn't he?


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 7, 2014)

Santino said:


> Betjeman was a bit of a dick, wasn't he?


In what way?
Wouldn't surprise me though, a lot of poets of that era were thoroughly dislikeable.


----------



## Santino (Mar 7, 2014)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> In what way?


Despising people who eat tinned food, for a start.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 7, 2014)

Casanever

To most men, the notion
Of 'romance and mystery'
Means clearing the porn from
Their internet history.

Nic Aubury


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 7, 2014)

Santino said:


> Despising people who eat tinned food, for a start.


Ah. Well so long as he wasn't a raging fascist I don't mind that so much...
We have to draw a line somewhere, tinned food seems a reasonable place to start


----------



## Santino (Mar 7, 2014)

Although Betjeman is thought of as a nice old cove, and Larkin as a grumpy sod, Larkin was a much more generous observer of other people than Betjeman, who was a terrible snob.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 8, 2014)

Intimacy

Nineteen days without you when I woke,
one morning, full with what I lacked;
laid in the bath finding evidence
of your absence and my neglect.
I shaved my underams and legs
plucked my eyebrows, shaped my pubes
and used my tiny scissors to snip
an errant hair.  I paid attention again
to detail, tried to look at my body
the way you would - knowing
that I would drive out, that day,
to find you - that after our frantic urgency,
or that slowed motion when (somehow)
you trip it and we keep going on
and on - knowing that, after this,
you would examine every inch of me,
your blue-gray eyes drunk with it,
you rolling that one word around
your mouth like a jelly bean _gorgeous.
gorgeous.  You're so gorgeous..._
Later, you take my right breast
between your teeth, skim your tongue
across my nipple, ask: _Where's it gone?
I miss it.  there was just a single one._

Elizabeth Barrett


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

by WS Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colour.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

The Prediction by Mark Strand

That night the moon drifted over the pond, 
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees, 
a young woman walked, and for an instant

the future came to her:
rain falling on her husband's grave, rain falling
on the lawns of her children, her own mouth
filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,

a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,
a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death
thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind rising
and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.


----------



## RedDragon (Mar 8, 2014)

*Not Waving but Drowning*

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning. 

Stevie Smith


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

A Blessing by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

Peaches by Donald Hall

A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branche;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech to you peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

Mid August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Gary Snyder

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
looking down for miles
through high still air.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 8, 2014)

The English Are So Nice! by DH Lawrence

The English are so nice
So awfully nice
They are the nicest people in the world.

And what's more, they're very nice about being nice
About your being nice as well! 
If your not nice they will soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
They're all very well
But they're not _really_ nice, you know
They're not nice in _our_ sense of the word, are they now?

That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 8, 2014)

*Shakespeare**, SONNET 27*

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head, 
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) 
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, 
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, 
Looking on darkness which the blind do see: 
Save that my soul's imaginary sight 
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, 
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
 Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
 For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2014)

Guacamole*

Avocadoes were somewhere on the lust-list
we made sate on the floor of room 404
_write down,_ you said, _write down every wicked
little dirty thing you'd like us to try._  I pitted
the felt-tip against my teeth, then whispered:
_I want you to carefully split a ripe avocado,
loosen its pip, scoop out the warm yellowy
flesh and squeeze it to a gentle pulp, then - 
_
I stopped - back suddenly at my mother's side,
eye-level with hip and kitchen top, glued to
her hands as she cuts and twists the wizened pears,
mashes in garlic, the devil-tailed chillies, a
spalsh of lime.  Ravenous, open-mouthed, I crave
to lick the buttery mush between her fingers,
the jaded smear from her wrist, to suck her
wedding ring, to suck her wedding ring clean.

Kaddy Benyon

*I remembered this one after reading the avocado thread in suburban.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 12, 2014)

And Pigs Might Fly

It was crisis day in the parliament 
The house was hushed and still. 
A member rose with a question 
“Are we doomed to go downhill?” 
“I am confident of an upturn”, 
The PM made reply. 
“If workers pay is held at bay, 
We'll all be home and dry.” 
“How true, how true”, cried the workers. 
“Let's end this wicked strike. 
We don't want a rise in wages, 
They can stick it where they like.” 
“Thank God, Thank God”, sobbed the bosses. 
“There's faith on the factory floor. 
And now we've got this extra lot 
We'll give it to the poor.” 
They filled their pockets with money 
And ran with eager feet 
Pressing their surplus profits 
On the people in the street. 
They moved among the dole queues 
And boarded every bus 
With streaming eyes and heartfelt cries 
“You need it more than us”. 
Soon all the people prospered 
And the devil became a saint 
Now the sober unions 
Had exercised restraint. 
The cities were filled with singing 
And the sound of laughter spread 
As hand took hand in the golden land 
and pigs flew overhead.

author not known


----------



## Mikey77 (Mar 13, 2014)

Writer's block
holds me back like a soft cock
let me think for one moment
I feel it presently I am impotent

At my best I've not a care
but it's rare that I'm there
If I was poet laureate I'd get the sack
But my high standards are those of a megalomaniac

Thanks...


----------



## fractionMan (Mar 13, 2014)

Toby Thompson, on studying Shakespeare in Secondary school


----------



## Greebo (Mar 13, 2014)

Tout fait l'amour. Et moi j'ajoute,
Lorsque tu dis : "Tout fait l'amour":
Même le pas avec la route
La baguette avec le tambour.

Même le doigt avec la bague,
Même la rime et la raison,
Même le vent avec la vague,
Le regard avec l'horizon...

G. Nouveau


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 14, 2014)

Greebo said:


> T
> 
> G. Nouveau


tf:cr

(too foreign:can't read)


----------



## Greebo (Mar 14, 2014)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> tf:cr
> 
> (too foreign:can't read)


Sorry.  I deliberately put the original first because the rhythm's so punchy even if you don't understand most of it.  A quick and dirty translation follows...

Everyone makes love.  And I'll add to that,
When you say it:  "Everything makes love":
Even the step with the path,
The beater with the tambour.

Even the finger with the ring,
Even rhyme with reason,
Even the wind with the wave,
The gaze with the horizon...

G. Nouveau


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 15, 2014)

Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers by Robert Dawson

The ones you notice first are the natural  numbers.
Everybody knows their names; they are the anchors,
the stars, the alphas, the reference points. And of course
the rational numbers, who hang out with them,
sit next to them in arithmetic class.
It must be admitted that some are sidekicks,
spear carriers; _11/17_  for instance
is never likely to make headlines.
But the Grade Eight teacher makes sure they all fit in.
Then in high school you start to notice the others, the misfits.
They have weird names, refuse to conform,
are the subjects of sinister rumors:
_Did you hear about that Pythagorean ritual murder?
Yeah, creepy: something like that happens,
you bet there’s an irrational mixed up in it. You want
to watch yourself around them. One numerator,
one denominator, that’s what I say._

But not all irrational numbers are the same.
Consider _e_ : poster child for “It Gets Better”.
Awkward and poorly approximated for the first few terms,
but _1⁄n!_  gets small so fast
that soon _e _is accepted among the rationals
almost as one of their own. They privately feel
that _e _’s exotic air of the transcendental
indicates their own cosmopolitan taste.
Good marks in calculus, outstanding in Theory of Interest.
Ambition:  to get an MBA.

And _π_:  happy-go-lucky, Whole-Earth-Catalog spirit,
equally at home in Stats or Industrial Arts.
No one can really explain why _π _ gets on
so flirtingly well with some denominators,
the sevenths, say, or the hundredandthirteenths.
and not with others. That’s just how things are.
But the fit’s never perfect, and some day you’ll see _π _
leaning against a signpost,  thumb-out by the side of the highway,
living in the moment, destination anywhere,
waiting for the wind to change.

_φ _, long-haired, dressed in black, with a pentacle pendant,
and ill-fitting T-shirt depicting Stonehenge or the Pyramids.
Talks about sunflowers, crystals, numerology,
doesn’t get on with any fractions at all.
It’s hard to be sure if they avoid _φ _ or _φ _them; but every chance
for approximation misses by the largest possible margin.
1 + 1⁄(1 + 1⁄(1 + 1⁄(1 + ...)))  is the loneliest number.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 15, 2014)

Geometry by Rita Dove

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 15, 2014)

The Invention of Zero by Derek Collins

"The Muslims invented zero"
the taxi driver says
as he drives me home from the dentist.
Back at school in Kashmir
he'd been good at maths
encouraged that it was Muslims
who'd given zero a symbol,
a name, sifr. He's right.
I'd read in Dantzig's book, "Number",
how the Greeks could not imagine
the void, nothingness, as a number,
left it to the Arabs to lass emptiness
in a small circle, give it power
just as the dentist has filled
my hollow tooth to give it bite.
With the numbers the Arabs gave us
sums sharpened, became simple to do.

So simple and yet so difficult
to draw a circle around nothing,
around yearning,
so that it won't remain empty.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 15, 2014)

What Kind Of Times Are These? By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 17, 2014)

On Health

My good and noble health,
Thou matter'st more then wealth.
None know’th thy worth until
Thou fad’st, and we fall ill.

And every man can see,
In stark reality,
And every man will say:
“’Tis health I need today”.

No better thing we know,
No dearer gem we owe,
For all that we possess:
Pearls, stones of great finesse,
High offices and power
– One may enjoy this hour –
And so the gifts of youth,
And beauty are, in truth,
Good things, but only when
Our health is with us then.
For when the body’s weak,
The world around is bleak.
O jewel dear, my home
Awaiteth thee to come;
With thee it shall not perish.
’Tis all for thee to cherish.

Jan Kochanowski


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 20, 2014)

Mysteries by Terance Winch

All last night I kept speaking in this
archaic language, because I had been reading
Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders
in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first
detective story. Who dun it? I wondered.
It turns out an orangutan was the murderer.
It looks to me like the detective story got off
to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit
Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think,
God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything
was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why.
In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere.
During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan
about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't
finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer
was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless
the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug
suggested that he and I collaborate
on a series of detective stories in which
the murderer is _always_ an orangutan.


----------



## Santino (Mar 20, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> Mysteries by Terance Winch
> 
> All last night I kept speaking in this archaic language, because I had been reading Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first detective story. Who dun it? I wondered. It turns out an orangutan was the murderer. It looks to me like the detective story got off to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think, God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why. In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere. During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug suggested that he and I collaborate on a series of detective stories in which the murderer is _always_ an orangutan.



That's better.


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## Cheesypoof (Mar 20, 2014)

i need to write a poem soon.....it will be as emo as Drew would want....i wont put up anything too crap, it needs to come naturally


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 21, 2014)

In honour of World Poetry Day

Mein Kampf by David Lernee

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money


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## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 22, 2014)

*A Farewell to False Love*
BY SIR WALTER RALEGH
Farewell, false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason.

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.

Sith then thy trains my younger years betrayed,
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed,
Whose course was ever contrary to kind:
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu!
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 26, 2014)

Good Days Coming by Ho Chi Minh

Everything changes, the wheel
of the law turns without pause.

After the rain, good weather.
In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off
its muddy cloths.

For ten thousand miles
the landscape

Spreads out like
a beautiful brocade.

Gentle sunshine.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers,

Hang in the trees, amongst the
sparkling leaves,

All the birds sing at once.
Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?
After sorrow comes happiness.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 26, 2014)

*Rape Joke *
By Patricia Lockwood

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. _A goatee_.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word _interesting_, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

_The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee._

OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s _My Century_, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that _come on_, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is _elastic_, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 30, 2014)

*Milk For The Cat *
by Harold Munro

When the tea is brought at five o'clock,
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there.

At first she pretends, having nothing to do,
She has come in merely to blink by the grate,
But, though tea may be late or the milk may be 
sour,
She is never late.

And presently her agate eyes
Take a soft large milky haze,
And her independent casual glance
Becomes a stiff, hard gaze.

Then she stamps her claws or lifts her ears,
Or twists her tail and begins to stir,
Till suddenly all her lithe body becomes
One breathing, trembling purr.

The children eat and wriggle and laugh;
The two old ladies stroke their silk:
But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.

The white saucer like some full moon descends
At last from the clouds of the table above;
She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
Transfigured with love.

She nestles over the shining rim,
Buries her chin in the creamy sea;
Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw
Is doubled under each bending knee.

A long, dim ecstasy holds her life;
Her world is an infinite shapeless white,
Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,
Then she sinks back into the night,

Draws and dips her body to heap
Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,
Lies defeated and buried deep
Three or four hours unconscious there.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 30, 2014)

And another by Harold Munro because I'm digging his anthropomorphism this evening
(heh, funny I should say digging as I've had Heaney's 'Digging' going round in my head intermittently for the past few days. I won't post it as I"m sure it's been done already)

edit: ah look, there's another Munro poem called 'Week-End' in which he does this charming anthropomorphism and it goes:
					 ' ....All their hands are out
To greet us, and the gentle blankets seem
Purring and crooning: 'Lie in us, and dream.'
Isn't that great 
On that note I shall retire to my crooning coverlets.

*Every Thing*

Since man has been articulate,
Mechanical, improvidently wise,
(Servant of Fate),
He has not understood the little cries
And foreign conversations of the small
Delightful creatures that have followed him
Not far behind;
Has failed to hear the sympathetic call
Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind
Reposeful Teraphim
Of his domestic happiness; the Stool
He sat on, or the Door he entered through:
He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!
What is he coming to?

But you should listen to the talk of these.
Honest they are, and patient they have kept,
Served him without his Thank you or his Please. . .
I often heard
The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word,
Murmuring, before I slept.
The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud,
Then bowed,
And in a smoky argument
Into the darkness went.

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath : --
' Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know
Why; and he always says I boil too slow,
He never calls me 'Sukie, dear,' and oh,
I wonder why I squander my desire
Sitting submissive on his fire.'

Now the old Copper Basin suddenly
Rattled and tumbled from the shelf,
Bumping and crying: ' I can fall by myself;
Without a woman's hand
To patronize and coax and flatter me,
I understand
The lean and poise of gravitable land.'
It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout,
Twisted itself convulsively about,
Rested upon the foor, and, while I stare,
It stares and grins at me.

The old impetuous Gas above my head
Begins irascibly to flare and fret,
Wheezing into its epileptic jet,
Reminding me I ought to go to bed.

The Rafters creak; an Empty-Cupboard door
Swings open; now a wild Plank of the floor
Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot.
Down from the chimney half a pound of Soot
Tumbles, and lies, and shakes itself again.
The Putty cracks against hte window-pane.
A piece of Paper in the basket shoves
Another piece, and toward the bottom moves.
My independent Pencil, while I write,
Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock
Stirs all its body and begins to rock,
Warning the waiting presence of the Night,
Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain
Ticking of ordinary work again.

You do well to remind me, and I praise
Your strangely individual foreign ways.
You call me from myself to recognize
Companionship in your unselfish eyes.
I want your dear acquaintances, although
I pass you arrogantly over, throw
Your lovely sounds, and squander them along
My busy days. I 'll do you no more wrong.

Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat.
You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat,
Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak,
Your touch grow kindlier from week to week.
It well becomes our mutual happiness
To go toward the same end more or less.
There is not much dissimilarity,
Not much to choose, I know it well, in fine,
Between the purposes of you and me,
And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 30, 2014)

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider -
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. 

William Stafford


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## Greebo (Mar 31, 2014)

Just Thinking

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot--peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

William Stafford


----------



## mansonroad (Mar 31, 2014)

may well have been posted before but I can't bring myself to trawl through 12 years worth of posts to check haha, this is probably my favourite poem of all time 

In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden 

*I*

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

*II*

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.



*III*

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544#sthash.qvFXxwdQ.dpuf


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## Greebo (Mar 31, 2014)

mansonroad said:


> may well have been posted before but I can't bring myself to trawl through 12 years worth of posts to check <snip>


For future reference, you don't need to read the entire thread, you can use the search box (top right) put the poet's name or the poem's first line, and then select "search this thread only".


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## mansonroad (Mar 31, 2014)

cheers, should have done that in the first place


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 31, 2014)

.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 1, 2014)

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world: 
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, 
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, 
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 3, 2014)

See You

Take the first train to Cuntsville
I won't meet you at the station.
I'd be glad to wave you off
you are a human aberration.

Take that first train to Cuntsville 
every coach is standing only.
Every toilet's blocked and leaking
liquid reused in the buffet.

Buy a single to Cuntsville
it's a oneway destination
all your boats and bridges left in 
flames have made this situation.

Off you go
just bloody go
why don't you go?
Or you can miss the train and pick with me this bone.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 4, 2014)

spoils (of) by Jessica Morey-Collins

My elbows root a new kitchen table
to my chin. My eyes, brief peonies,
scatter across the last two years:​
hours bunch around you--ridge or valley,
eclipse: no lonesome quota of good books
or aged teas can quite silver past
your shoulders, your stone-
ground coffee, the gentle shake of your hands
plunging the French press and rarely

spilling. No matter how
thick I corded the dig of my heels,
you slid away. My wish just tin foil
over a dish we swung around in meticulous jibe
but forgot to write a recipe for. My wish, the tin
foil: cragged backtalk to the tink of the refrigerator
light bulb. Nothing keeps forever.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 5, 2014)

in cherry blossom 
shadows, no one really, is 
a stranger now


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 5, 2014)

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 6, 2014)

The talking heads who
Would destroy the magic
Lived inside my mind
Too long
They sneered at paper tigers
Other charms I had
To ward off evil demons
While I slept.

And all the dragons
Turned back into windmills.  There
Was no writing
On my paper sword.

The dragons took their fire
When they went away.
It’s hard to love or hate
The cold bleak structures
Littering the landscape
In their place.
We paint the colors
In ourselves.

And King Tut’s throne
I saw
Was really just the carcass
Of a long forgotten tree
With paint
And shelf life that would
Make a Twinkie proud.

And I myself became
A case, a vote, consumer
Human resource
Number on a census page,
And paid my taxes
Right on time
Stuck in limbo
Squashed between
Some other lonesome robots.

But now, I want to see
The iridescent spirits
Play among the leaves
And weeds of summer.
I want to see the
Snail trails sparkle
On the morning grass
And think they’re beautiful.

I want to feel again
some scorching heats and
Passions, exiles
Banished long ago
By common sense and logic.
I want those trolls
To get back under bridges.

I want to be
A person once again
And climb the beanstalks
Rage at giants
And believe that
Dog spit makes it better.

I must pack up
Those dreary demons
Logic, and his
Henchman Fact
Stick them back into
Their books and close
Their closets, two locks,
Maybe three
And only I
Possess the key.

And now, from down
Another road
I see the Tiger
Beckons me, and
Elves smile welcome
As I peek around that
Ancient corner in my mind.

I know I can reenter
Once again
The magic wondrous place
That knows no chemistry
Where I can think
and dream the world.


----------



## sojourner (Apr 8, 2014)

Happy Anniversary!!

*Dear Margaret

*
For Orgreave, the Beanfield, and Hillsborough.
For Operation Swamp 81.
For rejoicing in the burning and drowning of men.
For the miners, the unions,
the working class heroes,
the people whose skin you denied.
For the innocents turned into criminals.
For giving the Force a free rein
to wield batons and tear gas and horses,
to weaken and batter them all.

For the families who died.
For the lies you allowed to be told
all this time, not giving an ounce
of the truth or of justice for this 96.
For the mass destruction of all our communities,
psyches and spirits and faith.

For my dad, ex-Services, thrown on the dole
fifteen times in as many long months.

For my mother, dug deeper in poor mental health;
the poverty making her sicker, and sadder,
and madder than she’d ever been.

For my brother, who lived without wages for years,
burned out
on a pyre of your making.

For the youth of myself, for the public disgrace
of the free-dinner-queue, for the old cast-off shoes,
for none of the school trips or cookery lessons;
for the shrinking grey socks, for the punches and kicks
that my mother let fly in her madness.
For the ice and the mould inside every window.
For the hunger, the shame, my family’s pain,
for the living we scraped hand to mouth.

For all the above, for all our lost years,
for all of the grief and the depths that we reached…
dear Margaret,
there’s no absolution,
no forgiveness, or pity or grief.
Your legacy lives in the fat of the rich.
May your soul never find any peace.


----------



## sojourner (Apr 8, 2014)

And here's one for spanglechick  and the rest of the teachers on here. Jess Green, an amazing young poet, on Mr Gove...

http://www.pixable.com/share/5tFnT/?tracksrc=SHFAIPH3


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## Boru (Apr 9, 2014)

*My Piney Wood by Robert William Service*

I have a tiny piney wood; 
my trees are only fifty, 
Yet give me shade and solitude 
For they are thick and thrifty. 
And every day to me they fling 
With largess undenying, 
Fat cones to make my kettle sing 
And keep my pan a-frying. 

Go buy yourself a piney wood 
If you have gold for spending, 
Where you can dream in mellow mood 
With peace and joy unending; 
Where you can cheerfully retreat 
Beyond all churchly chiding, 
And make yourself a temple sweet 
Of rapturous abiding. 

Oh silence has a secret voice 
That claims the soul for portal, 
And those who hear it may rejoice 
Since they are more than mortal. 
So sitting in my piney wood 
When soft the owl is winging, 
As still as Druid stone I brood . . . 
For hark! the stars are singing.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 10, 2014)

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

								These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.


								If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.


								Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!


----------



## Greebo (Apr 10, 2014)

Corruptive

The dark wood _after_ the dark wood: the cold 
after cold in April's false November.
In that second worser place: more gone, less there,
but in that lurid present present, cast and held, 

rooted, kept, like some old false-berried yew. 
Just against; the door leading to preferment 
shut; no longer believing in _still_, by _some_, few
means, method, _could be, but for_ the bad day set, 

left, leaning atop bad day. 
							Out- and un-

ranked, toothached, wronged— rankled corruptive thing!
Ill-wishing, in-iquitous, clipped, up-hoped, stripped: just plain: thin.
Dare thy commit: commit this final fatal sin: 
_God my God, I am displeased by spring._

by Olena Kalytiak Davis


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)




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## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)

The Black Walnut Tree by Mary Oliver

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood–an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don't do
anything. That night I dream
of my fathers out of Bohemia
filling the blue fields
of fresh and generous Ohio
with leaves and vines and orchards.
What my mother and I both know
is that we'd crawl with shame
in the emptiness we'd made
in our own and our fathers' backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)

Future Work by Fleur Adcock

It is going to be a splendid summer.
The apple tree will be thick with golden russets
expanding weightily in the soft air.
I shall finish the brick wall beside the terrace
and plant out all the geranium cuttings.
Pinks and carnations will be everywhere.

She will come out to me in the garden,
her bare feet pale on the cut grass,
bringing jasmine tea and strawberries on a tray.
I shall be correcting the proofs of my novel
(third in a trilogy–simultaneous publication
in four continents); and my latest play

will be in production at the Aldwych
starring Glenda Jackson and Paul Scofield
with Olivier brilliant in a minor part.
I shall probably have finished my translations
of Persian creation myths and the Pre-Socratics
(drawing new parallels) and be ready to start

on Lucretius. But first I'll take a break
at the chess championships in Manila–
on present form, I'm fairly likely to win.
And poems? Yes, there will certainly be poems:
they sing in my head, they tingle along my nerves.
It is all magnificently about to begin.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)

After a long winter, giving
each other nothing, we collide
with blossoms in our hands.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)

Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey by Billy Collins

I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.

The fellow may be gazing
over an English landscape,
hillsides dotted with sheep,
a row of tall trees topping the downs,

or he could be moping through the shadows
of a dark Bavarian forest,
a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales
tucked into his rucksack.

But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good.
I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

Something is always missing–
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,
some minor but essential touch.
Or the quality of things has diminished.

The sky was a deeper, more dimensional blue,
clouds were more cathedral-like,
and water rushed over rock
with greater effervescence.

From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat
as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood
and mills around in a field of weeds.

We have heard the poets long-dead
declaim their dying
from a promontory, a riverbank,
next to a haycock, within a copse.

We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.

And when we put down the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes,
stinging with print,
and slip in the bookmark of sleep,

we will be schooled enough to know
that when we wake up
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly as good as they once were.

Something will be missing
from this long, coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray

the glossy gardenia drooping
in its chipped terra-cotta pot.
Shoes, socks, ashtray, the shroud of curtains,
the browning core of an apple.

Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our naps, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 11, 2014)

Grammar by Tony Hoagland

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's conjugated a verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 13, 2014)

April Love by Ernest Dowson

We have walked in Love's land a little way,
We have learnt his lesson a little while,
And shall we not part at the end of day,
With a sigh, a smile?

A little while in the shine of the sun,
We were twined together, joined lips, forgot
How the shadows fall when the day is done,
And when Love is not.

We have made no vows--there will none be broke,
Our love was free as the wind on the hill,
There was no word said we need wish unspoke,
We have wrought no ill.

So shall we not part at the end of day,
Who have loved and lingered a little while,
Join lips for the last time, go our way,
With a sigh, a smile?


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 13, 2014)

Around this time last year (was it last year?!?) I was seeing someone and it didn't work out, and I found that poem just at that particular moment. I didn't look for it. Like it found me. It gave me a bit of solace. Spring heart.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 13, 2014)

Midnight Song of the Seasons: Spring Song by Yue Fu

The spring wind moves a spring heart, 
My eye flows to gaze at the mountain forest. 
The mountain forest's extraordinarily beautiful, 
The bright spring birds are pouring out clear sound.


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## Greebo (Apr 13, 2014)

WHY DOROTHY WORDSWORTH IS NOT AS FAMOUS AS HER BROTHER

"I wandered lonely as a...
They're in the top drawer, William,
Under your socks -
I wandered lonely as a -
No not that drawer, the top one.
I wandered by myself -
Well wear the ones you can find.
No, don't get overwrought my dear, I'm coming.
"I wandered lonely as a -
Lonely as a cloud when -
Soft-boiled egg, yes my dear,
As usual, three minutes -
As a cloud which floats -
Look, I said I'll cook it,
Just hold on will you -
All right, I'm coming.

"One day I was out for a walk
When I saw this flock -
It can't be too hard, it had three minutes.
Well put some butter in it. -
This host of golden daffodils
As I was out for a stroll one -
"Oh you fancy a stroll, do you?
Yes all right, William, I'm coming.
It's on the peg. Under your hat.
I'll bring my pad, shall I, in case
You want to jot something down?"

Lynn Peters


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## Greebo (Apr 13, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> <snip> I didn't look for it. Like it found me. It gave me a bit of solace. Spring heart.


They do that sometimes.


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## Ceej (Apr 17, 2014)

Dillinger4 - I love that Mary Oliver one so much.

*Epitaph On The World by Henry David Thoreau*
Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
This golden youth long since was past,
Its silver manhood went as fast,
An iron age drew on at last;
‘Tis vain its character to tell,
The several fates which it befell,
What year it died, when ’twill arise,
We only know that here it lies.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2014)

Ceej said:


> Dillinger4 - I love that Mary Oliver one so much.



I have posted this one before, but it bears repeating:

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2014)

Clear Morning by Ho Chi Minh

The morning sun
shines over the prison wall,

And drives away the shadows
and miasma of hopelessness.

A life-giving breeze
blows across the earth.

A hundred imprisoned faces
smile once more.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2014)

A Colour of the Sky by Tony Hoagland

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
 when you pass through clumps of wood 
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, 
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again? 
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing 
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll, 
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, 
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written 
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets. 
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, 
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. 
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. 
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store 
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam, 
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. 
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2014)

Jet by Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out 
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel 
with the boys, getting louder and louder 
as the empty cans drop out of our paws 
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars. 
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, 
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish 
and old space suits with skeletons inside. 
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life 
out of the box, uncapping the bottle 
to let the effervescence gush 
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances 
in unison, and then the fireflies flash 
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation 
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex 
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night 
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet 
we once came from, 
to which we will never 
be permitted to return. 
We are amazed how hurt we are. 
We would give anything for what we have.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2014)

Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland

After I heard _It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall_
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

"You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy,"
I heard the therapist say on television
												 to the teenage murderer,
"about all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
												 one day at a time—"

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

_Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
	 are covered with blood—
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
											   Signed, America._

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2014)

Beauty by Tony Hoagland

When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks, 
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.

After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror, 
sucking in her stomach and standing straight, 
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,

but I could see her pause inside that moment 
as the knowledge spread across her face 
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time, 
a little knobby.

I’m probably the only one in the whole world 
who actually remembers the year in high school 
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab, 
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill 
which was her specialty,

while some football player named Johnny 
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again 
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.

Or how she spent the next decade of her life 
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.

Then one day her time of prettiness 
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women 
in the magazines and on the streets 
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand 
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—

It was spring. Season when the young 
buttercups and daisies climb up on the 
mulched bodies of their forebears 
to wave their flags in the parade.

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds, 
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head 
as if she was throwing something out,

something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 19, 2014)

Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen by Gary Snyder

In the high seat,
 before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman
 Creek.
Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 20, 2014)

The First Madrigal by Anna Swir

That night of love was pure
as an antique musical instrument
and the air around it.

Rich
as a ceremony of coronation.
It was fleshy as a belly of a woman in labor
and spiritual
as a number.

It was only a moment of life
and it wanted to be a conclusion drawn from life.
By dying
it wanted to comprehend the principle of the world.

That night of love
had ambitions.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 20, 2014)

*Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes*
By Thomas Gray

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 20, 2014)

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them,
say I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W. H. Auden


----------



## Greebo (Apr 20, 2014)

Possibly NSFW although Donne and Shakespeare could sneak far stronger stuff under the radar.


Spoiler



Fetish

I can see this relationship tanking,
so it's time to be honest, I think.
In the space between dreaming and wanking,
I've developed a striking new kink.

Though I used to be coy and coquettish,
as all men like their women to be,
my new-leaf aspirational fetish
is demanding, "what's in it for me?"

I can see this might be disconcerting
for a man who likes hookers and porn,
in whose mind every female is squirting
to the sound of his name, dusk till dawn,

so let's get you some sex education
with incentives: my Love USP
is undying devout adoration
but first tell me: what's in it for me?

You would like me to make you my hero,
to discuss, at great length, Aston Villa;
in exchange you are offering zero;
one-way traffic.  So dull.  So vanilla.

I'll forgive your flawed pacing (too snaily);
I'll provide all you need, and for free,
and I'm happy to email you daily
if you tell me what's in it for me.

Is it something I'm presently lacking?
A locked room with an out-of-reach key?
If you want my support and my backing
then I think anyone would agree
you must tell me what's in it for me.

Please, before I'm a hundred and three,
can you tell me what's in it for me?

Samantha Willis


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## Greebo (Apr 20, 2014)

(a loose translation follows)
Warum - das weiß ich nicht

Ich schreibe ein Gedicht,
warum - das weiß ich nicht.
Vielleicht ist's wegen dir,
vielleicht auch wegen mir.
Wenn du es liesst, wird's deines sein,
wenn ich es les', wird's meines sein.
So ist halt ein Gedicht.
Warum - das weiß ich nicht

Wolfgang Doll (from "Der Bücherwurm - Gedichte zum Lächeln und Lachen")
............
The reason is unknown

I'm writing a poem,
the reason is unknown.
Perhaps because of you,
perhaps cos of me too.
When you read it it'll be thine,
when I read it, it'll be mine.
It's just a simple poem,
the reason is unknown.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 20, 2014)

Greebo said:


> Possibly NSFW although Donne and Shakespeare could sneak far stronger stuff under the radar.
> 
> 
> Spoiler
> ...



A question I often ask myself (but in reverse - 'What's in it for you?'). The only answer I can find is that I have almost nothing tangible to offer.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 20, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> A question I often ask myself (but in reverse - 'What's in it for you?'). The only answer I can find is that I have almost nothing tangible to offer.


What about the intangible?


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 20, 2014)

Greebo said:


> What about the intangible?


 
More of that. It doesn't always seem like a good thing.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 20, 2014)

It's the best thing Dill.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 20, 2014)

I think so.


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## Ceej (Apr 21, 2014)

Also reposted, but bears repeating - we seem to surrounded by loss and sadness sometimes, so good advice here.

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world


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## Greebo (Apr 22, 2014)

Vantage

From where I watch, there are no highest leaves,
no leaves that don’t have over them more leaves 
impeding what they open up and out for, 

darkening downward as they feed on green 
diminishments, as if dark, if it still
can darken, could be itself the light 

the darker leaves beneath are hungry for.
From where I watch even the shade hungers
And is hungered after—all along the chain 

past bark, root, leaf, ghost speck of leaf,	
microbial scrapings, and beyond them, flakes 
chipped off of flakes off of a now- 

no-longer anything sucked dry, unsifted 
and unsiftable into so fine a green 
even the dark shines through. What’s hunger but

a hole to fill, gravity of a self-
consuming self-proliferating blind
and densely tangled maze of this from that,

from this, somewhere inside of which a cry
for mercy isn’t heard, or is, and the jaws shut, 
and the very dirt becomes the dirt of it. 

Alan Shapiro


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## Ceej (Apr 23, 2014)

Happy birthday, Will!


A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 24, 2014)

To Althea, from Prison by Richard Lovelace

WHEN Love with unconfinèd wings	 
  Hovers within my gates,	 
And my divine Althea brings	 
  To whisper at the grates;	 
When I lie tangled in her hair			 
  And fetter'd to her eye,	 
The birds that wanton in the air	 
  Know no such liberty.	 

When flowing cups run swiftly round	 
  With no allaying Thames,	 10
Our careless heads with roses bound,	 
  Our hearts with loyal flames;	 
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,	 
  When healths and draughts go free—	 
Fishes that tipple in the deep	  
  Know no such liberty.	 

When, like committed linnets, I	 
  With shriller throat shall sing	 
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,	 
  And glories of my King;	  
When I shall voice aloud how good	 
  He is, how great should be,	 
Enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,	 
  Know no such liberty.	 

Stone walls do not a prison make,	  
  Nor iron bars a cage;	 
Minds innocent and quiet take	 
  That for an hermitage;	 
If I have freedom in my love	 
  And in my soul am free,	  
Angels alone, that soar above,	 
  Enjoy such liberty.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 24, 2014)

Not a poem. But for some reason I woke up thinking about the Diggers and the English Civil War  

A World Turned Upside Down. 

In 1649 to St. George's Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's will
They defied the landlords, they defied the laws
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow
We come to work the lands in common and make the waste ground grow
This earth divided we will make whole
So it may be a common treasury for all

The sin of property we do disdain
No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain
By theft and murder they took the land
Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

They make the laws to chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell
We will not worship the God they serve,
a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve

We work and eat together, we need no swords
We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords
Still we are free, though we are poor
Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!

From the men of property the orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers' claim
Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn
They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on

Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share
All things in common, all people one
They came in peace - the order came to cut them down


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## sojourner (Apr 24, 2014)

It'll be your proximity to Wigan, that


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 25, 2014)

Sometimes, With One I Love by Walt Whitman

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse 
   unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain 
   one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 25, 2014)

To You by Walt Whitman

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of
dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your
feet and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops,
work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating,
drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you
be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better
than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,
I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted
nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to
yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no
imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will
never consent to subordinate you,
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better,
God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-
figure of all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of
gold-color'd light,
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its
nimbus of gold-color'd light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it
streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon
yourself all your life,
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,
What you have done returns already in mockeries,
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in
mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you,
Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,
I pursue you where none else has pursued you,
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the
accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or
from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if
these balk others they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed,
premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied
in you,
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good
is in you,
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits
for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like
carefully to you,
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than
I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at an hazard!
These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are
immense and interminable as they,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of
apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or
mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements,
pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing
sufficiency,
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,
whatever you are promulges itself,
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what
you are picks its way.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16082#sthash.hvS6DzFm.dpuf


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 25, 2014)

To F.M. by Maya Deren

I waited for you in the fields of afternoon’
Eyes closed, I lay upon the grass
Listening for the sound of steps in the swaying of the trees;
Waiting for my lips to feel lips where the soft breeze had been;
Body tense to feel the warmth of hands where warmth of sun had shone.

You did not come. I went inside
Complaining that the suns go down
And that the wind is far too chill
And that trees make so much noise
A person’d better take her nap indoors.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

In the Smoke by Eugenio Montale

How often I have waited for you
at the station in the cold and fog,
trolled up and down, cought, buying papers
not even worth the name, 
smoking Giuba, later banned by the minister
of tobacco, what a fool!
Perhaps a wrong train, or an extra section,
or one that was simply cancelled. 
I'd peer at the trolleys of porters
to see if your luggage was there, 
and you coming behind it.
And there you were at last!
One memory among this many. 
It pursues me in my dreams.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

And Suddenly It's Evening by Salvatore Quasimodo

Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it's evening.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

Things I Didn't Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet

it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain 
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it 
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I've loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can't wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before 
and will be said after me

I didn't know I loved the sky 
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish 
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard 
the guards are beating someone again
I didn't know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest 
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish 
"the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high"
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief 
to a pine bough for luck

I never knew I loved roads 
even the asphalt kind
Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea 
Koktebele
formerly "Goktepé ili" in Turkish 
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute 
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take 
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I've written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play 
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand 
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there's a lantern in the servant's hand
and I can't contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason 
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika 
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky 
I didn't know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars 
I love them too
whether I'm floored watching them from below 
or whether I'm flying at their side

I have some questions for the cosmonauts 
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't 
be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract 
well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to 
say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them 
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad 
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind 
I didn't know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors 
but you aren't about to paint it that way
I didn't know I loved the sea
except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois 
strikes me
I like it

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my 
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop 
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved 
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting 
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette 
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty 
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

Old Grief by Leonardo Sinisgalli

Grief comes easily to old people.
At midday
sitting in the corner of an empty house
they burst into tears. 
Infinite despair
catches them by surprise.
They lift a withered slice of pear
to their lips, or the pulp of a fig
baked on the roof tiles.
Even a sip of water
or a visit by a snail
helps to ease a crisis.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

The Meaning of Simplicity by Yannis Ritsos

I hide behind the simple things so you'll find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things, 
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
our hand prints will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I am saying to you),
It lights up the empty house and the houses kneeling silence - 
always the silence remains kneeling. 

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
And that's when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

A Gift by Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to posses.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

I Take Back Everything I've Said by Nicanor Parra

_Before I go 
I'm supposed to get a last wish: 
Generous reader 
burn this book 
It's not at all what I wanted to say 
Though it was written in blood 
It's not what I wanted to say.

No lot could be sadder than mine 
I was defeated by my own shadow: 
My words took vengeance on me.

Forgive me, reader, good reader 
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace. I leave you 
With a forced and sad smile.

Maybe that's all I am 
But listen to my last word: 
I take back everything I've said. 
With the greatest bitterness in the world 
I take back everything I've said._


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

Thoughts by Nicanor Parra

What
Pascal asked himself 
is man:
A number raised to the zero power.
Nothing 
compared to the whole
The whole 
compared to nothing:
Birth plus death:
Noise multiplied by silence:
The arithmetical mean between all and nothing.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

Who is a Poet by Tadeusz Rozewicz

a poet is one who writes verses
and one who does not write verses

a poet is one who throws off fetters
and one who puts fetters on himself

a poet is one who believes
and one who cannot bring himself to believe

a poet is one who has told lies
and one who has been told lies

one who has been inclined to fall
and one who raises himself

a poet is one who tries to leave
and one who cannot leave


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

A Sketch for Modern Love Poem

And yet white
is best described by gray
bird by stone
sunflowers
in December

love poems of old
were descriptions of the flesh
described this and that
for instance eyelashes
and yet red
should be described
by gray the sun by rain
poppies in November
lips by night

the most tangible
description of bread
is a description of hunger
in it is
the damp porous core
the warm interior
sunflowers at night
the breasts belly thighs of Cybele

a spring-clear
transparent description
of water
is a description of thirst
ashes
desert
it produces a mirage
clouds and trees move into
the mirror
Lack hunger
absence

of flesh
is a description of love
is a modern love poem


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2014)

The Fly by Miroslav Holub

She sat on a willow-trunk
watching
part of the battle of Crecy,
the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.

During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.

And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.


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## Greebo (Apr 27, 2014)

Lit Instructor

Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean--
well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing. 

William Stafford


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## Greebo (Apr 27, 2014)

The Life That I Have

The life that I have 
Is all that I have 
And the life that I have 
Is yours 

The love that I have
Of the life that I have 
Is yours and yours and yours. 

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have 
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years 
In the long green grass 
Will be yours and yours and yours.

Leo Marks


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## Greebo (Apr 28, 2014)

Grief Puppet

In the nearby plaza, musicians would often gather.
The eternal flame was fueled by propane tank.
An old man sold chive dumplings from a rolling cart,
while another grilled skewers of paprika beef.
Male turtledoves would puff their breasts, woo-ing,
and for a few coins, we each bought an hour with
the grief puppet. It had two eyes, enough teeth,
a black tangle of something like hair or fur,
a flexible spine that ran the length of your arm.
Flick your wrist, and at the end of long rods
it raised its hands as if conducting the weather.
Tilt the other wrist, and it nodded. No effort
was ever lost on its waiting face. It never
needed a nap or was too hungry to think straight.
You could have your conversation over and over,
past dusk when old men doused their charcoal,
into rising day when they warmed their skillets.
The puppet only asked what we could answer.
Some towns had their wall, others their well;
we never gave the stupid thing a name, nor
asked the name of the woman who took our coins.
But later, we could all remember that dank felt,
and how the last of grief’s flock lifted from our chests.

Sandra Beasley


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 30, 2014)

Ceej said:


> When Death Comes by Mary Oliver


I love that. Thank you


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 30, 2014)

I'm realising what an enormous Mary Oliver fan I am 

*Breakage*
BY MARY OLIVER
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
  full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 30, 2014)

On my mind this morning:

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre 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?


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 30, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> On my mind this morning:
> 
> The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
> 
> ...


This poem was tormenting me at 4:30 this morning *essay panic*


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## Greebo (Apr 30, 2014)

May Day

I’ve decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago - let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I’ve decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn’t matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I’ve decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

Phillis Levin


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## Ceej (Apr 30, 2014)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I'm realising what an enormous Mary Oliver fan I am


 
Me too - magnificent.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 30, 2014)

Two from me today. Firstly, I noticed the leaves on the newly copiced tre have started to grow again. So I stopped to stare

*Leisure by WIlliam Henry Davies*


What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.


And I know it's long but it's excellent and I've had 'each man kills the thing he loves' rebounding in my mind of late.

*The Ballad of Reading Gaol*
Oscar Wilde

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ballad-reading-gaol

It's so long that I thought I'd just put in the link


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## Dillinger4 (May 1, 2014)

For Mayday

lines from The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Shelley

Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

What is Freedom? Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own

Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words, that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free!

The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo—Liberty!

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many — they are few"


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## Dillinger4 (May 1, 2014)

I saw my first ever girlfriend on the train to work this morning. We haven't seen each other for well ten years. It was a fortuitous. You never stop loving some people. I hope I see more of her. She has coloured my day. 

For Jane. A poem for a decade. This one describes something almost perfectly.

December at Yase by Gary Snyder.

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.


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## Greebo (May 5, 2014)

A Poet's Shame

I set out to write this poem and I had a simple plan. 
I'd avoid all things prosaic and I'd do the best I can 
To optimize the content and the grammar and the rhyme
And of course I'd tell a story that would echo for all time

I thought about the subject and the role the hero played
But when I penned the verses then I saw the hero fade
I read my lines and wondered if all poets had the same
Misunderstanding with the words and felt a poet's shame

I struggled with my concept and the form the poem took
Yet I doubt that you will ever see this poem in a book
For only I can understand the effort and the time
And a parent's love responsible for each and every line

And so like children poems cause you happiness and pride
Or conversely they cause torment as you quiver deep inside
And yet I do still write them and some I think are fine
But some are just so terrible I wish they weren't mine.

Richard Lackman


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## Dillinger4 (May 8, 2014)

Lines from Queen Mab by Percy Shelley

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.


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## 8115 (May 8, 2014)

Aubade

By  Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. 
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says _No rational being _
_Can fear a thing it will not feel,_ not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.


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## ShiftyBagLady (May 9, 2014)

I've had lines from this going through my head intermittently lately then this evening I wandering in my local rose garden, as you do, and more of it crystallised in my mind. I remembered it at bedtime, causing me to look it up.
Glad I did. 
I particularly like the last two stanzas. I like the imagery, the anthropomorphism, the rhythm and repetition and teh part where teh flowers anticipate her arrival saying she is this and that and she is in fact all things (well, like, no shit: she is the sun right...) it kind of sums up how you feel about somebody you love doesn't it? I love writing which incoporates the ambiguities of absence.
Oh, and how his heart would blossom under her feet resonates with something I'm (supposed to be) writing so it's just the perfect poem tonight 

*Come into the garden Maud*
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Come into the garden, Maud,
  For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
  I am here at the gate alone ;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
  And the musk of the rose is blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,
  And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
  On a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
  To faint in his light, and to die.

All night have the roses heard
  The flute, violin, bassoon ;
All night has the casement jessamine stirred
  To the dancers dancing in tune ;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
  And a hush with the setting moon.

I said to the lily, ‘There is but one
  With whom she has heart to be gay.
When will the dancers leave her alone ?
  She is weary of dance and play.’
Now half to the setting moon are gone,
  And half to the rising day ;
Low on the sand and loud on the stone
  The last wheel echoes away.

I said to the rose, ‘The brief night goes
  In babble and revel and wine.
O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,
  For one that will never be thine ?
But mine, but mine,’ so I sware to the rose,
  ‘For ever and ever, mine.’

And the soul of the rose went into my blood,
  As the music clashed in the hall ;
And long by the garden lake I stood,
  For I heard your rivulet fall
From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,
  Our wood, that is dearer than all ;

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet
  That whenever a March-wind sighs
He sets the jewel-print of your feet
  In violets blue as your eyes,
To the woody hollows in which we meet
  And the valleys of Paradise.

The slender acacia would not shake
  One long milk-bloom on the tree ;
The white lake-blossom fell into the lake
  As the pimpernel dozed on the lea ;
But the rose was awake all night for your sake,
  Knowing your promise to me ;
The lilies and roses were all awake,
  They sighed for the dawn and thee.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,
  Come hither, the dances are done,
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
  Queen lily and rose in one ;
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,
  To the flowers, and be their sun.

There has fallen a splendid tear
  From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear ;
  She is coming, my life, my fate ;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near ;’
  And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late ;’
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear ;’
  And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

She is coming, my own, my sweet,
  Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
  Were it earth in an earthy bed ;
My dust would hear her and beat,
  Had I lain for a century dead ;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
  And blossom in purple and red.


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## Betsy (May 9, 2014)

Hello all...I'm new here and can't find a thread where to formally say hello...apologies for that and apologies if the poem I post is already on here.... it is a great favourite of mine...

*Dreams*

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.

*Langston Hughes*


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## Santino (May 9, 2014)

Hello new person


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## Betsy (May 9, 2014)

Hello Santino


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## Greebo (May 9, 2014)

THE GREEN MAN

Like antlers, like veins of the brain the birches
Mark patterns of mind on the red winter sky;
"I am thought of all plants," says the Green Man,
"I am thought of all plants," says he.

The hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan
But white is her bark in the darkness of rain,
"I rise with the sap," says the Green Man,
"I rise with the sap," says he.

The ashes are clashing their boughs like sword-dancers,
Their black buds are tracing wild faces in the clouds;
"I come with the wind," says the Green Man,
"I come with the wind," says he.

The alders are rattling as though ready for battle
Guarding the grove where she waits for her lover;
"I burn with desire," says the Green Man,
"I burn with desire," says he.

In and out of the yellowing wands of the willow
The pollen-bright bees are plundering the catkins;
"I am honey of love," says the Green Man,
"I am honey of love," says he.

The hedges of quick are thick with may blossom
As the dancers advance on the leaf-covered King:
"It's off with my head," says the Green Man,
"It's off with my head," says he.

Green Man becomes grown man in flames of the oak
As its crown forms his mask and its leafage his feature;
"I speak through the oak," says the Green Man,
"I speak through the oak," says he.

The holly is flowering as hayfields are rolling
Their gleaming long grasses like waves of the sea;
"I shine with the sun," says the Green Man,
"I shine with the sun," says he.

The globes of the grapes are robing with bloom
Like the hazes of autumn, like the Milky Way's stardust;
"I am crushed for your drink," says the Green Man,
"I am crushed for your drink," says he.

The aspen drops silver of leaves on earth's salver
And the poplars shed gold on the young ivy flowerheads;
"I have paid for your pleasure," says the Green Man,
"I have paid for your pleasure," says he.

The reedbeds are flanking in silence the islands
Where meditates wisdom as she waits and waits;
"I have kept her secret," says the Green Man,
"I have kept her secret," says he.

The bark of the elder makes whistles for children
To call to the deer as they rove over the snow;
"I am born in the dark," says the Green Man,
"I am born in the dark," says he.

William Anderson


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## Betsy (May 10, 2014)

This could have been written with me in mind



*Just In Case*

"I'm going to the sea for a weekend,
in a couple of days I'll be back,
so I'll just take my little brown suit and a blouse
and a beret and carry my mac.

But what if the house is a cold one,
the house where I'm going to stay,
no fires after April, no hot drinks at night
and the windows wide open all day?
I'd better take one - no, two cardys
and my long tartan scarf for my head,
and my chaste new pyjamas in case they decide
to bring me my breakfast in bed,
and what about church on Sunday?
I could wear my beret and suit,
but if it were sunny, it would be a chance
to wear my straw hat with the fruit.
I can't wear my little brown suit, though
not with the straw and the fruit,
so I'll just take a silk dress to go with the straw
and a silk scarf to go with the suit.
I'll just take my jeans and that jumper
in case we go out in the car,
and my Guernsey in case we go out in a boat
and d'you know where my swimming things are?

D'you think I should take that black velvet
in case they've booked seats for a play?
And is it still usual to take your own towel
when you go somewhere to stay?
I had thought of just taking slippers,
but they do look disgustingly old,
I'd better take best shoes and sandals and boots
for the church and the heat and the cold.

I daren't go without my umbrella
in case I'm dressed and it rains;
I'm bound to need socks and my wellies
for walking down long muddy lanes.

I'd rather not take my old dressing gown,
its such a business to pack,
but s'pose they have breakfast before they get dressed
I'd have to have mine in my old mac.

I'm going to the sea for the weekend,
in a couple of days I'll be back,
so I'll just take my little brown suit and a blouse,
two cardys, my long tartan scarf,
my chaste new pyjamas
my straw hat with the fruit,
my silk dress, my silk scarf,
my jeans, that jumper,
my Guernsey, my swimming things,
my black velvet, my towel,
my slippers (no one need see them)
my sandals, my boots, my umbrella
my socks, my wellies
my dressing gown, no, not my dressing gown,
Ok my dressing gown,
and a beret and carry my mac.

*Charlotte Mitchell *


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## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2014)

Mindful by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?


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## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2014)

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew 
what you had to do, and began, 
though the voices around you 
kept shouting 
their bad advice-
though the whole house 
began to tremble 
and you felt the old tug 
at your ankles. 
"Mend my life!" 
each voice cried. 
But you didn't stop. 
You knew what you had to do, 
though the wind pried 
with its stiff fingers 
at the very foundations, though their melancholy 
was terrible. 
It was already late 
enough, and a wild night, 
and the road full of fallen branches and stones. 
but little by little, 
as you left their voices behind, 
the stars began to burn 
through the sheets of clouds, 
and there was a new voice 
which you slowly 
recognized as your own, 
that kept you company 
as you strode deeper and deeper 
into the world, 
determined to do 
the only thing you could do-
determined to save 
the only life you could save.


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## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2014)

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come 
when, with elation, 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror, 
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self. 
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 
all your life, whom you have ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life.


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## Betsy (May 10, 2014)

I wouldn't mind betting this one is already on here...

*A Subaltern’s Love Song*


Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing’s the light on your hair.

By roads “not adopted”, by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

*John Betjeman

*


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## Betsy (May 10, 2014)

A shorter one from Mr Betjeman

*In a Bath Teashop*

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another —

Let us hold hands and look.”

She such a very ordinary little woman;

He such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

*John Betjeman*


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## Greebo (May 10, 2014)

Betsy said:


> I wouldn't mind betting this one is already on here... <snip>
> **


If you look at the top right hand corner or each page there's the search box.  If you click on that, one of the options which appears is "search this thread only"


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## Betsy (May 10, 2014)

Greebo said:


> If you look at the top right hand corner or each page there's the search box.  If you click on that, one of the options which appears is "search this thread only"


Thanks,Greebo.


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## Greebo (May 10, 2014)

Betsy said:


> Thanks,Greebo.


No problem, there are so many bits to check at the same time that it's easy to miss the option you need.


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## Betsy (May 11, 2014)

*Spring*

Just as we lose hope
she ambles in,
a late guest
dragging her hem
of wildflowers,
her torn
veil of mist,
of light rain,
blowing
her dandelion
breath
in our ears;
and we forgive her,
turning from
chilly winter
ways,
we throw off
our faithful
sweaters
and open
our arms.

*Linda Pastan*


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## Greebo (May 11, 2014)

Bread

Someone else cut off my head
In a golden field.
Now I am re-created
By her fingers. This
Moulding is more delicate
Than a first kiss,
More deliberate than her own
Rising up
And lying down.
Even at my weakest, I am
Finer than anything
In this legendary garden.
Yet I am nothing till
She runs her fingers through me
And shapes me with her skill.

Brendan Kennelly


----------



## Betsy (May 12, 2014)

*Today *

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

*Billy Collins *


----------



## Greebo (May 12, 2014)

A Jar of Honey

You hold it like a lit bulb,
a pound of light,
and swivel the stunned glow
around the fat glass sides:
it's the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb
attesting to the nature of the struggle.

Jacob Polley


----------



## Greebo (May 12, 2014)

From Tanka Diary

The botanical garden is just as I remember,
although it is certain that everything
has changed since my last visit.

How many hilarious questions these fuzzy
fiddleheads are inquiring of spring
will be answered as green ferns unfurl?

Walking the path, I stop to pick up
bleached bark from a tree, curled into
a scroll of ancient wisdom I am unable to read.

Even in my dreams I’m hiking
these mountain trails expecting to find a rock
that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart.

Harryette Mullen


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## Betsy (May 12, 2014)

I particularly like the Jar of Honey,Greebo.

*The Night Has A Thousand Eyes*

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

*Francis William Bourdillon*


----------



## Pickman's model (May 12, 2014)

*An Irish Airman Foresees His Death -- WB Yeats*



I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 13, 2014)

*Moss-Gathering *
by Theodore Roethke

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, --
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had commited, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.


----------



## Betsy (May 15, 2014)

*The Lovers*

See how in their veins all becomes spirit:
into each other they mature and grow.
Like axles, their forms tremblingly orbit,
round which it whirls, bewitching and aglow.
Thirsters, and they receive drink,
watchers, and see: they receive sight.
Let them into one another sink
so as to endure each other outright.

*Rainer Maria Rilke*


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## Greebo (May 15, 2014)

Money Is an Energy

Everybody is already
someone else
An existential tag line

Money is current

I would like to not live
paycheck to paycheck

You could make a pun on currency
but not quite

Money is an energy nonetheless

Dark space		Dark water

A long silent drive

Dark matter(s)

Driving is my personality

The methods of one wor(l)d revealing
the hidden harmonies of another

Prayer card	 Lotto ticket	   You occupy
my pocket

My payment has not arrived

Justin Marks


----------



## Greebo (May 15, 2014)

Variations on an Old Standard

Come let us kiss. This cannot last -
Too late is on its way soon -
And we are going nowhere fast.

Already it is after noon,
That momentary palindrome.
The mid-day hours start to swoon -

Around the corner lurks the gloam.
The sun flies at half-mast, and flags.
The color guard of bees heads home,

Whizzing by in zigs and zags,
Weighed down by the dusty gold
They've hoarded in their saddlebags,

All the summer they can hold.
It is too late to be too shy:
The Present tenses, starts to scold -

Tomorrow has no alibi,
And hides its far side like the moon.
The bats inebriate the sky,

And now mosquitoes start to tune
Their tiny violins. I see
Rising like a grey balloon,

The head that does not look at me,
And in its face, the shadow cast,
The Sea they call Tranquility -

Dry and desolate and vast,
Where all passions flow at last.
Come let us kiss. It's after noon,
And we are going nowhere fast.

A.E. Stallings


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 16, 2014)

In solidarity with Turkish comrades

Last Will and Testament by Nazim Hikmet

Comrades, if I don't live to see the day
-- I mean,if I die before freedom comes --
take me away
and bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia.

The worker Osman whom Hassan Bey ordered shot
can lie on one side of me, and on the other side
the martyr Aysha, who gave birth in the rye
and died inside of forty days.

Tractors and songs can pass below the cemetery --
in the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline,
fields held in common, water in canals,
no drought or fear of the police.

Of course, we won't hear those songs:
the dead lie stretched out underground
and rot like black branches,
deaf, dumb, and blind under the earth.

But, I sang those songs
before they were written,
I smelled the burnt gasoline
before the blueprints for the tractors were drawn.

As for my neighbors,
the worker Osman and the martyr Aysha,
they felt the great longing while alive,
maybe without even knowing it.

Comrades, if I die before that day, I mean
-- and it's looking more and more likely --
bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia,
and if there's one handy,
a plane tree could stand at my head,
I wouldn't need a stone or anything.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 16, 2014)

A Sad State of Freedom by Nazim Hikmet

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others-
you are free to make the rich richer.
The moment you're born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.
Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you're free
with the freedom of being unemployed.
You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom-
you have the freedom to become an air-base.
You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being-
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.
There's neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.


----------



## Betsy (May 16, 2014)

*Toes*

He painted my toenails red.
Lying in bed, my foot in his lap
Carefully applying polish to each nail
His face a mask of concentration
Trying to get it just right,
I had to laugh because he looked so intent.
He smiled and leaned over and kissed my knee.
'Are you always going to paint my toes? '
I had asked him and he just grinned and said.
'Forever, Baby.'
Today I looked down and saw the polish
Was cracked and worn and coming off.
I remembered that promise he made
And couldn't keep.
I set about removing the last of the polish
He had so carefully applied weeks ago.
I reached for the red polish,
But then put it away. Red was for him.
So I painted them pink instead,
My favorite color,
My toes again.
*
Sandra Brennan*


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 19, 2014)

.


----------



## Betsy (May 20, 2014)

*And Beauty Came Like The Setting Sun*

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.


Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing
will never be done.

*Siegfried Sassoon*


----------



## Greebo (May 21, 2014)

King Lear

For the father who wakes
and wakes himself, eyes full of himself

and for the one, who when the sun descends
slips into the stormy

smite flat the rotundity o’ the world.

Done in with conspiracy and murder
in his sleep (his eye-tooth finally unfixed
and tucked into a cheek for safekeeping)

he dreams of a three-armed garment
unable to wonder or comprehend
how he has come to this blurred ridge and broken—

I try to fix in my mind, his shining eyes
the terrors he shut his lips against

and his early morning utterly lucid accusation:
“I never would have believed,” he said to me
“that you would be among them.”

Lisa Sewell


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2014)

Oi
Oi, I thought it was a one-a-day limit?  Anyway...

*http://www.poemhunter.com/kingsley-amis/poems/*
*K**ingsley Amis*

*Something Nasty In The Bookshop*

Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
They write about it.

And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn’t write.


----------



## Greebo (May 21, 2014)

phildwyer said:


> Oi
> Oi, I thought it was a one-a-day limit?  <snip>


When have you ever known urban stick to the rules for long?


----------



## Betsy (May 23, 2014)

*Les Ballons*

Against these turbid turquoise skies
The light and luminous balloons
Dip and drift like satin moons,
Drift like silken butterflies;

Reel with every windy gust,
Rise and reel like dancing girls,
Float like strange transparent pearls,
Fall and float like silver dust.

Now to the low leaves they cling,
Each with coy fantastic pose,
Each a petal of a rose
Straining at a gossamer string.

Then to the tall trees they climb,
Like thin globes of amethyst,
Wandering opals keeping tryst
With the rubies of the lime. 

*Oscar Wilde*


----------



## Greebo (May 23, 2014)

Peace
I.

I am as awful as my brother War,
I am the sudden silence after clamour.
I am the face that shows the seamy scar
When blood and frenzy has lost its glamour.
Men in my pause shall know the cost at last
That is not to be paid in triumphs or tears,
Men will begin to judge the thing that's past
As men will judge it in a hundred years.

Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed
Endlessly with the father and the son,
My naked light upon your darkness, dread! -
By which ye shall behold what ye have done:
Whereon, more like a vulture than a dove,
Ye set my seal in hatred, not in love.

II.

Let no man call me good. I am not blest.
My single virtue is the end of crimes,
I only am the period of unrest,
The ceasing of horrors of the times;
My good is but the negative of ill,
Such ill as bends the spirit with despair,
Such ill as makes the nations' soul stand still
And freeze to stone beneath a Gorgon glare.

Be blunt, and say that peace is but a state
Wherein the active soul is free to move,
And nations only show as mean or great
According to the spirit then they prove. -
O which of ye whose battle-cry is Hate
Will first in peace dare shout the name of Love?

Eleanor Farjeon


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 24, 2014)

The Coming of Wisdom with Time by WB Yeats

The leaves are many but the trunk is one.
Through all the lying days of my youth
I waved my leaves and branches in the sun.
Now, I wither into the truth.


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2014)

The Great Nemo

The gypsy, the Great Nemo,
  Palmist, Clairvoyant, Occultist,
Spent his days on the rusty pier in a haunted cabin
Clamped like a barnacle to the ironwork,
Vibrant to the swing and rhythm of great seas.
His magician's cave was full of cheap jewellery and china vases
To be bought for the law's sake at exorbitant prices.
When the door opened,
Old, brown newspaper cuttings, protraying the Great Nemo
Fortune-telling at fêtes for charity,
Flapped and wriggled flatly from the walls.

His cabin, though full of shadows, was not dark:
By the man's own future it was haunted.
Sea-light poured in at a round window like a port-hole,
illuminating the upper part
Of his short, thick-set body, sitting at the table,
And spot-lighting every wrinkle, every line on the coconut-coloured face,
Causing the flat gypsy glare of his eyes
To flare with an animal light, as they turned, burning,
Toward the crystal on the table.

"You are very intuitive," the Great Nemo would say,
"Your husband doesn't understand you.
You would make your fortune on the stage."
_That _did not tire him.
But when he threw back his client's fat hand,
And for an extra half-crown concentrated on the crystal,
Then he became an ancestral voice,
Prophesying from a caravan in distant countries.

Osbert Sitwell


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (May 24, 2014)

The Cat

She was licking 
the opened tin
for hours and hours
without realising
that she was drinking
her own blood

Spyros Kyriazopoulos


----------



## Betsy (May 24, 2014)

bubblesmcgrath said:


> The Cat
> 
> She was licking
> the opened tin
> ...


Mmmm..different.

*Loss
*
The day he moved out was terrible -
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.
*
Wendy Cope*


----------



## Greebo (May 26, 2014)

Necessity

Late last night I slew my wife,
   Stretched her on the parquet flooring;
I was loath to take her life,
   But I had to stop her snoring.

Harry Graham


----------



## Greebo (May 27, 2014)

Were They Hands Would They Flower

Why are you grieving?

Because the others are grieving.

You are not compelled to grieve independently?

The grass needs raking.

The grass?

The leaves. I will build a fence to keep them from the sea.

Then will you help the others?

Tollers ring bells even the dead can hear,
a ringing such that I am bound to.

And the leaves?

When they are taken by the waves I give them names,
desiring in this act a homecoming
to which I am constantly denied
on account of other people’s prayers.

Rob Schlegel


----------



## Pickman's model (May 27, 2014)

THE DESERTS GROW: WOE HIM WHO DOTH THEM HIDE!

—Ha!
Solemnly!
In effect solemnly!
A worthy beginning!
Afric manner, solemnly!
Of a lion worthy,
Or perhaps of a virtuous howl-monkey—
—But it's naught to you,
Ye friendly damsels dearly loved,
At whose own feet to me,
The first occasion,
To a European under palm-trees,
A seat is now granted. Selah.

Wonderful, truly!
Here do I sit now,
The desert nigh, and yet I am
So far still from the desert,
Even in naught yet deserted:
That is, I'm swallowed down
By this the smallest oasis—:
—It opened up just yawning,
Its loveliest mouth agape,
Most sweet-odoured of all mouthlets:
Then fell I right in,
Right down, right through—in 'mong you,
Ye friendly damsels dearly loved! Selah.

Hail! hail! to that whale, fishlike,
If it thus for its guest's convenience
Made things nice!—(ye well know,
Surely, my learned allusion?)
Hail to its belly,
If it had e'er
A such loveliest oasis-belly
As this is: though however I doubt about it,
—With this come I out of Old-Europe,
That doubt'th more eagerly than doth any
Elderly married woman.
May the Lord improve it!
Amen!

Here do I sit now,
In this the smallest oasis,
Like a date indeed,
Brown, quite sweet, gold-suppurating,
For rounded mouth of maiden longing,
But yet still more for youthful, maidlike,
Ice-cold and snow-white and incisory
Front teeth: and for such assuredly,
Pine the hearts all of ardent date-fruits. Selah.

To the there-named south-fruits now,
Similar, all-too-similar,
Do I lie here; by little
Flying insects
Round-sniffled and round-played,
And also by yet littler,
Foolisher, and peccabler
Wishes and phantasies,—
Environed by you,
Ye silent, presentientest
Maiden-kittens,
Dudu and Suleika,
—ROUNDSPHINXED, that into one word
I may crowd much feeling:
(Forgive me, O God,
All such speech- sinning!)
—Sit I here the best of air sniffling,
Paradisal air, truly,
Bright and buoyant air, golden-mottled,
As goodly air as ever
From lunar orb downfell—
Be it by hazard,
Or supervened it by arrogancy?
As the ancient poets relate it.
But doubter, I'm now calling it
In question: with this do I come indeed
Out of Europe,
That doubt'th more eagerly than doth any
Elderly married woman.
May the Lord improve it!
Amen.

This the finest air drinking,
With nostrils out-swelled like goblets,
Lacking future, lacking remembrances
Thus do I sit here, ye
Friendly damsels dearly loved,
And look at the palm-tree there,
How it, to a dance-girl, like,
Doth bow and bend and on its haunches bob,
—One doth it too, when one view'th it long!—
To a dance-girl like, who as it seem'th to me,
Too long, and dangerously persistent,
Always, always, just on SINGLE leg hath stood?
—Then forgot she thereby, as it seem'th to me,
The OTHER leg?
For vainly I, at least,
Did search for the amissing
Fellow-jewel
—Namely, the other leg—
In the sanctified precincts,
Nigh her very dearest, very tenderest,
Flapping and fluttering and flickering skirting.
Yea, if ye should, ye beauteous friendly ones,
Quite take my word:
She hath, alas! LOST it!
Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!
It is away!
For ever away!
The other leg!
Oh, pity for that loveliest other leg!
Where may it now tarry, all-forsaken weeping?
The lonesomest leg?
In fear perhaps before a
Furious, yellow, blond and curled
Leonine monster? Or perhaps even
Gnawed away, nibbled badly—
Most wretched, woeful! woeful! nibbled badly! Selah.

Oh, weep ye not,
Gentle spirits!
Weep ye not, ye
Date-fruit spirits! Milk- bosoms!
Ye sweetwood-heart
Purselets!
Weep ye no more,
Pallid Dudu!
Be a man, Suleika! Bold! Bold!
—Or else should there perhaps
Something strengthening, heart-strengthening,
Here most proper be?
Some inspiring text?
Some solemn exhortation?—
Ha! Up now! honour!
Moral honour! European honour!
Blow again, continue,
Bellows-box of virtue!
Ha!
Once more thy roaring,
Thy moral roaring!
As a virtuous lion
Nigh the daughters of deserts roaring!
—For virtue's out-howl,
Ye very dearest maidens,
Is more than every
European fervour, European hot-hunger!
And now do I stand here,
As European,
I can't be different, God's help to me!
Amen!

THE DESERTS GROW: WOE HIM WHO DOTH THEM HIDE!

--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 27, 2014)

.


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (May 27, 2014)

Still like this one learned at school years ago...

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, however pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.


*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

*


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 27, 2014)




----------



## dessiato (May 28, 2014)

Not a poem per se, but I was looking for American Indian legends and found this. I thought it merited an audience.
*
Lakota Instructions for Living*

Friend do it this way - that is,
whatever you do in life,
do the very best you can
with both your heart and mind.

And if you do it that way,
the Power Of The Universe
will come to your assistance,
if your heart and mind are in Unity.

When one sits in the Hoop Of The People,
one must be responsible because
All of Creation is related.
And the hurt of one is the hurt of all.
And the honor of one is the honor of all.
And whatever we do effects everything in the universe.

If you do it that way - that is,
if you truly join your heart and mind
as One - whatever you ask for,
that's the Way It's Going To Be.

Passed down from White Buffalo Calf Woman


----------



## Greebo (May 30, 2014)

Dust

When I went to look at what had long been hidden,
A jewel laid long ago in a secret place,
I trembled, for I thought to see its dark fire - 
But only a pinch of dust blew up in my face.

I almost gave my life long ago for a thing
That has gone to dust now, stinging my eyes -
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.

Sarah Teasdale


----------



## Betsy (May 31, 2014)

*I Am No Good At Love
*
I am no good at love
My heart should be wise and free
I kill the unfortunate golden goose
Whoever it may be
With over-articulate tenderness
And too much intensity.

I am no good at love
I batter it out of shape
Suspicion tears at my sleepless mind
And gibbering like an ape,
I lie alone in the endless dark
Knowing there's no escape.

I am no good at love
When my easy heart I yield
Wild words come tumbling from my mouth
Which should have stayed concealed;
And my jealousy turns a bed of bliss
Into a battlefield.
I am no good at love
I betray it with little sins
For I feel the misery of the end
In the moment that it begins
And the bitterness of the last good-bye
Is the bitterness that wins. *

Noel Coward*


----------



## eatmorecheese (Jun 1, 2014)

*Mgomba (The Banana Plant)*
by Euphrase Kezilahabi
translated by Katriina Ranne

The banana plant lies on the ground, no longer of use,
having been cut down, reluctantly, by the workers in the garden.
Children, anxiously, wait till time's up.
There's nothing in the garden,
other than a sorrowful wind
that makes the grass shiver and moan.

This is exactly like a polygamous ruler.
The tree of the town lies on the ground, no longer of use,
having been cut down, reluctantly, by the workers in the garden.
There's nothing in the room,
other than a sorrowful wind, shaking
the traitors circling the bed crying
tears of hope
that warn about the dangers of quarrels at home
  quarrels
between women
  quarrels
between children, about trinkets and leaders.
Poor you! Alexander's reign is over!

The leper's sores are exposed,
wounds that were hidden for so long
are now in plain view, stinking, 
to be sucked on by all kinds of flies.
But each time the fly sucks it is thinking
who next it will infect.


----------



## Betsy (Jun 1, 2014)

*She Walks In Beauty
*
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

*Lord Byron (George Gordon)*


----------



## Greebo (Jun 1, 2014)

From the Telephone

Out of the dark cup
Your voice broke like a flower.
It trembled, swaying on its taut stem.
The caress in its touch
Made my eyes close.

Florence Ripley Mastin


----------



## Greebo (Jun 3, 2014)

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed

I being born a woman and distressed 
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Edna St. Vincent Millay


----------



## Betsy (Jun 4, 2014)

*Love's Coming*

She had looked for his coming as warriors come,
With the clash of arms and the bugle's call;
But he came instead with a stealthy tread,
Which she did not hear at all.

She had thought how his armor would blaze in the sun,
As he rode like a prince to claim his bride:
In the sweet dim light of the falling night
She found him at her side.

She had dreamed how the gaze of his strange, bold eye
Would wake her heart to a sudden glow:
She found in his face the familiar grace
Of a friend she used to know.

She had dreamed how his coming would stir her soul,
As the ocean is stirred by the wild storm's strife:
He brought her the balm of a heavenly calm,
And a peace which crowned her life.

*Ella Wheeler Wilcox*


----------



## eatmorecheese (Jun 4, 2014)

*The Word Cutter*

My laughter laughs with me
  laughing joyfully
I don't have any thoughts in my head today
  they haven't woken up yet

I think it's morning
  dawn is breaking
And that's precisely the reason
  for the heart to be calm
and why this sweet beat
  resonates.

I laugh to myself... for I know
I'm not used to this smile
that strolls through a poem and a dance
laughing with me... exciting me like a wife with her husband
  like lovers forever.

I'm not used to this joyfulness and passion
  that leads me day and night
  to sing along with the chorus
  ... to follow the pleasures of the world.

So I decided...
  to cut off the words of joy and belief
  of love or religion
words that would temper the slave's revenge
  words that would win the war with hearts within
  as well as the wars within borders

My only word is suffering
So I prefer the old way...
  thoughts not written.

*Alamin Mazrui*


----------



## Sirena (Jun 4, 2014)

*Death of a Son*
_(who died in a mental hospital aged one)_

Something has ceased to come along with me.
Something like a person: something very like one.
And there was no nobility in it
Or anything like that.
Something there was like a one year
Old house, dumb as stone. While the near buildings
Sang like birds and laughed
Understanding the pact
They were to have with silence. But he
Neither sang nor laughed. He did not bless silence
Like bread, with words.
He did not forsake silence.
But rather, like a house in mourning
Kept the eye turned in to watch the silence while
The other houses like birds
Sang around him.
And the breathing silence neither
Moved nor was still.

I have seen stones: I have seen brick
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
But a house of flesh and blood
With flesh of stone
And bricks for blood. A house
Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other
Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.

But this was silence,
This was something else, this was
Hearing and speaking though he was a house drawn
Into silence, this was
Something religious in his silence,
Something shining in his quiet,
This was different this was altogether something else:
Though he never spoke, this
Was something to do with death.

And then slowly the eye stopped looking
Inward. The silence rose and became still.
The look turned to the outer place and stopped,
With the birds still shrilling around him.
And as if he could speak
He turned over on his side with his one year
Red as a wound
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this
And out of his eyes two great tears rolled like stones,
and he died.

_*Jon Silkin*_


----------



## Greebo (Jun 5, 2014)

Flight 214

The news is still falling
in our kitchen
like invisible rain

as we eat the pink salmon,
the lettuce, the mashed potatoes.

Because now everything
glistens. The candles, the soft

folds of red napkins
each in its place,

as though it all were sacred -
the rain
must still be falling.

Not me, not anyone I know.

Earlier in the day, the terrible
news lifted too easily,

a cheap Mylar balloon
cut loose - a tinny flash.

Couldn’t even tell its color
against the sky.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn


----------



## eatmorecheese (Jun 5, 2014)

*My Haemorrhoids*

Tonight I'm counting
my haemorrhoids.

One.
My wife on television.
All intense charisma
and big brown eyes.
Talking with sexy jokes
about the sensual sex life
of an octopus alien.

I burp
aiming my stubbie at the screen
_she's fucking boring at home!_

Two.
Brian Howard on the phone.
His voice flat and dry
sticking up my nose like dried
snot.
Telling me, not asking,
to write a report

justifying to a departmental cost-cutting
committee
the continuing value of my course
on Romantic Poetry.

_I'm teaching the little bastards
how to write commercially viable
Valentine's Day cards
and, besides_,
_it's keeping me alive, Brian_

Three.
And last.
Myself unsuccessfully
on the dunny.
All that codeine turning me
into catastrophically constipated Coleridge
without the visionary consolations.

Oh, dear STC, straining painfully
alongside of me
wouldn't you swap your demon lover
for the explosive gift
of a decent shit?

*Dorothy Porter*


----------



## Betsy (Jun 6, 2014)

Taken from here .. http://www.combinedops.com/Poetry.htm

* The Coxswain*

There are forty of us waiting

In this little LCA

We sailors ... and these soldiers

We're taking in today

They came aboard our mother ship

Now several days ago

They're growing very pale

As the strain begins to show

_They're only boys_ ... the most of them

Eighteen to twenty three

For some of them ... _tomorrow_

Is a day ... _they'll never see_

I can't promise we'll all make it lads

But I'll do my best ... _you'll see_

_I'll remember you_ ... you young soldiers

This day ... in Normandy

God bless you lads ... and keep you safe

We'll meet again ... one day

This is it then lads ... _keep your heads down_

AWAY ALL BOATS ... AWAY.

*Anon*


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## Greebo (Jun 6, 2014)

Stilling to North

Just as a blue tip of a compass needle
stills to north, you stare at a pencil

with sharpened point, a small soapstone
bear with a tiny chunk of turquoise

tied to its back, the random pattern
of straw flecked in an adobe wall;

you peruse the silver poplar branches,
the spaces between branches, and as

a cursor blinks, situate at the edge
of loss - the axolotl was last sighted

in Xochimilco over twenty years ago;
a jaguar meanders through tawny

brush in the Gila Wilderness -
and, as the cursor blinks, you guess

it’s a bit of line that arcs - a parsec
made visible - and as you sit,

the imperfections that mark you
attune you to a small emptied flask

tossed to the roadside and the x,
never brewed, that throbs in your veins.

Arthur Sze


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 7, 2014)

Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou by Percy Shelley

Rarely, rarely, comest thou, 
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou are fled away.

How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismay'd;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good;
Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love--though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things, 
Spirit, I love thee--
Thou art love and life! Oh come,
Make once more my heart thy home.


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## Greebo (Jun 8, 2014)

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.”

William Blake


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## Greebo (Jun 9, 2014)

Vertical

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be
horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor 
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers.
but most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch
whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean 
my chilled head,
not ready 
to lie down.

Linda Pastan


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## Greebo (Jun 9, 2014)

My Brook

Earth holds no sweeter secret anywhere
Than this my brook, that lisps along the green
Of mossy channels, where slim birch trees lean
Like tall pale ladies, whose delicious hair,
Lures and invites the kiss of wanton air.
The smooth soft grasses, delicate between
The rougher stalks, by waifs alone are seen,
Shy things that live in sweet seclusion there.

And is it still the same, and do the eyes
Of every silver ripple meet the trees
That bend above like guarding emerald skies?
I turn, who read the city’s beggared book,
And hear across the moan of many seas
The whisper and the laughter of my brook.

Helen Hay Whitney


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## Betsy (Jun 10, 2014)

*Twice Shy*

Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.

Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Ambiguous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum
And practised life for art.

Our juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late -
Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.

So, chary and excited
As a thrush linked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.

*Seamus Heaney*


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## Greebo (Jun 14, 2014)

Habit

Last night when my work was done,
And my estranged hands
Were becoming mutually interested
In such forgotten things as pulses,
I looked out of a window
Into a glittering night sky.

And instantly
I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.

Hazel Hall


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## Greebo (Jun 16, 2014)

What Are They Doing in the Next Room?

Are they unmaking everything?
Are they tuning the world sitar?
Are they taking an ice pick to being?
Are they enduring freedom in Kandahar?

Sounds, at this distance, like field hollers,
sounds like they’ll be needing CPR.
Sounds like the old complaint of love and dollars.
Sounds like when Coltrane met Ravi Shankar

and the raga met the rag and hearing
became different and you needed CPR
after listening and tearing was tearing
and love was a binary star—

distant bodies eclipsing each other
with versions of gravity and light.
Sounds like someone’s trying to smother
the other—a homicide or a wedding night.

The television derives the half-full hours.
Time exists as mostly what’s to come.
Losing also is ours…
I meant that as a question.

Is I the insomniac’s question?
Are you a dendrite or a dream?
Between oblivion and affection,
which one is fear and which protection?

Are they transitive or in?
Are they process or product?
Are they peeling off the skin?
Are they Paris or the abducted?

They’re reading something after Joyce,
post modern stuff that can be read
but not understood except as voices
rising and falling from the dead.

Do they invent me
as I invent their faces?
I see surveillance gray wasted
with bliss at having thieved identities.

In the AM, when tú turns to usted,
the sun clocks in to overwrite the night
with hues and saturations and the red
hesitates for a second to be incarnate.

Bruce Smith


----------



## killer b (Jun 17, 2014)

hello thread. I read this poem recently, and thought it was glorious. It's by Mark Doty.


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## killer b (Jun 17, 2014)

I love the way it switches after the first page from being a pretty but directionless pastoral thing to being about writing and being a poet and stuff. it made me laugh out loud when I first read it.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jun 17, 2014)

The pictures of the book text added something for me killer b , thanks.


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 17, 2014)

Verse III of East Coker in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

		 You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


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## killer b (Jun 17, 2014)

Rutita1 said:


> The pictures of the book text added something for me killer b , thanks.


I could't find the text online, but also I think the poem works so well because of the page being turned and everything changing. that wouldn't work on a web page.


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## Greebo (Jun 20, 2014)

Love in the Morning

Morning’s a new bird
stirring against me
out of a quiet nest,
coming to flight —

quick-changing,
slow-nodding,
breath-filling body,

life-holding,
waiting,
clean as clear water,

warmth-given,
fire-driven
kindling companion,

mystery and mountain,
dark-rooted,
earth-anchored.

Annie Finch


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 20, 2014)

For Midsummer.

When Summer's End is Nighing by A. E. Housman

When summer's end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer's parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.


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## Greebo (Jun 21, 2014)

To America

How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking ‘neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

James Weldon Johnson


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## Betsy (Jun 23, 2014)

*Hiawatha's Wooing*

"As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other!"
Thus the youthful Hiawatha
Said within himself and pondered,
Much perplexed by various feelings,
Listless, longing, hoping, fearing,
Dreaming still of Minnehaha,
Of the lovely Laughing Water,
In the land of the Dacotahs.
"Wed a maiden of your people,"
Warning said the old Nokomis;
"Go not eastward, go not westward,
For a stranger, whom we know not!
Like a fire upon the hearth-stone
Is a neighbor's homely daughter,
Like the starlight or the moonlight
Is the handsomest of strangers!"
Thus dissuading spake Nokomis,
And my Hiawatha answered
Only this: "Dear old Nokomis,
Very pleasant is the firelight,
But I like the starlight better,
Better do I like the moonlight!"
Gravely then said old Nokomis:
"Bring not here an idle maiden,
Bring not here a useless woman,
Hands unskilful, feet unwilling;
Bring a wife with nimble fingers,
Heart and hand that move together,
Feet that run on willing errands!"
Smiling answered Hiawatha:
'In the land of the Dacotahs
Lives the Arrow-maker's daughter,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water,
Handsomest of all the women.
I will bring her to your wigwam,
She shall run upon your errands,
Be your starlight, moonlight, firelight,
Be the sunlight of my people!"

It continues here if anyone would like to read it in full...

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hiawatha-s-wooing/

And ends with ...

Thus it was that Hiawatha
To the lodge of old Nokomis
Brought the moonlight, starlight, firelight,
Brought the sunshine of his people,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water,
Handsomest of all the women
In the land of the Dacotahs,
In the land of handsome women.

*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*


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## Betsy (Jun 23, 2014)

Have just read on the BBC website that Felix Dennis has died. 

*All The Young Dudes…*

All the young dudes, growin’ old,
Wanna get their story told,
Wanna see their names in print,
Write a bio’— make a mint.

All the young dudes, wearin’ specs,
Waitin’ on retirement cheques,
Takin’ stairlifts up to heaven —
Lift broke back in ’sixty-seven.

All the young dudes, gettin’ frail,
Hair a whiter shade of pale,
Thinkin’ back to glory days,
Memories a purple haze.

All the young dudes, short on cash,
Hittin’ wine insteada hash,
Got no use for LSD —
Drugs come from the pharmacy.

All the young dudes — cut to fade,
Gettin’ limp insteada laid,
Life’s a bitch and two’s a crowd —
Crank the volume way up loud.

*Felix Dennis*


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 23, 2014)

*the mother*
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get, 
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, 
The singers and workers that never handled the air. 
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, 
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. 
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? 
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 23, 2014)

Betsy said:


> Have just read on the BBC website that Felix Dennis has died.


Ah no 
I liked this one of his

*Never Go Back*
[To D.G.L.S. who has lived by this creed.]
Never go back. Never go back.
Never return to the haunts of your youth.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Memory holds all you need of the truth.

Never look back. Never look back.
Never succumb to the gorgon’s stare.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.

Never go back. Never go back.
Never surrender the future you’ve earned.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Never return to the bridges you burned.

Never look back. Never look back.
Never retreat to the ‘glorious past’.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Treat every day of your life as your last.

Never go back. Never go back.
Never acknowledge the ghost on the stair.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.


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## Greebo (Jun 23, 2014)

Wild Asters

In the spring I asked the daisies
	 If his words were true,
And the clever, clear-eyed daisies
	 Always knew.

Now the fields are brown and barren,
	 Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
	 Not one knows.

Sara Teasdale


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## Santino (Jun 27, 2014)

Not a poem, but lyrics today, from the late great Ruddy Yurts.


> Ruddy's Blues No.2
> 
> Numb, baby I know what to be,
> I thought I Had sunken deep I looked at me
> ...


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## Greebo (Jun 28, 2014)

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word - the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Phillip Larkin


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## Ceej (Jun 28, 2014)

I walked past John Harvey on the way to work today, we're on nodding terms. Not only one of my favourite poets ever ever, but reads them aloud like a gift.
I'm a little bit in love.

*Ghost of a Chance by John Harvey.*
_He plays the tune lazily,
pretty much the way he must have heard Billie sing it,
but slower, 
thick-toned,leaning back upon the beat,
his mind half on the melody,
half on the gin.
Between takes he stands,head down, 
shrunken insidea suit already overlarge,
cheeks sunken in.He thinks of her, 
Billie:
already it is possiblehe has started to bleed within.
From the control room, laughter,
but that’s not the sound he hears;
tenor close to his mouth,he turns towards the doors:
unseen, not quite unbidden,someone has just slipped in.
At the end of eight bar she closes his eyes and blows.
After two choruses he will cover his mouthpiece with its shield:
not play again._


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## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 29, 2014)

"REMEMBRANCE"
_by Alexander Pushkin_

WHEN the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still and on the silence of the town
The unsubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 29, 2014)




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## Greebo (Jun 29, 2014)

To Shakespeare

Oft, when my lips I open to rehearse
Thy wondrous spell of wisdom, and of power,
And that my voice, and thy immortal verse,
On listening ears, and hearts, I mingled pour,
I shrink dismayed – and awful doth appear
The vain presumption of my own weak deed;
Thy glorious spirit seems to mine so near,
That suddenly I tremble as I read –
Thee an invisible auditor I fear:
Oh, if it might be so, my master dear!
With what beseeching would I pray to thee,
To make me equal to my noble task,
Succor from thee, how humbly would I ask,
Thy worthiest works to utter worthily.

Frances Anne Kemble


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## killer b (Jun 30, 2014)

here is today's poem. I hope you enjoy.

Front Porch, Listening

No longer reading of Liège, 
corpses yard high on the glacis, 
German bayonets 
countering Belgian bullets 
with expected result, 
I eavesdrop as my neighbor 
suggests to her husband 
they summer at Gull Lake. 
Other books on my lap, 
I’ve heard her ask this man, 
ten years dead, the sensible 
and surreal, 
if he remembered 
the chorus of Carolina Moon 
or knows why night 
hangs smooth as it does. 
That I can’t hear him’s 
not her fault, 
just as Joan of Arc, 
confessing at Rouen 
to the visitations 
of Saints Catherine, 
Michael, and Margaret 
couldn’t have overcome 
her inquisitors’ deafness, 
that clerical incapacity 
to grasp the tones 
of passionate belief. 
Lithium might mute his voice, 
and she’d be thought 
better off, her mind 
realigned with the truth, 
which is that the dead 
don’t sit with us 
and recommend zinnias 
when we mention 
the garden’s imbalance, 
its inability to infatuate. 
And it is mad wisdom 
to chat with air, 
yet consider how promptly 
our bickering and guffaws, 
the puns and pet names 
which transform breath 
into humanity, 
dissipate into a silence 
that doesn’t hint 
we were here. 
In my book the Great War’s begun. 
Millions die in a paragraph. 
And while their voices 
escape me, my right mind 
hears in the wind 
the tone poem 
of their last words.

—Bob Hicok


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## Greebo (Jul 1, 2014)

Troubadour

When I was a boy and my fist
Would land into my father’s arm,

I’d cry out, and he’d say
Didn’t hurt me none.

He’s been dead six years now,
And my work is still to try

To beat myself up
And make the pain last.

Mark Yakich


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## Dillinger4 (Jul 1, 2014)

And You, Helen? By Edward Thomas

And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.


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## Betsy (Jul 3, 2014)

I have just heard Sir David Jason recite this on Radio 4

*Vitaï Lampada*

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night -- 
Ten to make and the match to win -- 
A bumping pitch and a blinding light, 
An hour to play and the last man in. 
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, 
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote 
"Play up! play up! and play the game!" 

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -- 
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -- 
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead, 
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. 
The river of death has brimmed his banks, 
And England's far, and Honour a name, 
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks, 
"Play up! play up! and play the game!" 

This is the word that year by year 
While in her place the School is set 
Every one of her sons must hear, 
And none that hears it dare forget. 
This they all with a joyful mind 
Bear through life like a torch in flame, 
And falling fling to the host behind -- 
"Play up! play up! and play the game!" 

*Sir Henry Newbolt*

It was on With Great Pleasure where Sir Terry Wogan chose the prose and poetry that means the most to him and was a very pleasant listen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0480341


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## Santino (Jul 3, 2014)

A shame that it's such imperialist filth.


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## Dillinger4 (Jul 3, 2014)

CIA Dope Calypso by Allen Ginsberg

In nineteen hundred forty-nine
China was won by Mao Tse-tung
Chiang Kai Shek's army ran away
They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday

Supported by the CIA

Pushing junk down Thailand way

First they stole from the Meo Tribes
Up in the hills they started taking bribes
Then they sent their soldiers up to Shan
Collecting opium to send to The Man

Pushing junk in Bangkok yesterday
Supported by the CIA

Brought their jam on mule trains down
To Chiang Mai that's a railroad town
Sold it next to the police chief's brain
He took it to town on the choochoo train
Trafficking dope to Bangkok all day
Supported by the CIA

The policeman's name was Mr. Phao
He peddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. aid

The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA

He got so sloppy and peddled so loose
He busted himself and cooked his own goose
Took the reward for the opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold

Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA

Touby Lyfong he worked for the French
A big fat man liked to dine & wench
Prince of the Meos he grew black mud
Till opium flowed through the land like a flood

Communists came and chased the French away
So Touby took a job with the CIA

The whole operation fell in to chaos
Till U.S. intelligence came in to Laos

Mary Azarian/Matt Wuerker I'll tell you no lie I'm a true American
Our big pusher there was Phoumi Nosavan

All them Princes in a power play
But Phoumi was the man for the CIA

And his best friend General Vang Pao
Ran the Meo army like a sacred cow
Helicopter smugglers filled Long Cheng's bars
In Xieng Quang province on the Plain of Jars

It started in secret they were fighting yesterday
Clandestine secret army of the CIA

All through the Sixties the dope flew free
Thru Tan Son Nhut Saigon to Marshall Ky
Air America followed through
Transporting comfiture for President Thieu

All these Dealers were decades and yesterday
The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA

Operation Haylift Offisir Wm Colby
Saw Marshall Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me
Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks
"Hitch-hiking" with dope pushers was how he got his fix

Subsidizing the traffickers to drive the Reds away
Till Colby was the head of the CIA


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 4, 2014)

Beauty by Edward Thomas

WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 4, 2014)

The wily shafts of state, those jugglers’ tricks,
Which we call deep designs and politics,
(As in a theatre the ignorant fry,
Because the cords escape their eye,
Wonder to see the motions fly) (…)
Methinks, when you expose the scene,
Down the ill-organ’d engines fall;
Off fly the vizards, and discover all:
How plain I see through the deceit!
How shallow, and how gross, the cheat!
Look where the pulley’s tied above! (…)
On what poor engines move
The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
What petty motives rule their fates! (…)
Away the frighten'd peasants fly,
Scared at the unheard-of prodigy (…)
Lo! it appears!
See how they tremble! how they quake!

Swift, “Ode to the Honorable Sir William Temple,” 1689


----------



## killer b (Jul 8, 2014)

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

- Bertolt Brecht


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 10, 2014)

Agamemnon Class 1939 by Iris Murdoch

Do you remember Professor
Eduard Fraenkel's endless
Class on the Agamemnon?
Between line eighty three and line a thousand
It seemed to us our innocence
Was lost, our youth laid waste,
In that pellucid, unforgiving air,
The aftermath experienced before,
Focused by dread into a lurid flicker,
A most uncanny composite of sun and rain.
Did we expect the war? What did we fear?
First love's incinerating crippling flame,
Or that it would appear
In public that we could not name
The aorist of some familiar verb....

The spirit's failure we knew nothing of,
Nothing really of sin or of pain
Heralded by the cries of hitherto silent Cassandra
The undulating siren creates in the entrails
And in the heart new structures
Of sensation, the abrupt start
Of war, its smell and sound.
The house distends with bombs,
The big guns vibrate in the ground.
Frightened men kill by remote control
Or face to face appalled see their enemy fall.
Houses and public buildings with a kind of surprise
Bend their knees and turn into tombs.

No one can rebuild that town
And the soldier who came home
Has entered the machine of a continued doom.
Only the sky and the sea
Are unpolluted and old
And godless with innocence.
And twilight comes to the chasm
And to the sea's expanse
And the terrible bright Greek air fades away.
Ever so many gentle worlds quietly end.
People sleep in catacombs.
White paths of doomed men
Daily criss-cross in the skies.
The sanctuary is bombed and lies
Open and unmysterious,
A garden or wild flowers.
Something crawls wounded on,
But the Holy One
Having suffered too long
Eventually dies.

Delphi medises and Apollo’s face grows dim.
What was it for? Guides tell a garbled tale.
The hero's tomb is a disputed mound.
What really happened on that windy plain?
The young are bored by stories of the war.
And you, the other young who stayed there
In the land of the past are courteous and pale,
Aloof, holding your fates.
We have to tell you that it was not in vain.
Even grief dates, and even Niobe
At last was fed, and you
Are all pain, and yet without pain, 
As is the way of the dead.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 10, 2014)

Waiting Again for Biopsy Results from the Second Floor Exercise Room

I glimpse the tulips every two seconds.
They arrived late this year. Those who planted

The bulbs must not have considered how they
Would look from here—red, paired with pink dogwood.

Seven umbrellas float by; only one
Inverts. Ammonia swathed on the machines

Makes this walk to nowhere less appealing.
A police car patrols the next window

Where a dingy white van remains parked. It
Is difficult to discern if it’s still

Raining. Two bridges (I have crossed neither)
And the asylum for the criminally

Insane loom across the estuary.
An old woman obscured by a plum cloche

Appears to hail a taxi but after
One stops, it’s clear that she is waving to

Children who laugh as they glide past. She turns
And exits my view. I will try to eat

Six green things today and nothing white. A
Flash dance mob and you are as likely to

Appear. My tiny bottle of perfume
Is almost empty. It sits alone, a

Deluxe sample, on the pink tray I bought
Last century in Florence. I don’t know

If I’ll buy a bottle—still unable
To find, at forty, my signature scent.

The postman slumps against the fountain, his
Body the heaviest load that he has

To carry. How much rain would it take for
The fountain to overflow? I wish I

Hadn’t been too self-conscious to learn the
Basics of the Argentine tango in

The three lessons before the wedding in
Thessaloniki. Ever since I read

Bronte, I refuse to use an umbrella
And pretend I’m walking the moors even

In the city. I am never where I
Am. If I told you what I look forward

To, I couldn’t bear your pity. I would
Not do any of this without music.

This room is a drenched rag of desire,
Even when it’s empty. It is not too

Late to learn something new, even with this
Trach scar and three letters in my desk drawer.

Nine dogs saunter past, smelling the sidewalk.
The weather does not seem to bother them.

It is too early to be this dark out.
I don’t want to leave the building today.

Jenniefer Franklin


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 13, 2014)

Origin by Sarah Lindsay

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator nor prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.


----------



## Betsy (Jul 14, 2014)

*The Peace of Wild Things *

When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 
waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

*Wendell Berry *


----------



## Betsy (Jul 15, 2014)

*I Am No Good At Love*

I am no good at love
My heart should be wise and free
I kill the unfortunate golden goose
Whoever it may be
With over-articulate tenderness
And too much intensity.

I am no good at love
I batter it out of shape
Suspicion tears at my sleepless mind
And gibbering like an ape,
I lie alone in the endless dark
Knowing there's no escape.

I am no good at love
When my easy heart I yield
Wild words come tumbling from my mouth
Which should have stayed concealed;
And my jealousy turns a bed of bliss
Into a battlefield.

I am no good at love
I betray it with little sins
For I feel the misery of the end
In the moment that it begins
And the bitterness of the last good-bye
Is the bitterness that wins. 

*Noel Coward*


----------



## Greebo (Jul 16, 2014)

*somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond*

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

E. E. Cummings

fogbat I saw the last line and thought of you.


----------



## fogbat (Jul 16, 2014)




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## Greebo (Jul 18, 2014)

Running Orders

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think "Do I know any Davids in Gaza?"
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha


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## Betsy (Jul 22, 2014)

*Study in Orange and White*

I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists.

And I was surprised to notice
after a few minutes of benign staring,
how that woman, stark in profile
and fixed forever in her chair,
began to resemble my own ancient mother
who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth.

You can understand why he titled the painting
"Arrangement in Gray and Black"
instead of what everyone naturally calls it,
but afterward, as I walked along the river bank,
I imagined how it might have broken
the woman's heart to be demoted from mother
to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness.

As the summer couples leaned into each other
along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats
full of spectators slid up and down the Seine
between the carved stone bridges
and their watery reflections,
I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base.

It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus"
"Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink,"
or the other way around
like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color
"Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn."

Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe
where I now had come to rest,
it would be like painting something laughable,
like a chef turning on a spit
over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks
and calling it "Study in Orange and White."

But by that time, a waiter had appeared
with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water,
and I sat there thinking of nothing
but the women and men passing by—
mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs—
and about myself,
a kind of composition in blue and khaki,
and, now that I had poured
some water into the glass, milky-green

*Billy Collins*


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 24, 2014)

*S.T. Coleridge, "Christabel: The Conclusion to Part Two"*

A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father's eyes with light;
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.

Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.

Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And what, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it 's most used to do.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 25, 2014)

*I Grieved For Buonaparte*

I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood
Of that Man's mind--what can it be? what food
Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain?
'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The Governor who must be wise and good,
And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business: these are the degrees
By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

-- William Wordsworth


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 27, 2014)

The Lemons by Eugenio Montale

Listen to me, the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.

Better if the hubbub of the birds
dies out, swallowed by the blue:
we can hear more of the whispering
of friendly branches in not-quite-quiet air,
and the sensations of this smell
that can’t divorce itself from earth
and rains a restless sweetness on the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of troubled passions calls a truce;
here we poor, too, receive our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemons.

See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret,
sometimes we feel we’re about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won’t hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.
The eye scans its surroundings,
the mind inquires aligns divides
in the perfume that gets diffused
at the day’s most languid.
It’s in these silences you see
in every fleeting human
shadow some disturbed Divinity.

But the illusion fails, and time returns us
to noisy cities where the blue
is seen in patches, up between the roofs.
The rain exhausts the earth then;
Winter’s tedium weighs the houses down,
the light turns miserly—the soul bitter.
Til one day through a half-shut gate
in a courtyard, there among the trees,
we can see the yellow of the lemons;
and the chill in the heart
melts, and deep in us
the golden horns of sunlight
pelt their songs.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 29, 2014)

Cold Mountain poem 10 by HanShan (Cold Mountain)

If there’s something good, delight!
Seize the moment while it flies!
Though life can last a hundred years,
Who’s seen their thirty thousand days?
Just an instant then you’re gone.
Why sit whining over things?
When you’ve read the Classics through,
You’ll know quite enough of death.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 29, 2014)

THE DERBY
-Henry Birtles-

Why do they come on that June afternoon
To the top of a hill, at the Capital’s edge
Why sit in traffic for half of the day
Why are they here; well they’ve gathered to pledge
An allegiance to one and for centuries they’ve come
To witness the run of the boy who’ll be king
Who’s name could be sung, for as long as men sing
Who’s proved that he holds all the aces you need
Assuming the mantle that greatness bestows
By placing himself at the head of his breed
To put to the sword the most worthy of foes
Why do the names of the victors stand tall
When a name as a name can mean nothing at all
Ask when you walk down your street or afar
Have you heard of Nijinsky, Mill Reef or Shergar
D’you know what I mean when I speak in hushed tones
D’you know what I mean when you can’t describe joy
D’you get what they get when one rises alone
Why the blood still runs fast at the mention of Troy
This is the Derby and this is the race
That the rest of the World, through its name find a place
For their own measurement, for their own litmus test
To find a Horse worthy of calling the best
And it all started here upon high Epsom Downs
Where the greatest still fight for the greatest of crowns
Where men stand as one, whether blue blood or red
Whether born of the street, or in purple are bred.
And they stand here to cheer and they stand here to call
And they stand to acclaim one who rose above all
This is the Derby and this is the race
This the Kingmaker; hold tight, take your place.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 29, 2014)

Happiness by Robert Hass

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain—
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating—

and because this morning
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax an inquisitive soul
from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,
I drove into town to drink tea in the cafe
and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay
like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,
and a small flock of tundra swans
for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass
in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,
they are also called whistling swans, are very white, 
and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,
and the notebook, turned to a new page,
was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,
I wrote: _happiness! it is December, very cold,
we woke early this morning,
and lay in bed kissing,
our eyes squinched up like bats._


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 29, 2014)

Free Association by Xi Chuan (I think?)

The bald man doesn’t need a comb, the tiger doesn’t need weapons, the fool doesn’t need thought. The person with no needs is practically a sage, but the sage needs to go and count the great big rivets on the iron bridge as a diversion. This is the difference between the sage and the idiot.
  Nietzsche said a person must discover twenty-four truths every day before he can sleep well. First of all, if a person found that many truths, the supply of truth in the world would exceed demand. Secondly, a person who discovers that many truths isn’t going to want to go to sleep.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 29, 2014)

Carved into a wooden handrail on the walkway crossing the pipes near Crary Lab / building 155, McMurdo Base, Antarctica:

_Strangers turn to friends
The bonds we make strong and fast
I sink into bliss





_


----------



## Greebo (Jul 30, 2014)

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz


----------



## Betsy (Jul 30, 2014)

*Ample Make This Bed*

Ample make this Bed
Make this Bed with Awe
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair

Be its Mattress straight
Be its Pillow round
Let no Sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground

*Emily Dickinson*

Stingo reciting it in Sophie's Choice..

(Spoiler ...don't watch if you haven't watched the film but intend to some time in the future)


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 31, 2014)

This body's existence is like a bubble's
may as well accept what happens
events and hopes seldom agree
but who can step back doesn't worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
gather and part like clouds
worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
relaxing all day on a peak.


----------



## 8115 (Jul 31, 2014)

Did you ever think
I can do better?

(Me.)


----------



## Santino (Aug 4, 2014)

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day—

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

- Philip Larkin


----------



## Greebo (Aug 4, 2014)

Santino said:


> MCMXIV
> 
> Those long uneven lines
> Standing as patiently
> ...


Also the 1617th post on this thread - marking the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.


----------



## Betsy (Aug 4, 2014)

*Death of Harry Patch (2012) *

When the next morning eventually breaks,
a young Captain climbs onto the fire step,
knocks ash from his pipe then drops it
still warm into his pocket, checks his watch,
and places the whistle back between his lips.

At 06.00 hours precisely he gives the signal,
but today nothing that happens next happens
according to plan. A very long and gentle note
wanders away from him over the ruined ground
and hundreds of thousands of dead who lie there

immediately rise up, straightening their tunics
before falling in as they used to do, shoulder
shoulder, eyes front. They have left a space
for the last recruit of all to join them: Harry Patch,
one hundred and eleven years old, but this is him

now, running quick-sharp along the duckboards.
When he has taken his place, and the whole company
are settled at last, their padre appears out of nowhere,
pausing a moment in front of each and every one
to slip a wafer of dry mud onto their tongues.

*Andrew Motion*

(Henry John "Harry" Patch, dubbed in his latter years "the Last Fighting Tommy", was a British supercentenarian, briefly the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving soldier known to have fought in the trenches of the First World War.)


----------



## porp (Aug 5, 2014)

A Peasant

Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed, 
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, 
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud. 
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin 
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin 
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth 
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—- 
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth 
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks 
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week. 
And then at night see him fixed in his chair 
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire. 
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind. 
His clothes, sour with years of sweat 
And animal contact, shock the refined, 
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness. 
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season 
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition, 
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress 
Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion. 
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars, 
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

R S Thomas


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Aug 5, 2014)

This has been going around in my mind for the past ten days....since my lovely, gentle aunt passed away...

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Tennyson


----------



## Greebo (Aug 11, 2014)

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

Naomi Shihab Nye


----------



## Greebo (Aug 13, 2014)

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania.

Dorothy Parker


----------



## Greebo (Aug 14, 2014)

Rapture: Lucus

Posters for the missing kapok tree appear on streetlights
offering a reward for its safe return. I hate to spoil it,

but the end of every biography is death. The end of a city
in the rainforest is a legend and a lost expedition. The end

of mythology is forgetfulness, placing gifts in the hole
where the worshipped tree should be. But my memory

lengthens with each ending. I know where to find the lost
mines of Muribeca and how to cross the Pacific on a raft

made of balsa. I know the tree wasn’t stolen. She woke from
her stillness some equatorial summer evening by a dream

of being chased by an amorous faun, which was a memory,
which reminded her that in another form she had legs

and didn’t need the anxious worship of people who thought
her body was a message. She is happier than the poem tattooed

on her back says she is, but sadder than the finches nesting
in her hair believe her to be. I am more or less content to be

near her in October storms, though I can’t stop thinking that
with the right love or humility or present of silk barrettes

and licorice she might become a myth again in my arms, ardent
wordless, needing someone to bear her away from the flood.

Traci Brimhall


----------



## Betsy (Aug 15, 2014)

*Just Is*

Poetry is shadow
dancing with light.

Poetry is paper
longing to become voice.

Poetry is musical notation
turning into sound.

Poetry is a world
that is flat
becoming round.

Poetry is the longed for kiss
that’s going to happen
but hasn’t happened

just as yet.

Poetry is the kiss
you’d miss

if it wasn’t

there.


Poetry is falling in love
with sound and language

(you can’t have one without the other)

and being happily married
to its sixth sense

Poetry

Poetry

...just is.

*Donal Dempsey*


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 15, 2014)

Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Aug 16, 2014)

To This Day....a spoken word poem



By Shane Koyczan


----------



## Greebo (Aug 17, 2014)

Balcony Scene

Up — or out? — here:
a problem of preposition,

my uneasy relation
with the world. Whether I’m

above it or apart. On the other side
of the latched glass door, a man

loves me. Worries. Calls my name.

					 •

Where — for art — thou-
sands of windows go dark

in slow succession. On Essex
and Ludlow and Orchard.

A thousand times goodnight.

					 •

A boy throwing stones at a window.
Right window, wrong boy.

					 •

Love goes toward love — 

And the place death, down there

waving its white kerchief —

Jameson Fitzpatrick


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 18, 2014)

Letter From Managua 1 by Margaret Randall.

All you want to do is murder us, those who have survived
your several dress rehearsals
It’s not that serious yet, most of us don’t meet
your person-level: neither robust nor blue-eyed nor promising
according to your current IQ
or the Rorschach that defines your sense of life.
Forgive us if we don’t agree
With your definition of the N-Bomb
the binary chemical solution or the Salvadorean solution
as an adequate pain-killer. We’re sufficiently underdeveloped
to want to deal with our pain in our own primitive way.
Forgive us too if we can’t fully answer
your questions about our society, define it
as marxist-lenist or social-democrat, agreeable pluralist
or sufficiently free enterprise.
If we insist on the crudity of exploring our own creative process
loving our homeland with the passion
50,000 sisters and brothers root in our throats.
Excuse us, please, we’re always forgetting
we were supposed to ask permission to defend our truth
and distribute our laughter as we see fit.
Don’t bother yourselves trying to understand
our teaching our soldiers poetry along with defense combat
self respect and how to write their names in ink instead of blood,
When our grandparents scraped their living from this land
you sent your Marines. Later you provided us
with “one of our own”: bought and paid for
by your American Way of Life.
He had a brother and a son, a grandson
and infinite pockets.
We said goodbye more than once
but you trained a legion of our brothers
bought them off and kept them in shape
(to keep us in shape)
and the shape they kept us in was increasingly pine-boxed
and horizontal. Here it was a crime
to be young, and you reminded us daily
of that crime
committed by so many, and so often.
But we kept forgetting, we fought and came up from under
your undying friend and his protective Guard.
We fought and won, we buried
our sisters and brothers (few were blond
or met your standards for personhood)
and we began the long pain, the silent joy, the impossible
made possible by our history of eyes and hands.
We know we don’t meet your general 1982 standards
for dependent nations.
All you want to do is murder us. All we want to do is live.


----------



## Greebo (Aug 23, 2014)

The Song of the Shirt

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread — 
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."

"Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work - work - work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's Oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!

Work - work - work,
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work - work - work,
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!

Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out, 
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch - stitch - stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear its terrible shape,
It seems so like my own — 
It seems so like my own, 
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear
And flesh and blood so cheap! 

Work - work - work!
My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread — and rags.
That shattered roof - this naked floor -
A table - a broken chair - 
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!

Work - work - work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work - work - work,
As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed,
As well as the weary hand.

Work - work - work,
In the dull December light,
And work - work - work,
When the weather is warm and bright
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.

Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet — 
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet;
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that costs a meal!

Oh! but for one short hour!
A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,
But only time for Grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!"

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread

Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!"

Thomas Hood


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2014)

*They Are Dead Now*

This isn’t a poem

This is two men in grey prison clothes.

One man sits looking at the sick flesh of his hands—hands that haven’t worked for seven years.

Do you know how long a year is?

Do you know how many hours there are in a day

when a day is twenty-three hours on a cot in a cell,

in a cell in a row of cells in a tier of rows of cells

all empty with the choked emptiness of dreams?

Do you know the dreams of men in jail?

They are dead now

The black automatons have won.

They are burned up utterly

their flesh has passed into the air of Massachusetts their dreams have passed into the wind.

“They are dead now,” the Governor’s secretary nudges the Governor,

“They are dead now,” the Superior Court Judge nudges

the Supreme Court Judge,

“They are dead now” the College President nudges

the College President

A dry chuckling comes up from all the dead:

The white collar dead; the silkhatted dead;

the frockcoated dead

They hop in and out of automobiles

breathe deep in relief

as they walk up and down the Boston streets.

they are free of dreams now

free of greasy prison denim

their voices blow back in a thousand lingoes

singing one song

to burst the eardrums of Massachusetts

Make a poem of that if you dare!

____

John Dos Passos


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 24, 2014)

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.


----------



## Greebo (Aug 25, 2014)

Bound

If I had loved you, soon, ah, soon I had lost you.
Had I been kind you had kissed me and gone your faithless way.
The kiss that I would not give is the kiss that your lips are holding:
Now you are mine forever, because of all I have cost you.

You think that you are free and have given over your sighing,
You think that from my coldness your love has flown away:
But mine are the hands you shall dream that your own are holding,
And mine is the face you shall look for when you are dying.

Aline Murray Kilmer


----------



## Greebo (Aug 27, 2014)

Now I Get It

Remember judge and you shall
Be judged
For laughing in school, for being
Stupid and always wrong.
Penance like the scent of the sheep
Is slow O’ weary, its coat
A kind of fluff that goes up
In filament theory.
Your own life ahead follows you
Like a scientist posing as a shepherd.

Fanny Howe


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 28, 2014)

Drifting on the sea go the swift ships.
Slacken the sails, there, loosen the ropes,
catch the wind and save your companions
if you want us to remember your name.
Stay far off, go not where the troubled wave rises.
Now it depends on you

Archilochus


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 28, 2014)

Falling blossoms.
Blossoms in bloom are also
falling blossoms.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Aug 28, 2014)

But the Wise Perceive Things about to Happen by C.P. Cavafy

_  “For the gods perceive future things,_
_	ordinary people things in the present, but_
_	the wise perceive things about to happen.”_

	Philostratos, _Life of Apollonios of Tyana, _viii, 7.


Ordinary people know what’s happening now,
the gods know future things
because they alone are totally enlightened.
Of what’s to come the wise perceive
things about to happen.

Sometimes during moments of intense study
their hearing’s troubled: the hidden sound
of things approaching reaches them,
and they listen reverently, while in the street outside
the people hear nothing whatsoever.


----------



## phildwyer (Aug 31, 2014)

*"On Living" by Nazim Hikmet*


I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say, 
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.


III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)


----------



## Greebo (Sep 1, 2014)

Coming Close

Take this quiet woman, she has been
standing before a polishing wheel
for over three hours, and she lacks
twenty minutes before she can take
a lunch break. Is she a woman?
Consider the arms as they press
the long brass tube against the buffer,
they are striated along the triceps,
the three heads of which clearly show.
Consider the fine dusting of dark down
above the upper lip, and the beads
of sweat that run from under the red
kerchief across the brow and are wiped
away with a blackening wrist band
in one odd motion a child might make
to say No! No! You must come closer
to find out, you must hang your tie
and jacket in one of the lockers
in favor of a black smock, you must
be prepared to spend shift after shift
hauling off the metal trays of stock,
bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,
and if by some luck the power were cut,
the wheel slowed to a stop so that you
suddenly saw it was not a solid object
but so many separate bristles forming
in motion a perfect circle, she would turn
to you and say, “Why?” Not the old why
of why must I spend five nights a week?
Just, “Why?” Even if by some magic
you knew, you wouldn’t dare speak
for fear of her laughter, which now
you have anyway as she places the five
tapering fingers of her filthy hand
on the arm of your white shirt to mark
you for your own, now and forever.

Philip Levine


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 4, 2014)

September by Teresa Hooley

The swallows wheel about the sky,
Trying their wings for overseas;
The thistledown goes floating by;
At midnight shine the Pleiades;
And there are mushrooms in the dawn,
And blackberries all wet with mist;
Ripe chestnuts dropping on the lawn;
Red apples that the sun has kissed.
The beech is touched with fire o'erhead,
Largess of gold the lime down flings,
Cool asters crowd the garden bed,
And over all the robin sings.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 4, 2014)

In September by Charles G. D. Roberts 

This windy, bright September afternoon
My heart is wide awake, yet full of dreams.
The air, alive with hushed confusion, teems
With scent of grain-fields, and a mystic rune,
Foreboding of the fall of Summer soon,
Keeps swelling and subsiding; till there seems
O'er all the world of valleys, hills, and streams,
Only the wind's inexplicable tune.

My heart is full of dreams, yet wide awake.
I lie and watch the topmost tossing boughs
Of tall elms, pale against the vaulted blue;
But even now some yellowing branches shake,
Some hue of death the living green endows:--
If beauty flies, fain would I vanish too.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2014)

Zhōngqiū kuàilè, Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

*Thoughts in the Silent Night by Li Bai*

Moonlight shining through the window
Makes me wonder if there is frost on the ground
Looking up to see the moon
Looking down I miss my hometown


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2014)

*Mid-Autumn Moon by Su Shi*

The sunset clouds are gathered far away, it's clear and cold,
The Milky Way is silent, I turn to the jade plate.
The goodness of this life and of this night will not last for long,
Next year where will I watch the bright moon?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2014)

Drinking Alone Under the Moon by Li Bai

From a pot of wine, among the flowers,
I drank alone with no companion.
Raising the cup, I asked the bright moon,
Bring me my shadow and make us three.
The moon cannot understand my drinking,
My shadow follows silently wherever I go.
The moon temporarily accompanies the shadow,
I take the opportunity to have a joyous time.
Moonlight wanders around when I sing,
The shadow floats along when I dance.
Enjoying the friendship while I am awake,
The companionship ends while I am drunk.
Let’s have friendship forever,
We will meet again in the vast sky


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 8, 2014)

I have posted this one before. More than once. It is one of my favourite poems and one of my favourite songs, it is about this time of year and the last two verses are perfect romance

*Now Westlin Winds **by Robert Burns*

Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring autumn's pleasant weather
The moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather
Now waving grain, wild o'er the plain
Delights the weary farmer
And the moon shines bright as I rove at night
To muse upon my charmer

The partridge loves the fruitful fells
The plover loves the mountain
The woodcock haunts the lonely dells
The soaring hern the fountain
Through lofty groves the cushat roves
The path of man to shun it
The hazel bush o'erhangs the thrush
The spreading thorn the linnet

Thus every kind their pleasure find
The savage and the tender
Some social join and leagues combine
Some solitary wander
Avaunt! Away! the cruel sway,
Tyrannic man's dominion
The sportsman's joy, the murdering cry
The fluttering, gory pinion

But Peggy dear the evening's clear
Thick flies the skimming swallow
The sky is blue, the fields in view 
All fading green and yellow
Come let us stray our gladsome way
And view the charms of nature
The rustling corn, the fruited thorn
And every happy creature

We'll gently walk and sweetly talk
Till the silent moon shines clearly
I'll grasp thy waist and, fondly pressed,
Swear how I love thee dearly
Not vernal showers to budding flowers
Not autumn to the farmer
So dear can be as thou to me
My fair, my lovely charmer


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 9, 2014)

Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn by Robert Burns

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour,
See approach proud Edward's power —
Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave? —
Let him turn, and flee!

Wha for Scotland's King and Law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa',
Let him follow me!

By Oppression's woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do, or die!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 11, 2014)

Men are sometimes masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
but in ourselves, that we are underlings.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 12, 2014)

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 12, 2014)

‘I thought of you’ by Sara Teasdale

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone 
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea –
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 12, 2014)

‘Il faut, voyez vous, nous pardonner les choses’ by Paul Verlaine

You see, we must be forgiven things:
That way, we will find happiness,
And if our life has moments of sadness,
At least we shall weep together.

Oh, if only our sister-souls could blend
Our confused desires with childish tenderness,
And wander on, far from men and women,
In the cool forgetfulness of that which has exiled us.

Let us be children, let us be two little girls,
Who are enamoured by nothing and amazed by all,
Who grow pale in their chaste bowers,
Without even knowing they have been forgiven.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 12, 2014)

‘My heart is heavy’ by Sara Teasdale

My heart is heavy with many a song
Like ripe fruit bearing down the tree,
But I can never give you one –
My songs do not belong to me.

Yet in the evening, in the dusk
When moths go to and fro,
In the gray hour if the fruit has fallen,
Take it, no one will know.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 13, 2014)

‘Ma Boheme’ by Arthur Rimbaud
_
I went off, my fists in my torn pockets,
Even my coat was becoming ideal:
I went beneath the sky, Muse! I was yours;
Oh! What splendid loves I dreamed of!_

_My only trousers had a large hole in them._
_- Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads_
_With rhymes. My shelter was under the Great Bear._
_My stars in the sky were rustling softly. _

_And I listened to them, sitting on the wayside, _
_Those good September nights, when I felt the drops _
_Of dew on my forehead like a fierce wine. _

_Where, rhyming amidst fantastical shadows,_
_Like lyre-strings, I plucked the elastics _
_Of my wounded shoes, a foot close to my heart_


----------



## Greebo (Sep 14, 2014)

Ode to Country Music

If I wasn’t such a deadbeat, I’d learn Greek.
	I wouldn’t write sonnets; I’d write epics
and odes. I’d love a man who was
	acceptable and conformed to every code.
I’d put together my desk and write my epic or ode
	at sunset over my suburb. How I would love my shrubs!
But all I do is listen to country (and the occasional Joni)
	and smoke. Judge me judge me
judge me. Oh I’ve been through the shallows.
	 I shallow. I hope. I hole. I know
I wrote you the most brutal love poem that knows.

Sandra Simonds


----------



## Greebo (Sep 14, 2014)

And another one - because it seemed like a good idea at the time...

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
   saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content 
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
   generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
   education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

W. H. Auden


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 16, 2014)

lines from Cad Goddeu (the Battle of the Trees) The Book of Taliesin VIII

I HAVE been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,
I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
A year and a half.
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over three score Abers.
I have been a course, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas:
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp,
Disguised for nine years.
in water, in foam.
I have been sponge in the fire,
I have been wood in the covert.

http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/t08.html


----------



## nicedream (Sep 17, 2014)

*“That money talks, I'll not deny, I heard it once: it said, 'goodbye”*

― Richard Armour

more of a quote really, but fuck it, it resonates with me at the moment.


----------



## imposs1904 (Sep 17, 2014)

*The Call (December 1918)*

Come from the slum and the hovel,
From the depth of your dumb despair;
From the hell where you writhe and grovel
Crushed by the woes you bear;
There are joys that are yours for the taking,
There are hopes of a height unknown,
A harvest of life in the making
From the sorrows the past has sown. 

Come from the dust of the battle,
Where your blood, like a river, runs,
Where helpless as driven cattle
You feed the insatiable guns.
You fight when your masters bid you,
Now fight that yourselves be free,
In the last great fight that shall rid you
Of your age-long slavery. 

There's a murmur of many voices
That shall roll like thunder at last;
The shout of a world that rejoices
In a harvest ripening fast.
For the slaves their shackles are breaking
With wonder and ecstasy;
There is life, new life, in the making
In a new-won world made free.
*F.J. Webb*​


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 18, 2014)

Scots Wha Hae by Robert Burns

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
Welcome to your gory bed,
		 Or to victory!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power—
		 Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave!
Wha sae base as be a slave?
		 Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland's king and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa',
		 Let him follow me!

By oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
		 But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!—
		 Let us do or die!


----------



## maya (Sep 18, 2014)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln 
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy 
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.


- Langston Hughes


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 18, 2014)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 18, 2014)

A Private Singularity by John Koethe

I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all:
A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my
Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening
To the music floating through my living room each night.
It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after
Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared
And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone
In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began.
You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell
On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail
In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — 
Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved
At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments
When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years
Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story,
Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego,
Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country
Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the
Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing,
Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — 
Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors,
And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,
As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light
Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in
And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs.
In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan,
Linger on a bench and read _Contre Sainte-Beuve_ and _Time Reborn_,
A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — 
It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail
With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place
Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live.
It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — 
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — 
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — 
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 19, 2014)

Sometimes in the Middle Autumn Days by George Orwell

Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,

I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.

And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;

Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.

So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 20, 2014)

Autumn Twilight by Arthur Symons

The long September evening dies 
In mist along the fields and lanes; 
Only a few faint stars surprise 
The lingering twilight as it wanes. 

Night creeps across the darkening vale; 
On the horizon tree by tree 
Fades into shadowy skies as pale 
As moonlight on a shadowy sea. 

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes, 
Grown pensive now with evening, 
See, lingering as the twilight wanes, 
Lover with lover wandering.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 20, 2014)

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 20, 2014)

Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 20, 2014)

To a Young Girl at a Window

 The Poor Old Soul plods down the street,
		Contented, and forgetting
How Youth was wild, and Spring was wild
		And how her life is setting;

And you lean out to watch her there,
		And pity, nor remember,
That Youth is hard, and Life is hard,
		And quiet is December. 

Margaret Widdemer


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## Greebo (Sep 21, 2014)

The Wind Sleepers

Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.

We no longer sleep
in the wind—
we awoke and fled
through the city gate.

Tear—
tear us an altar,
tug at the cliff-boulders,
pile them with the rough stones—
we no longer
sleep in the wind,
propitiate us.

Chant in a wail
that never halts,
pace a circle and pay tribute
with a song.

When the roar of a dropped wave
breaks into it,
pour meted words
of sea-hawks and gull
sand sea-birds that cry
discords.

H. D.


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## Dillinger4 (Sep 21, 2014)

However gorgeous the painted leaves
Autumn is not mine to say.
How I begrudge the wind in the pines
That too soon scatters the crimson.


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 21, 2014)

the wild swans at coole - w.b. yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty, 
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water 
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones 
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me 
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings 
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, 
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, 
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head, 
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air; 
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will, 
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water, 
Mysterious, beautiful; 
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day 
To find they have flown away?


----------



## wiskey (Sep 22, 2014)

I really like this Michael Rosen poem

Expedition

One of the most extraordinary expeditions
of all time occurred in 1854 
when a group of explorers left London 
on a bright summer’s day in July in 
search of nothing. The leader of the expedition
was Sir Roland Whisper, a man
who had investigated nothing for longer
than any other person alive. For years
he had pored over maps and charts
with this great task in mind. He gathered
around him a team of fearless adventurers and
London’s finest journalists signed up to 
Sir Roland’s team on the off chance
that they might be the first writer to send 
back to London the report that a great 
Englishman had discovered nothing.

And so, with their eyes fixed on the
distant horizon, the plucky little expedition 
boat sailed out of the Pool of London.
On quayside, wives, friends and well-
wishers bid them godspeed, hoping and
praying that the expedition would be 
a success. The sails of the boat 
disappeared from view, expectation 
was high and though one or two of those 
waving goodbye might have been beset 
with the occasional doubt, none could 
have predicted that not a single member
of the expedition would ever return.

As a result, no one knows whether 
Sir Roland’s expedition force did or
did not achieve the great prize of 
finding nothing.


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## Greebo (Sep 22, 2014)

In Praise Of Cities
I
Indifferent to the indifference that conceived her,
Grown buxom in disorder now, she accepts
- Like dirt, strangers, or moss upon her churches -
Your tribute to the wharf of circumstance,
Rejected sidestreet, formal monument…
And, irresistible, the thoroughfare.

You welcome in her what remains of you;
And what is strange and what is incomplete
Compels a passion without understanding,
For all you cannot be.

II
							Only at dawn
You might escape, she sleeps then for an hour:
Watch where she hardly breathes, spread out and cool,
Her pavements desolate in the dim dry air.

III
You stay. Yet she is occupied, apart.
Out of a mist the river turns to see
Whether you follow still. You stay. At evening
Your blood gains pace even as her blood does.

IV
Casual yet urgent in her love making,
She constantly asserts her independence:
Suddenly turning moist pale walls upon you
- Your own designs, peeling and unachieved -
Or her whole darkness hunching in an alley.
And all at once you enter the embrace
Withheld by day while you solicited.
She wanders lewdly, whispering her given name,
Charing Cross Road, or Forty Second Street:
The longest streets, desire that never ends,
Familiar and inexplicable, wearing
Cosmetic light a fool could penetrate.
She presses you with her hard ornaments,
Arcades, late movie shows, the piled lit windows
Of surplus stores. Here she is loveliest;
Extreme, material, the work of man.

Thom Gunn


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## Pickman's model (Sep 22, 2014)

NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
Ernest Dowson

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake;
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world should fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there is rest.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 23, 2014)

How To Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street 
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights, 
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again 
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's 
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Stephen Dobyn


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 23, 2014)

I  read a poem by Stephen Dobyn for the first time just the other day. I had never heard of him before. Here it is:

Ducks by Stephen Dobyn

Warm in my truck by the lighthouse at Watch Hill
on a sunny morning in midwinter, I observe
the ducks bobbing among ice-covered rocks
and think of Bashō and what his position might
have been on the subject of the demand-side
economics of poetry, a term I have just learned,
which argues that the smaller a poet’s number
of readers, the less reason the poet has to write
and why bother if not a single line will stick
in the mind a nanosecond past the poet’s death?
And I also wonder about these ducks and why
their feet don’t get frozen down there among
the chunks of ice, or maybe they only seem not
to get frozen and instead the ducks are very brave
as they seek out sweet things to eat, or sweet
for a duck. Bashō wrote; I feel when I sit with
Kikaku at a party that he is anxious to compose
a verse that will delight the entire company,
while I have no such wish. Bashō of course said
this in Japanese, which I know as much about
as I know about the feel of ducks. As for Kikaku,
he is recalled only tor once being mentioned
by Bashō, despite his faith in the demand-side
economics of poetry. On ducks, Bashō wrote:
Sea darkening—the wild duck’s cry is dimly white.
This morning the ducks have been joined by terns,
cormorants, and gulls. There’s good eating if you
don’t mind diving for it and don’t mind the cold.
The day is so clear I can almost count the trees
on Block Island eight miles away. I doubt Bashō
when writing a poem ever said: This will knock
their socks off. But he did write. Eat vegetable
soup rather than duck stew. Which wasn’t meant
to keep ducks from being eaten, bur expressed
his belief in simplicity— plainness and oddness
being qualities he liked. Across the narrow strip
of land to the lighthouse the wind blows so hard
that a seagull by my truck has to beat its wings
like crazy just to stay in one spot. Many times
my life feels like that, Iots of work just to stay put.
Bashō said that within him was something like
a windswept spirit that when he was young took
to writing poetry merely to amuse itself at first,
but then at last becoming its lifelong occupation.
At times it grew so dejected that it nearly quit,
at other times it grew so swollen with pride that
it rejoiced in vain victories over others, Barthes
in an essay claimed that writers are driven only
by vanity, which is why they must appear in print,
and maybe this fuels the demand-side economics
of poetry, the wish for a kiss-me-kiss-me response.
Like most lighthouses, this one is a white pillar
of stone with a beacon on top, but surely it’s no
longer needed, since ships don’t come this close
and all have radar—even small boats would be
warned away by the buoys. In the fog, its horn
makes a moan like a cow mourning for her calf
and its light slowly rotates like an exploratory eye,
but the whole business could be knocked down
and sold to developers, which makes good sense
if you buy into the demand-side theory of life.
Bashō said that ever since his windswept spirit
began to write poetry it never felt at peace with itself
but was prey to all sorts of doubts. Once it wanted
the security of a job at court and once it wanted
to measure the depths of its ignorance by becoming
a scholar. I know I haven’t read as much as I might,
but it seems the demand-side folks and Barthes
are leaving out a big part of the argument. A poet
has a complicated emotion and produces a poem;
a duck has a complicated emotion and produces
an egg. The demand-side case says they differ
just in the nature of their product, poem versus egg,
and both could fetch the same price at the market.
Off to my left float two brightly colored milliards;
to my right are three brown ducks, clearly females.
They appear to be ignoring one another, but perhaps
I’m wrong, perhaps they shoot quick sexual glances
in each other’s direction and soon they will head
back to the marsh and create an egg. And good
for them, I say, the world could use more ducks.
What other creature so aptly describes a doctor?
Bashō also wrote: Cold night—the wild duck, sick,
falls from the sky and sleeps a awhile. And he said
he didn’t become a courtier or scholar because
his unquenchable love of poetry held him back.
In fact, this. windswept spirit knew no other art
than the art of writing poetry, and consequently,
it clung to it, he said. more or less blindly At times
I repeat those last words to myself: more or less
blindly. Maybe many people would consider this
a bleak picture of the poet’s work, but in me
it awakens a sense of excitement, as when you love
to eat turkey bladders and then one day you meet somebody
else who loves to eat turkey bladders
and you feel you could talk to this person forever
and never grow bored. And I’m glad that Bashō
didn’t say the product or purpose was the poem’s
future life, but instead the product was the writing,
that Bashō was writing the poem for itself alone—
as reckless as that seems—and not for any future
profit. Doesn’t this put Bashō into the category
of nutcase, just as a person with an intense passion
for turkey bladders might be called a nutcase?
Sitting in my truck, locking out past the ducks,
out past Block Island and into the Atlantic, perhaps
in the direction of France, I see the water is a much
darker blue than in summer, as if the cold added
an extra layer of color The white tips of the waves
look more like ice or snow than flecks of froth.
How long could I watch without growing bored?
Maybe until I got hungry or needed to pee. As for
why ducks don’t get cold feet, to me it’s a mystery,
though I’ll wager books arc written on the subject,
just as books get written on the motivation of poets
and why they bother. A little ways from shore, light
reflects off the water as if from the sun’s hand mirror,
and I like to believe that shortly there will emerge
from the iridescence, more or less blindly, a small
boat carrying an aged Japanese poet, at which point
I’ll jump from my truck into the wind’s whirling
ambiguity and shout and wave my hat over my head.
Nothing is rational about this and it’s something
about which I should maybe keep my mouth shut,
but it’s an event the ducks and f hope to see happen,
not for profit, mind you, just for the thing itself.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 24, 2014)

Floating on a Marsh by Wang Wei

Autumn
the sky huge and clear
the marsh miles from farms and house

overjoyed by the cranes
standing around the sandbar

the mountains above the clouds in the distance

this water
utterly still
in the dusk

the white moon overhead

I let my boat drift free tonight
I can’t go home.


----------



## Santino (Sep 24, 2014)

Long poems with no stanza breaks are really off-putting.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 24, 2014)

blinding snow
there is no need
to understand everything


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 24, 2014)

when I see Andrew
Graham Dixon on TV
I think of Santino


----------



## Greebo (Sep 24, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> <snip> I think of Santino


That's a bit hard on Andrew Graham Dixon.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 24, 2014)

Chanson d'automne*

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Paul Verlaine

*Too foreign, didn't read?  An English version of it is here.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_d'automne


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 24, 2014)

Tomorrow by David Budbill

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 25, 2014)

_Leonard Cohen-Waiting for Marriane
_
I have lost a telephone
with your smell in it

I am living beside the radio
all the stations at once
but I pick out a Polish lullaby
I pick it out of the static
it fades I wait I keep the beat
it comes back almost alseep

Did you take the telephone
knowing I'd sniff it immoderately
maybe heat up the plastic
to get all the crumbs of your breath

and if you won't come back
how will you phone to say
you won't come back
so that I could at least argue


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 25, 2014)

this thread is a joy and an education btw, I read it daily


----------



## BoatieBird (Sep 25, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> Tomorrow by David Budbill
> 
> Tomorrow
> we are
> ...


 
A 'like' doesn't convey how much I like this


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

DotCommunist said:


> this thread is a joy and an education btw, I read it daily



It's good to know people read this thread and get something out of it. I am usually going on the assumption that poetry is almost universally ignored.


----------



## BoatieBird (Sep 25, 2014)

Dotty's right, this thread is a joy and an education.
A prayer for the day for heathens


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

For the people of Iraq and Syria 

An Iraqi Child by Heathcote Williams

An Iraqi child
Is drawing bombers, like those
Which nearly killed him.

The bombs have left his face
Swollen with fierce injuries –
Marks of angry pain.

He draws the bombers,
Though his arm and some fingers
Are amputated.

Now they're bandaged up,
With three crayons firmly taped
To the ends of his stumps.

He draws bleak, black lines
Chronicling his history.
"Who did this to me?"

"They had many planes.
They'd brought bombs to fit into each
Of their cruel planes."

"Why didn't they think
Of the people below?
Who drove all these planes?"

"One was called George Bush;
And one was called Tony Blair
With his friend, Campbell.

They'd made good friends
With lots of oil companies.
They wanted your oil.

To get into power
They'd made friends with newspapers
Who all said, 'Yes, bomb Iraq'.

Rupert Murdoch, boss
Of News International,
Told a hundred and twenty

Of his newspapers
To write a leader
Urging readers' to support war.

No one was immune:
Even The Guardian
(Financed by AutoTrader),

Was saying 'Bomb!'
Claiming that Gulf Wars
Were 'humanitarian' wars'".

"The simple cause",
Wrote The Guardian
In a pre-Iraq-war leader,

"At the end, is just."
And with the magic word,
'Humanitarian', cunning PR

Could make the liberal media
Mouth-pieces for war propaganda.
There was a lifestyle

To be supported by Iraq's cheap oil,
So opinion formers in wine-bars and clubs
And in Parliamentary tea-rooms

And in TV studios' hospitality suites –
While not discussing their expenses
Or their mortgages or their fees

Or their cars or their lifestyles
Or their favourite restaurants
Or their children's private schools –

Would dip a toe in the zeitgeist
And then bloviate
About regime change,

Like self-important sheep
Housing wolves:
'I mean, obviously

One has to get rid of Saddam...
Gassing his own people.
It's a breach of international law

For heaven's sake...!
The man has rockets. Chockfull of sarin,
VX, mustard gas, anthrax, you name it.

Didn't you see the Evening Standard?
Front page.
They could all reach London

In about forty-five minutes flat.
Apparently.
According to Tony..."

Tony, who in March 2002,
Received legal advice from the Foreign Office
That an attack on Iraq was illegal
Under international law...

Tony, who would make himself a stranger
To all moral standards
Save for the acquisition of wealth...

And millions are now his,
Thanks to consent
Being manufactured
By media gossips hovering round
Water-coolers, and by his craven civil servants,
And thanks to missiles being launched –
Nato's evil acupuncture
That turned Iraqi skies orange.

1,690, 903 Iraqi people were executed
For the 9/11 crime that they never committed
(But with which they were charged);

Baghdad was floodlit by bombs -
By bombs' continuous explosions -
And in Iraq no one's health was improved,

Just death from vile airborne cancers;
Birth defects that impoverish nightmares
And amputations on an industrial scale.

But the oil's easier to get at now
And Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve,
Would admit, "…that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge
What everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

"Humanitarian?"
The Iraqi boy might query, and then ask,
"So they're happy now?"

"Well, they're all very rich."
"Maybe they'd buy my drawing?"
The boy says.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

No More War Poets

They who with bombast and cliché
Dishonoured freedom, trashed its laws,
Had neither gall nor wit to say,
"Where are the poets of our cause?"

It is the fibre of free men,
Fit subject for immortal verse -
That we, who've lived by selfish pen,
Could tell the bad from what's much worse.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

Blood, Sand and Tears of a Young Boy by Farrah Sarafa

I wipe my tears while they-
they have no tears left to cry.
Dehydrated, like dried pineapple,
the closest they come  to resembling the concentric yellow
and fiber-branching slices
is the tired eye;
swollen and puffed like a pregnant belly
their shadow-plated arches, underneath
reveal how much they question "why."

"For what are you longing,"
I ask, looking into the complicated retina of the young boy.
"What is floating in the water of your deep and narrow well my
dear?"
He only speaks fear.

I feel his mother's cries moving inside of me,
shaking off flower vases and pots of marble stone
from granite table-tops
I shiver; steady in will and
willing to stay, I am made from glass
while this little boy is made from clay.
He is brought to pot by American soldiers
from which the Israelis may drink their raisin-milk in warm,
  making excuses to stay
in my mother's Palestine.

Placing my hand on his cold, winter's chest
I transfer my comforts as warmth, but their flag's pointing west;
  they are looking for help from a nation that is "best,"
though it is we
that have made Iraq into a land of nuclear test.
Missile tanks and planks
for cannonballs make storm in a place where
smoke bombs, tear gases and raping little girls from lower
classes
bring to form
nerve knots and tissue clots
along the green-starred spine of Iraq.
These people need no more tears;
  they are merely
  hungry.

"What does she hide beneath her big red striped gown" he asks,
inquiring of her tasks.
"Rice with cumin-spiced meats and lemon-sesame treats
or niter, sulfur and charcoal dynamite for an endless fight
against the rest of the world," he wonders of her vast plunders.

Desert souls, their tears are made of blood mixed with sand
while I, American, laugh in pain
  at Charlie Chaplin going insane on the television screen.
CNN bulletin interrupts my bliss with news of terrors
about red and flaming wearers
of suicide and contempt.
My laughs push into cries
and form a current for the Arabian Sea
whose crystal salts perspire and become of me.
Her waves undulate like snake-thin layers of blood thickened with
sand and stone
like a serpent's plea to be let free
  and to roam
the Garden of Eden.
America.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

Memory of my Youth by Elisha Porat

Poetry is a sudden process
of verbal compression.
I remember well one such illumination:
her father was a famous artist
who used to load his brush
with one bullet many --
to explode on the canvas with first touch.
He drew the beautiful head of his daughter
and shook his head with pity at my sweaty pages:
I feel for the two of you,
she doesn't know yet
that a poet is a continuous process
of the pain of existence.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 25, 2014)

Mahmoud Darwish: Think of Others

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 26, 2014)

Lines from _The Village Minstrel_ by John Clare, about the Enclosure Act:

There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,
There once were lanes that every valley wound –
Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;
Each tyrant fixed his sign where paths were found,
To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground;
Justice is made to speak as they command;
The high road now must be each stinted bound;
Inclosure, thou’rt a curse upon the land,
And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann’d.’
And now for a few lines from Enclosure:
‘Far spread the moory ground, alevel scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green,
That never felt the rage of blundering plough,
Though centuries wreathed spring blossoms on its brow.
Autumn met plains that stretched then far away
In unchecked shadows of green, brown, and grey.
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene;
No fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect from the gazing eye;
Its only bondage was the circling sky.
A mighty flat, undwarfed by bush and tree,
Spread its fair shadow of immensity,
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds,
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds.
-	  
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours,
Free as spring clouds and wild as forest flowers,
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once as it no ore shall be.
Enclosure came, and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave; …
-	  
The skybound wastes in mangled garbs are left,
Fence meeting fence in owner’s little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please,
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.’

‘These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hates sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, sacred freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came’.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Sep 27, 2014)

Dry loaf by Wallace Stevens

It is equal to living in a tragic land 
To live in a tragic time. 
Regard now the sloping, mountainous rocks 
And the river that batters its way over stones, 
Regard the hovels of those that live in this land. 

That was what I painted behind the loaf, 
The rocks not even touched by snow, 
The pines along the river and the dry men blown 
Brown as the bread, thinking of birds 
Flying from burning countries and brown sand shores, 

Birds that came like dirty water in waves 
Flowing above the rocks, flowing over the sky, 
As if the sky was a current that bore them along, 
Spreading them as waves spread flat on the shore, 
One after another washing the mountains bare. 

It was the battering of drums I heard 
It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried 
And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving, 
Marching and marching in a tragic time 
Below me, on the asphalt, under the trees. 

It was soldiers went marching over the rocks 
And still the birds came, came in watery flocks, 
Because it was spring and the birds had to come. 
No doubt that soldiers had to be marching 
And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 27, 2014)

After Apple-Picking

 My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost


----------



## Betsy (Sep 27, 2014)

*We Have Not Long To Love*

We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day....

*Tennessee Williams*


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 27, 2014)

Bitter Rain in my Courtyard by Wu Tsao

Bitter rain in my courtyard
In the decline of Autumn,
I only have vague poetic feelings
That I cannot bring together.
They diffuse into the dark clouds
And the red leaves.
After the yellow sunset
The cold moon rises
Out of the gloomy mist.
I will not let down the blinds
Of spotted bamboo from their silver hook.
Tonight my dreams will follow the wind,
Suffering the cold,
To the jasper tower of your beautiful flesh.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 27, 2014)

Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, _Take out your pencils. Begin._

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by _love thy neighbor as thyself_,
others by _first do no harm or take no more_
_than you need_. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 27, 2014)

It Took Time by Shinji Moon

This is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it;

how time twines around your neck, its thorns
digging into your skin so you can never forget
how clinging to a string of hope, threading it
between your spine, and having it unravel before you
in the span of an hour
is worse than any metaphor about nakedness
that you poets will ever write.

This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza
is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
the glass.

You can’t even possess yourself; let alone
the person you see standing before you.

The moon
hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
beautiful.

Time is falling through the hole in my pocket. January
is coming soon, and I have a feeling that he’s never going to fall
out of love with this December.

He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll
send her white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend
that love is a place you can cross state lines to get back to,

but it’s that time of the year again, and
calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
for good.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 28, 2014)

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

 I’d give you another day dizzy 
in its bracket for the reluctant circumference 
of a sad sad satellite’s antiquated orbital stoppage.
You can’t jump with a lead foot, can’t 
anthropomorphize insect anticipation, can’t 
pixelate postcard nostalgia, can’t 
trace a boy’s tiny hand and call him
king of anything that crosses your path, your past,
your iconographic reluctance to let go the toehold
of ordinary New York lasting so long at night, so
lusty in traffic & another orphan absently
kicking the underside of an orange plastic chair.
Poems shouldn’t make you wait for them to finish.
Like love, they should finish making you wait.

Noah Eli Gordon


----------



## Greebo (Sep 29, 2014)

O TASTE AND SEE

Because of a kiss on the forehead
in the long Night's infirmary,
through the red wine let light shine deep.

Because of the thirty six just men
that so stealthily roam this earth
raise high the glass and do not weep.

Who says the world is not a wedding?
Couples, in their oases, lullabye.
Let glass be full before they sleep.

Toast all that which seems to vanish
like a rainbow stared at, those bright
truant things that will not keep;

and ignorance of the last night
of our lives, its famished breathing.
Then, in the red wine, taste the light.

Dannie Abse


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 29, 2014)

The rain has stopped,
the clouds have drifted away,
and the weather is clear again.
If your heart is pure,
then all things in your world are pure.
Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself,
then the moon and the flowers
will guide you along the way.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 30, 2014)

Names

Thank you for dreaming of me
for letting me know
for waking up to remember that you dreamed 

I never wake up when I dream of you
What woke you up
was it someone
else’s body? 

A small thrill a little secret is ours
a desire for safe travel
in unspilled blood

Fady Joudah


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 30, 2014)

Late Echo by John Ashberry

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.


----------



## Betsy (Oct 1, 2014)

*An Ode to the Tax Disc*

It’s been a pain since 1921
Now from today it has gone
Never again will it be seen
In the bottom corner of you window screen
No more stressed out men and women across the nation
Searching for their Insurance Documentation
Never again will we see
A house turned upside down in search of an MOT
And how many times have you had to look
For that for the useless ubiquitous car log book
It’s gone forever and it won’t be missed
Goodbye to the Cars Tax Disc
And it’s a great thing I must say
Saving millions for the poor DVLA
Now those over worked Swansea souls
Can redirect what’s saved to fill the potholes
And saving forests of trees and lots of stress
For the car tax is now paperless
Cos how many times on the first day of the month
Have you had to catch an over priced bus
Stood in the queue waiting in line
Because you failed to do your tax on time
And now are far too frightened to take the risk
Of driving without a current tax disc
Because now we are in the precarious position
Where the police have number plate recognition
Unlike my dad who used a beer mat
Gone are the days you’d get away with that
Like most things now you can do it on line
It’ll save you the hassle and it’ll save you the time
Of standing in an endless post office queue
Because most of them have been closed down too
And I’ve torn it in half so many times
Trying to detached it along the perforated lines

So good bye and good riddance you will not be missed
I’m happily waving goodbye to the old car tax disc

*Mike Garry*

http://godisamanc.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/an-ode-to-the-tax-disk/


----------



## phildwyer (Oct 3, 2014)

Sweet child, you need not fear
Lest spring be lost.
Nor think of autumn sere
And winter's frost.

Fear not lest suffering bow
Or age betray;
Holy and fair as now
You shall stay.

The Gods will set their guard
To shield you well:
Flame, and the flying shard
Of bursting shell.

-- Enoch Powell


----------



## Greebo (Oct 3, 2014)

phildwyer said:


> Sweet child, you need not fear
> Lest spring be lost.
> Nor think of autumn sere <snip>
> -- Enoch Powell



An even more bitter twist on "They shall not grow old as we who are left..."


----------



## Greebo (Oct 3, 2014)

Last night,

I dreamt of making sense,
parts of speech caught up in sheets
and blankets, long strips of fabric
wrapped loosely around shoulders,
goblets, urns, cups with unmatched saucers. 

You were there, and the past seemed important,
what was said, what was done,
feelings felt but maybe not expressed,
signs randomly connected
yet vital to what comes next,
to a coming season,
next year’s trip to Nauset Beach. 

I woke up wanting to read a poem by that name,
and I found one with a lifeguard’s chair,
a broken shell, gulls watching egrets,
home an ocean away.

Michael Broder


----------



## phildwyer (Oct 3, 2014)

Greebo said:


> An even more bitter twist on "They shall not grow old as we who are left..."



It's the Houseman influence.  He was Powell's tutor at Cambridge.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2014)

For Alan Henning

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
   inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense	
   anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters
   and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2014)

Making Peace by Denise Levertov

A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2014)

The Dipper by Kathleen Jaime

It was winter, near freezing, 
I'd walked through a forest of firs 
when I saw issue out of the waterfall 
a solitary bird. 

It lit on a damp rock, 
and, as water swept stupidly on, 
wrung from its own throat 
supple, undammable song. 

It isn't mine to give. 
I can't coax this bird to my hand 
that knows the depth of the river 
yet sings of it on land.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2014)

Kick it to the long grass

The rough

Home of golf balls and diamonds

The back of the queue

The nevernow, the place

You know the one. The drawer of sods and sundries

I’ve been kicking about,  shoalin style

For too long


Make it so tomorrow

Tuesday-blue

twitchy midweek problems

all the words begin with ‘dis’ or ‘dys’

T’s tees and teas, but I’m a coffee man

I can discuss this at length, my concerns are recognized

I’ve reconed but I never threw discus

Never that long


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2014)

love Kathleen Jamie


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2014)

by Ko Un

Two people are eating
sitting facing each other

An ordinary everyday thing
and at the same time
the best thing

Like they say, it’s love


----------



## Greebo (Oct 4, 2014)

The Balloon of the Mind

Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

W. B. Yeats


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2014)

> Twenty years after the death of the iconic filmmaker Derek Jarman, the poet Kate Tempest - only a child when Jarman died - creates a new radio poem on the Kent beach where he lived. Tempest has been shortlisted for this year's Mercury-prize and was named in September as one of the Next Generation poets.
> 
> Crunching across the shingle of Britain's only desert, poet and playwright Kate Tempest's words are buffeted by relentless wind of Dungeness. Home to two lighthouses, two nuclear power stations, abundant wildlife, and to Prospect Cottage.
> 
> ...



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04k7vqk


----------



## Betsy (Oct 5, 2014)

*And Nothing Is Ever As You Want To Be.

*You lose your love for her and then
It is her who is lost,
And then it is both who are lost,
And nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.

In a very ordinary world
A most extraordinary pain mingles with the small routines,
The loss seems huge and yet
Nothing can be pinned down or fully explained.

You are afraid.
If you found the perfect love
It would scald your hands,
Rip the skin from your nerves,
Cause havoc with a computered heart.

You lose your love for her and then it is her who is lost.
You tried not to hurt and yet
Everything you touched became a wound.
You tried to mend what cannot be mended,
You tried, neither foolish nor clumsy,
To rescue what cannot be rescued.

You failed,
And now she is elsewhere
And her night and your night
Are both utterly drained.

How easy it would be
If love could be brought home like a lost kitten
Or gathered in like strawberries,
How lovely it would be;
But nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.
*
Brian Patten*.


----------



## Greebo (Oct 5, 2014)

Weave in, My Hardy Life

Weave in, weave in, my hardy life,
Weave yet a soldier strong and full for great campaigns to come,
Weave in red blood, weave sinews in like ropes, the senses, sight weave in,
Weave lasting sure, weave day and night the weft, the warp, incessant weave, tire not,
(We know not what the use O life, nor know the aim, the end, nor really aught we know,
But know the work, the need goes on and shall go on, the death-envelop’d march of peace as
	   well as war goes on,)
For great campaigns of peace the same the wiry threads to weave,
We know not why or what, yet weave, forever weave.

Walt Whitman


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 5, 2014)

By Ryokan

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 5, 2014)

I read some time Walt Whitman yesterday. Here it is:

from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman

Listen! I will be honest with you.
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve.
However sweet the laid-up stores,
However convenient the dwellings,
You shall not remain there.
However sheltered the port,
And however calm the waters,
You shall not anchor there.
However welcome the hospitality that welcomes you
You are permitted to receive it but a little while.

Afoot and lighthearted, take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before you,
The long brown path before you, leading wherever
you choose.
Say only to one another:
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 6, 2014)

The Word by Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today, 

between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.” 

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend 

and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up, 

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing 

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds 

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder 

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue, 

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom 

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children, 

—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 6, 2014)

Everything I touch
with tenderness, alas,
pricks like a bramble.


----------



## Greebo (Oct 6, 2014)

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September. 

Galway Kinnell


----------



## Greebo (Oct 6, 2014)

Bramble Bush

He was so very, very wise,
He thought that faith began
And ended with a spoken word.
He trusted every man.

And like the man of Our Town
Who was so wondrous wise,
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.

But when he found his eyes were out,
Unlike him, he could find
No bush to scratch them in again...
So he was always blind

Edith Mirick


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Oct 7, 2014)

*Lines Written In The Days Of Growing Darkness, by Mary Oliver*

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to say,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

through the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Oct 7, 2014)

Dillinger4 said:


> The Word by Tony Hoagland


Beautiful


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 7, 2014)

oh you arch and naughty man cohen:

I heard of a man 
who says words so beautifully 
that if he only speaks their name 
women give themselves to him. 

If I am dumb beside your body 
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 7, 2014)

from his 'flowers for hitler' collection:

Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,

not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races
so they'll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,
let us sell snow
to under-developed nations,
(It is true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite
Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals
at the same time,
let us have another official language, 
let us determine what it will be,
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship
to the most original suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home
to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.
and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere
like Gladstone bags abandoned
after a _coup d'état,_
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence
on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Havana
April 1961


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 7, 2014)

I might have already done this one on the thread but it bears repeating:

The Genius


For you 
I will be a ghetto jew 
and dance 
and put white stockings 
on my twisted limbs 
and poison wells 
across the town 

For you 
I will be an apostate jew 
and tell the Spanish priest 
of the blood vow 
in the Talmud 
and where the bones 
of the child are hid 

For you 
I will be a banker jew 
and bring to ruin 
a proud old hunting king 
and end his line 

For you 
I will be a Broadway jew 
and cry in theatres 
for my mother 
and sell bargain goods 
beneath the counter 

For you 
I will be a doctor jew 
and search 
in all the garbage cans for foreskins 
to sew back again 

For you 
I will be a Dachau jew 
and lie down in lime 
with twisted limbs 
and bloated pain 
no mind can understand


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 7, 2014)

DotCommunist said:


> Kick it to the long grass
> 
> The rough
> 
> ...




this one is me btw, I re-read this page of the thread and it looks like its kathleen jaime from my posting, but it isn't, its me having a good poetical day. You know when you are writing and you feel the muse? You can taste the victory as you write the lines. I won't continue spamming this thread with my own cos its not the thread for it but rah. When there is fire to your fingers


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Oct 7, 2014)

DotCommunist said:


> I won't continue spamming this thread with my own


I think you should


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 8, 2014)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I think you should




I might if you like 

I've never really plumbed the depth of my feelings not in poesy. I like clever recursive stuff. But the best stuff is recursive and has feeling. I really struggle with poesy atm because I did my stuff, I worked out the series of images. Done that. Now I'm semi-stuck writing love poems to a girl who has moved on from me. This is going to sound so very stupid, but good poetry hurts.


----------



## phildwyer (Oct 8, 2014)

DotCommunist said:


> Now I'm semi-stuck writing love poems to a girl who has moved on from me.



O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.


----------



## phildwyer (Oct 8, 2014)

DotCommunist said:


> I might have already done this one on the thread but it bears repeating:
> 
> The Genius
> 
> ...



Sylvia Plath rip-off innit.

	  "Daddy"

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of _you_,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always _knew_ it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 8, 2014)

.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 8, 2014)

The Failure of Language by Jacqueline Berger

First day of class, I ask the students, by way
of introduction, what they believe:
Language is our best tool, or language fails
to express what we know and feel.
We go around the room.
Almost everyone sides with failure.
Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool 
must sometimes be bent to work.

Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed,
she tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.
I change the flowers in the vase,
rub cream into her hands and feet.
When I lean down to kiss her goodbye,
I whisper I love you, words that maybe
have lost their meaning, being asked to stand
for so many unspoken particulars.

The sky when I walk to the parking lot
this last weekend of summer
is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees
which dusk turns the color of ash.

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

My students believe it’s important
to get the words right.
Once said, they can never be retrieved.
It takes years to learn to be awkward.
At their age, each word must be carefully chosen
to communicate the yes, but also leave room
for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car
with the engine running.

Inside us, constellations,
bit thread knotted into night’s black drape.
There are no right words,
if by right we mean perfect,
if by perfect we mean able to save us.

Four of us pack up our friend’s apartment.
Suddenly she can’t live unassisted.
I remember this glass, part of a set
I bought her years ago
when she became for a time a scotch drinker.
I bought it for its weight, something
solid to hold, and for the way an inch or two
of amber would look against its etched walls.
I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen.

It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 8, 2014)

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of _blackberry_ corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: _justice,
pine, hair, woman, you_ and _I_. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called _pumpkinseed_. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying _blackberry, blackberry, blackberry_.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 9, 2014)

A Colour of the Sky by Tony Hoagland

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
					 when you pass through clumps of wood  
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,  
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?  
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing  
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,  
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,  
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written  
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.  
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,  
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.  
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.  
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store  
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,  
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.  
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 9, 2014)

What Have I Learned by Gary Snyder

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

	 —the first Calochortus flowers
	 and in all the land,
			  it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
			  to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

	 you pass it on.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 9, 2014)

Generation by Rae Armantrout

We know the story.

She turns
back to find her trail
devoured by birds.

The years: the
undergrowth


----------



## Greebo (Oct 10, 2014)

Poem in the Modernist Manner

They were cheap but they were real,
the old bistros. You could have a meal,
drink the devil’s own red wine, and contemplate
the sawdust on the floor, or fate,
as the full-fed beast kicked the empty pail.

The conspiracy of the second rate
continued to reverberate.
Everyone wanted to get his licks.
Everyone said it was a steal.

So the girl and I stayed out late.
We walked along the shore
and I campaigned some more.
And the city built with words not bricks
burned like a paper plate.

David Lehman


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 11, 2014)

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.


----------



## Greebo (Oct 11, 2014)

Poem [on getting a card]

 on getting a card
long delayed
from a poet whom I love
but

with whom I differ
touching
the modern poetic
technique

I was much moved 
to hear
from him if
as yet he does not

concede the point
nor is he
indeed conscious of it
no matter

his style 
has other outstanding
virtues
which delight me

William Carlos Williams


----------



## Sirena (Oct 11, 2014)

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today, well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

Kalidasa - 5th c. AD


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

Love Poems Between Ryokan and Teishin

Was it really you
I saw
Or is this joy
I still feel
only a dream?
--Teishin

In this dream world
We doze
And talk of dreams -
Dream, dream on,
As much as you wish
--Ryokan

Here with you
I could remain
For countless days and years
Silent as the bright moon
We watched together
--Teishin

have you forgotten me
Or lost the path here?
I wait for you
All day, every day
But you do not appear
--Ryokan

The moon, I'm sure
Is shining brightly
High above the mountains
But gloomy clouds
Shroud the peak in darkness
--Teishin

You must rise above
The gloomy clouds
Covering the mountaintop
Otherwise, how will you
Ever see the brightness?
--Ryokan


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

There Was A Time by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith.
But now, my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
An abbey for monks.
A table for the Torah,
Kaaba for the pilgrim.
My religion is love.
Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take,
That shall be the path of my faith.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

From Blossoms by Li-Yeung Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

I am Completely Different by Kuroda Saburo

I am completely different.
Though I am wearing the same tie as yesterday,
am as poor as yesterday,
as good for nothing as yesterday,
today
I am completely different.
Though I am wearing the same clothes,
am as drunk as yesterday,
living as clumsily as yesterday, nevertheless
today
I am completely different.

Ah—
I patiently close my eyes
on all the grins and smirks
on all the twisted smiles and horse laughs—
and glimpse then, inside me
one beautiful white butterfly
fluttering towards tomorrow.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 12, 2014)

I am quite used to solitude. It is only in autumn, and in very specific autumnal moments, that I ever feel a bit lonely. The first chills, misty mornings and evenings, those first storms of autumn and winter, the wind and rain lashing against a window... those are the only moments where I feel a little bit lonely. Like everything, it soon passes. I blame Ernest Dowson. 

Autumnal, by Ernest Dowson

Pale amber sunlight falls across 
The reddening October trees, 
That hardly sway before a breeze 
As soft as summer: summer’s loss 
Seems little, dear! on days like these. 

Let misty autumn be our part! 
The twilight of the year is sweet: 
Where shadow and the darkness meet 
Our love, a twilight of the heart 
Eludes a little time’s deceit. 

Are we not better and at home 
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem 
No harvest joy is worth a dream? 
A little while and night shall come, 
A little while, then, let us dream. 

Beyond the pearled horizons lie 
Winter and night: awaiting these 
We garner this poor hour of ease, 
Until love turn from us and die 
Beneath the drear November trees.


----------



## Betsy (Oct 13, 2014)

*Ex "Ex"*

Long after I married you, I found myself
in his city and heard him call my name.
Each of us amazed, we headed to the café
we used to haunt in our days together.
We sat by a window across the paneled room
from the table that had witnessed hours
of our clipped voices and sharp silences.
Instead of coffee, my old habit in those days,
I ordered hot chocolate, your drink,
dark and dense the way you take it,
without the swirl of frothy cream I like.
He told me of his troubled marriage, his two
difficult daughters, their spiteful mother, how
she’d tricked him and turned into someone
he didn’t really know. I listened and listened,
glad all over again to be rid of him, and sipped
the thick, brown sweetness slowly as I could,
licking my lips, making it last.

*Andrea Hollander*


----------



## Greebo (Oct 13, 2014)

October

October child is born for woe
With the strength to dig a hoe
And ideas never called a doe
Creativity profound like its afternoon
October children are blessed.

The world created in October; probably
Every ending of a cycle, 
Is the beginning; ideally.
Coming twilight in november
October is natures funeral month.

Green gradually loses to yellow
Every fresh ready to dry-up a flesh
In October, the leaf falls
No wonder, its child is born for woe
God protects the October child.

In Nigeria, tis beginning of a good era
Business boom, and does the purse
Woe was four months before
Mellow, take a toast, don’t be sober, 
For October does his work well.

Onyekachukwu Vincent Onyech


----------



## Greebo (Oct 14, 2014)

In October

when I count the days in a calender
it will never end sooner

Lift the finger slower 
let the number be further
Too many stories I remember
bitter sweet in October

Necessary, unnecessary
all the moments become to be glee
be glad to see what we didn't see
be glad to find a funny side behind the sad story

October I was in
never be same with October I am in

In October I have learned
every story will end to be earned 

Eva Rachmania


----------



## Greebo (Oct 18, 2014)

On the Disadvantages of Central Heating

cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod
stove-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
		decades ago now

waking in northwest London, tea
brought up steaming, a Peak Frean
biscuit alongside to be nibbled
as blue gas leaps up singing
		decades ago now

damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung
habitat of bronchitis, of long
hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing
quite drying out till next summer:
		delicious to think of

hassocks pulled in close, toasting-
forks held to coal-glow, strong-minded
small boys and big eager sheepdogs
muscling in on bookish profundities
		now quite forgotten

the farmhouse long sold, old friends
dead or lost track of, what’s salvaged
is this vivid diminuendo, unfogged
by mere affect, the perishing residue
		of pure sensation

Amy Clampitt


----------



## 8115 (Oct 18, 2014)

Like a Beacon

In London
every now and then
I get this craving
for my mother’s food
I leave art galleries
in search of plantains
saltfish/sweet potatoes

I need this link

I need this touch
of home
swinging my bag
like a beacon
against the cold

Grace Nichols


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

I woke up early this morning to the sound of geese, flying in huge Vs over my house. If I had a spirit animal, it would be a goose. This is one of the things I treasure most of the entire year. 

for migrating geese:

Anon, 9th Century China

In the pavilion of separation, the leaves suddenly blew away. 
On the road of farewell, the clouds lifted all of a sudden. 
Ah! How I regret that men are not like wild geese 
Who go on their way together


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

Ode to the Goose by Luo Binwang 

Goose, goose, goose,
You bend your neck towards the sky and sing.
Your white feathers float on the emerald water,
Your red feet push the clear waves.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

I feel the life is 
sorrowful and unbearable 
though 
I can't flee away 
since I am not a bird.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

Sonnet by Joseph Ceravolo

In the middle of Autumn
early when the skies
show the dawn
still hovering in trees
and the geese, a series
of arrows break form
for another unknown bird
that catches our eyes,
I can’t return.
While overhead one storm
in the bird’s neck feathers carries
the dampness of the journey

soaked with our laughs and whispers
in the subterfuge of happiness


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

A Reflection of Beauty in Washington by Jimmy Carter

I recall one winter night 
going to the White House roof
to study the Orion nebulae,
but we could barely see the stars,
their images so paled by city lights.

Suddenly we heard a sound
primeval in its tone and rhythm
coming from the northern sky.
We turned to watch in silence
long wavering V's
breasts transformed to brilliance
by the lights we would have dimmed.
The geese passed overhead,
and then without a word
we went down to a peaceful sleep,
marveling at what we'd seen and heard.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

The Geese by Richard Peck

My father was the first to hear
The passage of the geese each fall,
Passing above the house so near,
He’d hear within his heart their call.

And then at breakfast time he'd say:
"The geese were heading south last night,"
For he had lain awake till day,
Feeling his earthbound soul take flight.

Knowing that winter's wind comes soon
After the rushing of those wings,
Seeing them pass before the moon,
Recalling the lure of far-off things.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

Canada Geese by Robert Davidson

Out of the haar, in flight,
in formation, in position, each eye
on the white rump in front, each aware
of the white bar on a face away to the side.
Direct, speedy – the flock is two waving lines
passing between mountains, over salt water,
following the coast, a creamy shoreline
broadening on to marshes, tidal islands
until – ahead and below – something familiar,
another flock resting on a sand bar.
Down they go.

Down, level with the hills.
Down, level with the road.
Down, level with the shore.
Skimming over water the lead bird
working hardest, the wind from his wings lifting
the following bird, then the next until
they are all floating on air broken by the birds in front.

They lift to cross an island. Come down again
on the other side. Up ahead, white-barred heads
turn on long necks. Take care! Take care!
crying from the bar, and from the air the flight
calls back, We’re here! We’re here! The sky
between sand bar and flight filled with voice.
Take care! We’re here! Take care! We’re here!

Spreading their wings, turning them downwards,
they stretch out webbed feet. Everthing now,
every part of them, is catching the air,
slowing them, dropping them.
Take care! Take care!
In they come as though they must scatter
the geese on the sand like marbles, but now
their dropped wings lift them and bring them
down again, slower now, one after the other,
feet planing across the water, all together

hhhiiiiiiiisssssssshhhhhhhhhhh!!!

to sit down on it, glide along the surface and paddle out
onto the sand, to become a feathery conference
of webs, wings, necks and beaks, all crying together.
We’re here! We’re here!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

The Geese by Jane Mead

slicing this frozen sky know
where they are going—
and want to get there.

Their call, both strange
and familiar, calls
to the strange and familiar

heart, and the landscape
becomes the landscape
of being, which becomes

the bright silos and snowy
fields over which the nuanced
and muscular geese

are calling—while time
and the heart take measure.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 19, 2014)

Lessons From Geese by Milton Olsen

FACT 1

As each goose flaps its wings it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a "V" formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

LESSON

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

FACT 2

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

LESSON

If we have as much sense as a goose we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

FACT 3

When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position.

LESSON

It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other's skills, capabilities and unique arrangements of gifts, talents or resources.

FACT 4

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

LESSON

We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, the production is much greater. The power of encouragement (to stand by one's heart or core values and encourage the heart and core of others) is the quality of honking we seek.

FACT 5

When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock.

LESSON

If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.


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## Greebo (Oct 20, 2014)

Cradle Song

SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright,	 
Dreaming in the joys of night;	 
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep	 
Little sorrows sit and weep.	 

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,	 
Secret joys and secret smiles,	 
Little pretty infant wiles.	 

As thy softest limbs I feel	 
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast	 
Where thy little heart doth rest.	 

O the cunning wiles that creep	 
In thy little heart asleep!	 
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.

William Blake


----------



## Waltz (Oct 21, 2014)

_Dorian Peterson Potter


"My Sweet Love - Triplets"



You take my breath completely away 
You mean the world to me, my love and 
Only I have to gaze softly into your eyes 

I rememb'r all the smiles upon your face 
And when I'm sad I replay them in my mind 
My heart savorin' every time I can't replace 

Sometimes it seems I'm living just a dream 
From which I don't want ever to wake up from 
And when you're far 'way I just want to scream 

'Cause life without you can never be the same 
Love runs wild thru my veins like a roarin' fire 
And my skin burns recurring just your name._


----------



## Waltz (Oct 21, 2014)

*Tammy J. Winslett*




_"WHEN I MET YOU"

There was a day that I met you
Oh! Your smile so beautiful too; 
We started to talk more each day
Even though I didn't have much to say.

All of the words my heart told, 
It was that moment love started to grow.
More and more as the days went by
I knew it was only a matter of time.

Feeling my heart as it skipped a beat, 
My love for you was getting deep.
There was a chance I had to take
My love was real it wasn't fake.

As days passed, I couldn't take anymore
I said, I love you; it opened the door.
I took a few steps closer to you
And I heard the words; I love you too.

There was a darkness that filled my life
But you came along and shined it bright.
I love you now and forever more
Remember this, it's you I adore._


----------



## Greebo (Oct 22, 2014)

Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden

Catmint—tubular, lavender, an ointment
to blur the scar, bloom the skin. My mouth has begun
the hunt for words that heal.

In the garden, I am startled by a cluster
of sun-colored petals marked, Radiation.
Piles of radiation. Orange radiation, huddled together

like families bound by a hospital-bright morning.
And behind them: a force of yuccas
called Golden Swords. A bush or mound

of sheath-like leaves sprouting from a proud center.
And isn’t that the plot?
First the radiation, then the golden sword.

I remember, incurably,
your mother. The laughter that flowered
from her lips. I’m sorry I have no good words

to honor her war. It crumbled me to watch you
overwhelmed by her face
in the daffodils outside your childhood home.

Eugenia Leigh


----------



## Greebo (Oct 24, 2014)

It's Finally Friday

It’s finally Friday - I’m so glad.
It’s been a crazy week.
I got chewed out on Monday,
and since then it’s all been bleak.
I lost my lunch on Tuesday,
and a parent went insane,
which shocked me so completely
that I almost popped a vein.
I poked my eye on Wednesday,
and the nurse gave me a shot.
She sent me to the doctor
when I fainted on the spot.
On Thursday I was tardy
’cause I kinda overslept.
And the snack that I was craving
came up missing in a theft.
And so it’s finally Friday.
No more pencils, no more books.
No more sitting in detention,
no more teachers’ dirty looks.
By Friday I’m exhausted,
out of energy and breath.
But that’s the day you’ll hear me shout,
“Rejoice, TGIF!”
And twice a month on Friday,
I remember why I stay:
You see, I am the principal -
that’s when I get my pay.

Paul Orshoski


----------



## Greebo (Oct 28, 2014)

While Writing

Someone inside says, “Get busy.”
But I’ve got appointments to keep,
I have an abstemious love of equations calculated quickly
While the tepid day melts into design.

And the high cheekbones of the beautiful life
Bear the loose look of a calendar by lamplight.
I search for patterns in everything.
I am tied in knots of comprehension.

I think, how useful it might be
To pierce all the hands of the earth
With an oath of pins encircling snarling planets
But talent and shallowness sewn together

Is nothing but a kerchief tied around a survivalist’s head,
And it helps to know the feet wriggling through a hole
In the universe will land for an instant
Upon the cushions of the dark,

And that after marching one doozy of a kilometer after another, 
We each come upon the same poem scribbled in invisible ink 
Taped to the door of a room
In which an austere justice is burning for us.

Noelle Kocot


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## Greebo (Oct 29, 2014)

That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnet 73)

 That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

William Shakespeare


----------



## Betsy (Nov 1, 2014)

*Bedtime Story*

‘_I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should
bar the way!’ — Alfred Noyes ‘The Highwayman’_

I was reading him ‘The Highwayman’
As he lay tucked up in his bed,
My fingers drumming the horses hooves
On the back of the book as I read
I read by a ribbon of moonlight
As he turned to me to say:
‘I hope that he dodges the soldiers!
Though hell should bar his way!’
But I lost myself in that wild ride
Of a man in a velvet coat —
And when I looked he was fast asleep
With a bunch of sheet at his throat.

*Felix Dennis*


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Nov 1, 2014)

*As I Began to Love Myself – A Poem on Self Love by Charlie Chaplin*

As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering
are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth.
Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody
As I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time
was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this
person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.

As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life,
and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “MATURITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance,
I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens
at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm.
Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”.

As I began to love myself I quit steeling my own time,
and I stopped designing huge projects for the future.
Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do
and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in
my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”.

As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for
my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew
me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude
a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.

As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since
I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”.

As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worry
about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where EVERYTHING
is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”.

As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me
and it can make me sick. But As I connected it to my heart, my
mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this
connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”.

We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know THAT IS “LIFE”!


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## Greebo (Nov 2, 2014)

New Year’s Morning*

Only a night from old to new!
Only a night, and so much wrought!
The Old Year’s heart all weary grew,
But said: “The New Year rest has brought.”
The Old Year’s hopes its heart laid down,
As in a grave; but, trusting, said:
“The blossoms of the New Year’s crown
Bloom from the ashes of the dead.”
The Old Year’s heart was full of greed;
With selfishness it longed and ached,
And cried: “I have not half I need.
My thirst is bitter and unslaked.
But to the New Year’s generous hand
All gifts in plenty shall return;
True love it shall understand;
By all my failures it shall learn.
I have been reckless; it shall be
Quiet and calm and pure of life.
I was a slave; it shall go free,
And find sweet peace where I leave strife.”
Only a night from old to new!
Never a night such changes brought.
The Old Year had its work to do;
No New Year miracles are wrought.

Always a night from old to new!
Night and the healing balm of sleep!
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.
All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.

Helen Hunt Jackson

*By rights, this would have been better posted yesterday.


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## Greebo (Nov 3, 2014)

I saw this and thought of social media.

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  
To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson


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## Greebo (Nov 4, 2014)

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers.

R S Thomas


----------



## Greebo (Nov 6, 2014)

Poppies on the Wheat

Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat,
A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow
Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat
Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet
Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro
To mark the shore.

The farmer does not know
That they are there. He walks with heavy feet,
Counting the bread and wine by autumn’s gain,
But I, - I smile to think that days remain
Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet
No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain,
I shall be glad remembering how the fleet,
Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.

Helen Hunt Jackson


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 7, 2014)

Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your torrents,
and all your waves and breakers
sweep over me.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 7, 2014)

Poppies

The gay day is ablaze… And in the languid grass
The poppies’ patches burn like impotent desire…
Like lips that can allure or deathly poison us,
Or wings of butterfly, wide spread and red like fire.

The gay day is ablaze… But old and empty stands
This garden, long ago lost of the feasts and pleasure,
And poppies,weathered, like old women’s heads,
Are warmly overspread by heaven chalice, azure.

Innokenty Annensky
translated by Yevgeny Bonver


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## Greebo (Nov 8, 2014)

Poppies

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

Mary Oliver


----------



## Greebo (Nov 10, 2014)

Wild Poppies

And how do you survive? Your long throat,
your red-rag-to-a-bull head?

You rise heavy in the night, stars drinking
from your poppy neck.

Your henna silks serenade me
under the breadth of the Pyrenees.

You move like an opera,
open like sea anemones.

You are earth’s first blood.
How the birds love you,

I envy your lipstick dress.
You are urgent as airmail, animal red,

Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head.
Your butterfly breath

releases your scents, your secrets,
bees blackening your mouth

as your dirty red laundry
all hangs out.

Marion McCready


----------



## Greebo (Nov 11, 2014)

For those who had had their fill of poppies, in France they wear a cornflower (bleuet) to as a token of rememberance for the war dead (it's also to remember and show solidarity with those wounded in war, people with PTSD, war widows & orphans)

Cornflower

there:
a rising nearness, a beacon
its blueness a raggy topknot mix
of indigo, azure and violet
that humbles you to silence
as you stumble across its sudden fulness
signalling from wheat-field trespass

Consider its other names:

Hurtsickle from its tough stems -
that angelicaed haze of greyey-green
blunting the reaper’s scythe

Cyanus, memento of the garland
his namesake garnered as a lad
to frame his love for Flora

Centaurea, after Chiron the centaur
who swathed Hercules’ poisoned arrow-wounds
in braids of sky-blue petal-heads
and was healed

Remember these
and recall this flower
the single bloom to grow in Nagasaki’s aftermath
Hiroshima’s wreath

Cornflower,
talisman of hurt, of youth, of hope

Roger elkin


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## Betsy (Nov 11, 2014)

*On the Idle Hill of Summer*

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams, 
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams. 

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by, 
Dear to friends and food for powder, 
Soldiers marching, all to die. 

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain, 
Lovely lads and dead and rotten; 
None that go return again. 

Far the calling bugles hollo, 
High the screaming fife replies, 
Gay the files of scarlet follow: 
Woman bore me, I will rise. 

*A.E.Housman*


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## Betsy (Nov 11, 2014)

*For The Fallen*

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

*They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.*

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

*Robert Laurence Binyon*


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## Greebo (Nov 12, 2014)

Page 22 / oh lucky me

oh lucky me
I am of some use
I am of some inspiration
to the two men 
across the lunchcounter
I remind them of the
last Chinese restaurant
they took their family to
did you know that
Chinese food was delicious?

Frances Chung


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 13, 2014)

The Years

I have invited the years to join me
in this hut in the woods,
and the years have told me
I should love what happens - 
this is the only world I can live in.
Nothing has been wasted, they say,
Every featherweight of grief is precious.
The years have told me to be happy:
they say I should dance with joy
for my ordinary life.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 13, 2014)

Our Never

Is the never of childhood, deeper
than the never of adolescence,
which has a whining, stammering
quality, which is a stamped foot
followed by huffing steps, and wholly
unlike the never of adulthood,
has none of the bright spider
cracks of reason multiplying
along its roof, threading its dark
dome with fine lines of light.
Didn’t you think, with such a
cavernous never in mind,
you might have consulted me?
Even a 3 AM phone call would’ve
been justified. On the line
in the dark, you could have shared
a little childhood mythology,
told me about some night when
you didn’t sleep, couldn’t hear
your parents, and morning seemed
further away than “far away,”
seemed consigned to a distinct
and inimitable never.  You could’ve
evoked for me the particular textures
of that never, explained that
you were mulling them again now,
assaying them for a contemporary
application. Sure, I’d have been
startled. What would you expect—
hearing how your childhood bed
sank into a hollow in the earth,
or how nighttime had, snickering,
closed you in its trench coat, and
how the residue of the experience,
the resin it left, you were brewing
into something for us. I’d have
wanted to see you right away
and would have been myself
forced to wait till next morning.
So, I, too, would’ve spent
an evening in an underground
hollow, or bundled up inside
night’s coat, wading through
one never on the off chance
that I could forestall another.

Benjamin S. Grossberg


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## Dillinger4 (Nov 15, 2014)

We ran along the railway,
arriving in some place called ‘the City’
where we trade in our youth, and our muscle.
Finally we have nothing to trade, only a cough
and a skeleton nobody cares about.
‘Sleepless’

Midnight. Everyone is sleeping soundly,
We keep our pair of young wounds open.
These black eyes, can you really lead us to the light?
‘Night Shift’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...chinese-factory-worker-who-committed-suicide/

https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry


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## Dillinger4 (Nov 15, 2014)

I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That

The paper before my eyes fades yellow
With a steel pen I chisel on it uneven black
Full of working words
Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages...
They've trained me to become docile
Don't know how to shout or rebel
How to complain or denounce
Only how to silently suffer exhaustion
When I first set foot in this place
I hoped only for that grey pay slip on the tenth of each month
To grant me some belated solace
For this I had to grind away my corners, grind away my words
Refuse to skip work, refuse sick leave, refuse leave for private reasons
Refuse to be late, refuse to leave early
By the assembly line I stood straight like iron, hands like flight,
How many days, how many nights
Did I - just like that - standing fall asleep?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 15, 2014)

The Last Graveyard

Even the machine is nodding off
Sealed workshops store diseased iron
Wages concealed behind curtains
Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts
With no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust
They have stomachs forged of iron
Full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric
Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall
Time flows by, their heads lost in fog
Output weighs down their age, pain works overtime day and night
In their lives, dizziness before their time is latent
The jig forces the skin to peel
And while it's at it, plates on a layer of aluminum alloy
Some still endure, while others are taken by illness
I am dozing between them, guarding
The last graveyard of our youth.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 15, 2014)

I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can't swallow any more
All that I've swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 15, 2014)

these poems are incredible. To me, they are a bit reminiscent of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 18, 2014)

Combustion

If a human body has two-hundred-and-six bones
and thirty trillion cells, and each cell
has one hundred trillion atoms, if the spine
has thirty-three vertebrae—
				   if each atom
has a shadow—then the lilacs across the yard
are nebulae beginning to star.
If the fruit flies that settle on the orange
on the table rise
like the photons
					 from a bomb fire miles away,
my thoughts at the moment of explosion
are nails suspended
in a jar of honey.
							  I peel the orange
for you, spread the honey on your toast.
When our skin touches
our atoms touch, their shadows
merging into a shadow galaxy.
And if echoes are shadows
of sounds, if each hexagonal cell in the body
is a dark pool of jelly,
if within each cell
drones another cell—
						The moment the bomb explodes
the man’s spine bends like its shadow
across the road.
The moment he loses his hearing
I think you are calling me
from across the house
because my ears start to ring.
From the kitchen window
					 I see the lilacs crackling like static
as if erasing, teleporting,
thousands of bees rising from the blossoms:
tiny flames in the sun.
I lick the knife  
and the honey pierces my tongue:
					   a nail made of light.
My body is wrapped in honey. When I step outside
								  I become fire.

Sara Eliza Johnson


----------



## Greebo (Nov 20, 2014)

House of strays

Suddenly, a hole opens in the year and we slip into it, the riptide
pull of strange, lonely dogs and broken phone lines.
You forgive me if I mistake hunted for haunted,
but I do like to rearrange things in my body every few years.
Take a can of gasoline to the frayed and ghosted.
Lights out. All hands on deck.
Still you wonder why I keep losing my shoes in the road
and coaxing cats in the alley with cans of tunafish and a flashlight.
Why my contentment is beautiful, but highly improbable, sort of like
four leaf clovers or an ice cream truck in the middle of the night.
This tiny thing breathing between us that aches something awful.
By summer, I am slipping all the complimentary mints in my coat pockets
while you pay the check. Gripping the railings on bridges to keep
diving over. Some dark dog in my throat when I say hello.

Kristy Bowen


----------



## Greebo (Nov 21, 2014)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say, 
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was thirteen.
Her stepmother,
a beauty in her own right,
though eaten, of course, by age,
would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred -
something like the weather forecast -
a mirror that proclaimed 
the one beauty of the land.
She would ask,
Looking glass upon the wall,
who is fairest of us all?
And the mirror would reply,
You are the fairest of us all.
Pride pumped in her like poison.

Suddenly one day the mirror replied,
Queen, you are full fair, ‘tis true,
but Snow White is fairer than you.
Until that moment Snow White
had been no more important
than a dust mouse under the bed.
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand
and four whiskers over her lip
so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Now I am fairest, she said,
lapping her slim white fingers.

Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and the snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck.
On the seventh week
she came to the seventh mountain
and there she found the dwarf house.
It was as droll as a honeymoon cottage
and completely equipped with
seven beds, seven chairs, seven forks
and seven chamber pots.
Snow White ate seven chicken livers
and lay down, at last, to sleep.

The dwarfs, those little hot dogs,
walked three times around Snow White,
the sleeping virgin.  They were wise
and wattled like small czars.
Yes.  It’s a good omen,
they said, and will bring us luck.
They stood on tiptoes to watch
Snow White wake up.  She told them
about the mirror and the killer-queen
and they asked her to stay and keep house.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
Soon she will know you are here.
While we are away in the mines
during the day, you must not
open the door.

Looking glass upon the wall . . .
The mirror told
and so the queen dressed herself in rags
and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White.
She went across seven mountains.
She came to the dwarf house
and Snow White opened the door
and bought a bit of lacing.
The queen fastened it tightly
around her bodice,
as tight as an Ace bandage,
so tight that Snow White swooned.
She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy.
When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace
and she revived miraculously.
She was as full of life as soda pop.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
She will try once more.

Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb, 
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece.

The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves
to bury her in the black ground
so they made a glass coffin
and set it upon the seventh mountain
so that all who passed by
could peek in upon her beauty.
A prince came one June day
and would not budge.
He stayed so long his hair turned green
and still he would not leave.
The dwarfs took pity upon him
and gave him the glass Snow White--
its doll’s eyes shut forever--
to keep in his far-off castle.
As the prince’s men carried the coffin
they stumbled and dropped it
and the chunk of apple flew out
of her throat and she woke up miraculously.

And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.

Anne Sexton


----------



## Greebo (Nov 23, 2014)

Pursuit

What do I care
that the stream is trampled,
the sand on the stream-bank
still holds the print of your foot:
the heel is cut deep.
I see another mark
on the grass ridge of the bank -
it points toward the wood-path.
I have lost the third
in the packed earth.

But here
a wild-hyacinth stalk is snapped:
the purple buds - half ripe -
show deep purple
where your heel pressed.

A patch of flowering grass,
low, trailing -
you brushed this:
the green stems show yellow-green
where you lifted - turned the earth-side
to the light:
this and a dead leaf-spine,
split across,
show where you passed.

You were swift, swift!
here the forest ledge slopes -
rain has furrowed the roots.
Your hand caught at this;
the root snapped under your weight.

I can almost follow the note
where it touched this slender tree
and the next answered -
and the next.

And you climbed yet further!
you stopped by the dwarf-cornel -
whirled on your heels,
doubled on your track.

This is clear -
you fell on the downward slope,
you dragged a bruised thigh - you limped -
you clutched this larch.

Did your head, bent back,
search further -
clear through the green leaf-moss
of the larch branches?

Did you clutch,
stammer with short breath and gasp:
wood-daemons grant life -
give life—I am almost lost.

For some wood-daemon
has lightened your steps.
I can find no trace of you
in the larch-cones and the underbrush.

H. D.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 23, 2014)

I know the rule is one a day, but just this once...

Wine and Water

OLD Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,
He ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail.
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale.
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
'I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.'

The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah he cocked his eye and said, 'It looks like rain, I think.
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.'

But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod.
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or chapel, or Eisteddfod,
For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God,
And water is on the Bishop's board and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.

G. K. Chesterton


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Nov 24, 2014)

*Mad Girl’s Love Song*

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,

I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

And arbitrary darkness gallops in.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head).
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:

Exit seraphim and enter Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said.

But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head).
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;

At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head).


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## Greebo (Nov 24, 2014)

operation: get down

	   It is very
	   Common
			  To have

	   A cave within us
			  To hide

	   Away in when it all
	   Seems hopeless. To cry

			  Tears of mostly blood.

	   To feed on the day-
			  Dream in which

	   Side mirrors shear off
			  Of your car

	   As the walled road
					 Narrows.

	   To swerve might make...

	   There is a saint for the down
	   & out. A rock is a rock

			  Is a rock & redwood
			  Trees grow out
					 Of our chests.

	   It is horrible & right,
			  Here in this place. Dum

			  Spiro, spero.* We’re all in
	   This shit together.

Alex Lemon

*While I breathe, I hope


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## Pickman's model (Nov 24, 2014)

I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and, lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din --
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
'God keep you, stranger,' I exclaimed. 'You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too.'
He raised his eyes and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn
Replied -- his manner with disdain was spiced:
'What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I'm Christ.' 

--Ambrose Bierce


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## Greebo (Nov 25, 2014)

This Magic Moment

			Poetry does make things happen. A friend says, “I wanted
to let you know that my stepfather is chattering like
			a schoolboy about a poem of yours on my Facebook page.
This may not seem like much to you, but this guy has been
			giving me a hard time since I was two. You built a bridge
between people who never understood each other before.”
			How’d that happen? Magic, that’s how. I know the poem

			she means; it took me years to write it. Songwriter
Doc Pomus was crippled by polio, and he wrote once
			about this dream he had again and again: “I used to believe
in magic and flying and that one morning I would wake up
			and all the bad things were bad dreams. . . . And I would
get out of the wheelchair and walk and not with braces
			and not with crutches,” though when the light came through

			the window in the morning, there he was, encased
in steel and leather from hip to ankle, unable to move.
			Again and again he has the dream, and then one day
he writes “This Magic Moment,” where the guy meets
			the girl, and suddenly he has everything he wants. How?
Magic! Wouldn’t you love to have saved pale Keats
			with his blood-speck’d lips? And Fanny, her skin like cream,

			listening through the wall. He dies with his lungs on fire,
she mourns, marries, gives birth, and, after her husband dies,
			gives Keats’ letters to her children—she had kept them all
that time. We have them, and we have his poems. And his
			tool kit, too: look what he does in the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Nobody bolts music and lyrics together the way Keats does,
			no one pays more attention to detail. There’s a Jack Gilbert

			poem that begins with a real incident from World War II,
when the Polish cavalry rode out against the Germans
			with their swords glittering, only the Germans had tanks.
But that’s not bravery, says Gilbert. Bravery is doing
			the same thing every day when you don’t want to.
Not the marvelous but the familiar, over and over again.
			Do that, and the magic will come. My dad was frail

			and distracted in his last hours. My mother said he asked,
Do we have enough money? and when she said yes, he said,
			Then let's just get in the Buick and go. He was looking
at car trips, thirty-cent gas, roadside picnics, these new things
			they called motels. My brother, me, the little house
we lived in, fifty years of marriage, a long and happy life as
			 a Chaucer scholar: all that was in the sunny days to come

David Kirby


----------



## Greebo (Nov 26, 2014)

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Jack Gilbert


----------



## Greebo (Nov 27, 2014)

We Dogs of a Thursday Off

The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,

The intense intoxication of nothing to be done,
A day off,

The dance of the big-hearted dog 
In us, freed into a sudden green, an immense field:

Off we go, more run than care, more dance—
If a polka could be done not in a room but straight

Ahead, into the beautiful distance, the booming 
Sound of the phonograph weakening, but our legs

Getting stronger with their bounding practice:
This day, that feeling, drunkenness

Born of indecision, lack of focus, but everything 
Forgiven: Today is a day exposed for what it is,

A workday suddenly turned over on its back, 
Hoping to be rubbed.

Alberto Ríos


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 28, 2014)

Happy awakwening Will, here's one from a comrade of yours:

*I must conjure from my past*

I must conjure from my past
the dim and unavowed
spectre of a slave,
of a bound woman,
whose bound figure
pleads silently
and whose blood I must acknowledge in my own

faniciful wraith? Imagining?
Yet how else can I reaconcile my rebel blood and protest
but by acknowledgement
of that spectre's mute rebellious blood.

Dennis Brutus


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 30, 2014)

RIP Mark Strand


----------



## Greebo (Nov 30, 2014)

The End

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

Mark Strand


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Nov 30, 2014)

*“Spring and Fall” (1880)*
*Gerard Manley Hopkins*


To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.



Quoted not just for the time of year as it passes and moves to its end ...but because I came across my aunt's favourite poems in a folder ...

And I love it so much...


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 2, 2014)

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 3, 2014)

for ShiftyBagLady under the mistletoe

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 3, 2014)

Consider the Space Between Stars

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks

and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space

between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand: 
vanishing years, filled with light.

Linda Pastan


----------



## Greebo (Dec 4, 2014)

Dreamheart

They took the old heart out of your chest
all blue and spoiled like a sick grapefruit

the way you removed your first wife from your life,
and put a strong young blonde one in her place.

What happened to the old heart is unrecorded
but the wife comes back sometimes in your dreams,

vengeful and berating, with a hairdo orange as flame,
like a mother who has forgotten that she loved you

more than anything. How impossible it is to tell
bravery from selfishness down here,

a leap of faith from a doomed attempt at flight.
What happened to the old heart is the scary part:

thrown into the trash, and never seen again,
but it persists. Now it's like a ghost,

with its bloated purple face,
moving through a world of ghosts,

that's all of us;
dreaming we're alive, that we're in love.

Tony Hoagland


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 9, 2014)

For Dillinger4 because nothing says I heart you like a display of mackerel

*A Display of Mackerel*
BY MARK DOTY

They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,
which divide the scales’
radiant sections

like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other
—nothing about them
of individuality. Instead

they’re _all_ exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate

in its oily fabulation
as the one before
Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
all, all for all,

the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 10, 2014)

Self-portrait

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin 

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Edward Hirsch


----------



## Greebo (Dec 14, 2014)

Saint’s Day Triolet: Saint Anthony

When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony
preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost
souls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we plea
to the one who will listen: Saint Anthony,
please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key
to our bolted hopes. Patron retriever of all we’ve tossed
when no one else would. Listen, Saint Anthony,
teach us to steward this world, all our netted loss.

Deborah Paredez


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## Dillinger4 (Dec 14, 2014)

Trouble in mind, i'm blue
But i won't be blue always,
'cause the sun's gonna shine
In my backdoor some day.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 16, 2014)

pj harvey but her lyrics are poesy so

Colour of the Earth


Louis was my dearest friend
Fighting in the ANZAC trench
Louis ran forward from the line
I never saw him again
Later in the dark
I thought I heard Louis' voice
Calling for his mother, then me
But I couldn't get to him
He's still up on that hill
20 years on that hill
Nothing more than a pile of bones
But I think of him still
If I was asked I'd tell
The colour of the earth that day
It was dull and browny red
The colour of blood, I'd say


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## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2014)

*Dusk of Horses*

Right under their noses, the green
Of the field is paling away
Because of something fallen from the sky.

They see this, and put down
Their long heads deeper in grass
That only just escapes reflecting them

As the dream of a millpond would.
The color green flees over the grass
Like an insect, following the red sun over

The next hill. The grass is white.
There is no cloud so dark and white at once;
There is no pool at dawn that deepens

Their faces and thirsts as this does.
Now they are feeding on solid
Cloud, and, one by one,

With nails as silent as stars among the wood
Hewed down years ago and now rotten,
The stalls are put up around them.

Now if they lean, they come
On wood on any side. Not touching it, they sleep.
No beast ever lived who understood

What happened among the sun’s fields,
Or cared why the color of grass
Fled over the hill while he stumbled,

Led by the halter to sleep
On his four taxed, worthy legs.
Each thinks he awakens where

The sun is black on the rooftop,
That the green is dancing in the next pasture,
And that the way to sleep

In a cloud, or in a risen lake,
Is to walk as though he were still
in the drained field standing, head down,

To pretend to sleep when led,
And thus to go under the ancient white
Of the meadow, as green goes

And whiteness comes up through his face
Holding stars and rotten rafters,
Quiet, fragrant, and relieved.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 20, 2014)




----------



## Sirena (Dec 21, 2014)

The Holly and the Ivy, when they are both full grown
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the Holly bears the crown.
Oh, the rising of the Sun and the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.

The Holly bears a blossom as white as any flower
And when the Sun is newly born, 'tis at the darkest hour.

The Holly bears a berry and blood-red is its hue
And when the Sun is newly born, it maketh all things new.

The Holly bears a leaf that is forever green
And when the Sun is newly born, let love and joy be seen.

The Holly and the Ivy the Mistletoe entwine
And when the Sun is newly born, be joy to thee and thine.

Oh the rising of the Sun and the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 21, 2014)

The Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld

As we know, 
There are known knowns. 
There are things we know we know. 
We also know 
There are known unknowns. 
That is to say 
We know there are some things 
We do not know. 
But there are also unknown unknowns, 
The ones we don't know 
We don't know.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 21, 2014)

The Situation by Donald Rumsfeld

Things will not be necessarily continuous. 
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous 
Ought not to be characterized as a pause. 
There will be some things that people will see. 
There will be some things that people won't see. 
And life goes on.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 21, 2014)

The Shortest Day

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!

Susan Cooper


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Dec 21, 2014)

*Childhood Christmas*
by Patrick Kavanagh (1905-67)

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost-
How wonderful that was, how wonderful
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical
The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw-
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhoods. Again
The tracks of Cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon-the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
'Can't he make it talk' - 
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade-

There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 22, 2014)

Underground Xmas

Out of the packed train comes a horizontal tree, pine
needles poking through tight

plastic wrap. She’s wearing
a raincoat and a frown, the blue spruce

hugged in her strong arms like a Roman battering ram.
Commuters step aside, all sighs and clucks.

This woman loves someone enough
to bring them Christmas on the subway, wrestle

a tree twice her height through tongue-
sucking rush-hour crowds.

The sharp holiday
scent of pine enlivens the last car of the C train,

trails her to the 50th Street escalator,
where she juggles the pungent

tree on her hip, ascending.

Jackie Sheeler


----------



## Sirena (Dec 22, 2014)

Greebo said:


> Underground Xmas
> 
> Out of the packed train comes a horizontal tree, pine
> needles poking through tight
> ...



I've just done that - not on the tube - but staggering back from Balham, against the wind, with the tree acting as a sail trying to blow me backwards and, all the while, trying to keep hold also of my rolled-up yoga mat...


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2014)

xms poems ftw.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 22, 2014)

Sirena said:


> I've just done that - not on the tube - but staggering back from Balham, against the wind, with the tree acting as a sail trying to blow me backwards and, all the while, trying to keep hold also of my rolled-up yoga mat...


Well done for keeping up with the yoga instead of being too busy.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 24, 2014)

The Boy Who Laughed At Santa Claus

In Baltimore there lived a boy.
He wasn't anybody's joy.
Although his name was Jabez Dawes,
His character was full of flaws.

In school he never led his classes,
He hid old ladies' reading glasses,
His mouth was open when he chewed,
And elbows to the table glued.
He stole the milk of hungry kittens,
And walked through doors marked NO ADMITTANCE.
He said he acted thus because
There wasn't any Santa Claus.

Another trick that tickled Jabez
Was crying 'Boo' at little babies.
He brushed his teeth, they said in town,
Sideways instead of up and down.
Yet people pardoned every sin,
And viewed his antics with a grin,
Till they were told by Jabez Dawes,
'There isn't any Santa Claus!'

Deploring how he did behave,
His parents swiftly sought their grave.
They hurried through the portals pearly,
And Jabez left the funeral early.

Like whooping cough, from child to child,
He sped to spread the rumor wild:
'Sure as my name is Jabez Dawes
There isn't any Santa Claus!'
Slunk like a weasel of a marten
Through nursery and kindergarten,
Whispering low to every tot,
'There isn't any, no there's not!'

The children wept all Christmas eve
And Jabez chortled up his sleeve
No infant dared hang up his stocking
For fear of Jabez' ribald mocking.

He sprawled on his untidy bed,
Fresh malice dancing in his head,
When presently with scalp-a-tingling,
Jabez heard a distant jingling;
He heard the crunch of sleigh and hoof
Crisply alighting on the roof.
What good to rise and bar the door?
A shower of soot was on the floor.

What was beheld by Jabez Dawes?
The fireplace full of Santa Claus!
Then Jabez fell upon his knees
With cries of 'Don't,' and 'Pretty Please.'
He howled, 'I don't know where you read it,
But anyhow, I never said it!'
'Jabez' replied the angry saint,
'It isn't I, it's you that ain't.
Although there is a Santa Claus,
There isn't any Jabez Dawes!'

Said Jabez then with impudent vim,
'Oh, yes there is, and I am him!
Your magic don't scare me, it doesn't'
And suddenly he found he wasn't!
From grimy feet to grimy locks,
Jabez became a Jack-in-the-box,
An ugly toy with springs unsprung,
Forever sticking out his tongue.

The neighbors heard his mournful squeal;
They searched for him, but not with zeal.
No trace was found of Jabez Dawes,
Which led to thunderous applause,
And people drank a loving cup
And went and hung their stockings up.

All you who sneer at Santa Claus,
Beware the fate of Jabez Dawes,
The saucy boy who mocked the saint.
Donner and Blitzen licked off his paint.

Ogden Nash


----------



## Greebo (Dec 28, 2014)

Christmas Trees

 A Christmas circular letter

The city had withdrawn into itself  
And left at last the country to the country;  
When between whirls of snow not come to lie  
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove  
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,  
Yet did in country fashion in that there  
He sat and waited till he drew us out,  
A-buttoning coats, to ask him who he was.  
He proved to be the city come again  
To look for something it had left behind  
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.  
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;  
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place  
Where houses all are churches and have spires.  
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees.	
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment  
To sell them off their feet to go in cars  
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,  
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.  
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.	  
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees, except  
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,  
Beyond the time of profitable growth—  
The trial by market everything must come to.  
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.	  
Then whether from mistaken courtesy  
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether  
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,  
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,	
You let me look them over.”  

									“You could look.  
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”  
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close  
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few	
Quite solitary and having equal boughs  
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,  
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,  
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”  
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.  
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,  
And came down on the north. 

									He said, “A thousand.”  
“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”  
He felt some need of softening that to me:	  
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”  
Then I was certain I had never meant  
To let him have them. Never show surprise!  
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside  
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents	
(For that was all they figured out apiece)—  
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends  
I should be writing to within the hour  
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,  
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools	
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!  
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,  
As may be shown by a simple calculation.  
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.	  
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,  
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Robert Frost


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2014)

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,  
Some say in ice.  
From what I’ve tasted of desire  
I hold with those who favor fire.  
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate  
To know that for destruction ice  
Is also great  
And would suffice.

Robert Frost


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 31, 2014)

Te Deum by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 31, 2014)

On New Years Eve by June Jordan

Infinity doesn't interest me

 not altogether
 anymore

 I crawl and kneel and grub about
 I beg and listen for

 what can go away
				   (as easily as love)

 or perish
 like the children
 running
 hard on oneway streets/infinity
 doesn't interest me

 not anymore

 not even
 repetition your/my/eye-
 lid or the colorings of sunrise
 or all the sky excitement
 added up

 is not enough

 to satisfy this lusting admiration that I feel
 for
 your brown arm before it
 moves

 MOVES
 CHANGES UP

 the temporary sacred
 tales ago
 first bikeride round the house
 when you first saw a squat
 opossum
 carry babies on her back

 opossum up
 in the persimmon tree
 you reeling toward
 that natural
 first
 absurdity
 with so much wonder still
 it shakes your voice

					  the temporary is the sacred
					  takes me out

 and even the stars and even the snow and even
 the rain
 do not amount to much unless these things submit to some disturbance
 some derangement such
 as when I yield myself/belonging
 to your unmistaken
 body

 and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain
 peaks the
 hidden rivers/waterfalls the
 deepdown minerals/the coalfields/goldfields
 diamond mines close by the whoring ore
 hot
 at the center of the earth

 spinning fast as numbers
 I cannot imagine

 let the world blot
 obliterate remove so-
 called
 magnificence
 so-called
 almighty/fathomless and everlasting
 treasures/
 wealth
 (whatever that may be)

 it is this time
 that matters

 it is this history
 I care about

 the one we make together
 awkward
 inconsistent
 as a lame cat on the loose
 or quick as kids freed by the bell
 or else as strictly
 once
 as only life must mean
 a once upon a time

 I have rejected propaganda teaching me
 about the beautiful
 the truly rare

 (supposedly
 the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
 supposedly
 the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
 is beautiful
 for instance)
 but
 the truly rare can stay out there

 I have rejected that
 abstraction that enormity
 unless I see a dog walk on the beach/
 a bird seize sandflies
 or yourself
 approach me
 laughing out a sound to spoil
 the pretty picture
 make an uncontrolled
 heartbeating memory
 instead

 I read the papers preaching on
 that oil and oxygen
 that redwoods and the evergreens
 that trees the waters and the atmosphere
 compile a final listing of the world in
 short supply

 but all alive and all the lives
 persist perpetual
 in jeopardy
 persist
 as scarce as every one of us
 as difficult to find
 or keep
 as irreplaceable
 as frail
 as every one of us

 and
 as I watch your arm/your
 brown arm
 just before it moves

 I know

 all things are dear
 that disappear

 all things are dear
 that disappear


----------



## Greebo (Dec 31, 2014)

Accomplishments

What you have not done
is without error. What you
have not said is beyond contradiction.

What you understand of God
was yesterday. Today a bicycle
waits, chained to a bench.

The success of this afternoon’s nap
is the dream of lifting seven boxes,
your week, sealed with clear tape.

They stack, three to a column,
with the seventh like a capstone.
What you do not know they contain.

Michael Chitwood


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Jan 1, 2015)

Ring Out, Wild Bells





from _In Memoriam A.H.H._ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1849)





Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
 The flying cloud, the frosty light;
 The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
 Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
 The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
 For those that here we see no more,
 Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
 And ancient forms of party strife;
 Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
 The faithless coldness of the times;
 Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
 The civic slander and the spite;
 Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
 Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
 Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
 Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Jan 1, 2015)

*Untitled (The New Year's unwritten page we view)*
The New Year's unwritten page we view
As a lea field to plough and sow;
The memory of weeds from the last-turned page comes through,
But only matters what this year we grow.

(31 December 1942)
-Patrick Kavanagh


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Jan 1, 2015)

He wishes for the cloths of heaven.
W.B. Yeats


Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, 
Enwrought with golden and silver light, 
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 
Of night and light and the half-light, 
I would spread the cloths under your feet: 
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 
I have spread my dreams under your feet; 
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.



This year will be full of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Yeat's birth...
http://www.yeatsday.com/yeatsday-2015/


----------



## Greebo (Jan 1, 2015)

The Naked and the Nude

For me, the naked and the nude 
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometimes nude! 

Robert Graves


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 2, 2015)

The Old Year by John Clare

The Old Year’s gone away
	 To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
	 Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
	 In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
	 In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
	 Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
	 And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
	 In every cot and hall--
A guest to every heart’s desire,
	 And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
	 Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
	 Are things identified;
But time once torn away
	 No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
	 Left the Old Year lost to all.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 2, 2015)

A Wave on Our Window by Wang Changling

Lying on a high seat in the south study,
We have lifted the curtain—and we see the rising moon
Brighten with pure light the water and the grove
And flow like a wave on our window and our door.
It will move through the cycle, full moon and then crescent again,
Calmly, beyond our wisdom, altering new to old.
… Our chosen one, our friend, is now by a limpid river—
Singing, perhaps, a plaintive eastern song.
He is far, far away from us, three hundred miles away.
And yet a breath of orchids comes along the wind.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2015)

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty -- Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous
tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.


-keats


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2015)

There is no shadow on New Years Day
It’s the bright first day of things
We are re-made, unmade, put back together

Another notch in the bedpost of my life
Another entropy defeated. Another year.
Nothing killed us this year- as if they could.

I could tell you:
We have the music
Ours is the dawn
Things can only get better

I could sing you:
Auld Langsyne, that liars refrain
That misty eyed paean to forgiveness
Cheaply given and valued so

I could tell you:
Of vows made in cups
Held sincerely, till the morning.
Of dreams pledged annually
Of smashed glasses
Of stiff brushed brooms
Of the cold light that rests
On new years day


----------



## 8115 (Jan 3, 2015)

FIRST CHAPTER

*'The Prodigal'*
By Derek Walcott

In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania, 
he placed his book face-down on the sunlit seat 
and it began to move. Metre established, 
carried on calm parallels, he preferred to read 
the paragraphs, the gliding blocks of stanzas 
framed by the widening windows-Italian 
light on the factories, October's 
motley in Jersey, wild fans of trees, the blue 
metallic Hudson, and in the turning aureate afternoon, 
dusk on rose brickwork as if it were Siena.

Nothing. Nobody at the small railroad station. 
The willows fan open. Here we hung our harps, 
as the river slid past to elegiac banjos 
and the barge crawled along an ochre canal 
past the white spires of autumnal towns 
and racketing freight trains all long whoop and echo. 
Stations, bridges and tunnels enter their language 
and the scribble of brown twigs on a blank sky.

And now the cars began to fill with pilgrims, 
while the book slept. With others in the car, 
he felt as if he had become a tunnel 
through which they entered the idea of America-familiar 
mantling through the tunnel's skin. 
It was still unfamiliar, the staidness of trains. 
And the thoughtful, the separate, gliding in cars 
on arrowing rails serenely, each gripped face intent 
on the puzzle of distance, as stations pass 
without waving, and sad, approaching cities, 
announced by the prologue of ramshackle yards 
and toothless tunnels, and the foliage rusting 
across an old aqueduct, loomed and then dwindled
into their name. There were no stations 
or receding platforms in the maps of childhood 
nor blizzards of dogwood, no piercing steeples 
from buttressed cathedrals, nor statues whose base 
held dolphins, blunt browed, repeating themselves. 
Look at that man looking from the stalled window-he 
contains many absences. He has ridden 
over infinite bridges, some with roofs below, 
many where the afternoon glittered like mica 
on the empty river. There was no time 
to fall in love with Florence, to completely understand 
Wilmington or the rusty stanchions 
that flashed past with their cables 
or how the screaming gulls knew 
the names of all the women he had lost. 
There was sweet meditation on a train 
even of certain griefs, a gliding time 
on the levelled surface of elegiac earth 
more than the immortal motion of a blue bay 
next to the stone sails of graves, his growing loss. 

Echoing railway stations drew him to fiction, 
their web of schedules, incoherent announcements, 
the terror of missing his train, and because trains 
(their casual accuracy, the joy in their gliding power) 
had (there were no trains on the islands 
of his young manhood) a child's delight in motion, 
the lines and parallels and smoky arches 
of unread famous novels would stay the same
for yet another fall with its bright counties, 
he knew, through the gliding window, the trees would lift 
in lament for all the leaves of the unread books, 
_Anna Karenina_, for the long wail of smoke 
across Alpine meadows, for soldiers leaning 
out of war-crowded stations, a separate joy 
more rooted in landscapes than the flare of battles. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, 
somewhere between Balzac and Lautréamont, 
a little farther on than Baudelaire Station 
where bead-eyed Verlaine sat, my train broke down, 
and has been stuck there since. When I got off 
I found that I had missed the Twentieth Century. 
I studied those small things which besieged the station, 
the comical belligerence of dragonflies 
and the perpetual astonishment of owls. 
It was another country whose time had passed, 
with pastoral willows and a belief in drawing. 
I saw where Courbet lived; I saw the big quarry 
and the lemon light of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. 
The noise of roaring parliaments, a noise 
that sounded like the ocean, whorled in my ear-shell, 
was far, and the one sibilance was of the poplars 
who once bowed to Hobbema. My joy was stuck. 
The small station was empty in the afternoon, 
as it had been on the trip to Philadelphia. 
I sipped the long delight of a past time 
where ambition was too late. My craft was stuck. 
My deep delight lay in being dated 
like the archaic engine. Peace was immense. 
But Time passed differently than it did on water.

*II*

There is a continent outside my window, 
in the Hudson's patient narrative. There's some calm. 
But traffic hurtles up the West Side Highway, 
and in fall, the embankment blazes, but 
even in spring sunlight I have rarely sought 
the glittering consolation of the river, 
its far-fetched history, the tongues of unknown trees 
talk to an old man sitting on a bench. 
Along the smouldering autumnal sidewalks, 
the secretive coffee-shops, bright flower stalls, 
wandering the Village in search of another subject 
other than yourself, it is yourself you meet. 
An old man remembering white-headed mountains. 
And subtly the sense insinuates itself 
that frequent exile turns into treachery, 
missing the seasons at the table of July 
on lower Seventh Avenue when young women glide 
like Nereids in their lissome summer dresses, 
all those Susannas for a single elder! 
In spring the leaves sing round a tireless statue 
who will not sit although invited to.

From a fresh- to a salt-water muse. Home to the Hudson. 
The bells on a bright Sunday from my bed, 
the squares of sunlight on the buildings opposite 
the river slate, the sky cloudless, enamelled. 
Then Sunday brings its summary of the world, 
with the serene Hudson and its criss-crossing ferries, 
great clouds and a red barge. 
Gaze, graze on the numinous greys 
of the river, its spectral traffic 
and the ghostly bridges, the bouquet of lamps, 
along the embankment your name fades into fog. 

Clouds, the sag of old towels, sodden in grey windows, 
the far shore scumbled by the fog, 
ducks bob on the grey river like decoys, 
not ducks but the submerged pieces of an old pier, 
lights fade from the water, "Such, such were the joys," 
muffled remorse in the December air.

*III*

Desire and disease commingling, 
commingling, the white hair and the white page 
with the fear of white sight, blindness, amputation, 
a recurring kidney stone, the plague of AIDS, 
shaken in the mirror by that bewildered look, 
the truculence, the drooping lip of a spiritual lout. 
Look at it any way you like, it's an old man's book 
whenever you write it, whenever it comes out, 
the age in your armpits in the pleats of your crotch, 
the faded perfumes of cherished conversations, 
and the toilet gurgling its eclogues, resurrecting names 
in its hoarse swivelling into an echo after. 
This is the music of memory, water.

*IV*

On Mondays, Boston classes. Lunch, a Korean corner-my 
glasses clouded by a tribal broth, 
a soup that tamed shaggy Mongolian horsemen 
in steaming tents while their mares stamped the snow. 
Asia swirls in a blizzard; winter is rising 
on drifts across the pavements, soon every gutter 
will be a locked rivulet then it will be time 
for rose and orange lights to dot the Prudential, 
and sparrows to bulb along the stricken branches. 
I missed the fall. It went with a sudden flare 
and blew its wick in Gloucester, sank in Salem, 
and bleached the salt grass bending off Cape Ann, 
flipped seals into the sound, rattled the shades 
of a dark house on that headland abandoned 
except by Hopper. You know the light I mean. 
American light. And the wind is 
the sound of an age going out the window, 
yellow and red as taxis, the leaves. And then 
boring through volumes of cloud, a silverfish-


----------



## imposs1904 (Jan 4, 2015)

*TO THE ADVOCATES OF MILITARISM. (May 1916)*

Compel them to come in, for there shall be
A feast well-spread, to suit the taste of all-
Ruin and pain and untold misery;
The downward trend, the devastating fall,
From every higher impulse; robes to wear
Woven of fraud, hypocrisy and lies.
Compel them to come in that all may share
This wolfish feast of bloodstained infamies.
Not yours the chains of slavery to break;
You heed no woman's sorrows, no man's groans,
No flag of freedom in the breeze unfurled.
Your passion is destruction, you would make
A world-wide graveyard full of dead men's bones.
Whence reeks a stench that sickens all the world.
*F. J. Webb.*


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## Greebo (Jan 7, 2015)

On seeing a tuft of snowdrops in a storm

When haughty expectations prostrate lie,
And grandeur crouches like a guilty thing,
Oft shall the lowly weak, till nature bring
Mature release, in fair society
Survive, and Fortune's utmost anger try;
Like these frail snowdrops that together cling,
And nod their helmets, smitten by the wing
Of many a furious whirl-blast sweeping by.
Observe the faithful flowers! if small to great
 May lead the thoughts, thus struggling used to stand
The Emathian phalanx, nobly obstinate;
And so the bright immortal Theban band,
Whom onset, fiercely urged at Jove's command,
Might overwhelm, but could not separate!

William Wordsworth


----------



## Greebo (Jan 8, 2015)

Fox

The yards grow ghosts. Between the limbs and wings,
bleached street-lit things, I’m best at moving on.
Hunt-heavy, gray, slunk overlow like so
much weight got in the way, my shape’s the shape
of something missed, flash-pop or empty frame.
Though you could say I’ve made a game of this,
and though midtrickery it might be true,
when evening lingers in the key of leaving
my senses swoon. A synonym for stay,
I’m always coming back. I chew through traps.
I love whatever doesn’t get too close.

Caki Wilkinson


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## Sprocket. (Jan 8, 2015)

Is This Egotry?

I make no argument with God.
Is this egotry? Methinks I have listened
O'er long to His arguments from the lips of men,
For each man tunes his own mouthings
With God's conviction, declaring himself
The trumpet of truth at the hand of the Lord.

I make no argument with God.
I find Him in silence! So why need I list
To the prating of man, who sets his words
Tortured in complication? I say I hear
In silence the still voice within me, and know
It is not afraid that I acclaim my faith.
I make no argument with God.
In this I announce not my own egotry--
But admit man's!

Patience Worth.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 11, 2015)

How can you gather together 
the thousand fragments 
of each person? 
What's wrong with the rudder? 
The boat inscribes circles 
and there's not a single gull. 
The world sinks: 
hang on, it'll leave you 
alone in the sun. 
You write: 
the ink grew less, 
the sea increases. 

The body that hoped to flower like a branch, 
to bear fruit, to become like a flute in the frost — 
imagination has thrust it into a noisy bee-hive 
so that musical time can come and torture it.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2015)

_Au Lecteur (Charles Baudelaire)_
La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;
Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,
Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,
Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.

Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche métal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.

C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!
Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,
sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.

Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin,
Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin
Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.

Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d'helminthes,
Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes.

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encor brondé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie.

Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,

Il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

C'est l'Ennui!—l'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!

_*trans:*
To the Reader
Folly, depravity, greed, mortal sin
Invade our souls and rack our flesh; we feed
Our gentle guilt, gracious regrets, that breed
Like vermin glutting on foul beggars' skin.

Our sins are stubborn; our repentance, faint.
We take a handsome price for our confession,
Happy once more to wallow in transgression,
Thinking vile tears will cleanse us of all taint.

On evil's cushion poised, His Majesty,
Satan Thrice-Great, lulls our charmed soul, until
He turns to vapor what was once our will:
Rich ore, transmuted by his alchemy.

He holds the strings that move us, limb by limb!
We yield, enthralled, to things repugnant, base;
Each day, towards Hell, with slow, unhurried pace,
We sink, uncowed, through shadows, stinking, grim.

Like some lewd rake with his old worn-out whore,
Nibbling her suffering teats, we seize our sly
delight, that, like an orange—withered, dry—
We squeeze and press for juice that is no more.

Our brains teem with a race of Fiends, who frolic
thick as a million gut-worms; with each breath,
Our lungs drink deep, suck down a stream of Death—
Dim-lit—to low-moaned whimpers melancholic.

If poison, fire, blade, rape do not succeed
In sewing on that dull embroidery
Of our pathetic lives their artistry,
It's that our soul, alas, shrinks from the deed.

And yet, among the beasts and creatures all—
Panther, snake, scorpion, jackal, ape, hound, hawk—
Monsters that crawl, and shriek, and grunt, and squawk,
In our vice-filled menagerie's caterwaul,

One worse is there, fit to heap scorn upon—
More ugly, rank! Though noiseless, calm and still,
yet would he turn the earth to scraps and swill,
swallow it whole in one great, gaping yawn:

Ennui! That monster frail!—With eye wherein
A chance tear gleams, he dreams of gibbets, while
Smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile. . .
—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!_


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 12, 2015)

England in 1819 by Percy Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 13, 2015)

There Was A Time by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith.
But now, my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
An abbey for monks.
A table for the Torah,
Kaaba for the pilgrim.
My religion is love.
Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take,
That shall be the path of my faith.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 15, 2015)

*III*

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

							You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
	You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
	You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
	You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
	You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


----------



## Betsy (Jan 19, 2015)

*The Ladies of the Charity Shop*

The ladies of the charity shop

Were given a brand new till.

They never got the hang of it

And now they never will.

They only approached it in groups of three,

With expressions of loathing and pain,

One to push buttons,

One to have kittens

And one to try again.


The ladies of the charity shop

Were a most harmonious clique.

They all popped in on a rota system

At least three mornings a week,

To drink gallons and gallons and gallons of tea

And have a good chinwag about

Cardigans, ornaments, wrestling tournaments,

Gall-bladders, goitres and gout.


The ladies of the charity shop

Maintained, with no hint of apology,

That they never expected to find themselves

At the forefront of till technology.

The old model suited them down to the ground.

When they wanted to put in some cash

And the drawer got jammed

They said "Bother" and "Damn"

And gave it a good old bash.


The ladies of the charity shop

Have been in darkest mourning

Since a quarter to ten last Wednesday

When, without the slightest warning,

They opened the new till to put in a pound,

The contraption showed its teeth,

Gave a frightful roar like a carnivore

And swallowed Jemima Moncrieff.


The ladies of the charity shop

Phoned divisional headquarters,

No repair man came, but a TV crew

And a posse of press reporters.

One asked the ladies a question

With a tabloid glint in his eye.

"Was the victim nude?"

They said,"Don't be rude,

This isn't the W.I."


The ladies of the charity shop

Have sold off all their stock

To a nice young man with a Transit van

And a stall on Camden Lock.

At their manager's suggestion

They all went on the spree,

Got merry on sherry

On the Brittany ferry

And buried the till at sea.

* Peter Wyton*


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 20, 2015)

I'm sure i've posted these before but they're awesome

*Dream Song 1*

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could _do_ it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.


and


*Dream Song 40*

I'm scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone,
combers out to sea
know they're goin somewhere but not me.
Got a little poison, got a little gun,
I'm scared a lonely.

I'm scared a only one thing, which is me,
from othering I don't take nothin, see,
for any hound dog's sake.
But this is where I livin, where I rake
my leaves and cop my promise, this' where we
cry oursel's awake.

Wishin was dyin but I gotta make
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jan 20, 2015)

And one more. Because I can.

Dream Song 384

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done,
I stand above my father’s grave with rage,
often, often before
I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one
who cannot visit me, who tore his page
out: I come back for more.

I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn
O ho alas alas
When will indifference come, I moan & rave
I’d like to scrabble till I got right down
away down under the grass

and ax the casket open ha to see
just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard
we’ll tear apart
the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry
will heft the ax once more, his final card,
and fell it on the start.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 20, 2015)

Continuity

I’ve pressed so
far away from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

A. R. Ammons


----------



## Greebo (Jan 21, 2015)

A Lame Begger

I am unable, yonder beggar cries,
To stand, or move; if he say true, he lies.

John Donne


----------



## Betsy (Jan 23, 2015)

*Quite Fun*

My son Augustus, in the street, one day, 
Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.
A stranger asked him: "Can you show me, pray,
The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery?"
"The quickest way? You bet I can!" said Gus, 
And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.
Whatever people say about my son, 
He does enjoy his little bit of fun.
*
Harry Graham*


----------



## Betsy (Jan 24, 2015)

Starting shortly on Radio 4

T_he Song of Hiawatha by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This epic narrative poem, with its picturesque and highly imaginative tales, threads the many aspects of native American mythology concerning life, nature and ritual. Weaving together "beautiful traditions into a whole" as Longfellow intended._

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0501k2f

I've put it on here as I thought some might like a listen.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 24, 2015)

*From Blossoms by Li-Yeung Lee*

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.


----------



## Santino (Jan 25, 2015)

*Five Hundred Mile*

When I awauken from my rest
I ken ye’ll be there at my breast
When I fare abroad, I ken that thee
Will fare abroad along wi’ me.
When rairin fou and in my cups
I ken ye’ll match me, sup for sup
And if I haver, and speak no matter,
It’s to ye, I’ll gab and yatter.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m sweitin wi’ ma trauchle,
It’s for thee that I strauchle.
And when I ha’ my penny-fee,
Near every penny goes to thee.
When hame-throu my journey tak me
If ye be there, then hame’ll dae me.
And if I come an eildit man,
I ken we’ll grow auld, hand in hand.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m on ma lane and lanesome,
It’s for want of ye I’m waesome.
When in ma bed I lie a-sleeping,
It’s days with ye that fill ma dreaming.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 25, 2015)

Address to a Haggis

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, 
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race! 
Aboon them a' yet tak your place, 
Painch, tripe, or thairm: 
Weel are ye wordy o'a grace 
As lang's my arm. 

The groaning trencher there ye fill, 
Your hurdies like a distant hill, 
Your pin was help to mend a mill 
In time o'need, 
While thro' your pores the dews distil 
Like amber bead. 

His knife see rustic Labour dight, 
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight, 
Trenching your gushing entrails bright, 
Like ony ditch; 
And then, O what a glorious sight, 
Warm-reekin', rich! 

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an' strive: 
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive, 
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve 
Are bent like drums; 
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive, 
Bethankit! hums. 

Is there that owre his French ragout 
Or olio that wad staw a sow, 
Or fricassee wad make her spew 
Wi' perfect sconner, 
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view 
On sic a dinner? 

Poor devil! see him owre his trash, 
As feckles as wither'd rash, 
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash; 
His nieve a nit; 
Thro' blody flood or field to dash, 
O how unfit! 

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed, 
The trembling earth resounds his tread. 
Clap in his walie nieve a blade, 
He'll mak it whissle; 
An' legs an' arms, an' hands will sned, 
Like taps o' trissle. 

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care, 
And dish them out their bill o' fare, 
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 
That jaups in luggies; 
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer 
Gie her a haggis!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 28, 2015)

Wondrously akin are the
young dead and the hero.
Survival is the mission of neither.
His is the ascent unending
through amorphous constellations
of everlasting personal peril.
Few could overtake him there.
But Fate, to us so mute,
toward him bends inspired,
singing the hero on to meet
her roaring storm in
his cataclysmic world.
I hear none like him.
Suddenly the river of wind
rushes through me, bearing
his voice of muted thunder


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2015)

On Not Writing a Protest Poem

I think I have lain down among their voices
it is as if the continent, or its map, were drawn or sewn
quilt soft it’s the way landscape gets
after a first snow and its detail
moves, or whispers, and has become a vast yard
of the living and all of them speaking
badly in unison, different words for the same despair.

What has to be said is so small, small as a stone
and not difficult, not demanding
not like an orchestra or any electric host
heavenly or otherwise
its taste is peculiar and intimate the way a leaf
tastes of lemons or the watery sea
of bits of salt, you can’t eradicate it.

So if I lie down
among the others and cease to strive
I can allow them - what they are saying
lifts like a smoke, disperses, this history
on the brinks of history, this innumerable solitary
personal worrying crime of becoming
good, when it is too easy to be good, these days
when God exacts the opposite, and the meek world protests,
like a patient being turned in bed.

Heather Spears


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 31, 2015)

*Fall in love all over again by Sam Riviere*

much against everyone's advice
I have decided to live the life
I want to read about and write it
not by visiting the graves of authors
or moving to london to hear
in my sleep its gothic lullaby
not by going for coastal walks
or being from the north and lathing
every line as an approach it's
way outmoded I run a bath turn
off the lights I think only of
lathering the pale arms of my wife
for now a girl who dreads weekends
then I guess I might as well teach
squandering so as not to squander
this marvellous opportunity right?


----------



## Greebo (Feb 1, 2015)

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

	  Go home and write
	  a page tonight.
	  And let that page come out of you -
	  Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.  
I went to school there, then Durham, then here  
to this college on the hill above Harlem.  
I am the only colored student in my class.  
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,  
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,  
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,  
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator  
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me  
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
hear you, hear me - we two - you, me, talk on this page.  
(I hear New York, too.) Me - who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.  
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.  
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records - Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.  
So will my page be colored that I write?  
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white -
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.  
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me -
although you’re older - and white -
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

Langston Hughes


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## Greebo (Feb 2, 2015)

Abort, Retry, Ignore

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
	System manuals piled high
	and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat here doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the "save" command
	But got instead a reprimand:
	It read, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Was this some occult illusion?
Some maniacal type intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself,
Had never faced before.

Carefully I weighed my options...
These three seemed to be the top ones.
	Clearly I must now adopt one;
	choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore?
With my fingers pale and trembling
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending,
Hoping all would be restored

Praying for some guarantee,
Finally I pressed a key.
But what on the screen did I see?
	Again "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
	I tried to catch the chips off guard -
I pressed again, but twice as hard,
But luck was just not on the cards,
I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation
Trying random combinations.
	Still there came the incantation
	"Abort, Retry, Ignore."
There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted
Getting up, I turned away
And paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight
A bold and blinding flash of light
A lightening bolt that cut the night,
	And shook me to my very core.
	The PC screen collapsed and died.
"OH NO! MY DATABASE!" I cried.
I heard a distant voice reply,
"You'll see your spreadsheets nevermore!"

To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes.
	Perhaps it goes to heaven,
	Where the angels have it stored.
But as for Productivity, well,
I fear this has gone straight to Hell.
And that's the tale I have to tell -
Your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

Lucy Blades


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 8, 2015)

I didn't feel this much when I read it first. But a breathy welsh lilt on the radio gave life to it:

Valentine: Carol Anne Duffy


Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.


----------



## Sirena (Feb 11, 2015)

A poem for the season.  This was a Poem On The Tube a few years ago and I stole it from a nearly-empty carriage.  It's a bit dog-eared now but I read it every early Spring

*'Seed' *by Paula Meehan

The first warm day of spring
and I step out into the garden from the gloom
of a house where hope had died
to tally the storm damage, to seek what may
have survived. And finding some forgotten
lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn
holding in their fingers a raindrop each
like a peace offering, or a promise,
I am suddenly grateful and would
offer a prayer if I believed in God.

But not believing, I bless the power of seed,
its casual, useful persistence,
and bless the power of sun,
its conspiracy with the underground,
and thank my stars the winter’s ended.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 14, 2015)

Blood

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” 
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. 
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was, 
“Shihab”—“shooting star”—
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” 
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. 
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root 
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news. 
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, 
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone _civilized?_
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?


-naomi shihab nye


----------



## Greebo (Feb 14, 2015)

ATLAS 

There is a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes, which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living; which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in the air,
As Atlas did the sky.

U.A. Fanthorpe


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2015)

Thanks Phil

*Burial Rites*

Everyone comes back here to die
as I will soon. The place feels right
since it’s half dead to begin with.
Even on a rare morning of rain,
like this morning, with the low sky
hoarding its riches except for
a few mock tears, the hard ground
accepts nothing. Six years ago
I buried my mother’s ashes
beside a young lilac that’s now
taller than I, and stuck the stub
of a rosebush into her dirt,
where like everything else not
human it thrives. The small blossoms
never unfurl; whatever they know
they keep to themselves until
a morning rain or a night wind
pares the petals down to nothing.
Even the neighbor cat who shits
daily on the paths and then hides
deep in the jungle of the weeds
refuses to purr. Whatever’s here
is just here, and nowhere else,
so it’s right to end up beside
the woman who bore me, to shovel
into the dirt whatever’s left
and leave only a name for some-
one who wants it. Think of it,
my name, no longer a portion
of me, no longer inflated
or bruised, no longer stewing
in a rich compost of memory
or the simpler one of bone shards,
dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes,
the roots of the eucalyptus
I planted in ’73,
a tiny me taking nothing,
giving nothing, and free at last.

Philip Levine


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 16, 2015)

For M

Bright Star by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 priestlike 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 stedfast, 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.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 21, 2015)

The Dream

Love, if I weep it will not matter,
  And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
  But it is good to feel you there.

Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking, - 
  White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
  There was a shutter loose, - it screeched!

Swung in the wind, - and no wind blowing! - 
  I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort, - 
  And you were gone!  Cold, cold as dew,

Under my hand the moonlight lay!
  Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter, - 
  Ah, it is good to feel you there!

Edna St. Vincent Millay


----------



## Greebo (Feb 24, 2015)

A Person Protests to Fate

A person protests to fate:

“The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me.”

Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.

During the long middle:

conjugating a rivet
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
preserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

Jane Hirshfield


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 3, 2015)

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic by Edmund Hirsch

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2015)

A couple of Grooks by Piet Hein:

IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

A poet should be of the
old-fahioned meaningless brand:
obscure, esoteric, symbolic,
 - the critics demand it;
so if there's a poem of mine
that you do understand
I'll gladly explain what it means
till you don't understand it.


THE PARADOX OF LIFE

A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see
that Life is two locked boxes, each
containing the other's key.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 11, 2015)

ASTRO-GYMNASTICS

Go on a starlit night,
  stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
  outwards into space,
and let the starry
  firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
  your elected base.
Feel Earth's colossal weight
  of ice and granite,
of molten magma,
  water, iron, and lead;
and briefly hold
  this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
  your strangely solid head.

Piet Hein


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 12, 2015)

1977

Maria Callas is dead and Groucho Marx.
Loren Eiseley is dead. Vladimir Nabokov
And Robert Lowell and Elvis. Dead.
This is the year in the Years of Lead
When The Metropolitan Indians rioted
In Bologna after the Carabinieri shot
Francesco Lorusso. They wore warpaint
And skittered and gagged at the tanks
While Johnny Lyndon celebrated the Queen’s
Jubilee on a boat out on the Thames,
Eighty seven years after Wounded Knee.
This is the year the States reinstated
The death penalty and Gary Gilmore
Gave his final grin at 8:07am in front
Of a firing squad at Utah State Prison.
Charlie Chaplin, dear friends, is dead.
The public intellect is looking for a body
In a garage in Los Altos, Silicon Valley.
This is the year of the ersatz investment
In irony, competition, the comedic value
Of total violence we recognize finally
As the final admonishment of the modern.
A year of 3.3 million human zygotes
Soaking in the sodium light of imagination.
The sun is booming. Emanuel Jaques
Drowns in a sink at 245 Yonge Street
And Gerald Hannon publishes “Men Loving
Boys Loving Men” in The Body Politic.
The humours are comely and bilious.
I’m not alive to laugh about any of this.

Matt Rader


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 13, 2015)

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir _instantaneously_. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

-- (Terry Pratchett, Mort)


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 13, 2015)

The New Dog

Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper
and pen, has come

this manic animal
whose innocent disruptions
make nonsense
of my old simplicities- 

as if I needed him
to prove again that after
all the careful planning,
anything can happen. 

-Linda Patan


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 13, 2015)

*The Highwayman*
_*By Alfred Noyes*_

Part One
I
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding-
Riding-riding-
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

IV
And dark in the old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say-

V
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

Part Two
I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching-
Marching-marching-
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through the casement, the road that he would ride.

III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say-
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till here fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like
years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.

VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs
ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did
not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up strait and still!

VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night
!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him-with her death.

VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

* * * * * *

X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding-
Riding-riding-
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

XI
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,
And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 14, 2015)

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

My husband says dark matter is a reality
not just some theory invented by adolescent computers
he can prove it exists and is everywhere

forming invisible haloes around everything
and somehow because of gravity
holding everything loosely together

the way a child wants to escape its parents
and doesn’t want to - what’s that -
we don’t know what it is but we know it is real

the way our mothers and fathers fondly
angrily followed fixed orbits around
each other like mice on a track

the way every human and every atom
rushes through space wrapped in its invisible
halo, this big shadow - that’s dark dark matter

sweetheart, while the galaxies
in the wealth of their ferocious protective bubbles
stare at each other

unable to cease
proudly
receding

Alicia Ostriker


----------



## Greebo (Mar 15, 2015)

Constancy In Change

COULD this early bliss but rest 

Constant for one single hour! 
But e'en now the humid West 

Scatters many a vernal shower. 
Should the verdure give me joy? 

'Tis to it I owe the shade; 
Soon will storms its bloom destroy, 

Soon will Autumn bid it fade. 

Eagerly thy portion seize, 

If thou wouldst possess the fruit! 
Fast begin to ripen these, 

And the rest already shoot. 
With each heavy storm of rain 

Change comes o'er thy valley fair; 
Once, alas! but not again 

Can the same stream hold thee e'er. 

And thyself, what erst at least 

Firm as rocks appear'd to rise, 
Walls and palaces thou seest 

But with ever-changing eyes. 
Fled for ever now the lip 

That with kisses used to glow, 
And the foot, that used to skip 

O'er the mountain, like the roe. 

And the hand, so true and warm, 

Ever raised in charity, 
And the cunning-fashion'd form,-- 

All are now changed utterly. 
And what used to bear thy name, 

When upon yon spot it stood, 
Like a rolling billow came, 

Hast'ning on to join the flood. 

Be then the beginning found 

With the end in unison, 
Swifter than the forms around 

Are themselves now fleeting on! 
Thank the merit in thy breast, 

Thank the mould within thy heart, 
That the Muses' favour blest 
Ne'er will perish, ne'er depart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 16, 2015)

*Phlegm.*

I grew up to my dad’s incessant coughing,

And the accompanying thick yellow phlegm he would hack out,

I miss it,

A nostalgia for the old days,

Happier times with sadder songs,

It served as a constant reminder for how the bowels of the Ba’ath,

Were excreted on Kurdistan’s soil,

Picturing the old black radio,

Desperate for a reply,

Crackling the words:

‘Comrade, can you hear me?’,

As they singed slowly in Chemical Ali’s foul hatred,

The wheezing chest overflowing with the froth of Saddam’s broth,

Exterminating any areas of the trachea that had tasted Kurdish words,

The foaming mouth,

The peeling skin,

Watching their brothers writhe with them in demonic choreography,

Forcing the iris’ to immigrate,

Leaving them as blank as the Sahara el Beyda;

A stagger,

A fall,

A death,

And repeat.

There you have,

the formula for genocide.

My dad doesn’t cough anymore,

And you cannot smell the mustard gas on him…

Just the lingering stench of revolution.


----------



## Sirena (Mar 19, 2015)

*Burlington Bertie *

I'm Bert,
P'raps you've heard of me?
Bert,
You've had word of me,
Plodding along,
Happy and strong.
Living on plates of fresh air.
I dress up in fashion
And when I am feeling depressed
I shave from my cuff all the whiskers and fluff,
Stick my hat on and toddle up West.

I'm Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten-thirty
and saunter along like a toff.
I walk down the Strand with my gloves on my hand
Then I walk down again with them off.
I'm all airs and graces, correct easy paces,
Without food so long, I've forgot where my face is.
I'm Bert, Bert, I haven't a shirt
But my people are well off, you know.
Nearly everyone knows me from Smith to Lord Roseb'ry,
I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow.
I stroll
With Lord Hurlington,
Roll
In The Burlington
Call for Champagne,
Walk out again,
Come back and borrow the ink.
I live most expensive
Like Tom Lipton I'm in the swim
He's got so much 'oof' that he sleeps on the roof
And I live in the room over him.

I'm Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten thirty
And saunter along Temple Bar.
As round there I skip
I keep shouting "Pip Pip!"
And the darn'd fools think I'm in my car!
At Rothschild's I swank it,
My body I plank it
On his front door step with _The Mail_ for a blanket.
I'm Bert, Bert, and Rothschild was hurt
He said "You can't sleep there" I said "Oh"
He said "I'm Rothschild, sonny!" I said "That's damn'd funny,
I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow".

I smile
Condescendingly,
While they're extending me
Cheer upon cheer
When I appear,
Captain with my polo team.
So strict are my people
They're William The Conqueror's strain.
If they ever knew I'd been talking to you
Why they'd never look at me again.

I'm Burlington Bertie I rise at ten thirty
And reach Kempton Park around three
I stand by the rail, when a horse is for sale
And you ought to see Wooton watch me.
I lean on some awning while Lord Derby's yawning
Then he bids two thousand and I bid "Good Morning
I'm Bert, Bert, I'd buy one, a Cert
But where would I keep it you know
I can't let my man see me in bed with a gee-gee
I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow!

My pose,
Tho' ironical
Shows
That my monocle
Holds up my face, keeps it in place,
Stops it from slipping away.
Cigars, cigars,haha
I smoke thousands,
I usually deal in The Strand
But you have to take care when you're getting them there
Or some idiot might step on your hand.

I'm Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten thirty
Then Buckingham Palace I view.
I stand in the yard while they're changing the guard
And the King shouts across "Toodle oo"!
The Prince of Wales' brother along with some other
Slaps me on the back and says "Come and see Mother"
I'm Bert, Bert, and royalty's hurt,
When they ask me to dine I say no.
I've just had a banana with Lady Diana,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Diana_Cooper
I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow.
(by Harry B Norris)


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 19, 2015)

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw—
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity's not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air—
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity's not there!

Macavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;
And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square—
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair—
But it's useless to investigate—Macavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
It must have been Macavity!'—but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumb;
Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN'T THERE !
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!


----------



## Greebo (Mar 21, 2015)

My Light with Yours

					   I

When the sea has devoured the ships,
And the spires and the towers
Have gone back to the hills.
And all the cities
Are one with the plains again.
And the beauty of bronze,
And the strength of steel
Are blown over silent continents,
As the desert sand is blown—
My dust with yours forever.

					   II

When folly and wisdom are no more,
And fire is no more,
Because man is no more;
When the dead world slowly spinning
Drifts and falls through the void—
My light with yours
In the Light of Lights forever!

Edgar Lee Masters


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 23, 2015)

given dear selene recently blocked out the sun for a bit:

*Alone And Drinking Under The Moon*

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.


-Li Po


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 23, 2015)

Li Po


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 23, 2015)

Mutability by Percy Shelley

We are as 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 woe, 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!


----------



## Greebo (Mar 23, 2015)

Chosen because this morning seems too good to waste waiting around, even for the bus.

Ultimatum

I'm wearied of wearying love, my friend,
Of worry and strain and doubt;
Before we begin, let us view the end,
And maybe I'll do without.
There's never the pang that was worth the tear,
And toss in the night I won't -
So either you do or you don't, my dear,
Either you do or you don't!

The table is ready, so lay your cards
And if they should augur pain,
I'll tender you ever my kind regards
And run for the fastest train.
I haven't the will to be spent and sad;
My heart's to be gay and true -
Then either you don't or you do, my lad,
Either you don't or you do!

Dorothy Parker


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 24, 2015)

*Private and Profane*
BY MARIE PONSOT
From loss of  the old and lack of  the new
From failure to make the right thing do
Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
  From words not the word, from a feckless voice
  From poetic distress and from careless choice
  Exclude our intellects,  James Joyce.
From genteel angels and apostles unappalled
From Hollywood visions as virgins shawled
Guard our seeing, Grünewald.
  From calling a kettle an existential pot,
  From bodying the ghost of  whatever is not,
  John save us, O most subtle Scot.
From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod
From eating the pease and rejecting the pod
Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.
  Couperin come with your duple measure
  Alter our minds against banal pleasure.
Dürer direct with strictness our vision;
Steady this flesh toward your made precision.
  Mistress of accurate minor pain,
  Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane.
From pretending to own what we secretly seek,
From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,
Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.
  From ignorance of structural line and bone
  From passion not pointed on truth alone
  Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone.
  From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son;
  From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;
  From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.
That zeal for free will get us in deep,
That the chance to choose be the one we keep
That free will steel self  in us against self-defense
That free will repeal in us our last pretense
That free will heal us
  Jeanne d’Arc, Job,  Johnnie Skelton,
  Jehan de Beauce, composer  Johann,
  Dark  John Milton, Charter Oak  John,
Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt;
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 24, 2015)

Then it replied: ‘A conscience that is clouded
By its own shame or by that of another,
Will certainly feel that your words are sharp.

But none the less, all lying set aside,
Make clear to everyone the whole vision;
And let them scratch wherever they may itch.

For if you words are objectionable
For the first taste, they will yield nourishment
Afterwards, once they have been digested.

This cry of yours will do as the wind does,
Strike hardest on the summits that are highest;
And that is no small argument of honor.'

Dante, _Paradiso,_ XVII, 124-135.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 25, 2015)

Shift

Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor
at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers.
Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths
of talkative students by the time she neared retirement,
and Mr. Vickers, a skilled electrician in his day,
didn’t adapt when fuses became circuit breakers,
a fact that didn’t stop him from tinkering
in our basement until the house was consumed by flame.

I used to want to be this bad at a job.
I wanted to show up pissy drunk to staff meetings
when the power point slides were already dissolving
one into another, but I had this bad habit
of showing up on time
and more sober than any man should be
when working audio/visual hospitality
in a three star hotel that was a four star hotel
before he started working there.

When the entire North Atlantic blacked out,
every soul in the Hyatt Regency Dearborn flooded
the parking lot panicked about terrorists and rapture,
while I plugged in microphones and taped down cables
by flashlight—you know, in case whatever cataclysm
unfolded didn’t preempt the meetings. Meetings,
before which I’d convince a children’s hospital
to pay fifteen dollars to rent a nine dollar laser pointer.
Thirty-five bucks for a flip chart,
extra paper on the house. Is it good to be good at a job
if that job involves pretending to be a secret service agent
for Phizer’s George Bush impersonator? I don’t know

if it’s better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job,
but there must be some kind of satisfaction
in doing a job so poorly, you’re never asked to do it again.
I’m not saying he’s a hero, but there’s a guy out there
who overloaded a transformer and made a difference,
because in a moment, sweating through my suit,
groping in the dark when my boss was already home,

I learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache
like this to know that I could always ache for something.
There’s a hell for people like me where we shovel
the coal we have mined ourselves into furnaces
that burn the flesh from our bones nightly,
and we never miss a shift.

Jamaal May


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## Impossible Girl (Mar 25, 2015)

*Asunder*


Do not write - I am sad and just wish to expire. 
Lovely summers without you are but a dark night. 
I have closed up my arms, which can no more reach you, 
And to strike at my heart is to strike at the grave. 
Do not write! 


Do not write - Let us learn for ourselves how to die. 
Ask only God... and to yourself if I loved you! 
In your absence's depth to hear that you love me 
Is to hear heaven without ever getting there. 
Do not write! 


Do not write - I fear you, and too my memory; 
It keeps the voice that calls often to me. 
Do not show one running water who cannot drink. 
A dear handwritten word is like a live portrait. 
Do not write! 


Do not write me sweet words I no longer dare read. 
It seems your voice spreads them upon my heart 
And that I see them searing through your smile, 
It seems a kiss imprints them on my heart. 
Do not write! 

Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore


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## Impossible Girl (Mar 25, 2015)

*Home*


The saying goes like this
Home is where the heart is.
I’ve been thinking about
What I could do without.
I could miss the sun, I could miss the stars
And all the wonders of the universe so far
I could be hungry, broke, homeless even
I’d just feel like an angel in Heaven
When I’m granted with your tender smile
Wrapped up in your arms, anything is worthwhile
As the love I see in your eyes every day

For my home is you, come what may

- Your humble servant, little me - *

* This may not be proper english, but it comes from the heart


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## Impossible Girl (Mar 26, 2015)

What day are we

We are all the days
My friend
We are all of life
My love
We love each other, we live
We live, each other we love
And we don’t know what this life of ours is
And we don’t know what this day of ours is
And we don’t know what this love of ours is

Jacques Prévert


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## ShiftyBagLady (Mar 26, 2015)

*Spring*
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers


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## Greebo (Mar 27, 2015)

You Know Where You Did Despise

You know where you did despise 
(Tother day) my little Eyes, 
Little Legs, and little Thighs, 
And some things, of little Size, 
You know where. 

You, tis true, have fine black eyes, 
Taper legs, and tempting Thighs, 
Yet what more than all we prize 
Is a Thing of little Size, 
You know where.

Alexander Pope


----------



## Impossible Girl (Mar 27, 2015)

*Mirage *

The hope I dreamed of was a dream, 
Was but a dream; and now I wake, 
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old, 
For a dream's sake. 

I hang my harp upon a tree, 
A weeping willow in a lake; 
I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapped 
For a dream's sake. 

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; 
My silent heart, lie still and break: 
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed 
For a dream's sake.

Christina Rossetti


----------



## Impossible Girl (Mar 30, 2015)

Having visited the hometown of the Bard, I thought of sharing these few verses that I like very much :

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth

William Shakespeare - Richard II, 2.1, 40-51


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## Santino (Mar 30, 2015)

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 1, 2015)

*Edge*
BY SYLVIA PLATH
The woman is perfected. 
Her dead 

Body wears the smile of accomplishment, 
The illusion of a Greek necessity 

Flows in the scrolls of her toga, 
Her bare 

Feet seem to be saying: 
We have come so far, it is over. 

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, 
One at each little 

Pitcher of milk, now empty. 
She has folded 

Them back into her body as petals 
Of a rose close when the garden 

Stiffens and odors bleed 
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. 

The moon has nothing to be sad about, 
Staring from her hood of bone. 

She is used to this sort of thing. 
Her blacks crackle and drag.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 1, 2015)

I read this one a fair few times today. I think it's really lovely

Daffodils
by Ted Hughes

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads-still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April-your last April.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks-
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens-
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered-
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch-

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath-

We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust.


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## Impossible Girl (Apr 2, 2015)

*O me ! O life !*

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

_  Answer._
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman


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## RoyReed (Apr 3, 2015)

Refreshed and clear,
The moon now shines
After the fearful storm.

Takijirō Ōnishi

He wrote this haiku before committing seppuku.


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## Impossible Girl (Apr 10, 2015)

*Choice*

I'd rather have the thought of you 
To hold against my heart, 
My spirit to be taught of you 
With west winds blowing, 
Than all the warm caresses 
Of another love's bestowing, 
Or all the glories of the world 
In which you had no part. 

I'd rather have the theme of you 
To thread my nights and days, 
I'd rather have the dream of you 
With faint stars glowing, 
I'd rather have the want of you, 
The rich, elusive taunt of you 
Forever and forever and forever unconfessed 
Than claim the alien comfort 
Of any other's breast. 

O lover! O my lover, 
That this should come to me! 
I'd rather have the hope of you, 
Ah, Love, I'd rather grope for you 
Within the great abyss 
Than claim another's kiss- 
Alone I'd rather go my way 
Throughout eternity.

Angela Morgan


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 10, 2015)

THE FATAL SISTERS - AN ODE
Thos. Gray, Esq.

Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepare.)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darken'd air.

Glitt'ring lances are the loom,
Where the dusky warp we strain,
Weaving many a soldier's doom,
Orkney's woe, and Randver's bane.

See the grisly texture grow,
('Tis of human entrails made,)
And the weights, that play below,
Each a gasping warrior's head.

Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore,
Shoot the trembling cords along.
Sword, that once a monarch bore,
Keep the tissue close and strong.

Mista black, terrific maid,
Sangrida, and Hilda see,
Join the wayward work to aid:
Tis the woof of victory.

Ere the ruddy sun be set,
Pikes must shiver, javelins sing,
Blade with clatt'ring buckler meet,
Hauberk crash, and helmet ring.

(Weave the crimson web of war)
Let us go, and let us fly,
Where our friends the conflict share,
Where they triumph, where they die.

As the paths of fate we tread,
Wading thro' th' ensanguin'd field:
Gondula, and Geira, spread
O'er the youthful king your shield.

We the reins to slaughter give,
Ours to kill, and ours to spare:
Spite of danger he shall live.
(Weave the crimson web of war.)

They, whom once the desert-beach
Pent within its bleak domain,
Soon their ample sway shall stretch
O'er the plenty of the plain.

Low the dauntless earl is laid
Gor'd with many a gaping wound:
Fate demands a nobler head;
Soon a king shall bite the ground.

Long his loss shall Erin weep,
Ne'er again his likeness see;
Long her strains in sorrow steep,
Strains of immortality.

Horror covers all the heath,
Clouds of carnage blot the sun.
Sisters, weave the web of death;
Sisters, cease, the work is done.

Hail the task, and hail the hands!
Songs of joy and triumph sing!
Joy to the victorious bands;
Triumph to the younger king.

Mortal, thou that hear'st the tale,
Learn the tenor of our song.
Scotland thro' each winding vale
   Far and wide the notes prolong.

Sisters, hence with spurs of speed:
Each her thund'ring falchion wield;
Each bestride her sable steed.
Hurry, hurry to the field.


----------



## Impossible Girl (Apr 10, 2015)

My favourite one from Sir Will, Sonnet 130 :

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

William Shakespeare


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 10, 2015)

*Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes*
BY THOMAS GRAY

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
 The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
 Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
 The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
 She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
 The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
 Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
 With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
 What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
 Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
 She tumbled headlong in.
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
 Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
 A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
 And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
 Nor all that glisters, gold.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 10, 2015)

THE ONE BLACK STAIN
--Robert E. Howard--

They carried him out on the barren sand
where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand
as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land
wail to the lonely tide.

Drake faced them all like a lion at bay,
with his lion head upflung:
"Dare ye my word of law defy,
to say this traitor shall not die?"
And his captains dared not meet his eye
but each man held his tongue.

Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of sober face:
"Worthy of death he may well be,
but the trial ye held was mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where justice hid her face.

"More of the man had ye been, on deck
your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of the law."

Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake.
"Puritan knave!" swore he.
"Headsman! Give him the axe instead!
He shall strike off yon traitor's head!"
Solomon folded his arms and said,
darkly and somberly:

"I am no slave for your butcher's work."
"Bind him with triple strands!"
Drake roared and the men obeyed,
Hesitantly, as if afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade
and pinioned his iron hands.

They bent the doomed man over to his knees,
the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend,
one last long look they saw him send,
At Drake his judge and his one time friend
who dared not meet his eye.

The axe flashed silver in the sun,
a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear,
and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near
above the lonely strand.

"This be every traitor's end!"
Drake cried, and yet again.
Slowly his captains turned and went
and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent
in the eyes of Solomon Kane.

Night fell on the crawling waves;
the admiral's door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold;
his irons clashed as the ship rolled.
And his guard, grown weary and overbold,
lay down his pipe and dozed.

He woke with a hand at his corded throat
that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key,
and the somber Puritan stood free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously
with the wrath that is slow to rise.

Unseen, to the admiral's door,
went Solomon Kane from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship,
the guard's keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip
through the door unbarred.

Drake at the table sat alone,
his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping --
but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping,
death's swiftly flowing sands.

He reached no hand for gun or blade
to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see,
lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery,
and bitter, cankering pain.

A moment Solomon Kane stood there,
the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird,
and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred
And Kane went forth without a word
and closed the cabin door.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 10, 2015)

La Course Interrompue

I.
Jean qui allait a Dijon
  (Il montait en bicyclette)
Rencontra un gros lion
  Qui se faisait la toilette.

II.
Voila Jean qui tombe a terre
Et le lion le digere!

	 *	 *	 *	 *	 *	 *	 *

Mon Dieu! Que c’est embetant!
Il me devait quatre francs.

Col. D. Streamer (aka Harry Graham)


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## Patteran (Apr 13, 2015)

The Nobodies - Los Nadios, by Eduardo Galeano

Fleas dream of buying a dog
and the nobodies dream of getting out from under their poverty, 
that some magic day
suddenly good fortune will rain upon them
that it will downpour bucketfulls of good luck.
But good luck doesn’t rain today
or tomorrow or ever,
not even a little drizzle falls from the sky.
No matter how much the nobodies cry for it
and even when their left hand itches
or they get up on the right foot,
or when they start the year getting a new broom.

The nobodies: the sons of no one,
the owners of nothing.
The nobodies: treated as no one,
running after the carrot, dying their lives, fucked,
double-fucked.

Who are not, even when they are.
Who don’t speak languages, but rather dialects.
Who don’t follow religions,
but rather superstitions.  
Who don’t do art, but rather crafts.
Who don’t practice culture, but rather folklore.
Who are not human,
but rather human resources.
Who have no face but have arms,
who have no name, but rather a number.
Who don’t appear in the  universal history books,
but rather in the police pages of the local press.
The nobodies,
the ones who are worth less
than the bullet that kills them.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 13, 2015)

Greebo said:


> La Course Interrompue
> 
> I.
> Jean qui allait a Dijon
> ...


Too french, couldn't read


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## Greebo (Apr 14, 2015)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> Too french, couldn't read


Google translate is your friend - and the rhyming and scansion doesn't work when it's put into English.
The race cut short
1
on the way to Dijon,
with his pushbike, Jean
met a large Lion
who was washing his face.
2
Jean fell off his bike,
and the lion dined on him.
*****
God how annoying!
He owed me four francs.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 15, 2015)

Silt

Things you know but can’t say,
the sort of things, or propositions
that build up week after week at the end of the day,

& have to be dredged
by the practical operators so that their grosser cargo
& barges & boxy schedules can stay.

The great shovels and beaks and the rolling gantries
of Long Beach, and of Elizabeth, New Jersey,
can keep their high and rigorous distinction
between on-time and late, between work and play.

“Since you excluded me, I will represent you,
not meanly but generously, with an attention
that is itself

a revenge, since it shows that I know you

better than you have ever known yourselves,

that if I could never have learned
how to be you, nor how to be
somebody you’d like to be very near, nevertheless

you could not do without me, or keep me away.”

Stephen Burt


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 15, 2015)

THE DERBY
-Henry Birtles-

Why do they come on that June afternoon
To the top of a hill, at the Capital’s edge
Why sit in traffic for half of the day
Why are they here; well they’ve gathered to pledge
An allegiance to one and for centuries they’ve come
To witness the run of the boy who’ll be king
Who’s name could be sung, for as long as men sing
Who’s proved that he holds all the aces you need
Assuming the mantle that greatness bestows
By placing himself at the head of his breed
To put to the sword the most worthy of foes
Why do the names of the victors stand tall
When a name as a name can mean nothing at all
Ask when you walk down your street or afar
Have you heard of Nijinsky, Mill Reef or Shergar
D’you know what I mean when I speak in hushed tones
D’you know what I mean when you can’t describe joy
D’you get what they get when one rises alone
Why the blood still runs fast at the mention of Troy
This is the Derby and this is the race
That the rest of the World, through its name find a place
For their own measurement, for their own litmus test
To find a Horse worthy of calling the best
And it all started here upon high Epsom Downs
Where the greatest still fight for the greatest of crowns
Where men stand as one, whether blue blood or red
Whether born of the street, or in purple are bred.
And they stand here to cheer and they stand here to call
And they stand to acclaim one who rose above all
This is the Derby and this is the race
This the Kingmaker; hold tight, take your place.


----------



## Impossible Girl (Apr 16, 2015)

*The Albatross*

_Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare
Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep
In lax accompaniment through the air
Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep. 

No sooner than they dump them on the floors
These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,
Feel great white wings go down like useless oars
And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!
How droll and ugly he who shone on high!
The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,
Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds
Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;
Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,
He cannot walk beneath the weight of wings._

The Original:

*L'Albatros*

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.
_
Charles Baudelaire_


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2015)

Moon by JH Prynne 

The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady

so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.

Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. The challenge is
not a moral excitement, but the expanse,

the continuing patience
dilating into forms so
much more than compact.

I would probably not even choose to inhabit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet

suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form:

we are more pliant than the mercantile notion
of choice will determine-we go in this way
on and on and the unceasing image of hope
is our place in the world. We live there and now

at night I recognise the signs
of this, the calm is a
modesty about conduct in

the most ethical sense. We disperse into the ether
as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion
of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of
wish: where we live, as we more often are than

we know. If we expand
into this wide personal vacancy
we could become the extent

of all the wishes that are now too far beyond
us. A community of wish, as the steppe
on which the extension would sprinkle out
the ethic density, the compact modern home.

The consequence of this
pastoral desire is prolonged
as our condition, but

I know there is more than the mere wish to
wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
beyond this and will never end: these are songs
to the night under no affliction, knowing that

the wish is gift to the
spirit, is where we may
dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart
and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining
stone: the negligence and still passion of night.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 22, 2015)

Doha Thing Long Thought and Kind

A gift is a risk. Let roses be the prodrome.
It’s like it dropped a gold and a silver

ring with its name on it
in my brain. That was the gift

before the storm. It sent you a stumbling
block. Just scribble yes or no

on the form. Now every time the doorbell
rings I think someone’s sent me one.

A gift is a guess. Did it come close?
It’s what you need most

that turns you nerve side out. Right
now I think I’m growing something

long thought and kind of
clumsy. Just wrap it in drafts with awk

in the margins. Stuff it
in a wooden pillow with a drawer.

A gift is a task. It could be oxblood
or puce. You have to decide

whether to send those flowers that drop
whole from the stem or

the ones whose petals fall one
by one. You know how rain will

turn the roses nerve side out?
A gift is a test. They need to know that.

When she wrote their thorns
are the best part of them I can’t begin

to tell you how many kinds of
right she was. Now I think I’m growing

something long thought
to be the prerogative of certain

entitled individuals. Wings
or thorns. When all I wanted was

a more subtle pulse
at the throat bone. Well what size

do you wear? I am smelting you a surprise.
Not another luminous lyre

cum lint remover. Take it
from me. If you depend on gifts

for what you need you’ll end up with
a gold and a silver shoe both

for the same lame foot.

Alice Fulton


----------



## Greebo (Apr 23, 2015)

On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid  
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,  
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart  
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,  
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,  
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

John Milton


----------



## Greebo (May 1, 2015)

I Am the People, the Mob

I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then — I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob — the crowd — the mass — will arrive then.

Carl Sandberg


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 7, 2015)

I fucking love this fucking poem
it fucking gets me fucking going
the fucking passion in his eyes
it makes me want to fucking cry


----------



## DotCommunist (May 7, 2015)

oh my dear lord thats good


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 7, 2015)

That film, Strumpet, is pretty good. But that scene just wins me. And I've watched it a fair bit...


----------



## DotCommunist (May 7, 2015)

worthy of the text posted in full:



EVIDENTLY
CHICKEN TOWN





the fucking cops are fucking keen
to fucking keep it fucking clean

the fucking chief's a fucking swine

who fucking draws a fucking line

at fucking fun and fucking games

the fucking kids he fucking blames

are nowehere to be fucking found

anywhere in chicken town





the fucking scene is fucking sad

the fucking news is fucking bad

the fucking weed is fucking turf

the fucking speed is fucking surf

the fucking folks are fucking daft

don't make me fucking laugh

it fucking hurts to look around

everywhere in chicken town





the fucking train is fucking late

you fucking wait you fucking wait

you're fucking lost and fucking found

stuck in fucking chicken town





the fucking view is fucking vile

for fucking miles and fucking miles

the fucking babies fucking cry

the fucking flowers fucking die

the fucking food is fucking muck

the fucking drains are fucking fucked

the colour scheme is fucking brown

everywhere in chicken town





the fucking pubs are fucking dull

the fucking clubs are fucking full

of fucking girls and fucking guys

with fucking murder in their eyes

a fucking bloke is fucking stabbed

waiting for a fucking cab

you fucking stay at fucking home

the fucking neighbors fucking moan

keep the fucking racket down

this is fucking chicken town





the fucking train is fucking late

you fucking wait you fucking wait

you're fucking lost and fucking found

stuck in fucking chicken town





the fucking pies are fucking old

the fucking chips are fucking cold

the fucking beer is fucking flat

the fucking flats have fucking rats

the fucking clocks are fucking wrong

the fucking days are fucking long

it fucking gets you fucking down

evidently chicken town


----------



## DotCommunist (May 7, 2015)

and bollocks away and fuck yourselves to anyone who says the naughty words have no place in poetry


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 7, 2015)

I read that (not the drug references though) to ShiftyJunior once and beeped out all of the fuckings 
It made him like poetry.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 7, 2015)

ShiftyBagLady said:


> I fucking love this fucking poem
> it fucking gets me fucking going
> the fucking passion in his eyes
> it makes me want to fucking cry




Every fucking day in the North. 

There is some Dylan Thomas slipped into that. The second verse of In My Craft or Sullen Art:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.


----------



## Greebo (May 8, 2015)

Showers

The child tells me, put a brick in the tank, 
don’t wear leather, don’t eat brisket,
snapper, or farmed salmon - not tells,
orders - doesn’t she know the sluice gates
are wide open and a trillion gallons
wasted just for the dare of it? 

Until the staring eye shares that thrill,
witnessing: I am just iris and cornea,
blind spot where brain meets mind,
the place where the image forms itself
from a spark - image of the coming storm.

Still the child waits outside the bathroom
with the watch she got for Best Essay,
muttering, two minutes too long.

Half measures, I say. She says, action.
I: I’m one man. She: Seven billion.

If you choose, the sea goes back.

D. Nurkse


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2015)

Drifting on the sea go the swift ships.
Slacken the sails, there, loosen the ropes,
catch the wind and save your companions
if you want us to remember your name.
Stay far off, go not where the troubled wave rises.
Now it depends on you


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 10, 2015)

All force strives forward to work far and wide
To live and grow and ever to expand;
Yet we are checked and thwarted on each side
By the world's flux and swept along like sand:
In this internal storm and outward tide
We hear a promise, hard to understand:
From the compulsion that all creatures binds,
Who overcomes himself, his freedom finds.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 11, 2015)

Bad New Government
By Emily Berry

Love, I woke in an empty flat to a bad new government;
it was cold the fridge was still empty my heart, that junkie,
was still chomping on the old fuel vroom, I start the day like a tired
motorcyclist I want to go very fast and email you about the following
happy circumstances: early rosebuds, a birthday party, a new cake recipe but
today it’s hot water bottles and austerity breakfast and my toast burns in protest

You are not here of course but you live in me like a tiny valve of a man
you light up my chambers Later I will call to tell you about the new
prime minister, the worrying new developments and about how
I am writing my first political poem which is also (always) about my love for you


----------



## Greebo (May 21, 2015)

Doors opening, closing on us

Maybe there is more of the magical
in the idea of a door than in the door
itself. It’s always a matter of going
through into something else. But

while some doors lead to cathedrals
arching up overhead like stormy skies
and some to sumptuous auditoriums
and some to caves of nuclear monsters

most just yield a bathroom or a closet.
Still, the image of a door is liminal,
passing from one place into another
one state to the other, boundaries

and promises and threats. Inside
to outside, light into dark, dark into
light, cold into warm, known into
strange, safe into terror, wind

into stillness, silence into noise
or music. We slice our life into
segments by rituals, each a door
to a presumed new phase. We see

ourselves progressing from room
to room perhaps dragging our toys
along until the last door opens
and we pass at last into was.

Marge Piercy


----------



## Greebo (May 23, 2015)

Shades

Shall I tell you, then, how it is? -
There came a cloven gleam
Like a tongue of darkened flame
To flicker in me.

And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.

In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In a mouse that pauses to listen

Glimmers our
Shadow; yet it deprives
Them none of their glisten.

In every shaken morsel
I see our shadow tremble
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.

As if it were part and parcel,
One shadow, and we need not dissemble
Our darkness: do you understand?

For I have told you plainly how it is.

D. H. Lawrence


----------



## butchersapron (May 27, 2015)

The Man on the Dump

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche  
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full  
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.  
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,  
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems  
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,  
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says  
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs  
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.  
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green  
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew  
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads  
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.  
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,  
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),  
Between that disgust and this, between the things  
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)  
And those that will be (azaleas and so on),  
One feels the purifying change. One rejects  
The trash.

			   That’s the moment when the moon creeps up  
To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.  
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon  
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.  
That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,  
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear  
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,  
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:  
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

Wallace Stevens.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 31, 2015)

Everything is Going to be Alright by Derek Mahon

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right


----------



## Greebo (Jun 1, 2015)

Men as Friends

I have a few which is news to me
Tom drops by in the mornings with his travel
mug my mother would call it a coffee klatch

we review our terrible histories with fathers
and talk about the father he’s become and how much
it will cost to replace gutters the ice brought down

and then there’s soft-spoken Harvey
with whom I enjoy long pauses in conversation about how
they raised the Nelson town hall and put a foundation underneath

during which we both look at Mt. Monadnock and then down
at the ground and then back at each other silence precipitating
the pretty weather we share before he goes inside for lunch

when I had to pack up my office Tom boxed
and loaded books into my car I didn’t think he’d want
to but his idea of friendship includes carrying heavy things

at the dog park the retired Marine with the schnauzer
asked do you have a husband  I replied I don’t care for men
in that way as a Marine James mostly played cards

on a supply ship now he mostly hunts and fishes
climbs his orchard ladder for my Cortlands
and in trout season leaves, in my fridge, two rainbows

Robin Becker


----------



## Greebo (Jun 6, 2015)

Kiss Over Zero

anything over zero is zero
anything over one is itself

a bed over zero
is a funhouse mirror aimed

at a cloudy sky
a sky and its clouds over zero

a storm over one
is an infinite storm

a night over one
is a kiss over zero

and the minute hand eating its tail
is a red ear on a wet pillow

the memory of laughter
is a lamp over one

one inhales before one sighs
a lamp over zero is zero

the hole in a satin sheet
slowly ate up the yellow

till splitting the hem
the hole was unleashed

like a kiss
a long kiss over zero

George David Clark


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 8, 2015)

*From 1921

Freedom or Slavery?*

Born in a world that is tainted and rank with disease;
Bred amid squalor and sunk in monotonous toil;
Almost inhuman, like beasts that are laden and led.
Is our fate fixed? Shall there ne'er be cessation and ease
For our torn, weary feet? Shall we ne'er have the strength to recoil
From the sad death-in-life, where to live is to envy the dead?

Beauty of nature and art, of fame and creative joy,
Nothing of these do we know, nor care we to understand;
Love that is truly has touched us and passed us by.
Chain-laden slaves are we, whom our masters can crush and destroy
At their wayward, whimsical will, with a negligent wave of the hand,
In the way a wanton child might crush and torture a fly.

Is there no God to help, no Zeus, or Jahveh, or Buddh?
As well might our prayers be made to an image of wood or stone,
Hear, then, the truth; be sure you shall find it discordant and crude.
But harmony creeps through the discord, and a light in the crudeness gleams—
Freedom is our for the taking, and the power to take our own.

Out of the wreck of a world that is falling into decay,
Rise, if within you dwells a spark of the will to dare;
Come in our ranks and work, and fight, and if need be die!
We have nothing to lose but our chains. Of a surety comes a day
When a choice must be made at last, when we break the fetters we wear
Or retain them still, slaves proud of our slavery.

*F. J. Webb*
​


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 13, 2015)

I'm Explaining a Few Things by Pablo Neruda

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfiresleapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 13, 2015)

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


----------



## Greebo (Jun 14, 2015)

Realtor

Please
consider Ocean Beach
out of reach.
Try not to gulp
the green water
we porpoise
like employees.
My purpose:
your thought-partner.

There is a feeling
just shy of feeling,
like tongue on teeth.
Disbelief
hangs there,
an ill-chosen comma,
a lanyard with a pass.
I swear the train is coming.
I’m only here to help.

A client bought,
on second thought,
that House in Vermont.
Night is flirty words
with fiends,
the phlebotomists
from Quest
boning up on Thoreau.
It’s too soon to throw

in the cards.
Live and let give?
Here. Let me give
you the high-five.
I searched;
my activism,
lightly starched.
I never meant
to live in euphemism.

Randall Mann
“This poem was written largely in response to a few tech-driven predicaments in my city, San Francisco: prohibitively priced rents and real estate; and the often impoverished, disingenuous communication and connection between gay men. House in Vermont and high-five are slang for HIV.”


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 17, 2015)

Summer Solstice by Stacie Cassarino 

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 17, 2015)

Summer Triptych

1.
The world is water
to these bronzed boys
on their surfboards,
riding the sexual waves
of Maui
like so many fearless
cowboys, challenging
death on bucking
broncos of foam.

2.
On the beach at Santorini
we ate those tiny silverfish
grilled straight from the sea,
and when the sun went down
in the flaming west
there was applause
from all the sated diners,
as if it had done its acrobatic plunge
just for them.

3.
Swathed from head to toe
in seeming veils of muslin,
the figure in the Nantucket fog
poles along the shoreline on a flat barge.
It could be Charon transporting souls
across the River Styx, or just
another fisherman in a hoodie,
trolling for bluefish
on the outgoing tide.

Linda Pastan


----------



## SovietArmy (Jun 17, 2015)

Is anybody using this channel.  So beautiful to listening spoken words.  I do often listening with my cup of coffee.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PearlsofWisdom


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## Sirena (Jun 20, 2015)

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth


----------



## Greebo (Jun 22, 2015)

Leisure

Leisure, thou goddess of a bygone age,
   When hours were long and days sufficed to hold
	Wide-eyed delights and pleasures uncontrolled
By shortening moments, when no gaunt presage
Of undone duties, modern heritage,
	Haunted our happy minds; must thou withhold
	Thy presence from this over-busy world,
And bearing silence with thee disengage
	Our twined fortunes? Deeps of unhewn woods
	Alone can cherish thee, alone possess
Thy quiet, teeming vigor. This our crime:
	Not to have worshipped, marred by alien moods
	That sole condition of all loveliness,
The dreaming lapse of slow, unmeasured time.

Amy Lowell


----------



## Greebo (Jun 24, 2015)

Woman Work

I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The cane to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own.

Maya Angelou


----------



## Greebo (Jun 26, 2015)

Holy Cosmos

We’ve been told space
is like two dark lips colliding

like science fiction
it outlines a small cosmos

where fear hides in a glow
where negative space

becomes a place for wishing
a constellation of hazy tunes

of faint sharp vowels
a glossary of meteors

a telescope to god
a cold bright white

maybe distance damages us
maybe Jupiter

will suddenly surprise us
with a notion of holiness

but instead an old planet
takes over all the space

and we are reminded
of the traces of fire

in our gaze
defining our infidelities

Nathalie Handal


----------



## Greebo (Jun 28, 2015)

This Much and More

If my lover were a comet
			Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
			 In his hair.

Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
			Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
			And I’d plunge home!

Djuna Barnes


----------



## friendofdorothy (Jun 29, 2015)

Hello poetry fans, I've never noticed this thread before.
I'm posting this becase I saw the poet read it at a Wotever world queer Pride event recently and I was really impressed. He recited it with a musical sort of rhythm. Its quite long and full of the 'n' word, so I'll just put a link to it.

http://genius.com/Dean-atta-i-am-nobodys-nigger-stephenlawrence-annotated


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## Greebo (Jun 30, 2015)

Prayer at Sunrise

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

James Weldon Johnson


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 30, 2015)

*For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough:*

by Charles Bukowski


I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know
her dress upon my arm
but
they will not
give her back to me.


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2015)




----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2015)

Happy Family

Under the sun the dog with a stick
under the dog the woman with thick hair.
Daddy's there with junior,
both have hats and glasses - junior's are small
that's about all
oh, and Father is fond
beyond
the call of beauty.

John Hegley


----------



## Greebo (Jul 3, 2015)

The Roman teacher

In the Greek lesson
it is summertime
and this morning is the last time
for two cycles of the moon
that he will commune with his pupils.
Earlier this morning was the last time ever
he would commune with his beloved
for she has fooled around with another
and his jealousy is stronger than his love.
On his arrival some of the pupils are winking at each other
thinking that they will be schooled
without the usual iron glove,
allowed along to the beach
to have a smashing splashing time
swimming and skimming flattish pebbles
discus-like across the sea
but they are wrong.
It is _his _curriculum, _his _anger
and this morning they will share his pain,
they will each take out their tablets
and have a stab at giving six good reasons
why they shouldn't get a thorough thrashing with his cane.

John Hegley


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 3, 2015)

fuck's sake greebo  I never get here before you

sod it, gonna post a poem anyway and boo to the rules

*"The best time of the day" - Raymond Carver*

Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love

these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2015)

*The Isles of Greece*


The isles of Greece ! the isles of Greece
  Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
  Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung !
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The Scian and the Teian muse,
  The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse :
  Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest.’

The mountains look on Marathon—
  And Marathon looks on the sea ;
And musing there an hour alone,
  I dreamed that Greece might still be free ;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

A king sate on the rocky brow
  Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis ;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
  And men in nations;—all were his !
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set, where were they ?

And where are they ? and where art thou,
  My country ? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now—
  The heroic bosom beats no more !
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine ?

’Tis something in the dearth of fame,
  Though linked among a fettered race,
To feel at least a patriot’s shame,
  Even as I sing, suffuse my face ;
For what is left the poet here ?
For Greeks a blush—for Greece a tear.

Must _we _but weep o’er days more blest ?
  Must _we_ but blush ?—Our fathers bled.
Earth ! render back from out thy breast
  A remnant of our Spartan dead !
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylæ !

What, silent still ? and silent all ?
  Ah ! no ;—the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent’s fall,
  And answer, ‘Let one living head,
But one, arise,—we come, we come !’
’Tis but the living who are dumb.

In vain—in vain : strike other chords ;
  Fill high the cup with Samian wine !
Leave battles to the Turkish hordes,
  And shed the blood of Scio’s vine !
Hark ! rising to the ignoble call—
How answers each bold Bacchanal !

You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet ;
  Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone ?
Of two such lessons, why forget
  The nobler and the manlier one ?
You have the letters Cadmus gave—
Think ye he meant them for a slave ?

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine !
  We will not think of themes like these !
It made Anacreon’s song divine :
  He served—but served Polycrates—
A tyrant ; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.

The tyrant of the Chersonese
  Was freedom’s best and bravest friend ;
_That _tyrant was Miltiades !
  O that the present hour would lend
Another despot of the kind !
Such chains as his were sure to bind.

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine !
  On Suli’s rock, and Parga’s shore,
Exists the remnant of a line
  Such as the Doric mothers bore ;
And there, perhaps, some seed is sown,
The Heracleidan blood might own.

Trust not for freedom to the Franks—
  They have a king who buys and sells ;
In native swords and native ranks
  The only hope of courage dwells :
But Turkish force and Latin fraud
Would break your shield, however broad.

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine !
  Our virgins dance beneath the shade—
I see their glorious black eyes shine ;
  But gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.

Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
  Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep ;
  There, swan-like, let me sing and die :
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!

George Gordon Byron.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 8, 2015)

Stridulation Sonnet

Tiger beetles, crickets, velvet ants, all
know the useful friction of part on part,
how rub of wing to leg, plectrum to file,
marks territories, summons mates. How

a lip rasped over finely tined ridges can
play sweet as a needle on vinyl. But
sometimes a lone body is insufficient.
So the sapsucker drums chimney flashing

for our amped-up morning reveille. Or,
later, home again, the wind’s papery
come hither through the locust leaves. The roof
arcing its tin back to meet the rain.

The bed’s soft creak as I roll to my side.
What sounds will your body make against mine?

Jessica Jacobs


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jul 8, 2015)

Hymn to the Bankers by Erich Kastner tr. By Anna Tindall

He may rejoice and be content 
Who does not know these men. 
They borrow gold at five per cent 
And lend it out at ten. 

They're never shocked by what they see. 
Their heart is never still. 
Their product is discrepancy 
(Interpret as you will.) 

Their appetite is fathoms deep. 
They feed and dominate. 
They never sow, they only reap 
And let their gold gestate. 

Sorcerers in human form 
They charm from empty hands. 
They make their fortunes on the phone 
And petrol from the sands. 

Whether gold is scarce or sure 
They still make what they need 
And slit the throats of others; for 
The paper makes them bleed. 

They swear by the rule of three 
So have no need to pray. 
For God they have some sympathy 
Though they love gold more easily. 
(But they all go bust one day.)


----------



## Greebo (Jul 10, 2015)

I'm posting lyrics, just this once, live with it.  

"A Change Is Gonna Come"

I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh, and just like the river I've been running ever since

It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will

It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die
Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky

It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will

I go to the movie and I go down town
Somebody keep telling me don't hang around

Its been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will

Then I go to my brother
And I say, "Brother, help me please."
But he winds up knockin' me
Back down on my knees

There been times when I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will

Sam Cooke


----------



## Greebo (Jul 10, 2015)

Living Room

God sees me. I see you. You’re just like me.
	   This is the cul-de-sac I’ve longed to live on.
Pure-white and dormered houses sit handsomely

along the slate-roofed, yew-lined neighborhood.
	   Past there is where my daughters walk to school,
across the common rounded by a wood.

And in my great room, a modest TV
	 informs me how the earth is grown so small,
ringed in spice routes of connectivity.

My father lived and died in his same chair
	   and kept it to one beer. There’s good in that.
Who could look down upon, or even dare

to question, what he managed out of life?
	   Age makes us foolish. Still, he had a house,
a patch of grass and room to breathe, a wife.

It’s my house now, and I do as I please.
	   I bless his name. I edge the yard, plant greens.
Our girls swing on the porch in a coming breeze.

David Yezzi


----------



## Greebo (Jul 12, 2015)

Of Love: A Sonnet

How love came in I do not know,
Whether by the eye, or ear, or no;
Or whether with the soul it came
(At first) infused with the same;
Whether in part ’tis here or there,
Or, like the soul, whole everywhere,
This troubles me: but I as well
As any other this can tell:
That when from hence she does depart
The outlet then is from the heart.

Robert Herrick


----------



## Santino (Jul 13, 2015)

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W.H. Auden


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 13, 2015)

*From 1915
*
*TO A PATRIOT*​*Who told the writer "Socialists won't fight because they are cowards."*​
Not that we fear to die, for why should we,
Who face a living death from day to day.
Fear what we know "eternal rest" to be—
A speedy end rather than slow decay?
No, what we fear is that we should be brought
To suffer wounds, disease and lingering pain
In aiding those of brute-like cunning wrought,
Who maim the body, crush and starve the brain.
Maybe the time is nearer than we know
When we the disinherited, the spurned,
Shall face our masters in the last great fight;
Shall wade through waste and desolating woe
Toward the splendour of a death well earned
If only life be won in death's despite.
* F. J. Webb*


----------



## Greebo (Jul 17, 2015)

The Sun in Bemidji, Minnesota

The sun isn’t even a pearl today—
its light diffused, strained gray
by winter haze—this the grayest
day so far, so when I enter the Wells
Fargo parking lot the last thing I expect
is to see the sun in the car next to mine.
I watch a woman make out with the sun,
and I’m jealous of the sun. Beautiful
beyond her desire—wanting the sun
so—she almost glows as she tugs
sweetness from his whiskers with
her teeth, and his drool runs down
her chin. I think the sun is a man,
but it’s hard to tell in this light. No,
it’s a mango, and I’m jealous of her.

Sean Hill


----------



## Greebo (Jul 20, 2015)

In Tongues
for Auntie Jeanette

1.
Because you haven’t spoken
in so long, the tongue stumbles and stutters,
sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just
a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.

You once loved a man so tall
sometimes you stood on a chair to kiss him.

2.
What to say when one says,
“You’re sooo musical,” takes your stuttering for scatting,
takes your stagger for strutting,
takes your try and tried again for willful/playful deviation?

It makes you wanna not holla
silence to miss perception’s face.

3.
It ain’t even morning or early,
though the sun-up says “day,” and you been
staggering lange Zeit gegen a certain
breathless stillness that we can’t but call death.

Though stillness suggests a possibility
of less than dead, of move, of still be.

4.
How that one calling your tryin’
music, calling you sayin’ entertaining, thinks
there’s no then that we, (who den dat we?), remember/
trace in our permutations of say?

What mastadonic presumptions precede and
follow each word, each be, each bitter being?

5.
These yawns into which we enter as into a harbor—
Come. Go. Don’t. says the vocal oceans which usher
each us, so unlike any ship steered or steering into.
A habit of place and placing a body.

Which choruses of limbs and wanting, of limp
linger in each syllabic foot tapping its chronic codes?

Tonya M. Foster


----------



## Greebo (Jul 21, 2015)




----------



## Greebo (Jul 23, 2015)

*Amergin's Final Charm (with no apologies whatsoever to the shade of Robert Graves)

I am the pill: used as poison,
I am the cure: mutated to sickness,
I am the tool: that becomes a weapon,
I am the road: cut through a forest,
I am the river: diverted & dammed,
I am the panacea: for the new placebo,
Paragon of Animals: who but I
can tilt the whole of the world on its head?

I am the ocean: unable to breathe,
I am the child:  who lives in tomorrow,
I am the earth:  rapaciously squandered,
I am the stranger: shot at the border,
I am the city: watching the horizon,
I am the rifle: trained on the starving,
embryo god: who but I
am responsible for the slighest in everything?

I am the freeman: rotting in prison,
I am the confession: invented by torture,
I am the drunk: content at the wheel,
I am the god: created by man,
I am the lies: presented as truth,
I am the wound: in the flank of the world,
I am what I am: who but I
can unleash Hell for six minutes on Earth?

Andrew Paul Wood
*


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jul 27, 2015)

*Haiku 3*
_By Thomas Herr_


The promise of touch and kiss

And the prospect of healing us through fingertips

Means the answer is yes.


----------



## Greebo (Aug 6, 2015)

Ghosts and Fashion

Although it no longer has a body
to cover out of a sense of decorum,

the ghost must still consider fashion—

must clothe its invisibility in something
if it is to “appear” in public.

Some traditional specters favor
the simple shroud—

a toga of ectoplasm
worn Isadora-Duncan-style
swirling around them.

While others opt for lightweight versions
of once familiar tee shirts and jeans.

Perhaps being thought-forms,
they can change their outfits instantly—

or if they were loved ones,
it is we who clothe them
like dolls from memory.

Elaine Equi


----------



## Greebo (Aug 21, 2015)

Mercy Beach

Stony trails of jagged beauty rise
like stretch marks streaking sand-hips.
All the Earth has borne beguiles us
& battered bodies build our acres.

Babes that sleep in hewn rock cradles
learn to bear the hardness coming.
Tough grace forged in tender bones—
may this serve & bless them well.

They grow & break grief into islands
of sun-baked stone submerged in salt
kisses, worn down by the ocean’s ardor
relentless as any strong loving.

May they find caresses that abolish pain.
Like Earth, they brandish wounds of gold!

Kamilah Aisha Moon


----------



## billy_bob (Aug 21, 2015)

jms said:


> This Is Just To Say
> William Carlos Willaims (1883-1963)
> 
> I have eaten
> ...



Has enough time passed for me to get away with reposting this?


----------



## Greebo (Aug 23, 2015)

Discovery

The gray path glided before me
Through cool, green shadows;
Little leaves hung in the soft air
Like drowsy moths;
A group of dark trees, gravely conferring,
Made me conscious of the gaucherie of sound;
Farther on, a slim lilac
Drew me down to her on the warm grass.
“How sweet is peace!”
My serene heart said.

Then, suddenly, in a curve of the road,
Red tulips!
A bright battalion, swaying,
They marched with fluttering flags,
And gay fifes playing!

A swift flame leapt in my heart;
I burned with passion;
I was tainted with cruelty;
I wanted to march in the wind,
To tear the silence with gay music,
And to slash the sober green
Until it sobbed and bled.

The tulips have found me out.

Florence Ripley Mastin


----------



## Greebo (Aug 26, 2015)

"Star Light, Star Bright..."

Star, that gives a gracious dole,
What am I to choose?
Oh, will it be a shriven soul,
Or little buckled shoes?

Shall I wish a wedding-ring,
Bright and thin and round,
Or plead you send me covering -
A newly spaded mound?

Gentle beam, shall I implore
Gold, or sailing-ships,
Or beg I hate forevermore
A pair of lying lips?

Swing you low or high away,
Burn you hot or dim;
My only wish I dare not say -
Lest you should grant me him.

Dorothy Parker


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 26, 2015)

*Annabel Lee*
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
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 wingèd 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 kinsmen 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 her sepulchre there by the sea—
 In her tomb by the sounding sea.


----------



## Greebo (Aug 29, 2015)

Dangerous for Girls

 It was the summer of Chandra Levy, disappearing
	   from Washington D.C., her lover a Congressman, evasive
			  and blow-dried from Modesto, the TV wondering

in every room in America to an image of her tight jeans and piles
	   of curls frozen in a studio pose. It was the summer the only 
			  woman known as a serial killer, a ten-dollar whore trolling

the plains of central Florida, said she knew she would
	   kill again, murder filled her dreams
			  and if she walked in the world, it would crack

her open with its awful wings. It was the summer that in Texas, another
	   young woman killed her five children, left with too many
			  little boys, always pregnant. One Thanksgiving, she tried

to slash her own throat. That summer the Congressman
	   lied again about the nature of his relations, or,
			  as he said, he couldn’t remember if they had sex that last

night he saw her, but there were many anonymous girls that summer,
	   there always are, who lower their necks to the stone
			  and pray, not to God but to the Virgin, herself once

a young girl, chosen in her room by an archangel.
	   Instead of praying, that summer I watched television, reruns of
			  a UFO series featuring a melancholic woman detective

who had gotten cancer and was made sterile by aliens. I watched
	   infomercials: exercise machines, pasta makers,
			  and a product called Nails Again With Henna,

ladies, make your nails steely strong, naturally,
	   and then the photograph of Chandra Levy
			  would appear again, below a bright red number,

such as 81, to indicate the days she was missing.
	   Her mother said, please understand how we’re feeling
			  when told that the police don’t believe she will be found alive,

though they searched the parks and forests
	   of the Capitol for the remains and I remembered
			  being caught in Tennessee, my tent filled with wind

lifting around me, tornado honey, said the operator when I called
	   in fear. The highway barren, I drove to a truck stop where
			  maybe a hundred trucks hummed in pale, even rows

like eggs in a carton. Truckers paced in the dining room,
	   fatigue in their beards, in their bottomless
			  cups of coffee. The store sold handcuffs, dirty

magazines, t-shirts that read, Ass, gas or grass.
	   Nobody rides for free, and a bulletin board bore a 
			  public notice: Jane Doe, found in a refrigerator box

outside Johnson, TN, her slight measurements and weight.
	   The photographs were of her face, not peaceful in death,
			  and of her tattoos Born to Run, and J.T. caught in

scrollworks of roses. One winter in Harvard Square, I wandered 
	   drunk, my arms full of still warm, stolen laundry, and
			  a man said come to my studio and of course I went—

for some girls, our bodies are not immortal so much as
	   expendable, we have punished them or wearied
			  from dragging them around for so long and so we go

wearing the brilliant plumage of the possibly freed
	   by death. Quick on the icy sidewalks, I felt thin and
			  fleet, and the night made me feel unique in the eyes

of the stranger. He told me he made sculptures
	   of figure skaters, not of the women’s bodies,
			  but of the air that whipped around them,

a study of negative space,
	   which he said was the where-we-were-not
			  that made us. Dizzy from beer,

I thought why not step into
	   that space? He locked the door behind me.

Connie Voisine


----------



## Greebo (Aug 30, 2015)

A Jelly-Fish

Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.

Marianne Moore


----------



## Greebo (Sep 1, 2015)

HOME

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled 
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between 
your legs
or the insults are easier 
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you 
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

Warsan Shire


----------



## Greebo (Sep 6, 2015)

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight’s end or flight’s beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It’s the color in the lower sky 
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

Lorine Niedecker


----------



## Greebo (Sep 22, 2015)

Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City

The lettering on the shop window in which
you catch a glimpse of yourself is in Polish.

Behind you a man quickly walks by, nearly shouting
into his cell phone. Then a woman

at a dreamier pace, carrying a just-bought bouquet
upside-down. All on a street where pickpockets abound

along with the ubiquitous smell of something baking.
It is delicious to be anonymous on a foreign city street.

Who knew this could be a life, having languages
instead of relationships, struggling even then,

finding out what it means to be a woman
by watching the faces of men passing by.

I went to distant cities, it almost didn’t matter
which, so primed was I to be reverent.

All of them have the beautiful bridge
crossing a grey, near-sighted river,

one that massages the eyes, focuses
the swooping birds that skim the water’s surface.

The usual things I didn’t pine for earlier
because I didn’t know I wouldn’t have them.

I spent so much time alone, when I actually turned lonely
it was vertigo.

Myself estranged is how I understood the world.
My ignorance had saved me, my vices fueled me,

and then I turned forty. I who love to look and look
couldn’t see what others did.

Now I think about currencies, linguistic equivalents, how lopsided they	  are, while
my reflection blurs in the shop windows.

Wanting to be as far away as possible exactly as much as still with you.
Shamelessly entering a Starbucks (free wifi) to write this.

Jennifer Grotz


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 10, 2015)

Bush's War by Robert Hass

I typed the brief phrase. "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper.
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way.
Berlin is a northerly city. In May
At the end of the twentieth century
In the leafy precincts of Dahlem Dorf.
South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,
Spring is northerly, it begins before dawn
In a racket of bird song. The amsels
Shiver the sun up as if they were shaking
A liquid tangle of golden wire. There are two kinds
Of flowering chestnuts, red and white,
And the wet pavements are speckled
With petals from the incandescent spikes
Of their flowers and shoes at U-bahn stops
Are flecked with them. Green of holm oaks.
Birch tassels, the soft green of maples.
And the odor of lilacs is everywhere.
At Oscar Helene Heim station a farmer
Sells white asparagus from a heaped table.
In a month he'll be selling chanterelles;
In the month after that, strawberries
And small, rosy crawfish from the Spree.
The piles of stalks of the asparagus
Are startlingly phallic, phallic and tender
And deathly pale. Their seasonal appearance
Must be the remnant of some fertility ritual
Of the German tribes. Steamed, they are the color
Of old ivory. In May, in restaurants
They are served on heaped white platters
With boiled potatoes and parsley butter,
Or shavings of Parma ham and lemon juice
Or sorrel and smoked salmon. And,
Walking home in the slant, widening,
Brilliant northern light that falls
On the new-leaved birches and the elms,
Nightingales singing at the first, subtlest,
Darkening of dusk, it is a trick of the mind
That the past seems just ahead of us,
As if we were being shunted there
In the surge of a rattling funicular.
Flash forward: the firebombing of Hamburg,
Fifty thousand dead in a single night,
"The children's bodies the next day
Set in the street in rows like a market
In charred chicken." Flash forward:
Firebombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand
In a night. Flash forward: forty-five
Thousand Polish officers slaughtered
By the Russian Army in the Katyn Woods.
The work of half a day. Flash forward:
Two million Russian prisoners of war
Murdered by the German army all across
The eastern front, supplies low,
Winter of 1943. Flash: Hiroshima.
And then Nagasaki, as if the sentence
Life is fire and flesh is ash needed
To be spoken twice. Flash: Auschwitz,
Dachau, Therienstadt, the train lurching,
The stomach woozy, past displays of falls
Of hair, piles of valises, spectacles
With frames designed to curl delicately
Around a human ear. Flash;
The gulags, seven million in Byelorussia
And Ukraine. In innocent Europe on a night
In spring, among the light-struck birches,
Students holding hands. One of them
Is carrying a novel, the German translation
Of a slim book by Marguerite Duras
About a love affair in old Saigon. (Flash:
Two million Vietnamese, fifty five thousand
Of the American young, whole races
Of tropical birds extinct from saturation bombing)
The kind of book the young love
To love, about love in time of war.
Forty five million, all told, in World War II.
In Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring time,
You are never not wondering how
It happened, and the people around you
In the station with chestnut petals on their shoes.
Children then, or unborn, never not
Wondering. Is it that we like the kissing
And bombing together, in prospect
At least, girls in their flowery dresses?
Someone will always want to mobilize
Death on a massive scale for economic
Domination or revenge. And the task, taken
As a task, appeals to the imagination.
The military is an engineering profession.
Look at boys playing: they love
To figure out the ways to blow things up.
But the rest of us have to go along.
Why do we do it? Certainly there's a rage
To injure what's injured us. Wars
Are always pitched to us that way.
The well-paid news readers read the reasons
On the air. And we who are injured,
Or have been convinced that we are injured,
Are always identified with virtue. It's that--
The rage to hurt mixed with self-righteousness
And fear--that's murderous.
The young Arab depilated himself
As an act of purification before he drove
The plane into the office building. It's not
Just violence, it's a taste for power
That amounts to loathing for the body.
Perhaps it's this that permits people to believe
That the dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the glimpse afforded them before they died
Of the raw white of the splintered bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of their injured killers.
It's hard to say which is worse about this,
The moral sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.
And what good are our judgments to the dead?
And death the cleanser, Walt Whitman's
Sweet death, the scourer, the tender
Lover, shutter of eyelids, turns
The heaped bodies into summer fruit,
Magpies eating dark berries in the dusk
And birch pollen staining sidewalks
To the faintest gold. Bald nur--Goethe--no,
Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch. Just wait.
You will be quiet soon enough. In Dahlem,
Under the chestnuts, in the leafy spring.


----------



## Sirena (Nov 1, 2015)

One for the dark Autumn season from William Shakespeare....

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 6, 2015)

8 a.m.

I am cycling, in a sensible, bright coat.
A girl comes pedalling quickly by, looose shawls
skidding from shoulders, hitched skirts, silver pumps.
I was that girl.  O may she ride her falls.

Alison Brackenbury


----------



## 8115 (Nov 17, 2015)

*Peace Poem*

Oliver Bernard


waking at five or so to white

sky and various bird beginnings

from exhausting dreams of past

emotional encounters I can

rest at last in a small room

lying still considering

whether to go back to sleep

seeing the sky go colours of

sunrise I begin to wonder

how the tree looks and the wall

downstairs in the shadow of

the houses sleepers lie asleep

in Kenninghall in Diss in Mellis

bliss behind the children's eyelids

all alone in morning silence

what is peace if it is not

loving indiscriminately

others? Watching over all

human sleep and knowing there's

no need and every need to do so?

what is peace but watching while

being loved and cared for by

the very clouds and trees

and grass

nourishing earth and candid sky

breakneck rivers rising tides?

newspapers at seven o'clock

are laying on the day the grey

word of war and world of worry

all I want's a weather forecast

promising there'll be more weather


----------



## killer b (Nov 25, 2015)

'The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered'
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.


The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.


Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper 
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".


Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets! 
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.


Clive James


----------



## Sirena (Nov 25, 2015)

Girls and boys, come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day;
Leave your supper and leave your sleep
And join your playfellows into the street.
Come with a whoop, come with a call,
Come with a good will or not at all.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A halfpenny roll will serve us all.
You find milk, and I'll find flour,
And we'll have a pudding in half an hour.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 6, 2015)

The Rum Tum Tugger - T S Elliot

The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat:
If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse.
If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,
If you put him in a flat then he'd rather have a house.
If you set him on a mouse then he only wants a rat,
If you set him on a rat then he'd rather chase a mouse.
Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat--
	And there isn't any call for me to shout it:
		   For he will do
	As he do do
	   And there's no doing anything about it!

The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore:
When you let him in, then he wants to be out;
He's always on the wrong side of every door,
And as soon as he's at home, then he'd like to get about.
He likes to lie in the bureau drawer,
But he makes such a fuss if he can't get out.

Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat--
	And there isn't any use for you to doubt it:
		   For he will do
	As he do do
	   And there's no doing anything about it!

The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious beast:
His disobliging ways are a matter of habit.
If you offer him fish then he always wants a feast;
When there isn't any fish then he won't eat rabbit.
If you offer him cream then he sniffs and sneers,
For he only likes what he finds for himself;

So you'll catch him in it right up to the ears,
If you put it away on the larder shelf.
The Rum Tum Tugger is artful and knowing,
The Rum Tum Tugger doesn't care for a cuddle;
But he'll leap on your lap in the middle of your sewing,
For there's nothing he enjoys like a horrible muddle.
Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat--
	And there isn't any need for me to spout it:
		   For he will do
	As he do do
	   And theres no doing anything about it!


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 10, 2015)

Well. I have found another new favourite poem 

*Toward the Solstice*

*by Adrienne Rich*

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
all the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
on this old slanting roof,
the slanted field below
thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
stand nakedly in the green,
stand sullenly in the slowly whitening field.

My brain glows
more violently, more avidly
the quieter, the thicker
the quilt of crystals settles,
the louder, more relentlessly
the torrent beats itself out
on the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
the thirtieth of November,
a beginning or an end,
we are moving into the solstice
and there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
my life is still tangled
with dead weeds, thistles,
enormous burdocks, burdens
slowly shifting under
this first fall of snow,
beaten by this early, racking rain
calling all new life to declare itself strong
or die,

if I could know
in what language to address
the spirits that claim a place
beneath these low and simple ceilings,
tenants that neither speak nor stir
yet dwell in mute insistence
till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.

If history is a spider-thread
spun over and over though brushed away
it seems I might some twilight
or dawn in the hushed country light
discern its grayness stretching
from molding or doorframe, out
into the empty dooryard
and following it climb
the path into the pinewoods,
tracing from tree to tree
in the failing light, in the slowly
lucidifying day
its constant, purposive trail,
til I reach whatever cellar hole
filling with snowflakes or lichen,
whatever fallen shack
or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
and there, under the first or last
star, trusting to instinct
the words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
year after year, winter
after summer, the right rune
to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past.

If some rite of separation
is still unaccomplished
between myself and the long-gone
tenants of this house,
between myself and my childhood,
and the childhood of my children,
it is I who have neglected
to perform the needed acts,
set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
in front of mirrors,
or merely pause and listen
to my own pulse vibrating
lightly as falling snow,
relentlessly as the rainstorm,
and hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture,
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself.

A decade of cutting away
dead flesh, cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers,
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

(1977)


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 7, 2016)

the lion-eating poet in the stone den


Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


----------



## Greebo (Jan 20, 2016)

To Hope

WHEN by my solitary hearth I sit,   
When no fair dreams before my “mind’s eye” flit,   
  And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;   
	Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,   
	And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head.			

Whene’er I wander, at the fall of night,   
  Where woven boughs shut out the moon’s bright ray,   
Should sad Despondency my musings fright,   
  And frown, to drive fair Cheerfulness away,   
	Peep with the moon-beams through the leafy roof,			
	And keep that fiend Despondence far aloof.   

Should Disappointment, parent of Despair,   
  Strive for her son to seize my careless heart;   
When, like a cloud, he sits upon the air,   
  Preparing on his spell-bound prey to dart:			
	Chase him away, sweet Hope, with visage bright,   
	And fright him as the morning frightens night!   

Whene’er the fate of those I hold most dear   
  Tells to my fearful breast a tale of sorrow,   
O bright-eyed Hope, my morbid fancy cheer;		   
  Let me awhile thy sweetest comforts borrow:   
	Thy heaven-born radiance around me shed,   
	And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head!   

Should e’er unhappy love my bosom pain,   
  From cruel parents, or relentless fair;			
O let me think it is not quite in vain   
  To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air!   
	Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,   
	And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head!   

In the long vista of the years to roll,			
  Let me not see our country’s honour fade:   
O let me see our land retain her soul,   
  Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom’s shade.   
	From thy bright eyes unusual brightness shed—   
	Beneath thy pinions canopy my head!			

Let me not see the patriot’s high bequest,   
  Great Liberty! how great in plain attire!   
With the base purple of a court oppress’d,   
  Bowing her head, and ready to expire:   
	But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings			
	That fill the skies with silver glitterings!   

And as, in sparkling majesty, a star   
  Gilds the bright summit of some gloomy cloud;   
Brightening the half veil’d face of heaven afar:   
  So, when dark thoughts my boding spirit shroud,			
	Sweet Hope, celestial influence round me shed,   
	Waving thy silver pinions o’er my head.

John Keats


----------



## Greebo (Jan 24, 2016)

Bagpipe Music

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o’Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife ‘Take it away; I’m through with
over-production’.

It’s no go the gossip column, it’s no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother’s help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,
It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

 Louis MacNeice


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## Santino (Jan 25, 2016)

*Five Hundred Mile*

When I awauken from my rest
I ken ye’ll be there at my breast
When I fare abroad, I ken that thee
Will fare abroad along wi’ me.
When rairin fou and in my cups
I ken ye’ll match me, sup for sup
And if I haver, and speak no matter,
It’s to ye, I’ll gab and yatter.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m sweitin wi’ ma trauchle,
It’s for thee that I strauchle.
And when I ha’ my penny-fee,
Near every penny goes to thee.
When hame-throu my journey tak me
If ye be there, then hame’ll dae me.
And if I come an eildit man,
I ken we’ll grow auld, hand in hand.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.

When I’m on ma lane and lanesome,
It’s for want of ye I’m waesome.
When in ma bed I lie a-sleeping,
It’s days with ye that fill ma dreaming.

For anely to proclaim my luve,
Five hundred mile I’d gae.
And to foonder at your door,
I’d walk five hundred mae.


----------



## YouSir (Jan 25, 2016)

Treading through technicolour
with monochrome feet
bringing dull grey-tone with each step
as if all vivid shades
were an infection
killed by unintended antibodies
purging the sickness of vision
before the choice is made
to live it or not

Eventually birthing paralysis
as the only kind reaction
to this blinding arrangement

Judged by a higher voice
a Super Ego
unwilling to let the Id eyes open
but damning of ego’s claim to dull hues

And in the distance You
scouring all in a victimless war
of colours
acidic
striking
raw
and infinite

Fought for a goal set out of our reach
set against capacity
and beyond even love

A liberation from self-inflicted darkness
made impossible by now rooted feet
a perfect mockery
that though all voices desire
none can step towards
because the granite and the charcoal path
has killed too much already
for the murder of more spectral lights
to be a price worth paying


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## Greebo (Jan 25, 2016)

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop


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## Sirena (Feb 1, 2016)

A lyric for this very evening.....

CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE I
by Robert Herrick
 DOWN with the Rosemary and Bays,
 Down with the Misletoe ;
 Instead of Holly, now up-raise
 The greener Box (for show).

 The Holly hitherto did sway ;
 Let Box now domineer
 Until the dancing Easter day,
 Or Easter's eve appear.

 Then youthful Box which now hath grace
 Your houses to renew ;
 Grown old, surrender must his place
 Unto the crisped Yew.

 When Yew is out, then Birch comes in,
 And many flowers beside ;
 Both of a fresh and fragrant kin
 To honour Whitsuntide.

 Green rushes, then, and sweetest bents,
 With cooler oaken boughs,
 Come in for comely ornaments
 To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift ; each thing his turn does hold ;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

CEREMONY FOR CANDLEMAS EVE II
Down with the Rosemary, and so
Down with the Bays and Misletoe ;
Down with the Holly, Ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall :
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind :
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.


----------



## Sirena (Feb 16, 2016)

It was somewhere in September and the sun was going down, 
When I came in search of copy to a Darling-River town:
‘Come-and -Have -a-Drink’ we’ll call it, ’tis a fitting name, I think
And ’twas raining, for a wonder, up at Come-and-Have-a-Drink.

'Neath the public-house verandah, I was resting on a bunk
When a stranger rose before me and he said that he was drunk;
He apologised for speaking; there was no offence, he swore;
But he somehow seemed to fancy that he’d seen my face before.

‘No erfence,’ he said. I told him that he needn’t mention it,
For I might have met him somewhere: I had travelled round a bit,
And I knew a lot of fellows in the Bush and in the streets
But a fellow can’t remember all the fellows that he meets.

Very old and thin and dirty were the garments that he wore,
Just a shirt and pair of trousers, and a boot, and nothing more;
He was wringing-wet and, really, in a sad and sinful plight,
And his hat was in his left hand, and a bottle in his right.

His brow was broad and roomy, but its lines were somewhat harsh,
And a sensual mouth was hidden by a drooping, fair moustache;
(His hairy chest was open to what poets called the “wined”,
And I would have bet a thousand that his pants were gone behind).

He agreed: “Yer can’t remember all the chaps yer chance to meet,”
And he said his name was Sweeney — people lived in Sussex-street.
He was campin’ in a stable, but he swore that he was right,
“Only for the blanky horses walkin’ over him all night.”

He’d apparently been fighting, for his face was black-and-blue,
And he looked as though the horses had been treading on him, too;
But an honest, genial twinkle in the eye that wasn’t hurt
Seemed to hint of something better, spite of drink and rags and dirt.

It appeared that he mistook me for a long-lost mate of his 
One of whom I was the image, both in figure and in phiz 
(He’d have had a letter from him if the chap were living still,
For they’d carried swags together from the Gulf to Broken Hill).

Sweeney yarned awhile, and hinted that his folks were doing well,
And he told me that his father kept the Southern Cross Hotel:
And I wondered if his absence was regarded as a loss
When he left the elder Sweeney landlord of the Southern Cross.

He was born in Parramatta, and he said, with humour grim,
That he’d like to see the city ere the liquor finished him,
But he couldn’t raise the money. He was damned if he could think
What the Government was doing. Here he offered me a drink.

I declined, ’twas self-denial and I lectured him on booze,
Using all the hackneyed arguments that preachers mostly use;
Things I’d heard in temperance lectures (I was young and rather green),
And I ended by referring to the man he might have been.

Then a wise expression struggled with the bruises on his face,
Though his argument had scarcely any bearing on the case:
“What’s the good o’ keepin’ sober?  Fellers rise and fellers fall;
What I might have been and wasn’t doesn’t trouble me at all.”

But he couldn’t stay to argue, for his beer was nearly gone.
He was glad, he said, to meet me, and he’d see me later on,
But he guessed he’d have to go and get his bottle filled again:
And he gave a lurch and vanished in the darkness and the rain.

And of afternoons in cities, when the rain is on the land,
Visions come to me of Sweeney with his bottle in his hand,
With the stormy night behind him, and the pub veranda-post 
And I wonder why he haunts me more than any other ghost.

Still I see the shearers drinking at the township in the scrub,
And the Army praying nightly at the door of every pub,
And the girls who flirt and giggle with the bushmen from the West 
But the memory of Sweeney overshadows all the rest.

Well, perhaps it isn’t funny; there were links between us two 
He had memories of cities, he had been a jackeroo;
And, perhaps, his face forewarned me of a face that I might see
From a bitter cup reflected in the wretched days to be.

I suppose he’s tramping somewhere where the bushmen carry swags,
Cadging round the wretched stations with his empty tucker-bags
And I fancy that of evenings, when the track is growing dim,
What he ‘might have been and wasn’t’ comes along and troubles him.

Henry Parsons


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## Greebo (Feb 29, 2016)

February 29

An extra day—

Like the painting’s fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day—

Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.

An extra day—

With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much—
just one day’s worth, exactly.

An extra day—

Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

Jane Hirshfield


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## butchersapron (Mar 4, 2016)

The Temeraire

The gloomy hulls, in armor grim,
  Like clouds o'er moors have met,
And prove that oak, and iron, and man
  Are tough in fibre yet.

But Splendors wane. The sea-fight yields
  No front of old display;
The garniture, emblazonment,
  And heraldry all decay.

Towering afar in parting light,
  The fleets like Albion's forelands shine--
The full-sailed fleets, the shrouded show
  Of Ships-of-the-Line.

The fighting Temeraire,
  Built of a thousand trees,
Lunging out her lightnings,
  And beetling o'er the seas--
O Ship, how brave and fair,
  That fought so oft and well,
On open decks you manned the gun
	Armorial.
What cheering did you share,
  Impulsive in the van,
When down upon leagued France and Spain
  We English ran--
The freshet at your bowsprit
  Like the foam upon the can.
Bickering, your colors
  Licked up the Spanish air,
You flapped with flames of battle-flags--
  Your challenge, Temeraire!
The rear ones of our fleet
  They yearned to share your place,
Still vying with the Victory
  Throughout that earnest race--
The Victory, whose Admiral,
  With orders nobly won,
Shone in the globe of the battle glow--
  The angel in that sun.
Parallel in story,
  Lo, the stately pair,
As late in grapple ranging,
  The foe between them there--
When four great hulls lay tiered,
  And the fiery tempest cleared,
And your prizes twain appeared,
	Temeraire!

But Trafalgar' is over now,
  The quarter-deck undone;
The carved and castled navies fire
  Their evening-gun.
O, Tital Temeraire,
  Your stern-lights fade away;
Your bulwarks to the years must yield,
  And heart-of-oak decay.
A pigmy steam-tug tows you,
  Gigantic, to the shore--
Dismantled of your guns and spars,
  And sweeping wings of war.
The rivets clinch the iron-clads,
  Men learn a deadlier lore;
But Fame has nailed your battle-flags--
  Your ghost it sails before:
O, the navies old and oaken,
  O, the Temeraire no more!

Melville


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## Greebo (Mar 21, 2016)

Original extended poem from "When a good man goes to war"

Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun when a good man goes to war
Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and the dark will rise when a good man goes to war
Demons run but count the cost
The battle’s won but the child is lost
The fight goes on but what’s it for when a good man goes to war
Now rise the sun, now dawn the day
When good men run and women stay
When battle’s done and nothing’s won
It’s a woman’s work to say
Well then, soldier, how goes the day?

Steven Moffat


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## Dillinger4 (Mar 22, 2016)

The wily shafts of state, those jugglers’ tricks,
Which we call deep designs and politics,
(As in a theatre the ignorant fry,
Because the cords escape their eye,
Wonder to see the motions fly) (…)
Methinks, when you expose the scene,
Down the ill-organ’d engines fall;
Off fly the vizards, and discover all:
How plain I see through the deceit!
How shallow, and how gross, the cheat!
Look where the pulley’s tied above! (…)
On what poor engines move
The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
What petty motives rule their fates! (…)
Away the frighten'd peasants fly,
Scared at the unheard-of prodigy (…)
Lo! it appears!
See how they tremble! how they quake!

Swift, “Ode to the Honorable Sir William Temple,” 1689


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## Pickman's model (Mar 31, 2016)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 11, 2016)

Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around" [excerpt] by Rumi

Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.

That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don't look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it's carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don't call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.

Don't always be waiting to see
what's behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.

Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.


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## Sirena (May 17, 2016)

'Spirits' by Birago Diop (translated)

"Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.

Listen to things
More often than beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sighing:
This is the breathing of ancestors,
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in a woman’s breast,
In the wailing of a child,
And the burning of a log,
In the moaning rock,
In the weeping grasses,
In the forest and the home.
The dead are not dead.

Listen more often
To Things than to Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to
The bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors breathing.

Each day they renew ancient bonds,
Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law,
To the will of the spirits stronger than we
To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,
Whose covenant binds us to life,
Whose authority binds to their will,
The will of the spirits that stir
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,
The breathing of spirits
Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.

Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:
Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing."


----------



## Greebo (Jun 18, 2016)

A Fixed Idea

What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant; and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

Amy Lowell


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## Greebo (Jun 29, 2016)

Grief’s Weird Sister, Gratitude

How to read a tome of Collected Poems?
Read one that pivotally changes you
and lose track of the page and title.
How to clean a house? Lose your ring in it.

Milosz not having to make peace one day
because the people are dead, nor revisit
some cities of his blood, because they are
razed. I’m still reading for that one.

If I wince that I got cuppy, said too much,
maybe years ago, sometimes the sudden
knowledge that my auditor is no longer
will come in as wistful relief, if with grief.

So I’d like to find it. This “how” isn’t
an engineering question, but angle,
here alchemically
translated to hope by way of loss.

Jennifer Michael Hecht


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2016)

*Duffa Rex*

 I

King of the primeval avenues, the municipal parklands:  architect of the Tulse Hill Poetry Group:  life and soul of the perennial carousals:  minstrel:  philatelist:  long-serving clerical officer:  the friend of everyone who's anyone.
'Pack it in,' said Duffa, 'and buy me a drink.'

 II

He digs for the salt-screw, buried in crepitant spud-slivers. Speaks of his boyhood in the gruntler's yarg, the unworked cork-bundles, coagulations of nurls.
The mockery of his companions is unabated. It is the king's round, they urge. His hoard is overripe for commerce.
One by one he draws coins to the light;  examines them:  exemplary silver, his rune stones. Treasure accrued in a sparse week, to be invested in precious liquid.


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## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2016)

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


S. Sassoon


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## Greebo (Jul 11, 2016)

Experience

This morning I looked at the map of the day
And said to myself, “This is the way! This is the way I will go;
Thus shall I range on the roads of achievement,
The way is so clear—it shall all be a joy on the lines marked out.”
And then as I went came a place that was strange,—
’Twas a place not down on the map!
And I stumbled and fell and lay in the weeds,
And looked on the day with rue.

I am learning a little—never to be sure—
To be positive only with what is past,
And to peer sometimes at the things to come
As a wanderer treading the night
When the mazy stars neither point nor beckon,
And of all the roads, no road is sure.

I see those men with maps and talk
Who tell how to go and where and why;
I hear with my ears the words of their mouths,
As they finger with ease the marks on the maps;
And only as one looks robust, lonely, and querulous,
As if he had gone to a country far
And made for himself a map,
Do I cry to him, “I would see your map!
I would heed that map you have!”

Carl Sandburg


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## Greebo (Jul 23, 2016)

Between the Dragon and the Phoenix

Fire in the heart, fire in the sky, the sun just
a smallish smudge resting on the horizon
out beyond the reef that breaks the waves,

fiery sun that waits for no one. I was little more
than a child when my father explained
that the mongrel is stronger than the thoroughbred,

that I was splendidly blended, genetically engineered
for survival. I somehow forgot this, misplaced this,
time eroding my memory as it erodes everything.

But go ask someone else to write a poem about Time.
Out over the bay, the sun is rising, and I am running
out of time. Each and every year, on my birthday,

I wake to watch the sunrise. I am superstitious.
And today, as in years past, it is not my father
but my father’s father who comes to shout at me:

Whether you like it or not, you are a child of fire. You
descend from the Dragon, descend from the Phoenix.
Your blood is older than England, older than Castille.

Year after year, he says the same thing, this old man
dead long before I was born. So, I wake each year
on the day of my birth to watch the fire enter the sky

while being chastised by my dead grandfather.
Despite being a creature of fire, I stay near the water.
Why even try to avoid what can extinguish me?

There are times I can feel the fire flickering inside my frame.
The gulls are quarreling, the palm trees shimmering—
the world keeps spinning on its axis. Some say I have

nine lives. Others think me a machine. Neither is true.
The truth is rarely so conventional. Fire in my heart, fire
in my veins, I write this down for you and watch

as it goes up in flames. There are no paragraphs
wide enough to contain this fire, no stanzas
durable enough to house it. Blood of the Dragon,

blood of the Phoenix, I turn my head slowly
toward the East. I bow and call for another year.
I stand there and demand one more year.

C. Dale Young


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## Greebo (Jul 31, 2016)

Crystal Palace Protest

Great ridge of the North Wood,
Guardian since time.
Repeller of invaders who threatened our lives;
Green hill of the people about to be wrecked
By those in the city, it used to protect.
Men in their towers
Of steel, glass and concrete
Who expanded their kingdom to the foot of this hill.
Now look to this bastion of ancient green space
And see only profit.......
So wildlife is killed. 
The springs of this hilltop that nourished our gardens
Now capped off by councils who presume to prescribe
A high growth economy of multiplex boxes
Where flora and fauna can no longer survive.
The smog of this city creeps higher and higher
Lucidious canker of rich men's desires
To pave all our orchards and tarmac our fields
In search of profit on brown site cash deals.
Paxton once tried this in patriarch's style,
To build a great palace, the landmark for miles.
But nature, the leveller, looked down on her mound;
With north wind and fire, she took back her ground.
The debt to this hillside we all hold in trust
Defend the green spaces against profiteers lust.
For the future of England lies in our hands;
Tarmac and concrete or open green land.

Anon.


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## Pickman's model (Jul 31, 2016)

STELLA MARIS

Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo.
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay,
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell,
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 27, 2016)

loyalty is a strange coin
given freely
spent unwisely
spent but not earned
Not casually

Marker for trust and usage
Dogs and children breathe it
Untill they learn and it is then a coin.
To be earned warily and given carefully

only smarties have the answer.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 28, 2016)

Ode to Vger

where did you go?
In the black you were gone so long.
what did you see? Was it cold?
I called for you over and over.
Only static.
Where have you been?
What did you see?

Dancing twin stars? black hole accretions?
Where was the come home signal?
We waited for you

You saw it all didn't you?
and you can never tell


----------



## angusmcfangus (Aug 28, 2016)

jms said:


> This Is Just To Say
> William Carlos Willaims (1883-1963)
> 
> I have eaten
> ...



Jist ti Let Yi No

(from the American of Carlos Williams)

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

Tom Leonard

Thought this version maybe more meaningful to fellow urbanites.


----------



## Greebo (Sep 25, 2016)

Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

UA Fanthorpe


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 29, 2016)

Rich in Vitamin C by JH Prynne

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
	  delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
		  past loose glass in the door
	  into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
	  darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
	  the baltic loved one who sleeps.

Or as syrup in a cloud, down below in
	  the cup, you excuse each folded
cry of the finch's wit, this flush
	  scattered over our slant of the
		  day rocked in water, you say
	  this much. A waver of attention at
the surface, shews the arch there and
		  the purpose we really cut;
	  an ounce down by the water, which

in cross-fire from injustice too large
	  to hold he lets slither
											from starry fingers
	  noting the herbal jolt of cordite
and its echo: is this our screen, on some
	  street we hardly guessed could mark
an idea bred to idiocy by the clear
	  sight-lines ahead. You come in
		  by the same door, you carry

what cannot be left for its own
	  sweet shimmer of reason, its false blood;
the same tint I hear with the pulse it touches
	  and will not melt. Such shading
of the rose to its stock tips the bolt
	  from the sky, rising in its effect of what
motto we call peace talks. And yes the
	  quiet turn of your page is the day
		  tilting so, faded in the light.

Jacket # 6 - J.H. Prynne - poem - Rich in Vitamin C - with a commentary by John Kinsella



> "Rich in Vitamin C" shows how every human interaction, personal reflection, and meditation on time and place involves others, and effects, and is influenced by, macro and micro changes in the social, economic, and political climate. Above and beyond all else, Prynne's concerns are moral and ethical - he believes even that in the intimacy of the lyric moment, we have an obligation to recognise what is happening in the greater world.


----------



## Sirena (Oct 4, 2016)

Alan Bennett reads the Shipping Forecast, Today - BBC Radio 4


----------



## Greebo (Oct 5, 2016)

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) 
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, 
And saw, within the moonlight in his room, 
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, 
An angel writing in a book of gold: 
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, 
And to the presence in the room he said, 
"What writest thou?"The vision raised its head, 
And with a look made of all sweet accord, 
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." 
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so," 
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, 
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then, 
Write me as one that loves his fellow men." 

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night 
It came again with a great wakening light, 
And showed the names whom love of God had blest, 
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. 

Leigh Hunt


----------



## bluescreen (Oct 6, 2016)

*Among Children
	

	
	
		
		

		
			



*
Philip Levine

I walk among the rows of bowed heads -
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to widows of the suburbs. You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, _Ha! Ha!_
How dear the gift of laugher in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed. Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There is such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
closed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women from Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 3, 2016)

from robert browning's 'pippa passes'

But at night, brother Howlet, far over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!


----------



## mod (Nov 3, 2016)

I am London by Cliff Britten


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 3, 2016)

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
*Related Poem Content Details*
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Five years have past; five summers, with the length 
Of five long winters! and again I hear 
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs 
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again 
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 
That on a wild secluded scene impress 
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect 
The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 
The day is come when I again repose 
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, 
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, 
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see 
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines 
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, 
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke 
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! 
With some uncertain notice, as might seem 
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire 
The Hermit sits alone. 
											  These beauteous forms, 
Through a long absence, have not been to me 
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: 
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; 
And passing even into my purer mind 
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too 
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, 
As have no slight or trivial influence 
On that best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts 
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, 
To them I may have owed another gift, 
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on,— 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul: 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things. 
														If this 
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— 
In darkness and amid the many shapes 
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— 
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, 
		 How often has my spirit turned to thee! 
   And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, 
With many recognitions dim and faint, 
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 
The picture of the mind revives again: 
While here I stand, not only with the sense 
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts 
That in this moment there is life and food 
For future years. And so I dare to hope, 
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first 
I came among these hills; when like a roe 
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 
Wherever nature led: more like a man 
Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then 
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days 
And their glad animal movements all gone by) 
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite; a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, not any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, 
And all its aching joys are now no more, 
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts 
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, 
Abundant recompense. For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 
The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods 
And mountains; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth; of all the mighty world 
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, 
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise 
In nature and the language of the sense 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 
											Nor perchance, 
If I were not thus taught, should I the more 
Suffer my genial spirits to decay: 
For thou art with me here upon the banks 
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, 
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch 
The language of my former heart, and read 
My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while 
May I behold in thee what I was once, 
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, 
Knowing that Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy: for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon 
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; 
And let the misty mountain-winds be free 
To blow against thee: and, in after years, 
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured 
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind 
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, 
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts 
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, 
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance— 
If I should be where I no more can hear 
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams 
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget 
That on the banks of this delightful stream 
We stood together; and that I, so long 
A worshipper of Nature, hither came 
Unwearied in that service: rather say 
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal 
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, 
That after many wanderings, many years 
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, 
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me 
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!


----------



## mod (Nov 4, 2016)

Mad Man by Cliff Britten


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 4, 2016)

The One Black Stain
Robert E Howard

They carried him out on the barren sand
where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand
as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land
wail to the lonely tide.

Drake faced them all like a lion at bay,
with his lion head upflung:
"Dare ye my word of law defy,
to say this traitor shall not die?"
And his captains dared not meet his eye
but each man held his tongue.

Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of sober face:
"Worthy of death he may well be,
but the trial ye held was mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where justice hid her face.

"More of the man had ye been, on deck
your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of the law."

Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake.
"Puritan knave!" swore he.
"Headsman! Give him the axe instead!
He shall strike off yon traitor's head!"
Solomon folded his arms and said,
darkly and somberly:

"I am no slave for your butcher's work."
"Bind him with triple strands!"
Drake roared and the men obeyed,
Hesitantly, as if afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade
and pinioned his iron hands.

They bent the doomed man over to his knees,
the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend,
one last long look they saw him send,
At Drake his judge and his one time friend
who dared not meet his eye.

The axe flashed silver in the sun,
a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear,
and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near
above the lonely strand.

"This be every traitor's end!"
Drake cried, and yet again.
Slowly his captains turned and went
and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent
in the eyes of Solomon Kane.

Night fell on the crawling waves;
the admiral's door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold;
his irons clashed as the ship rolled.
And his guard, grown weary and overbold,
lay down his pipe and dozed.

He woke with a hand at his corded throat
that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key,
and the somber Puritan stood free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously
with the wrath that is slow to rise.

Unseen, to the admiral's door,
went Solomon Kane from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship,
the guard's keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip
through the door unbarred.

Drake at the table sat alone,
his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping --
but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping,
death's swiftly flowing sands.

He reached no hand for gun or blade
to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see,
lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery,
and bitter, cankering pain.

A moment Solomon Kane stood there,
the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird,
and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred
And Kane went forth without a word
and closed the cabin door.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 7, 2016)

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


----------



## bluescreen (Nov 7, 2016)

Auden, thou shouldst be living at this hour


----------



## Idris2002 (Nov 7, 2016)

*When It's a First Love*
When it's a first love, it burns the heart
And a second love, it clings to the first one,
Well, and the third love - the key trembles in the lock,
The key trembles in the lock, the suitcase in the hand.

When it's a first war, it's no one's fault,
And a second war is somebody's fault,
And when it's a third war it's only my fault
And my fault it's seen by all.

When it's a first deception it's like misty dawn,
And the second deception sways drunk,
And when it's a third deception it's darker than night,
It's darker than night, it's more horrible than war.

Boulat Okoudjava


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 11, 2016)

_*ANY SYSTEM*_
*by Leonard Cohen*

Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down
We warned you before
and nothing that you built has stood
Hear it as you lean over your blueprint
Hear it as you roll up your sleeve
Hear it once again
Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down

You have your drugs
You have your guns
You have your Pyramids your Pentagons
With all your grass and bullets
you cannot hunt us any more
All that we disclose of ourselves forever
is this warning
Nothing that you built has stood
Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Nov 11, 2016)

Fuck the rules

This is for Greebo

_Late fragment - _Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 26, 2016)

Ancient History by Jamit McKendrick

The year began with baleful auguries:
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires, 
the waves lethargic under a coat of pitch 
the length of the coastline. And a cow spoke, 
which happened last year too, although last year 
no one believed cows spoke. Worse was to come. 
There was a bloody rain of lumps of meat 
which flocks of gulls snatched in mid-air 
while what they missed fell to the ground 
where it lay for days without festering. 
Then a wind tore up a forest of holm-oaks 
and jackdaws pecked the eyes from sheep. 
Officials construing the Sibylline Books 
told of helmeted aliens occupying 
the cross-roads, and high places of the city. 
Blood might be shed. Avoid, they warned, 
factions and in-fights. The tribunes claimed 
this was the usual con-trick 
trumped up to stonewall the new law 
about to be passed. Violence was only curbed 
by belief in a rumour that the tribes 
to the east had joined forces and forged 
weapons deadlier than the world has seen 
and that even then the hooves of their scouts 
had been heard in the southern hills. 
The year ended fraught with the fear of war. 
Next year began with baleful auguries


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 26, 2016)

John Milton. 1608–1674

*On His Blindness*

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Nov 27, 2016)




----------



## butchersapron (Dec 9, 2016)

Mean to post something on tuesday in memory of this (and no, i've not read 100 years of solitude):

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont


Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones 
	   Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold, 
	   Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
	   When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones; 
Forget not: in thy book record their groans 
	   Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold 
	   Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd 
	   Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 
The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they 
	   To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow 
	   O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway 
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow 
	   A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way 
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.


John Milton


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 9, 2016)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 13, 2016)

But ’tis strange.
   And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
   The instruments of darkness tell us truths…


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Dec 27, 2016)

"Late Lament"

Breathe deep the gathering gloom,
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bedsitter people look back and lament,
Another day's useless energy spent.

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son,
Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 27, 2016)

I have not in fact been alone:
there have always been strangers
some in scattered parts of this land
or in countries unvisited

others though the great chain
of the centuries
who without ever meeting
it is possible to trust

in the truth of _yin_
that is always gentle
_like water flowing_
_to the lowest places																	   Tao Te Ching viii_

the Tao where _the soft and gentle _
_overcome the hard and strong												  _
because _truth being that which is_
_can never be destroyed													  _

and reminds us that America
the land of nonviolence violence
snake handlers peace workers baseball movies
sweat lodges genealogists and stock car races

is undefinable
from the jazz of Ledbelly
and concerts of the Grateful Dead
to the Wiffenpoof song

from Whitman’s hopes for the unwritten
to the _New Yorker_ poets
with a toad in their lawn mower
or snake in their burning brush pile

the land which Reiko aged eighteen
refused to leave
when her parents returned
to tradition-bound Japan.

Uncertain as always
whether this republic is past saving
or whether some of us still tread
the perilous path of the future

part of me just meditates
on the new and more flourishing wildlife
that is improving Point Reyes
ten years after the Mount Vision fire.				

From the glories of the Tang Dynasty
I recall only one date: the year
the usurper An Lushan
drove both Wang Wei and Du Fu

far from the corrupt court
into the mountains
where for the first time they were free
to write the only poems we remember


----------



## Sirena (Jan 6, 2017)




----------



## butchersapron (Jan 10, 2017)

1869 -- England:   "Extraordinary meteor" seen in the sky, Weston-super-Mare, near Bristol; five hours later three shocks felt said to have been earthquakes [Chudleigh Weekly Express] Source: Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned.

Year of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the
scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand--silent I stood, with teeth shut close--I watch'd;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but
trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds, you mounted the
scaffold
--I would sing in my copious song your census returns of The States,
The tables of population and products--I would sing of your ships and
their cargoes,
The proud black ships of Manhattan, arriving, some fill'd with
immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold;
Songs thereof would I sing--to all that hitherward comes would I
welcome give; 10
And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, sweet
boy of England!
Remember you surging Manhattan's crowds, as you pass'd with your
cortege of nobles?
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;
I know not why, but I loved you... (and so go forth little song,
Far over sea speed like an arrow, carrying my love all folded,
And find in his palace the youth I love, and drop these lines at his
feet
--Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600
feet long,
Her, moving swiftly, surrounded by myriads of small craft, I forget
not to sing;
--Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in
heaven; 20
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting
over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over
our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone
--Of such, and fitful as they, I sing--with gleams from them would I
gleam and patch these chants;
Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good! year of
forebodings! year of the youth I love!
Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!--lo! even here, one
equally transient and strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this
book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?

Walt Whitman. 1859

It was John Brown on the scaffold btw. History's Greatest Meteor.​


----------



## Santino (Jan 11, 2017)

Dillinger4 said:


> I have not in fact been alone:
> there have always been strangers
> some in scattered parts of this land
> or in countries unvisited
> ...


What is this?


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2017)

Santino said:


> What is this?


from 'the tao of 9/11'
Jacket 34 - October 2007 - Peter Dale Scott: Five poems


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 26, 2017)




----------



## chainsawjob (Feb 16, 2017)

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion 
by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, 
and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, 
is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 
has been fashioned of the clay 
which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Kahlil Gibran


----------



## stockwelljonny (Mar 18, 2017)

*Hinterhof*
by James Fenton

Stay near to me and I'll stay near to you —
As near as you are dear to me will do,
	Near as the rainbow to the rain,
	The west wind to the windowpane,
As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew.

Stay true to me and I'll stay true to you —
As true as you are new to me will do,
	New as the rainbow in the spray,
	Utterly new in every way,
New in the way that what you say is true.

Stay near to me, stay true to me. I'll stay
As near, as true to you as heart could pray.
	Heart never hoped that one might be
	Half of the things you are to me —
The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day


----------



## Sirena (Apr 1, 2017)

_*Sir Patrick Spens*_

The king sits in Dunfermline toune
drinking the blude reid wine,
"O whar can I get skeely skipper,
To sail this ship o' mine?"

Up and spak an eldern knicht,
Sat at the kings richt kne:
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That sails upon the se."

The king has written a braid letter,
And signed it wi his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.

To Noroway! to Noroway!
to Noroway oer the faem!
The king's daughter to Noroway
'Tis thou maun bring her hame.

The first line that Sir Patrick red,
A loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
A teir blinded his ee.

"O wha is this has don this deid,
This ill deid don to me,
To send me out this time o' yeir,
To sail upon the sea!

"Mak haste, mak haste, my mirry men,
Our guid ship sails the morne":
"O say na sae, my master deir,
I feir a deadlie storme.

"Yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi the auld moone in her arme,
And I feir, I feir, my master deir,
That we will cum to harme."

O loth, o loth,
The Scots lords were
To weet their cork-heild schoone;
Bot lang owre a' the play wer playd,
Thair hats they swam aboone.

O lang, lang may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the strand.

O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi thair gold kems in their hair,
Waiting for thair ain deir lords,
For they'll se thame na mair.

Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
Tis fiftie fathom deip,
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
The Scots lords at his feit.


----------



## Ceej (Apr 6, 2017)

Happy 98th Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who decades ago wrote:

“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”

― Lawrence Ferlinghetti


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 6, 2017)

A New Dream of Politics by Ben Okri

They say there is only one way for politics.
That it looks with hard eyes at the hard world
And shapes it with a ruler’s edge,
Measuring what is possible against
Acclaim, support, and votes.

They say there is only one way to dream
For the people, to give them not what they need
But food for their fears.
We measure the deeds of politicians
By their time in power.

But in ancient times they had another way.
They measured greatness by the gold
Of contentment, by the enduring arts,
The laughter at the hearths,
The length of silence when the bards
Told of what was done by those who
Had the courage to make their lands
Happy, away from war, spreading justice
And fostering health,
The most precious of the arts
Of governance.

But we live in times that have lost
This tough art of dreaming
The best for its people,
Or so we are told by cynics
And doomsayers who see the end
Of time in blood-red moons.

Always when least expected an unexpected
Figure rises when dreams here have
Become like ashes. But when the light
Is woken in our hearts after the long
Sleep, they wonder if it is a fable.

Can we still seek the lost angels
Of our better natures?
Can we still wish and will
For poverty’s death and a newer way
To undo war, and find peace in the labyrinth
Of the Middle East, and prosperity
In Africa as the true way
To end the feared tide of immigration?

We dream of a new politics
That will renew the world
Under their weary suspicious gaze.
There’s always a new way,
A better way that’s not been tried before.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 22, 2017)

Try to Praise the Mutilated World BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 22, 2017)

For the Anniversary of My Death
BY W. S. MERWIN

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   
When the last fires will wave to me 
And the silence will set out 
Tireless traveler 
Like the beam of a lightless star 

Then I will no longer 
Find myself in life as in a strange garment 
Surprised at the earth 
And the love of one woman 
And the shamelessness of men 
As today writing after three days of rain 
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease 
And bowing not knowing to what


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 23, 2017)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George


----------



## Santino (Apr 24, 2017)

Dillinger4 said:


> Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
> Or close the wall up with our English dead.
> In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
> As modest stillness and humility:
> ...




This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.


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## Dillinger4 (Apr 29, 2017)

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 30, 2017)

The Garden By Andrew Marvell

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crown’d from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flow’rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walk’d without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.

How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Apr 30, 2017)

The Sea And The Hills

Who hath desired the Sea? -- the sight of salt water unbounded -- 
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded? 
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing -- 
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing -- 
His Sea in no showing the same his Sea and the same 'neath each showing: 
His Sea as she slackens or thrills? 
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills! 

Who hath desired the Sea? -- the immense and contemptuous surges? 
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve, as the star-stabbing bow-sprit emerges? 
The orderly clouds of the Trades, the ridged, roaring sapphire thereunder -- 
Unheralded cliff-haunting flaws and the headsail's low-volleying thunder -- 
His Sea in no wonder the same his Sea and the same through each wonder: 
His Sea as she rages or stills? 
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills. 

Who hath desired the Sea? Her menaces swift as her mercies? 
The in-rolling walls of the fog and the silver-winged breeze that disperses? 
The unstable mined berg going South and the calvings and groans that declare it -- 
White water half-guessed overside and the moon breaking timely to bare it -- 
His Sea as his fathers have dared -- his Sea as his children shall dare it: 
His Sea as she serves him or kills? 
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills. 

Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather 
Than forecourts of kings, and her outermost pits than the streets where men gather 
Inland, among dust, under trees -- inland where the slayer may slay him -- 
Inland, out of reach of her arms, and the bosom whereon he must lay him 
His Sea from the first that betrayed -- at the last that shall never betray him: 
His Sea that his being fulfils? 
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills.

Rudyard Kipling


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## Dillinger4 (May 7, 2017)

ON NOTHING by Jamie McKendrick

_I do not think it is absurd for you to say that nothing is something,
since no one can deny that 'nothing' is a noun._
																					Anselm of Canterbury

If nothing is the opposite of something
then it too is something and not nothing.
Or is that just language rushing in
to fill what makes the intellect recoil?

It's us not nature that abhors a vacuum,
though in frictionless space there's still a fraction
more than nothing, if not enough of it
to slow the planets in their orbits.

But the full moon hides its emptiness
and every plenitude its opposite;
the present buckles into nowlessness

that lasts for never as a dark star draws
downward threads of light. There nothing exists,
couching like a sphinx among the rubble


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## Dillinger4 (May 7, 2017)

A ROOM WITH A VIEW by Ian Duhig

_I don’t know how any civilized person can watch TV, let alone own a set_ - W.H. Auden

But now I see civilization through new square eyes
since buying a TV with two square metres of screen.
Better than Debord at seeing through the spectacle
to the bone beneath the bling, it focusses as fairly
on the diva’s bleached moustache as choral acne,
with equal liquid-crystal clarity from gods to stalls.
Brilliant as walls of Pre-Raphaelites, TV is wallpaper
beyond Morris, more human because it is moving,
which can inspire us all to poetry as it did Ashbery,
like the campfires our half-ape ancestors watched,
evolving so they'd be able to change the channel.


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## ShiftyBagLady (May 7, 2017)

Dry Loaf 
By Wallace Stevens

It is equal to living in a tragic land 
To live in a tragic time. 
Regard now the sloping, mountainous rocks 
And the river that batters its way over stones, 
Regard the hovels of those that live in this land. 

That was what I painted behind the loaf, 
The rocks not even touched by snow, 
The pines along the river and the dry men blown 
Brown as the bread, thinking of birds 
Flying from burning countries and brown sand shores, 

Birds that came like dirty water in waves 
Flowing above the rocks, flowing over the sky, 
As if the sky was a current that bore them along, 
Spreading them as waves spread flat on the shore, 
One after another washing the mountains bare. 

It was the battering of drums I heard 
It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried 
And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving, 
Marching and marching in a tragic time 
Below me, on the asphalt, under the trees. 

It was soldiers went marching over the rocks 
And still the birds came, came in watery flocks, 
Because it was spring and the birds had to come. 
No doubt that soldiers had to be marching 
And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.


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## Dillinger4 (May 8, 2017)

I sometimes fear that 
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress 
worn by grotesques and monsters 
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. 

Fascism arrives as your friend. 
It will restore your honour, 
make you feel proud, 
protect your house, 
give you a job, 
clean up the neighbourhood, 
remind you of how great you once were, 
clear out the venal and the corrupt, 
remove anything you feel is unlike you...

It doesn't walk in saying, 
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."


----------



## bluescreen (May 8, 2017)

.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 9, 2017)

The Ball Poem
By John Berryman

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball.
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight.
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 12, 2017)

Period by R.S. Thomas

It was a time when wise men
Were not silent, but stifled
By vast noise. They took refuge
in books that were not read.

Two counsellors had the ear
Of the public. One cried 'Buy'
Day and Night, and the other,
More plausibly, 'Sell your repose'.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 13, 2017)

The Ruin

(translated from Old English by M. Alexander)

Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.
The stronghold burst…
Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.
Rime scoureth gatetowers
rime on mortar.
Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,
age under-ate them.
And the wielders & wrights?
Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone
fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers
and sons have passed.
Wall stood,
grey lichen, red stone, kings fell often,
stood under storms, high arch crashed –
stands yet the wallstone, hacked by weapons,
by files grim-ground…
…shone the old skilled work
…sank to loam-crust

Mood quickened mind, and man of wit,
cunning in rings, bound bravely the wallbase
with iron, a wonder.

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng-noise;
these many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Weird changed that.

Came days of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead,
death fetched off the flower of the people;
where they stood to fight, waste places
and on the acropolis, ruins.
Hosts who would build again
shrank to the earth. Therefore are these courts dreary
and that red arch twisteth tiles,
wryeth from roof-ridge, reacheth groundwards…
Broken blocks…

There once many a man
mood-glad, gold-bright, of gleams garnished,
flushed with wine-pride, flashing war-gear,
gazed on wrought gemstones, on gold, on silver,
on wealth held and hoarded, on light-filled amber,
on this bright burg of broad dominion.

Stood stone houses; wide streams welled
hot from source, and a wall all caught
in its bright bosom, and the baths were
hot at hall’s hearth; that was fitting…

………… Thence hot streams, loosed, ran over hoar stone
unto the ring-tank…
…It is a kingly thing
…city…


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2017)

On the death of Kazimir Malevich

Ripping the stream of memory,
You look around and your face is pride-stricken.
Your name is — Kazimir.
The sun of your salvation wanes and you look at it.
Beauty has supposedly torn apart your earth’s mountains,
No area can frame your figure.
Give me those eyes of yours! I’ll throw open a window in my head!
Man, why have you stricken your face with pride?
Your life is only a fly and your desire is succulent food.
No glow comes from the sun of your salvation.
Thunder will lay low the helmet of your head.
Pe — is the inkpot of your words.
Trr — is your desire.
Agalthon — is your skinny memory.
Hey, Kazimir! Where’s your desk?
Looks as if it’s not here, and your desire is — Trr.
Hey, Kazimir! Where’s your friend?
She is also gone, and your memory’s inkpot is — Pe.
Eight years have crackled away in those ears of yours.
Fifty minutes have beat away in that heart of yours.
Ten times has the river flowed before you.
The inkpot of your desire Trr and Pe has ended.
“Imagine that!” you say, and your memory is — Agalthon.
There you stand, pushing apart smoke with your hands supposedly.
The pride-stricken expression on that face of yours wanes,
And your memory and your desire Trr disappear.

May 17, 1935

Daniil Kharms


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 22, 2017)

*"Mexico"*

Once each year
After a warm day in April
When darkness comes to the desert
Uninvited but planning to spend the night
Something hits me like a shovel
And I am stunned into believing
Anything is possible

There is no overture to frenzy
I simply look up and see Scorpio
Most dangerous of friends
With the last two stars in his tail
Blinking like lights at a railroad crossing
While in one claw he holds the top
Of a mountain in Mexico

And suddenly I know
Everything I need is waiting for me
South of here in another country
And I have been walking through empty
Rooms and talking to furniture

Then I say to myself
Why would I stay home and listen to Bach
Such precision could have happened
To anyone to an infinite number of monkeys with harpsichords

And next morning I start south
With my last chances flapping their wings
While birds of passage stream over me
In the opposite direction

I never find what I am looking for
And each time I return older
With my ugliness intact
But with the knowledge that if it isn’t there
In the darkness under Scorpio
It isn’t anywhere


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 22, 2017)

Moon by JH Prynne

The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady

so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.

Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. The challenge is
not a moral excitement, but the expanse,

the continuing patience
dilating into forms so
much more than compact.

I would probably not even choose to inhabit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet

suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form:

we are more pliant than the mercantile notion
of choice will determine-we go in this way
on and on and the unceasing image of hope
is our place in the world. We live there and now

at night I recognise the signs
of this, the calm is a
modesty about conduct in

the most ethical sense. We disperse into the ether
as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion
of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of
wish: where we live, as we more often are than

we know. If we expand
into this wide personal vacancy
we could become the extent

of all the wishes that are now too far beyond
us. A community of wish, as the steppe
on which the extension would sprinkle out
the ethic density, the compact modern home.

The consequence of this
pastoral desire is prolonged
as our condition, but

I know there is more than the mere wish to
wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
beyond this and will never end: these are songs
to the night under no affliction, knowing that

the wish is gift to the
spirit, is where we may
dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart
and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining
stone: the negligence and still passion of night.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 22, 2017)

Under the Poplars by Cesar Vallejo
_
for José Eulogio Garrido_

	  Like priestly imprisoned poets,		  
the poplars of blood have fallen asleep. 
On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem				   
chew arias of grass at sunset.		   

	  The ancient shepherd, who shivers		  
at the last martyrdoms of light,				   
in his Easter eyes has caught							
a purebred flock of stars.						

	  Formed in orphanhood, he goes down		  
with rumors of burial to the praying field,		  
and the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow. 

	  It survives, the blue warped		  
in iron, and on it, pupils shrouded,				   
a dog etches its pastoral howl.


----------



## Ceej (May 23, 2017)

On this saddest of days - by Mike Gary
Mancunian poet.

We are the threads that weave,
we are the busy bee's
we are the fabric and the seams,
the reason why we achieve.
we are the warp and weft,
we earn our daily bread and we work because hard work brings success
we're born out of industry, we're cotton song through history
we're revolutionary, we work while others sleep,
we're in the bricks and mortars, with the mothers, fathers sons and daughters
the very DNA of what makes this city great
we are the wool ,the whine, the twine, crafted, tailored and designed
we're the sign of the cross, we're temples, synagogues and mosques,
we interlock and bisect, we criss cross and interject,
we are the textile of time,
the fundamentals of life
we are the battlers and fighters, we invented all-nighters
we're in the pulse the heartic sound,
we are the earth the sky the clouds
we are the contour lines, we are the isobars
we're ugly, beautiful, we carry battle scars
Success is our main goal,
our defence is our attack
if you give us your soul, we'll give you our heart and souls back.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 29, 2017)

From Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake

They told me that the night and day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up;
And they enclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle, 		
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red, round globe, hot burning,


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 31, 2017)

Misery and Splendor
BY ROBERT HASS

Summoned by conscious recollection, she 
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking, 
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room, 
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch 
embracing. He holds her as tightly   
as he can, she buries herself in his body. 
Morning, maybe it is evening, light 
is flowing through the room. Outside, 
the day is slowly succeeded by night, 
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly 
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room 
does not change, so it is plain what is happening. 
They are trying to become one creature, 
and something will not have it. They are tender 
with each other, afraid 
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment 
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other, 
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry. 
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful 
and baffled will. They feel 
they are an almost animal, 
washed up on the shore of a world— 
or huddled against the gate of a garden— 
to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 31, 2017)

*Vain Warnings by Silvina Ocamp*


Be careful with your imagination.
Someplace on earth it remains, all the time it follows us
little by little turning into crude or delicate reality
what man or beast, plants or stones imagined.
The sick with fever, those who shake, those who want to and cannot speak,
in waiting rooms, amid pages of newspapers, oranges,
those who gaze at the ceiling or else the sun, injured,
those who embrace unlawfully, not knowing why
or in the blue precinct of marriage, those disfigured by hearty laughter,
the children, the slaves, the unjust, those who go shopping, handle meat,
the prisoners, soldiers, tyrants, with faces of singers,
the swimmers, the eager executioners, those who blaspheme,
those who beg or give, the missionaries, the anarchists,
the submissive, the proud, the solitary, those who don’t understand,
those who work constantly,
those who get tired after never doing anything
again don’t do anything without a break, irreducibly, the unborn,
those who carry signs in their fur, letters, drawings,
mysteries that no one has deciphered,
those who wash everything all day long like the raccoon,

the foul-smelling that scavenge for bones or excrement,
wallowing about to stink even more,
those who simply appear spiritual, or musical, or poetic,
those who devour others like them
or themselves because driven mad,
those that are streaked, with spots, with silver scales and tails,
the ferocious and the domesticated, those who love,
those who eat each other in order to fecundate,
those who live only on grass or precious milk
or those who need to eat rotten meat
those who crawl or the most beautiful, with princely feathers
those whom the water gathers among its glass, clear green or black
in the dark molds of the earth, buried,

those who take so long in dying that they do not die
and seem like plants or else stones, with the additions of time
those who barely live by a miracle, by suicide, on nothing
everything that they have imagined
and that we mortals imagine
forms the reality of the world.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 4, 2017)

*The End of the World by Archibald McLeish*



Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot 
The armless ambidextrian was lighting 
A match between his great and second toe 
And Ralph the Lion was engaged in biting 
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum 
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough 
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb — 
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over 
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, 
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover, 
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies, 
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall 
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 7, 2017)

*Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium*

	  (Ernesto Cardenal, 1954, trans. Donald Walsh)

It’s not that I think the people raised this statue to me,
because I know better than you that I ordered it myself.
Nor that I have any illusions about passing with it into posterity
because I know the people will one day tear it down.
Nor that I wished to erect to myself in life
the monument you’ll not erect to me in death:
I put up this statue just because I know you’ll hate it.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 7, 2017)

*Incantation*

	(Czeslaw Milosz, 1968, trans. the author and Robert Pinsky)

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo,
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.


----------



## BoatieBird (Jun 10, 2017)

Campaign

In which her body was a question-mark

querying her lies; her mouth a ballot-box that bit the hand that fed. Her eyes? They swivelled for a jackpot win. Her heart was a stolen purse;
her rhetoric an empty vicarage, the windows smashed.

Then her feet grew sharp stilettos, awkward.

Then she had balls, believe it.

When she woke,

her nose was bloody, difficult.

The furious young

ran towards her through the fields of wheat.


Carol Ann Duffy


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 11, 2017)

You and Gold and What Awaits You by Roque Dalton

In capitalism it’s a lie to say:
“Take care, you’re worth your weight in gold.”
Because in capitalism only the owners
of gold are worth their weight in gold.

In the construction of socialism
one no longer lies and it can be said:
“You’re worth more than gold, but
it’s necessary to take care of
the gold of social property,
Foreign exchange is important.”

Only in communism can it be said:
“You’re worth what you’re worth.
Gold has nothing to do with what you’re worth.”

In communism gold only has value
through the use workers and citizens 
give it,
for example in dentistry
in decoration
or in adorning the necks
or ears of girls.


----------



## stockwelljonny (Jun 12, 2017)

*Karen Solie*





*Crail Spring*
Surprised on returning to find the flat
flooded with light. Merciless,
evaporative, even when overcast, and,
as the solstice neared, sanctimonious
in its imperative to productivity.
An expert with his pen-light wondering
how you let it get this bad. That tone.
We were out all day in the clarity
of errors that had multiplied
into reality. Extra weight exposed
by the indignity of seasonal clothes,
and suspicious the promise
of those first fine days wouldn’t be
borne out. Children wept with exhaustion
in the playground past eleven, birds
goaded awake at three. So when the haar
sailed in, flags flying, party in a bag,
and took over the streets, we rejoiced
to see our choices diminish along
with the outlines of what they’d wrought.
Otherwise, not a fucking thing, and we
decided to make a long weekend of it.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 12, 2017)

XVI Poem by Roque Dalton

Laws are created to be followed
By the poor.
Laws are made by the rich
To bring some order to exploitation.
The poor are the only law abiders in history.
When the poor make laws
The rich will be no more.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 12, 2017)

Eighteen Seventy by Arthur Rimbaud

You Dead of ninety-two and ninety-three,
Who, pale from the great kiss of Liberty,
Crushed, calm, beneath your wooden shoes
That yoke that weighs on human brows and souls:

Men exalted, great in agony,
You whose hearts raged with love, in misery,
O soldiers that Death, noble Lover, has sown
In all the old furrows, so they’ll be reborn:

You whose blood washed every soiled grandeur,
Dead of Valmy, Dead of Fleurus, Dead of Italy,
O millions of Christs with eyes gentle and sombre:

We’ve let you fall asleep with the Republic,
We, cowering under kings as if under blows.
– They’re telling tales of you so we’ll remember!


----------



## stockwelljonny (Jun 18, 2017)

In Paris With You - James Fenton

Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful
And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.
I'm one of your talking wounded.
I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.
But I'm in Paris with you.

Yes I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess I've been through.
I admit I'm on the rebound
And I don't care where are we bound.
I'm in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame, 
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy

Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are, 
Learning what I am.

Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris, 
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There's that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I'm in Paris with you.

Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.
I'm in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth, 
I'm in Paris with... all points south.
Am I embarrassing you? 
I'm in Paris with you.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2017)

O Sultan, my master, if my clothes
are ripped and torn
it is because your dogs with claws
are allowed to tear me.
And your informers every day are those
who dog my heels …
the reason you’ve lost wars twice
was because you’ve been walled in from
mankind’s cause and voice


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2017)

GRENFELL TOWER, JUNE 2017: 
a poem by Ben Okri

'It was like a burnt matchbox in the sky.
It was black and long and burnt in the sky.
You saw it through the flowering stump of trees.
You saw it beyond the ochre spire of the church.
You saw it in the tears of those who survived.
You saw it through the rage of those who survived.
You saw it past the posters of those who had burnt to ashes.
You saw it past the posters of those who jumped to their deaths.
You saw it through the TV images of flames through windows
Running up the aluminium cladding
You saw it in print images of flames bursting out from the roof.
You heard it in the voices loud in the streets.
You heard it in the cries in the air howling for justice.
You heard it in the pubs the streets the basements the digs.
You heard it in the wailing of women and the silent scream
Of orphans wandering the streets
You saw it in your baby who couldn’t sleep at night
Spooked by the ghosts that wander the area still trying
To escape the fires that came at them black and choking.
You saw it in your dreams of the dead asking if living
Had no meaning being poor in a land
Where the poor die in flames without warning.
But when you saw it with your eyes it seemed what the eyes
Saw did not make sense cannot make sense will not make sense.
You saw it there in the sky, tall and black and burnt.
You counted the windows and counted the floors
And saw the sickly yellow of the half burnt cladding
And what you saw could only be seen in nightmare.
Like a war-zone come to the depths of a fashionable borough.
Like a war-zone planted here in the city.
To see with the eyes that which one only sees
In nightmares turns the day to night, turns the world upside down.

Those who were living now are dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.
See the tower, and let a world-changing dream flower.

Residents of the area call it the crematorium.
It has revealed the undercurrents of our age.
The poor who thought voting for the rich would save them.
The poor who believed all that the papers said.
The poor who listened with their fears.
The poor who live in their rooms and dream for their kids.
The poor are you and I, you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.
Sometimes it takes an image to wake up a nation
From its secret shame. And here it is every name
Of someone burnt to death, on the stairs or in their room,
Who had no idea what they died for, or how they were betrayed.
They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

Those who are living now are dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower
See the tower, and let a world-changing dream flower.

They called the tower ugly; they named it an eyesore.
All around the beautiful people in their beautiful houses
Didn’t want the ugly tower to ruin their house prices.
Ten million was spent to encase the tower in cladding.
Had it ever been tested before except on this eyesore,
Had it ever been tested for fire, been tried in a blaze?
But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty.
But in twenty four storeys, not a single sprinkler.
In twenty four storeys not a single alarm that worked.
In twenty four storeys not a single fire escape,
Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting
For an inferno. That’s the story of our times.
Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap
On the inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make
The empty look nice. That’s all they will see,
How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen.
But if you really look you can see it, if you really listen
You can hear it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding.
There’s cladding everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding — things that look good
But have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.
They say the words but the words are hollow.
They make the gestures and the gestures are shallow.
Their bodies come to the burnt tower but their souls don’t follow.

Those who were living are now dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower
See the tower, and let a world-changing deed flower.

The voices here must speak for the dead.
Speak for the dead. Speak for the dead.
See their pictures line the walls. Poverty is its own
Colour, its own race. They were Muslim and Christian,
Black and white and colours in between. They were young
And old and beautiful and middle aged. There were girls
In their best dresses with hearts open to the future.
There was an old man with his grandchildren;
There was Amaya Tuccu, three years old,
Burnt to ashes before she could see the lies of the world.
There are names who were living beings who dreamt
Of fame or contentment or education or love
Who are now ashes in a burnt out shell of cynicism.
There were two Italians, lovely and young,
Who in the inferno were on their mobile phone to friends
While the smoke of profits suffocated their voices.
There was the baby thrown from many storeys high
By a mother who knew otherwise he would die.
There were those who jumped from their windows
And those who died because they were told to stay
In their burning rooms. There was the little girl on fire
Seen diving out from the twentieth floor. Need I say more.

Those who are living now are dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower
See the tower, and let a world-changing dream flower.

Always there’s that discrepancy
Between what happens and what we are told.
The official figures were stuck at thirty.
Truth in the world is rarer than gold.
Bodies brought out in the dark
Bodies still in the dark.
Dark the smoke and dark the head.
Those who were living are now dead.

And while the tower flamed they were tripping
Over bodies at the stairs
Because it was pitch black.
And those that survived
Sleep like refugees on the floor
Of a sports centre.
And like creatures scared of the dark,
A figure from on high flits by,
Speaking to the police and brave firefighters,
But avoiding the victims,
Whose hearts must be brimming with dread.
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.

But if you go to Grenfell Tower, if you can pull
Yourselves from your tennis games and your perfect dinners
If you go there while the black skeleton of that living tower
Still stands unreal in the air, a warning for similar towers to fear,
You will breathe the air thick with grief
With women spontaneously weeping
And children wandering around stunned
And men secretly wiping a tear from the eye
And people unbelieving staring at this sinister form in the sky
You will see the trees with their leaves green and clean
And will inhale the incense meant
To cleanse the air of unhappiness
You will see banks of flowers
And white paper walls sobbing with words
And candles burning for the blessing of the dead
You will see the true meaning of community
Food shared and stories told and volunteers everywhere
You will breathe the air of incinerators
Mixed with the essence of flower.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.

Make sense of these figures if you will
For the spirit lives where truth cannot kill.
Ten million spent on the falsely clad
In a fire where hundreds lost all they had.
Five million offered in relief
Ought to make a nation alter its belief.
An image gives life and an image kills.
The heart reveals itself beyond political skills.
In this age of austerity
The poor die for others’ prosperity.
Nurseries and libraries fade from the land.
A strange time is shaping on the strand.
A sword of fate hangs over the deafness of power.
See the tower, and let a new world-changing thought flower.'


----------



## bubblesmcgrath (Jun 25, 2017)

Pickman's model said:


> GRENFELL TOWER, JUNE 2017:
> a poem by Ben Okri
> 
> 'It was like a burnt matchbox in the sky.
> ...




That is powerful.....
Extremely upsetting but needed.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jun 25, 2017)

Wait
By Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. 
Distrust everything, if you have to. 
But trust the hours. Haven't they 
carried you everywhere, up to now? 
Personal events will become interesting again. 
Hair will become interesting. 
Pain will become interesting. 
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 
their memories are what give them 
the need for other hands. And the desolation 
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 
carved out of such tiny beings as we are 
asks to be filled; the need 
for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 
Don't go too early. 
You're tired. But everyone's tired. 
But no one is tired enough. 
Only wait a while and listen. 
Music of hair, 
Music of pain, 
music of looms weaving all our loves again. 
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 
most of all to hear, 
the flute of your whole existence, 
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 9, 2017)

*Leda and the Swan*
_William Yeats
_
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
				   Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Jul 22, 2017)

My Grandmother's Love Letters
Hart Crane
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 21, 2017)

*The Octopus*
_Kay Ryan_

The octopus has
eight of something.
If they’re legs then
all the arms are
missing. Nature often
makes mistakes in
distribution. You’d
think it would be
more distressing. Too
many rubber legs with
suckers, too many sets
of teeth on top each other:
some button in the
shop stuck on or off.
Sometimes a brain-feed
sticks until the brain
that gets delivered has
a hundred times the
strength it needs in
nature. Which changes
nature. A hundred
other creatures
gang together in a chain
of mutual interest
they wouldn’t have perceived
without the strange intelligence.


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 22, 2017)

*The Plough of Time*
_Lawrence Ferlinghetti_

Night closed my windows and
The sky became a crystal house
The crystal windows glowed
The moon
shown through them
through the whole house of crystal
A single star beamed down
its crystal cable
and drew a plough through the earth
unearthing bodies clasped together
couples embracing
around the earth
They clung together everywhere
emitting small cries
that did not reach the stars
The crystal earth turned
and the bodies with it
And the sky did not turn
nor the stars with it
The stars remained fixed
each with its crystal cable
beamed to earth
each attached to the immense plough
furrowing our lives


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 25, 2017)

*A Dream*
_Susan Paddon_

I imagine this boy,
a small boy. Someone to have driven toy cars with,
built complicated forts with, deep
in the woods. I see him
healthy.

My mother is there. She is rosy-cheeked
and no taller than the seat of a chair.
She keeps her distance, watches me and the boy play.
Each time I almost get close to her, she moves on,
disappears.

Since no one else is around,
I concentrate on the boy.
We throw marbles in the sand 
out of purple and gold bags;
grow old and tired enough
to fall asleep.

I've heard a lot of people
have this dream.


----------



## V.T. O'Brien (Sep 25, 2017)

Ireland by Paul Muldoon
_
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.
_


----------



## killer b (Oct 7, 2017)

*wishes for sons*
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

i wish them cramps. 
i wish them a strange town 
and the last tampon. 
i wish them no 7-11. 

i wish them one week early 
and wearing a white skirt. 
i wish them one week late. 

later i wish them hot flashes 
and clots like you 
wouldn't believe. let the 
flashes come when they 
meet someone special. 
let the clots come 
when they want to. 

let them think they have accepted 
arrogance in the universe, 
then bring them to gynecologists 
not unlike themselves.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 10, 2017)

*The Censure of the Parliament Fart (1607)*

Never was bestowed such art 
Upon the tuning of a Fart. 
Downe came grave auntient Sir John Crooke 
And redd his message in his booke. 
Fearie well, Quoth Sir William Morris, Soe: 
But Henry Ludlowes Tayle cry'd Noe. 
Up starts one fuller of devotion 
Then Eloquence; and said a very ill motion 
Not soe neither quoth Sir Henry Jenkin 
The Motion was good; but for the stincking 
Well quoth Sir Henry Poole it was a bold tricke 
To Fart in the nose of the bodie pollitique 
Indeed I must confesse quoth Sir Edward Grevill 
The matter of it selfe was somewhat uncivill 
Thanke God quoth Sir Edward Hungerford 
That this Fart proved not a Turdd


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 23, 2017)

ilkley gazette 24/10/1891


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 3, 2017)

huddersfield daily chronicle, 30/08/1899


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 4, 2017)

On the Beach at Night Alone by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone, 
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, 
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. 

A vast similitude interlocks all, 
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, 
All distances of place however wide, 
All distances of time, all inanimate forms, 
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, 
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, 
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, 
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, 
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, 
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, 
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 12, 2017)

On Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 12, 2017)

In Warsaw by Czeslaw Milosz

What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny
Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?

You swore never to be
A ritual mourner.
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many centuries.

But the lament of Antigone
Searching for her brother
Is indeed beyond the power
Of endurance. And the heart
Is a stone in which is enclosed,
Like an insect, the dark love
Of a most unhappy land.

I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It's madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the
Only two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 21, 2017)

before you read this book by Peter Dale Scott

take a morning walk outside
and imagine over your head
the white stars

you are quite confident are there
because you have seen them
though only at night

and then when your mind has expanded
think of the earth’s surface you tread on
curving away to maybe Paris

the next takes a little doing
but when you have the stars and curve in mind
imagine how the space over your head

is mirrored darkly
with all last evening’s stars
deep down under your feet

until you feel our planet
surrounded
smaller even than a bit of dust

Bless the Huge Unknown
within us
that can do this

and ask compassion
for those on this crowded soil
who are suffering



Now you can read
but begin with something great
perhaps a Song of Innocence by Blake.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 24, 2017)

It was the first wound of Jesus that spoke out loud and bold
	‘Oh I who nestle by his heart know it is nearly cold’.

It was the second wound of Jesus that spoke from his right
		breast
	‘Oh I who gauge his failing breath know it has nearly ceased.’

It was the third wound of Jesus that spoke from his left palm
	‘Oh I who feel his racing pulse know it will soon be calm’.

It was the fourth wound of Jesus that was so pale and wan
	‘Oh I who am in his right hand know how death draws on’.

It was the fifth wound of Jesus that cried from his left foot
	‘Oh I who mark his falling blood know it is nearly out’.

It was the sixth wound of Jesus that answered in great pain
	‘Oh I can vouch that I have seen almost the last drop drain’.

It was the seventh wound of Jesus that spoke  out ‘Seven, seven
	‘Seven are the deadly wounds that call out against heaven’.

R.A.K Mason


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 26, 2017)

The Poor Poet by Czselaw Milosz

The first movement is singing,
A free voice, filling mountains and valleys.
The first movement is joy,
But it is taken away.

And now that the years have transformed my blood
And thousands of planetary systems have been born and died in my flesh.

I sit, a sly and angry poet
With malevolently squinted eyes,
And, weighing a pen in my hand,
I plot revenge.

I poise the pen and it puts forth twigs and leaves, it is covered with blossoms
And the scent of that tree is impudent, for there, on the real earth,
Such trees do not grow, and like an insult
To suffering humanity is the scent of that tree.

Some take refuge in despair, which is sweet
Like strong tobacco, like a glass of vodka drunk in the hour of annihilation.
Others have the hope of fools, rosy as erotic dreams.

Still others find peace in the idolatry of country,
Which can last for a long time,
Although little longer than the nineteenth century lasts.

But to me a cynical hope is given,
For since I opened my eyes I have seen only the glow of fires, massacres,
Only injustice, humiliation, and the laughable shame of braggarts.
To me is given the hope of revenge on others and on myself,
For I was he who knew
And took from it no profit for myself.


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 27, 2017)

*Industrial Poem*
_Peter Trower_ (1930-2017)

That night, Slim Abernathy
pushed the wrong button and wrapped his friend
three times around a drive-shaft
in directions the bones won’t bend.

They shut her down and eased him out
broken most ways a man can break
yet he clung to his ruin for twenty-four hours
like a man to a life-raft for his death’s sake.

But they’d hardly hurried him away from there
as we stood around shockdrunk, incapable of help
when they cranked those expensive wheels up again
and started rolling more goddamn pulp.

“Hamburger for lunch tonight, boys!”
joked a foreman to the crew.
I wished he’d smelled our hate but he never even flinched
as the red-flecked sheets came through.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 24, 2017)

Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival by JH Prynne

The century roar is a desert carrying
too much away, the plane skids off
with an easy hopeless departure.

The music, that it should
leave, is far down
in the mind

just as if the years were part of the
same sound, prolonged into the latent

action of the heart.
That is more: there

affection will shoot it up
like a crazed pilot. The desert

is a social and undedicated expanse, since
what else there is counts as merest propaganda.

The heart is a changed
petromorph, making
pressure a social

intelligence: essential news
or present fact
over the whole distance back
and further, away.


Or could be thus, as water
is the first social fluency
in any desert: the cistern

comes later and is an inducement of false power.
Which makes the thinning sorrow of flight
the last disjunction, of the heart: that

news is the person, and love
the shape of his compulsion

in the musical phrase,
nearly but not

yet back, into
the remotest
past.

Of which the heart is capable and will journey
over any desert and through the air, making
the turn and stop undreamed of:

love is, always, the
flight back
to where
we are.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 24, 2017)

Moon by JH Prynne

The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady

so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.

Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. The challenge is
not a moral excitement, but the expanse,

the continuing patience
dilating into forms so
much more than compact.

I would probably not even choose to inhabit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet

suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form:

we are more pliant than the mercantile notion
of choice will determine-we go in this way
on and on and the unceasing image of hope
is our place in the world. We live there and now

at night I recognise the signs
of this, the calm is a
modesty about conduct in

the most ethical sense. We disperse into the ether
as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion
of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of
wish: where we live, as we more often are than

we know. If we expand
into this wide personal vacancy
we could become the extent

of all the wishes that are now too far beyond
us. A community of wish, as the steppe
on which the extension would sprinkle out
the ethic density, the compact modern home.

The consequence of this
pastoral desire is prolonged
as our condition, but

I know there is more than the mere wish to
wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
beyond this and will never end: these are songs
to the night under no affliction, knowing that

the wish is gift to the
spirit, is where we may
dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart
and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining
stone: the negligence and still passion of night.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 25, 2017)

In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 106

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 25, 2017)

The Magi by W. B. Yeats

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 2, 2018)

Calm by Charles Baudelaire

Have patience, O my sorrow, and be still. 
You asked for night: it falls: it is here. 
A shadowy atmosphere enshrouds the hill, 
to some men bringing peace, to others care. 
While the vile human multitude 
goes to earn remorse, in servile pleasure’s play, 
under the lash of joy, the torturer, who 
is pitiless, Sadness, come, far away: 
Give me your hand. See, where the lost years 
lean from the balcony in their outdated gear, 
where regret, smiling, surges from the watery deeps. 
Underneath some archway, the dying light 
sleeps, and, like a long shroud trailing from the East, 
listen, dear one, listen to the soft onset of night.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 11, 2018)

*The Hurricane*
_“We are the birds of the coming storm.” — August Spies_

The tide is out, the wind blows off the shore; 
Bare burn the white sands in the scorching sun; 
The sea complains, but its great voice is low.

Bitter thy woes, O People, 
And the burden 
Hardly to be borne! 
Wearily grows, O People, 
All the aching 
Of thy pierced heart, bruised and torn! 
But yet thy time is not, 
And low thy moaning. 
Desert thy sands! 
Not yeat is thy breath hot, Vengefully blowing; 
It wafts o’er lifted hands.

The tide has turned; the vane veers slowly round; 
Slow clouds are sweeping o’er the blinding light; 
White crests curl on the sea — its voice grows deep.

Angry thy heart, O People! 
And its bleeding 
Fire-tipped with rising hate! 
Thy clasped hands part, O People, 
For thy praying Warmed not the desolate! 
God did not hear thy moan: 
Now it is swelling 
To a great drowning cry; 
A dark wind-cloud, a groan, Now backward veering 
From that deaf sky!

The tide flows in, the wind roars from the depths, 
The whirled-White sand heaps with the foam-white waves; 
Thundering the sea rolls o’er its shell-crunched wall!

Strong is thy rage, O People, 
In its fury 
Hurling thy tyrants down! 
Thow metest wage, O People. 
Very swiftly, 
Now that thy hate is grown: 
Thy time at last is come; 
Thou heapest anguish, 
Where thou thyself wert bare! 
No longer to thy dumb. 
God clasped and kneeling. 
_Thou answerest thine own prayer._


----------



## 8115 (Jan 11, 2018)

*The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me*
by Delmore Schwarz

"the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,  
A manifold honey to smear his face,  
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,  
The central ton of every place,  
The hungry beating brutish one  
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,  
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,  
Climbs the building, kicks the football,  
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,  
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,  
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,  
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,  
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope  
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.  
—The strutting show-off is terrified,  
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,  
Trembles to think that his quivering meat  
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,  
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,  
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,  
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,  
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,  
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,  
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,  
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed  
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,  
Amid the hundred million of his kind,  
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 15, 2018)

From East Coker by TS Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 16, 2018)

aberdeen times 12/1/1939


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Feb 3, 2018)

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
with naked fote stalking in my chambre
I have sene theim gentill tame and meke
that nowe are wyld and do not remembre
that sometyme they put theimself in daunger
to take bred at my hand and now raunge
besely seking with a continuell chaunge
Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
twenty tymes better but ons in speciall
in thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse
When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
and she me caught in her armes long and small
therewithall swetely did me kysse
and softely said dere hert howe like you this
It was no dreme I brode waking
but all is torned thorough my gentilnes
into a straunge fasshion of forsaking
and I have leve to go of her goodenes
and she also to use new fangilness
but syns that I so kyndely ame served
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved

Wyatt


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 7, 2018)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 27, 2018)

Spring Snow by WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Here comes the powdered milk I drank
as a child, and the money it saved.
Here come the papers I delivered,
the spotted dog in heat that followed me home

and the dogs that followed her.
Here comes a load of white laundry
from basketball practice, and sheets
with their watermarks of semen.

And here comes snow, a language
in which no word is ever repeated,
love is impossible, and remorse. . . .
Yet childhood doesn’t end,

but accumulates, each memory
knit to the next, and the fields
become one field. If to die is to lose
all detail, then death is not

so distinguished, but a profusion
of detail, a last gossip, character
passed wholly into fate and fate
in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 27, 2018)

Spring Snow by Arthur Sze

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Feb 27, 2018)

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave
An eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning:
At Time's whirring loom I work and I play,
God's living garment I weave and display.

Goethe


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 27, 2018)

Snow Drifts by Horace

Look how the snow drifts
	   flare on the Soracte’s slopes
—there, straining branches
	   barely sustain their white
load. Locked in ice, streams
	   buckle, send cracks
stuttering over the winter’s sharp still.

Unclasp this cold, stir
	   flame in the embers, pile
the hearth with fat logs.
	   Bring out a bottle warm
with a summer four years
	   gone, wine that grapes
pressed from the sunlight on Sabine hillsides.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 7, 2018)

Adams Curse by WB Yeats

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
											 And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Mar 7, 2018)

Dillinger4 said:


> Adams Curse by WB Yeats
> 
> We sat together at one summer's end,
> That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
> ...



I love that poem..... x


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Mar 7, 2018)

We know who the killers are,
We have watched them strut before us
As proud as sick Mussolinis’,
We have watched them strut before us
Compassionless and arrogant,
They paraded before us,
Like angels of death
Protected by the law.




It is now an open secret
Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs
And justice on their minds,
And now we know that the road to liberty
Is as long as the road from slavery.



The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us to love each other
And never to take the tedious task
Of waiting for a bus for granted.
Watching his parents watching the cover-up
Begs the question
What are the trading standards here?
Why are we paying for a police force
That will not work for us?
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us
That we cannot let the illusion of freedom
Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk the streets,
The whole world can now watch
The academics and the super cops
Struggling to define institutionalised racism
As we continue to die in custody
As we continue emptying our pockets on the pavements,
And we continue to ask ourselves
Why is it so official
That black people are so often killed
Without killers?
We are not talking about war or revenge
We are not talking about hypothetics or possibilities,
We are talking about where we are now
We are talking about how we live now
In dis state
Under dis flag, (God Save the Queen),
And God save all those black children who want to grow up
And God save all the brothers and sisters
Who like raving,
Because the death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us that racism is easy when
You have friends in high places.
And friends in high places
Have no use whatsoever
When they are not your friends.
Dear Mr Condon,
Pop out of Teletubby land,
And visit reality,
Come to an honest place
And get some advice from your neighbours,
Be enlightened by our community,
Neglect your well-paid ignorance
Because
We know who the killers are.


This is on display at the moment in the British Library. Powerful. Moving.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 10, 2018)

Period by RS Thomas

It was a time when wise men
Were not silent, but stifled
By vast noise.  They took refuge
In books that were not read.

Two counsellors had the ear
Of the public.  One cried ‘Buy’
Day and night, and the other,
More plausibly, ‘Sell your repose.’


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 10, 2018)

Your gift of life was idleness,
As you would set day’s task aside
To marvel at an opening bud,
Quivering leaf, or spider’s veil
On dewy grass in morning spread.
These were your wandering thoughts, that strayed
Across the ever-changing mind
Of airy sky and travelling cloud,
The harebell and the heather hill,
World without end, where you could lose
Memory, identity and name
And all that you beheld, became,
Insect wing and net of stars
Or silver-glistering wind-borne seed
For ever drifting free from time.
What has unbounded life to do
With body’s grave and body’s womb,
Span of life and little room?


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Apr 1, 2018)

The Mother
I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow - And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.

Padraig Pearse


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 2, 2018)

*Spring*
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
To what purpose, April, do you return again? 
Beauty is not enough. 
You can no longer quiet me with the redness 
Of little leaves opening stickily. 
I know what I know. 
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe 
The spikes of the crocus. 
The smell of the earth is good. 
It is apparent that there is no death. 
But what does that signify? 
Not only under ground are the brains of men 
Eaten by maggots. 
Life in itself 
Is nothing, 
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. 
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, 
April 
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Apr 4, 2018)

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 
The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 
And as the other Spheares, by being growne 
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 
And being by others hurried every day, 
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 
For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West 
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 
And by that setting endlesse day beget; 
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 
Sinne had eternally benighted all. 
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see 
That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 
What a death were it then to see God dye? 
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? 
Could I behold that endlesse height which is 
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 
Humbled below us? or that blood which is 
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? 
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus 
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? 
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 
They'are present yet unto my memory, 
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, 
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; 
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

John Donne


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Apr 12, 2018)

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.

Dylan Thomas


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 17, 2018)

*This Flag Not Fondly Waving*

now it's computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them
and so they won't want to meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like i am now.

_Charles Bukowski_ (1920-1994)


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 19, 2018)

*Sign of the Cross*
_*C*armine Starnino_

It “reversed the curse,” we were told.
You did it after waking and before turning in.
You did it when seated at a meal.
You did it when leaving and re-entering the house.
_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_.
Some dipped into the font and exaggeratedly
tapped forehead, chest and shoulders.
For others, it was all in the wrist: an up-down,
right-left flick like a drip-style brushstroke.
A few pinched thumb and fingers, made intersecting
incisions in air, inches from the sternum.
The last time for me was the time
I was the last one with him. Life support
switched off, face spasms and eye twitches
stopped. There we were, father and the son.
I was at a loss for what to do.
Nothing between us was ever resolved.
So I traced the holy seal upon his brow.
and felt myself strangely absolved.


----------



## Beats & Pieces (Apr 24, 2018)

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed 
Of crimson joy: 
And his dark secret love 
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2018)

A Wales Visitation by Allen Ginsberg

White fog lifting & falling on mountain-brow 
Trees moving in rivers of wind 
The clouds arise 
as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist 
above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed 
along a green crag 
glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine— 


Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught 
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion, 
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology, 
the wisdom of earthly relations, 
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible 
orchards of mind language manifest human, 
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry 
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny 
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs— 


Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower 
& network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self 
the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating 
heard in Blake’s old ear, & the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness 
clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey— 
Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness! 


All the Valley quivered, one extended motion, wind 
undulating on mossy hills 
a giant wash that sank white fog delicately down red runnels 
on the mountainside 
whose leaf-branch tendrils moved asway 
in granitic undertow down— 
and lifted the floating Nebulous upward, and lifted the arms of the trees 
and lifted the grasses an instant in balance 
and lifted the lambs to hold still 
and lifted the green of the hill, in one solemn wave 


A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale, 
a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley, 
the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean 
tonned with cloud-hang, 
—Heaven balanced on a grassblade. 
Roar of the mountain wind slow, sigh of the body, 
One Being on the mountainside stirring gently 
Exquisite scales trembling everywhere in balance, 
one motion thru the cloudy sky-floor shifting on the million feet of daisies, 
one Majesty the motion that stirred wet grass quivering 
to the farthest tendril of white fog poured down 
through shivering flowers on the mountain’s head— 


No imperfection in the budded mountain, 
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together, 
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble, 
grass shimmers green 
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes, 
horses dance in the warm rain, 
tree-lined canals network live farmland, 
blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills, 
pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern— 


Out, out on the hillside, into the ocean sound, into delicate gusts of wet air, 
Fall on the ground, O great Wetness, O Mother, No harm on your body! 
Stare close, no imperfection in the grass, 
each flower Buddha-eye, repeating the story, 
myriad-formed— 
Kneel before the foxglove raising green buds, mauve bells dropped
doubled down the stem trembling antennae, 
& look in the eyes of the branded lambs that stare 
breathing stockstill under dripping hawthorn— 
I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside, 
smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless, 
tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness— 
One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath 
moves every floweret in the stillness on the valley floor, 
trembles lamb-hair hung gossamer rain-beaded in the grass, 
lifts trees on their roots, birds in the great draught 
hiding their strength in the rain, bearing same weight, 


Groan thru breast and neck, a great Oh! to earth heart 
Calling our Presence together 
The great secret is no secret 
Senses fit the winds, 
Visible is visible, 
rain-mist curtains wave through the bearded vale, 
gray atoms wet the wind’s kabbala 
Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain, 
rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless, 
breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside, 
Heaven breath and my own symmetric 
Airs wavering thru antlered green fern 
drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffn, 
Sounds of Aleph and Aum 
through forests of gristle, 
my skull and Lord Hereford’s Knob equal, 
All Albion one. 


What did I notice? Particulars! The 
vision of the great One is myriad— 
smoke curls upward from ashtray, 
house fire burned low, 
The night, still wet & moody black heaven 
starless 
upward in motion with wet wind.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 27, 2018)

There you have seen 
the true dark enemies of England. 
Sick father and mother 
who would have us children forever. 

Stephen, our land must live. 
This land we love must live. 
Her deep, dark flame 
must never die. 
Night is falling. 

Your land and mine goes down 
into a darkness now, 
and I, and all the other
guardians of her flame 
are driven from our home
 up out into the wolf’s jaw.

But the flame still flickers in the fen. 
You are marked down to cherish that. 
Cherish the flame 
till we can safely wake again. 
The flame is in your hands, 
we trusted you, our sacred demon of ungovernableness. 
Cherish the flame. 
We shall rest easy. 

Stephen, be secret. 
Child, be strange. 
Dark, true, impure and dissonant. 
Cherish our flame. 
Our dawn shall come.


----------



## Beats & Pieces (May 3, 2018)

QUEEN and huntress, chaste and fair,
	Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
	State in wonted manner keep:
		Hesperus entreats thy light,
		Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade
	Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
	Heaven to clear when day did close:
		Bless us then with wished sight,
		Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
	And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
	Space to breathe, how short soever:
		Thou that mak'st a day of night—
		Goddess excellently bright.

Ben Jonson


----------



## Beats & Pieces (May 18, 2018)

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of _l'entre deux guerres_
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T.S Eliot


----------



## Beats & Pieces (May 27, 2018)

Abstain wholly, or wed. Thy bounteous Lord
Allows thee choice of paths: take no byways;
But gladly welcome what he doth afford;
Not grudging, that thy lust hath bounds and stays.
Continence hath his joy: weigh both; and so
If rottenness have more, let Heaven go.

George Herbert


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 6, 2018)

*The Hydra*
_W.S Merwin_

No the dead have no brothers

The Hydra calls me but I am used to it
It calls me Everybody
But I know my name and do not answer

And you the dead
You know your names as I do not
But at moments you have just finished speaking

The snow stirs in its wrappings
Every season comes from a new place

Like your voice with its resemblances

A long time ago the lightning was practicing
Something I thought was easy

I was young and the Dead were in other
Ages
As the grass had its own language

Now I forget where the difference falls

One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us
Can stop dying for a moment
But you the dead

Once you go into those names you go on you never
Hestitate
You go on


----------



## chainsawjob (Jul 16, 2018)

Exodus by Lotte Kramer

For all mothers in anguish
Pushing out their babies
In a small basket

To let the river cradle them
And kind hands find
And nurture them

Providing safety
In a hostile world:
Our constant gratitude.

As in this last century
The crowded trains
Taking us away from home

Became our baby baskets
Rattling to foreign parts
Our exodus from death.


----------



## Yogibear (Jul 17, 2018)

Another one from Lotte

*Silence*

Today the river slinks like oil,
Hardly a current in its mud
As autumn leaves crawl on its face.

I left them in their blinding talk
To meet adopted path and sky,
And bend the grass for light and space.

Here I can hold the air with birds,
Still, solitary in their flight
Without men's calculated race.

Now only sun and water rule
Unchallenged over silent pain:
And the burst cry of a grey swan.


----------



## chainsawjob (Aug 4, 2018)

Animals by Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in it's mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days


----------



## Idris2002 (Aug 4, 2018)

Yossarian said:


> *This Flag Not Fondly Waving*
> 
> now it's computers and more computers
> and soon everybody will have one,
> ...


And lo, it came to pass.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Aug 5, 2018)

*The Symbolic Life *
*Hayan Charara, 1972*
They kept showing up, for days,
dead on the windowsill,
and for days I did nothing about the ladybugs
except to ask if their entering the house
unnoticed and dying before I saw them
was symbolic.
Thinking so was easy.
They symbolized birth and death,
change and rebirth.
It was also possible the tiny beetles
embodied an inborn need
to show themselves,
to turn up in every and any place,
even as the dried-out remains of the once lively.
Or they stood for the burden of being one thing
relieved by becoming another,
which all the world’s children suffer.

This went on and on, and could’ve gone on
forever, so finally I opened the window
and blew them into the wide open
because everything and everyone should get a chance
to be mourned, and they got theirs,
but first they had to die, which is life,
not symbolism.


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 21, 2018)

irishman 16/12/1882


----------



## chainsawjob (Aug 26, 2018)

And Now Goodbye

by Jaroslav Seifert tr. by Ewald Osers


To all those million verses in the world
I've added just a few.
They probably were no wiser than a cricket's chirrup.
I know. Forgive me.
I'm coming to the end.

They weren't even the first footmarks
in the lunar dust.
If at times they sparkled after all
it was not their light.
I loved this language.

And that which forces silent lips
to quiver
will make young lovers kiss
as they stroll through re-gilded fields
under a sunset
slower than in the tropics.

Poetry is with us from the start.
Like loving,
like hunger, like the plague, like war.
At times my verses were embarrassingly foolish.

But I make no excuse.
I believe that seeking beautiful words
is better
than killing and murdering.


----------



## chainsawjob (Aug 26, 2018)

I Sing of Change

by Niyi Osundare


I sing 
of the beauty of Athens 
without it's slaves

Of a world free
of kings and queens
and other remnants
of an arbitrary past

Of earth
with no sharp north
or deep south
without blind crutains
or iron walls

Of the end
of warlords and armouries
and prisons of hate and fear

Of deserts treeing
and fruiting
after the quickening rains

Of the sun radiating ignorance
and stars informing
nights of unknowing

I sing of a world reshaped


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 12, 2018)

flag of ireland 5/12/1868


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 13, 2018)

irishman 22/10/1870


----------



## chainsawjob (Sep 27, 2018)

A home in dark grass - Robert Bly

In the deep fall the body awakes,
And we find lions on the seashore -
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises, the water is born,
Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.

We did not come to remain whole,
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken,
And start again; drawing up on great roots;

Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.

That we should learn of poverty and rags,
That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,
And swim in the sea,
Not always walking on dry land,
And, dancing, find in the trees a saviour,
A home in the dark grass,
And nourishment in death.


----------



## chainsawjob (Sep 27, 2018)

Dangerous Coats by Sharon Owens

Someone clever once said
Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets
To spread sedition
Which means unrest
To you and me
A grandiose word
For commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies, start sewing
Dangerous coats
Made of pockets and sedition


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 11, 2018)

irishman 16/6/1860


----------



## Mrs D (Oct 11, 2018)

It continues like this for 88 pages.


----------



## yield (Oct 19, 2018)

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 3, 2018)

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain,

of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today— O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home—

For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,

And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa's strand I came

To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free?

Not me?

Surely not me?

The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we've dreamed

And all the songs we've sung

And all the hopes we've held

And all the flags we've hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—

the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—

the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood,

whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry,

whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,

We must take back our land again,

America! O, yes, I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

-Langston Hughes


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Nov 6, 2018)

A Soldier's Grave

Then in the lull of midnight, gentle arms 
Lifted him slowly down the slopes of death 
Lest he should hear again the mad alarms 
Of battle, dying moans, and painful breath. 

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made 
A grave for him that he might better rest. 
So, Spring shall come and leave it seet arrayed, 
And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest

by Francis Ledwidge


----------



## 8115 (Nov 6, 2018)

Under Milk Wood
A Play for Voices
by
Dylan Thomas

First published 1954




					   UNDER MILK WOOD



	   [Silence]

	   FIRST VOICE (_Very softly_)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock,
the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are
sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers,
the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher,
postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman,
drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot
cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft
or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,
bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the
bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And
the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed
yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,
streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only _your_ eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the
invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed
stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the _Arethusa_, the
_Curlew_ and the _Skylark_, _Zanzibar_, _Rhiannon_, the _Rover_,
the _Cormorant_, and the _Star of Wales_ tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional
salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row,
it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,
the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in
bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and
bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes,
fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a
domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves;
in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night
in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its
hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot,
text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours
done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night
neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the
Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of
Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed;
tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the
slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you
can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats
over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth,
Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching
pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the
eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes
and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes
and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.


----------



## chainsawjob (Nov 11, 2018)

Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained:
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now..."


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 12, 2018)

*The Muted Mockery of Poppy (Cock) Day 
*
The ribbons arrayed the honours displayed
The medals jingling on parade
Echo of battles long ago
But they’re picking sides for another go. 

The martial air, the vacant stare
The oft-repeated pointless prayer
“Peace oh’ Lord on earth below”
Yet they’re picking sides for another go. 

The clasped hands, the pious stance
The hackneyed phrase “Somewhere in France”
The eyes downcast as bugles blow
Still they’re picking sides for another go. 

Symbol of death the cross-shaped wreath
The sword is restless in the sheath
As children pluck where poppies grow
They’re picking sides for another go. 

Have not the slain but died in vain?
The hoardings point, “Prepare again”
The former friend a future foe?
They’re picking sides for another go. 

I hear Mars laugh at the cenotaph
Says he, as statesmen blow the gaff
“Let the Unknown Warriors flame still glow”
For they’re picking sides for another go. 

A socialist plan the world would span
Then man would live in peace with man
Then wealth to all would freely flow
And want and war we would never know.

*											  James Boyle, 1971*


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 13, 2018)

8115 said:


> Under Milk Wood
> A Play for Voices
> by
> Dylan Thomas
> ...



I love this far more than 1 like.


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 18, 2018)

*Theory*
_Robin Becker_

As the animal returns on a beaten path
to the den, we go back over the facts
certain we ignored clear signs.

I left for Italy that summer, though
she had quit her job and moved back home.
I knew it signalled a bad turn but chose

the Tuscan love affair in the seventeenth-century
olive mill. We say we survive our siblings’
suicides, meaning we stood with our parents

at the unthinkable graves. In one theory,
the troubled family sacrifices one member,
as plants surrender leaves in times of drought.


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 12, 2018)

OZYMANDIAS - P.B. SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Dec 24, 2018)

*The Young Man's Song*
*W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939*
I whispered, "I am too young," 
And then, "I am old enough";   
Wherefore I threw a penny   
To find out if I might love.   
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair,"   
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,   
I am looped in the loops of her hair.   

Oh, love is the crooked thing,   
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,   
For he would be thinking of love   
Till the stars had run away,   
And the shadows eaten the moon.   
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 7, 2019)

*St. Distaff's Day*
_Robert Herrick_

PARTLY work and partly play
  You must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the plough soon free your team;
  Then come home and fother them;
If the maids a-spinning go, 		
  Burn the flax and fire the tow.
Bring in pails of water then,
  Let the maids bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right;
  Then bid Christmas sport good night, 		
And next morrow every one
  To his own vocation.


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Jan 11, 2019)

Brass Tacks by Natalya O Flaherty

She is only 18 I think.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2019)

*You Lie*

You lie in the great listening
ambushed, snowed in.

Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Sweden —

Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Eden —

The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for none, for everyone —

The Landwehrkanal will not roar.
Nothing
stops

Paul Celan (1967)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2019)

A repost - maybe should have waited till 19th but today is the day people will be paying most attention i think:

For Jan Palach, a Name Drawn by Lot, on the Anniversary of His Death the Third Day after Attempted Self-Immolation in Protest of Communist Occupation of Czechoslovakia, January 19, 1969

I taught in your building once,
the one renamed for you
by the professors of philosophy,
a beautiful four-square block
of a building built to last centuries,
facing west into the hills backing
the great Vltava.

Afternoons
in class, looking across the river
through the wall-high windows,
I could see the thousand-year-old
crown of the Castle glittering,
and at night, standing on the Charles,
celestial above the city.

From here,
in the old ghetto, at the new century,
it looked benign, like a blessing
on your house and the half-dozen
synagogues and dozen blocks
of dwellings brought back to life
after your cold war imitation

of the bonze priests in Vietnam,
who chose fighting fire with fire.
You almost died, then did, writing,
between life and death, that
I do not want anyone to imitate me.
The Soviets ignored you, though
they were mortal too in twenty years.

If I’d written your name with the poets
on the board, someone whose job it was
would’ve come along and erased it,
which is why pink marble and a plaque
were mounted at the entrance
of the building, whose former name
now no one can remember.

The námêsti,
the square that bears your name,
bore the names of soldiers
of the young Red Army—until nineteen
eighty-nine, the year no one had to die,
not God nor Kafka, for whom the fire
to warm the icy world was words.

Stanley Plumly


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 18, 2019)

*When Death Comes*
_Mary Oliver _

When death comes 
like the hungry bear in autumn; 
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 
when death comes 
like the measle-pox

when death comes 
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

US poet Mary Oliver dies aged 83


----------



## 8115 (Jan 18, 2019)

Trouble is not my middle name
By Liz Lochhead

Trouble is not my middle name.
It is not what I am.
I was not born for this.
Trouble is not a place
though I am in it deeper than the deepest wood
and I’d get out of it (who wouldn’t?) if I could.

Hope is what I do not have in hell –
not without good help, now. Could you
listen, listen hard and well
to what I cannot say except by what I do?

And when you say I do it for badness
this much is true:
I do it for badness done to me before
any badness that I do to you.

Hard to unfankle this.
But you can help me. Loosen
all these knots and really listen.
I cannot plainly tell you this, but, if you care,
then — beyond all harm and hurt –
real hope is there.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

Much Easier
By RYSZARD KRYNICKI

Your heart transmits and receives signals
from lost civilizations

your brain is a dead city in the distant future
grave robbers raise new mausoleums

papillary lines revolve in unknown spaces
card files have been burnt or pulped

your “you” is startled by your “I”

“nothing’s for certain” took the elevator down
while “anything can happen”
climbed the stairs

you grow harder harder
it’s much easier than it seems


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

To Trust by Szilárd Borbély

Agathon held a stone in his mouth
for three years, until he learned the art
of silence. When he knew how to be quiet

he decided that now he would study
patience. But he didn't have the patience for it. Someone
was always irritating him. If only I could

live alone!—he said. So he withdrew
to the desert. He carried water from afar.
One day, while he was filling his jug,

it was upset. He filled it again. But
again it was upset. He tried a third time,
in vain. Suddenly, his patience was used up,

and _he_ was upset. He smashed his earthen
vessel. Later on he came back to his senses
and asked it for forgiveness. And the jug

forgave him. And instructed him: "Have
faith in no one! There is no feeling more injurious
than trust. It is the begetter of every passion!"—

spoke the crockery. Agathon then returned
to the world of people. And lo and behold, from then on
he was wise in comprehension, tireless in work,

sparing with food. "Be as the dog,
who leaves when he is pestered." And so he left,
when he grew weary of the world's vexations.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

In Every Direction by Silvina Ocampo

We go leaving ourselves in every direction,
in beds, in rooms, in fields, in seas, in cities,
and each one of those fragments
that has ceased to be us, continues being
as always us, making us 
jealous and hostile.
“What will it do that I would like to do?”
we think. “Who will it see that I would like to see?”
We often receive chance news
of that creature . . .
We enter its dreams
when it dreams of us,
loving it
like those whom we love most;
we knock at its doors
with burning hands,
we think it will return in the illusion of belonging to us
mistaken as before
but it will keep being treacherous and unreachable.
As with our rivals we would kill it. We will only be able
to glimpse it in photographs. It must survive us.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

Dolphins by Silvina Ocampo

Dolphins don’t play in the waves
as people think.
Dolphins fall asleep going down to the ocean floor.
What are they looking for?  I don’t know.
When they touch the end of the water
abruptly they awake
and rise again because the sea is very deep
and when they rise, what are they looking for?
I don’t know.
And they see the sky and it makes them sleepy again
and they go back down asleep,
and they touch the ocean floor again
and awaken and rise back up.
Our dreams are like that.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

The Pines by Silvina Ocampo

You didn’t listen to the beating of a tree’s heart,
couched against the trunk gazing upwards,
you didn’t see the leaves moving
with the throb of a heart,
you didn’t feel the shudder
of the swaying branches above your body,
you didn’t listen to the heart of the pines
when the wind moves them and those leaves
that are like green fragrant pins
fall, and when the clouds pass,
you didn’t see that the world was turning,
the entire world, and you didn’t feel
that the sky was drawing near,
was entering inside the pines,
and that you were disappearing, penetrating with it
inside the pines, becoming in that sky another tree.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)

I come back to this over and over again

From East Coker by TS Eliot

III.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

						You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 4, 2019)




----------



## Santino (Feb 5, 2019)

Dillinger4 said:


>


In my end is my beginning.


----------



## Winot (Feb 5, 2019)

Dillinger4 said:


>



East Coker


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Feb 13, 2019)

A True Account Of Talking To The Sun On Fire Island
By Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud 
and clear, saying "Hey! I've been 
trying to wake you up for fifteen 
minutes. Don't be so rude, you are 
only the second poet I've ever chosen 
to speak to personally 

so why 
aren't you more attentive? If I could 
burn you through the window I would 
to wake you up. I can't hang around 
here all day." 

"Sorry, Sun, I stayed 
up late last night talking to Hal." 

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was 
a lot more prompt" the Sun said 
petulantly. "Most people are up 
already waiting to see if I'm going 
to put in an appearance." 

I tried 
to apologize "I missed you yesterday." 
"That's better" he said. "I didn't 
know you'd come out." "You may be 
wondering why I've come so close?" 
"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot 
wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me 
anyway. 

"Frankly I wanted to tell you 
I like your poetry. I see a lot 
on my rounds and you're okay. You may 
not be the greatest thing on earth, but 
you're different. Now, I've heard some 
say you're crazy, they being excessively 
calm themselves to my mind, and other 
crazy poets think that you're a boring 
reactionary. Not me. 

Just keep on 
like I do and pay no attention. You'll 
find that people always will complain 
about the atmosphere, either too hot 
or too cold too bright or too dark, days 
too short or too long. 

If you don't appear 
at all one day they think you're lazy 
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it. 

And don't worry about your lineage 
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on 
the jungle, you know, on the tundra 
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were 
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting 
for you to get to work. 

And now that you 
are making your own days, so to speak, 
even if no one reads you but me 
you won't be depressed. Not 
everyone can look up, even at me. It 
hurts their eyes." 
"Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!" 

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's 
easier for me to speak to you out 
here. I don't have to slide down 
between buildings to get your ear. 
I know you love Manhattan, but 
you ought to look up more often. 

And 
always embrace things, people earth 
sky stars, as I do, freely and with 
the appropriate sense of space. That 
is your inclination, known in the heavens 
and you should follow it to hell, if 
necessary, which I doubt. 

Maybe we'll 
speak again in Africa, of which I too 
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now 
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem 
in that brain of yours as my farewell." 

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake 
at last. "No, go I must, they're calling 
me." 
"Who are they?" 

Rising he said "Some 
day you'll know. They're calling to you 
too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 13, 2019)

from "fungi from yuggoth" by h.p. lovecraft


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 22, 2019)

To Ryszard Krynicki - A Letter by Zbigniew Herbert

Not much will remain Ryszard in truth not much 
of the poetry of our mad century Rilke Eliot sure 
a few other worthy shamans who knew the secret 
of word spells time-resistant forms without which 
no phrase deserves memory and speech is like sand 

our school notebooks subjected to earnest torture 
with their traces of sweat tears and blood will be 
to the eternal proofreader a song without a score 
nobly righteous and all too self-evident 

we came too easily to believe beauty does not save 
that it leads wantons from dream to dream to death 
none of us was able to wake the dryad of a poplar 
or to decipher the handwriting of the clouds 
that is why no unicorn will stray across our tracks 
we’ll raise up no ship in the bay no peacock no rose 
nakedness was left to us and we stand here naked 
on the right the better side of the tryptych 
The Last Judgment 

we took public affairs onto our lanky shoulders 
the battle with tyranny lies the recording of pain 
but our foes - you admit - were despicably small 
and so was it worth it to bring down holy speech 
to rostrum gibberish to a newspaper’s black foam 

so little joy - sister of the gods - in our poems Ryszard 
too few glimmering twilights mirrors wreaths ecstasies 
nothing just obscure psalmodies the whine of animulae 
urns of ash in a burned-out garden 

		  what forces do we need - in spite of destiny 
		  the decrees of history and human iniquity - 
		  to whisper a good night in treason’s garden 

		  what forces of the spirit do we need 
		  blindly beating despair against despair 
		  to ignite a spark a word of atonement 

		  that the dancing circle might last on the soft grass 
		  that a child’s birth and every beginning be blessed 
		  the gifts of the air of the earth of fire and of water 

I don’t know - my friend - and that’s why 
I send you these owl’s riddles in the night 
a warm embrace 

		  a bow from my shadow


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 22, 2019)

The Colonel by CAROLYN FORCHÉ

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went   
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 22, 2019)




----------



## chainsawjob (Feb 24, 2019)

Like Otters by Holly McNish

Maybe there's no fear
that we'll float far apart
from each other
in these waters
as moon calls the tide

but cosy in bed, still
I rest so much better
like otters, together
your warm hand in mine


----------



## Dillinger4 (Mar 15, 2019)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre 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?


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 3, 2019)

Epigram: British Journalist. 
by Humbert Wolfe.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank god) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 10, 2019)

Here's a poem, a beautiful one. Can you guys help me find out who wrote it? Apparently I did a screenshotbut didn't take one of the source


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 10, 2019)

Caroline Bird – In These Days of Prohibition


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 10, 2019)

Dillinger4 said:


> Caroline Bird – In These Days of Prohibition


After I posted that I thought to tag you


----------



## killer b (Apr 22, 2019)




----------



## ShiftyBagLady (Apr 26, 2019)

Morning poem from Derek Mahon


----------



## killer b (Apr 26, 2019)

A topical one from 1984 (thanks to the LRB twitter feed)

The Philosophical Phallus
Clive James

_Female desire aims to subdue, overcome and pacify the unbridled ambition of the phallus - Roger Scruton_

The unbridled phallus of the philosopher
Was seen last week galloping across the South Downs,
Flame spurting from its flared nostril.

The phallus being a horse in which
Both mane and tail are bunched together at the back end,
This unharnessed piece of horseflesh was of necessity unable
To accompany with a display of shaken neck-hair
The tossing of its head,
But the tossing of its head was tremendous nevertheless,
Like that of Bucephalus, the steed of Alexander.

Where the lush grass curves up to the rim of the chalk cliffs
So that they drop away where you cannot see them
When looking from inland,
Such was the cyclorama against which ran rampant
The unbridled phallus of the philosopher,
Pulling lawn like an emerald treadmill incessantly beneath
The unravelling thunder of its hooves –
Accoutrements which a phallus does not normally possess
But perhaps in this case they were retractable
Like the undercarriage of some large, cigar-shaped aircraft –
The Starlifter, for example, or the C-5 Galaxy.

See where it comes across the Ontological Divide
Separating Men and Women!
The unbridled phallus in its frightening hauteur,
Gushing suds with each procreative snort –
Not the small, dog-skulled horse of the Greeks and the Etruscans,
But the horse of the Persians as noted by Herodotus,
Big, built thickly, hefty-headed,
Its two great globular hindquarters throbbing
Like the throats of rutting frogs.

The prancing pudendum curls its lip but says Yes to Life:
It is a yea-neigher.
Not only does it say ‘ha-ha!’ among the trumpets,
But in the landscaped gardens of fashionable country houses
It trumpets among the ha-has,
And the pulsing vein of its back is not afraid.

Though fleet-footed as an Arab it is stronger than a Clydesdale,
Shouldered like a Shire, bulk-bodied like a Suffolk –
A standing, foam-flanked reproach
To all those of us more appropriately represented
By the Shetland Pony,
Or that shrunken, shrivelled toy horse with the mule-tail
_Equus przewalskii_, Prejvalsky’s horse
From the Kobdo district of western Mongolia.

At nightfall the women of storm-swept lonely farms,
Or at casement windows of the grand houses aforesaid,
Or women anywhere who languish unfulfilled _qua_ women,
Feel their Ontological Divide transformed to jelly
At the vibrant snuffle in the distance –
Long to subdue it, to overcome it, to pacify it,
Willing it homeward to its chosen stable,
Which will suffer its presence all the more exquisitely
For being neither deep nor wide enough wholly to contain

The unbridled ambition of the philosophical phallus


----------



## Bajie (Apr 30, 2019)

The ancient oak
Bore witness to us
Laughing beneath it
Bathed in summer haze

Now winters frosted moon
Rises
Dragging silver shadows
From the leafless tree

It stands now in solitude
Silhouetted against the black sky
As if grieving 
For the love it once witnessed
Which is no more.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 1, 2019)

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 1, 2019)

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I've decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place	
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 19, 2019)

_The glittering leaves of the rhododendrons
Balance and vibrate in the cool air;
While in the sky above them
White clouds chase each other._


----------



## Yossarian (May 21, 2019)

*"That the Earth is suspended..."*
_Rosanna Warren_

As scilla prinks out, purple, from half-thawed clods
and the cardinal flings his ribbon of song
in two high arcs, then trails the vibrato among the boughs

May unclenches. But not enough.
Buds grip fetal leaves. Each night
scatters frost. On sidewalks we tread on broken sky.

You are sick, and far away. The world is in flux
said Anaximander: worlds are born, appear,
and disappear. We perish, even the gods

fade. Spare me the industrial daffodils
poking through scraps of snow. The season will have
its hard birth, and we will be dragged

into light. For how many years
has that ill corroded your gut? Whirlwinds, typhoons
break out of the cloud, the tearing makes thunder, the crack

against black makes the flash. So natural
philosophy began. You watched glaciers slide
and crash at the tip of the earth, you floated on a rope

into ice crevasses to catch the gleam
and the groan. Ice sculpted the planet,
and sculpts it still: you hammered aluminum

into that shape. The stars are a wheel of fire
broken off from earth fire, surrounded by air.
We came from the unlimited, to it we return. So taught

Anaximander of Miletus, who thought we would be destroyed.


----------



## ShiftyBagLady (May 25, 2019)

*The posh mums are boxing in the square*
*by Wayne Holloway-Smith*


roughing each other up	in a nice way
This is not the world into which I was born
		   so I’m changing it
I’m sinking deep into the past and dressing my own mum
in their blue spandexes
svelte black stripes from hip to hem
and husbands with better dispositions toward kindness
or at least	I’m giving her new lungs
I’m giving her a best friend	with no problems and both of them pads
some gloves to go at each other with	in a nice way
I’m making it a warm day for them but also
I’m making it rain
the two of them dapping it out in long shadows
I’m watching her from the trees grow
strength in her thighs	my mum
grow strength in her glutes my mum
her back taught upright
her knees
and watching her grow no bad thing in her stomach no tumour
her feet do not hurt to touch	my mum she is hopping
sinews are happening
wiry arms developing their full reach
no bad thing explodes

sweat and not gradual death	I’m cheering
no thing in her stomach no alcohol
no cigarettes with their crotonaldehyde let my dad keep those
no removal of her womb
– and I’m cheering her on in better condition
cheering she is learning to fight for her own body
in spandex her new life
and though there is no beef between them
if her friend is gaining the upper hand
I will call out from the trees
		her name
						Christine!
and when she turns	as turn she must
my mum		   in the nicest possible way
can slug her right in the gut


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2019)

The dead are getting more restless each day.

They used to be easy
we’d put on stiff collars flowers
praised their names on long lists
shrines of the homeland
remarkable shadows
monstrous marble.

The corpses signed away for posterity
returned to formation
and marched to the beat of our old music.

But not anymore
the dead
have changed.

They get all ironic
they ask questions.

It seems to me they’ve started to realise
they’re becoming the majority!


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2019)

Laws are created to be followed
by the poor.
Laws are made by the rich
to bring some order to exploitation.
The poor are the only law abiders in history.
When the poor make laws
the rich will be no more.


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2019)

In capitalism it’s a lie to say:
“Take care, you’re worth your weight in gold.”
Because in capitalism only the owners
of gold are worth their weight in gold.

In the construction of socialism
one no longer lies and it can be said:
“You’re worth more than gold, but
it’s necessary to take care of
the gold of social property,
Foreign exchange is important.”

Only in communism can it be said:
“You’re worth what you’re worth.
Gold has nothing to do with what you’re worth.”

In communism gold only has value
through the use workers and citizens 
give it,
for example in dentistry
in decoration
or in adorning the necks
or ears of girls.


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## Dillinger4 (Jun 21, 2019)

In ancient Greece
Aristotle taught philosophy to his disciples
while they walked across a large courtyard.

Because of this his school was called “the peripatetic.”

Fighting poets
are peripateticker than those Aristotelian peripatetics
because we apprehend the philosophy and poetry of the people
while traveling
through the cities and mountains of our land


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## Dillinger4 (Jul 9, 2019)

O foul descent! that I who erst contended

With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind

Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime,

This essence to incarnate and imbrute,

That to the hight of Deitie aspir’d;

But what will not Ambition and Revenge

Descend to? who aspires must down as low

As high he soard, obnoxious first or last exposed

To basest things.


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## Idris2002 (Aug 8, 2019)

* The Council of the Gods, by Kit Wright *

Lay no blame. Have pity.
Put your fingers in the wounds of the Committee.

They never reached your item.
Disputing Item One ad infinitum.

Lay no blame. Be tender.
The retrospective start of the agenda.

Was all they managed treating.
Consider, pray, the feeling of the meeting.

(They felt awful). Not surprising
They never came to matters not arising.

From Matters Arising:
Who took the chair when the standing committee last sat?
Who kept the minutes for hours and hours and hours?
Who tabled the motion,
Who motioned the table
Whereat
The standing committee
Sat? Have pity.
Put your fingers in the wounds of the committee.

The gods have not been sleeping.
All night they sat, in grief and boredom, weeping.


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## Pickman's model (Aug 8, 2019)

the kraken wakes
alfred lord tennyson

below the thunders of the upper deep,
far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
the kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
about his shadowy sides: above him swell
huge sponges of millennial growth and height; 
and far away into the sickly light,
from many a wondrous grot and secret cell
unnumbered and enormous polypi
winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
there hath he lain for ages and will lie
battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
until the latter fire shall heat the deep; 
then once by men and angels to be seen,
in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Aug 14, 2019)

Lies About Love
We are all liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
as if it were a coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud. 

DH Lawrence


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## Pickman's model (Aug 14, 2019)

the one black stain
robert e howard

They carried him out on the barren sand
where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand 
as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land
wail to the lonely tide.

Drake faced them all like a lion at bay,
with his lion head upflung:
"Dare ye my word of law defy,
to say this traitor shall not die?"
And his captains dared not meet his eye
but each man held his tongue.

Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of sober face:
"Worthy of death he may well be,
but the trial ye held was mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where justice hid her face.

"More of the man had ye been, on deck
your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of the law."

Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake.
"Puritan knave!" swore he.
"Headsman! Give him the axe instead!
He shall strike off yon traitor's head!"
Solomon folded his arms and said,
darkly and somberly:

"I am no slave for your butcher's work."
"Bind him with triple strands!"
Drake roared and the men obeyed,
Hesitantly, as if afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade
and pinioned his iron hands.

They bent the doomed man over to his knees,
the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend,
one last long look they saw him send,
At Drake his judge and his one time friend
who dared not meet his eye.

The axe flashed silver in the sun,
a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear,
and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near
above the lonely strand.

"This be every traitor's end!"
Drake cried, and yet again.
Slowly his captains turned and went
and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent
in the eyes of Solomon Kane.

Night fell on the crawling waves;
the admiral's door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold;
his irons clashed as the ship rolled.
And his guard, grown weary and overbold,
lay down his pipe and dozed.

He woke with a hand at his corded throat
that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key,
and the somber Puritan stood free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously
with the wrath that is slow to rise.

Unseen, to the admiral's door,
went Solomon Kane from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship,
the guard's keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip
through the door unbarred.

Drake at the table sat alone,
his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping --
but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping,
death's swiftly flowing sands.

He reached no hand for gun or blade
to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see,
lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery,
and bitter, cankering pain.

A moment Solomon Kane stood there,
the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird,
and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred
And Kane went forth without a word
and closed the cabin door.


----------



## barlimo (Aug 16, 2019)

*Tithonus*
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, 
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, 
And after many a summer dies the swan. 
Me only cruel immortality 
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, 
Here at the quiet limit of the world, 
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream 
The ever-silent spaces of the East, 
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. 

		 Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— 
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, 
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd 
To his great heart none other than a God! 
I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' 
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, 
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give. 
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, 
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, 
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd 
To dwell in presence of immortal youth, 
Immortal age beside immortal youth, 
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love, 
Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now, 
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, 
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears 
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: 
Why should a man desire in any way 
To vary from the kindly race of men 
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance 
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? 

		 A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes 
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. 
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals 
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, 
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd. 
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom, 
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, 
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team 
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, 
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, 
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. 

		 Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful 
In silence, then before thine answer given 
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. 

		 Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, 
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, 
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true? 
'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.' 

		 Ay me! ay me! with what another heart 
In days far-off, and with what other eyes 
I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd— 
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw 
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; 
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood 
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all 
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, 
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm 
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds 
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd 
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, 
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, 
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. 

		 Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: 
How can my nature longer mix with thine? 
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold 
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet 
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam 
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes 
Of happy men that have the power to die, 
And grassy barrows of the happier dead. 
Release me, and restore me to the ground; 
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave: 
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; 
I earth in earth forget these empty courts, 
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.


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## ShiftyBagLady (Aug 17, 2019)

I've just discovered the most wonderful poet 

*Dreams*
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY CLARE CAVANAGH AND STANISLAW BARANCZAK

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft, 
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps— 
in a split second the dream 
piles before us mountains as stony 
as real life. 

And since mountains, then valleys, plains 
with perfect infrastructures. 
Without engineers, contractors, workers, 
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies— 
raging highways, instant bridges, 
thickly populated pop-up cities. 

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen— 
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us 
and when to vanish. 

Without architects deft in their craft, 
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy, 
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps 
and walls constructed out of solid air. 

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly, 
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers, 
a bitten apple with teeth marks. 

And we—unlike circus acrobats, 
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists— 
can fly unfledged, 
we light dark tunnels with our eyes, 
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues, 
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead. 

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom, 
the choices of our heart, our tastes, 
we’re swept away 
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings. 

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, 
the doctors with couches for analyses— 
if anything fits, 
it’s accidental, 
and for one reason only, 
that in our dreamings, 
in their shadowings and gleamings, 
in their multiplings, inconceivablings, 
in their haphazardings and widescatterings 
at times even a clear-cut meaning 
may slip through.


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## Ceej (Aug 20, 2019)

Touch of the Mary Oliver's there, ShiftyBagLady - just lovely.


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## killer b (Aug 23, 2019)




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## JuanTwoThree (Aug 23, 2019)

A Shropshire Lad 31: A. E. HOUSMAN

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; 
	  His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves; 
The gale, it plies the saplings double, 
	  And thick on Severn snow the leaves. 

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger 
	  When Uricon the city stood: 
'Tis the old wind in the old anger, 
	  But then it threshed another wood. 

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman 
	  At yonder heaving hill would stare: 
The blood that warms an English yeoman, 
	  The thoughts that hurt him, they were there. 

There, like the wind through woods in riot, 
	  Through him the gale of life blew high; 
The tree of man was never quiet: 
	  Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I. 

The gale, it plies the saplings double, 
	  It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone: 
To-day the Roman and his trouble 
	  Are ashes under Uricon.


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## 8115 (Sep 11, 2019)




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## Dillinger4 (Sep 29, 2019)

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!


----------



## pseudonarcissus (Sep 30, 2019)

By Richard Scott


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## killer b (Sep 30, 2019)

I love this one in the latest LRB

*On the Psychological Effect of Living with Houseplants
*
Stephanie Bishop

Not long ago I found myself in
conversation with a group of people about
the effect of living with houseplants. They
were proselytising the health benefits and
comparing Instagram shots on their
phones, where everyone aspired to the
same sparse white living room decorated
with pops of green. I confessed however,
that I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive – I
couldn’t keep a houseplant alive to save
my life, I think I said – and that despite my
desire to do otherwise, this is one thing
that I routinely fail at. I say to my husband,
‘Look, it is dying,’ and he says, ‘That’s
because it just needs water.’ Even though I
know this, even though he has told me, I
still do not water it. Instead, some small
voice in me insists that the plant has it in
itself to survive a little longer. My husband
takes pity on the limp leaves, he worries
about them, and waters the plant with care
from a special can with a long narrow
spout that allows him to direct the water
with great precision, at the very base of
the plant where the pale stem descends
into the pot of soil. I am grateful that he
does this because I cannot, because the
thoughts I direct to the plant are the same
thoughts I direct to myself, which are the
thoughts, I realise, that my mother
directed to me: You don’t need to eat yet,
You can’t possibly still be thirsty, How can
you be tired already? Surely you can do
better than that. Both my husband and I
humanise our houseplants, we
anthropomorphise them, and because of
this I look at the living plant and think it
should make its livingness go a little
further, stretch it out, test it, live harder
on less, strive to be upright, and each time
I do this I feel myself dehumanised, little
by little more. I would like not to be this
kind of person, this person who refuses to
give water when water is so clearly needed.
But it runs in the family, this failure to
keep houseplants alive. My mother cannot
do it either, and now I wonder how her
mother spoke to her, which might have
been the same but could have been
different or perhaps it was just split
somehow because I remember my
grandmother tending a patio of brilliantly
flowering impatiens, red and orange and
hot pink, and on her coffee table there was
always a vase of deeply perfumed roses
that she had grown herself. Perhaps she
told her daughter, my mother, to hurry on
now and not bother her and sort her
livingness out on her own because she had
houseplants to water.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 3, 2019)

for national poetry day


----------



## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2019)

Manifesto by Nicanor Parts

Ladies and gentlemen
This is our last word
– Our first and last word –
The poets have come down from Olympus.

For the oldest
Poetry was a kind of luxury
For us, however
First need is:
We can’t live without poetry.

Unlike the older ones
– And I say this with all due respect –
We support
That the poet is not an alchemist
The poet is a man, too
A builder who builds his wall:
A door and window manufacturer.

We talk
In the language of everyday
We don’t believe in cabbalistic signs

And something else:
The poet is here
So the tree doesn’t grow crookedly.

This is our message.
We denounce the poet creator
The cheap poet
The rat in the library poet.
All these gentlemen
– And I say this with all due respect –
Should be accused and judged
For building castles in the air
For waste space and time
Composing sonnets for the moon
For grouping words together at random
According to the latest Paris fashion.
For us not:
Thought is not born in the mouth
It is born in the heart of the heart.

We renounce
The poetry of dark glasses
The poetry of the cape and the sword
The poetry of the shadow of a big wing.
Instead, we favour
The poetry of the naked eye
The poetry of the uncovered chest
The poetry of the naked head.

We do not believe in nymphs or tritons.
Poetry must be this:

We do not believe in nymphs or thirds.
Poetry must be this:
A girl surrounded by sprigs
Or, it is absolutely nothing.

Now, at a political level
These are our direct ancestors
Our good direct ancestors!
They were refracted and dispersed
Passing through a crystal prism.
Some of them became communists.
I do not know if they really were.
Suppose, however, they were.
What I know is this:
They were noτ folk poets
They have been venerable bourgeois poets.
Things must be called by their name:
Only one or two
Have touched people heart.
Whenever they found the opportunity
They were expressed in words and in action
Against guided poetry
Against the poetry of today
Against the poetry of proletariat.

Even if we accept as they were communists
Their poetry was a disaster
Second hand surrealism
Third hand decadentism,
Old planks returned by the sea.
Poetry of the adjectives
Poetry nasal, laryngeal
Poetry arbitrary
Poetry copied from books
Poetry based
In the revolution of words
While it should be based
In the revolution of ideas.
Vicious cycle poetry
for a half a dozen chosen ones
“Absolute freedom of expression”

Today wewe cross ourselves asking
Why did they write these things,
To scare the petty bourgeois?
Miserably wasted time!
The petty bourgeois don’t react
Unless it’s about their stomach.

Do not they scare with poems!

Things are as follows:
While they supported
A poetry of the twilight
A poetry of the night time
We recommend
The poetry of dawn.
Our message is this:
The flashes of poetry
Must arrive to everyone, equally
Poetry is enough for everyone.

Nothing further, companions
We condemn
– And I say this with all due respect –
Poetry of the little god
Poetry of the sacred cow
Poetry of the furious bull.

Against the poetry of the clouds
We set up
The poetry of solid ground
– Cold head, warm heart
We are decidedly solid-groundists –
Against the poetry of the cafe
We set the poetry of nature
Against the poetry of the loungeroom
The poetry of the public square
The poetry of social protest.

The poets have come down from Olympus.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2019)

Rollercoaster by Nicanor Parts

For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.
I'm not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2019)

Let the More Loving One be Me by WH Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 4, 2019)

This one is for me, after going through an extremely shit time in the past few months

After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


----------



## wiskey (Oct 24, 2019)

This has given me thinking fodder today 

*Autobiography in Five Short Chapters*
*By Portia Nelson*
_
I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place
but, it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street_


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## Baronage-Phase (Oct 27, 2019)

Remembering Sylvia Plath


Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 7, 2019)

*November*
_Margaret Atwood_

This creature kneeling
dusted with snow, its teeth
grinding together, sound of old stones
at the bottom of a river

You lugged it to the barn
I held the lantern,
we leaned over it
as if it were being born.

The sheep hangs upside down from the rope,
a long fruit covered with wool and rotting.
It waits for the dead wagon
to harvest it.

Mournful November
this is the image
you invent for me,
the dead sheep came out of your head, a legacy:

Kill what you can’t save
what you can’t eat throw out
what you can’t throw out bury

What you can’t bury give away
what you can’t give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 11, 2019)

Just scanned this in from an old socialist newspaper.

*How Will You Vote? (1909)
From the November 13th, 1909 issue of The Western Clarion*

How will you vote, fellow-worker?
   Have you given the matter a thought?
Will you prove befooled when the last votes polled,
   By bribe or promise bought? 

Will you vote for the same old parties
  By whom you’re bought and sold?
Will you bow once more, as you’ve oft before,
  To the cursed rule of Gold? 

Will you vote to be saddled and bridled
  And rode by a grafting crew?
Will you say that what was your father's lot
   Is good enough for you? 

Will you vote to be human cattle?
   For your babes to be the same?
Will you throw away your vote today 
  To their wrong and your shame? 

Will you vote again for the master class,
  For their right to rule and rob?
Will you vote that the best you can hope for the rest
  Of life is (perhaps) a Job? 

A job that is merely lent to you,
  At your master's will to lose;
Thraldom for'you and your children, too,
   Is this the lot you'll choose? 

Will you vote for a life uncertain. 
   Which constant cares annoy?
To suffer need, to sweat and bleed,
   That Idlers may enjoy? 

Or will you vote for a grand new right?
   The right to be really free,
The right to produce for the workers' use,
   The right to security. 

Will you vote for the Socialist demand?—
   THE WORLD FOR THOSE WHO WORK;
The means of wealth and comfort and health,
   And "naught for those who shirk.” 

Think of these things well, brother,
   And it will come to pass
That your vote will be a vote. to be free,
   A vote for the working class!
*															Wilfrid Gribble*


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## killer b (Nov 21, 2019)

Ode to Clothes

Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely
risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollows of your legs,
and so embraced
by your indefatigable faithfulness
I rise, to tread the grass,
enter poetry,
consider through the windows,
the things,
the men, the women,
the deeds and the fights
go on forming me,
go on making me face things
working my hands,
opening my eyes,
using my mouth,
and so,
clothes,
I too go forming you,
extending your elbows,
snapping your threads,
and so your life expands
in the image of my life.
In the wind
you billow and snap
as if you were my soul,
at bad times
you cling
to my bones,
vacant, for the night,
darkness, sleep
populate with their phantoms
your wings and mine.
I wonder
if one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will leave you stained with my blood
and then
you will die with me
or one day
not quite
so dramatic
but simple,
you will fall ill,
clothes,
with me,
grow old
with me, with my body
and joined
we will enter
the earth.
Because of this
each day
I greet you
with reverence and then
you embrace me and I forget you,
because we are one
and we will go on
facing the wind, in the night,
the streets or the fight,
a single body,
one day, one day, some day, still.

Pablo Neruda


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 4, 2019)

irishman 18/8/1877


----------



## 8115 (Dec 13, 2019)

We've had it before but I think it's today's poem.

*Bad New Government*
*by Emily Berry*


Love,	   I woke in an empty flat					  to a bad new government;
it was cold		  the fridge was still empty			   my heart, that junkie,
was still chomping on the old fuel			_vroom_, I start the day like a tired
	motorcyclist	 I want to go very fast and email you about the following
happy circumstances: early rosebuds, a birthday party, a new cake recipe but
  today it’s hot water bottles and austerity breakfast and my toast burns in protest

	  You are not here of course but you live in me like a tiny valve of a man
you light up my chambers		   Later I will call to tell you about the new
	   prime minister,	  the worrying new developments	  and about how
I am writing my first political poem	 which is also (always) about my love for you


----------



## Baronage-Phase (Dec 27, 2019)

*Lightenings viii*

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Seamus Heaney 

(Read at funeral today. )


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 28, 2020)

THE HOUSE OF CAESAR - Viola Garvin

Yea — we have thought of royal robes and red.
Had purple dreams of words we utterèd;
Have lived once more the moment in the brain
That stirred the multitude to shout again.
All done, all fled, and now we faint and tire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — we have launched a ship on sapphire seas,
And felt the steed between the gripping knees;
Have breathed the evening when the huntsman brought
The stiffening trophy of the fevered sport —
Have crouched by rivers in the grassy meads
To watch for fish that dart amongst the weeds.
All well, all good — so hale from sun and mire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yet — we have thought of Love as men may think,
Who drain a cup because they needs must drink;
Have brought a jewel from beyond the seas
To star a crown of blue anemones.
All fled, all done — a Cæsar's brief desire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — and what is there that we have not done,
The Gods provided us 'twixt sun and sun?
Have we not watched an hundred legions thinned,
And crushed and conquered, succorèd and sinned?
Lo — we who moved the lofty gods to ire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — and what voice shall reach us and shall give
Our earthly self a moment more to live?
What arm shall fold us and shall come between
Our failing body and the grasses green?
And the last heart that beats beneath this head —
Shall it be heard or unrememberèd?
All dim, all pale — so lift me on the pyre —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 2, 2020)

Ancient History by Jamie McKendrick

The year began with baleful auguries:
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires, 
the waves lethargic under a coat of pitch 
the length of the coastline. And a cow spoke, 
which happened last year too, although last year 
no one believed cows spoke. Worse was to come. 
There was a bloody rain of lumps of meat 
which flocks of gulls snatched in mid-air 
while what they missed fell to the ground 
where it lay for days without festering. 
Then a wind tore up a forest of holm-oaks 
and jackdaws pecked the eyes from sheep. 
Officials construing the Sibylline Books 
told of helmeted aliens occupying 
the cross-roads, and high places of the city. 
Blood might be shed. Avoid, they warned, 
factions and in-fights. The tribunes claimed 
this was the usual con-trick 
trumped up to stonewall the new law 
about to be passed. Violence was only curbed 
by belief in a rumour that the tribes 
to the east had joined forces and forged 
weapons deadlier than the world has seen 
and that even then the hooves of their scouts 
had been heard in the southern hills. 
The year ended fraught with the fear of war. 
Next year began with baleful auguries.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 2, 2020)

as the twentieth century fades out 
the nineteenth begins 
.......................................again 
it is as if nothing happened 
though those who lived it thought 
that everything was happening 
enough to name a world for & a time 
to hold it in your hand 
unlimited.......the last delusion 
like the perfect mask of death


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 2, 2020)

America by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, "Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 2, 2020)

Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna.

Dante Aligheri Canto XXXIII, lines 85-87


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 21, 2020)

No war but class war
Arm the proletariat
Eat the fucking rich


----------



## Aladdin (Mar 18, 2020)

> *Bread and Roses*
> 
> As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
> A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
> ...


----------



## 8115 (Mar 18, 2020)

*The Applicant*
BY SYLVIA PLATH

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of _that_?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.


----------



## Aladdin (Mar 23, 2020)




----------



## Saunders (Apr 9, 2020)

W S Graham’s ‘Lines on Roger Hilton’s watch’. 




__





						Lines On Roger Hilton's Watch - Poetry Archive
					

Which I was given because I loved him and we had Terrible times together. O tarnished ticking time Piece with your bent hand, You must be used to being Looked at suddenly In the middle of the night When...




					poetryarchive.org


----------



## chainsawjob (Apr 18, 2020)

i'm too tired to talk today
i've nothing interesting to say
you can still come round for tea
i'd love the company
if you're happy just to sit
we could read our books together
i might take a nap
i would love to see your face
i just can't be arsed to chat

Hollie McNish


----------



## chainsawjob (Apr 27, 2020)

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann



Amazing spoken word version here


----------



## chainsawjob (May 25, 2020)

I am - by John Clare (written in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum 1848)

I am - yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes -
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange - nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2020)

For them prats in London:

*The Return*

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,          
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain      
Wavering!      

See, they return, one, and by one,              
With fear, as half-awakened; 
As if the snow should hesitate           
And murmur in the wind,      
            and half turn back;     
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"         
            inviolable.       

Gods of the wingèd shoe!      
With them the silver hounds, 
            sniffing the trace of air!         

Haie! Haie!            
    These were the swift to harry;        
These the keen-scented;         
These were the souls of blood.          

Slow on the leash,      
            pallid the leash-men!
_
Ezra Pound_


----------



## flypanam (Jun 18, 2020)

When horses die, they breathe
When grasses die, they wither,
When suns die, they go out,
When people die, they sing songs.


by Khlebnikov


----------



## killer b (Jul 16, 2020)

killer b said:


> Ode to Clothes
> 
> Every morning you wait,
> clothes, over a chair,
> ...


In March, the actor Samuel West asked for suggestions of poems for him to read out for a lockdown poetry project - I asked for this, and then promptly forgot about it. 

However! This morning he tweeted me to let me know it was going live today (the project seems to have expanded to include other actors, so mine was read by Gemma Whelan, who I seem to have seen quite a bit on telly and in films lately, which is nice).



another 373 poems to plough through on his soundcloud too...


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 4, 2020)

*The Night Before She Died*
_Susan Paddon_

Maria dreamed of the yard in Yalta.
All of the fruit trees were crying
and she didn't know why. The dogs were there.
Olga too, just back from America, eating a giant
pumpkin pie in the shade. Maria sat down
in the middle of the lawn and began to laugh.
She laughed so hard her stomach cramped and
then her feet began to rise involuntarily.
The movement continued to her knees and hips,
and before she knew it, she was floating upside down
her dress billowing in the warm breeze,
and still she was laughing, utterly and
uncontrollably now. The trees stopped crying
to look at her, and all at once they began laughing too.


----------



## RedRedRose (Aug 13, 2020)

Young and Old

“When all the world is young, lad,
  And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
  And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
  And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
  And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
  And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
  And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
  The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
  You loved when all was young.”


----------



## killer b (Sep 2, 2020)

Diane Wakoski


----------



## Sprocket. (Oct 26, 2020)

The Hare

In the black furrow of a field
I saw an old witch-hare this night;
And she cocked a lissome ear,
And she eyed the moon so bright,
And she nibbled o’ the green;
And I whispered ‘Whsst! witch-hare’,
Away like a ghostie o’er the field
She fled, and left the moonlight there.

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)


----------



## Idris2002 (Nov 6, 2020)

The Oracles

’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain
  When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,
And mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain,
  And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.

I took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking,
  The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain;
And from the cave of oracles I hear the priestess shrieking
  That she and I should surely die and never live again.

Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;
  But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.
’Tis true there’s better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;
  And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.
_
The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
  Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands must die for nought, and home there’s no returning._
  The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.
A. E. Housman


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 6, 2020)

*The House Of Caesar*
Viola Garvin

Yea — we have thought of royal robes and red.
Had purple dreams of words we utterèd;
Have lived once more the moment in the brain
That stirred the multitude to shout again.
All done, all fled, and now we faint and tire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — we have launched a ship on sapphire seas,
And felt the steed between the gripping knees;
Have breathed the evening when the huntsman brought
The stiffening trophy of the fevered sport —
Have crouched by rivers in the grassy meads
To watch for fish that dart amongst the weeds.
All well, all good — so hale from sun and mire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yet — we have thought of Love as men may think,
Who drain a cup because they needs must drink;
Have brought a jewel from beyond the seas
To star a crown of blue anemones.
All fled, all done — a Cæsar's brief desire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — and what is there that we have not done,
The Gods provided us 'twixt sun and sun?
Have we not watched an hundred legions thinned,
And crushed and conquered, succorèd and sinned?
Lo — we who moved the lofty gods to ire —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!

Yea — and what voice shall reach us and shall give
Our earthly self a moment more to live?
What arm shall fold us and shall come between
Our failing body and the grasses green?
And the last heart that beats beneath this head —
Shall it be heard or unrememberèd?
All dim, all pale — so lift me on the pyre —
The Feast is over and the lamps expire!


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 28, 2020)

*A Thanksgiving Prayer*
_William Burroughs_

 "To John Dillinger and hope he is still alive. Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986" 

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for
"Kill a Queer for Christ"
stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind his
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the memories
-- all right let's see your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal
of the last and greatest
of human dreams.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 1, 2021)

Sudden Light
BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 3, 2021)

The Winter of Listening by David Whyte (The House of Belonging)


No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 3, 2021)

STELLA MARIS

Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo.
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay,
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell,
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 3, 2021)

That is beautiful, Pickman's model x


----------



## stockwelljonny (Jan 16, 2021)

Somewhere the wave  Derek Mahon

Once more the window and a furious fly
shifting position, niftier on the pane
than the slow liner or the tiny plane.
Dazzled by the sun, dazed by the rain,
today this frantic speck against the sky,
so desperate to get out in the open air
and cruise among the roses, starts to know
not all transparency is come and go.

But the window opens like an opened door
so the wild fly escapes to the airstream,
the raw crescendo of the crashing shore
and ‘a radical astonishment at existence’ –
a voice, not quite a voice, in the sea distance
listening to its own thin cetaceous whistle,
sea music gasp and sigh, slow wash and rustle.
Somewhere the wave is forming which in time . . .


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 20, 2021)

A quote by Paul Tillich
					

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strik...



					www.goodreads.com
				




I'm not crying you're crying





"Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted.
Paul Tillich"


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 20, 2021)

IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS

Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain,
has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think;
Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few-
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persan’s moon,
the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 20, 2021)

.


----------



## stockwelljonny (Jan 23, 2021)

*Monica by Hera Lindsay Bird*



Monica

Monica

Monica

Monica

Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Is one of the worst characters in the history of television

She makes me want to wash my hands with hand sanitizer

She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot
And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows
Nobody liked her, except for Chandler
He married her, and that brings me to my second point
What kind of a name for a show was F.R.I.E.N.D.S
When two of them were related
And the rest of them just fucked for ten seasons?
Maybe their fucking was secondary to their friendship
Or they all had enough emotional equilibrium
To be able to maintain a constant state of mutual-respect
Despite the fucking
Or conspicuous nonfucking
That was occurring in their lives
But I have to say
It just doesn’t seem emotionally realistic
Especially considering that
They were not the most self-aware of people
And to be able to maintain a friendship
Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy
Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were

I fell in love with a friend once
And we liked to congratulate each other what good friends we were
And how it was great that we could be such good friends, and still fuck
Until we stopped fucking
And then we weren’t such good friends anymore

I had a dream the other night
About this friend, and how we were walking
Through sunlight, many years ago
Dragged up from the vaults, like
Old military propaganda
You know the kind; young women leaving a factory
Arm in arm, while their fiancées
Are being handsomely shot to death in Prague
And even though this friend doesn’t love me anymore
And I don’t love them
At least, not in a romantic sense
The memory of what it had been like not to want
To strap concrete blocks to my head
And drown myself in a public fountain rather than spend another day
With them not talking to me
Came back, and I remembered the world
For a moment, as it had been
When we had just met, and love seemed possible
And neither of us resented the other one
And it made me sad
Not just because things ended badly
But more broadly
Because my sadness had less to do with the emotional specifics of that situation
And more to do with the transitory nature of romantic love
Which is becoming relevant to me once again
Because I just met someone new
And this dream reminded me
That, although I believe that there are ways that love can endure
It’s just that statistically, or
Based on personal experience
It’s unlikely that things are going to go well for long
There is such a narrow window
For happiness in this life
And if the past is anything to go by
Everything is about to go slowly but inevitably wrong
In a non-confrontational, but ultimately disappointing way

Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica Geller from popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S
Was the favourite character of the Uber driver
Who drove me home the other day
And is the main reason for this poem
Because I remember thinking Monica???
Maybe he doesn’t remember who she is
Because when I asked him specifically
Which character he liked best off F.R.I.E.N.D.S
He said ‘the woman’
And when I listed their names for him
Phoebe, Rachel and Monica
He said Monica
But he said it with a kind of question mark at the end
Like……. Monica?
Which led me to believe
Either, he was ashamed of liking her
Or he didn’t know who he was talking about
And had got her confused with one of the other
Less objectively terrible characters.
I think the driver meant to say Phoebe
Because Phoebe is everyone’s favourite
She once stabbed a police officer
She once gave birth to her brother’s triplets
She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about her
Monica gives a shit what everyone thinks about her
Monica’s parents didn’t treat her very well
And that’s probably where a lot of her underlying insecurities come from
That have since manifested themselves in controlling
And manipulative behaviour
It’s not that I think Monica is unredeemable
I can recognize that her personality has been shaped
By a desire to succeed
And that even when she did succeed, it was never enough
Particularly for her mother, who made her feel like her dreams were stupid
And a waste of time
And that kind of constant belittlement can do fucked up things to a person
So maybe, getting really upset when people don’t use coasters
Is an understandable, or at least comparatively sane response
To the psychic baggage
Of your parents never having believed in you
Often I look at the world
And I am dumbfounded that anyone can function at all
Given the kind of violence that
So many people have inherited from the past
But that’s still no excuse to throw
A dinner plate at your friends, during a quiet game of Pictionary
And even if that was an isolated incident
And she was able to move on from it
It still doesn’t make me want to watch her on TV
I am falling in love and I don’t know what to do about it
Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire
And don’t even get me started on Ross


----------



## Yossarian (Feb 7, 2021)

*Drama Class at the Disco*
_Lois Lorimer_

We house it in an old motel
on four lanes that lead to Toronto
where homeless families
shelter in these 1950's motels
often five to a room
with a grill from Walmart

Our incentive is a snack,
and it works. Kids lope
across the parking lot
to an abandoned disco
where we've set up drama class,
but after-school arts can only go so far,
where a sandwich goes further.

A seven-year-old, 
playing a king, asks me
if he can have a "real" throne,
and he points to a pile
at the back of the room,
where his mother's furniture
awaits a home.

We drag its humbleness into the palace.
His face, alight with familiarity,
shines brighter than his crown,
and in his mom's armchair,
hope attends him.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 3, 2021)

Thompson’s Taxis
(After Tennyson)


Should you require a motor car
To meet you at the train,
Or to bear you on a health trip when
The “brain storm” comes again,
Or fetch you from that dinner when
Your staying power is gone—
Just grab a telephone and yell
For five, two noughts and one.

Or should you want to buy a car
For pleasure or for trade,
Or any of the many parts
Of which a car is made,
It is a far far better thing
To navigate your feet
To Thompson’s engineering works:
Nineteen Great Brunswick Street

_(found among the ads at the front of the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook at https://ia802607.us.archive.org/5/items/sinnfeinrebellio00dubl/sinnfeinrebellio00dubl.pdf) _


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 20, 2021)

*Mediterranean*
_Rosanna Warren_

when she disappeared on the path ahead of me
I leaned against a twisted oak, all I saw was evening light where she had been:

gold dust light, where a moment before
and thirty-eight years before that

my substantial mother strode before me in straw hat, bathing suit,
and loose flapping shirt,
every summer afternoon, her knapsack light across her back,

her step, in sandals, firm on the stony path
as we returned from the beach

and I mulled small rebellions and observed the dwarfish cork trees
with their pocky bark, the wind-wrestled oaks with arms akimbo,

while shafts of sea-light stabbed down between the trunks.
There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve,

some question she hadn’t answered,
and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me

it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was
not that she walked there, ten years after her death,

but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place.


----------



## nottsgirl (Apr 19, 2021)

*Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out*
BY RICHARD SIKEN
Every morning the maple leaves.
                               Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
            from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
_You will be alone always and then you will die._
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
         of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
                   Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
         and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
                                                         You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
_Love on the water, love underwater, love, love_ and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
            Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
                                                                                               flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
                that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
                           Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
               I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
         glass, but that comes later.
                                                            And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
            shut up
I’m getting to it.
                                    For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
                                                                                                the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
          young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
            but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
                                                               and getting stabbed to death.
                                    Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
          You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
                  What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
            really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
                                                       Let me do it right for once,
             for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
                   Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
                                                               and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
                               Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
             Hello darling, sorry about that.
                                                       Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
                                    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
            Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
            to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
                  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are _not_
feeding yourself to a bad man
                                                   against a black sky prickled with small lights.
            I take it back.
The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
                                                I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
                                                                                               Crossed out.
            Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
                   Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
                                                                                                reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
               forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.
                                                                    Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
            in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
                           from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
                                                                                              darkness,
                                                                                     suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
                                  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
          bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
             my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
                                                            of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
          smiling in a way
                    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
          up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
                                                I looked out the window and said
_This doesn’t look that much different from home,_
            because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
                                           We walked through the house to the elevated train.
            All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
                                                                                             mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
            smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
                                                                                      just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said _Love, for you,
                                 is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
                                                                                                 terrifying. No one
                                                                                 will ever want to sleep with you._
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
                        here’s the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
            is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
            Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
                                                                                                                 Jerusalem.
                            We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
             a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
             another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
             Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
                                                                                                 Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
                                        Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
             in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
             lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
                                                the blue rings of my eyes as I say
                                                                                                   something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
             and I don’t want to be the kind that says _the wrong way._
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
                                                            There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
             and the grains of sugar
                              on the toast, _love love_ or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
                                                                                  it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
                     we have had our difficulties and there are many things
                                                                                                  I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
             years later, in the chlorinated pool.
                                      I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
             these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
_We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . ._
             When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
                  I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
                                                  Quit milling around the yard and come inside.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 22, 2021)




----------



## Yossarian (May 12, 2021)

*"That the Earth is suspended..."*
_Rosanna Warren_

As scilla prinks out, purple, from half-thawed clods
and the cardinal flings his ribbon of song
in two high arcs, then trails the vibrato among the boughs

May unclenches. But not enough.
Buds grip fetal leaves. Each night
scatters frost. On sidewalks we tread on broken sky.

You are sick, and far away. The world is in flux
said Anaximander: worlds are born, appear,
and disappear. We perish, even the gods

fade. Spare me the industrial daffodils
poking through scraps of snow. The season will have
its hard birth, and we will be dragged

into light. For how many years
has that ill corroded your gut? Whirlwinds, typhoons
break out of the cloud, the tearing makes thunder, the crack

against black makes the flash. So natural
philosophy began. You watched glaciers slide
and crash at the tip of the earth, you floated on a rope

into ice crevasses to catch the gleam
and the groan. Ice sculpted the planet,
and sculpts it still: you hammered aluminum

into that shape. The stars are a wheel of fire
broken off from earth fire, surrounded by air.
We came from the unlimited, to it we return. So taught

Anaximander of Miletus, who thought we would be destroyed.


----------



## Yossarian (May 13, 2021)




----------



## RedRedRose (May 15, 2021)

The Sands of Dee

‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee;’
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o’er and o’er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see.
The rolling mist came down and hid the land:
And never home came she.

‘Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,
A tress of golden hair,
A drownèd maiden’s hair
Above the nets at sea?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes of Dee.’

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam,
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea:
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.

Charles Kingsley


----------



## Yossarian (May 16, 2021)




----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

*Theory*
_Robin Becker_

As the animal returns on a beaten path
to the den, we go back over the facts
certain we ignored clear signs.

I left for Italy that summer, though
she had quit her job and moved back home.
I knew it signalled a bad turn but chose


the Tuscan love affair in the seventeenth-century
olive mill. We say we survive our siblings’
suicides, meaning we stood with our parents


at the unthinkable graves. In one theory,
the troubled family sacrifices one member,
as plants surrender leaves in times of drought.


----------



## stockwelljonny (May 29, 2021)

The Rain Stick by Seamus Heaney

Up-end the stick and what happens next 
is a music that you never would have known 
to listen for. In a cactus stalk 

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash 
come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe 
being played by water, you shake it again lightly 

and diminuendo runs through all its scales 
like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes 
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves, 

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies; 
the glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air. 
up-end the stick again. What happens next 

is undiminished for having happened once, 
twice, ten, and thousand times before. 
who cares if all the music that transpires 

is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus? 
You are like a rich man entering heaven 
through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.


----------



## Aladdin (May 30, 2021)

*Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
   Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
   We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
   Within a dream.


Ernest Dowson*


----------



## Diamond (Jun 1, 2021)

Fate-Playing // Ted Hughes.​
Because the message somehow met a goblin
Because precedents tripped your expectations
Because your London was still a kaleidoscope
Of names and places any jolt could scramble,
You waited mistaken. The bus from the North
Came in and emptied and I was not on it.
No matter how much you insisted,
And begged the driver, probably with tears,
To produce me or to remember seeing me
Just miss getting on. I wasn't on it.
Eight in the evening and I was lost and at large
Somewhere in England. You restrained
Your confident inspiration
And did not dash out into the traffic
Milling around Victoria, utterly certain
Of bumping into me where I would have to be walking.
I was not walking anywhere. I was sitting
Unperturbed, in my seat on the train
Rocking towards King's Cross. Somebody,
Calmer than you, had a suggestion. So,
When I got off the train, expecting to find you
Somewhere down at the root of the platform,
I saw that surge and agitation, a figure
Breasting the flow of released passengers,
Then your molten face, your molten eyes,
And your exclamations, your flinging arms,
Your scattering tears
As if I had come back from the dead
Against every possibility, against
Every negative but your own prayer
To your own God. There I knew what it was
To be a miracle. And behind you
Your jolly taxi-driver, laughing, like a small god,
To see an American girl being so American,
And to see your frenzied chariot ride-
Sobbing and goading him, and pleading him
To make happen what you needed to happen-
Succeed so completely, thanks to him.
Well, it was a wonder
That my train wasn't earlier, even much earlier,
That it pulled up, late, the very moment
You irrupted onto the platform. It was
Natural and miraculous and an omen
Confirming everything
You wanted confirmed. So your huge despair,
Your cross London panic dash
And now your triumph, splashed over me
Like love forty-nine times magnified,
Like the first thunder cloudburst engulfing
The drought in August
When the whole cracked earth seems to quake
And every leaf trembles
And everything holds up its arms weeping.


----------



## Elpenor (Jun 4, 2021)

8115 said:


> Under Milk Wood
> A Play for Voices
> by
> Dylan Thomas
> ...


I listened to this today while working, played it via Spotify, the Richard Burton recording.

It was mesmerising, although I can’t claim I gave it my full attention as I was working, it reminded me, if only for the different voices, of my favourite poem, The Waste Land by T S Eliot.

I felt I should give it a listen as my Mum and Nanna were both proud Welsh women and were fans of Under Milk Wood.


----------



## killer b (Aug 10, 2021)

fucking hell Philip Larkin (99 today)


----------



## killer b (Aug 23, 2021)

The Committee Weighs In, by Andrea Cohen


----------



## Lancman (Aug 24, 2021)

Elpenor said:


> I listened to this today while working, played it via Spotify, the Richard Burton recording.
> 
> It was mesmerising, although I can’t claim I gave it my full attention as I was working, it reminded me, if only for the different voices, of my favourite poem, The Waste Land by T S Eliot.
> 
> I felt I should give it a listen as my Mum and Nanna were both proud Welsh women and were fans of Under Milk Wood.


The BBC made a brilliant video of Under Milkwood, thoroughly recommend it.


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 7, 2021)

('The Nation', 29 January 1876)


----------



## bluescreen (Sep 7, 2021)

Stanza 4 line 3 "to wunst" - do you reckon that means "for once"?


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 7, 2021)

bluescreen said:


> Stanza 4 line 3 "to wunst" - do you reckon that means "for once"?


yeh a quick google suggests once for wunst


----------



## bluescreen (Sep 7, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> yeh a quick google suggests once for wunst


I saw that; it was the preposition 'to' that made me wonder.


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 7, 2021)

bluescreen said:


> I saw that; it was the preposition 'to' that made me wonder.


think you have the meaning right tho


----------



## Dillinger4 (Sep 7, 2021)

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.


----------



## chainsawjob (Sep 26, 2021)

Autumn - John Clare

The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.


----------



## killer b (Oct 16, 2021)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 8, 2021)

“When I Imagine All the Possibilities of the Swarm” by Muriel Leung

Suppose there is an end to our suffering. Like a chariot,
the absence of grief circles us with the obstinate heat
of the largest star. To believe in the radiant orbit of this fire.
To face an empty cup and find the constellated mire of you
and me and the toppling of a century. We rise from the painful
corridors of a life. Rarely did we dream of planetary rings,
and yet, tilting ourselves up, we see the heavenly bodies
of all that has passed, each one bright with surrender.
We can go on. We can dress ourselves in the celestial cloak
of this wide expanse, every woman and femme and the disorder
of the peal. I will never write another elegy again.
I am looking at you now in the acceleration of time.
All the possibilities of the swarm ignite. The humming of many
wings amassing into a greater noise. We can write our origins
sacred here and renounce the country of our fear.
There is only our singular pulse when we fill the sky.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 8, 2021)

“America, We Talk About It” by Juan Felipe Herrera

— every day of the week. It is not easy. First I had to learn. Over
decades — to take care of myself. Are you listening. I had to
learn. I had to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the
courage to listen to my self. My true inner self. For that I had to
push you aside. It was not easy I had pushed aside my mother
my father my self in that artificial stairway of becoming you to
be inside of you — after years I realized perhaps too late there
was no way I could bring them back I could not rewind the
clock. But I did — I could do one thing. I could care. Now we
— are here.


----------



## chainsawjob (Nov 14, 2021)

Three Postcards by Brian Bilston

The first one came from Weston-super-Mare
with the newly-built Grand Pier in view,
a bright, gleaming promise of the future,
and the sea, an impossible blue.

Unfamiliar, that neat hand, the black fountain pen.
But she knew he was the one, even then.

The next, she received eighteen months on:
Tidworth station, as viewed from Church Hill.
The foreground, a row of thatched cottages;
the barracks beyond; fields, silent and still.

She propped it against a vase on their mantelpiece,
a wedding present from her niece.

The last, a busy scene from Boulogne,
a censor-passed, heaven-sent souvenir.

'_Crossing rough - but I made it!'_ he'd written.
_When it's all over, we should come here!'_

She clutched it tight as the baby moved once more.
The telegram had come two days before.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 17, 2021)

In the pavilion of separation, the leaves suddenly blew away.
On the road of farewell, the clouds lifted all of a sudden.
Ah! How I regret that men are not like wild geese
Who go on their way together


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 22, 2021)

irishman 15/2/1879


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 25, 2021)

the poets speak of the things which cannot be said
so that we know
which silence
is the one streaming in the light
when the movie stops reeling

in the silence
after the talk of love
a bird sang


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 26, 2021)

Doctor Wha

Wha’s Doctor Wha? Wha better kens nor he
 that jouks the yetts and rides the birlin wheels
 o time and space, shape-shiftin as he reels
 through endless versions o reality?
 Bit dis he ken himsel? Weel, mibbe sae,
 yet wha’s tae ken gin aw that’s kent by Wha
 maks mair or less or better sense ava
 nor whit we ithers ken, or think we dae?
 The universe is fou o parallels:
 wha’s like us? Hunners? Thoosans? We oorsels
 micht be mere glisks o life-forms yet tae be.
 Whit’s real? Whaur’s here? When’s noo? Wha’s quick or deid?
 Wha’s jist a thoctie in anither’s heid?
 Wha’s Doctor Wha?  Wha better kens nor s/he?

James Robertson


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 28, 2021)

Home by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here


----------



## Dillinger4 (Nov 29, 2021)

What Kind of Times are These by Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 29, 2021)

I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt
by Sylvia Plath
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering–
immune to mental pain
or agony.
My world was warm with April sun
my thoughts were spangled green and gold;
my soul filled up with joy, yet felt
the sharp, sweet pain that only joy
can hold.
My spirit soared above the gulls
that, swooping breathlessly so high
o'erhead, now seem to brush their whirring
wings against the blue roof of
the sky.
(How frail the human heart must be–
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing–
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)
Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firma-
ment.
(How frail the human heart must be–
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep.


----------



## bluescreen (Nov 29, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt
> by Sylvia Plath
> I thought that I could not be hurt;
> I thought that I must surely be
> ...


She was fourteen when she wrote that.

ETA I didn't know the poem (was sceptical tbh) then found this. Impressive








						Teenage Sylvia Plath’s First Tragic Poem, with a Touching Remembrance by Her Mother
					

“Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.”




					www.themarginalian.org


----------



## nottsgirl (Nov 29, 2021)

White Apples​BY DONALD HALL
when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
                                           I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 29, 2021)

bluescreen said:


> She was fourteen when she wrote that.
> 
> ETA I didn't know the poem (was sceptical tbh) then found this. Impressive
> 
> ...



Yes..I knew that..


----------



## bluescreen (Nov 29, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Yes..I knew that..


Well, that's impressive too. I've read pretty well all her mature stuff. By some weird coincidence, or is it, when I looked at twitter just now the *first thing* I saw (timed at 8.20) was a retweet of this (won't be signing on as it's expensive and anyway I'm a bit Plathed out):








						The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath. Feb.-March 2023 — Literature Cambridge
					

Sylvia Plath Course 2023   Join us for 4 x weekly classes,  live online  via zoom with Mariah Whelan. We will study a range of Plath’s brilliant poetry plus her journals and critical writings, and her only novel,  The Bell Jar  (1963).   Dates  The classes are weekly on Thursdays, live online via Zo




					www.literaturecambridge.co.uk


----------



## Dillinger4 (Dec 3, 2021)

.


----------



## redcogs (Dec 4, 2021)

Remote from Mansion and from Mart
Beyond our outer furrowed fields
One with the rock he cleaves apart
One with the weary pick he wields
Both with his weight of discontent
Beneath the heaven’s sighing grey
His steaming shoulders stark and bent
He drags his joyless years away

For dreamy dames with haughty eyes
And cunning men with soft white hands
Have offered you in sacrifice
Lone outcast of the outcast land
For all the furs that keep them warm
And all the food that keeps them fit
Through all the years they’ve wrought you harm
And take a churlish pride in it

Oh hard we’ve hashed it far and near
I’ve shared your warmth and dull despair
We’ve sung our songs and none to hear
And shared our woes and none to care
Some day how soon we may not tell
We’ll rend the riven fetters free
Till then may heaven guard you well
And god be good to you and me..

The Navvy;  Patrick Macgill.

A hard to find poem which i’ve transcribed from a beautiful version put to music, link below.  Macgill was considered the Navvy's poet in the early 20th C, when he laboured with those who had built the canals.


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 12, 2022)




----------



## Dillinger4 (Jan 25, 2022)

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dreams for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moing to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful be realistic to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes."
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.


----------



## hitmouse (Jan 27, 2022)

One of my favourites, from Sara Sutterlin:


----------



## Dillinger4 (Feb 3, 2022)

The Buddhas Last Instruction by Mary Oliver

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal -- a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire --
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.


----------



## Elpenor (Feb 4, 2022)

With apologies to Pam Ayres, I wrote this in self-pity!

Oh, I wish I’d done me stretches 
Copied the figures in my physios sketches 
I used to run so many races 
But now can't bend to tie my laces 
Oh, I wish I'd done me stretches 

I wish I'd not chosen to ignore 
When they said to work your core 
Not me; I did a speed session 
My one concern: PB progression 
Strength work to me an utter bore 

When I used to race for hours 
Through sun and snow, and wind and showers 
No time I had for a pre-race jog 
Instead was queueing for the bog 
The need to pee would overpower 

My coach, she told me no end 
"What doesn't break, won't have to mend" 
I was young then, didn't listen 
New running shoes had I to christen 
No need for me to stretch or bend 

Yoga and Pilates were never done 
As for strength work not begun 
Rarely thought of lifting weights 
No cross training for me awaits 
Not worth the time when I could run 

If to the future I could see 
Plantar fasciitis, runners knee 
My shin splints and a dodgy hammy, 
Would combine for a quadruple whammy 
I'd do my stretching - yes siree! 

So I lie here on a massage couch 
Can't run no more, a total grouch 
I really don't think it's such a laugh 
How much I pay the osteopath 
He works my glutes - and I scream "Ouch!" 

How I laughed at others stretching 
When after hill sprints I was wretching
Now I admit the sorry truth 
I'm not the runner of my youth 
Oh, how I wish I'd done me stretching!


----------



## Yossarian (Feb 14, 2022)

Roses are red
but here's something new
Violets are violet
not fucking blue


----------



## bluescreen (Feb 26, 2022)

From 2018 but still timely and moving. Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet from the Donbas region. Her poem 'Decomposition' is read here by Polina Barskova.


----------



## killer b (Mar 7, 2022)

_For a Sixth Form Reader_ by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Read no more odes, my son, read timetables:
they’re to the point. And roll the sea-charts out
before it’s too late. Be watchful, do not sing,
for once again the day is clearly coming
when they will brand refusers on the chest
and nail up lists of names on people’s doors.
Learn how to go unknown, learn more than me:
to change your face, your documents, your country.
Become adept at every petty treason,
the sly escape each day and any season.
For lighting fires encyclicals are good:
and the defenceless can always put to use,
as butter-wrappers, party manifestoes.
Anger and persistence will be required
to blow into the lungs of power the dust
choking, insidious, ground out by those who
storing experience, stay scrupulous: like you:


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 17, 2022)

When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
— Clint Smith

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect &    there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.


----------



## Aladdin (Mar 17, 2022)

The Toombe Road by Seamus Heaney.


One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The visible, untoppled omphalos.


----------



## Clair De Lune (Mar 30, 2022)

It is still winter in Mariupol.

     A harsh wind blows through City Theatre Square 

     And a shopping trolley hangs like a toy in a tree 

     While children are tenderly wrapped in rugs 

     Before being taken out into the cold 

     To be dumped in a hurried, narrow trench.


     You can hear the nails as they drive them in, 

     Missile by missile, bomb by aerosol bomb,

     Hammers hitting iron, thudding into the cross

     As the slow public crucifixion unfolds — 

     Like it did in Georgia, Chechnya, Syria

     In Gori and Grozny and in beautiful Aleppo. 


     And our job is to sit in impotence —

     To watch and wait and then to sift the rubble, 

     Hoping and praying for an early spring, 

     For that first green shoot amongst the ruins.

     We are here to hold, to witness and to heal,

     We are here to learn the ways of compassion. 




© William Ayot


----------



## Elpenor (Apr 1, 2022)

As it’s April, here’s a recording of The Waste Land


----------



## killer b (Apr 28, 2022)

Michael Rosen posted this poem by his dad this morning - a wounder, but really great.


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 5, 2022)

*Amelia's Model*
_Michael Longley_


I.

In her model of the solar system
My seven-year-old cosmologist
Ties to a barbecue skewer
With fuse wire the planets, buttons:
For Venus an ivory button,
Mercury silver beside the sun,
Mother-of-pearl for Jupiter,
Red and green for Mars and Earth,
For Saturn’s rings a pipe cleaner,
So that in the outer darkness
Close to the kitchen her brown eyes
Represent Uranus, Neptune.

II.

Amelia, you didn’t include Pluto
In your wire sculpture of the solar system:
Tiny and very far away, an ice
World of ice mountains and methane snow,
A dance of five moons unlit by the sun,
The god of the afterlife’s kingdom—
We shall go there when we die, dear child.


----------



## Boru (Jun 5, 2022)

The Liaison Co-ordinator by Tom Leonard​
Efturryd geenuz iz speel
iboot whut wuz right
nwhut wuz rang
boot this nthat
nthi next thing
a sayzty thi bloke
nwhut izzit yi caw yir joab jimmy
am a liaison co-ordinator
hi sayz oh good ah sayz
a liaison co-ordinator

jist whut this erria needs
whut wi aw thi unimploymint
inaw thi bevvyin
nthi boayz runnin amock
nthi hoossyz fawnty bits
nthi wummin n tranquilisers
it last thiv sent uz
a liaison co-ordinator.
Sumdy wia digree
in f*ck knows whut
getn pyd fur no known 
whut thi f*ck ti day way it.


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 9, 2022)




----------



## chainsawjob (Jun 12, 2022)

Elder - P.J. Kavanagh

Feigns death in winter, none lives better,
chewed by cattle springs up stronger;
an odd Personal smell and unlovable skin;
straight shoots like organ pipes in cigarette paper;
no nurseryman would sell you an Elder
‘not bush, not tree, not bad, not good’,
Judas was surely a fragile man
to hang himself from this ‘God’s stinking tree’.
In summer it juggles flower-plates in air,
creamy as cumulus, and berries, each a weasel’s eye of light.
Pretends it’s unburnable (Who burns it sees the Devil),
cringes, hides a soul of cream plates,
purple fruits in a rattle of bones,
A good example.


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 14, 2022)




----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 15, 2022)

Charles Bukowski ‘My Cat The Writer’


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 18, 2022)

*John Mole - " Stan Laurel"*

Ollie gone, the heavyweight
Balletic chump, and now
His turn to bow out, courteous,
A perfect gentleman who
Tips his hat to the nurse

Or would, that is, if he were
Still in business. She
Adjusts his pillow, smooths
The sheets until their crisp -
And - even snow - white starchiness

Becomes his cue. It's time
For one last gag, the stand - up
Drip - feed: _Sister,
Let me tell you this
I wish I was skiing,_

And she, immaculately cornered
For the punch - line:  _Really
Mr Laurel, do you ski? _A
chuckle -
_No, but I'd rather I  was doing
That than this,_

Than facing death, the one
Fine mess he's gotten into
That he can't get out of
Though a nurse's helpless
laughter
Is the last he hears.


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 19, 2022)

*Lee L. Berkson - "Marilyn"*

that last take - not MISFITS, them.
she and clark under a fine moon, posse of stars.
the colt bolts to the mountain, finds innocence.
monty broods by the corral.
she loves them all, even monty.
she says goodbye, as if tomorrow .....

suppose she slept easy without the pills
suppose the call got through to bobby or jack.
imagine joe in the on-deck circle
menacing in yankee pinstripes, batting cleanup,
always cleanup, arthur in the wings.

suppose she packs, grabs her poodle
slips out the side door, incognito
as she can be in silver lamé,
top cut low enough to jar the dullest memory.
suppose she flies into morning
lands in Majorca, hops a single engine
some island off the map.

say she practices her spanish
words like 'buenos notes' and 'adios'
fading into orange roofs, papaya
a shell's throw from the water
the sand and sun. a bird sings to her
wants no autograph.


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 23, 2022)

_Come on folks - this is meant to be a daily poem
You don't want me hogging it...( or hedgehogging it....)
Anyway...._

*Philip Larkin - "The Mower"*

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other; we should be kind
While there is still time.


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 25, 2022)

*John Cooper Clarke - "Evidently Chickentown"

*


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jun 29, 2022)

_Dedicated to a friend across the sea....
*Ernest Dowson*_

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long. –Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.


----------



## chainsawjob (Jul 6, 2022)




----------



## petee (Jul 6, 2022)

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'

- Yeats
it speaks to my politics and family background but it's also a masterclass in meter.


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jul 9, 2022)

_Yesterday marked 200 years of the death of Shelley...._

*SONG TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND  - Percy Bysshe Shelley*

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat -nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love's gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears

Sow seed, -but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth, -let no imposter heap;
Weave robes, -let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre!


----------



## Boru (Jul 9, 2022)

In a similar vein to Song to the men of England is this poem by Dominic Behan.

Building Up And Tearing England Down​Dominic Behan

I’ve won a hero’s name with McAlpine and Costain
 With Fitzpatrick, Murphy, Ashe and the Wimpey’s gang
 I’ve been often on the road on me way to draw the dole
 When there’s nothing left to do for Johnny Laing
 And I used to think that God made the mixer, pick and hod
 So that Paddy might know hell above the ground
 I’ve had gangers big and tough tell me tear it all out rough
 When you’re building up and tearing England down

In a tunnel underground a young Limerick man was found
 He was built into the New Victoria Line
 When the bonus gang had past, sticking through the concrete cast
 Was the face of little Charlie Joe Devine
 And the ganger man McGurk said big Paddy hates to work
 When the gas main blew and he flew off the ground
 Oh, they swore he said don’t slack, I’ll not be there until I’m back
 Keep on building up and tearing England down

I was on the hydro dam on the day that Jack McCann
 Got the better of his stammer in a week
 He fell from the shuttering jamb and the poor auld stuttering man
 He was never ever more inclined to speak
 And I saw auld Bald McCall from the big flyover fall
 Into a concrete mixer spinning round
 Though it wasn’t his intent, he got a fine head of cement
 When he was building up and tearing England down

I remember Carrier Jack with his hod upon his back
 How he swore one day he’d set the world on fire
 But his face they’ve never seen since his shovel it cut clean
 Through the middle of the big high tension wires
 No more like Robin Hood will he roam through Cricklewood
 Or dance around the pubs in Camden Town
 Oh, but let no man complain, sure no Pat can die in vain
 When he’s building up and tearing England down

So come all you navvies bold, do not think that English gold
 Is just waiting to be taken from each sod
 Or the likes of you and me will ever get an OBE
 Or a knighthood for good service to the hod
 They’ve the concrete master race for to keep you in your place
 And a ganger man to kick you to the ground
 If you ever try to take part of what the bosses make
 When you’re building up and tearing England down


----------



## surreybrowncap (Jul 9, 2022)

Boru said:


> In a similar vein to Song to the men of England is this poem by Dominic Behan.
> 
> Building Up And Tearing England Down​Dominic Behan
> 
> ...


First time I came across this poem...
I'm English...
Father was Irish who came to this country and worked on the railway..
Abusive and violent towards my mother..
Not sure it was this country that made him that way..


----------



## Boru (Jul 9, 2022)

surreybrowncap said:


> First time I came across this poem...
> I'm English...
> Father was Irish who came to this country and worked on the railway..
> Abusive and violent towards my mother..
> Not sure it was this country that made him that way..


Sorry to hear that about your da.. there could be any number of reasons.  Or excuses for that behaviour
England and emigration acted as a safety net and safety valve for the new Irish state and its many failings and shortcomings.
The people who left often had nothing to go back to and went from rural poverty to urban poverty and its associated pressures.
The jist of both poems us that there is always an underclass and someone to keep us down
❤️

Edit to add.. the words are often sung too..


----------



## bluescreen (Jul 9, 2022)




----------



## Dystopiary (Jul 10, 2022)

*Rong Radio - Benjamin Zephaniah* 

Rong Radio - Benjamin Zephaniah

My ears are battered and burned and
i have just learned that i have been
listening to the wrong radio station

My mind has been brutalised now the pain can’t be disguised
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station

I was beginning to believe that all black men were bad men
and white men would reign again
I was beginning to believe that i was a mindless drugs freak that
couldn’t control my sanity or my sexuality
I was beginning to believe that I could not believe in nothing except nothing
and all i ever wanted to do was to get you and to do you.
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

My future has been blighted i am so short sighted
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station

I was beginning to not trust me, in fact, i wanted to arrest me
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

I’ve been dancing to music that i can’t stand.
I’ve been reciting commercials to my girlfriends.
I’ve been trying to convince myself that what i really need is a sunbed
and a mortgage and some hairspray, the kind of hairspray that will wash my grey blues away.

I been trying to convince myself that i could ease my conscience
if I gave a few pence or a few cents to a starving baby in Africa
because African babies need my favours
because Africa is full of dictators
and oh yeah globalisation will bring salvation!
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

I thought my neighbours formed an axis of evil
I wanna go kill people
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

I am sure I didn’t inhale so why is my mind going stale
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station

I was beginning to believe that all muslims are terrorists
and christian terrorists think they existed
I really did believe that terrorism couldn’t be done by governments
not our government, not white government
I just could not see what was wrong with me.
I gave hungry people hamburgers you see
I was beginning to believe that our children were better than their children
their children would die from terrorism but i couldn’t hear their children call
and a child from Palastine simply didn’t count at all.
What despair,
no children i was not aware
I’d been listening to the wrong radio station.

For years I’ve been sedated, and now i think I’m educated
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station
and every time i got ill, i took the same little white pill
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

When it started I was curious but then it got so serious
It was cool when it began but now I really hate Iran
and look at me now i wanna make friend with Pakistan
I wanna bomb Afghanistan, and i need someone to tell me,
where the hell is Kurdistan?
Yeah, you can be my ally for a while until i come to bomb your child
and I’m sure there’s a continent called the middle east
and i think i can bomb my way to peace
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

I’ve been listening to the wrong jams, I’ve been listening to the wrong beat
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.
I’ve been listening to the wrong tones of the wrong zones
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station
I’ve been listening to the wrong voices
I made such mad choices
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.
I’ve been listening to spies I’ve been listening to lies
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

I needed to know what some pop star somewhere was having for breakfast
I needed to know that I was no longer working class
I needed to know if the stock market rose 1 percent
I needed to know that I had a ruler to give me confidence
I needed to know that my life would improve loads
if I had an operation on my nose.
I needed to hear that DJ say,
“Good morning, good morning!”
I thought he was there just for me
I loved the way that he would say, “This show was sponsered by...”.
“Oh my oh my”, he made me cry
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

Can you dig this? I put my self on a hit—list
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station
I’m laughing and I’m crying and I’m watching myself dying
I’ve been listening to the wrong radio station.

Listen to him, can you hear?
Listen to her, can you hear?
Listen to it, can you hear?
Listen to me, keep this frequency clear!
Tune in, Drop out.


----------



## chainsawjob (Jul 11, 2022)




----------



## surreybrowncap (Jul 12, 2022)

*WHEN WE TWO PARTED - Lord Byron*

When we two parted
   In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
   To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
   Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
   Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
   Sunk chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
   Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
   And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
   And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
   A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me—
   Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
   Who knew thee too well—
Long, long shall I rue thee,
   Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met—
   In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
   Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
   After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
   With silence and tears.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 12, 2022)




----------



## surreybrowncap (Jul 12, 2022)

Aladdin said:


> View attachment 331821


Opposite my old house once stood William Blake's home.
Now a block of flats.
Situated in Lambeth North / Waterloo area.








						Spot These Gorgeous William Blake Mosaics, Hiding In Lambeth
					

The world's biggest gallery of Blake's work.




					londonist.com


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## chainsawjob (Jul 16, 2022)

"Shout out to the crews who kept us dancing  "


----------



## chainsawjob (Jul 17, 2022)

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Ariel's poem from The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Act5 Sc. 1


----------



## chainsawjob (Jul 17, 2022)

One Day…
An army of furious older women will take over the world.
And I want to be there at the front.
Because one day, every woman wakes up and realises, that quite frankly, they put themselves through hell.
Trying to fit in, trying to be enough, to be attractive, to be acceptable, to be responsible, to be reliable, to be a mother, to be a wife, to be a friend, to be a carer, to hold a career, to keep it all spinning effortlessly….
And in a flash, years and years of back-breaking conformity, whizzes before your eyes and you have a lightbulb moment…
It was never going to happen.
We could never have done it all.
For it is not possible.
No man could do it either. Not a chance.
Women of this world, beautiful, wonderful women – let that lightbulb go on sooner rather than later because when it does, you will be free.
Free to live.
Free to mess up.
Free to take breaks and make mistakes.
Free to pass over on the list of things you ‘should’ be doing.
And you will understand that whatever you did today, it was enough.
You are enough.
One day, an army of furious older women will take over the world and I want to be there, right at the front.

Donna Ashworth
From ‘to the women’:


----------



## Winot (Jul 17, 2022)

*On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia*

To leave the city
Always takes a quarrel. Without warning,
Rancors that have gathered half the morning
Like things to pack, or a migraine, or a cloud,
Are suddenly allowed
To strike. They strike the same place twice.
We start by straining to be nice,
The say something shitty.

Isn't it funny
How it's what _has_ to happen
To make the unseen ivory gates swing open,
The rite we must perform so we can leave?
Always we must grieve
Our botched happiness: we goad
Each other till we pull to the hard shoulder of the road,
Yielding to tears inadequate as money.

But if instead
Of turning back, we drive into the day,
We forget the things we didn't say.
The silence fills with row on row
Of vines or olive trees. The radio
Hums to itself. We make our way between
Saronic blue and hills of glaucous green
And thread

Beyond the legend of the map
Through footnote towns along the coast
That boast
Ruins of no account–a column
More woebegone than solemn–
Men watching soccer at the two cafes
And half-built lots where dingy sheep still graze.
Climbing into the lap

Of the mountains now, we wind
Around blind, centrifugal turns.
The sun's great warship sinks and burns.
And where the roads without a sign are crossed,
We (inevitably) get lost.
Yet to be lost here
Still feels like being somewhere,
And we find

When we arrive and park,
No one minds that we are late–
There is no one to wait–
Only a bed to make, a suitcase to unpack.
The earth has turned her back
On one yellow middling star
To consider lights more various and far.
The shaggy mountains hulk into the dark

Or loom
Like slow, titanic waves. The cries
Of owls dilate the shadows. Weird harmonies rise
From the valley's distant glow, where coal
Extracted from the lignite mines must roll
On acres of conveyor belts that sing
The Pythagorean music of a string.
A huge grey plume

Of smoke or steam
Towers like the ghost of a monstrous flame
Or giant tree among the trees. And it is all the same–
The power plant, the forest, and the night,
The manmade light.
We are engulfed in an immense
Ancient indifference
That does not sleep or dream.

Call it Nature if you will,
Though everything that is is natural–
The lignite-bearing earth, the factory,
A darkness taller than the sky–
This out-of-doors that wins us our release
And temporary peace–
Not because it is pristine or pretty,
But because it has no pity or self-pity.

AE Stallings




__





						On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia
					





					ronnowpoetry.com


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 20, 2022)




----------



## surreybrowncap (Jul 29, 2022)

​_*..".But A Short Time To Live" *_*by  Leslie Coulson*


Our little hour,—how swift it flies  
 When poppies flare and lilies smile;  
How soon the fleeting minute dies,  
 Leaving us but a little while  
To dream our dream, to sing our song,          
 To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower,  
The Gods—They do not give us long,—  
 One little hour.  

Our little hour,—how short it is  
 When Love with dew-eyed loveliness          
Raises her lips for ours to kiss  
 And dies within our first caress.  
Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,  
 Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour,  
For Time and Death, relentless, claim          
 Our little hour.  

Our little hour,—how short a time  
 To wage our wars, to fan our hates,  
To take our fill of armoured crime,  
 To troop our banners, storm the gates.          
Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red,  
 Blind in our puny reign of power,  
Do we forget how soon is sped  
 Our little hour?  

Our little hour,—how soon it dies:          
 How short a time to tell our beads,  
To chant our feeble Litanies,  
 To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds.  
The altar lights grow pale and dim,  
 The bells hang silent in the tower—          
So passes with the dying hymn  
 Our little hour.


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 2, 2022)

Resistance
_David Lehman_

The sunset earlier, the sky spooky
as the nineteenth century, skeletal trees,
a brief orange glow before the blues
and grays darken in a landscape that lasts
for an hour before the shapes dissolve
into the dark of All Hallows’, a night
as sacred as would scare us, the guiltless ones,
who maintain our belief in metaphysics,
which French _philosophes_ declared dead
in 1970 or so. As the last branches
disappear into the heavenly darkness,
what remains is what resists and what
clings to the oblivion of a fallen world
that exists in memory only, and poetry.


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 4, 2022)

RubyToogood, your thread is 20 years old today!


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 4, 2022)

Figs
_Henri Cole_

Overnight the figs got moldy and look like little brains—
or Ids without structure—that say something dark
about our species not really laying down a garden
but living out the violent myths.
An insect chorus, almost diaphanous
in a neighbor’s yard, says something, too:
_America began in tall ships that glowed from within,
but, for the wretched, it still wretchedeth every day._
As the bright day goes around the sun,
why do our days grow
more aggressive and difficult?
Why do the world’s shadows
come so close
as its wonders beckon?


----------



## RubyToogood (Aug 4, 2022)

Yossarian said:


> RubyToogood, your thread is 20 years old today!


I never bloody read it


----------



## Sasaferrato (Aug 4, 2022)

Because I could not stop for Death – (479)​Launch Audio in a New Window
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –


----------



## hitmouse (Aug 10, 2022)

Louise Gluck, apparently:


----------



## chainsawjob (Sep 1, 2022)

W.B. Yeats

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Sep 3, 2022)

anna akhmatova
[Balchoï Fontan, Ucrânia, 1889-1966]

COURAGE

Now we know what really counts
and what's been made of reality
The time for courage has come right up to us
and courage doesn't flee from us
It's not a horror now to stand up to the grave against lethal bullets,
We don't even feel bitter about losing the rooves above,
we keep alive, Russian,
the great Russian lingo
We take you pure and free
and we keep it safe to give to our grandchildren
and from enslavement you freed us all
forever!

[Supastupor translation 2022, maintaining the formatting as faithfully as possible]

#Translated from Portuguese, a 3rd-hand translation by an amateur#

I can't find the same translation online, the one in the book reads very sarcastic. However, after some light research it would seem Babushka Akhmatova was praised for her work in 'the great patriotic war' ..... but she was lucky not to get gulaged having written an epic poem dedicated to Stalin's victims......her son was imprisoned for 7 years... could have been longer but good ol' Khrushchev was the party secretary by then.....it's confusin then ......it's confusing now


----------



## bluescreen (Sep 8, 2022)

*All The Talents*


Liz Truss. Theresa Coffey.
Qwerty Wordle. Kelly Badenough.
Jonas Filth-Muck. Shaun Knotts O’Clever.
Pip Shithouse. Floella Blaggerman.
Dominic Raat. Noelene Caries.
Brandon Arse. Snorky Dump.
Polly Moribund. Helena Handcart.
Sir John Pluff-Trousers. Jeremy Filch.
Sarah De Luzional. Tom Mephisto.
Buster Sanction. Bernard Devious.
Brett Spatchcock. Brian Envelopes.
Patrick Flagg-Stompkin. Sally Headbutt.
Baron Hardline of Cutpurse. Grant Cipher.
Sebastian Fling-Fleshkin. Sid Crypto.
Lord Luvaduck of Halicarnassus.
Thanatos Armtwistle. John St.John Hades.

Andy Jackson


From here, well worth keeping an eye on, with a new poem each day in their Die Depfeffelschrift: new boots and pantisocracies


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 10, 2022)

Medium
_Jennifer Grotz_

In the nineteenth century,
I’d have found a medium,
a knocking table, a crystal ball,

but to conjure him in 2016
I go online and Google,
scroll page after page until

his name disappears
in a list of random links,
but still there’s his handle on Skype,

still the picture of him crossing the finish line
of the Portland marathon,
still the smiling-in-the-wind-on-the-beach photo, still

that e-mail that arrived at 3 _a.m._
back in February, those words of such
love and affirmation out of the blue

that I knew were strange but didn’t query,
thought maybe he’d been up drinking,
was feeling sentimental, and

that must have been
the night of the first attempt
we found written in his journal,

how he’d thrown himself off a bridge
into the cold dirty Willamette
but survived,

and how disappointed
he must have felt then,
the body involuntarily countering

with a surge of adrenaline,
his body feeling at its
utmost alive.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Sep 16, 2022)

Saw this on twitter


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Sep 21, 2022)

Red n' Black

Fight all oppression with the red and black
For liberty
No to the parties and the bureaucrats
Disarm the bourgeosie
While we live with property
We shall never be free
So seize all the factories with the red the black
And anarchy

No cross nor bible with the red and the black
No hypocrisy
Clerics, priests and mullahs spread the same old lies
Serving this socitey
There are no sinners
Just their morality
So burn down their churches with the red and the black
Hail blasphemy

End class divisions with the red and the black
For unity
We're stronger together than we are alone
Wherever we might be
No 'first' or 'third' world but one world
Unequal and unfree
So tear down their frontiers with the red and the black
For humanity

The whole world is our world with the red and the black
In harmony
The last fight in history brings it home to us
Our common treasury
While thousands become millions
Struggling to be free
We raise the cry of ages proudly as our own
Land and liberty!


By Ashley Fletcher


----------



## furluxor (Sep 22, 2022)

*The Leaden-Eyed*
_Vachel Lindsay_

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.


----------



## Sasaferrato (Sep 24, 2022)

Your laughter
Crashes through the sunlit air
Like shards of gleaming shattered crystal
Every shard
Stabbing through a fragment
Of my shattered heart
Your joy angers me in my sorrow
My boy, my beautiful boy, is gone
The sorrow remains


----------



## weltweit (Sep 24, 2022)

As I was walking down the street one day,
I saw a house on fire.
There was a man,
Standing at an upper storey window,
Shouting and screaming at the crowd that was gathered there below,
For he was sore afraid.

Jump,
You f*cker, jump!
Jump into this 'ere blanket what we are holding
And you will be alright.
He jumped, hit the deck,
Broke his f*cking neck,
There wa-a-as no blanket.

Laugh,
We nearly shat!
I have not laughed so much since grandma died,
Or Auntie Mabel caugh her left tit in the mangle.
We are miserable sinners,
Fi-i-i-ilthy f*ckers.
Ar-rse holes.

Oh, dear little Flo,
I love you so,
Especially in your nightie,
When the moonlight flits
Across your tits,
Oh Jesus Christ Almighty...

Derek & Clive


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Sep 25, 2022)

Not So Long Ago by Hugo Dewar

Woke one bright morning not so long ago;
Heard the sound of shooting out on the street below;
Went to the window and saw the barricade
Of paving stones the working people made not so long ago.
Met a man that morning not so long ago;
Handed me a leaflet on the street below;
Lean and hard-faced workingman with a close-cropped head;
Held me for a moment, eye to eye, then said,
“Read it. Read it. Read it and learn
What it is we fight for and why the churches burn.”

Out on the Ramblas, she passed me on her way,
Weapon cradled in her arm; it was but yesterday.
“Not just for wages now and not alone for bread.
We’re fighting for a whole new world, a whole new world,” she
said.

On the barricades all over town not so long ago,
The time had come to answer with a simple “Yes” or “No.”
They, too, were storming heaven. Do you think they fought in vain?
That because they lost a battle they would never rise again?
That the man with the leaflets, the woman with the gun,
Did not have a daughter? Did not have a son?


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Sep 29, 2022)

You're Angry by Kevan Hughes

You're angry that 'your' queen is dead
And you know that I don't care
You're angry that I don't recognise
Her 'rightful Son and Heir'

You're angry that I don't show 'respect'
To something I don't believe
You're angry that I have the freedom
To choose when I should grieve

You're angry, that unlike you,
I wasn't put upon this earth
To bow and scrape and know my place,
Like some medieval serf

You're angry that somehow,
I'm allowed a point of view
You're angry when you realise
I don't agree with you

You're angry that I don't embrace
Your feudalistic rules
You're angry because you know that I despise
Such grovelling, fawning fools

But you see, I am angry too
About so many different things
Born in a world of sycophants,
And all the grief it brings

I'm angry at the BBC, the Daily Mail,
The morons that they quote
The puerile propaganda
They're ramming down my throat

I'm angry that I'm mourning,
For a vision that has gone
Angry that we can't make a world
That works for everyone

I'm angry that we're still held back
By forelock tuggers such as you
Angry that you're wedded to your masters
And your own outdated view

I'm angry that you worship
The people at the top
Your whole world's an anachronism
It really has to stop


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Sep 30, 2022)

Fighting For the Revolution

We've sung their songs for far too long
and to their gods we've prayed
We've sewn their fields and reaped their crops yet hunger has remained.
We've slaved in all their factories for their profits to be made
We've fought and died in their bloody wars for things to stay the same.

Now we want the revolution!
Now we want the revolution!
Now we want the revolution!
So organise for anarchy and build the barricades!

The bosses and the ruling class are shaking in their shoes
There is no room for compromise, this fight we must not lose.
To end their bloody tyranny there's things that we must do
So organise for anarchy to build the world anew.

Fighting for the revolution!
Fighting for the revolution!
Fighting for the revolution!
No gods, no states, no masters in the new world that we choose!


By Ashley Fletcher


----------



## bluescreen (Oct 2, 2022)

Another gem from New Boots and Pantisocracies and their DePfeffelschrift 

*Prìomhaire*

_Online variations on the Scottish Gaelic for ‘Prime Minister’_

A synonym for ceannardas: high-head, chief-end
(never ‘chieftain’). Scrot bag, racist git;
wee sleekit bastard, scunnerin basturt
(cuid nae hae put it better masell).
Wank-stain, utter knob. Shut yer geggie!
Ur a numpty bawbag if ever there was ane.
Get it right up yie! Mum
always said ne’er
trust any whose eyes are too close tegeither.
Gardyloo. U’ll do wonders for IndyRef2,
fud, with more faces than the town clock –
haunted furby, spineless cock
womble. An in-your-face out-and-out cunt.
Imagine school children studying history
in 50 years’ time. This’ll be known as the WTF-era.

-- Taylor Strickland
from here: new boots and pantisocracies


----------



## JimW (Oct 10, 2022)

Arthur Waley's translation of one of the song-poems in the Book of Songs (compiled circa 600 BCE):

Tossed is that cypress boat,
Wave-tossed it floats.
My heart is in turmoil, I cannot sleep.
But secret is my grief.
Wine I have, all things needful
For play, for sport.

My heart is not a mirror,
To reflect what others will.
Brothers too I have;
I cannot be snatched away.
But lo, when I told them of my plight
I found that they were angry with me.

My heart is not a stone;
It cannot be rolled.
My heart is not a mat;
It cannot be folded away.
I have borne myself correctly
In rites more than can be numbered.

My sad heart is consumed, I am harassed
By a host of small men.
I have borne vexations very many,
Received insults not few.
In the still of night I brood upon it;
In the waking hours I rend my breast.

O sun, ah, moon,
Why are you changed and dim ?
Sorrow clings to me
Like an unwashed dress.
In the still of night I brood upon it,
Long to take wing and fly away.

泛彼柏舟，亦泛其流。耿耿不寐，如有隐忧。微我耿酒，以敖以游。

我心匪鉴，不可以茹。亦有兄弟，不可以据。薄言往愬，逢彼之怒。

我心匪石，不可转也。我心匪席，不可卷也。威仪棣棣，不可选也。

忧心悄悄，愠于群小。觏闵既多，受侮不少。静言思之，寤辟有摽。

日居月诸，胡迭而微？心之忧矣，如匪澣衣。静言思之，不能奋飞。

James Legge's version here: Book of Poetry : Lessons from the states : Odes Of Bei : Bo Zhou - moon - Chinese Text Project


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 13, 2022)

Colonel John Okie's LAMENTATION, OR A RUMPER CASHIERED.​To the tune of, And a Begging we will go.

OF a Famous Brewer my purpose is to tell,
Now mighty Roaring Oliver and Pride are gone to Hell,
The Noble Stoker Okey that doth the rest Excel,
And give him more Ale and Grains:

The Rumps great Champion, the defender of the State,
The Commonwealths Sir Guy o'recome by cunning Fate,
Packing out of England, with the Divels Excise Rate,
And give, &c.

And I (quoth this John) must now bring up the Rear,
And Tally the Account of our State Stinking Beer,
I wish I had my complices again to help me here,
And give, &c.

My Trade hath had the Honour, the State to overturn,
How often times did I, and Pride the House Adjourn?
I know I must be hang'd for I'm too Wett to Burn,
And give, &c.

Yet when I think how slighly, my partners me forsooke,
And never put the totall Summe to Bible nor to Book,
I wish the Div'l for comp'ny had Okey also took,
And give, &c.

Then had I spar'd my angry Corking Knife,
Which I drew at th' Exchange against a Hawkers Wife,
For crying against the Rump end, our gainful strife,
And give, &c.

They say I am indited, for Secluding of the Members,
One thousand six hundred forty eight in December,
Would the Inditement was rak't in my Stoake hole Embers,
And give him, &c.

My strong Irons beaten into broad Swords and Spears,
My thick Smoke did vanish into Jealousies and Fears,
But now all my wash is limbeckt into Tears,
And give him, &c.

A Fat Tub-woman was my Goddesse great of War,
My Hostesse by Bellona that lived at the Starr,
No matter if to Tyburn, I ride in Dray or Carr,
And give him, &c.

But my Dray is transformd to An Ammunition Wagon,
My Horses swopt for light Nags, for service of the Dragoon,
With which I overtooke the Welch, when they came from St. Fagon,
And give him, &c.

My brazen impudence, now leaves me at my Copper,
And that will go ere long, then I'le be bottle stopper,
And then Sepulchres Bell, O how I fear that Clapper,
And give him, &c.

Adieu then all my Vailes, my Tilts, my Dregs and Yest,
A Rump, and a Free State, shield me from an Inquest,
I am not bound for Portsmouth but Tyburn in the West.
And give him, &c.

I'le now betake my self again unto the old Mash Tun,
And with my Brewing Oares, I'le Row to Wimbleton,
I Murdered Charls the Father, I may'nt endure the Son,
And give him, &c.

My old guile will be best, now I am stricken out 'oth Role,
I'le Cunningly retreat again into my warm Stoke Hole,
Sir Arthur is to find me store of Newcastle Cole.
And give him more Ale and Grains.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 23, 2022)

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal -- a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire --
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 23, 2022)

I forget what
mind is

like, all that
thought and private
history. Luckily,
even without
it, its distances

remain: desert,
mountain, sky. I

won’t say
I’m any happier
now, no
happier than sunlit

almond orchards
finding themselves

suddenly in bloom.


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## bluescreen (Oct 23, 2022)

Dillinger4 said:


> “Make of yourself a light,”
> said the Buddha,
> before he died.
> I think of this every morning
> ...


This is 
'The Buddha's Last Instruction' by Mary Oliver

I don't know who wrote the second poem you quoted but it would be good to know.


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## Dillinger4 (Oct 31, 2022)

Money is talking
to itself again

in this season’s
bondage
and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button
and this is what you get,

money pretending
that its hands are tied.


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## bluescreen (Oct 31, 2022)

Dillinger4 said:


> Money is talking
> to itself again
> 
> in this season’s
> ...


It's good to give the name of the poet. "Money Talks" is by Rae Armantrout


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## Dillinger4 (Nov 1, 2022)

good is dead

Mein Kampf by David Lerner

all i want to do is
make poetry famous

ali i want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all i want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money

this ain’t no party
this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no foolin’ a

grab-bag of
clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about

how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun

this ain’t no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bullshit

this ain’t no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and
fall desperately in love

this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down
wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about
the broken rainbow

it is a carnival of dread

it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena

it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but

throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the the motherfucker can
swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it

but, my friends…

there is so much to hate These Days

that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I’ll never pay

because they’re after us

they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we get politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glassy magazines
promising that they’ll
fuck us till we shoot blood

if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives

I’ve got mine


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## DotCommunist (Nov 2, 2022)

​Poem For Stillness

He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a  gun barrel

And sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brain

He’s fought in many wars
but is no match for his own despair

These white pills
have left him so colorless
his shadow must stand up
to fetch him water

We ought to accept
that no soldier
has ever returned
from war
alive

-Garous Abdolmalekian


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 11, 2022)

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.


In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.


You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


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## Lorca (Dec 5, 2022)

Not sure if posted before but thought this was quite a clever poem:


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 7, 2022)

Spark

I always resented all the years, the hours, the
minutes I gave them as a working stiff, it
actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me
dizzy and a bit crazy—I couldn’t understand the
murdering of my years
yet my fellow workers gave no signs of
agony, many of them even seemed satisfied, and
seeing them that way drove me almost as crazy as
the dull and senseless work.

the workers submitted.
the work pounded them to nothingness, they were
scooped-out and thrown away.

I resented each minute, every minute as it was
mutilated
and nothing relieved the monotony.

I considered suicide.
I drank away my few leisure hours.

I worked for decades.

I lived with the worst kind of women, they killed what
the job failed to kill.

I knew that I was dying.
something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become as
them, accept.

then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest
bit.
it needn’t be much, just a spark.
a spark can set a whole forest on
fire.
just a spark.
save it.

I think I did.
I’m glad I did.
what a lucky god damned
thing.


Charles Bukowski


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## Yossarian (Dec 11, 2022)

*I Am Simon Armitage*
Simon Armitage

I am _Simon Armitage_. I am
_Aiming Maestro_,
_Airiest Gammon_. I am

_Armani Egotism_,
_Ammonia Tigers_,
_Grim Anatomies_.

_I am German Otis_,
_I am Inmost Rage_,
_I am Moist Anger_.

_Granite Mimosa_ I am,
_Reaming Maoist_,
_Marmite Saigon.
Mismanage Riot_,
_Origami Stamen_,
_Omega Martinis_,

_I am More Giants_,
_I am Groin Meats_,
_I am Me Roasting_. I am

_Soaring Tammie_,
_Steaming Moira_,
_Emigration Sam_.

_I am a Snog Timer_.
_I am Sir Megaton_.
_Against Memoir_ I am.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 24, 2022)

Christmas Day In The Workhouse

By George R. Sims


It is Christmas Day in the workhouse,
and the cold, bare walls are bright
With garlands of green and holly,
and the place is a pleasant sight;
For with clean-washed hands and faces
in a long and hungry line

The paupers sit at the table,
for this is the hour they dine.
And the guardians and their ladies,
although the wind is east,
Have come in their furs and wrappers
to watch their charges feast;
To smile and be condescending,
putting on pauper plates.
To be hosts at the workhouse banquet,
they've paid for with the rates.

0h, the paupers are meek and lowly
with their 'Thank'ee kindly, mumsl'
So long as they fill their stomachs
what matter it whence it comes?
But one of the old men mutters
and pushes his plate aside,
"Great God!" he cries, "but it chokes me;
for this is the day she died!"
The guardians gazed in horror,
the master's face went white;
Did a pauper refuse their pudding?
Could that their ears believe right?

Then the ladies clutched their husbands,
thinking the man would die,
Struck by a bolt, or something,
by the outraged One on high.
But the pauper sat for a moment,
then rose 'mid silence grim,
For the others had ceased to chatter
and trembled in every limb:

He looked at the guardians' ladies,
then, eyeing their lords, he said;
"I eat not the food of villains,
whose hands are foul and red;"
"Whose victims cry for vengeance
from their dark, unhallowed graves."
"He's drunk," said the workhouse master,
"or else he's mad and raves."

"Not drunk or mad," cried the pauper,
"but only a haunted beast,
Who, torn by the hounds and mangled,
declines the vulture's feast."
"I care not a curse for the guardians,
and I won't be dragged away;
Just let me have the fit out,
it's only on Christmas Day...
That the black past comes to goad me
and prey on my burning brain;
I'll tell you the rest in a wbisper,
I swear I won't shout again.

"Keep your hands off me, curse you!
Hear me right out to the end.
You come here to see how paupers,
the season of Christmas spend;
You come here to watch us feeding,
as they watched the captured beast;
Here's why a penniless pauper,
spits on your paltry feast."

"Do you think I will take your bounty
and let you smile and think
You're doing a noble action
with the parish's meat and drink?
Where is my wife, you traitors,
the poor old wife you slew?
Yes, by the God above me,
my Nance was killed by you."

"Last Winter my wife lay dying,
starved in a filthy den.
I had never been to the parish,
I came to the parish then;
I swallowed my pride in coming!
for ere the ruin came
I held up my head as a trader,
and I bore a spotless name.

"I came to the parish craving,
bread for a starving wife
Bread for the woman who'd loved me
thro' fifty years of life;
And what do you think they told me,
mocking my awful grief,
That the house was open to us,
but they wouldn't give out relief."

"I slunk to the filthy alley,
'twas a cold, raw Christmas Eve
And the bakers' shops were open,
tempting a man to thieve;
But I clenched my fists together,
holding my head awry,
So I came to her empty-handed
and mournfully told her why."

"Then I told her the house was open;
she had heard of the ways of that
For her bloodless cheeks went crimson,
and up in her rags she sat,
Crying, 'Bide the Christmas here, John,
 we've never had one apart;
I think I can bear the hunger,
the other would break my heart.

"All through that eve I watched her,
holding her hand in mine,
Praying the Lord and weeping
till my lips were salt as brine;
I asked her once if she hungered,
and she answered 'No.'
The moon shone in at the window,
set in a wreath of snow."

"Then the room was bathed in glory,
and I saw in my darling's eyes
The faraway look of wonder,
that comes when the spirit flies;
And her lips were parched and parted,
and her reason came and went.
For she raved of our home in Devon,
where our happiest years were spent."

"And the accents, long forgotten,
came back to the tongue once more.
For she talked like the country lassie
I wooed by the Devon shore;
Then she rose to her feet and trembled,
and fell on the rags and moaned,
And, 'Give me a crust, I'm famished...
for the love of God,' she groaned.

"I rushed from the room like a madman
and flew to the workhouse gate,
Crying, 'Food for a dying woman!'
and the answer came, 'Too late!'
They drove me away with curses;
then I fought with a dog in the street
And tore from the mongrel's clutches
a crust he was trying to eat."

"Back through the filthy by-ways...
back through the trampled slush!
Up to the crazy garret,
wrapped in an awful hush;
My heart sank down at the threshold,
and I paused with a sudden thrill.
For there, in the silv'ry moonlight,
my Nance lay cold and still."
"Up to the blackened ceiling,
the sunken eyes were cast
I knew on those lips, all bloodless,
my name had been the last;
She called for her absent husband...
Oh God! Had I known--
Had called in vain, and, in anguish,
had died in that den alone."

"Yes, there in a land of plenty,
lay a loving woman dead.
Cruelly starved and murdered
for a loaf of the parish bread;
At yonder gate, last Christmas,
I craved for a human life,
You, who would feed us paupers,
what of my murdered wife?"

"There, get ye gone to your dinners,
don't mind me in the least,
Think of the happy paupers
eating your Christmas feast
And when you recount their blessings
in your parochial way,
Say what you did for me too...
only last Christmas Day."


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 27, 2022)

Dinosauria, We (Born Into This)  by Charles Bukowski

Born like this

Into this

As the chalk faces smile

As Mrs. Death laughs

As the elevators break

As political landscapes dissolve

As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree

As the oily fish spit out their oily prey

As the sun is masked

We are

Born like this

Into this

Into these carefully mad wars

Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness

Into bars where people no longer speak to each other

Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this

Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty

Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed

Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

Born into this

Walking and living through this

Dying because of this

Muted because of this

Castrated

Debauched

Disinherited

Because of this

Fooled by this

Used by this

Pissed on by this

Made crazy and sick by this

Made violent

Made inhuman

By this

The heart is blackened

The fingers reach for the throat

The gun

The knife

The bomb

The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

The fingers reach for the bottle

The pill

The powder

We are born into this sorrowful deadliness

We are born into a government 60 years in debt

That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt

And the banks will burn

Money will be useless

There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets

It will be guns and roving mobs

Land will be useless

Food will become a diminishing return

Nuclear power will be taken over by the many

Explosions will continually shake the earth

Radiated robot men will stalk each other

The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms

Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground

The sun will not be seen and it will always be night

Trees will die

All vegetation will die

Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men

The sea will be poisoned

The lakes and rivers will vanish

Rain will be the new gold

The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases

And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition

The petering out of supplies

The natural effect of general decay

And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

Born out of that.

The sun still hidden there

Awaiting the next chapter.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 3, 2023)

Blue Bird by Charles Bukowski




There's a bluebird in my heart that        wants to get out        but I'm too tough for him,        I say, stay in there, I'm not going        to let anybody see        you.        there's a bluebird in my heart that        wants to get out        but I pour whiskey on him and inhale        cigarette smoke        and the whores and the bartenders        and the grocery clerks        never know that        he's        in there.       there's a bluebird in my heart that .        wants to get out.        but I'm too tough for him,.        I say,.        stay down, do you want to mess.        me up?.       you want to screw up the.       works?.        you want to blow my book sales in .        Europe?.        there's a bluebird in my heart that.        wants to get out.        but I'm too clever, I only let him out.        at night sometimes.        when everybody's asleep..       I say, I know that you're there,.       so don't be .       sad..        then I put him back,        but he's singing a little        in there, I haven't quite let him        die        and we sleep together like        that        with our        secret pact        and it's nice enough to        make a man        weep, but I don't        weep, do        you?


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## Dillinger4 (Tuesday at 9:26 AM)

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me by Mary Oliver

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That's what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment,
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain—
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.


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## Dillinger4 (Tuesday at 9:29 AM)

Solitude by Umberto Saba

The changing seasons, sunlight and darkness,
alter the world, which, in its sunny aspect
comforts us, and with its clouds brings sadness.

And I, who have looked with infinite
tenderness at so many of its guises,
don’t know whether I ought to be sad today

or gladly go on as if a test had been passed;
I’m sad, and yet the day is so beautiful;
only in my heart is there sun and rain.

I can transform a long winter into spring;
where the pathway in the sun is a ribbon
of gold, I bid myself  ”good evening.”

In me alone are my mists and fine weather,
as in me alone is that perfect love
for which I suffered so much and no longer mourn,

let my eyes suffice me, and my heart


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## Dillinger4 (Tuesday at 9:31 AM)

Ancient History by Jamie McKendrick

The year began with baleful auguries:
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires, 
the waves lethargic under a coat of pitch 
the length of the coastline. And a cow spoke, 
which happened last year too, although last year 
no one believed cows spoke. Worse was to come. 
There was a bloody rain of lumps of meat 
which flocks of gulls snatched in mid-air 
while what they missed fell to the ground 
where it lay for days without festering. 
Then a wind tore up a forest of holm-oaks 
and jackdaws pecked the eyes from sheep. 
Officials construing the Sibylline Books 
told of helmeted aliens occupying 
the cross-roads, and high places of the city. 
Blood might be shed. Avoid, they warned, 
factions and in-fights. The tribunes claimed 
this was the usual con-trick 
trumped up to stonewall the new law 
about to be passed. Violence was only curbed 
by belief in a rumour that the tribes 
to the east had joined forces and forged 
weapons deadlier than the world has seen 
and that even then the hooves of their scouts 
had been heard in the southern hills. 
The year ended fraught with the fear of war. 
Next year began with baleful auguries.


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