~The official POETRY thread~

[chica]

Here you can post other people's poems that you like. Deep or superficial - it's up to you, but necessarily outstanding!


We Real Cool

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

[davdavon]

Charles Bukowski
How To Be A Good Writer

you've got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.

and don't worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.

just drink more beer
more and more beer

and attend the racetrack at least once a

week

and win
if possible

learning to win is hard -
any slob can be a good loser.

and don't forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.

don't overexercise.

sleep until moon.

avoid paying credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.

remember that there isn't a piece of ass
in this world over $50
(in 1977).

and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong -

an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.

stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient -
time is everybody's cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treachery

all that dross.

stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.

get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your window

hit that thing
hit it hard

make it a heavyweight fight

make it the bull when he first charges in

and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.

If you think they didn't go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you're doing now

without women
without food
without hope

then you're not ready.

drink more beer.
there's time.
and if there's not
that's all right
too.

[chica]

This is great, I had been reading Bukowski just before I started this thread Does anyone know his poem about a stray cat that he adopted? I read it long time ago, I can't remember the title. It was beautiful.

Here's another one:


the trash can

this is great, I just wrote two
poems I didn't like.

there is a trash can on this
computer.
I just moved the poems
over
and dropped them into
the trash can.

they're gone forever, no
paper, no sound, no
fury, no placenta
and then
just a clean screen
awaits you.

it's always better
to reject yourself before
the editors do.

especially on a rainy
night like this with
bad music on the radio.

and now--
I know what you're
thinking:
maybe he should have
trashed this
misbegotten one
also.

ha, ha, ha,
ha.

Charles Bukowski


P.S. I didn't start my post with those words on purpose Subconscious?

[Cream Cakes]

How about this poem people???

The Lonely Millionaire

The tour eventually ends.
He's between homes
His furniture's in a friend's cellar.
It doesn't matter where he lives.
It's beans on toast when he's at home,
Or he goes to a restaurant with a friend.
Always the people-watcher,
If he had any less presence,
He'd be invisible.
He drinks a little too much at the bar,
And silently slags off,
Each woman as she enters.
In some ways he's the ultimate playboy,
No woman good enough.
The only life that greets him,
When he gets home,
Is his dog,
Grateful to be out of kennels.


Naomi Kiowa Anyos Cunningham

Copyright ©2006 Naomi Kiowa Anyos Cunningham

[chica]

Here you can post other people's poems that you like.

But anyway, serves me right

[Sinefil]

ON LIVING

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'' ...


Nazim Hikmet
February, 1948
(Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk - 1993)

I hope you can understand.
And please:
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/...hikmet_NF.html

[chica]

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.

I miss that enthusiasm at 23

[The Cat's Mother]

Three of my favourite little poems by Stevie Smith:


1. Bag-Snatching in Dublin

Sisely
Walked so nicely
With footsteps so discreet
To see her pass
You'd never guess
She walked upon the street.

Down where the Liffey waters' turgid flood
Churns up to greet the ocean-driven mud,
A bruiser in fix
Murdered her for 6/6.

2. I Remember

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.

3. Pad, Pad

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

****

Ah! I shall be up reading her all night, now.....

[chica]

When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.

This sounds like something Moz would come up with All three of them do, actually. They are so gentle and harsh at the same time.

[Busy Clippers]

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound,
You understand me.
Thank you, and rest easy.

The Lake Isle
by Ezra Pound

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish and the shag,
And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop, or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.

[chica]

Favourite poet. Current mood.


Sumatra

Now we are carefree, light and tender.
We just think: how quiet are the snowy
peaks of the Urals.
If a pale figure makes us sad,
the one we lost to an evening,
we also know that somewhere, instead of it a rivulet
flows and is all red.
Each love, each morning in a foreign land
envelops our soul closer by its hand
in an endless tranquility of blue seas,
in which red corals glitter
like the cherries of my homeland.
We wake at night and sweetly smile
at the Moon with its bent bow
and we caress those distant hills
and the icy mountains with our tender hand.

Milos Crnjanski, 1920

[Chartres]

THE NIGHTJAR


Half awake the summer night broods
quietly on dreams that no one knows.
The tarns' glistening floods
reflect a twilight sky's
infinity, pale, morose,
Whiter grow the stars on high.
Afar, afar
the nightjar
sings alone her toneless, comfortless melody.

Never boldly, towards the heights she swings,
because of her lowness hovers low.
Downy twilight wings
seem bound to the earth,
by dust and soil weighed down below.
Woe to him whose wings in pair
cannot rise,
only linger,
helplessly drawn to the mud, whose colours they bear.

But the whitest of white among swans,
that travel in morning's bright space
their royal lanes,
never cherished a yearning
such as the nightjar has.
None has a longing so true
for the distant and far
as the nightjar
for the ever beckoning, ever yielding blue.

//Karin Boye, translation David McDuff. 1922

[Busy Clippers]

Happy Birthday, John Keats, flower of manhood, beautiful consumptive boy, beloved of Fanny Brawne. Twenty six years was not long enough!

Where's the Poet?
by John Keats
composed 1816 (age 21).

Where's the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
'Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.

[prisoner77]

Your harsh words only resonate in the way you turn your back to me
holding back the tears trembling, I grab both of your ears, I'll take it anywhere I can get it, toss the tenderness aside it's going to be a bumpy ride.

[Codreanu]

Happy Birthday, John Keats, flower of manhood, beautiful consumptive boy, beloved of Fanny Brawne. Twenty six years was not long enough!

Tuberculosis is beautiful, is it not? I can't think of a more romantic fatal illness. I mean, you have the slow wasting, the jaded Pre-Raphaelite complexion, and, most blessed of all, that peculiar mental agility and amorous exhilaration of its later stages. No wonder Kafka and St. Thérèse experienced profound joy after their first haemoptyses.

Too many 19th century Russian novels? Perhaps.

Regardless, I'm thinking a quick jaunt through the shanties of India or South Africa might be necessary to provide me the inspiration to write something worthy of you; I could always load up on antibiotics before becoming too awfuly wretched. Until then I will just read Keats' letters to Fanny, think of you, and work upon my 'Ode to the Tubercle Bacillus'.

[wolve]

This may sound extremely mellow, but nevertheless:


Percy B. Shelley - 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 law divine
In one another's being 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 sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

[no one in particular]

Tuberculosis is beautiful, is it not? I can't think of a more romantic fatal illness. I mean, you have the slow wasting, the jaded Pre-Raphaelite complexion, and, most blessed of all, that peculiar mental agility and amorous exhilaration of its later stages. No wonder Kafka and St. Thérèse experienced profound joy after their first haemoptyses.

Too many 19th century Russian novels? Perhaps.

Regardless, I'm thinking a quick jaunt through the shanties of India or South Africa might be necessary to provide me the inspiration to write something worthy of you; I could always load up on antibiotics before becoming too awfuly wretched. Until then I will just read Keats' letters to Fanny, think of you, and work upon my 'Ode to the Tubercle Bacillus'.

cod, can you make my illness sound so lovely? (then maybe more would not be so afraid of me)

[Codreanu]

cod, can you make my illness sound so lovely?

You wouldn't have emphysema would you, no one? Or do you only hyperventilate during exchanges with chica?

(then maybe more would not be so afraid of me)

Are you anything like my shadow? Then I'm afraid it's hopeless.

[Busy Clippers]

Regardless, I'm thinking a quick jaunt through the shanties of India or South Africa might be necessary to provide me the inspiration to write something worthy of you; I could always load up on antibiotics before becoming too awfuly wretched. Until then I will just read Keats' letters to Fanny, think of you, and work upon my 'Ode to the Tubercle Bacillus'.

Don't forget, my dear, that I live in the tropics. There's tubercle bacillus lurking everywhere, as sure as if it dripped like dew from the stamens of the red hibiscus. No need to go so far as India; I'll have the IV antibiotics, a laptop with voice recognition software, and a comfortable bed ready.

()

As a matter of fact, tomorrow I am scheduled for my annual TB test. Let's hope my recent output is due more to the stirrings of the heart than to the wheezing of the lungs.

[Codreanu]

There's tubercle bacillus lurking everywhere, as sure as if it dripped like dew from the stamens of the red hibiscus.

Kali's flower! How appropriate.

No need to go so far as India; I'll have the IV antibiotics, a laptop with voice recognition software, and a comfortable bed ready.

How deeply neurotic must I be to find myself so warm-hearted and enthralled over the above, your suggestion?

And what if, despite the most virulent strain of TB the tropics has to offer, I still suffer writer's block (the dumb state of bliss from having you near)? I'm bringing my pastels, just in case.

Let's hope my recent output is due more to the stirrings of the heart than to the wheezing of the lungs.

My hopes are already in the stirrings of your heart. x