quote:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

quote:

My army, O, my army! The time I dreamed of comes!
I want to see your colours; I want to hear your drums!
I heard them in my boyhood when all men's hearts seemed cold;
I heard them as a Young Man — and I am growing old!
My army, O, my army! The signs are manifold!

My army, O, my army! My army and my Queen!
I used to sing your battle-songs when I was seventeen!
They came to me from ages, they came from far and near;
They came to me from Paris, they came to me from Here! —
They came when I was marching with the Army of the Rear.

My Queen's dark eyes were flashing (oh, she was younger then!);
My Queen's Red Cap was redder than the reddest blood of men!
My Queen marched like an Amazon, with anger manifest —
Her dark hair darkly matted from a knifegash in her breast
(For blood will flow where milk will not — her sisters knew the rest).

My legions ne'er were listed, they had no need to be;
My army ne'er was trained in arms — 'twas trained in misery!
It took long years to mould it, but war could never drown
The shuffling of my army's feet in the hunger-haunted town —
A little child was murdered, and so Tyranny went down.

My army kept no order, my army kept no time;
My army dug no trenches, yet died in dust and slime;
Its troops were fiercely ignorant, as to the manner born;
Its clothes were rags and tatters, or patches worn and torn —
Ah, me! It wore a uniform that I have often worn!

The faces of my army were ghastly as the dead;
My army's cause was Hunger, my army's cry was "Bread!"
It called on God and Mary and Christ of Nazareth;
It cried to kings and courtesans that fainted at its breath —
Its women beat their poor, flat breasts where babes had starved to death.

My army! My army — I hear the sound of drums
Above the roar of battles — and, lo! my army comes!
Nor creed of man may stay it — nor war, nor nation's law —
The pikes go through the firing-lines as pitchforks go through straw —
Like pitchforks through the litter, while empires stand in awe.

quote:

When your rifle is lost, and your bayonet too,
And your mates have all turned tail,
And captain and country are done with you,
And the chances are death or gaol —
When the treacherous knife for your throat is raised
Or the handcuffs held for your wrists —
Then put up a fight with your fists, old man!
Oh, put up a fight with your fists!

For the sign of a man since strife began
(Which nobody can deny),
Of the Man who Won, and the Beaten Man,
Was the sign of the Old Black Eye.
Oh, the signs of a man since a man had foes,
To show 'em the reason why,
Were ever the sign of the Broken Nose
And the sign of the Blue-Black Eye.

When you're down in the world where you once were up —
When weather and friends were fair —
And the coat you wear is a lonesome coat,
And your pants are a lonesome pair,
When the friends who borrowed when luck was good
All leave you severely alone,
Then put up a fight on your own, old man!
Oh, put up a fight on your own!

You'll need to stand, where the down-track ends,
With your drink-lulled senses clear,
For you'll get no help from your fine new friends,
And you'll get no help from beer.
They'll call you a boozer and loafer and all,
And be noble for your disgrace.
But put your back to the nearest wall,
And strike at the nearest face.

There are friends you helped, when your star was high,
Who pass you as something strange —
Oh, they drank your beer in the days gone by,
And they borrowed your careless change!
But you pass 'em blind and you pass 'em dumb,
And they'll borrow your cash again;
For they'll drink your wine in the days to come,
And you'll pity the world of men.

There were friends that you lost by your own neglect
In the days of your sinful pride;
There were friends that you lost with your self-respect
Who'd have fought for you side by side.
You'd never have thought it would come to this —
That you'd battle the world alone —
But swallow the lump in your throat, old man,
And put up a fight of your own.

There were friends who came thrice, with help and advice,
Ere the days of your folly were spent —
Oh, you wish you had answered the letters they wrote
And paid back the money they lent!
Think not of the grey-black mists behind,
Nor the future's lurid mists,
But put up a fight with your fists (so to speak) —
Oh, put up a fight with your fists.

You'll know, when it's done, and the fight you've won —
And won on your lonesome own —
That a man goes up with a host of friends,
But a man goes down alone.
But you laugh at it all as they chair you in,
As they did in the days gone by,
And they'll chuckle and grin, and drink to your win,
At the Sign of the Old Black Eye.

Joseph Brodsky posted:

I said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destroy the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow's my squat company.

My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my shoulders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Ronan Harris posted:

It's colder than before
The seasons took all they had come for.
Now winter dances here
It seems so fitting, don't you think ?
To dress the ground in white
and grey.

It's so quiet I can hear
My thoughts touching every second
That I spent waiting for you
Circumstances afford me
No second chance to tell you
How much I've missed you.

My beloved, do you know
When the warm wind comes again
Another year will start to pass ?
And please don't ask me why I'm here
Something deeper brought me
Than a need to remember.

We were once young and blessed with wings
No heights could keep us from their reach
No sacred place we did not soar
Still, greater things burned within us
I don't regret the choices
that I've made
I know you feel the same.

My beloved, do you know
How many times I stared at clouds
Thinking that I saw you there ?
These are feelings that do not pass so easily
I can't forget what we claimed as ours

Moments lost though time remains
I am still proud of what we were
No pain remains, no feeling
Eternity awaits.

Grant me wings that I might fly
My restless soul is longing
No pain remains; no feeling
Eternity awaits.

Ezra Pound posted:

In a Station of the Metro

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

Vladimir Nabokov posted:

We have been married forty years. At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour. How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?

I love you when you're standing on the lawn
Peering at something in a tree: "It's gone
It was so small. It might come back" (all this
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).
I love you when you call me to admire
A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire.
I love you when you're humming as you pack
A suitcase or the farcical car sack
With round-trip zipper. And I love you most
When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost
And hold her first toy on your palm, or look
At a postcard from her, found in a book.

Wallace Stevens posted:

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

sebzilla posted:

Yeats posted:

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

quote:

Thou call'st me effeminate, for I love women's joys;
I call not thee manly, though thou follow boys.

Charles Bukowski posted:

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.

Stephen Crane posted:

In The Desert

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.”

Robert Frost posted:

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.

quote:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Shelley posted:

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.

Vulpes posted:

No Ozymandias? For shame.

William Carlos Williams posted:

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

Neruda (as translated by Stephen Mitchell) posted:

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

Randall Jarrell posted:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

ScumLord69 posted:

Plums!

quote:

1.
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next
summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2.
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do no know what I am doing.

3.
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4.
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Kenneth Koch, "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" (1962)

quote:

code:

                                            She's wearing a smile tonight.

                                            "I'm drunk," she tells me, and her
                                            eyes tilt upwards. Up to the sky, up to the
                                            stars. Balancing between school and social
                                            life, left or right, which way to look at,
                                            being sober and being drunk. Balancing on
                 Bare feet into the dirt    two legs like rubber bands. And that was okay
                     dry dust falls down    because most people she met balanced between
                     like powdered sugar    BMWs and Porsches, or Jacuzzis and hot
          enshrouding the scorching sun.    water springs. At least she knew what it was
                                            like to live in the gutter. Her junkie-
                                            posture was hidden in a lot of slummy clothes
                        From the winter,    she scrounged up somewhere. Shoes she stole.
                    Icicles in your eyes    A cigarette. She twisted left, she twisted
                 melting down in streaks    right. Her neck said crack. The bag in her
    freezing like diamonds on your chin.    inside pocket said crack as well. "Damned
                                            drunk," she repeats, and bursts out in laughter.

And your skin. It was snow, only colder.    Her laugh echoing through all those lousy
                And the sun's still here    streets, along with the wind, the fog, bacteria.
                     but it seems older.    Once she stops laughing and looks in a puddle,
                                            catches her reflection, she silences down. With
                                            the sterile light of a flickering streetlamp, she
                                            notices some gasoline that's seeped into the
                                            puddle turning into rainbowy colors.

                                            "Damned drunk," she tells me again.

Anonymous posted:

Opening shock?
Absence of the familiar.
Thirty-two feet per second per second.
How do you breathe in freefall?
"Through genetically developed gills" goes the 'whuffo' joke.
I wasn't laughing.
Mother Earth came to greet me and I shook her.

Sufjan Stevens posted:

The Seer's Tower

In the tower above the earth
There is a view that reaches far
Where we see the universe
I see the fire, I see the end

Seven miles above the earth
There is Emmanuel of mothers
With his sword, with his robe
He comes dividing man from brothers

In the tower above the earth,
we built it for Emmanuel
In the powers of the earth,
we wait until it rips and rips
In the tower above the earth,
we built it for Emmanuel
Oh my mother, she betrayed us
but my father loved and bathed us

Still I go to the deepest grave
Where I go to sleep alone

ScumLord69 posted:

Flossie Williams posted:

Dear Bill: I've made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you'll find
blue-berries--a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.

On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer--Just light the gas--
boil the water and put it in the tea

Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs--
I didn't know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours--

See you later. Love. Floss.

Please switch off the telephone.

quote:

We work in this building and we are hideous
In the fluorescent lights, and you know our clothes
Woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels
And ride up and down the elevators, filled with us
Turning and returning like the spray of light that goes
In the dance-halls among the dancing fools.
My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps
To see the goodness of the world laid bare
And rising with the government on its lips
The alphabet congealing in the air
Around our heads. But in my belly's flames
Something is dancing, calling me by many names
That are secret, and filled with light, and rise
And break - and I see my previous lives.

quote:

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings.
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,
coolie, friend of the family, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival—
I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red friend of the family, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I’m just a red friend of the family who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, friend of the family, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation,

Frank O'Hara posted:

The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

Keetje Kuipers posted:

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.

quote:

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

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.

quote:

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.

Afanasy Fet posted:

Russian:

На стоге сена ночью южной
Лицом ко тверди я лежал,
И хор светил, живой и дружный,
Кругом раскинувшись, дрожал.

Земля, как смутный сон немая,
Безвестно уносилась прочь,
И я, как первый житель рая,
Один в лицо увидел ночь.

Я ль несся к бездне полуночной,
Иль сонмы звезд ко мне неслись?
Казалось, будто в длани мощной
Над этой бездной я повис.

И с замираньем и смятеньем
Я взором мерил глубину,
В которой с каждым я мгновеньем
Все невозвратнее тону.

English:

My face turned upwards to the sky
One summer night I lay upon some hay
A lively close-knit starry chorus
Was flickering all around.

The mute earth, nebulous and dreamlike,
Rushed off without a trace
And I, like Eden's first inhabitant,
Faced night's gaze all alone.

Was it I hurtling into midnight's depths
Or was it crowds of stars that hurtled toward me?
It seemed as if a mighty palm
Held me suspended over the abyss.

And with a heart confused and stunned
I cast my gaze into the depths,
Whence sinking every moment deeper,
I never will return.

Nicolás Guillén posted:

ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!

La culebra tiene los ojos de vidrio;
la culebra viene y se enreda en un palo;
con sus ojos de vidrio, en un palo;
con sus ojos do vidrio.
La culebra camina sin patas,;
la culebra se esconde en la yerba;
caminando se esconde en la yerba,
caminando sin patas.

ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombe!
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!

Tú le das con el hacha, y se muere:
ˇdale ya!
ˇNo le des con el pie, que te muerde,
no le des con el pie, que se va!

Sensemayá, la culebra,
sensemayá,
Sensemayá, con sus ojos,
sensemaya.
Sensemayá, con su lengua,
sensemayá.
Sensemayá, con su boca,
sensemayá.

ˇLa culebra muerta no puede comer;
la culebra muerta no puede silbar;,
no puede caminar,
no puede correr!
ˇLa culebra muerta no puede mirar;
la culebra muerta no puede beber;
no puede respirar,
no puede morder!

ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, la culebra . . .
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, no se mueve . . .
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, Za culebra . . .
ˇMayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, se murio!

Scandalous Wench posted:

Michael Dickman posted:

My Autopsy

I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the
small and glowing loaves of bread

I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
poems

You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on
despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth



There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave

Both

My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
particles of skin

The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned
helix of dust and cinnamon

Breathe in

Breathe out

I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them

There



There is a way
if we want
out of drowning

I’m having
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel

A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel
Face, a Corpse Reviver

What are you having?

I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round

Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice,
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,
and the two fingers of gin
that make up paradise



There is a way
if we want
to untie ourselves

The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark

There are lots of stories about intestines

People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake

The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new
bright plastic curled around the older brother

Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned

Some people climb them into Heaven

Others believe we live in one
God’s intestine!

A conveyor belt of stars and saints

We tie and we loosen

Minor
and forgettable
miracles

Edna St. Vincent Millay posted:

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

quote:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullčd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapčd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.