Today's poet

[freckle]

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,
am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear
solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile
and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."

ee cummings

How exquisite...such a long time since i have visited the thread (sadly) but what a wonderful reminder of why i should...i have never come across this one how utterly lovely

[that_fjell_guy]

On the Day of Nixon's Funeral


It's time to put the aside the old resentments; lies,
machinations, the paranoia, bugs in telephones,
the body bags, secret bombings, his sweaty upper lip,
my cousin Arnie, too dumb to go to school,

too virtuous to confess he'd give blow jobs
for nothing at the Paramount, so he lost a leg
in Da Nang. Now it's time for amnesiacs to play
Beethoven's Eroica by Nixon's casket.

To applaud his loyalty, to grant a few mistakes,
to honor his diplomacy, him and his pal Kissinger
who bombed the lush green paddies of Cambodia.
And now for a few lyric moments as I wait patiently

for my fiftieth birthday. Wood ducks decorate the pond
near this farmhouse, and in the marsh I've spied
a meadow lark, a fox, a white-tailed hawk who soars
above the Western Mountain peaks. Oh, I'm in love

with the country all right. So I can forget my friend
Sweeney, who shot Congressman Lowenstein
because the radio in his tooth insisted on it.
I remember the march on the Pentagon in purple,

a proud member of the Vegetarian Brigade. I was drugged,
as many of us were drugged, as my parents
were drugged by a few major networks, by a ranch house
and an Oldsmobile. I once spit on Hubert Humphrey,

threw a brick through Dow Chemical's plate-glass door.
I wrote insane letters to Senators, burying them
in moral rectitude: I got a response from one:
Senator Kennedy — the dead one — whose office wrongly

argued for slow withdrawal instead of Instant Victory.
I remember Tricky Dick in Nineteen Fifty-three:
I'm eight years-old, frightened and ignorant,
lying down before my parents' first TV: my aunts

and uncles sitting in a circle, biting their nails,
whispering names of relatives awaiting trial, who,
thanks to Nixon, lost their sorry jobs. You can see why
I'd want to bury this man whose blood would not circulate,

whose face was paralyzed, who should have died
in shame and solitude, without benefit of eulogy or twenty-one
gun salutes. I want to bury him in Southern California
with the Birchers and the Libertarians. I want to look out

my window and cheer the remaining cedars
that require swampy habitats to survive. To be done
with shame and rage this April afternoon, where embryonic
fiddleheads, fuzzy and curled and pale as wings,

have risen to meet me. After all, they say he was a scrappy man,
wily and sage, who served as Lucifer, scapegoat, scoundrel,
a receptacle for acrimony and rage — one human being
whose life I have no reverence for, which is why I'm singing now.

Ira Sadoff

Interesting this. Makes you want to look into this stuff more. Reminds me of Gil Scott Heron's H2Ogate Blues, and one of Kurt Vonneguts books 'Jailbird'

[Alf]

So you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Charles Bukowski

[Alf]

It has been a bit quiet on this thread recently. A reworking of John Masefield's 'Sea Fever' by Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Inland

People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore,—
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,
Spanking the boats at the harbour's head,
What do they long for, as I long for,—
Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning,—
One salt taste of the sea once more?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Alf]

Apparently dead sheep in poems are a metaphor for guilt.


Dead sheep

There’s a dead sheep – swelling by the hedge

a woman standing by the cottage door,

a ghost



waiting for her man.

What should she do?

The sheep is dead with lamb wedged deep inside her.



Night creeps in

she lights the lamp

and paces.



The sheep is heavy

on her conscience now.

A female presence,

a legacy

of treachery from long ago.


Anne Foxglove

[Mossdog]

Apparently dead sheep in poems are a metaphor for guilt.


Dead sheep

There’s a dead sheep – swelling by the hedge

a woman standing by the cottage door,

a ghost



waiting for her man.

What should she do?

The sheep is dead with lamb wedged deep inside her.



Night creeps in

she lights the lamp

and paces.



The sheep is heavy

on her conscience now.

A female presence,

a legacy

of treachery from long ago.


Anne Foxglove

Then there's lots of guilt amidst the hills of the Eastern Lakes!

On a more colourful note - aren't the buttercups simply magnificant this year?

Buttercups and Daisies

I never see a young hand hold
The starry bunch of white and gold,
But something warm and fresh will start
About the region of my heart; -
My smile expires into a sigh;
I feel a struggling in my eye,
'Twixt humid drop and sparkling ray,
Till rolling tears have won their way;
For, soul and brain will travel back,
Through memory's chequer'd mazes,
To days, when I but trod life's track
For buttercups and daisies.

There seems a bright and fairy spell
About there very names to dwell;
And though old Time has mark'd my brow
With care and thought, I love them now.
Smile, if you will, but some heartstrings
Are closest link'd to simplest things;
And these wild flowers will hold mine fast,
Till love, and life, and all be past;
And then the only wish I have
Is, that the one who raises
The turf sod o'er me, plant my grave
With buttercups and daisies.

Eliza Cook

[freckle]

It has been a bit quiet on this thread recently. A reworking of John Masefield's 'Sea Fever' by Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Inland

People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore,—
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,
Spanking the boats at the harbour's head,
What do they long for, as I long for,—
Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning,—
One salt taste of the sea once more?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I really enjoyedthis Alf especially as I will shortly be moving very close to the sea (fingers crossed!) ....i am hoping to visit more regularly now that things are finally settling down for me!

[freckle]

"Boogie Street"
Leonard Cohen

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.
They’re saving me a seat.
I’m what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.

And O my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall,
Wherein I bathed with you.
Bewildered by your beauty there,
I’d kneel to dry your feet.
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One…

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go . . .

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

"I am your man" by Slyvie Simmons- new autobiography of Leonard Cohen...I have mixed feelings about his work sometimes finding it a tad cheesy sometimes enjoying its poetic quality, listening to slyvie simmons on radio 6 it sounds like he leads an interesting life wouldn't mind reading the book at some juncture

[Alf]

"Boogie Street"
Leonard Cohen

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.
They’re saving me a seat.
I’m what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.

And O my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall,
Wherein I bathed with you.
Bewildered by your beauty there,
I’d kneel to dry your feet.
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One…

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go . . .

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

"I am your man" by Slyvie Simmons- new autobiography of Leonard Cohen...I have mixed feelings about his work sometimes finding it a tad cheesy sometimes enjoying its poetic quality, listening to slyvie simmons on radio 6 it sounds like he leads an interesting life wouldn't mind reading the book at some juncture

I have fond memories of 'Bugis Street' in Singapore in the mid seventies before they sanitized the place and spoiled it :thunbdown:
I won't include the poem/song about the place

[Alf]

This one is from Durham lass Elizabeth Barratt Browning for all you dog lovers out there. 'Flush' was the name of her Cocker Spaniel but I am not sure how it got that name unless it was particularly fastidious with its personal hygiene

Flush or Faunus

You see this dog. It was but yesterday
I mused, forgetful of his presence here,
Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear;
When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay,
A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way
Right sudden against my face,--two golden-clear
Large eyes astonished mine,--a drooping ear
Did flap me on either cheek, to dry the spray!
I started first, as some Arcadian
Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove:
But as my bearded vision closelier ran
My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above
Surprise and sadness; thanking the true Pan,
Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning