PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Two consecutive lines of a poem, usually of the same length, that rhyme.
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
I was a kid other kids’
parents gossiped about.
They told their children
what I was: too negative.
I get it. Fair to fear
contagion of bad attitudes,
That night, I opened your wardrobe and found
a trophy of vultures, their necks pierced
by hanger hooks. I saw at once
that you hunted everything I loved —
What's it like at the centre of the AGO?
Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed
in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last
inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice
for my mother. To be a more comfortable
bear with me it wasn’t long ago I was brainless
lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth chewing them
into pure light so much of me then was nothing
My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucci Prada
My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata
But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle
It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
Tune: Rory Dall’s Port
First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; …
I have a picture of us when we are seven
but we aren’t in it. At the time it was taken
we thought we were. We posed with our wide
The trick to building houses was making sure
they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste
was growing more sophisticated and occasionally
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall?
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred
What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,
Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,
Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,
The lords of life, the lords of life, —
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
