PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
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
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s
nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which…
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
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
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Blousy guitar I don’t want to count the beats Hey Hey
My pen I have bed hair in the best way Daughter
of sunlight and air and I’m glad you were born
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and
everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your
glasses to single out what you know is there because
Where is the word I want?
Groping
in the thicket,
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There…
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
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.
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
…
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
Constantly risking absurdity
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
ONE
Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
