misc/poetry
Leonard Cohen,
Philip Larkin,
Fernando Pessoa,
Pablo Neruda,
Mark Doty,
Alex Gallo-Brown,
Maggie Smith,
Robert Hass,
Matthew Zapruder
poems i like
Don’t believe everything you see on YouTube
& I don’t mean don’t believe it
The way you wouldn’t believe something
On the cover of the National Enquirer; I mean
Don’t believe it like so many people
Believed lonelygirl15. Don’t place
Too much importance on a person’s intentions
Which for most people become clear
Only with time. You know
There are so many videos that will show you
How to do your hair like your favorite soap star.
It’s kind of incredible the innovations
That have been made in hair care products. Life
Before conditioner was never good
& it didn’t get better, but now when you get
Out of the shower it’s easy to untangle your hair. It’s not
A metaphor or universal but the idea is your hair
Will be soft
entitled 'poem'
DOG POEM
On this day 11 years ago my father died.
I watched him refuse death.
There was no reason to share this.
It was an indignity.
There is no refusing.
The brain stops even if until the last it performs miraculously the
duty of remaining illuminated.
He died on an evening like this warm one in November.
Loose leaves blew around the parking lot as I drove away from the
place of his death, a hospital.
I smoked with my mother's second sister just beyond the gate of the house my parents bought, owned and lived in together for twenty-six years.
I lived in that house, but did not live there then.
We smoked and a reporter came to the gate and asked her
questions.
She was ashamed.
There was no need to answer her.
We did not answer.
We smoked.
The night was strangely warm, like so many peculiar Halloweens,
November in just a few days.
Autumn quiets or casts itself between the warm parts of air.
It fills spaces of warmth with cold.
And the man fell silent, looking at the sunset.
But what good is a sunset to one who hates and loves?
PERHAPS THOSE WHO ARE GOOD AT SEEING ARE POOR AT FEELING
Perhaps those who are good at seeing are poor at feeling
And do not enchant because they don’t know how to act.
There are ways for doing all things,
And love also has its way.
Those whose way of seeing a field is by seeing the grass
Cannot have the blindness that makes a man stir feelings.
I loved, and was not loved, which I only saw in the end,
For one is not loved as one is born but as may happen.
She still has beautiful lips and hair, like before.
And I am still alone in the field, like before.
I think this and my head lifts up
As if it had been bent down,
And the divine sun dries the small tears I can’t help but have.
How vast the field is and how tiny love!
I look, and I forget, as the world buries and trees lose their leaves.
Because I am feeling, I cannot speak.
I listen to my voice as if it belonged to another.
And my voice speaks of her as if this other were speaking.
Her hair is yellow-blond like wheat in bright sunlight,
And when she speaks, her mouth utters things not told by words.
She smiles, and her teeth gleam like the river’s stones.
18 NOVEMBER 1929
I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.
from time's passage <3
Put time to good use!
But what’s time that I should put it to use?
Put time to good use!
Not a day without a few lines . . .
Honest and first-rate work
Like that of a Virgil or Milton . . .
But to be honest or first-rate is so hard!
To be Milton or Virgil is so unlikely!
from a note in the margin
I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.
opening stanza of I got off the train
BY THE MOONLIGHT, IN THE DISTANCE
By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?
I don’t know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.
What anguish engulfs me?
What love can’t I explain?
It’s the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.
love the last stanza
Residents of the area call it the crematorium.
It has revealed the undercurrents of our age.
The poor who thought voting for the rich would save them.
The poor who believed all that the papers said.
The poor who listened with their fears.
The poor who live in their rooms and dream for their kids.
The poor are you and I, you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.
Sometimes it takes an image to wake up a nation
From its secret shame. And here it is every name
Of someone burnt to death, on the stairs or in their room,
Who had no idea what they died for, or how they were betrayed.
They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.
They called the tower ugly; they named it an eyesore.
All around the beautiful people in their beautiful houses
Didn’t want the ugly tower to ruin their house prices.
Ten million was spent to encase the tower in cladding.
Had it ever been tested before except on this eyesore,
Had it ever been tested for fire, been tried in a blaze?
But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty.
But in twenty four storeys, not a single sprinkler.
In twenty four storeys not a single alarm that worked.
In twenty four storeys not a single fire escape,
Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting
For an inferno. That’s the story of our times.
Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap
On the inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make
The empty look nice. That’s all they will see,
How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen.
But if you really look you can see it, if you really listen
You can hear it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding.
There’s cladding everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding — things that look good
But have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.
They say the words but the words are hollow.
They make the gestures and the gestures are shallow.
Their bodies come to the burnt tower but their souls don’t follow.