Poetry Corner

[BeatFreq]

thought it'd be fun to have a thread for poems we like. i'll get the ball rolling with some of my favorite poet, lawrence ferlinghetti...


********************************

The World Is A Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician

- lawrence ferlinghetti

************************************************** *******

Recipe For Happiness In Khaborovsk Or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/recipe-for-happiness-khaborovsk-or-anyplace/#)in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/recipe-for-happiness-khaborovsk-or-anyplace/#)
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.


- lawrence ferlinghetti

[BeatFreq]

Populist Manifesto No. 1

Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,
down from your foothills and mountains,
out of your teepees and domes.
The trees are still falling
and we’ll to the woods no more.
No time now for sitting in them
As man burns down his own house
to roast his pig
No more chanting Hare Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse approaches
eating light, heat & power,
and the clouds have trousers.
No time now for the artist to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our little literary games,
no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,
no time now for fear & loathing,
time now only for light & love.
We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening & rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth & Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your mouths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Poets of the Cities’
hung in museums including myself,
All you poet’s poets writing poetry
about poetry,
All you poetry workshop poets
in the boondock heart of America,
All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets,
All you pre-stressed Concrete poets,
All you cunnilingual poets,
All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,
All you eyeless unrealists,
All you self-occulting supersurrealists,
All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,
All you Groucho Marxist poets
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat,
All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,
All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,
All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of poetry,
All you zen brothers of poetry,
All you suicide lovers of poetry,
All you hairy professors of poesie,
All you poetry reviewers
drinking the blood of the poet,
All you Poetry Police -
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great’new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relations to it -
Poets, descend
to the street of the world once more
And open your minds & eyes
with the old visual delight,
Clear your throat and speak up,
Poetry is dead, long live poetry
with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open poetry
with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’
with other subjective levels
or other subversive levels,
a tuning fork in the inner ear
to strike below the surface.
Of your own sweet Self still sing
yet utter ‘the word en-masse -
Poetry the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men & women still walking there,
still lovely creatures everywhere,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.


- lawrence ferlinghetti

[BeatFreq]

I Am Waiting


I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep through the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped’ onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to ‘be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty’s clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder


- lawrence ferlinghetti

[the drizzle]

ARIEL

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air ----
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel ----
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.


-Sylvia Plath
</pre>

[chestylarue]

there once was a man from nantucket...

[Foster]

I don't read much poetry but here is my favorite from my childhood...


My beard grows down to my toes,
I never wears no clothes,
I wraps my hair
Around my bare,
And down the road I goes


Shel Silverstein

[the drizzle]

tommy said it was a hat
so i put it on

now dad is saying
where's the toilet stopper gone?

_shelsilverstein

[Foster]

tommy said it was a hat
so i put it on

now dad is saying
where's the toilet stopper gone?

_shelsilverstein

LOL...another great

[dave]

http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/beowulf.html



Early History of the Danes
Listen:
You have heard of the Danish Kings
in the old days and how
they were great warriors.
Shield, the son of Sheaf,
took many an enemy's chair,
terrified many a warrior,
after he was found an orphan.
He prospered under the sky
until people everywhere
listened when he spoke.
He was a good king!
Shield had a son,
child for his yard,
sent by God
to comfort the people,
to keep them from fear--
Grain was his name;
he was famous
throughout the North.
Young princes should do as he did--
give out treasures
while they're still young
so that when they're old
people will support them
in time of war.
A man prospers
by good deeds
in any nation.
Shield died at his fated hour,
went to God still strong.
His people carried him to the sea,
which was his last request.
In the harbor stood
a well-built ship,
icy but ready for the sea.
They laid Shield there,
propped him against the mast
surrounded by gold
and treasure from distant lands.
I've never heard
of a more beautiful ship,
filled with shields, swords,
and coats of mail, gifts
to him for his long trip.
No doubt he had a little more
than he did as a child
when he was sent out,
a naked orphan in an empty boat.
Now he had a golden banner
high over his head, was,
sadly by a rich people,
given to the sea.
The wisest alive can't tell
where a death ship goes.
Grain ruled the Danes
a long time after his father's death,
and to him was born
the great Healfdene, fierce in battle,
who ruled until he was old.
Healfdene had four children--
Heorogar, Hrothgar, Halga the Good,
and a daughter who married
Onela, King of the Swedes.

Hrothgar Becomes King of the Danes

After Hrothgar became king
he won many battles:
his friends and family
willingly obeyed him;
his childhood friends
became famous soldiers.
So Hrothgar decided
he would build a mead-hall,
the greatest the world had
ever seen, or even imagined.
There he would share out
to young and old alike
all that God gave him
(except for public lands and men's lives).
I have heard that orders
went out far and wide;
tribes throughout the world
set to work on that building.
And it was built, the world's
greatest mead-hall.
And that great man
called the building
"Herot," the hart.
After it was built,
Hrothgar did what he said
he would: handed out gold
and treasure at huge feasts.
That hall was high-towered,
tall and wide-gabled
(though destruction awaited,
fire and swords of family trouble;
and outside in the night waited
a tortured spirit of hell).
The words of the poet,
the sounds of the harp,
the joy of people echoed.
The poet told how the world
came to be, how God made the earth
and the water surrounding,
how He set the sun and the moon
as lights for people
and adorned the earth
with limbs and leaves for everyone.
Hrothgar's people lived in joy,
happy until that wanderer of the wasteland,
Grendel the demon, possessor of the moors,
began his crimes.
He was of a race of monsters
exiled from mankind by God--
He was of the race of Cain,
that man punished for
murdering his brother.
From that family comes
all evil beings--
monsters, elves, zombies.
Also the giants who
fought with God and got
repaid with the flood.

[Jobin]

Grans Demise

What's the worst thing that could happen to you whilst waiting for a bus?
How about your leg exploding and covering you in pus?
Granted, it's quite unlikely but it happened to my gran,
Although she's a special case, she was formerly a man.
Dont let this incident deter you if you're on your way today
To have your bits and bobs fiddled with and turned the other way
I'm assured by those who know about these things it's quite unlikely
That your limbs will go bang and leave a mess that's most unsightly.
See, the trouble with my gran (or gramps, depending on your view)
Was a general view of life considered sane by just a few.
So when he or she decided fun could be had by changing gender
She did the op at home instead of acting like a bender.
Now gramps (as he was formerly) had no surgical expertise
And the tools he used were better employed for chopping trees
But still he thought a successful home op would make him famous
Maybe thats why he f**ked up and sewed his leg to his anus.

[dave]

Jehovah buried, Satan dead,
do fearers worship Much and Quick;
badness not being felt as bad,
itself thinks goodness what is meek;
obey says toc,submit says tic,
Eternity's a Five Year Plan:
if Joy with Pain shall hang in hock
who dares to call himself a man?

go dreamless knaves on shadows fed,
your Harry's Tom,your Tom is Dick;
while gadgets murder squawk and add,
the cult of Same is all the chic,
by instruments,both span and spic,
are justly measured Spic and Span:
to kiss the mike if Jew turn kike
who dares to call himself a man?

loudly for Truth have liars pled,
their heels for Freedom slaves will click;
where Boobs are holy,poets mad,
illustrious punks of Progress shriek;
when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,
Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:
if Hate's a game and Love's a fuck
who dares to call himself a man?

King Christ,this world is all aleak;
and lifepreservers there are none:
and waves which only He may walk
Who dares to call himself a man.


-jehovah buried, satan dead
ee cummings

[~!MjC!~]

Roses are red
Your mom gave me head
This thread is gay
What more can I say.

[Steve]

I'm not going to copypasta... but this is my all-time favorite piece.

The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/646/) by Coleridge.

[precariousleigh]

Satiety by Nicole Wirth

A drug-induced false sense of security
A blissful facade of love and light
A constant battle to connect and coexist
A masquerade of interest in activity

Stubbornly striving to mold reality to dream
A constant and consistent war on energy
Turning blue into red with no success
Slipping further into patterns of jagged edges

Cutting and burning and bruising and biting
The pain so ingrained it's no longer felt
Going through the motions, and falling
The moments of happiness are more than few

Blindness and joylessness and vindication
Unwilling to listen to the truth inside
Turning a cheek to those much wiser
To pretend the inevitable won't ever arrive

Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted life
The lessons of the past lost once again
The urgent need to connect and grow
The longing for stability takes over truth

Grow and learn and prosper and move on
Refocus the energy to mold a new start
Run far, run fast, and run steady
This will all be a distant recollection soon

Take the lessons and grow taller, stronger
The petals will blossom into a different flower
The phoenix rises and begins to soar
The moon becomes full and blue and beautiful

Happiness, prosperity, and blissful joy await
All these giflts found within yourself
They are no longer suppressed and hidden
Let the love light shine and nurture yourself

Let go, yet hold true
Fly, yet stay grounded
You have complete control
You are bliss and energy, and all that is good

Be well bright light...

[Cha0s By Design]

Most of the poetry I enjoy
comes from song lyrics I'd say.

[Orangepeel]

My magic is down.
My spells mope around
the house like sick old dogs
with bloodshot eyes
watering cold wet noses.

My charms are in a pile
in the corner like the
dirty shirts of a summer fatman.

One of my potions died
last night in the pot.
it looks like a cracked
Egyptian tablecloth.

--Richard Brautigan

[BeatFreq]

recently attended a reading/discussuion with this guy - I really recommend checking out his book 'Sea of Faith'



John Brehm
DEAR INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE
Thank you for your letter informing me of the errors
in my 2005 filing. I’m enclosing a check for
$5,657.00 to cover the tax which I evidently
still owe and the interest on that tax.
I would hereby like to ask, however,
that you forgive the penalty of $1,136.00
since the employer failed to send me a 1099
for the income I made as a consultant that year.
Of course I realize it’s my responsibility to report
all my income, but in the absence of a 1099
I simply forgot. I have a number of clients
and I’m (obviously) not the best bookkeeper.
Nor am I particularly “good with money.”
I am a poet as well as a freelance writer,
and being a poet isn’t quite as lucrative
as you might imagine. You may notice,
for example, that for all of last year I received
$57.00 in royalties. (A friend of mine helpfully
observed that I could have made more money
“as a parking meter,” to which I replied that
I could have made a lot more money as a parking meter,
and gotten a lot more respect as well.)
Unlike most hard-working poets in America,
I don’t teach, mainly because I don’t know anything.
I’m probably not all that far from the clichéd notion
of the romantic poet you yourself may hold.
I get stoned sometimes and stare at trees and clouds
for hours on end, try to see the wind, etc.
I weep for no reason, remember real or imagined
slights for ages, and lick my wounds with words.
I live in a studio apartment, a garret if you will.
I have a huge desk—it’s like the deck of a ship,
and I its landlocked captain, gazing out to sea.
It sits underneath my sleeping loft, which
my girlfriend likes to call “the lofty loft,”
for reasons I won’t go into here as they may seem
inappropriate, or too personal, or perhaps
irrelevant to my purpose, which is to ask your
forgiveness of the penalty and to offer reasons why
by explaining the hardships of the poet’s life.
I’ll just say that sometimes it gets pretty lofty up there
and sometimes we imagine we’re on a magic carpet
drifting smoothly above the city below, in its state
of semi-controlled, slow-motion collapse,
and on out over the ocean, which she loves and fears,
just like I do, or over the summer-campy Catskills,
where we can’t afford to buy a country house,
with their worn-down mountains and charmingly
self-effacing trees, so unlike the impossibly massive
and overly serious cedars and hemlocks and
Douglass fir trees of the Pacific Northwest,
where I used to live until poverty forced me East.
Those trees are brooders—dignified, mist-shrouded
monsters—beautiful, of course, and awe-inspiring
(I wonder if you have felt this), but too damply
archaic and imposing and uncomprehendable
for my taste. I like a tree you can take in with
a single steady gaze. I wonder if you are as bad
at poetry as I am at accounting. Perhaps we are
the inverted mirror-images of each other.
I don’t imagine you get asked that question
very often or receive many letters like this one.
Maybe you’re reading this out loud even now
to your office (I almost said “cell”) mates. Of my book
a reviewer once said that “one simply can’t resist
reading these poems out loud to someone else,”
and I wonder if you feel this—the irresistible
need to read this poem aloud. I’m sure
the letters you receive are mostly angry ones,
the kind that say things like, “Here, take my
Goddamn money and buy Dick Cheney a few more
gallons of puppy blood for his nightly ablutions,”
or “Dear IRS, please use the enclosed check to
purchase some hand-held rocket-launchers to blast the fuck
out of some poor Iraqi’s house, which you prefer
to call ‘a suspected insurgent stronghold.’”
Or, “Please give this money to the CEO of Exxon
so he can buy silk socks while I regurgitate
my supper and try not to starve.”
I thought of taking that approach, I felt
that desire to get in a shot or two, to give voice
to righteous indignation, treat you like
a non-person, someone mindlessly
and heartlessly saying “no” all day long.
But I’m done with all that, I want to reach you,
to speak to you as a fellow human being immersed
in the same joys and suffering as I am—didn’t you
once write poems yourself, poems of anguish
and loss and loneliness?—and to remind you
of the karmic delights of forgiveness that
await you if you release me
from this debt.

[Cloudkicker]

Beans.


Beans, beans,
the magical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot,
The more you toot, the better you feel,
So, lets have beans with every meal!

[the drizzle]

brautigan is good.


DEER TRACKS

Beautiful, sobbing
high-geared fucking
and then to lie silently
like deer tracks in the
freshly-fallen snow beside
the one you love.
That's all.

[Starry]

I keep my paint brush with me
Wherever I may go,
In case I need to cover up
So the real me doesn’t show.
I’m so afraid to show you me,
Afraid of what you’ll do – that
You might laugh or say mean things.
I’m afraid I might lose you.

I’d like to remove all my paint coats
To show you the real, true me,
But I want you to try and understand,
I need you to accept what you see.
So if you’ll be patient and close your eyes,
I’ll strip off all my coats real slow.
Please understand how much it hurts
To let the real me show.

Now my coats are all stripped off.
I feel naked, bare and cold,
And if you still love Me with all that you see,
You are my friend, pure as gold.

I need to save my paint brush, though,
And hold it in my hand,
I want to keep it handy
In case somebody doesn’t understand.
So please protect me, my dear friend
And thanks for loving me true,
But please let me keep my paint brush with me
Until I love me, too.

[the drizzle]

wow. um...

hmmmm.

moving on:

BOBBY BROWN

Hey there, people, Im bobby brown
They say Im the cutest boy in town
My car is fast, my teeth is shiney
I tell all the girls they can kiss my heinie
Here I am at a famous school
Im dressin sharp n im
Actin cool
I got a cheerleader here wants to help with my paper
Let her do all the work n maybe later Ill rape her

Oh God I am the american dream
I do not think Im too extreme
An Im a handsome sonofabitch
Im gonna get a good job n be real rich

(get a good
Get a good
Get a good
Get a good job)

Womens liberation
Came creepin across the nation
I tell you people I was not ready
When I fucked this dyke by the name of freddie
She made a little speech then,
Aw, she tried to make me say when
She had my balls in a vice, but she left the dick
I guess its still hooked on, but now it shoots too quick

Oh God I am the american dream
But now I smell like vaseline
An Im a miserable sonofabitch
Am I a boy or a lady...i dont know which

(I wonder wonder
Wonder wonder)

So I went out n bought me a leisure suit
I jingle my change, but Im still kinda cute
Got a job doin radio promo
An none of the jocks can even tell Im a homo
Eventually me n a friend
Sorta drifted along into s&m
I can take about an hour on the tower of power
long as I gets a little golden shower

Oh God I am the american dream
With a spindle up my butt till it makes me scream
An Ill do anything to get ahead
I lay awake nights sayin, thank you, fred!
Oh god, oh god, Im so fantastic!
Thanks to freddie, Im a sexual spastic
And my name is bobby brown
Watch me now, Im goin down,
And my name is bobby brown
Watch me now, Im goin down....

[Mylia]

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.
-rumi

[DMinus]

Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks
Lick on deez nutz and suck the dick
Get's the fuck out after you're done
And I hops in my ride to make a quick run

[soLid]

The Annihilation of Nothing
By Thom Gunn

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,
More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,
Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks - images burst with fire
Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided
Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.
Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.


--

Thom Gunn is one of my favorite poets and I think this is one of his best.

[the drizzle]

Flakes! Flakes!
Flakes! Flakes!

They don't do no good
They never be workin'
When they oughta should
They waste your time
They're wastin' mine
California's got the most of them
Boy, they got a host of them
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
They got the Flakes

Flakes! Flakes!

They can't fix yer brakes
You ask 'em, "Where's my motor?"
"Well it was eaten by snakes . . ."
You can stab 'n' shoot 'n' spit
But they won't be fixin' it
They're lyin' an' lazy
They can be drivin' you crazy
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
Swear t'God they got the most
At every business on the coast
[Take it away, Bob. . .]

I asked as nice as I could
If my job would
Somehow be finished by Friday
Well, the whole damn weekend
Came 'n' went, Frankie
[Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?]
'N'they didn't do nothin'
But they charged me double for Sunday
You know, no matter what you do
They gonna cheat 'n' rob you
Then they'll send you a bill
That'll get your senses reelin'
And if you do not pay
They got computer collectors
That'll get you so crazy
Til your head'll go through th' ceilin'
Yes it will!

I'm a moron 'n' this is my wife
She's frosting a cake
With a paper knife
All what we got here's
American made
It's a little bit cheesey,
But it's nicely displayed
Well we don't get excited when it
Crumbles 'n' breaks
We just get on the phone
And call up some Flakes
They rush on over
'N' wreck it some more
'N' we are so dumb
They're linin' up at our door
Well, the toilet went crazy
Yesterday afternoon
The plumber he says
"Never flush a lampoon!"
This great information
Cost me half a week's pay
And the toilet blew up
Later on the next day ay-eee-ay
Blew up the next day WOO-OOO

We are millions 'n' millions
We're coming to get you
We're protected by unions
So don't let it upset you
Can't escape the conclusion
It's probably God's Will
That civilization
Will grind to a standstill
And we are the people
Who will make it all happen
While yer children is sleepin',
Yer puppy is crappin'
You might call us Flakes
Or something else you might coin us
But we know you're so greedy
That you'll probably join us
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you

FRANK ZAPPA


(for a musical version of this, please see the zappa thread. the white zone is for loading, and unloading, only) :pizza:

[Brandon]

More of a Haiku, but...

"Does anyone else find this weird?
I mean, we're looking down on Wayne's basement..
only that's not Wayne's basement... isn't that weird?"

[Cloudkicker]

More of a Haiku, but...

"Does anyone else find this weird?
I mean, we're looking down on Wayne's basement..
only that's not Wayne's basement... isn't that weird?"

LOL! x100,000 points!

[Jahporia]

you are awesome Brandon, nice 1 :) this one always stuck with me...Mina Loy "Songs to Joannes"...have others i love too.


http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/mina_loy.jpg
Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane <dl><dt>I would an eye in a Bengal light </dt><dt>Eternity in a sky-rocket </dt><dt>Constellations in an ocean </dt><dt>Whose rivers run no fresher </dt><dt>Than a trickle of saliva </dt><dt>
</dt><dt>These are suspect places </dt><dt>
</dt><dt>I must live in my lantern </dt><dt>Trimming subliminal flicker </dt><dt>Virginal to the bellows </dt><dt>Of experience </dt><dt>Colored glass. </dt></dl>
II
<dl><dt>At your mercy </dt><dt>Our Universe </dt><dt>Is only </dt><dt>A colorless onion </dt><dt>You derobe </dt><dt>Sheath by sheath </dt><dt>Remaining </dt><dt>A disheartening odour </dt><dt>About your nervy hands </dt></dl> III
<dl><dt>Night </dt><dt>Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares </dt><dt>--------------------------------------------- </dt><dt>Noon </dt><dt>Curled to the solitaire </dt><dt>Core of the </dt><dt>Sun </dt></dl> <dl><dt>
</dt></dl> V
<dl><dt>Shuttle-cock and battle-door </dt><dt>A little pink-love </dt><dt>And feathers are strewn </dt></dl>

VI
<dl><dt>Let Joy go solace-winged </dt><dt>To flutter whom she may concern </dt></dl>
<dl><dt>
</dt><dt>IX
</dt><dt>We might have coupled </dt><dt>In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment </dt><dt>Or broken flesh with one another </dt><dt>At the profane communion table </dt><dt>Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips </dt><dt>
</dt><dt>We might have given birth to a butterfly </dt><dt>With the daily-news </dt><dt>Printed in blood on its wings </dt></dl>

X
<dl><dt>In some </dt><dt>Prenatal plagiarism </dt><dt>Foetal buffoons </dt><dt>Caught tricks </dt><dt>--- --- --- --- --- </dt><dt>From archetypal pantomime </dt><dt>Stringing emotions </dt><dt>Looped aloft </dt><dt>--- --- --- --- </dt><dt>For the blind eyes </dt><dt>That Nature knows us with </dt><dt>And most of Nature is green </dt><dt>--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- </dt></dl>

XI
<dl><dt>Green things grow </dt><dt>Salads </dt><dt>For the cerebral </dt><dt>Forager's revival </dt><dt>And flowered flummery </dt><dt>Upon bossed bellies </dt><dt>Of mountains </dt><dt>Rolling in the sun</dt></dl>

XVII

I don't care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walk-
ing to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut

Red a warm colour on the battle-field
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath



XXXII
The moon is cold
Joannes
Where the Mediterranean----------------

[BeatFreq]

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

- e.e. cummings

*********************************

<BIG>How Poetry Comes to Me</BIG>
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

- Gary Snyder

*****************************************

[BeatFreq]

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

- Gary Snyder

**************************************

<BIG>Kisiabaton</BIG>

Beat-up datsun idling in the road
shreds of fog
almost-vertical hillsides drop away
huge stumps fading into mist
soft warm rain
Snaggy, forked and spreading tops, a temperate cloud-forest tree

Chamaecyparis formosiana--
Taiwan hinoki,
hung-kuai red cypress
That the tribal people call kisiabaton

this rare old tree
is what we came to see.
- Gary Snyder

[the drizzle]

<center> America

Allen Ginsberg

</center> America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/88/abe-brigade.html#wobblies).
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/88/spain-home.html)
America Sacco & Vanzetti (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/88/sacvan.html) must not die
America I am the Scottsboro (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/88/scottsboro.html) boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

[ShauniQua]

Here's another Allen Ginsberg one...didn't post the whole thing, as it's ridiculously long :)

Howl
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo...

[Jahporia]

...two of my other favs :)

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

Pablo Neruda

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

The Red Wheelbarrow

by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens