Poetry Samples
#1 : IN GOYA'S GREATEST SCENESIn Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies in an abstract landscape of blasted trees bent statues bats wings and beaks slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks and all the final hollering monsters of the ‘imagination of disaster’ they are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed And they do Only the landscape is changed They still are ranged along the roads plagued by legionnaires false windmills and demented roosters They are the same people only further from home on freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more strung-out citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America Found on: Poetry Foundation
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#3: The poet's eye obscenely seeingThe poet's eye obscenely seeing
sees the surface of the round world with its drunk rooftops and wooden oiseaux on clothesliens and its clay males and females with hot legs and rosebud breasts in roll away beds and its trees full of mysteries and its Sunday parks and speechless statues and its America with its ghost towns and empty Ellis Islands and it's surrealist landscape of mindless prairies supermarket suburbs steamheated cemeteries cinerama holy days and protesting cathedrals a kissproof world of plastic toiletseats tampax and taxis drugged store cowboys and las vegas virgins disowned indians and cinemad matrons unroman senators and conscientious non-objectors and all other fatal shorn-up fragments of the immigrant's dream come too true and mislaid among the sunbathers Found On: Google Books
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#5 Sometime during eternitySometime during eternity
some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad And moreover he adds It’s all writ down on some scroll-type parchments which some henchmen leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres a long time ago and which you won’t even find for a coupla thousand years or so or at least for nineteen hundred and fortyseven of them to be exact and even then nobody really believes them or me for that matter You’re hot they tell him And they cool him They stretch him on the Tree to cool And everybody after that is always making models of this Tree with Him hung up and always crooning His name and calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow or they can’t quite make it Only he don’t come down from His Tree Him just hang there on His Tree looking real Petered out and real cool and also according to a roundup of late world news from the usual unreliable sources real dead Found On: Poem Hunter
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#6:They WEre Putting up the statue They were putting up the statue
of Saint Francis in front of the church of Saint Francis in the city of San Francisco in a little side street just off the Avenue where no birds sang and the sun was coming up on time in its usual fashion and just beginning to shine on the statue of Saint Francis where no birds sang And a lot of old Italians were standing all around in the little side street just off the Avenue watching the wily workers who were hoisting up the statue with a chain and a crane and other implements And a lot of young reporters in button-down clothes were taking down the words of one young priest who was propping up the statue with all his arguments And all the while while no birds sang any Saint Francis Statue and while the lookers kept looking up at Saint Francis with his arms outstretched to the birds which weren't there a very tall and very purely naked young virgin with very long and very straight straw hair and wearing only a very small bird's nest in a very existential place kept passing thru the crowd all the while and up and down the steps in front of Saint Francis her eyes downcast all the while and singing to herself Found On: Google Books
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#8: in golden gate park that day
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#13 Not like Dante |
In Golden Gate Park that day
a man and his wife were coming along thru the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world He was wearing green suspenders and carrying an old beat-up flute in one hand while his wife had a bunch of grapes which she kept handing out individually to various squirrels as if each were a little joke And then the two of them came on thru the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world and then at a very still spot where the trees dreamed and seemed to have been waiting thru all time for them they sat down together on the grass without looking at each other and ate oranges without looking at each other and put the peels in a basket which they seemed to have brought for that purpose without looking at each other And then he took his shirt and undershirt off but kept his hat on sideways and without saying anything fell asleep under it And his wife just sat there looking at the birds which flew about calling to each other in the stilly air as if they were questioning existence or trying to recall something forgotten But then finally she too lay down flat and just lay there looking up at nothing yet fingering the old flute which nobody played and finally looking over at him without any particular expression except a certain awful look Found On: Poetry Foundation
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Not like Dante
discovering a commedia upon the slopes of heaven I would paint a different kind of Paradiso in which the people would be naked as they always are in scenes like that because it is supposed to be a painting of their souls but there would be no anxious angels telling them how heaven is the perfect picture of a monarchy and there would be no fires burning in the hellish holes below in which I might have stepped nor any altars in the sky except fountains of imagination |
#14: DON'T LET THAT HORSE |
#15: CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY |
Don’t let that horse
eat that violin cried Chagall’s mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached Found On: Poem Hunter
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Constantly risking absurdity
and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence Found On: Poem Hunter
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#16: KAFKA'S CASTLE STANDS Above the world |
#18: Frightened |
Kafka's Castle stands above the world
like a last bastille of the Mystery of Existence Its blind approaches baffle us Steep paths plunge nowhere from it Roads radiate into air like the labyrinth wires of a telephone central thru which all calls are infinitely untraceable Up there it is heavenly weather Souls dance undressed together and like loiterers on the fringes of a fair we ogle the unobtainable imagined mystery Yet away around on the far side like the stage door of a circus tent is a wide wide vent in the battlements where even elephants waltz thru |
Frightened
by the sound of my own voice and by the sound of birds singing on hot wires in sunday sleep I see myself slaying sundry sinners and turkeys loud dogs with sharp dead dugs and black knights in iron suits with Brooks labels and Yale locks upon the pants Yes and with penis erectus for spear I slay all old ladies making them young again with a touch of my sweet swaying sword retrouving them their maiden hoods and heads ah yes in flattering falsehoods of sleep we come we conquer all but all the while real standard time ticks on and new bottled babies with real teeth devour our fantastic fictioned future Found On: Google Books
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