*Poem of the day thread

[farmerbarleymow]

I am going to cheat, and post three poems that I like a lot.

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, likes skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Willaim Henry Davies, 1871-1940


This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, 1922-80


The Daffodils

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

Three poems to live life by I think.

 

[Yossarian]

Day for night
Richard Brautigan

The cab takes me home
through the Tokyo dawn.
I have been awake all night.
I will be asleep before the sun
rises.
I will sleep all day.
The cab is a pillow,
the streets are blankets,
the dawn is my bed.
The cab rests my head.
I’m on my way to dreams.

 

[Yossarian]

One of Liverpool's (destined to be European City of Culture 2008) finest poets...

TONIGHT AT NOON
Adrian Henri

Tonight at noon
Supermarkets will advertise 3p extra on everything
Tonight at noon
Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home
Elephants will tell each other human jokes
America will declare peace on Russia
World War I generals will sell poppies on the street on November 11th
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees


Tonight at noon
Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing fields
A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool
Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton
And Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights
In front of the Black house
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein


Girls in bikinis are moonbathing
Folksongs are being sung by real folk
Art galleries are closed to people over 21
Poets get their poems in the Top 20
There's jobs for everybody and nobody wants them
In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing in broad daylight
In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly bury the living
and
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon

 

[twinkle]

i know why the cages bird sings

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

maya angelou

 

[Yossarian]

When Caesar's mushroom is in season
Paul Reekie

When Caesar's mushroom is in season
It is the reversal of the mushroom season
As Caesar's mushroom comes in March
The mushroom season is in September
Six months earlier
One half year
Equinoctal
Autumnal to vernal

Do you hope for more
Than a better balance
Between fear and desire
It'll only be the straying
That finds the path direct
Neither in the woods nor in the field
No robes, like Caesar's, trimmed with purple
Rather an entire street trimmed with purple
And every door in it
Wrapped in a different sort of christmas paper


The September mushroom of midnight
Show the rhythms of vision
Can't move for tripping over them
Wipe your tapes
Wipe your tapes with lightning

 

[Stibs]

Ignoring all of the poems that are of great value, profound and life changing, my FAVOURITE poem is Lepanto by GK Chesterton.

It is horribly camp and ott and kitsch.

But it reads like a Terry Gilliam filmLepanto

 

[drfranni]

IF I SHOULD DIE

by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

IF I should die,
And you should live,
And time should gurgle on,
And morn should beam,
And noon should burn,
As it has usual done;
If birds should build as early,
And bees as bustling go,--
One might depart at option
From enterprise below!
'Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand
When we with daisies lie,
That commerce will continue,
And trades as briskly fly.
It make the parting tranquil
And keeps the soul serene,
That gentlemen so sprightly
Conduct the pleasing scene!

 

[drfranni]

I love this......

.....not that I'm bitter or anything!

Rupert Brooke
A Channel Passage

The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing--you!
You, you alone could hold my fancy ever!
And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole.
Now there's a choice--heartache or tortured liver!
A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!

Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The sobs and slobber of a last year's woe.
And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye,
To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

The Heart

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

- Stephen Crane

 

[drfranni]

Must be feeling soppy today....

Bus

By Lacy David

I used to believe when I boarded the bus
Everyone riding with me
Would stay on for the whole, long journey
But right in the middle of a straight, flat road through a perfect yellow meadow
That bell always rings
And the Greyhound pulls over
To let someone I love get out.

Sometimes we don’t even say goodbye.

Then the hard, blue seat next to me is empty
And I think no one will ever sit there again.
At the last stop, I fell into a frantic sleep
With my face against that icy window
Then I was bumped awake
To chocolate children in red berets
And nuns with shining blue eyes singing hymns
And a banker with a broken shoulder
Who offered to share his last apple with me.

We traded stories
And telephone numbers
And all the most beautiful sights to see
Then he took his luggage
And shook my hand
And went on with his own journey
On a different bus

While I missed him
And ached for more apples.

It is on each of us to stay on the bus

And keep moving ahead and ahead
Through the muddy, deep ruts, around the hot potholes
And over the smooth, new black top
When the headlights die and the night won’t stop
And the engine groans on the hard, steep grade.
Then a tire blows
But it gets repaired
Between the towns of Stuck and Scared
It gets repaired.
I envy people who travel in two’s
With Hartmann luggage and Ferragamo shoes
And a home to come home to when the cab pulls away
And the film is developed and they can say
We saw Yosemite
We went to Yellowstone
We walked through Shropshire
Well, I was there, too.
I just wish I could be in the pictures with you.
I wish I could be in the pictures with you.
Now the driver is whistling
My bus is leaving
’m trying to smile as it pulls me away
And I shout through the window
“Be safe
Be happy
I’ll remember you.
Please remember me.”

 

[twinkle]

like that a lot drf
i've had Rudyard Kipling's If in my head all day for some reason. sure it's been posted before but here it is again in all it's beautiful glory. ..

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Rather more in the genuine spirit of Empire was Hilaire Belloc's couplet:

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

(From The Modern Traveller.)

 

[drfranni]

Hee hee - Justin - brilliant!

Seasonal poem as it looks as if we are just leaving this season...

AUTUMN
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -

Thou comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain,
With banners, by great gales incessant fanned,
Brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand,
And stately oxen harnessed to thy wain!
Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne,
Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o'er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!
Thy shield is the red harvest moon, suspended
So long beneath the heaven's o'er-hanging eaves;
Thy steps are by the farmer's prayers attended;
Like flames upon an altar shine the sheaves;
And, following thee, in thy ovation splendid,
Thine almoner, the wind, scatters the golden leaves!

 

[drfranni]

And one for sour people with toothache (aka me)

Wishes of an Elderly Man

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one,

I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"


Always attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh but I doubt it, meself

 

[Yossarian]

Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place; as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

 

[Yossarian]

To the Warmongers
Seigfried Sassoon

I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.

 

[butchersapron]

Another one against the British empire A traditional Irish one this time:

The Dunes

I walked today on the cold grey shore
where I watched when I was much younger
while they built the dunes upon the sand

for the dead from the Great Hunger
for the dead from the Great Hunger.

Although I was a doctor's son
I gazed in fear and wonder
as they perished from the raging plague
that came in from the Great Hunger
that came in from the Great Hunger.

When I watched at the age of four
in Eighteen Forty Seven
the mounds they built upon the shore.
They seemed to point to heaven
they seemed to point to heaven.

But the wind and the rain they have worked away.
Now the dunes are uneven
and the children kick the sand around
and the bones they are revealed then
and the bones they are revealed then.

My brothers and sisters died.
My mother only four and twenty
and I alone survived to see
the potatoes grow in plenty
the potatoes grow in plenty.

They stole our grain as we died in pain
to put upon their tables.
The dying covered the dead with sand
and danced while they were able
and danced while they were able.

While the fiddler played we drank poitin
and ate the last of the berries.
Then knelt and said the rosary
round the mounds of dead we'd buried
round the mounds of dead we'd buried.

I saw dark shadows rise up from the sand
and dance all around the dunes
and they danced the rattling dance of the dead
to a set of mournful tunes
to a set of mournful tunes.

A crack of lightening split the sky.
The rain on the dunes it poured.
I left them lying where I shot them down
the bailiff and the landlord.
Then I went for a drink in Westport.

I walked today on the cold grey shore
where I watched when I was much younger
while they built the dunes upon the sand
for the dead from the Great Hunger
for the dead from the Great Hunger.

 

[inflatable jesus]

Nice one butchers

It was this handsome chap that wrote it wasn't it?

 

[Azrael]

Ode to Spring, by Robert Burns

When maukin bucks, at early fucks,
In dewy grass are seen, Sir,
And birds, on boughs, take off their mows
Among the leaves sae green, Sir;
Latona's sun looks liquorish on
Dame Nature's grand impetus
Till his prick go rise, then westward flies
To roger Madame Thetis.

Yon wandering rill that marks the hill,
And glances o'er the brae, Sir,
Slides by a bower where many a flower
Sheds fragrance on the day, Sir;
There Damon lay, with Sylvia gay,
To love they thought no crime, Sir:
The wild-birds sang, the echoes rang,
While Damons arse beat time, Sir. -

First with the thrush, his thrust and push
Had compass large and long, Sir;
The blackbird next, his tuneful text,
Was bolder, clear and strong, Sir:
The linnet's lay then came in play,
And the lark that soar'd aboon, Sir;
Till Damon fierce, mistimed his arse,
And fucked quite out of tune, Sir.

 

[drfranni]

Stephen Crane

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
As you thrust a bare arm backward
And made play with your hair
And a comb a silly gilt comb
Ah, God—that I should suffer
Because of the way a little finger moved.

 

[onemonkey]

rubaiyat of omar khayyam

XXXVIII

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing--Oh, make haste!


rest is here

 

[Yossarian]

Last Night the Wind and Rain Together Blew
Li Yu

Last night the wind and rain together blew,
The wall-curtains rustled in their autumn song.
The candle died, the water-clock was exhausted,
I rose and sat, but could not be at peace.
Man's affairs are like the flow of floodwater,
A life is just like floating in a dream.
I should more often go drunken through the country,
For otherwise I could not bear to live.

 

[Azrael]

V, by Tony Harrison

Of "get this filth off our screens Channel 4" 'Daily (hate) Mail' fame.

‘My father still reads the dictionary every day.
He says your life depends on your power to master words.’
Arthur Scargill
Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,

which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.
This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

Far-sighted for his family’s future dead,
but for his wife, this banker’s still alone
on his long obelisk, and doomed to head
a blackened dynasty of unclaimed stone,

now graffitied with a crude four-letter word.
His children and grandchildren went away
and never came back home to be interred,
so left a lot of space for skins to spray.

The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,
brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.
the opponent of last week, this week, or next,
and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses
on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.

Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,
dodging between tall family vaults and trees
like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,
fills every space he finds with versus Vs.
Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,
the sprayer master of his flourished tool,
get short-armed on the left like that red tick
they never marked his work with much at school.

Half this skinhead’s age but with approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

These Vs are all the versuses of life
From LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

Class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these fixtures are fought on’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)’s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

Which is, I grant, the word that springs to mind,
when going to clear the weeds and rubbish thrown
on the family plot by football fans, I find
UNITED graffitied on my parents’ stone.
How many British graveyards now this May
are strewn with rubbish and choked up with weeds
since families and friends have gone away
for work or fuller lives, like me from Leeds?
When I first came here 40 years ago
with my dad to ‘see my grandma’ I was 7.
I helped dad with the flowers. He let me know
she’d gone to join my grandad up in Heaven.

My dad who came each week to bring fresh flowers
came home with clay stains on his trouser knees.
Since my parents’ deaths I’ve spent 2 hours
made up of odd 10 minutes such as these.

Flying visits once or twice a year,
And though I’m horrified just who’s to blame
that I find instead of flowers cans of beer
and more than one grave sprayed with some skin’s name?

Where there were flower urns and troughs of water
And mesh receptacles for withered flowers
are the HARP tins of some skinhead Leeds supporter.
It isn’t all his fault though. Much is ours.
5 kids, with one in goal, play 2-a-side.
When the ball bangs on the hawthorn that’s one post
and petals fall they hum Here Comes the Bride
though not so loud they’d want to rouse a ghost.
They boot the ball on purpose at the trunk
and make the tree shed showers of shrivelled may.
I look at this word graffitied by some drunk
and I’m in half a mind to let it stay.

(Though honesty demands that I say if
I’d wanted to take the necessary pains
to scrub the skin’s inscription off
I only had an hour between trains.

So the feelings that I had as I stood gazing
and the significance I saw could be a sham,
mere excuses for not patiently erasing
the word sprayed on the grave of dad and mam.)

This pen’s all I have of magic wand.
I know this world’s so torn but want no other
except for dad who’d hoped from ‘the beyond’
a better life than this one, with my mother.

Though I don’t believe in afterlife at all
and know it’s cheating it’s hard not to make
a sort of furtive prayer from this skin’s scrawl,
his UNITED mean ‘in Heaven’ for their sake,

an accident of meaning to redeem
an act intended as mere desecration
and make the thoughtless spraying of his team
apply to higher things, and to the nation.

Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs
to let the people know who’s forged their fetters
Like PRI CE O WALES above West Yorkshire mines
(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!)

The big blue star for booze, tobacco ads,
the magnet’s monogram, the royal crest,
insignia in neon dwarf the lads
who spray a few odd FUCKS when they’re depressed.

Letters of transparent tubes and gas
in Düsseldorf are blue and flash out KRUPP.
Arms are hoisted for the British ruling class
and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up.

And there’s HARRISON on some Leeds building sites
I’ve taken in fun as blazoning my name,
which I’ve also seen on books, in Broadway lights,
so why can’t skins with spraycans do the same?
But why inscribe these graves with CUNT and SHIT?
Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure?
This pitman’s of last century daubed PAKI GIT,
this grocer Broadbent’s aerosolled with NIGGER?

They’re there to shock the living, not arouse
the dead from their deep peace to lend support
for the causes skinhead spraycans could espouse.
The dead would want their desecrators caught!

Jobless though they are how can these kids,
even though their team’s lost one more game,
believe that the ‘Pakis’, ‘Niggers’, even ‘Yids’
sprayed on the tombstones here should bear the blame?

What is it that these crude words are revealing?
What is it that this aggro act implies?
Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling
or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies?

So what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can’t you speak
the language that yer mam spoke. Think of ‘er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur!
‘She didn’t talk like you do for a start!’
I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.
She didn’t understand yer fucking ‘art’!
She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!

I wish on this skin’s words deep aspirations,
first the prayer for my parents I can’t make,
then a call to Britain and to all nations
made in the name of love for peace’s sake.

Aspirations, cunt! Folk on t’fucking dole
‘ave got about as much scope to aspire
above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt, as coal
aspires to be chucked on t’fucking fire.

‘OK, forget the aspirations. Look, I know
United’s losing gets you fans incensed
and how far the HARP inside you makes you go
but all these Vs: against! against! against!

Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke.
It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did –
Butcher, publican and baker. Me, I’ll croak
doing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid.

‘ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed ‘er.
Death after life on t’dole won’t seem as ‘ard!
Look at this cunt, Wordsworth, organ builder,
This fucking ‘aberdasher Appleyard!

If mi mam’s up there, don’t want to meet ‘er
listening to me list mi dirty deeds,
and ‘ave to pipe up to St fucking Peter
ah’ve been on t’dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!

Then t’Alleluias stick in t’angels’ gobs.
When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void
What’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs?
The cunts who lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?

This lot worked at one job all life through.
Byron, ‘Tanner’, ‘Lieth ‘ere interred’.
They’ll chisel fucking poet when they do you
and that, yer cunt, ‘s a crude four-letter word.

‘Listen, cunt!’ I said, ‘before you start your jeering
the reason why I want this in a book
‘s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!’
A book, yer stupid cunt, ‘s not worth a fuck!

 

[Azrael]

‘The only reason why I write this poem at all
on yobs like you who do the dirt on death
‘s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’
Don’t fucking bother, cunt! Don’t waste your breath!
‘You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn’t know
and it doesn’t fucking matter if you do,
the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud
but the autre that je est is fucking you.’

Ah’ve told yer, no more Greek...That’s yer last warning!
Ah’ll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come.
They’ll find yer cold on t’grave tomorrer morning.
So don’t speak Greek. Don’t treat me like I’m dumb.
‘I’ve done my bits of mindless aggro too
not half a mile from where we’re standing now.’
Yeah, ah bet yer wrote a poem, yer wanker you!
‘No, shut yer gob a while. Ah’ll tell yer ‘ow...’
‘Herman Darewski’s band played operetta
with a wobbly soprano warbling. Just why
I made my mind up that I’d got to get her
with the fire hose I can’t say, but I’ll try.

It wasn’t just the singing angered me.
At the same time half a crowd was jeering
as the smooth Hugh Gaitskill, our MP,
made promises the other half were cheering.

What I hated in those high soprano ranges
was uplift beyond all reason and control
and in a world where you say nothing changes
it seemed a sort of prick-tease of the soul.

I tell you when I heard high notes that rose
above Hugh Gaitskill’s cool electioneering
straight from the warbling throat right up my nose
I had all your aggro in my jeering.

And I hit the fire extinguisher ON knob
and covered orchestra and audience with spray.
I could run as fast as you then. A good job!
They yelled ‘damned vandal’ after me that day...’

And then yer saw the light and up ‘eavy!
And knew a man’s not how much he can sup...
Yer reward for growing up’s this super-bevvy,
a meths and champagne punch ini t’FA Cup.

Ah’ve ‘eard all that from old farts past their prime.
‘ow now yer live wi’ all yer once detested...
Old farts with not much left’ll give me time.
Fuckers like that get folk like me arrested.

Covet not thy neighbour’s wife, thy neighbour’s riches.
Vicar and cop who say, to save our souls,
Get thee beHind me, Satan, drop their breeches
and get the Devil’s dick right up their ‘oles!

It was more a working marriage that I’d meant,
a blend of masculine and feminine.
Ignoring me, he started looking, bent
on some more aerosolling, for his tin.

‘It was more a working marriage that I mean!’
Fuck, and save mi soul, eh? That suits me.
Then as if I’d egged him on to be obscene
he added a middle slit to one daubed V.

Don’t talk to me of fucking representing
the class yer were born into any more.
Yer going to get ‘urt and start resenting
it’s not poetry we need in this class war.

Yer’ve given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs
yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own.
Ah’ve got mi work on show all ovver Leeds
like this UNITED ‘ere on some sod’s stone.

‘OK!’ (thinking I had him trapped) ‘OK!’
‘If you’re so proud of it, then sign your name
when next you’re full of HARP and armed with spray,
next time you take this short cut from the game.’

He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried
and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign
the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried.
He aerosolled his name. And it was mine.

The boy footballers bawl Here Comes the Bride
and drifting blossoms fall onto my head.
One half of me’s alive but one half died
when the skin half sprayed my name among the dead.

Half versus half, the enemies within
the heart that can’t be whole till they unite.
As I stoop to grab the crushed HARP lager tin
the day’s already dusk, half dark, half light.

That UNITED that I’d wished onto the nation
or as reunion for dead parents soon recedes.
The word’s once more a mindless desecration
by some HARPoholic yob supporting Leeds.

Almost the time for ghosts I’d better scram.
Though not given much to fears of spooky scaring
I don’t fancy an encounter with mi mam
playing Hamlet with me for this swearing.
Though I’ve a train to catch my step is slow.
I walk on the grass and graves with wary tread
over these subsidences, these shifts below
the life of Leeds supported by the dead.

Further underneath’s that cavernous hollow
that makes the gravestones lean towards the town.
A matter of mere time and it will swallow
this place of rest and all the resters down.

I tell myself I’ve got, say, 30 years.
At 75 this place will suit me fine.
I’ve never feared the grave but what I fear’s
that great worked-out black hollow under mine.

Not train departure time, and not Town Hall
with the great white clock face I can see,
coal, that began, with no man here at all,
as 300 million-year-old plant debris.

5 kids still play at making blossoms fall
and humming as they do Here Comes the Bride.
They never seem to tire of their ball
though I hear a woman’s voice call one inside.

2 larking boys play bawdy bride and groom.
3 boys in Leeds strip la-la Lohengrin.
I hear them as I go through growing gloom
still years away from being skald or skin.

The ground’s carpeted with petals as I throw
the aerosol, the HARP can, the cleared weeds
on top of dad’s dead daffodils, then go,
with not one glance behind, away from Leeds.

The bus to the station’s still the No. 1
but goes by routes that I don’t recognise.
I look out for known landmarks as the sun
reddens the swabs of cloud in darkening skies.

 

[Azrael]

Home, home, home, to my woman as the red
darkens from a fresh blood to a dried.
Home, home to my woman, home to bed
where opposites seem sometimes unified.

A pensioner in turban taps his stick
along the pavement past the corner shop,
that sells samosas now, not beer on tick,
to the Kashmir Muslim Club that was the Co-op.

House after house FOR SALE where we’d played cricket
with white roses cut from flour-sacks on our caps,
with stumps chalked on the coal-grate for our wicket,
and every one bought now by ‘coloured chaps’,
dad’s most liberal label as he felt
squeezed by the unfamiliar, and fear
of foreign food and faces, when he smelt
curry in the shop where he’d bought beer.

And growing frailer, ‘wobbly on his pins’,
the shops he felt familiar with withdrew
which meant much longer tiring treks for tins
that had a label on them that he knew.

And as the shops that stocked his favourites receded
whereas he’d fancied beans and popped next door,
he found that four long treks a week were needed
till he wondered what he bothered eating for.
The supermarket made him feel embarrassed.
Where people bought whole lambs for family freezers
he bought baked beans from check-out girls too harassed
to smile or swap a joke with sad old geezers.
But when he bought his cigs he’d have a chat,
his week’s one conversation, truth to tell,
but time also came and put a stop to that
when old Wattsy got bought out by M. Patel.

And there, ‘Time like an ever rolling stream”s
What I once trilled behind that boarded front.
A 1000 ages made coal-bearing seams
and even more the hand that sprayed this CUNT

on both Methodist and C of E billboards
once divided in their fight for local souls.
Whichever house more truly was the Lord’s
both’s pews are filled with cut-price toilet rolls.

Home, home to my woman, never to return
till sexton or survivor has to cram
the bits of clinker scooped out of my urn
down through the rose-roots to my dad and mam.

Home, home to my woman, where the fire’s lit
these still chilly mid-May evenings, home to you,
and perished vegetation from the pit
escaping insubstantial up the flue.
Listening to Lulu, in our hearth we burn,
As we hear the high Cs rise in stereo,
what was lush swamp club-moss and tree-fern
at least 300 million years ago.

Shilbottle cobbles, Alban Berg high D
lifted from a source that bears your name,
the one we hear decay, the one we see,
the fern from the foetid forest, as brief flame.

This world, with far too many people in,
starts on the TV logo as a taw,
then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin
to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War.

As the coal with reddish dust cools in the grate
on the late-night national news we see
police v. pickets at a coke-plant grate,
old violence and old disunity.

The map that’s colour-coded Ulster/Eire’s
flashed on again as almost every night.
Behind a tiny coffin with two bearers
men in masks with arms show off their might.

The day’s last images recede to first a glow
and then a ball that shrinks back to a blank screen.
Turning to love, and sleep’s oblivion, I know
what the UNITED that the skin sprayed has to mean.
Hanging my clothes up, from my parka hood
may and apple petals, browned and creased,
fall onto the carpet and bring back the flood
of feelings their first falling had released.

I hear like ghosts from all Leeds matches humming
with one concerted voice the bride, the bride
I feel united to, my bride is coming
into the bedroom, naked, to my side.

The ones we choose to love become our anchor
when the hawser of the blood-tie’s hacked, or frays.
But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling: Wanker!
It’s the aerosolling skin I met today’s.
My alter ego wouldn’t want to know it,
His aerosol vocab would baulk at LOVE,
the skin’s UNITED underwrites the poet,
the measures carved below the ones above.

I doubt if 30 years of bleak Leeds weather
and 30 falls of apple and of may
will erode the UNITED binding us together.
And now it’s your decision: does it stay?

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find out where I’m buried but I’m near
the grave of haberdasher Appleyard,
the pile of HARPs, or some new neonned beer.

Find Byron, Wordsworth, or turn left between
one grave marked Broadbent, one marked Richardson.
Bring some solution with you that can clean
whatever new crude words have been sprayed on.
If love of art, or love, gives you affront
that the grave I’m in ‘s graffitied then, maybe,
erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT
but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

Victory? For vast, slow, coal-creating forces
that hew the body’s seams to get the soul.
Will earth run out of her ‘diurnal courses’
before repeating her creation of black coal?

If, having come this far, somebody reads
these verses, and he/she wants to understand,
face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,
and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
How poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.

 

[butchersapron]

Can i have two as they're very short please? (keep up the good work everyone, except me - some great stuff here i wouldn't have heard of...ta).

Rick's Pollution Poem:

Pollution
All around
Sometimes up
And sometimes down
But always around
Pollution, are you coming to my town?
Or am I coming to yours ?
We're on different buses, Pollution
But we're both using petrol...bombs!


Rick's Poem from Demolition:

What are you doing, Neil ?
To make a meal, Neil ? (its surreal)
From totalitarian vegetables
How much does it cost, Neil .. ?

By Rik.

 

[WasGeri]

Haven't got time to read this whole thread - running late for work!

Howl by Allen Ginsberg is mine. Will post it later if I remember (and it's not been posted already)

 

[Hollis]

Jesus, is that 'Ode to Spring' really by Robert Burns. - Can't say I've read any of his stuff before, & it wasn't exactly what I was expecting.

 

[Yossarian]

The City
Constantine Cavafy

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting."

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other —
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

 

[butchersapron]

Revolutionary Consciousness

He lost his hand in a bright new
automated punch press

Five digits now none
Taken by a digital computer
Whitch
Lo and Behold
Makes mistakes just like human beans

Humanized computer
Computerized human
It's all the same
But it can't hold hands

Neither can he.
He took took his other five digits
and melted them down into a
Fist.


Mr Toad (Martin Glaberman)