what's your poem?

Match (mat.ch) n-es 1. An arrangement
of a marriage: We agreed to the match
without understanding what it meant.
2. An engagement in a game or a contest
in which two people oppose or compete
with each other: A couple with nothing
in common but the outcome of the match.
3. A pair of opposites (that attract). —
v. matched, matching, matches. 1. To see
a similarity; to cause to correspond:
to liken. 2. To flip coins, and compare
the faces in a game of chance. 3. To join
two pieces of wood, tongued and grooved
to fit. 4. To secure; to hold together;
to form a bond.

Match (mat.ch) n-es 1. An article that
is manufactured for the express purpose
of starting a fire; usually a splinter
of wood or cardboard coated with a thin
combustible substance at the tip that
ignites it by friction: "The quick, sharp
scratch, / and blue spurt of a lighted
match." —Browning. 2. The evolution
of energy from heat to light 3. Love.

Warren Slesinger

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

plastic, stacked on the
newspaper vending machine...
his winter headband

holding back wild hair,
needing a shave yesterday...
he fixes me with

his high-voltage, sky-
blue eyes, with pin-point pupils,
on this rainy, grey

sunday morning, and
asks me; "what's happening, man?"
all i can manage

at this early hour
is a sort of soundless croak,
and i squat down to

wait for the bus... he
asks me where im going, and
i tell him; "...to work."

...he asks me what i
do, and i tell him ...he says
he "likes my jacket."

i tell him; "its a
poncho." "oh, yeah", he says, "a
poncho, right." ...he lights

a cigarette and
walks into the street looking
for the bus... then a

pidgeon lands on the
curb, and starts drinking from an
oily puddle

in the gutter ...he
reaches into his bundle
and pulls out a bag

of broken cookies
and tosses them to the bird
...more birds land and eat

...he calls and coos to
them softly ...i watch them peck
at the crumbs and then

walk over to his
feet... i picture him bending
down and scooping one

up and twisting its
head, breaking its neck, and then
stuffing it into

his bundle for a
meal later... instead, he stands
with one arm outstretched,

his finger pointing,
waiting for one to perch on
his nicotine stained

didjit... they ignore
him more successfully then
i was able to...

the bus arrives, and
we board... about thirteen blocks
later, he gets off,

and as he exits
from the mechanical doors,
clutching his bundle,

shoulders hunched against
the rain, patting himself down
for another smoke,

and dry match, i hear
the sound of church bells tolling
at 'queen of angels'

-- stosh machek

"April Fool Birthday Poem For Grandpa"

Today is your
birthday and I have tried
writing these things before,
but now
in the gathering madness, I want to
thank you
for telling me what to expect
for pulling
no punches, back there in that scrubbed Bronx parlor
thank you
for honestly weeping in time to
innumerable heartbreaking
italian operas for
pulling my hair when I
pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd know how it feels,
we are
involved in it now, revolution, up to our
knees and the tide is rising, I embrace
strangers on the street, filled with their love and
mine, the love you told us had to come or we
die, told them all in that Bronx part, me listening in
spring Bronx dusk, breathing stars, so glorious
to me your white hair, your height your fierce
blue eyes, rare among italians, I stood
a ways off listening as I pour out soup
young men with light in their faces
at my table, talking love, talking revolution
which is love, spelled backwards, how
you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom
at us, would thunder Dante, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men
bent to your ends, well I want you to know
we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca
for Sacco ad Vanzetti, without knowing
it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Bearsley
Oscar Wilde (all street lights
shall be purple), do it
for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb
Kropotkin
Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for
the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.

******
"Song For Baby-O, Unborn"

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Where are the lyrics about pink elephant flying through marshmallow skies?
Where are the nursery-rhyme-like melodies?
Where are the mellotrons?

A Martian Writes A Postcard Home.

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

-- Craig Raine

[poem snipped]

Oh coolness! I remember back in high school, in one of my English classes, we almost spent the whole period just going over this one poem. We dissected it to where there was absolutely nothing left of it. I wish I could remember what it ended up meaning, but I do know we spent an awful lot of time discussing what the colors red and white signify, as well as the possible symbolism behind the rainwater being on the wheelbarrow so close to chickens.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes
Shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
But you shall shine more bright in its contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
WHen wastefuk wars shall statues overturn
And broils root out the work of masonary,
Nor Mars his sword, nor wars' quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all oblivious emnity
shall you pace forth - our praise shall still find room.
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
SO, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover' eyes.

Eveeryone go aaah!

a fish hook,
an open eye

- Margaret Atwood

No use, you walk backwards,
admiring your own footprints

- M.A

a better one...

grey rain the day
the man said when I die
let it rain that day
whenever it rains then
is grey to whomever
time says goodbye

who set the man singing
said the man who died
said grey the man is grey
said grey the rain is dead
goodbye said the rain

whenever the man is singing then
in a grey raincoat time says die
wring out the rain
ring it out that day
save the grave for whomever the man said
save the rain for a gay day
sing it whenever said the grey
die sighs the rain
goodbye whenever

-Colin Morton

Hope......goosestep.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a mle, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

I sang a song at dusking time
Beneath the evening star,
And Terence left his latest rhyme
To answer from afar.

Pierrot laid down his lute to weep,
And sighed, "She sings for me."
But Colin slept a careless sleep
Beneath an apple tree.

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

A City's Death by Fire

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

--

-- Liz :x (elizabeth.daply...), October 10th, 2002

**********

I think there should be a separate Liz thread already, although there is no news yet of her. I don't know her, so don't feel that I am the one to start it.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

-- Pablo Neruda

― luna.c (luna.c), Thursday, 10 October 2002 17:15 (fifteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://miloraps.bandcamp.com/album/sovereign-nose-of-y-our-arrogant-face

The things about you I appreciate
may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
and chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power
and see your eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
and other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
to chase you screaming up a tower
or make you cower
by asking you to differentiate
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like successfully to guess your weight
and win you at a fete.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders
falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders, too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I’d like all your particulars in folders
marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
the neat arrangement of your teeth
(half above and half beneath)
in rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk
I like the way your elbows work,
on hinges.

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I’d like to teach them how to count,
and certain things we might exchange,
something familiar for something strange.
I’d like to give you just the right amount
and give some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you hold a teacup.
I like your legs when you unwind them,
even in trousers I don’t mind them.
I’d always know, without a recap,
where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I’d like to cross two hemispheres
and have you chase me.
I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers
or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt
and cancelling other dates.
I’d like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt
or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign
and had a yen for sudden homicide.
I’d let you put insecticide
into my wine.
I’d even like you if you were the Bride
of Frankenstein
or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s
Jekyll and Hyde.
I’d even like you as my Julian
of Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan.
How melodramatic
if you were something muttering in attics
like Mrs Rochester or a student of Boolean
Mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I’d like to find a good excuse
to call on you and find you in.
I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin,
and see you grin.
I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin,
I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence.
I’d like to be your second look.
I’d like to let you try the French Defence
and mate you with my rook.
I’d like to be your preference
and hence
I’d like to be around when you unhook.
I’d like to be your only audience,
the final name in your appointment book,
your future tense.

Damn dude

I think I read that first on another ilx thread tbh it's a beaut

yes but you just try saying that to a coworker these days

Post a poem u

On the Flyleaf of Pound's Cantos

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, fools!
Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

-- Basil Bunting

That's good

One more go-to:

Inniskeen Road: July Evening

The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

-Patrick Kavanagh

I am endlessly taken by the run and rhythm from half past eight to stone

lonely guy just writing poem baout things

that is a good one too

A Man in Assynt by Norman MacCaig is a little long to post here so I'll link it here

I really love this reading by the author and just falling into the West Highland landscapes.

So many to name, but the beginning of Keith Waldrop's 'Shipwreck in Heaven' springs to mind:

Balancing. Austere. Life-
less. I have tried to keep
context from claiming you.

Without doors. And there are
windows. How far, how
far into the desert have we come?

Rude instruments, product
of my garden. Might also be
different, what I am thinking of.

So you see: it is
not symmetrical, dark
red out of the snow.

Or part I of Rosmarie Waldrop's 'In a Doorway' (from Blindsight):

The world was galaxies imagined flesh. Mortal. What to think now? Think simple. Matter? A lump of wax? An afterglow? Or does everything happen of its own accord? Perfect and full-bodied. No more. Observable. No longer. In your eyes or line of sight. Down all three dimensions of time. Or lock up the house. Or prophets.

•

Here I work toward. A kind of elegy. Here a strange ceiling. "Earth fills his mouth." I would look at you. And write you. A spell but slack at the edge. And in the door where I stand your voice goes. Hollow.

•

If what happened. (Happened?) Hand. Between palms. Grief. Death. Coffee with cream. Coffee. Arms, knees and free will. And shiny. Rainbows.

•

The words have detached. And spread throughout my body. Such reckless growth. Windbag! Want to see come full circle the wheel? To comment. My own commentary till I till. My own great-granddaughter's body?

•

Absence. But it cuts. Repeat. Furiously Yes then No. Even a fictional character catches a chill. Makes the heart. And cold penetrates. We do not fall off the surface. But you, planet earth. Grow. Even as we read. Fonder of the dark.

I also miss the late Simon Howard, whose blog is still up:

http://walkingintheceiling.blogspot.ca

The following was written by one of my students, a 12 year-old kid from New York whom I taught via Skype. I provide it verbatim:

The Look

This look I see too much,
Out of confusion
And bewilderment.

From people who,
Cannot comprehend,
The stories of those,
Who can suppress.

This look I find unbearable,
The look
From those who may
Be forgetful.

I still do not understand,
What is the cause of
This unmistakable glance.

I sometimes wonder what he's up to now. Hopefully writing poetry.

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

I was expecting 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'.

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

Its hard to read any poetry not written by irish tbh

love that one so much i moved to the canal in question tbh

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50986/paradoxes-and-oxymorons

A FOOTFALL TAPPING SECRECIES OF STONE

kavanagh stop it

As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

love these, keep em comin