poetry: results 241–264 of 735

Tyra Banks is a cowboy.

Like the capital of Tadzhikistan

I long to be a name I neither know

nor can pronounce, a smeared calligraphy

of membrane and breath, an outpost of bone.

Bill minced your heart in kindergarten. Bill,

litigious prick, missed the bottom step. Bill

the shih tzu–pomeranian mix. Bill

the vermiculturist. Mechanic Bill…

Father Mother

The animals of this land are beautiful and foreign

They run on two legs, carry small square teeth in the front like beaver and wild mules

Mamma

I so fucking own them

Papa the steel casings pass so quickly through them

Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay—

      Stay till the good old year,

So long companion of our way,

      Shakes hands, and leaves us here.

            Oh stay, oh stay,

One little hour, and then away.

     the                          floor

                        hollowed-out

                              for         cholera

                                dead,

        stars                     keep

                                 sky.

Free to spend the night

In Houston, in Texas, in its odd mystery Texas comes first. Football, women

Adoring wide receivers and tight ends and the average Joe who thirsts after

Both. The quotient, sex or otherwise, is sky-high, like the audience sucking down

Beer or whiskey or cigarettes just to make it past this last day of summer…

The trees planted in

the median

follow me. They

could be a kind of peppertree…

First eyelids and lips are closed, then open. Now, open eyes appear unseeing. A kind of dreaming.

For thousands of years people have carried their faces this way, one by one, only on their heads.

Under these conditions nothing is harder to control than reason. You babble without speaking,

march into the desert without water. We will die tomorrow, the day after at the latest.

Such Anniversary shall be—

Sometimes—not often—in Eternity—

When farther Parted, than the Common Woe—

Look—feed upon each other's faces—so—

In doubtful meal, if it be possible

Their Banquet's true—

181: Wooden hearted and dumb: Clearly he is referencing that terrible translation he loved so much of Valentroika's Russian epic, "Uncle Winter," in which the author melodes that "when my mother's voice grew unheard my heart/became cold as wood/laid in the ground for millennia."

It is well documented that the author obsessed over the untimely sickness of his mother in a manner similar to other pre-debauchist outlawed writers such as E. A. Poe, even going so far as to refer to himself as such.

If I were to catch fire

for any/some thing, burn my love out bright and hot;

I'd be left with ashes, the taste

of ashtray in my mouth as though I'd loved

a smoker. (The bastard!)

What if you were three mad sisters

who lived at home with your mother

who hates you? Oh, you are?

Well, then, no wonder you are pregnant

and homeless on the streets of Minneapolis

with your cold glass globe containing the Mysteries.

I would like to openly tell you what I saw

but 1) somewhere along the road I added two letters to my name,

and this makes me slightly unaccountable.

2) I am also known to propose dances that have only one or two movements in sum.

Man is no star, but a quick coal

                  Of mortal fire;

Who blows it not, nor doth control

                  A faint desire,

Lets his own ashes choke his soul.

      When God at first made Man,

      Having a glass of blessings standing by—

Let us (said He) pour on him all we can;

Let the world's riches, which dispersād lie,

      Contract into a span.

This one goes out to all the wedding guests

who got sloshed on free booze then pissed on their cell phones.

Land-lines are for chumps who don't mind getting tapped;

pimps, cons, and dealers subsist on their cell phones.

That wasn't love looking for me, this was:

I saw him, gray-colored and hunch-backed, lurking behind

the garbage dump with binoculars, thumping toward me like a tuba—

In this episode of angels, a mortal couple strolls, hand in hand, down a hall, around a corner on a cruise ship when a door shuts, a gas leaks, and a frantic couple is sealed in a tunnel, in a vessel…

Hard work facilitates sexual identification. Hardly against false epiphanies. I'll be solid ground; you be top of the world. I'll be down to earth; you be rising above. You be rising up.

The reality of your spine will not render response an anthem. The more one depicts, the greater lack is felt. We begin at the base and set out on a skyward tracking stroke.

Love built a stately house, where Fortune came,

And spinning fancies, she was heard to say

That her fine cobwebs did support the frame,

Whereas they were supported by the same;

But Wisdom quickly swept them all away.

The bondsman wouldn't touch him, and when they bring him up, shuffling and handcuffed, you almost don't recognize your man. He looks beat. Meek. Maybe make-believe, like something's just gone off inside him. You're in the court of common pleas, but it feels to you like a lot of sermonizing, all mystical and official, all ritual, all well-oiled wood.