poetry: results 457–480 of 735

The job description reads, roughly, hooked on the bang-bang

To kill you first must obfuscate, say

"Ammo more expensive than a gun"

"Let's buy a bullet! Who's got bread?"

The hem of the curtain hits

the windowsill like a riding whip.

To the finish line.

I woke up thinking there were beautiful people under the covers. I woke up thinking beauty had followed me home in the form of an economical soap. If only…

This is eternal, this lack of skill and know-how, this devout, this impractical, this inoculated pink and golden dawn, one or two languages in bed, a desk, a bureau, a table, two or three chairs. I stayed awake. I stayed among…

In the big fun

disaster, I revisit every place

we loved one another and cry, I fall

asleep to the same song in the back of a Jeep

night after night…

When I was a child, the government

tattooed my mother's blood type under

her left arm. Nuclear meltdown

was inevitable, they said. Soon, they would

flood my town to build a reservoir…

There's a moment in every dog's life

when it surrenders its dogginess

to a greater good…

A bagful of nickels in exchange for a bagful of black detergent that smelled of sliced oranges. They even shook on it.

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,

   Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

   Sweets into your list, put that in!

I have stood beside you, saying this, as you reach into the cupboard for another stack of dry noodles. You eat them with the dead still on, with the sticky deadness still on…

One weekend in June, we rushed

The shore, hoping

For a mass baptism, one

Might guess. We wore nothing,

And she carried the saddest look

Of anyone in that crowd.

You pull a name from the river, cradle

it to your breast. It is a twitching egg,

a pitcher of bees you wish to pour skyward.

He has been hit by a train, totaled his car five times,

Nearly starved to death due to malnutrition,

Has had malignant cancer three times, has one lung,

And almost drowned to death on several occasions.

I have had playmates, I have had companions

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days;

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Let us drink and be merry, dance, joke, and rejoice,

With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!

My tongue freezes on syllables        then starts stammering

the way a hand does, trembling on a doorjamb.

Tennessee Williams once visited Manhattan where he celebrated the Broadway success of A Streetcar Named Desire with a leather purse.

Each new day planned another. It was always a cool evening, bones brittle as toothpicks.

Don't be biased, but it's about

healing, leaping buildings in a single bound. I went

to Utah once, on the Greyhound bus, and stopped in

a yellow café…

10. Do grapes feel that sweet while crushing them barefoot? Should I have made love like she did—sticky, swelled, then bursting?

to think a reverse template

could redeem some missing

mirror image as banal as pornography

when I needed a compost pile

At The Future

Home of the New

Church…

They tell you

that when you think

you can breathe,

you'll bury

what you draw.

Can you make me

a chair that looks

like this chair?