Category: Poetry

“The Whole Mess … Almost” by Gregory Corso

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment
I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room   
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

 

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:
“Don’t! I’ll tell awful things about you!”
“Oh yeah? Well, I’ve nothing to hide … OUT!”
Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:   
“It’s not my fault! I’m not the cause of it all!” “OUT!”   
Then Love, cooing bribes: “You’ll never know impotency!   
All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!”
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
“You always end up a bummer!”
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
“Without us you’ll surely die!”
“With you I’m going nuts! Goodbye!”

 

Then Beauty … ah, Beauty—
As I led her to the window
I told her: “You I loved best in life
… but you’re a killer; Beauty kills!”   
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her   
“You saved me!” she cried
I put her down and told her: “Move on.”

 

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out.
The only thing left in the room was Death   
hiding beneath the kitchen sink:
“I’m not real!” It cried
“I’m just a rumor spread by life … ”   
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all   
and suddenly realized Humor
was all that was left—
All I could do with Humor was to say:   
“Out the window with the window!”

 

Gregory Corso, “The Whole Mess … Almost” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. 

“Creatures” by Billy Collins

On By JennieIn Poetry2 Comments

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

~Billy Collins

“If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have to Miss You So Much” by Ali Shapiro

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Lately I keep things
just to throw them away: practice,
practice. What I mean is, I’ve had enough
longing, enough of nothing
ever being enough. Look how the earth
shrugs its mountainous shoulders, how the cows don’t blink
unless there’s a fly, how the pavement quits
to dirt without warning, how the river can’t tell
itself from the rain. Since when can I not
get over anything? Just watch me go
to this town’s lone bar, which is open and chock-full
of blondes, blondes, blondes. The jukebox plays country
for free, which leaves me
with my ballast of quarters and cornered
by a woman who tells me she breaks things: horses
n’ hearts. I wish she would take
my heart out back and shoot it, lame
as it is, run as it’s been
by you into the ground, but she’d rather teach me
to two-step, which it turns out
I’m born for, having indecisively shuffled back and forth
through your door all these years. But from here
you’re a myth, tiny
jockey, impossible as Brooklyn,
elevators, it not being summer anymore.
Look, even the shades
are half-drawn and drooping
like eyelids, the walls
like the patrons, sloppy
and slouched. I promise I’ll love you forever
if you please just don’t make me
start now, in the brief dumb calm
of the just-fine, with this cowgirl pressing
her big stone-washed hips into mine. I want to take her home
but to someone else’s home, or perhaps just send her home
with someone else. What I mean is, I’m tired
of everything gorgeous. Of the burden
of burning. Of wondering
when. What I mean is, on some nights I miss you so much
that I never want to see you again.

“If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have to Miss You So Much” by Ali Shapiro

“Invictus” ~William Ernest Henley

On By JennieIn Poetry2 Comments

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

~William Ernest Henley

“The Wings” ~Denise Levertov

On By JennieIn Poetry

Something hangs in back of me,
I can’t see it, can’t move it.

I know it’s black,
a hump on my back.

It’s heavy. You
can’t see it.

What’s in it? Don’t tell me
you don’t know. It’s

what you told me about–
black

inimical power, cold
whirling out of it and

around me and
sweeping you flat.

But what if,
like a camel, it’s

pure energy I store,
and carry humped and heavy?

Not black, not
that terror, stupidity

of cold rage; or black
only for being pent there?

What if released in air
it became a white

source of light, a fountain
of light? Could all that weight

be the power of flight?
Look inward: see me

with embryo wings, one
feathered in soot, the other

blazing ciliations of ember, pale
flare-pinions. Well–

could I go
on one wing,

the white one?

~Denise Levertov