My favourite poetry (2)

Posted In: Poetry + Prose. Reading This Thread:

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 1:33 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
Was reading through that old thread the other day and it looked kinda cool, so given that it's too late to resurrect it I thought I'd just start another one. I'll go first.

Remember - Christina Rosetti

Remember me when i am gone away,
gone far away into the silent land;
when you can no more hold me by the hand,
nor i half-turn to go, yet turning to stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
you can tell me of our future that you plann'd -
only remember me; you understand
it will be too late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
and afterwards remember, do not grieve;
for if the darkness and corruption leave
a vestige of the thoughts that i once had,
better by far that you should forget and smile
than that you should remember and be sad.
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 2:15 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
This is my favouritest poem ever. You might recognise a couple of the lines cos I used them as part of me signature for a bit.

Fern Hill - Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
the night above the dingle starry,
time let me hail and climb
golden in the heydays of his eyes,
and honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
and once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
trail with daisies and barley
down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as i was green and carefree, famous among the barns
about the happy hard and singing as the farm was home,
in the sun that is young once only,
time let me play and be
golden in the mercy of his means,
and green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
and the Sabbath rang slowly
in the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
and playing, lovely and watery
and fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
as I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
all moon long I heard, blessed among the stables, the nightjars
flying with the ricks, and the horses
flashing in the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
with the dew, come back, the c*ck on his shoulder; it was all
shining, it was Adam and maiden,
the sky gathered again
and the sun grew round that very day.
So if must have been after the birth of the simple light
in the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
out of the whinnying green stable
onto the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
under the new-made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
in the sun over and over
I ran my heedless ways,
my wishes raced through the house high hay
and nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
in all his turning so few and such morning songs
before the children, green and golden
follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
in the moon that is always rising,
nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
and wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land,
oh as i was young and easy in the mercy of his means
time held me green and dying,
though i sang in my chains like the sea.

Edited by the doc Apr 2007
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 2:24 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
William Blake is the daddy round my house, plain and simple.

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
and saw what I never had seen;
a chapel was built in the midst,
where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
and, 'Thou shalt not,' writ over the door;
so I turned to the Garden of Love
that so many sweet flowers bore;

and I saw it was filled with graves,
and tombstones where flowers should be;
and priests in black were making their rounds,
and binding with briars my joys and desires.
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

29xthepain

| 1,583 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 3:07 pm

29xthepain - the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

 
good selections our kid! love the christina rosetti poem... i remember delmi lent me a book of her poems... fantastic! What a legend that guy was! Here's to delmi!
...I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
Im the white man in the palais
Just lookin for fun...

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 4:15 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
Here's to delmi indeed

And here's to Emily D*ckinson, another favourite of mine. Her poems didn't have titles, they had numbers, and this is number 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense -
to a discerning Eye -
much sense - the starkest madness -
'Tis the majority
in this, as all, prevail.
Assent - and you are sane -
demure - you're straightaway dangerous -
and handled with a chain.
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 4:24 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
Another Emily now, miss Bronte, she of Wuthering Heights fame. That is an amazing book asa well, for those of you who haven't read it.

Stars - Emily Bronte

Ah! why, because the dying sun
restored our earth to joy
have you departed, every one,
and left a desert sky?

All through the night, your glorious eyes
were gazing down in mine,
and with a full heart's thankful sighs
I blessed thy watch divine!

I was at peace, and drank your beams
as they were life to me
and revelled in my changeful dreams
like petrel on the sea.

Thought followed thought - star followed star
through boundless regions on,
while one sweeti influence, near and far,
thrilled through and proved us one.

Why did the morning dawn to break
so great, so pure a spell,
and scorch with fire the tranquil cheek
where your cool radiance fell?

Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight
his feierce bemas struck my brow;
the soul of Nature sprang elate,
but mine sank sad and low!

My lids closed down - yet through their veil
I saw him blazing still;
and steep in the gold the misty dale
and flash upon the hill.

I turned me to the pillow then
to call back Night, and see
your worlds of solemn light, again
throb with my heart and me!

It would not do - the pillow glowed
and glowed both roof and floor,
and birds sang loudly in the wood,
and fresh winds shook the door.

The curtains waved, the wakened flies
were murmuring round my room,
imprisoned there, till i shpuld rise
and give them leave to roam.

O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;
O Night and Stars return!
And hide me from the hostile light
that does not warm, but burn -

That drains the blood of suffering men;
drinks tears instead of dew;
let me sleep through his blinding reign
and only wake with you!
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

the doc

| 21,161 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 4:30 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert
a shap with lion body and the head of a man,
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
reel shadows of the indignante desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
that twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
and what rough beast, its hour come at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

29xthepain

| 1,583 posts


22nd Apr 2007 at 4:53 pm

29xthepain - the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

 
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, `` What is it? ''
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ``Do I dare?'' and, ``Do I dare?''
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: ``How his hair is growing thin!'']
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: ``But how his arms and legs are thin!'']
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep. . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: `` I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all''--
If one, settling a pillow by her head, should say:
``That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.''

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
``That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.''
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.


I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.




The italian at the beginning translates as:
"If I believed that my reply were made
To one who to the world would e'er return,
This flame without more flickering would stand still;
But inasmuch as never from this depth
Did any one return, if I hear true,
Without the fear of infamy I answer,..."

From Dante's Inferno, Canto XXVII, lines 61-66
...I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
Im the white man in the palais
Just lookin for fun...

TinyShine

| 2,139 posts


23rd Apr 2007 at 2:30 pm

TinyShine -

 
Mirror
by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


Sarah xx

29xthepain

| 1,583 posts


23rd Apr 2007 at 2:45 pm

29xthepain - the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

 
This is particularly unseasonal, but what the hey, it's a fantastic little poem...

It's called:

A Thanksgiving Prayer

by William S Burroughs



Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be sh*t out through wholesome
American guts.


Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For n*gg*r-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind their
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.
...I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
Im the white man in the palais
Just lookin for fun...

the doc

| 21,161 posts


23rd Apr 2007 at 3:41 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
That Burroughs poem is f*cking ace, i haven't seen that one for ages. The world is a poorer place without that drugged-up, psychopathic madman.
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

the doc

| 21,161 posts


25th Apr 2007 at 7:48 pm

the doc - What's a little sin to see us through?

What's a little sin to see us through?

 
To You - Walt Whitman

Stranger, if you, passing, meet me
and desire to speak to me,
why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you.
Whiskey, painkillers and speed will carry me there.....

TinyShine

| 2,139 posts


26th Apr 2007 at 9:10 pm

TinyShine -

 
I thought I'd sticky this one as the other thread was pretty old!

Anyone else got some favourites to bring to the table?!

Sarah xx

29xthepain

| 1,583 posts


26th Apr 2007 at 10:52 pm

29xthepain - the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

 
The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower

by Dylan Thomas



The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

...I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
Im the white man in the palais
Just lookin for fun...

29xthepain

| 1,583 posts


26th Apr 2007 at 10:59 pm

29xthepain - the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

the rotten egg of an angry political goose...

 
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
 hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
 fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
 starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
 supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
 cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
 staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
 sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
 on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
 wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
 of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
 purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and c*ck and
 endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
 leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
 tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
 enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
 blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
 winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
 mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
 Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
 them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
 all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
 through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
 crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
 to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
 escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
 anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
 brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
 picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
 China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
 ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
 lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
 because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
 who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
 ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
 of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
 soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
 and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
 the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
 fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
 with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
 hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
 of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
 undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
 wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
 the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
 committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
 intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
 waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*cked in the a*s by saintly motorcyclists, and
 screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
 Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
 public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
 ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
 a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
 pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
 of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
 womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her a*s
 and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
 package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
 along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
 a vision of ultimate c*nt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
 sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
 were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
 the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
 secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
 the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
 backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
 with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
 & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
 too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
 sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
 over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
 & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
 waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
 heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
 son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
 be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
 bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
 and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
 build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
 tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
 the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
 of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
 of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
 decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
 were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
 growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
 amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
 ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
 ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
 by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
 away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
 soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
 jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
 street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
 records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
 key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
 and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
 hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
 had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
 & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
 Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
 is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
 tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
 second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
 with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
 sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
 or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
 Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
 their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
 presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
 shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
 neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
 hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
 nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
 resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
 fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
 of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
 echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
 dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
 stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
 tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
 telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
 emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
 rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
 nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
 total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
 of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
 vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
 juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
 images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
 consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
 Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
 you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
 confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
 naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
 what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
 of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
 into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
 the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
 good to eat a thousand years.


...I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
Im the white man in the palais
Just lookin for fun...


 
 
Rayanne Graff: His name is George. Also, he started Spam.
Rayanne Graff: i spoke to him a couple of times and that was in October of 2009.
the doc: Wow, a proper old head
Rayanne Graff: Yeah, he was the 15th person to join.
satansrubberduck: I didn't directly start Spam. Also the proof of that long since disappeared.
Rayanne Graff: No, it didn't; the Spam spam spam you made in 2002 is on page 105 of the Spam board.
satansrubberduck: Oh. I looked for it years ago and couldn't find it. The colour tags are (thankfully) broken.
satansrubberduck: Odd to think it's been over a decade since I first got involved with 'Zine.
Claire: It's not odd to me since I've just had the exact same conversation with you...
I Cunt Spell: YOU'RE ALL OLD
I Cunt Spell: SO VERY VERY OLD
Captain Stupendo: SRD made an appearence holy moly haven't seen him on here for years
Maeby: JIM!
the doc: Wow, event Starws isn't here tonight
the doc: Straws ^
the doc: *whistles*
the doc: Ah well, off I go as well then
Rayanne Graff: Sorry, Stu; i was busy tidying things. xx

 

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