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| Poetry | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 5 2008, 07:38 PM (348 Views) | |
| steph | Mar 5 2008, 07:38 PM Post #1 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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Not really sure if this is classed as entertainment but there's this person on LJ (it was in the spotlight) who posts a poem every day. Today's one was really cute, thought I'd post it here. Anyone else can post poems they like here too! “Warning!” Jenny Joseph When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick the flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat And eat three pounds of sausages at a go Or only bread and pickle for a week And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes. But now we must have clothes that keep us dry And pay our rent and not swear in the street And set a good example for the children. We must have friends to dinner and read the papers. But maybe I ought to practise a little now? So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple. |
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| steph | Apr 6 2008, 03:26 PM Post #2 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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“On Turning Ten” Billy Collins The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. |
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| steph | Sep 3 2008, 06:55 PM Post #3 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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I love this: “curiosity” Virginia Tamez I sometimes wonder if instinct kicked in if your feet kicked, or if you just hung there and didn't fight it (because you'd wanted it for so long) I sometimes wonder if your neck broke or if you suffocated if you saw spots or if your eyes were shut what image played in your mind those last few moments (and how many moments did it take?) I sometimes wonder were you crying and what were you thinking (if you were thinking at all) if you took your glasses off if you were wearing green how much air was between your feet and the ground if you hoped that someone would save you in time what kind of rope you used if it burned your skin and would it be so fucking unreasonable to burn every rope I find I sometimes wonder what I was dreaming about why I wasn't with you and if you were mad at me and if you hate me and if this will always hurt so numbingly much. |
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| steph | Sep 9 2008, 10:40 AM Post #4 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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Some of this I love, other bits I don't/ Maura O'Connor Today I am fragile pale twitching insane and full of purpose. I'm thinking of my lover: my soft hips pressing his coarse belly, my tongue on a salmon nipple, his hand buried in my thick orange hair the telephone ringing. I'm thinking we tend our illnesses as if they are our children: fevered screaming demanding attention and twenty dollar bills, hours we could have spent making love with the television on. Faith is a series of calculations made by an idiot savant. I'm in love. I'm alone in this city of painted boxes stacked like alphabet blocks spelling nothing. There are things I know: trees don't sing birds don't sprout leaves roses bloom because that's what roses do, whether we write poems for them or not. I concentrate on small things: ivy threaded through chain link, giveaway kittens huddled in a soggy cardboard box, a fat man blowing a harmonica through a beard of rusty wires brown birds chattering furiously on power lines. I try not to think about lung cancer, AIDS, the chemicals in the rain; things I can't imagine any more than a color I've never seen. My heart is graffiti on the side of a subway train, a shadow on the wall made by a child. Nothing has been fair since my first skinned knee I believe death must be. I cling to love as if it were an answer. I go on buying eggs and bread, boots and corsets, knowing I'll burn out before the sun. I'm thinking of the days I tried to stay awake while the billboards and TV ads for condoms, microwave brownies, and dietetic jello lulled me to sleep. A brown-eyed girl once told me a secret that should have blown this city into a mass of unconnected atoms Our sewage is piped to the sea. Beggars in the street are hated for having the nerve to die in public. Charity requires paperwork, Relief requires medication as if we were the afterthoughts of institutions greater than our rage. Gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace we think it is kind. We all go on buying lottery tickets Diet Coke and toothpaste as if the sky over our heads were the roof of a guilded cage. We provide evidence that we were here: initials cut into cracked vinyl bus seats, into trees growing from squares of concrete, a name left on a stone, an office building, a flower, a disease, a museum, a child. Tonight the stars glitter like rhinestones on a black suede glove. In the coffin my room has become, I talk to God about the infrequency of rain about people who can't see the current gentleness running under the pale crust of my skin. I tell him under the jackhammer crack, the diesel truck rumble, even the clicking sound traffic lights make switching from yellow to red, there is a silence swallowing every song, conversation, every whisper made beside graves or in the twisted white sheets of love. I tell him I can't fill it with dark wine, blue pills, a pink candle lit at the altar the lover touching my hair. God doesn't answer. God doesn't know our names. He's only the architect designing the places we occupy like high rise offices or ant hills I know this the way I know sunrise and sunset are caused by the endless turning of the Earth. |
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| steph | Sep 17 2008, 10:08 AM Post #5 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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“Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” Martin Espada for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago. Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans. Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub. Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs. Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come. Alabanza I say, even if God has no face. Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: Teach me to dance. We have no music here. And the other said with a Spanish tongue: I will teach you. Music is all we have. |
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| steph | Nov 19 2008, 02:47 PM Post #6 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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"Photograph" Andrea Gibson I wish I was a photograph tucked into the corners of your wallet I wish I was a photograph you carried like a future in your back pocket I wish I was that face you show to strangers when they ask you where you come from I wish I was that someone that you come from every time you get there and when you get there I wish I was that someone who got phone calls and postcards saying wish you were here I wish you were here autumn is the hardest season the leaves are all falling and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground and the trees are naked and lonely I keep trying to tell them new leaves will come around in the spring but you can't tell trees those things they're like me they just stand there and don't listen I wish you were here I've been missing you like crazy I've been hazy eyed staring at the bottom of my glass again thinking of that time when it was so full it was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine or sticking straws into the center of the sun and sipping like icarus would forever kiss the bullets from our guns I never meant to fire you know I know you never meant to fire lover I know we never meant to hurt each other now the sky clicks from black to blue and dusk looks like a bruise I've been wrapping one night stands around my body like wedding bands but none of them fit in the morning they just slip off my fingers and slip out the door and all that lingers is the scent of you I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well all the wishes in the world would come true do you remember do you remember the night I told you I've never seen anything more perfect than than snow falling in the glow of a street light electricity bowing to nature mind bowing to heartbeat this is gonna hurt bowing to I love you I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around like children love recess bells I still hear the sound of you and think of playgrounds where outcasts who stutter beneath braces and bruises and acne are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies are never gonna grow up to be happy I think of happy when I think of you so wherever you are I hope you're happy I really do I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking I hope your lungs are open and breathing your life I hope there's a kite in your hand that's flying all the way up to orion and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out I hope you're smiling like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth cause I might be naked and lonely shaking branches for bones but I'm still time zones away from who I was the day before we met you were the first mile where my heart broke a sweat and I wish you were here I wish you'd never left but mostly I wish you well I wish you my very very best |
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| steph | Dec 2 2008, 03:09 PM Post #7 |
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don't be frightened of turning the page
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Charles Bukowski - Let it enfold you either peace or happiness, let it enfold you when I was a young man I felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun. I trusted no man and especially no woman. I was living a hell in small rooms, I broke things, smashed things, walked through glass, cursed. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed,in and out of fights, in and out of my mind. women were something to screw and rail at, I had no male freinds, I changed jobs and cities, I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, english accents,spain, france,italy,walnuts and the color orange. algebra angred me, opera sickened me, charlie chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies. peace an happiness to me were signs of inferiority, tenants of the weak an addled mind. but as I went on with my alley fights, my suicidal years, my passage through any number of women-it gradually began to occur to me that I wasn't different from the others, I was the same, they were all fulsome with hatred, glossed over with petty greivances, the men I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. everybody was nudging, inching, cheating for some insignificant advantage, the lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator. cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. the less I needed the better I felt. maybe the other life had worn me down. I no longer found glamour in topping somebody in conversation. or in mounting the body of some poor drunken female whose life had slipped away into sorrow. I could never accept life as it was, i could never gobble down all its poisons but there were parts, tenous magic parts open for the asking. I re formulated I don't know when, date, time, all that but the change occured. something in me relaxed, smoothed out. i no longer had to prove that I was a man, I did'nt have to prove anything. I began to see things: coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a cafe. or a dog walking along a sidewalk. or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself and its eyes looked at me and they were beautiful. then- it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in the worst situations and there were plenty of those. like say, the boss behind his desk, he is going to have to fire me. I've missed too many days. he is dressed in a suit, necktie, glasses, he says, "I am going to have to let you go" "it's all right" I tell him. He must do what he must do, he has a wife, a house, children. expenses, most probably a girlfreind. I am sorry for him he is caught. I walk onto the blazing sunshine. the whole day is mine temporailiy, anyhow. (the whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry, short-changed, cheated, everybody is despondent, dissillusioned) I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness. I embraced that stuff like the hottest number, like high heels, breasts, singing,the works. (dont get me wrong, there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism that overlooks all basic problems just for the sake of itself- this is a shield and a sickness.) The knife got near my throat again, I almost turned on the gas again but when the good moments arrived again I did'nt fight them off like an alley adversary. I let them take me, i luxuriated in them, I bade them welcome home. I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw,almost handsome, yes, a bit ripped and ragged, scares, lumps, odd turns, but all in all, not too bad, almost handsome, better at least than some of those movie star faces like the cheeks of a baby's butt. and finally I discovered real feelings of others, unheralded, like lately, like this morning, as I was leaving, for the track, i saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there (not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, the pyramids, Mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning, the toteboard waiting for me) I saw the shape of my wife's head, she so still, I ached for her life, just being there under the covers. I kissed her in the, forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me. |
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