POETS AND POEMS I LIKE     

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Jim Morrison

 

“Curses And Invocations”

Weird, bait-headed mongrels,

I keep expecting one of you to rise.

Large, buxom, obese queens,

Garden hogs and cunt veterans,

Quaint, cabbage saints,

Shit hoarders and individualists,

Drag-strip officials,

Tight lipped losers

And lustful fuck salesmen.

My militant dandies,

All strange order of monsters

Hot on the trail of the wood vine,

We welcome you to our procession.

 

Emily Dikinson

 

“Because I Could Not Stop For Death”

Because I could not stop for death-

He kindly stopped for me-

The carriage held but just ourselves-

And immortality.

 

We slowly drove-He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labour and my leisure too,

For his civility-

 

We passed the school, where children strove

At recess-in the ring-

We passed the fields of gazing grain-

We passed the setting sun-

 

Or rather-he passed us-

The dews drew quivering and chill-

For only gossamer, my gown-

My tippet-only tulle-

 

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground-

The roof was scarcely visible-

The cornice-in the ground-

 

Since then-‘tis centuries-and yet

Feels shorter than a day

I first surmised the horses heads

Were toward eternity-

 

William Blake

 

“Songs Of Innocence – Introduction”

Piping down the valleys wild

Piping songs of pleasant glee

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me,

 

“Pipe a song about a lamb”;

so I piped with merry chear.

“Piper pipe that song again”-

so I piped, he wept to hear.

 

“Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe

Sing thy songs of happy chear”;

So I sung the same again

While he wept with joy to hear.

 

“Piper sit thee down and write

in a book that all may read”-

So he vanish’d from my sight.

And I plucked a hollow reed,

 

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

“Howl” (extract)

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,

Angel-headed 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 coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz……

 

Seamus Heaney

 

“Mid-Term Break”

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o’ clock our neighbours drove me home.

 

In the porch I met my father crying-

He had always taken funerals in his stride-

And big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

 

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

 

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble”,

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

 

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

 

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

 

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

 

A four foot box, a foot for every year.  

 

 

   

  

 

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