back to share this tasty morsel in retrospect it is probably a fan poem for a fandom/pairing that im not sure of but it's still good as hell Spoiler: of martyrs and orchid-sunrise when is a martyr not a martyr? he asks over afternoon tea, the evening i run away for the third time and return three hours later, crying into my cassette tapes and splintered knuckles. i still cannot meet his eyes. i pull my fingers over the hyacinth petals, the ones on his countertop from three weeks ago, over and over, until it feels more like cowardice, more like hiding. he grabs my hand, turns it into butterflies, his irises a radar of warmth and starlight, and he mumbles the question again. I hum in response, baritone meeting static for the first time, and he paints my arms gold, magicks my mouth into sunrise so i’ll give him an answer, and he replies, when he saves everyone but himself. the meaning sinks in, and he holds my shoulders while I tremble myself into an earthquake; frantic, my hair becomes snakes, becomes wisps of smoke, becomes moonlight. i shiver into a new dawn. https://allpoetry.com/poem/14106292-of-martyrs-and-orchid-sunrise-by-SmaugySmaug
Ok this one got me down deep: Selkie Rachel Plummer The secret me is a boy. He takes girlness off like a sealskin: something that never sat right on his shoulders. The secret me is broad-shouldered; the sea can’t contain him, the land can’t anchor his waves to its sand. The secret me swims with the big fish, brash, he swaggers like a mermaid, bares teeth like daggers, barks at the moon when it’s thin. He’s whiskered, that boy. Thick-skinned. Quick-finned, always turning tail. He wears his own skin like a sail, lets it carry him to where salt swallows mouthfuls of air. Let them find me there by the shore: the girl-seal with a secret boy inside. Rough-voiced. Black-eyed. Washed bare as the beach by the tide.
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Spoiler: Orpheus In Hell When he first brought his music into hell He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the shapeless fires And the jukebox groaning of the damned Some of them would hear him. In the upper world He had forced the stones to listen. It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces Wondering if all of hell were without music. He tried an old song but pain Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying, “Orpheus!” He was at the entrance again And a little three-headed dog was barking at him. Later he would remember all those dead voices And call them Eurydice. https://www.poeticous.com/jack-spicer/orpheus-in-hell
Oh and this one too! Might be spamming this thread because I've gotten really into poetry lately. Sorry in advance. Spoiler: The Language of Birds 1 A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone—solid, inevitable—but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a long time. 2 A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve? And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone can. Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible. Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway. The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. 3 They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier, these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black—mammoth, lion, horse, bear—things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic and alert. They weren’t animals but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing, meant something but the meaning was slippery: it wasn’t there but it remained, looked like the thing but wasn’t the thing—was a second thing, following a second set of rules—and it was too late: their power over it was no longer absolute. What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does. The night sky is vast and wide. They huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, painted themselves in herds, all together and apart from the rest. They looked at the sky, and at the mud, and at their hands in the mud, and their dead friends in the mud. This went on for a long time. 4 To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices. The night sky is vast and wide. A man had two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds would sing all day never stopping. The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird. The birds agreed. https://poets.org/poem/language-birds
This is the poem that got me into poetry in the first place. I never really liked reading poems (except for one which I'll put in the next post.) when I was in school. None of them ever caught my attention. Spoiler: This Be the Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
Not sure why I like this poem so much, it's very long and I have a short attention span. But if you were to ask me to name my favorite poem I would probably name this one. It was too long to put in a post, so I'm just going to link it. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834
Spoiler: Haunted Houses All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floors. We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of something moving to and fro. There are more guests at table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall. The stranger at my fireside cannot see The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear; He but perceives what is; while unto me All that has been is visible and clear. We have no title-deeds to house or lands; Owners and occupants of earlier dates From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands, And hold in mortmain still their old estates. The spirit-world around this world of sense Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere Wafts through these earthly mists and vapoursdense A vital breath of more ethereal air. Our little lives are kept in equipoise By opposite attractions and desires; The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, And the more noble instinct that aspires. These perturbations, this perpetual jar Of earthly wants and aspirations high, Come from the influence of an unseen star An undiscovered planet in our sky. And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light, Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd Into the realm of mystery and night,— So from the world of spirits there descends A bridge of light, connecting it with this, O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss. https://poets.org/poem/haunted-houses
Spoiler: You, Doctor Martin You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death. We stand in broken lines and wait while they unlock the doors and count us at the frozen gates of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken and we move to gravy in our smock of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat. I make moccasins all morning. At first my hands kept empty, unraveled for the lives they used to work. Now I learn to take them back, each angry finger that demands I mend what another will break tomorrow. Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes. The breaking crowns are new that Jack wore. Your third eye moves among us and lights the separate boxes where we sleep or cry. What large children we are here. All over I grow most tall in the best ward. Your business is people, you call at the madhouse, an oracular eye in our nest. Out in the hall the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull of the foxy children who fall like floods of life in frost. And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, counting this row and that row of moccasins waiting on the silent shelf. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/you-doctor-martin/
One last poem before I head to work. Spoiler: Look Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free. They tell us that most of the billions of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. But logic tells us there must be operas, there have to be car accidents cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She - just kept her thoughts to herself. She just - followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=48834
real boy Thomas Stewart this is a true story: they said you’re not a real boy until you cut the wizard out of the tree, it’s a question of which tree: real boys might pick oak, birch or beech, and then boys that pick alder, elm or hawthorn are unreal, unreal boys hold the axe and whisper, cousin of Merlin, give me some magic, but magic is not a boy’s language here, in the boy’s toilets or there in the changing rooms it is the outstretched branch welcoming you to be a real boy unreal boys, who hide under their towels or become black dots on the rugby pitch or study the mole above their nipple, or the drooping stomach in the mirror are the quietly hungry trees in the breeze, if I were a tree I’d be a white willow by the bay, a salix alba alone and sexless, I would only know the touch of my own branches, yet I long to be a real boy I know I am already a tree, made of roots, standing in the wind, in solitude, exposed, displaying my chest, made of wood, my bushy hair and eyebrows falling falling past my chipped teeth, across the scar on my chin and the leaves growing from my hands.
Spoiler: O Me! O Life! Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51568/o-me-o-life Spoiler: Not Waving But Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46479/not-waving-but-drowning
Spoiler: Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry
Spoiler: What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names-- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there even in full sun. https://wordsfortheyear.com/2014/10/03/what-we-want-by-linda-pastan/
Spoiler: You Will Hear Thunder You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/you-will-hear-thunder/
Spoiler: Making a Fist For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. “How do you know if you are going to die?” I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, “When you can no longer make a fist.” Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54308/making-a-fist
Spoiler: We Wear the Mask We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44203/we-wear-the-mask
This one is a little long so I'm just going to link it. https://www.theliteraryreview.org/poetry-2/lament-for-the-death-of-ignacio-sanchez-mejias/ I've never actually read anything by Lorca until today, even though my favorite poet (Jack Spicer) mentions Lorca in some of his poems. Part 4 of this poem was in a library book I randomly checked out of the library a few days ago when I was looking for poetry collections.
