(no subject)

[plastic-planets.livejournal.com]

Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
-W.H. Auden

Sara Jane Stoner - The Eunuch’s Haute Psychotics

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

The Eunuch’s Haute Psychotics

Like Liberace, I was born
a gay man prone to overdressing,
though I, certainly, was bred
for something meaner than entertainment.
My fate: to take down any shade of elephant
be it pinky or grand proboscis.

Fancy their supposing I lack a gun
with ruby bullets such as these
tracing the tips of my spur blades,
sapphire barrel beads side-lighting
my thighs like Vegas signage,
a ballroom’s worth of fine Austrian crystals

tricking my white leather into out-flashing
an army of Liberaces. Their smiles hidden
for the false jewels wedged between their teeth.
(And you know what they say about Liberace’s nose.)
They tell me, I do admire your chaps, sir.
Where did you find those chaps, sir?

A gift, I say, from my brothers and sisters,
pianists and eunuchs all, who knew
the fingerings to Fighterland,
or was it that they showed me
how to fight my way to Fingerland?

Fancy even seeking
the golden gun
with all these semi-
precious
triggers.

mary oliver

[ravengirl.livejournal.com]

the poem is not the world.
it isn't even the first page of the world.

but the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
it knows that much.

it wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

~mary oliver
excerpt from the poem "flare"
from the book the leaf and the cloud

From Cantos for James Michener: Part II

[goatunit.livejournal.com]

CXVI.

A man walked into a bar at sunset, took his hat off and wiped his brow with the back of his shirtsleeve.
"After a hard day's work you deserve a cold beer," said the bartender.
"Gimme a cold beer," he said. "It's been a long day but it's all worth it now."
The rest of the work crew walked into the bar.
"We've been working hard and now working time is through," they said.
"There's nothing like a cold beer when all is said and done."
"Man this beer hits the spot," said one, "all day long, while I was working, I was imagining how good this was gonna taste."
"Yeah, there's nothing like an ice cold beer after a hard day's work," said another.

- David Berman

Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere

[http://users.livejournal.com/_outercourse/]

Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere, by Maggie Estep


I am THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
so don't mess with me
I've got a big bag full of SEX TOYS
and you can't have any
'cause they're all mine
'cause I'm
the SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.

"Hey," you may say to yourself,
"who the hell's she tryin' to kid,
she's no sex goddess,"
But trust me,
I am
if only for the fact that I have
the unabashed gall
to call
myself a SEX GODDESS,
I mean, after all,
it's what so many of us have at some point thought,
we've all had someone
who worshipped our filthy socks
and barked like a dog when we were near
giving us cause
to pause and think: You know, I may not look like much
but deep inside, I am a SEX GODDESS.

Only
we'd never come out and admit it publicly
well, you wouldn't admit it publicly
but I will
because I am
THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.

I haven't always been
a SEX GODDESS
I used to be just a mere mortal woman
but I grew tired of sexuality being repressed
then manifest
in late night 900 number ads
where 3 bodacious bimbettes
heave cleavage into the camera's winking lens and sigh:


"Big Girls oooh, Bad Girls oooh, Blonde Girls oooh,
you know what to do, call 1-900-UNMITIGATED BIMBO ooooh."

Yeah
I got fed up with the oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
I got fed up with it all
so I put on my combat boots
and hit the road with my bag full of SEX TOYS
that were a vital part of my SEX GODDESS image
even though I would never actually use
my SEX TOYS
'cause my being a SEX GODDESS
it isn't a SEXUAL thing
it's a POLITICAL thing
I don't actually have SEX, no
I'm too busy taking care of
important SEX GODDESS BUSINESS,
yeah,
I gotta go on The Charlie Rose Show
and MTV and become a parody
of myself and make
buckets full of money off my own inane brand
of self-righteous POP PSYCHOLOGY
because my pain is different
because I am a SEX GODDESS
and when I talk,
people listen
why ?
Because, you guessed it,
I AM THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
and you're not.

(no subject)

[strangeidea.livejournal.com]

On the Anniversary Of His Death The Men
Of The Village Meet To Talk About Frankenstein
Ron Koertge

The way he was sewn together
made their skin feel so smooth.
His green cheese complexion
and stupid haircut made them,
by contrast, attractive and
fashionable.

They didn't have to borrow
some stiff's heart. And they had real
souls, too, not just fistfuls of bad
weather.

Hey, remember the torches and clubs?
Remember running around half-nuts
all night? And then it was so great
to come home: a bubbling tureen
of soup, wolfsbane on the mantle,
garlic over the door, those grateful
wives who'd never looked as good
before or since.

Susan Aizenberg - Things That Cannot Be Compared (Dissonance I)

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

Things That Cannot Be Compared (Dissonance I)

                           After Sei Shonagon

My father's hand, elegant as typescript, before his stroke. My mother's lefty scrawl, the way she underlined We on my birthday card—We wish you much happiness!— four months after his death. The deep green of this morning's lowering cloudbank, sea lettuce riding the Intertidal. Bleached sheet of the sky back home, Nebraska heat shimmering above the stunned soy fields. Miraculous snowy egret, tall as a woman, feeding with genteel sang-froid on palm fronds outside my mother's kitchen window, so close we might have touched her swanny neck. Black bear cub, lost last night in the widening dark glade beyond the yellow hoops of porch lights, who would not be lured to safety by the game warden's stale doughnuts. Shrill song of gulls scavenging. The flutter and purr of Carolina locusts.

When one has stopped loving someone, one feels that person has become someone else, even though he is the same person.

Substitute ghost. A question of mourning. Unable to mourn.

Red hour of the wolf. No sound except the whirr of fan blades above our borrowed bed, the silvery notes of my mother's wooden cuckoo. She believes it herald of my father's spirit. Each hour I hear it crow, bright cry rising from its mechanical throat like the freed breath of sleepers. It wakes me from my dream of her overlit kitchen, the negative space before the window where my father is not standing, transfixed by the egret, calling to me to Come, see! Where he does not wince as I join him, recoil from his kiss.

help me!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_outercourse/]

I'm looking for a poem, its been posted in here before, I know because this is where I first read it, but it was a while ago and I can't find it.

It was a really odd poem. I can't tell you what it was called or who its by, but it was about when you get your ears pierced, asked for the bits back. I can tell you the last line,though: "Get your bits back. Save the kittens." please help!

So I'm contributing SOMETHING, here's a poem.

Is About, by Allen Ginsberg

Dylan is about the Individual against the whole creation
Beethoven is about one man's fist in the lightning clouds
The Pope is about abortion & the spirits of the dead...
Television is about people sitting in their living room looking at their things
America is about being a big Country full of Cowboys Indians Jews Negroes & Americans
Orientals Chicanos Factories skyscrapers Niagara Falls Steel Mills radios homeless Conservatives, don't forget
Russia is about Czars Stalin Poetry Secret Police Communism barefoot in the snow
But that's not really Russia it's a concept
A concept is about how to look at the earth from the moon without ever getting there. The moon is about love & Werewolves, also Poe
Poe is about looking at the moon from the sun
or else the graveyard
Everything is about something if you're a thin movie producer chain-smoking muggles
The world is about overpopulation, Imperial invasions, Biocide Genocide, Fratricidal Wars, Starvation, Holocaust, mass injury & murder, high technology
Super science, atom Nuclear Neutron Hydrogen detritus, Radiation Compassion Buddha, Alchemy
Communication is about monopoly telivision radio movie newspaper spin on Earth, i.e. planetary censorship.
Universe is about Universe.
Allen Ginsberg is about confused mind writing down newspaper headlines from Mars--
The audience is about salvation, the listeners are aBOUT SEX, Spiritual gymnastics, nostalgia for the Steam Engine & Pony Express
Hitler Stalin Roosevelt & Churchill are about arithmetic & Quadrilateral equations, above all chemistry physics & chaos theory--
Who cares what it's all about?
I do! Edgar Allen Poe cares! Shelly cares! Beethoven & Dylan care.
Do you care? What are you about
or are you a human being with 10 fingers and two eyes?

(no subject)

[the-blue-dahlia.livejournal.com]

SYMPATHY

by: Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

The path grown over through the years

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

The Letter

by Amy Lowell


Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly's legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quickrs and twists have nothing in them
Or blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crips, smooth, virgin of
loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired. Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you,
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.