You Take My Hand - Margaret Atwood

[angabel.livejournal.com]

You Take My Hand

You take my hand and
I'm suddenly in a bad movie,
it goes on and on and
why am I fascinated

We waltz in slow motion
through an air stale with aphrodisms
we meet behind the endless ptted palms
you climb through the wrong windows

Other people are leaving
but I always stay till the end
I paid my money, I
want to see what happens.

In chance bathtubs I have to
peel you off me
in the form of smoke and melted
celluloid
             Have to face it I'm
finally an addict,
the smell of popcorn and worn plush
lingers for weeks

-Margaret Atwood

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

Nuptial Substance

Standing like a cherry tree without bark or flowers,
special, burning, with veins and saliva,
and fingers and testicles,
I look at a girl of paper and moon,
horizontal, trembling and breathing and white
and her nipples like two separated ciphers,
and the rosy meeting of her legs where
her mound flutters with nocturnal eyelashes.

Pale, overflowing,
I feel words sink into my mouth,
words like drowned children,
and on we go and ships grow teeth,
and waters and breadth as if on fire.

I shall place her like a sword or a mirror,
and I shall open until death her fearful legs,
and I shall bite her ears and her veins,
and I shall make her retreat, her eyes closed
in a thick river of green semen.

I shall flood her with poppies and lightningbolts,
I shall wrap her in knees, in lips, in needles,
I shall enter her with inches of weeping epidermis
and pressures of crime and soaked hair.

I shall make her flee escaping through fingernails and sighs
toward never, toward nothing,
climbing up the slow marrow and the oxygen,
clutching memories and reasons
like a single hand, like a cleft finger
waving a fingernail of forsaken salt.

She must run sleeping along roads of skin
in a country of ashen gum and ashes,
struggling with knives, and sheets, and ants,
and with eyes that fall on her like dead men,
and with drops of black substance slipping
like blind fish or bullets of thick water.

- Pablo Neruda
trans. Donald D. Walsh

(no subject)

[agata.livejournal.com]

Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes Richard Brautigan

Fuck me like fried potatoes
on the most beautifully hungry
morning of my God-damn life.

Robert Hass – Letter to a Poet

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

Letter to a Poet

A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes

his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California

in the January sun
where families bicycle on Saturday
and the mother with high cheekbones

and coffee-colored iridescent
hair curses her child
in the language of Pushkin –-

John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world

which makes us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us

power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.

What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind

we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us.

"Evening in the Sanitarium" - Louise Bogan

[the13thsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Evening in the Sanitarium

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles; 
       of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman
       whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
To the suburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.

The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of the corridors the baths are running.
Mrs. C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something.

Monday's Child -- traditional

[simpletwice.livejournal.com]

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child must work for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

Howard Nemerov

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Make Big Money At Home!
Write Poems In Spare Time!

Oliver wanted to write about reality.
He sat before a wooden table,
He poised his wooden pencil
Above his pad of wooden paper,
And attempted to think about agony
And history, and the meaning of history,
And all stuff like that there.

Suddenly this wooden thought got into his head:
A Tree. That's all, no more than that,
Just one tree, not even a note
As to whether it was deciduous
Or evergreen, or even where it stood.
Still, because it came unbidden,
It was inspiration, and had to be dealt with.

Oliver hoped that this particular tree
Would turn out to be fashionable,
The axle of the universe, maybe,
Or some other mythologically
Respectable tree-contraption
With dryads, or having to do
With the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Fall.

"A Tree," he wrote down with his wooden pencil
Upon his pad of wooden paper
Supported by the wooden table.
And while he sat there waiting
For what would come next to come next,
The whole wooden house began to become
Silent, particularly silent, sinisterly so.


-Howard Nemerov

(no subject)

[agata.livejournal.com]

Mad Girl's Love Song Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade
Exit seraphim and Satan's men
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)