(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Nin Andrews

Notes for a Sermon on the Mount

1. Pussies are not gods. They are creates beings.
2. Unlike god, they do not always exist.
3. Dignified, majestic, intelligent, we must attend to them nonetheless.
4. Like all spiritual beings, pussies cannot be seen with the human eye at just any time of day.
5. Pussies represent both the visible and the invisible, the sacred and the profane.
6. They appear to be nowhere and everywhere at once. To be personal and impersonal, human and divine.
7. In the occult story of Adam and Eve, God placed a sword-bearing angel at the entrance of the divine pussy to keep the unwary from ever returning.
8. Revelations describe them as being "robed in a cloud with a rainbow over their heads."
9. Many times a pussy has taken on the form of an actual woman and is sometimes mistakenly thought to have a human spirit.
10. One must not forget to entertain strangers, for by doing so, one might entertain a pussy eithout even knowing it.
11. Always remember: one must never pray to pussies. Or other golden heifers.
12. Nor should one ask God to send forth a pussy to help minister to one's soul.
13. A pussy must come of its own accord. For thus is the way of the pussy and of the alpha and omega.

(from The Best American Poetry, 2001, Robert Hass, guest editor, Scribner Poetry, 2001).

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Erica Jong

Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem

1   Beware of the man who denounces ambition; 
	his fingers itch under his gloves.

2   Beware of the man who denounces war
	through clenched teeth.

3   Beware of the man who denounces women writers;
	his penis is tiny & cannot spell.

4   Beware of the man who wants to protect you;
	he will protect you from everything but himself.

5   Beware of the man who loves to cook;
	he will fill your kitchen with greasy pots.

6   Beware of the man who loves your soul;
	he is a bullshitter.

7   Beware of the man who denounces his mother;
	he is a son of a bitch.

8   Beware of the man who spells son of a bitch as one word;
	he is a hack.

9   Beware of the man who loves death too well;
	he is taking out insurance.

10  Beware of the man who loves life too well;
	he is a fool.

11  Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists;
	he is afraid.

12  Beware of the man who trusts psychiatrists;
	he is in hock.

13  Beware of the man who picks your dresses;
	he wants to wear them.

14  Beware of the man you think is harmless;
	he will surprise you.

15  Beware of the man who cares for nothing but books;
	he will run like a trickle of ink.

16  Beware of the man who writes flowery love letters;
	he is preparing for years of silence.

17  Beware of the man who praises liberated women;
	he is planning to quit his job.

(from The American Poetry Anthology, Daniel Halpern, editor, Avon Books, 1975)

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Robert Mezey

In the Soul Hour

Tonight I could die as easily as the grass
and I can't help thinking
whenever the light flickers along the finished blood red boards
how just the other side
of the fiery grain
the skull of the house is clapped in darkness

The joys of our lives tonight
the dance sweat the shining sidelong eyes
the faint sweet cuntsmells hiding in perfume

music from another planet

voices at night
carried across the blowing water

(from The American Poetry Anthology, Daniel Halpern, editor, Avon Books, 1975)

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

William Matthews

The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives

I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star--the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package. He says he likes the way music throws you back into your own body, like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but I sometimes think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand, but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

(from The American Poetry Anthology, Daniel Halpern, editor, Avon Books, 1975)

The Hills of Little Cornwall

[akirad.livejournal.com]

The Hills of Little Cornwall
by Mark Van Doren

The hills of little Cornwall
Themselves are dreams.
The mind lies down among them,
Even by day, and snores,
Snug in the perilous knowledge
That nothing more inward pleasing,
More like itself,
Sleeps anywhere beyond them
Even by night
In the great land it cares two pins about,
Possibly; not more.

The mind, eager for caresses,
Lies down at its own risk in Cornwall;
Whose hills,
Whose cunning streams,
Whose mazes where a thought,
Doubling upon itself,
Considers the way, lazily, well lost,
Indulge it to the nick of death--
Not quite, for where it curls it still can feel,
Like feathers,
Like affectionate mouse whiskers,
The flattery, the trap.


.

Thanksgiving Prayer

[flowerstand.livejournal.com]

A Thanksgiving Prayer
by William S. Burroughs


Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind their
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Denise Levertov: To the Reader

[rickmangled.livejournal.com]

Apparently Allen Ginsberg has gotten inordinate affection on this community and I haven't noticed.

It's not an absolute favorite anyway. Here's one I just love to read.
(short enough, for once, to not merit a cut!)

To the Reader: by Denise Levertov

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

Poem, by Frank O'hara

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

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

[1956]

The Midnight Skaters

[madmouth.livejournal.com]

The Midnight Skaters
by Edmund Blunden




The hop-poles stand in cones,
The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder ;
But not the tallest there, ’tis said,
Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.

Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters ?
What wants he but to catch
Earth’s heedless sons and daughters ?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him ;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.