Galoots

Related poetry:

1. The Lawyers Know Too Much THE LAWYERS, Bob, know too much. They are chums of the books of old John Marshall. They know it all, what a dead hand wrote, A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling, The bones of the fingers a thin white ash. The lawyers know a dead man’s thoughts too well. In the heels of […]...
2. Let America Be America Again Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed Let it be that great strong land of love Where never […]...
3. Rhyme Builder I envy not those gay galoots Who count on dying in their boots; For that, to tell the sober truth Sould be the privilege of youth; But aged bones are better sped To heaven from a downy bed. So prop me up with pillows two, And serve me with the barley brew; And put a […]...
4. Child Margaret THE CHILD Margaret begins to write numbers on a Saturday morning, the first numbers formed under her wishing child fingers. All the numbers come well-born, shaped in figures assertive for a frieze in a child’s room. Both 1 and 7 are straightforward, military, filled with lunge and attack, erect in shoulder-straps. The 6 and 9 […]...
5. Never Suddenly, desperately I thought, “No, never In millions of minutes Can I for one second Calm-leaving my own self Like clothes on a chair-back And quietly opening The door of one house (No, not one of all millions) Of blood, flesh and brain, Climb the nerve-stair and look From the tower, from the windows Of […]...
6. Frustration Gazing to gold seraph wing, With wistful wonder in my eyes, A blue-behinded ape, I swing Upon the palms of Paradise. A parakeet of gaudy hue Upon a flame tree smugly rocks; Oh, we’re a precious pair, we two, I gibber while the parrot squawks. “If I had but your wings,” I sigh, “How ardently […]...
7. 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh You can’t run Radio Shack programs In its disc drive. Nor can a Commodore 64 Drive read a file You have created on an IBM Personal Computer. Both Kaypro and Osborne computers use The CP/M operating system But can’t read each other’s Handwriting For they format (write On) discs in different […]...
8. Sleeping in Blue I lean into you, We bury down In the dunes The breeze holds Like a whisper You stroke my brown knees Your fingers Are my unspoken thoughts The silence is sensuous, Suffuses like Scent of sandalwood I watch The sea Your hands The waves Seep into my bones The sky descends We sleep in blue....
9. Tortures Nothing has changed. The body is susceptible to pain, It must eat and breathe air and sleep, It has thin skin and blood right underneath, An adequate stock of teeth and nails, Its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable. In tortures all this is taken into account. Nothing has changed. The body shudders as […]...
10. Anne Rutledge Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all.’ Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, And the beneficient face of a nation Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, […]...
11. Portrait of a Motor Car IT’S a lean car… a long-legged dog of a car… a gray-ghost eagle car. The feet of it eat the dirt of a road… the wings of it eat the hills. Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep. It is in Danny’s life […]...
12. The Jackfruit I am like a jackfruit on the tree. To taste you must plug me quick, while fresh: The skin rough, the pulp thick, yes, But oh, I warn you against touching The rich juice will gush and stain your hands...
13. Wars IN the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet. In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires. In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not Yet dreamed out in the heads of men. In the old wars clutches of short swords and […]...
14. Cuttings This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life? I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it The small waters seeping upward, The tight grains parting at […]...
15. Poem Of Night 1 I move my hand over Slopes, falls, lumps of sight, Lashes barely able to be touched, Lips that give way so easily It’s a shock to feel underneath them The bones smile. Muffled a little, barely cloaked, Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate. 2 I put my hand On the side of your face, You lean your […]...
16. As You Leave Me Shiny record albums scattered over The living room floor, reflecting light From the lamp, sharp reflections that hurt My eyes as I watch you, squatting among the platters, The beer foam making mustaches on your lips. And, too, The shadows on your cheeks from your long lashes Fascinate me almost as much as the dimples […]...
17. Dream Song 76: Henry's Confession Nothin very bad happen to me lately. How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones, Terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety. Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones, What could happen bad to Mr Bones? €”If life is a handkerchief sandwich, In a modesty of death I join my father Who dared […]...
18. Thinking For Berky In the late night listening from bed I have joined the ambulance or the patrol Screaming toward some drama, the kind of end That Berky must have some day, if she isn’t dead. The wildest of all, her father and mother cruel, Farming out there beyond the old stone quarry Where highschool lovers parked their […]...
19. Whoso List to Hunt Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, helas! I may no more. The vain travail hath worried me so sore, I am of them that furthest come behind. Yet may I by no means, my worried mind Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore Fainting I […]...
20. Mock Panegyric on a Young Friend In measured verse I’ll now rehearse The charms of lovely Anna: And, first, her mind is unconfined Like any vast savannah. Ontario’s lake may fitly speak Her fancy’s ample bound: Its circuit may, on strict survey Five hundred miles be found. Her wit descends on foes and friends Like famed Niagara’s fall; And travellers gaze […]...
21. Making Love To Concrete An upright abutment in the mouth Of the Willis Avenue bridge A beige Honda leaps the divider Like a steel gazelle inescapable Sleek leather boots on the pavement Rat-a-tat-tat best intentions Going down for the third time Stuck in the particular You cannot make love to concrete If you care about being Non-essential wrong or […]...
22. Snow SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk. Snow changes our bones into fog streamers caught by the wind and spelled into many dances. Six bits for a sniff of snow in the old days bought […]...
23. Dream Song 43: 'Oyez, oyez!' The Man Who Did Not Deliver ‘Oyez, oyez!’ The Man Who Did Not Deliver Is before you for his deliverance, my lords. He stands, as charged For This by banks, That cops, by lawyers, by Publishingers for Them. I doubt he’ll make Old bones. Be. I warned him, of a summer night: consist, Consist. Ex-wives roar. Further, the Crown holds that […]...
24. Momus Momus is the name men give your face, The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland, Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray Against horizons purple, silent. Yes, Momus, Men have flung your face in bronze To gaze in gargoyle downward on […]...
25. Milton: But in the Wine-presses the Human Grapes Sing not nor Dance But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance: They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming, In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires, In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe: The plates and screws and racks and […]...
26. The Widow at Windsor ‘Ave you ‘eard o’ the Widow at Windsor With a hairy gold crown on ‘er ‘ead? She ‘as ships on the foam she ‘as millions at ‘ome, An’ she pays us poor beggars in red. (Ow, poor beggars in red!) There’s ‘er nick on the cavalry ‘orses, There’s ‘er mark on the medical stores An’ […]...
27. I Went Down into the Desert I went down into the desert To meet Elijah- Arisen from the dead. I thought to. find him in an echoing cave; For so my dream had said. I went down into the desert To meet John the Baptist. I walked with feet that bled, Seeking that prophet lean and brown and bold. I spied […]...
28. With No Experience In Such Matters To hold a damaged sparrow Under water until you feel it die Is to know a small something About the mind; how, for example, It blames the cat for the original crime, How it wants praise for its better side. And yet it’s as human As pulling the plug on your Dad Whose world has […]...
29. My Orcha'd in Linden Lea ‘Ithin the woodlands, flow’ry gleaded, By the woak tree’s mossy moot, The sheenen grass-bleades, timber-sheaded, Now do quiver under voot; An’ birds do whissle over head, An’ water’s bubblen in its bed, An’ there vor me the apple tree Do lean down low in Linden Lea. When leaves that leately wer a-springen Now do feade […]...
30. Gamblers All sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside Remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and You walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face In the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your […]...
31. Eulogy To A Hell Of A Dame some dogs who sleep ay night Must dream of bones And I remember your bones In flesh And best In that dark green dress And those high-heeled bright Black shoes, You always cursed when you drank, Your hair coimng down you Wanted to explode out of What was holding you: Rotten memories of a Rotten […]...
32. Smoke I SIT in a chair and read the newspapers. Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind. I sit in a chair […]...
33. Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep With a purpose, so far as I could tell. How he got from the dark of sleep To the dark of waking up I’ll never know; The lax sprawl sleep allowed him Began to set from the edges in, Like a custard, and then he […]...
34. I VENT MY WRATH ON ANIMALS I came alive When things went Crazy. I pulled the plug on The reports of Sturm & drang When someone Signaled I Left open What I Could not close. I broke a Covenant that Was more fierce Than murder. I vent my wrath On animals Pretending they will turn Divine. I open up Rare certainties […]...
35. The Fury Of Beautiful Bones Sing me a thrush, bone. Sing me a nest of cup and pestle. Sing me a sweetbread fr an old grandfather. Sing me a foot and a doorknob, for you are my love. Oh sing, bone bag man, sing. Your head is what I remember that Augusty You were in love with another woman but […]...
36. Drumnotes DAYS of the dead men, Danny. Drum for the dead, drum on your remembering heart. Jaurès, a great love-heart of France, a slug of lead in the red valves. Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, a shark’s mouthful. Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg fathers, moths […]...
37. Dusty Doors CHILD of the Aztec gods, How long must we listen here, How long before we go? The dust is deep on the lintels. The dust is dark on the doors. If the dreams shake our bones, what can we say or do? Since early morning we waited. Since early, early morning, child. There must be […]...
38. The Four Brothers MAKE war songs out of these; Make chants that repeat and weave. Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns; Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns. Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs, Going along, Going along, On the roads from San Antonio to […]...
39. Lean Out of the Window Lean out of the window, Goldenhair, I hear you singing A merry air. My book was closed, I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor. I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom. Singing and singing A merry air, Lean out of […]...
40. The Ordinary Man If you and I should chance to meet, I guess you wouldn’t care; I’m sure you’d pass me in the street As if I wasn’t there; You’d never look me in the face, My modest mug to scan, Because I’m just a commonplace And Ordinary Man. But then, it may be, you are too A […]...