A Real Motorcycle

Related poetry:

1. Real Estate News ARMOUR AVENUE was the name of this street and door signs on empty houses read “The Silver Dollar,” “Swede Annie” and the Christian names of madams such as “Myrtle” and “Jenny.” Scrap iron, rags and bottles fill the front rooms hither and yon and signs in Yiddish say Abe Kaplan & Co. are running junk […]...
2. The Lion For Real “Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative…” I came home and found a lion in my living room Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion! Two stenographers pulled their brunnette hair and banged the window shut I hurried home to Patterson and stayed two days Called up old Reichian analyst Who’d kicked me out […]...
3. Time, Real And Imaginary On the wide level of a mountain’s head, (I knew not where, but ’twas some faery place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstripp’d the other ; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy […]...
4. In Back Of The Real railroad yard in San Jose I wandered desolate In front of a tank factory and sat on a bench Near the switchman’s shack. A flower lay on the hay on the asphalt highway the dread hay flower I thought It had a Brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty Spikes like Jesus’ inchlong crown, […]...
5. Twilight: After Haying Yes, long shadows go out From the bales; and yes, the soul Must part from the body: What else could it do? The men sprawl near the baler, Too tired to leave the field. They talk and smoke, And the tips of their cigarettes Blaze like small roses In the night air. (It arrived And […]...
6. Prologue 1/ The taste of a poem Is in the relishing Sweet, sour or bitter Cold, lukewarm or hot The test of a poem Is in the nourishing Undying, fleeting or naught Its effect in the heart 2/ Here are the lines That got stuck in the jam On their way to your heart Possibly the […]...
7. Without Looking Either at my friend’s daughter’s Sixteen-year-old body dumped On the morgue slab, T-shirt Stuck fast to one ripped Breast I identified quick, and then Got out of there Or at the old gentleman With tubes in the living room, spittle Stained in his wispy Beard, out of The corner of my eye I hardly Notice […]...
8. The New Poetry Handbook 1 If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles. 2 If a man lives with a poem, he shall die lonely. 3 If a man lives with two poems, he shall be unfaithful to one. 4 If a man conceives of a poem, he shall have one less child. 5 If a man […]...
9. The Hourglass Do but consider this small dust Here running in the glass, By atoms moved; Could you believe that this The body was Of one that loved? And in his mistress’ flame, playing like a fly, Turned to cinders by her eye? Yes; and in death, as life, unblessed, To have’t expressed, Even ashes of lovers […]...
10. The Real Work It may be that when we no longer know what to do We have come our real work, And that when we no longer know which way to go We have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings....
11. 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 […]...
12. The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the […]...
13. O Sun of Real Peace O SUN of real peace! O hastening light! O free and extatic! O what I here, preparing, warble for! O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take his height-and you too, O my Ideal, will surely ascend! O so amazing and broad-up there resplendent, darting and burning! O vision prophetic, stagger’d with […]...
14. Where Is the Real Non-Resistant (Matthew V, 38-48.) Who can surrender to Christ, dividing his best with the stranger, Giving to each what he asks, braving the uttermost danger All for the enemy, MAN? Who can surrender till death His words and his works, his house and his lands, His eyes and his heart and his breath? Who can surrender […]...
15. Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World Whether what we sense of this world Is the what of this world only, or the what Of which of several possible worlds which what? something of what we sense May be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense. For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance Of travelers, eating […]...
16. Poem This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does no matter. The poem will go on without you. It has […]...
17. Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have A Problem With Time He reads my latest attempt at a poem And is silent for a long time, until it feels Like that night we waited for Apollo, My mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking, Haven’t they landed yet? At last Dugan throws it on the table and says, This reads like a cheap detective […]...
18. THE TABLE IN A RESTAURANT Bhaskar Roy Barman The moment I close my eyes In meditation on the unfathomable I visualize golden fleeces of cloud Perambulating the skies And old faces peering down through the fleeces, Their faces writhed into a semblance of smile. With them I used to sit at a table in a restaurant By the window overlooking […]...
19. Summer Holiday When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow- ered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps […]...
20. The Friend We sat across the table. He said, cut off your hands. They are always poking at things. They might touch me. I said yes. Food grew cold on the table. He said, burn your body. It is not clean and smells like sex. It rubs my mind sore. I said yes. I love you, I […]...
21. Temporary Poem Of My Time Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west, Latin writing, from west to east. Languages are like cats: You must not stroke their hair the wrong way. The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert, The trees bend in the wind, And stones fly from all four winds, Into […]...
22. Ars Poetica A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. * A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as […]...
23. Sudden Movements My father’s head has become a mystery to him. We finally have something in common. When he moves his head his eyes Get big as roses filled With the commotion of spring. Not long ago he was a man Who had tomato soup for lunch And dusted with the earnestness Of a gun fight. Now […]...
24. Glass Words of a poem should be glass But glass so simple-subtle its shape Is nothing but the shape of what it holds. A glass spun for itself is empty, Brittle, at best Venetian trinket. Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence. Words should be looked through, should be windows. The best word were invisible. […]...
25. Coffee Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee Affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you; It stimulates all the organs. I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but As time […]...
26. Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing The light along the hills in the morning Comes down slowly, naming the trees White, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate. Notice what this poem is not doing. A house, a house, a barn, the old Quarry, where the river shrugs How much of this place is yours? Notice what this poem is […]...
27. The Poem Cat Sometimes the poem Doesn’t want to come; It hides from the poet Like a playful cat Who has run Under the house & lurks among slugs, Roots, spiders’ eyes, Ledge so long out of the sun That it is dank With the breath of the Troll King. Sometimes the poem Darts away Like a coy […]...
28. Last Answers I wrote a poem on the mist And a woman asked me what I meant by it. I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist, how pearl and gray of it mix and reel, And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening into points of mystery quivering with color. […]...
29. The Big Boots Of Pain There can be certain potions Needled in the clock For the body’s fall from grace, To untorture and to plead for. These I have known And would sell all my furniture And books and assorted goods To avoid, and more, more. But the other pain I would sell my life to avoid The pain that […]...
30. Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry Relax. This won’t last long. Or if it does, or if the lines Make you sleepy or bored, Give in to sleep, turn on The T. V., deal the cards. This poem is built to withstand Such things. Its feelings Cannot be hurt. They exist Somewhere in the poet, And I am far away. Pick […]...
31. The Poetry Reading at high noon At a small college near the beach Sober The sweat running down my arms A spot of sweat on the table I flatten it with my finger Blood money blood money My god they must think I love this like the others But it’s for bread and beer and rent Blood money […]...
32. Dream Song 96: Under the table, no. That last was stunning Under the table, no. That last was stunning, That flagon had breasts. Some men grow down cursed. Why drink so, two days running? Two months, O seasons, years, two decades running? I answer (smiles) my question on the cuff: Man, I been thirsty. The brake is incomplete but white costumes Threaten his rum, his cointreau, […]...
33. The Touch For months my hand was sealed off In a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings. Perhaps it is bruised, I thought, And that is why they have locked it up. You could tell time by this, I thought, Like a clock, by its five knuckles And the thin underground veins. It lay […]...
34. Question And Answer he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer night, running the blade of the knife under his fingernails, smiling, thinking of all the letters he had received telling him that the way he lived and wrote about that it had kept them going when all seemed truly hopeless. putting the blade on the […]...
35. Saddest Poem I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars, And the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.” The night wind whirls in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. On nights […]...
36. Flare 1. Welcome to the silly, comforting poem. It is not the sunrise, Which is a red rinse, Which is flaring all over the eastern sky; It is not the rain falling out of the purse of God; It is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward, Or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into […]...
37. Mingus At The Showplace I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen And so I swung into action and wrote a poem And it was miserable, for that was how I thought Poetry worked: you digested experience shat Literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since Defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar, […]...
38. 4:02 p. m poem supposed to be about One minute and the lives of three women in it Writing it and up The block a woman killed By her husband Poem now about one minute And the lives of four women In it Haitian mother She walks through Town carrying her son’s Head-banging it against Her thigh calling […]...
39. Inspiration How often have I started out With no thought in my noodle, And wandered here and there about, Where fancy bade me toddle; Till feeling faunlike in my glee I’ve voiced some gay distiches, Returning joyfully to tea, A poem in my britches. A-squatting on a thymy slope With vast of sky about me, I’ve […]...
40. Does your semen smell like camembert? Does your semen smell like camembert? It’s just A thought I had today at lunch, I must have had The hunch before, perhaps reversed, and then Forgot. It’s not the sort of thought you’d have a lot Unless you make a sport of masturbation. Or Ejaculation in the air. So where did it occur? I […]...