Post your favorite poem (by yourself or others)

[Hoi Polloi]

nh

[theBruiser500]

[ QUOTE ]
Manuel Machado - Retrato

RETRATO

Esta es mi cara y ésta es mi alma: leed.
Unos ojos de hastío y una boca de sed...
Lo demás, nada... Vida... Cosas... Lo que se sabe...
Calaveradas, amoríos... Nada grave,
Un poco de locura, un algo de poesía,
una gota del vino de la melancolía...
¿Vicios? Todos. Ninguno... Jugador, no lo he sido;
ni gozo lo ganado, ni siento lo perdido.
Bebo, por no negar mi tierra de Sevilla,
media docena de cañas de manzanilla.
Las mujeres... -sin ser un tenorio, ¡eso no!-,
tengo una que me quiere y otra a quien quiero yo.

Me acuso de no amar sino muy vagamente
una porción de cosas que encantan a la gente...
La agilidad, el tino, la gracia, la destreza,
más que la voluntad, la fuerza, la grandeza...
Mi elegancia es buscada, rebuscada. Prefiero,
a olor helénico y puro, lo "chic" y lo torero.
Un destello de sol y una risa oportuna
amo más que las languideces de la luna
Medio gitano y medio parisién -dice el vulgo-,
Con Montmartre y con la Macarena comulgo...
Y antes que un tal poeta, mi deseo primero
hubiera sido ser un buen banderillero.
Es tarde... Voy de prisa por la vida. Y mi risa
es alegre, aunque no niego que llevo prisa.

[/ QUOTE ]

i'm doin ga presneatation on one of this dudes things tomorrow (today) theoretically

[theBruiser500]

great idea for a thread, I love te Second Coming (with a couple others here), look forward to reading these poems tomorrow when i have time

[Michael Davis]

Here's a poem I wrote just now. It's not really my favorite but you might enjoy anyways:

Horatio Alger out riding a bike
looking out for little tykes.
A man of the book always protects
those who most need protecting.

It's fun to like little girls until you get old
and they put you on TV.

-Michael

[ThomasPHoolery]

May 24, 1980

I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country the bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.


Joseph Brodsky

[mikech]

i was listening to some billie holiday last night and was reminded of this wonderful poem by frank o'hara.


The Day Lady Died


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
<font color="white">.................................... ........</font>I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

[fnord_too]

It seems like most people are posting the work of others, so here is one of mine from long ago. (This is one of the few I can recall off the top of my head easily)

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
desert

she,
having learned the sand,
no longer walks erect,
stands erect,
sits erect,
thinks erect

</pre><hr />

[britspin]

[ QUOTE ]
There's a letter on the desktop
That I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
From our adolescent war
And I start to feel a fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams
-Indigo Girls

[/ QUOTE ]

This song was one that always got me through the loss of the "great love of my life" when I was about 18/19 or so.

Can barely remember her now, but still love the song.

It was given to me by a girl who was a welsh rugby student international.

Given that she was a woman rugby international and into the indigo girls, you can get some idea of my self aborption at the time by the fact that I did not realise until much later that she was a lesbian.

[TripSearching]

Identity
by Julio Noboa Polanco

Let them be as flowers,
always watered, fed, guarded, admired,
but harnessed to a pot of dirt.

I'd rather be a tall, ugly weed,
clinging on cliffs, like an eagle
wind-wavering above high, jagged rocks.

To have broken through the surface of stone,
to live, to feel exposed to the madness
of the vast, eternal sky.
To be swayed by the breezes of an ancient sea,
carrying my soul, my seed,
beyond the mountains of time or into the abyss of the bizarre.

I'd rather be unseen, and if
then shunned by everyone,
than to be a pleasant-smelling flower,
growing in clusters in the fertile valley,
where they're praised, handled, and plucked
by greedy, human hands.

I'd rather smell of musty, green stench
than of sweet, fragrant lilac.
If I could stand alone, strong and free,
I'd rather be a tall, ugly weed.

[nath]

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", accompanied with Eliot's original notes and supplementary notes.

possibly my favorite work of any kind in the English language.