A WOMAN UNCONSCIOUS

Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.

The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought
(Not to be thought ridiculous)

Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned
That there's no trusting (trusting to luck)
Dates when the world's due to be burned;

That the future's no calamitous change
But a malingering of now,
Histories, towns, faces that no
Malice or accident much derange.

And though bomb be matched against bomb,
Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure --
Earth gone in an instant flare --
Did a lesser death come

Onto the white hospital bed
Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,
Closed her eyes on the world's evidence
And into pillows sunk her head?

Ted Hughes

SISTER

The river is over it's banks.
The streets are flooded.
The room where you used to sleep
has water at the threshold.
We took some of the ashes
to your place in Savannah.
Some of them we dropped
from the middle of Golden Gate.
The rest we buried in the garden
at Mike's place in Laguna
where we saw you last
looking like your bones had almost won
their long battle with the lovely flesh
of your body.
And poor Mike,
that everyone always thought
was just an asshole,
standing there near you
suddenly seeing you
through our strange eyes
burst out crying.
Marianne,
you should see the river
you should see the water
how it's taking over everything.

SELF PORTRAIT

My friend, you who claim to know me,
look round my room: nothing of its decoration
was my own choosing; open my wardrobe:
it has nothing to show you that is specially me.
My lover and my dog know how I caress them,
but I remain unknown to them. My old instrument
is well aware of my hand’s contours;
it too cannot sing about me.

Yet I am not in hiding - simply, I do not exist.
I act, I suffer, as all men do,
but my essential core is non-existence itself.

My friend, you must not regard me as having
secrets.I am as transparent as glass - how then
do you imagine you can really see me?

Sandor Weores June 21, 2008
June 21, 2008 2:11 AM

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 11

Embrace

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.

Billy Collins

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 8 2008

In maybe 4 seconds
you can take yourself out
and your whole family
and somebody else's
just by losing track
of which side of the white line
you are hurtling down
the road on.
4 seconds? Hell, 1.5 would do it
with time to spare
for a cut off scream.

Time is money and then some.
Why waste it
reading somebody's
assinine
tossed off
half-baked
and on top of it all
arrogantly obscure
and crammed with
non-sequiturs
shitty poem?

If a poem
doesn't do something for you
it is stealing from you.

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 3 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (POLISH IT LIKE A PIECE OF SILVER)

I am standing in the cemetery at Byrds, Texas.
What did Judy say? "God-forsaken is beautiful, too.
"A very old man who has cancer on his face and takes
care of the cemetery, is raking a grave in such a
manner as to almost (polish it like a piece of silver.

Richard Brautigan

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 2, 2008

A Crazed Girl

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

William Butler Yeats