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sullysue
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e. e. cummings

 

beautiful

 

is the

unmea

ning

of (sil

 

ently) fal

 

ling (e

ver

yw

here) s

 

now

 

:goodone:

 

I think about this one from time to time when I'm I standing outside while snow is falling. Love how the form replicates the random patterns of softly falling snow.

 

And he breaks up the words "everywhere" and "snow" to make the words "here" and "now." So it's like he is writing the poem as he is watching the snow falling. I always liked that interpretation.

 

I never saw that before until you just pointed it out.

 

wow.

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Each life converges to some centre

Expressed or still;

Exists in every human nature

A goal,

 

Admitted scarcely to itself, it may be,

Too fair

For credibility's temerity

To dare.

 

Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven,

To reach

Were hopeless as the rainbow's raiment

To touch,

 

Yet persevered toward, surer for the distance;

How high

Unto the saints' slow diligence

The sky!

 

Ungained, it may be, by a life's low venture,

But then,

Eternity enables the endeavoring

Again.

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

Love me some Emily, but OMG that poor, tortured girl!

 

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me,

 

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

 

 

Ach, bleak stuff!

 

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.

The carriage held by just ourselves, and Immortality.

 

Yeah. Pretty bleak.

 

But we still love her.

 

But that bitch needed to learn how to make titles fire her poems.

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Approach of Winter

 

The half-stripped trees

struck by a wind together,

bending all,

the leaves flutter drily

and refuse to let go

or driven like hail

stream bitterly out to one side

and fall

where the salvias, hard carmine--

like no leaf that ever was--

edge the bare garden.

 

- William Carlos Williams

 

YES, Barney!! You are kicking some ass with WCW and St. Vincent Millay!!

 

Read so many poems by them, currently reading a book of Emily Dickinson's stuff!

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Picturesque

 

 

Winter ski hills soft and white

Autumn colours naturally bright

Summer vacations and time consumed

Spring flowers and their natural bloom

The son sliding into home plate

The daughter as she learns to skate

Children together at the campground

Young babies with smiles all around

A family portrait so naturally cliche

A wedding photo capturing the big day

Lovely couples with affection

We see picture perfection

A deadly car accident so grotesque

Why can't life be so picturesque?

 

 

-B. Lee

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The Beautiful Changes

 

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

 

-- Richard Wilbur

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Where Flesh Circulates

 

 

Its so hard to remember in the world - - Weren’t you there? Dead so you

 

think of ports - - Couldn’t reach flesh - - Might have to reach flesh from

 

anybody - -

 

And i will depart under the Red Masters

 

for strange dawn words of color exalting their

 

falling on my face impending attack satellite in a

 

Gold and perfumes of light city red stone

 

shadows brick terminal time wet dream flesh creakily the

 

the last feeble faces fountains play stale

 

spit from crumpled cloth Weimar youths on my face

 

bodies where flesh circulates Masters of color

 

exalting their dogs impending attack of light

 

unaware of the vagrant shadows on the Glass and Metal Streets

 

silver flying scanning patterns electric dogs

 

dark street life ”Here he is now” staring out

 

from the dawn he strode toward the flesh jissom webs drifting

 

where identity scarred metal faces masturbating

 

”Who him?” spitting blood laugh on the iron afternoons

 

ejaculates wet dream flesh in red brick Terminal Time

 

red nitrous fumes under the orange gas flares

 

grey metal fall out on terminal cities

 

to the shrinking sky fading color sewage delta

 

caught in this dead whistle stop post card sky

 

dead rainbow flesh and copper pagodas flickered on the

 

in a city of red stone black skin work fish smell and

 

dead eyes in doorways red water words spitting blood laugh

 

sharp as water reeds fish syllables

 

stirring this Moroccan sunlight vagrant noon station

 

spent in the mirror dawn jissom webs drifting rainbow

 

speeded up from afternoon’s slow ferris wheel flesh.

 

- William S. Burroughs

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Pondering

 

 

...Sometimes

I wonder how it will turn

Just experiences we all learn

 

...Sometimes

I see how you feel

A poor soul begs for his next meal

 

...Sometimes

I know how it all ends

Now I redefine the term "friends"

 

...Sometimes

I look for my false-god

Another used-salesman, smile, or fraud

 

...Sometimes

I sit all day and repeat 'WHY'

And those stars fill the night-lit sky

 

 

-B. Lee

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Portrait

 

She has no need to fear the fall

Of harvest from the laddered reach

Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing

From the steep beach.

 

Nor hold to pain's effrontery

Her body's bulwark, stern and savage,

Nor be a glass, where to foresee

Another's ravage.

 

What she has gathered and what lost,

She will not find to lose again.

She is possessed by time, who once

Was loved by men.

 

-- Louise Bogan

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The Photographer

 

 

He holds the camera

attention focused

on

his subject

 

Camera raised

to his eyes

 

As steady as a sniper

who slowly

focuses

on his subject...

 

He gasps -

As the camera

becomes

his mind's eye

 

Holding his breath...

The trigger is set...

 

Slowly pressing...

locked -

(Two beeps)

Sees red

Exhales and

presses that trigger!

 

SNAP!

 

Though he may

not

understand war

He will return home

safely

 

Many stories

will soon

be told

to his children

 

"We fought men"

"We fought Mother Nature"

"We fought ourselves...."

 

 

 

- B. Lee

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Men's lenses

 

 

She is like the world to me

Eyes blue

like the clear waters

of a tropical beach

 

Her personality -

Promising

How I perceived it

to be

 

Her face glows

brightness -

Like the morning sun

 

Her beauty -

is everything to me

how everything should be

 

Most of all

What I love about her most

are her tits

 

 

-B. Lee

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Men's lenses

 

 

She is like the world to me

Eyes blue

like the clear waters

of a tropical beach

 

Her personality -

Promising

How I perceived it

to be

 

Her face glows

brightness -

Like the morning sun

 

Her beauty -

is everything to me

how everything should be

 

Most of all

What I love about her most

are her tits

 

 

-B. Lee

 

That's fanTAStic!!

 

:rfl:

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34C

 

 

At Ryerson-U that fall,

Dida lived down the hall

She flipped me her bra that one aft,

Showed her size and we both laughed

 

I wrote on her door in bad taste,

My marker couldn't be erased

Though Dida was not at all mad,

We laughed at all the fun we had

 

Whenever I write from now and then,

I make sure it's not a permanent pen

And because of my ideas and me,

Her 'nick that year was "34C"!

 

 

 

-B. Lee

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Stars Over the Dordogne

 

Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy

Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker

Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.

The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.

They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.

Nor do they send up fires where they fall

Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.

They are eaten immediately by the pines.

 

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars

Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.

And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.

The smaller and more timid never arrive at all

But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.

They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.

But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,

They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

 

The Big Dipper is my only familiar.

I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are

Hanging shyly under the studded horizon

Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem.

Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.

Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright

I am overlooking them by looking too hard.

Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

 

And what if the sky here is no different,

And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?

Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.

The few I am used to are plain and durable;

I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth

Or much company, or the mildness of the south.

They are too puritan and solitary for that—

When one of them falls it leaves a space,

 

A sense of absence in its old shining place.

And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,

I see those constellations in my head,

Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.

There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.

On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell

Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes

And drink the small night chill like news of home.

 

-- Sylvia Plath

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The Indigo Bunting

 

I go to the door often.

Night and summer. Crickets

lift their cries.

I know you are out.

You are driving

late through the summer night.

 

I do not know what will happen,

I have no claim on you.

I am one star

you have as guide; others

love you, the night

so dark over the Azores.

 

You have been working outdoors,

gone all week. I feel you

in this lamp lit

so late. As I reach for it

I feel myself

driving through the night.

 

I love a firmness in you

that disdains the trivial

and regains the difficult.

You become part then

of the firmness of night,

the granite holding up walls.

 

There were women in Egypt who

supported with their firmness the stars

as they revolved,

hardly aware

of the passage from night

to day and back to night.

 

I love you where you go

through the night, not swerving,

clear as the indigo

bunting in her flight,

passing over two

thousand miles of ocean.

 

-- Robert Bly

 

LOVE this poem. LOVE this poet. Every single word he has ever written astonishes me.

Edited by kkdalloway
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It's long but it's worth every minute.

 

 

Sunday Morning

 

 

1

 

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings

Seem things in some procession of the dead,

Winding across wide water, without sound.

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

 

2

 

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measure destined for her soul.

 

3

 

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,

A part of labor and a part of pain,

And next in glory to enduring love,

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

 

4

 

She says, 'I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?'

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured

As April's green endures; or will endure

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

 

5

 

She says, 'But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.'

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

 

6

 

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set pear upon those river-banks

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

 

7

 

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

 

8

 

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

 

-- Wallace Stevens

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Communities 2.0

 

 

Logging-on will make us show

with you I can now grow

Stepping forward how we knew,

with that time spent with you

 

For now we do pretend,

For you are now my friend

Please do enjoy your stay...

We connect in every way

 

One day a connection will die

"Friends Forever" was a big lie

Realities which were spared,

are illusions only shared

 

Each day we grew much stronger,

As we are friends no-longer

Behind each step I see,

is the time taken from me

 

 

 

- B. Lee

Edited by barney_rebel
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Song

 

She sat and sang alway

By the green margin of a stream

Watching the fishes leap and play

Beneath the glad sunbeam.

 

I sat and wept away

Beneath the moon's most shadowy beam,

Watching the blossoms of the May

Weap leaves into the stream.

 

I wept for memory

She sang for hop that is so fair:

My tears were swallowed by the sea;

Her songs died on the air.

 

-- Christina Rosetti

Edited by kkdalloway
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excerpt from

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

 

-- William Wordsworth

Edited by kkdalloway
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from A Midsummer Night's Dream

Act V, Scene 1

 

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended -

That you have but slumb'red here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding than a dream.

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

 

-- William Shakespeare

 

One of my favorites of Shakespeare's. Incidentally, some of you might remember that the character Neal performs this soliloquy during a performance of the play in the movie Dead Poet's Society.

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