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Thanks Virginia ~ such talent! :lol: Here's one back at you.....
The Breast - A. Mohan I'm awake. Very suddenly, and without opening my eyes, I realize this is not my bed. And there's someone else in it. I try to remember last night, but a haze of champagne allows only the faint recollection of a birthday party and a game of truth or dare...oh no. That explains the headache. I'm not quite willing to face the sunlight streaming in, obscenely bright, so I reach with eyes still shut. Hoping to find something familiar...Matt's beard, Joseph's muscled arm, A breast. A woman's breast? I freeze. Then gently, cautiously draw my arm back, trying not to think about the sensation of warm smooth skin under my fingertips. The sledgehammer attack suddenly doubles, threatening migraine. Perhaps I could just go back to sleep and this will all go away? But I gather all of my courage, such as it is, and open my eyes, braced against the sunlight. When they recover from the glare I see... Masses of curly red hair, Smooth, pale limbs on a gymnast's body, Small, but definitely female breasts, And very bright, very worried green eyes, set in the heart-shaped face of a stranger. So what else can I do? Just calm the concern on that face with a smile (only slightly forced) Reach out a friendly arm and draw her close, Begin perhaps to enjoy the odd sensation of breast against breast. And try to relax. They say the difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six-pack of beer. Well, I guess the difference between a straight woman and a bi woman must be a couple of bottles of really good champagne. At least we have better taste. :D :D |
Terrigrrrrl, that's great. :lol:
Virginia hon, you missed your calling, but it's not too late. ;) Love your poem. Keep em coming. xoxo |
Terri
I loved that poem. It was grrrrreat! Virginia |
Here is a song/poem
Mystery Somewhere there's a soccer game. I can hear the wild crowd moan. It's not that life here is distasteful to me it's just that I'm all alone. I wanted what took a lifetime to learn and that determined then with no more pause than a sigh turn and start again. It's not that it's such a mystery. I saw it from miles away. In time I'll only think of you when I'm buttering my toast or in some other reflective moment when I expect the least or the most. It's not that it's such a mystery it was practically on display We've got "world enough and time" and "wither youth" comes or goes. I hope you'll always think of me as "mine" and not one of those. It's not that it's such a mystery this new-found malaise. It's just that this mystery has taken your place. ~Gord Downie and one more: Wheat Kings Sundown in the Paris of the prairies Wheat kings have all their treasures buried And all you hear are the rusty breezes Pushing around the weather vane Jesus In his Zippo lighter, he sees the killer's face Maybe it's someone standing in a killer's place Twenty years for nothing, well that's nothing new, Besides, no one's interested in something you didn't do Wheat kings and pretty things, let's just see what the morning brings. There's a dream where the high school is dead and stark It's a museum and we're all locked up in it after dark Where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister Hung with pictures of our parents' prime ministers Wheat Kings and pretty things, wait and see what tomorrow brings. Late-breaking story on the CBC, A nation whispers, "we always knew that he'd go free" They add, "you can't be fond of living in the past, 'cause if you are then there's no way that you're gonna last". Wheat Kings and pretty things let's just see what tomorrow brings Wheat kings and pretty things, that's what tomorrow brings. ~The Hip That one is based on a true story of a murder in Saskatoon |
Very cool, Squeak! :yes:
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Ok, I don't know if this on here already or not, or even if you want it to be but I just love this poem. It's Howl by Allen Ginsberg.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night, with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels, who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the E.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be ****ed in the *** by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930'S German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-whistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity. who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhas or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive' or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisy-chain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination-- ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time-- and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years. 1956 |
Wooooah, Velvet! That is GOOD! I've never seen it before... I'm checking out Allen Ginsberg now. Thank you. Another little opening in my world. :)
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Thanks Ellis, yeah it is a great poem, and it's even better when Ginsberg recites it himself. Unfortunately he died in 1997, but you can get recordings of it. I highly reccomend it. I have been facinated with the Beat writers eversince I first saw The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and asked my Mom what Maynard G. Krebs was supposed to be. She did tell me that he was just a caricature and that not to take him too seriously. I just started to learn what "Beatniks" were, and that led me to the Beat writers, and I have been hooked eversince.
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Actually, as soon as I read it I started looking him up, and found a site where I could listen/see Ginsberg reading. He read VERY well. He was very expressive.
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Ginsberg is GREAT! Whenever DH is lucky enough to get a creative writing class he does a section on the Beat Poets. Here is another one:
A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!-and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you gort out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? |
Here is a poem written by a local (Detroit area) poet:
ELEGY FOR ALLEN GINSBERG I O Allen your beloved mother Naomi went mad had visions cried them out to the waiting ears of fellow-mad fellow-patients in the booby hatch and died alone on the psych ward You yourself went mad had visions wrote them down cried them out to the waiting ears of fellow-mad fellow-artists in the Gallery Six and were proclaimed a genius Is that what talent is: writing stuff down and choosing your harkeners carefully? II O America did you listen when he howled loud and long for forty years or Did you avert your ears your eyes from this ragged-assed prophet of the present this con man extrordinaire this inverted dervish this smirched, smutty angel? Did you hear him growl his scatalogical beauty across the land? Did you hear it sing like graybeard Whitman's before it with the resonant truth of living? III O Freedom you are pared today O Art you are dwindled today O Life you are faded today on this day the Dharma lion howls no more. Copyright 1997, Michael Barney |
Woof! Those are great, Den! Thank you!
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I'VE BEEN PART OF THESE WALLS FOR SO LONG
I've been part of these walls for so long An eternity waiting For that spark of life that never came. Now it's time to let go Float down Squeeze out Time to make room For that new uterine lining. |
Den, who wrote that? :lol:
Hey girlies... look at this... http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/bo...odaysheadlines |
I did! My 15 year old read it for the first time lately. Got to the last line and practically ran away in horror!!
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I KNEW IT!!! :lol: I love it!!
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You should see the reaction when DH reads it at poetry readings!!!!!:lol:
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I've had a brief reunion with an old friend... brought back memories.
First Love: Moist kisses in damp woods Stolen, secret embraces Tight jeans in dark places The taste of Kaluha and cigarettes Smell of skin Smiling in the dark (I like to write raunchy poetry) Lois |
Lois, it's great! Keep them coming...
Umm, you didn't have sex, did you? ;) What do you mean by "brief reunion"? |
Only in my mind.....
:) Lois |
After The Last Dynasty
by Stanley Kunitz Reading in Li Po how "the peach blossom follows the water" I keep thinking of you because you were so much like Chairman Mao, naturally with the sex transposed and the figure slighter. Loving you was a kind of Chinese guerilla war. Thanks to your lightfoot genius no Eighth Route Army kept its lines more fluid, traveled with less baggage so nibbled the advantage. Even with your small bad heart you made a dance of departures. In the cold spring rains when last you failed me I had nothing left to spend but a red crayon language on the character of the enemy to break appointments, to fight us not with his strength but with his weakness, to kill us not with his health but with his sickness. Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony, here is a new note I want to pin on your door, though I am ten years late and you are nowhere: Tell me, are you still mistress of the valley, what trophies drift downriver, why did you keep me waiting? |
I like that.
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Ok this has been stuck in my head and I think it would make a lovely poem.
For No One (Lennon/McCartney) Your day breaks, your mind aches You find that all the words of kindness linger on When she no longer needs you. She wakes up, she makes up She takes her time and doesn't feel she has to hurry She no longer needs you. And in her eyes you see nothing No sign of love behind the tears Cried for no one A love that should have lasted years! You want her, you need her And yet you don't believe her when she said her love is dead You think she needs you. And in her eyes you see nothing No sign of love behind the tears Cried for no one A love that should have lasted years! You stay home, she goes out She says that long ago she knew someone but now he's gone She doesn't need him Your day breaks, your mind aches There will be time when all the things she said will fill your head You won't forget her. And in her eyes you see nothing No sign of love behind the tears Cried for no one A love that should have lasted years! |
Ah. I had to sing that... thanks, Squeak!
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Locked inside my love
What are you doing to me?
Why does my chest hurt so badly I can't breath? I want to feel your love surround me, wrap your loving arms around me. Feel your warm gentle embrace, and see the love grow across your face. I want to hold you in my arms so tight, Hold you there all through the night. Smell your hair and touch your skin, Feel my heart beat again. But a love like that I just can't have So I look to God up above and ask her for the key, there's nothing I can do she says Because she is locked inside your love. Just take away the pain I feel, When I can not hold her near Make the love go away And dissipate the fear. I can't do that she says It's up to you my child She whispers gently in my ear In a voice so meak and mild. It's you who must face your fears And take whatever comes your way I will stand quietly beside you And guide you every day. Do not stand idly by And waste away the days For life is much to precious To give up and hide away. My gift to you my dear sweet child Is to love with all your heart, Grab hold of life with all your strength And never let it part. by Virginia To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides. David Viscott :) |
Virginia, that is absolutely beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us. :grouphug:
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Virginia - yes, it is really beautiful.
Thank you for sharing your heart, Terri |
The Room
"Through that window – all else being extinct
Except itself and me – I saw the struggle Of darkness against darkness. Within the room It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw How order might – if chaos wished – become: And saw the darkness crush upon itself, Contracting powerfully; it was as if It killed itself, slowly: and with much pain. Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain. What else, when chaos draws all forces inward To shape a single leaf? . . . For the leaf came Alone and shining in the empty room; After a while the twig shot downward from it; And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk, Massive and coarse; and last the one black root. The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window: The great tree took possession. Tree of trees! Remember (when time comes) how chaos died To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage, Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape. I will be watching then as I watch now. I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf." ~ Conrad Aiken |
Warning
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick the flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat And eat three pounds of sausages at a go Or only bread and pickle for a week And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes. But now we must have clothes that keep us dry And pay our rent and not swear in the street And set a good example for the children. We must have friends to dinner and read the papers. But maybe I ought to practice a little now? So people who know me are not to shocked and surprised When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple. by Jenny Joseph |
Love that one Ellis!! my Mom has it posted on her refrigerator, and I tease her constantly so she'll actually LIVE it!!!
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Lovely poem Virginia! You are a very good writer and it's great that you share your work with us.
Amarantha-cool poem, is that from a novel or a published book or Conrad Aiken's poetry? From your quotes you seem to read a lot of fantasy type stuff :cool: Ellis-:lol: very cute! I already live like that so what am I going to do when I get old? :devil: Oh, yeah, when I get old I will sit in a rocking chair on the front porch of my Gothic mansion wearing a sillly hat and drinking Scotch while smoking gitanes and firing a shot gun full of rock salt at the neighborhood kids and yelling at them to get off my *&$@# lawn! Oh yeah!:D |
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