Favorite Poems?

I always liked this poem by Proudfoot over at sX

This pen is red
by Proudfoot

This pen is red, that’s what it is
Embodied by its adjectives
Not blue or black, those would be fine
Oh no, it’s red, it crossed the line
From normalcy to other things
Pink elephants and cows with wings
And all that unaccepted stuff
If Red Pen doesn’t like it, tough

Says Black to Red, “I’m sorry, friend,
You’re just unlucky, in the end.
You see, genetics dictate thus;
It’s very complicated stuff.
I’d change things if I could, no doubt
But Science hasn’t figured out
A way, and even if it did
I’d warn you not to pop your lid
For even if the choice was free
I don’t think Blue Pen would agree
He’s very stubborn, as you know
Old-fashioned, mean, and selfish, so
The best advice that I could give
Would be for you to simply Live.”

Does this make sense? Can it be true?
Is Red less good than Black and Blue?
Can it be wise to always give
Out labels based on adjectives?
It seems to me this doesn’t gel
It never works out very well
Let’s disagree with what Black said
And call them all by verbs instead.

Very hard to choose… But I’ll give it a try

Auguries of Innocence (William Blake)

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour…

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright…

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine…

Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in Eternity…

The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on Heaven’s shore…

He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out…

God appears, and God is Light,
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

“The moon’s appearance, a river of stars,
Snow-clad pines, clouds hovering on mountain peaks.
In darkness, they glow with brightness.
In shadows, they shine with a splendid light.
Like the dreaming of a crane flying in empty space,
Like the clear, still water of an autumn pool,
Endless eons dissolve into nothingness,
Each distinguishable from the other.
In this illumination all striving is forgotten.”

• Hongzhi Zhengjue

“The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill”

• Eihei Dogen

And finally, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”.
The spoken version can be found here for example.

Oh, I should have just said poems you loved. I know that there’s usually no real favorite poem…

So feel free to just post poems you really, really like.

Mine is,

      [u]The Road Not Taken[/u] 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

by Robert Frost.

I don’t really like poetry very much, to be honest. Never have. Although that poem about the Red Pen was pretty good - it had a decent sense of humour. Most poems are so flowery, serious and dull, which is the whole reason I dislike them.

We need more poems like Red Pen, I think!

Edit: Oh, AND the fact that poems never seem to say anything directly - they’re so full of metaphors and imagery that they never get straight to the point like I feel they should, which is REALLY annoying, lol!

TOADS - Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves .

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension !
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you love both.

Heres my fav:

I wish I was never born
By Defiance

Before our own beginning.
Before our life’s daybreak.
We all were merely sleeping,
Not knowing joy or ache.
But those who have awoken,
Stir us from sleep unbidden.
Our fate they then have chosen,
Thinking that we should wake.

Though choice cannot be given
To those in darkness sleep,
Who are these people wakened,
To stop the slumber deep?
What gave them the right to do this?
To take our oblivion’s bliss.
Unthinking it could be missed.
Sowing what they’ll not reap.

One never did have a choice,
One could just only take.
For asleep one had no voice,
That choice… they cannot make.
Some are glad they’re not asleep,
While others don’t laugh or weep
But some want for dark to keep,
Never wanting to wake.

I too asked not conception,
I did not ask for birth.
Nor did I want ascension,
From darkness and its dearth.
The choice was made by father
And also by dear mother;
Not to let be but rather
On me force life and mirth.

I know them I cannot blame,
Its just reality.
But it pains me all the same;
This cruel finality.
The only time I could choose,
Was after that choice was used,
After that, I only muse,
For it mattered much to me.

But now I have awakened.
I now know what’s at stake.
If then I could have chosen,
Then this is for my sake;
From sleeping sleep unknowing,
From dreaming simply nothing,
From darkness everlasting,
I DID NOT WANT TO WAKE!

I did not want to wake.

I never wanted to awake…

This is really the only poem that I have read that has really made a serious impression on me. Not that I read poetry much, but whatever…
Good job Def.

,that’s was great Deperc! Now it’s posted in a spot where it won’t be deleted either! I can’t post my very favorite because it may be taken the wrong way if I do…But one that always comes to mind especially the last line since I read it like 12 years ago is this one

The Abortion
Ann Sexton

Someone who should have been born is gone

Just as the earth puckered it’s mouth,
each bud puffing out from it’s knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard
where in truth the ground cracks evilly,
A dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Someone who should have been born is gone

the grass as bristly and stout as chives
and me wondering when the ground will break
and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Up in Pennsylvania I met a little man
not Rumplestilskin, at all, at all
he took the fullness that love began

Returning north even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin

Somebody who should have been born is gone

Yes woman, such logic will lead
To loss without death, Or say what you meant
you coward…This baby that I bleed

OMG. I was checking this thread again and scrolling down, looking for new posts. I read from bottom to up when in forums, so when I blazed down to the bottom, I glimpse my username and the title of my poem, which I say to myself, couldn’t be. Then as I go up, I realize it is.

Thanks DePerc! That really made my day. You’ve felt that way too huh?

Oh, Ellen, you should post your fave. How can a poem be taken the wrong way, anyway?

Here’s a golden oldie of mine. The flow is based entirely on internal rhyme and alliteration. This is not for the weak of heart.

Unsightful Parasites
by VeryGnawty

for Erin
Profligate parasites delight in the absence of light.
Smother mother earth with morbid egotism;
Halting the radiance of prism,
Nullifying magnetism,
All for the sake of pride.

Set aside heart apart from acceptance
For the chance of their own superiority.
Seniority undermines knowledge,
Authority deteriorates wisdom
In the Kingdom of the Dead.

Shed a tear in fear of losing that which you hold dear.
I hear a gasp as it slips through your grasp.
Reach out in vain through the pain with a bloodstained hand
For the sliver of light as you shiver in darkness,
Never to be seen again.

Now the corrupt have ruptured your construction.
Introduction to destruction: a degradation of escalation
To a fall of all that we know. The clouds contravene the pristine light,
Leaving a grieving shroud.

Oh Alvin, its a long story but its a poem that was written about me and I don’t want anything said about it anyway so I’ll just keep it as my own.

I was reading this topic and I saw the poem from Defiance that Deperc posted. In the first place I didn’t read him and didn’t saw it Defiance wrote it. I just had the feeling that it had something to do with Defiance. So I checked who posted it but it wasn’t Defiance, it was Deperc. I didn’t read the poem (I was gonna do after I read all the other things) and I red that it was from Defiance. I found it a little bit funny, I was right after all.
I read the poem, and it’s a nice poem I like it

I don’t have a favourite poem actually, there are some many great poems and I haven’t read that much poems.

Not every poem is like that. I have a book with poetry that’s kind of funny. Most of them get straigt to the point or don’t have a real point but they’re good. Not my favorite because I like it when they have something mysterie and are sad. And that book is full of happy poems.

Gees I must have missed that post from ST…I love poetry for it’s imagery. I think a poem can make a point better than just saying it point blank…Like the one I posted…If you said “I just had an abortion and I’m sad” it doesn’t even come close to what the feeling is… like “you coward…this baby that I bleed”

Ah ok…

I have quite a few but I’ll write one that alot of you may already know. Like anamcara, sometimes personal especially the one’s closest to your heart just can’t be done justice when you write it for someone else to read. That’s why I chose this one instead of the others I have stashed away.

Dream-Land Edgar Allen Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne regns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE-out of TIME

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And charms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dew that drip all over,
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters-lone and dead,-
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,-
By the mountains-near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,-

By the gray woods,-by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,-
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,-
By each spot the most unholy-
In each nook most melancholy,-
There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth-and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion
'Tis a peaceful, soothing region-
For the spirit that walks in shadow
'Tis-oh, -tis an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not-dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, name NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.

It’s long but I like Edgar Allen Poe.

Big huge edit

(I was rereading some of the poems here then I look for yours then I realize it isn’t here anymore…Why’d you edit it out?)

Thought it wasn’t such a good idea to have it here after all, the author would probably get mad, although it is a great poem and I will always love it

/me thinks to himself. Understanding finally dawns on him.

Ah. I think I get it now.

Here’s one by Jim Morrison.

The Celebration of the Lizard

Lions in the street and roaming
Dogs in heat, rabid foaming
A beast caged in the heart of a city
The body of his mother
Rotting in the summer ground
He fled the town

He went down South and crossed the border
Left the chaos and disorder
Back there over his shoulder

One morning he awoke in a green hotel
With a strange creature groaning beside him
Sweat oozed from its shiny skin

Is everybody in?
The ceremony is about to begin

Wake up!
You can’t remember where it was
Had this dream stopped?

The snake was pale gold
Glazed and shrunken We were afraid to touch it
The sheets were hot dead prisons

Now, run to the mirror in the bathroom Look!
I can’t live thru each slow century of her moving
I let my cheek slide down
The cool smooth tile
Feel the good cold stinging blood
The smooth hissing snakes of rain . . .

Once I had, a little game
I liked to crawl back into my brain
I think you know the game I mean
I mean the game called ‘go insane’

Now you should try this little game
Just close your eyes forget your name
Forget the world forget the people
And we’ll erect a different steeple

This little game is fun to do
Just close your eyes no way to lose
And I’m right there I’m going too
Release control we’re breaking thru

Way back deep into the brain
Back where there’s never any pain
And the rain falls gently on the town
And in the labyrinth of streams
Beneath, the quiet unearthly presence of
Nervous hill dwellers in the gentle hills around Reptiles abounding
Fossils, caves, cool air heights

Each house repeats a mold
Windows rolled
Beast car locked in against morning
All now sleeping
Rugs silent, mirrors vacant
Dust blind under the beds of lawful couples
Wound in sheets
And daughters, smug
With semen eyes in their nipples

Wait
There’s been a slaughter here

(Don’t stop to speak or look around
Your gloves and fan are on the ground
We’re getting out of town
We’re going on the run
And you’re the one I want to come)

Not to touch the earth
Not to see the sun
Nothing left to do, but
Run, run, run
Let’s run

House upon the hill
Moon is lying still
Shadows of the trees
Witnessing the wild breeze
C’mon baby run with me
Let’s run

Run with me
Run with me
Run with me
Let’s run

The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill
Rich are the rooms and the comforts there
Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs
And you won’t know a thing till you get inside

Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car
The engine runs on glue and tar
C’mon along, we’re not going very far
To the East to meet the Czar

Some outlaws lived by the side of the lake
The minister’s daughter’s in love with the snake
Who lives in a well by the side of the road
Wake up, girl! We’re almost home

Sun, sun, sun
Burn, burn, burn
Soon, soon, soon
Moon, moon, moon
I will get you
Soon!
Soon!
Soon!

Let the carnival bells ring
Let the serpent sing
Let everything

We came down
The rivers and highways
We came down from
Forests and falls

We came down from
Carson and Springfield
We came down from
Phoenix enthralled
And I can tell you
The names of the Kingdom
I can tell you
The things that you know
Listening for a fistful of silence
Climbing valleys into the shade

'I am the Lizard King
I can do anything
I can make the earth stop in its tracks
I made the blue cars go away

For seven years I dwelt
In the loose palace of exile
Playing strange games
With the girls of the island

Now I have come again
To the land of the fair, and the strong, and the wise

Brothers and sisters of the pale forest
O Children of Night
Who among you will run with the hunt?

Now Night arrives with her purple legion
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready.

Good poem. Jim made three songs out of it… One is Not to Touch the Earth, he had the beginning of the Album American Prayer start with part of the poem, and a song that wasn’t on any of their albums, Go Insane.[/b]