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        POETRY

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Floyd Based Poets;
 
George LallyJames LockeM.E. Robbins

OTHER POEMS ON CODA PAGE:
poem number: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - dedication

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George Lally
 A Warning to My One Year Old Grandaughter

Prepare yourself for earnest lads
who'd woo you with their words of yearning,
for fervent swains --just like their dads--
who will declare their hearts are burning,
prepare for suitors bold and shy,
who every ruse and ploy will try,
get ready dear, for love-sick guys,
who'll stir the air with their deep sighs,
--no surprise
my dear you have your mother's eyes.
George Lally 
 
©2007   all rights reserved 

Another Way
 (To BFS)
  
 Our paths may cross some of these  days
 in search of separate yearnings,
 Yours to the strand and crashing  waves,
 and mine to mountain turning,
  
 who can fathom our desires?
 So deep...... beyond discerning,
 Each seeks a different paradise...
 or new, or a returning.

   -G. Lally
©2006 all rights reserved


Villa


It's time,

I've  learned enough,

I'm going  from  the world awhile

to my imagined Villa,

I cannot wait to see it,

Queen Ann's lace,

and careless daisies,

will smile as I pass,

On a hill,

happy ruminants,

deep peace in a heaven of grass.


   -G. Lally
©2006 all rights reserved
Pale Spring
(for GBL)


A squirrel scolds,
I do not start,
and daffodils
don't shout out loud,
the surly trees
refuse their part,
with leaves clenched tight
in buds ungiving,
they know no joy
in love or living;
A colder, paler, Spring,
since you depart,
the air warms slowly,
and the heart


G.Lally
©2006 all rights reserved

 
  After Frost



The soil is lovely, moist, and deep
where sprightly earthworms plow,
The April rains upon us seep,
Though we don't feel them now,

No need to laugh, no need to weep,
No feelings, sight, or sound,
And no more promises to keep
beneath the fertile ground.

     
       - George Lally 
 
©2007
   all rights reserved

Tech Support



 When I have crashed
 or got confused,
 you were always there
 to walk me through it,

and thanks to you  I've learned some things, like files, and fonts, and virus scan,
(I've learned from you there's nothing to it)

If I need to, I can clear my history now,
and when my disk is fragmented,
you taught me what to do to make it right,

So teach me (please!) to operate this num lock; I need it as I try and try, to lock the numbness in, so I won't cry.

Alex died.


 - George Lally
©2006 all rights reserved

 Little Note



My modesty's

 well earned

in a lifetime

 free of acclaim,

when I croak

 no admiring bog,

      nobody

knows my name


- George Lally
©2006 all rights reserved
 
Ambivalence


I don't know whether to call you

- your life so full, so fast -

I'm like an old man in a cross walk,

and you, waiting for me to pass

with one foot hard on the brake,

...and the other foot on the gas.

- George Lally
©2007
 all rights reserved

 'Letter To My Brother
     In San Francisco'


Dear David,
The rumor's true.

Winter has wrapped our sick and tired
world in the customary bandages.

Soon enough they'll be discolored - fouled
by the residue of our strivings.

But for today, all is wrapped in a healing whiteness.
It's just as you remember:

The stillness of yard and street,
the trees transformed, the quiet!


           -G. Lally
 ©2007
 all rights reserved



  James Locke


The Game

By Jame Locke

While winter trees aspire in slender bars
To jail my eyes, embattled children
Wrestle grass and tangle sun
And leg and rolling ball--
Now here, now there, now here again.
Amid the shouts to "Kill 'em, boys,"
To "Wake up, boys; dontcha want to win it Boys," they strive to breach the limit.

Lookers turn with leveled fingers
To their brows to fight the sun;
Despite the anguished glare,
The sunlight dances on their hair;
Shadows hide beneath the hands
That hold the sky away.

On a distant electric line along
The endless horizon,  a solitary bird
Is sparkling in the light.

It has perched to set a wind-stirred feather And to look about.
But the violent claps
And the horrid shouts of the scrambling boys
Frighten the observing bird,
And it prepares to fly.
It prepares to fly
As do the airy ball and the very wanton I.


By Jame Locke

The Game -©2007 James Locke


Urban Magic


By James Locke


  
A conspiracy of  gods protects the purlieus
Of my home and yard. I am constantly
Under siege by the forces beyond the row
Of dogwoods at the top of the street.
I can feel the inimical vibrations
From neighbors and politicians and city
Managers and occasional disseminators
Of religious literature who prowl in packs
And even from wayward groups of children
Who have lost their innocence and though
Twelve years old may as well be twelve hundred.
There is such sordid knowledge in their eyes,
These enemies, these collaborators
Against peace and nature. They may dare
Look my way, but they don't dare intrude
Because there is a confederacy of gods
That protects the paradisiacal perimeter
Of my heretical hermitage. Pan rules
Over all. He lives hunkered down on the
Front porch; his terra cotta presence
Hides under the two begonias, and under
The angel wings, one can glimpse
The knobs that are his horns, really
Antennae sending out the "Do Not Enter"
Message, subliminally conveying
"Restricted Area," Sancrosanct Precincts,"
"Holy Ground: Remove your sandals
Or your presences." His hairy haunches
And distended belly suggest life within
These bounds, crucifixes against vampires.
And under him are the other members
Of the pantheocracy, of the coven against
Cravens: there is Francis (a pagan saint
If there ever was one) under the bird feeder
Sending his winged armies--his cardinals,
His jays and tits and chikadees--out
To flash abrupt wings in the eyes of anyone
Contemplating interruption (or shitting
On their cars or heads to make them think
Before succumbing to such a fecund place.
They think, "What does fecund mean anyway?")
There is Buddha who we remember had his vision
Under a Bo tree who is now under the hosta
Next to the driveway. His temple is in
The triangle on the second level of the yard,
The redoubt because there is surely a war going on.
Those looking into my jungle think rain forest
And want to cut it down; they think Mexico
And want to steal my land; they think
Africa and want to enslave; they think weeds
And want to spray DDT or Agent Orange.
But they who violate the territory of'
My terrible triumvirate, my Bermuda Triangle,
Never get out alive. Gods only know where they go.
 


 

James Locke

 Urban Magic -©2006 James Locke



TOP

Eustacia

By James Locke


 This poem is about Eustacia Vye of Return of the Native. It is about a particular element in us all: the feeling of restraints, mediocrity, boredom, whatever limits our ability to make life be extreme, maximum, powerful
 

Eustacia,
You are not happy with your lot
Ranging about the heath
With telescope and hourglass
Restless to the bones and the nerves
Which jangle in your skin
And make you cruel and thoughtless
So that you want to bite
Or scratch something
So it feels your presence,
Yours alone.
Only nineteen but subject
To hot flashes already,
Unaccountable breathing spells,
Hyperventilation and dizziness
And hellish temperatures.
You wander under the stars
Momentarily having to lean
Against a bank for breath,
Extricate your black hair
From thorny furze,
Hate the gods above
For narrowing the universe
To these few minutes,
To these few inches of skin,
To these few acres,
To these few yokels
Who have never felt
Anything like the orgasm
You constantly dream.
Where is he
To love you to madness,
To match you blow for blow,
Expectation for expectation,
Fantasy for fantasy,
Until you are finally satisfied
In some brutal pornographic way.
For us, you are the rich girl
Come from the country,
Lost in the underground
Of New York or LA
Lying nude finally
With a broken neck,
Having found the ultimate climax
Captured on film with someone
For whom your contempt
Made you fully real.
You are indeed Queen
Of the very darkest night.
 


James Locke

Eustacia - ©2006 James Locke






 

Depth


By James Locke


This paper is more than paper.
Which line is to be followed
When there are shadows cast
Down its whiteness by a three o'clock sun
Outside my window?
And beyond only an inch
The dictionary world--
Each word a window on reality:
Siege Perilous says to me
 
Vacant seat
At Arthur's Table
Where Grailfinders
Sit.
Death to the weak;
Life to the meek.
It
Bears reminders
Of the stable
And the Paraclete.
 
There is Silenus, Siegfried, or Silesia,
Sigismund, Sikhism. or Sir Philip Sydney--
Place, poet, providence, prurience, and potentates.
I see in the eye's reaching tunnel
Whirling dancers in exotic tents
Washed in extravagant music--
Tinkling sounds sifted through sheer gowns--
Below under the winter mulberry tree.
Summer snakes climb that tree to the roof
To sun in the eave,
To birth after heated mating on the lawn.
A black dog runs along the distant white fence:
K A L E I D O S C O P E!
Branches of trees swirl motionlessly,
Reaching out of sight to sky,
Obscuring the fading white sun
And other suns
And space
Beyond.
 

 
 

James Locke

Depth -©2006 James Locke

  Dawning

 By James Locke


I try to blame you for inaccuracies
While you snore rough like the sea,

Toss and turn out the night

Empty of thought.
Thoughts are what have kept me awake:
Lighting the lamp,
Setting the heat,
Watching dawn flowers
Bleed with the cold morning light,
Revolving my head like a bird’s
Observing yesterday’s things.
I look with an unstilled mind for causes.
 
Out of the chaos of your dreams
A fire consumes every wild flower
And clapboard house.
The pitch field where lie bright cinders
Is suddenly shadowed to the dark of Cocytus
By a winging bird that fills your head.
It grows gargantuan behind the nerve,
And from the sweep of its angled fan
It leaves green shoots unbudded in pleasant fields.
Glimpses of sweaty arms swinging in the sun,
And sounds of hammers striking sparks.

 
 

By James Locke

Dawning -©2006 James Locke




Snake in the Garden


In childish wantonness, you grabbed the rope

To swing way out across wide water.
You screamed for all to watch. You spun
Like a tangled puppet before the plunge,
Relishing the familiar feel to come:
Your feet and body free in space,
Knowing the momentary suspension in air,
Then down to the calm green below, reaching
For entry, scrambling among smooth stones
On the bottom with their slick algae touch
On feet and knees, pushing up and bursting
Out for breath. But suddenly your leg snapped,
Caught in the snakey rope's unexpected bite.
You dangled. Worried words rose from inverted lips,
"The end has come. No way out for me."
After swift swimmers rescued you carefully
From your awkward fear and insistent cry,
There was darkness in your cautious play.



By James Locke
 
©2007- James Locke



Home Gallery

          ___________________________________

I walk this gallery of
Company and fall flat.
These comrades never talk--
Smoke rings noose their fat necks.
Some ballet belle is squared
Like a gray flower walled
And paired off with a hare
Whose ears are much too long.
Albrecht Durer comes here
By proxy. The etched
Daumier, slender tippler,
Wobbles, the neverending
Sipper of the wine cup;
And I sup with a bull
From Lascaux I don't know.
On the other side,
Audubon's still birds glide
Into their nests. The rest
Are marble heads bobbing
Like green apples in tubs.
I've discovered they are all
Dead, and death is quiet
Against the riot noise
The stinging air can make
In the whorled ear and head.
These guests were brought to fill
This deserted night-room,
To be traders of time.
But now they evade me
Like shining rain running
Off the fingers. Their stares
Linger awhile then float
Down--opaque silks draped
Over abandoned chairs
That hunch like hungry bears
Quiet and intent.

     __________________________________

 James Locke
 
©2007- James Locke



 
 Voracious Eyes
 
By James Locke
 

 
I meet the sun, eye to eye:
The day's eye becomes my eyes' wafer.
Their lips close over the finch's
Slender figure, devour
The branches' dervish dance,
Absorb the snow's startling ice-
They present themselves.

My eyes feed on green grass,
Eat up brown earth,
Bite through white clouds, faces, and hair;
Nibble toward the bone,
Chew on slick red lips and break
The teeth between-
Those indigestible pearls.

They swallow whole
Girls and flowers,
Their mouths always open,
White swans with ruffling feathers,
Eyes burning brilliantly black,
Perfect half-moon onyx jewels,
Bright in the softly lagging sun.
I have consumed the afternoon
Meeting their eyes,
Where a dark glowing grows.

And beyond the day,
In its dark heart,
Beyond the lids shut tight
Like an oyster's shell
Is a place where birds emerge
From night's own drowsing crooked eye.

One-eyed night is aroused
By wings that beat and crash
Against the air. The horde's floating
Bodies and outstretched feet
Drift down and settle
On a shining lake.

So brazen birds come
Noisily and unaware.


Voracious Eyes -©2007 James Locke



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MARA E. ROBBINS
 
Evacuating Diana

As if on cue
The storm rolled in
Waves twelve feet high

And gray thunder
Punctuated by lightning.
We left.

Two cars packed
Against the wind
Rolling slowly through

The rain-
Days cut short
By impending natural disaster.

I didn’t want to leave.
Watching the ocean recede
Through the car window

Caught in the power
Of the storm
I wished to stay

To hear the howling
Feel the blowing sand
And stand

Hands to the sky
In the eye
Of Diana.

Now, my life
Swirls around me
Much like that spiral cloud-

Mass destruction
With a small center
Of calm.

This time, I cannot
Choose to evacuate.
I must stand

With my choices
Bearing down on me
Stand tall

With the rain
Pushing me down
Stand fast

When everything
Seems to be moving
S o  s  l  o  w.

I cannot leave
I cannot fall
I cannot be

Anywhere but here.
Listening to
The fierce replies

The peripheral howling
The trees
Crashing in the wind.

Diana came through
Like the huntress
Aiming skillfully

At the trappings
Of civilization-
Taking it all down.

Now, my life is a deer
With an arrow
In her heart.

Slowing.
Falling.
Pouring onto the earth.

Diana came through
Not in the guise
Of a hurricane

But an event
So tragic
So altering

So undeniable-
That I must take
This bloody arrow

Not in my own heart
But in my hands
And feel

Each poison barb
Each broken splinter of wood
Every ounce

Of life and death
And subtle power-
And burn it.

And bury it.
And keen my sorrow
To certain stars-

The only ones
That hear me.
The only ones that answer back.

Now, the moon grows,
Slowly,
Into the sickle blade

Poised to cut
The thin cords
Holding us here.

Far from the sea,
I feel the waves
Roll over me

And when I look back
I cannot see the ocean-
I do not even turn to salt.

I turn back to my life,
Making it
What it can be-

Gray thunder
Punctuated
By lightning,

And my eye
Is the only center of calm
That I can find.

~Mara Eve Robbins

August 21, 2001
Thank you Alice Hardin, for the inspiration to write this poem.

Preservation

Waking up in the morning
With tears stuck in the
Back of my throat like a song;
Each one poised to jump
Out and strike me, or just
To whittle away each eyelid
Until I can do nothing
But stare.
 

I take the tears and catch them
On my opened palm.
I take them and place them
Upon my heart, my heart that
Doesn’t remember
How to beat on time
But remembers
The last broken rhythm of yours.
 

Wishing I could save this
Is like wishing for my three cats
To spontaneously combust.
I want each memory
Carefully preserved in amber
Like a mosquito that stung me,
then fell into soft sap for
millions of years.
 

There they would not bite.
I could hold them-
Admire the golden light.
 

But now I hold my tears
Each one not carefully preserved
But finite as wind.
Comes and goes.
So I take each sting, each
Caress of tiny insect legs
On my body like a scar
And I wake with them,
 

And I sleep with them,
And I cannot give them to you;
I can only watch them
 

Blow away
Blow away
Blow away.
 

~M.E. Robbins

(81901)
 



 

The coated road

A small gray cabin.
A triangle of plowed earth.
A short letter, not yet delivered.
A long road coated with sun and rain.
 

An unexpected person.
An uneasy enjoyment.
An unfamiliar face, repeated.
An unfolded pillowcase, fluttering down.
 

Which meaning should I take?
Which one is more urgent?
Which direction will today lead me in?
Which way will I arrive?
 

Over and over I see you.
Over and over I travel this road.
Over and over the sun strikes back.
Over and over winter comes anyway.
 

I remember intimacy, increasing.
I remember laughter, two songs.
I remember spots dancing before my eyes.
I remember the hard bed of the pick up.
 

A dream that seems familiar.
A small detail ignored, nearly forgotten.
A short letter, acknowledging nothing.
A long long road, coated with sun and rain.
 

~M.E. Robbins
All rights reserved

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Growing Memory

There was a small garden on my fingertips
All that winter I spent asking
Why not you?

All it took in the spring were four
Small tomato plants and the
Fingers burst loose.

Leaning on the window I recall a
Swift night moonlight moment
Framed by a song;

Within that moment many smaller
Moments forming it. Which
Do you remember?

The same ones as me? Or entirely
Dissimilar ones, with less pungent
Flavor and time?

The train? The hood of the car?
Candles on floating ice?
Crystals in a tree?
 

Either way, my kitchen is only a kitchen now
No ivy framing red table
Café coffee wine,

Only brown cabinets and dirty linoleum.
It took you to change it.
I can barely maintain.

Sweep. Rinse. There’s nothing left to clean
Between the cracks. But now?
I wash my mind.

I water my garden. I look carefully
At all my fingers but find
Nothing growing.

Have we reached the place we
Intended to go? Is it
Reachable?

I have to revel in the small blooms
That pop up daily unexpected.
The future is too careless.
 

Today there is a sunflower under my
Bird feeders that I didn’t
Even plant.

Is that enough?

Today I find your voice again,
Entirely untranslatable
Onto film.

Is that enough?

Today there is still a piece of
Long blond hair inside me
That you dyed the first summer.

Is that enough?

Over and over, what seemed finished
Peeks around the only visible corner
And says; “surprise!”

I refuse to be surprised anymore.
The element of the unexpected
Is factored in.
 

I thought yesterday of that final week
When I found out where you were and
Left without even locking the door-

We lay on the grass in the sun,
Smoked cigarettes, and that was so much,
Was all I needed.

Now I cannot see the same way.
The world is a different place.
I hope we can still turn with it.

I hope the sunflower is enough.
I hope you asked; “why not me?”
I hope life missed us together.
 

~M.E. Robbins
All rights reserved


Home Life

Carrots
Bleach
Tea bags
Lightbulbs
Pasta
Bananas
Oj

I make a list for days
Spilling coffee on it
Smearing the edge with lotion
A phone number with no name
In the corner
As if I won’t forget something.

I usually do.
Occasionally now I find myself
Haphazard in the store
No coupons, no guidelines,
Just 10 minutes to shop,
Planning dinner as I go.

Part of what makes
My house my home
Is that I know
If I forget the milk
There is always a can
In the cupboard.

This is nothing like that.
I drive down this road
I have driven down
Thousands of times before
Trying to remember
How to say goodbye.

Instead I see a house
That I won’t be driving by
Anymore, two white swan
Planters on the porch
With red waterfalls of flowers
Down their backs.

I won’t miss those swans.
So disturbing somehow
All that red on white ceramic.
I won’t miss this long drive
At least not most of the time.
I won’t miss some things.
 

I make a list in my head
Of all of them. I feel
In my pocket to make sure
My other list, stain and all
Is still there. I wonder
If I have a pen.

I don’t need to write down
Those things I won’t mind
Forgetting.
 So I fumble
Through my glove compartment
For a pen.

And on the back
Of my grocery list
Coffee stain and all
I write through the
Wrinkles, through the
Lotion, through the window;

Porch swing
Rainbows
Wading in the creek
Christmas morning
Sunsets
Moon through stained glass window
Spring.

~M.E. Robbins
All rights reserved



July 2001

Two little girls
A pink umbrella

Waterfalls and curls
There’s nothing sweeter

On this earth
Than summertime

This year
But you’re not here

And the water
Is muddy and brown

I cried all the way to town
Oh my daughter

You are with me
And I nourish you

As best as I plan
Two little girls

A pink umbrella
Blues, with a watering can.
 

~M.E. Robbins
all rights reserved

 

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           Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)

            Ars Poetica

                 A poem should be palpable and mute
                 As a globed fruit,

                 Dumb
                 As old medallions to the thumb,

                 Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
                 Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

                 A poem should be wordless
                 As the flight of birds.

                                 *

                 A poem should be motionless in time
                 As the moon climbs,

                 Leaving, as the moon releases
                 Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

                 Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
                 Memory by memory the mind—

                 A poem should be motionless in time
                 As the moon climbs.

                                  *

                 A poem should be equal to:
                 Not true.

                 For all the history of grief
                 An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

                 For love
                 The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

                 A poem should not mean
                 But be.
 
 
 

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                    John Donne (1573-1631)

                     A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

                     As virtuous men pass mildly away,
                         And whisper to their souls, to go,
                     Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
                         "The breath goes now," and some say, "No:"

                     So let us melt, and make no noise,
                         No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
                     'Twere profanation of our joys
                         To tell the laity our love.

                     Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
                         Men reckon what it did, and meant;
                     But trepidation of the spheres,
                         Though greater far, is innocent.

                     Dull sublunary lovers' love
                         (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
                     Absence, because it doth remove
                         Those things which elemented it.

                     But we by a love so much refin'd,
                        That ourselves know not what it is,
                     Inter-assured of the mind,
                        Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

                     Our two souls therefore, which are one,
                        Though I must go, endure not yet
                     A breach, but an expansion,
                         Like gold to airy thinness beat.

                     If they be two, they are two so
                         As stiff twin compasses are two;
                     Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
                         To move, but doth, if the' other do.

                     And though it in the centre sit,
                         Yet when the other far doth roam,
                     It leans, and hearkens after it,
                         And grows erect, as that comes home.

                     Such wilt thou be to me, who must
                         Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
                     Thy firmness makes my circle just,
                         And makes me end, where I begun.
 
 

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             Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

            from Song of Myself

            I.
            I celebrate myself,
            And what I assume you shall assume,
            For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
            I loaf and invite my soul,
            I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

            II.
            Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . the shelves
            are crowded with perfumes,
            I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
            The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

            The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . it has no taste
            of the distillation . . . it is odorless,
            It is for my mouth forever . . . I am in love with it,
                          I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
                          I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

            The smoke of my own breath,
            Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . loveroot, silkthread,
            crotch and vine,
            My respiration and inspiration . . . the beating of my heart . . .
            the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
            The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore
            and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
            The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . words loosed
            to the eddies of the wind,

            A few light kisses . . . a few embraces . . . reaching around of arms,
            The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
            The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along
            the fields and hill-sides,
            The feeling of health . . . the full-noon trill . . . the song of me
            rising from bed and meeting the sun.

            Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned
            the earth much?
            Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
            Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

            Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
            of all poems,
            You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . there are
            millions of suns left,
            You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . nor
            look through the eyes of the dead. nor feed on the spectres
            in books,
            You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
            You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

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                      W. D. Snodgrass (1926- )

                      April Inventory

                      The green catalpa tree has turned
                      All white; the cherry blooms once more.
                      In one whole year I haven't learned
                      A blessed thing they pay you for.
                      The blossoms snow down in my hair;
                      The trees and I will soon be bare.

                      The trees have more than I to spare.
                      The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
                      Younger and pinker every year,
                      Bloom gradually out of reach.
                      The pear tree lets its petals drop
                      Like dandruff on a tabletop.

                      The girls have grown so young by now
                      I have to nudge myself to stare.
                      This year they smile and mind me how
                      My teeth are falling with my hair.
                      In thirty years I may not get
                      Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

                      The tenth time, just a year ago,
                      I made myself a little list
                      Of all the things I'd ought to know,
                      Then told my parents, analyst,
                      And everyone who's trusted me
                      I'd be substantial, presently.

                      I haven't read one book about
                      A book or memorized one plot.
                      Or found a mind I did not doubt.
                      I learned one date.  And then forgot.
                      And one by one the solid scholars
                      Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

                      And smile above their starchy collars.
                      I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
                      One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
                      Lacking a source-book or promotions,
                      I showed one child the colors of
                      A luna moth and how to love.

                      I taught myself to name my name,
                      To bark back, loosen love and crying;
                      To ease my woman so she came,
                      To ease an old man who was dying.
                      I have not learned how often I
                      Can win, can love, but choose to die.

                      I have not learned there is a lie
                      Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
                      That my equivocating eye
                      Loves only by my body's hunger;
                      That I have forces true to feel,
                      Or that the lovely world is real.

                      While scholars speak authority
                      And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
                      My eyes in spectacles shall see
                      These trees procure and spend their leaves.
                      There is a value underneath
                      The gold and silver in my teeth.

                      Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
                      We shall afford our costly seasons;
                      There is a gentleness survives
                      That will outspeak and has its reasons.
                      There is a loveliness exists,
                      Preserves us, not for specialists.

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     Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

       from Howl for Carl Solomon

       I.
       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, 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 after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, 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 kabbalah 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 street light 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 fire place Chicago,

       who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.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 fucked in the ass 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 rose gardens and the grass of public parks
           and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
       who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a
           Turkish Bath when the blond & 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 ass 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 cunt 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 sun rise, 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 hung over 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
        &