Mad Girl's Love Song

By Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Horoscope  by Ted Hughes

You wanted to study
Your stars — the guards
Of your prison yard, their zodiac. The planets
Muttered their Babylonish power-sprach —
Like a witchdoctor’s bones. You were right to fear
How loud the bones might roar,
How clear an ear might hear
What the bones whispered
Even embedded as they were in the hot body.

Only you had no need to calculate
Degrees for your ascendant disruptor
In Aries. It meant nothing certain — no more
According to the Babylonian book
Than a scarred face. How much deeper
under the skin could any magician peep?

You only had to look
Into the nearest face of a metaphor
Picked out of your wardrobe or off your plate
Or out of the sun or the moon or the yew tree
To see your father, your mother, or me
Bring you your whole Fate.

Pass Around the Cup Fair Maiden

By Hafiz


Pass around the cup fair maiden,
Because Love seemed easy at first,
But now I see how difficult it is.

The hearts of Lovers bleed,
and will be doomed to break,
when the scent of the Beloved blows away in the wind.

How can the traveller stay safe
when the clarion calls its sound of parting?

The Master tells us:
"soak your prayer rug red with wine, my friend".

Those who are still on the shore
feel they have peace of mind,
they don't know our storms and dark nights.

But at last, I find the Secret,
hidden in street corners,
revealed before me.

Hafiz, enjoy her Love
And instruct her,
"suffer the darkness for the sake of the light".

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Translation by Fitzgerald:


Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Dawn

By Federico Garcia Lorca




Dawn in New York has
Four columns of mire...
And a hurricane of black pigeons
Splashing in the putrid water.


Dawn in New York groans
On enormous fire escapes
Searching between the angles
For spikenards of drafted anguish.


Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
Because tomorrow and hope are impossible there:
Sometimes the furious swarming coins
Penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.


Those who go out early know in their bones
There will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
They know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
In mindless games, in fruitless labors.


The light is buried under chains and noises
In an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
As if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood

The Museum, The Hands III.

By Anthony Sobin

On display in Paleontology is the huge slab of petrified sea floor
separated carefully and carried away intact from fossil ocean -
"Each half-inch of strata represents roughly two thousand years."
Clear impressions offer solid evidence for the lives of the extinct,
The curling patterns in the mud of burrowing sea worms,
The death masks of trilobites like fingerprints of the Paleozoic.
In the dents and furrows we can focus on the outlines of their bodies
Just as the they were at death, before there was an Atlantic Ocean.

Last year's student, a woman who will always be too young for me,
stands intently watching the display as if something
Were happening in it - as if it were the movie at the drive-in
Complete with plot and action. As she looks up and sees me
My old recurring dream flashes by - the one that always ends
With Queen Bess ordering me beheaded and quartered, the dream
Which always begins cloudy, with me watching intensely,
As if through a half-inch layer of translucent bog water,
Tiny worms curling under my fingernails like thin brown threads,
Their trails beginning to fall into just the right patterns -
My own hands beginning to give me away. She is happy to see me,

And tells me all about he European summer, her new car and lover
And art history paper she's in the middle of - the one concerning
Michaelangelo's "Creation" far out on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We talk about how "unpainterly and statue-like the figures are,
Yet how they nonetheless seem real in spite of their look of being
Frozen there in stone." Only I am uneasy. It's cold she says
And jokes about wishing they'd start a huge fire in the English Room
I focus on her hair and her hand curling the bracelet at her wrist
I measure with my eye the hard transparent distance between us and
Hear her asking me if I know the statistics - the ratio in a lifetime
Of things we can see to the things we can touch.

Everyone On the Corner

- By William S. Tribel (Repressionist Poet)


In the digest form
Language of conspiracy
Association
Of or with, as opposed to
A tangible act in kind

In the digest form
Language in complicity
Destabilization
For and to the meek and massed
Sub minor majorities

In the digest form
Language inconsistency
Obama-nation
By as from those that say so
All and every in union

With grace and good form
All given propensity
Right until the end
Ever in the digest form
With no good reason for war

Into Dust

A Villanelle
- By Repressionist poet Tina Twito


These temporal things will crumble into dust.
These fickle moments skewered across the years.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You do not notice love disguising lust.
You seek the kiss you crave beneath the leers.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.

These shining wonders all begin to rust,
This new Pandora's box of subtler fears.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You'll find there is no bread beneath the crust.
You'll find that when you scream, nobody hears.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.

There's no true beauty where there's no disgust.
There's no true joy without the cleanse of tears.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You think my words decrepit and unjust.
You will not fear the heat until it sears.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

A Vast Confusion

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti



Long long I lay in the sands

Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life's voices lost in night
And the tape of it
somehow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light

Sweet Will

by Philip Levine

The man who stood beside me
34 years ago this night fell
on to the concrete, oily floor
of Detroit Transmission, and we
stepped carefully over him until
he wakened and went back to his press.


It was Friday night, and the others
told me that every Friday he drank
more than he could hold and fell
and he wasn’t any dumber for it
so just let him get up at his
own sweet will or he’ll hit you.


“At his own sweet will,” was just
what the old black man said to me,
and he smiled the smile of one
who is still surprised that dawn
graying the cracked and broken windows
could start us all to singing in the cold.


Stash rose and wiped the back of his head
with a crumpled handkerchief and looked
at his own blood as though it were
dirt and puzzled as to how
it got there and then wiped the ends
of his fingers carefully one at a time


the way the mother wipes the fingers
of a sleeping child, and climbed back
on his wooden soda-pop case to
his punch press and hollered at all
of us over the oceanic roar of work,
addressing us by our names and nations—


“Nigger, Kike, Hunky, River Rat,”
but he gave it a tune, an old tune,
like “America the Beautiful.” And he danced
a little two-step and smiled showing
the four stained teeth left in the front
and took another suck of cherry brandy.


In truth it was no longer Friday,
for night had turned to day as it
often does for those who are patient,
so it was Saturday in the year of ’48
in the very heart of the city of man
where your Cadillac cars get manufactured.


In truth all those people are dead,
they have gone up to heaven singing
“Time on My Hands” or “Begin the Beguine,”
and the Cadillacs have all gone back
to earth, and nothing that we made
that night is worth more than me.


And in truth I’m not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.


Not worth a thing! Just like it was said
at my magic birth when the stars
collided and fire fell from great space
into great space, and people rose one
by one from cold beds to tend a world
that runs on and on at its own sweet will.