Your Favorite Poems

[femmedyke]

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

[SoNotHer]

"To err is human; to forgive, divine."

And, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

and the deliciously fun "Essay on Man."

From "An Essay on Man" -

"Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul;
Reason's comparing balance rules the whole.
Man, but for that, no action could attend,
And but for this, were active to no end:
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot;
Or, meteor-like, flame lawless through the void,
Destroying others, by himself destroy'd."

[Talon]

THE RIVAL~Sylvia Plath


If the moon smiled, she would resemble you
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers
Her O-mouth grieves at the world, yours is unaffected

And your first gift is making stone out of everything
I wake to a mausoleum, you are here
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous
And dying to say something unanswerable

The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide
No day is safe from news of you
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

[Talon]

GLOIRE de DIJON~D.H. Lawrence

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

[SoNotHer]

Queen-Anne’s Lace
By William Carlos Williams

Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.

[SoNotHer]

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.