eatpoetry

Lust

by nobel laureate, Harold Pinter

There is a dark sound
Which grows on the hill
You turn from the light
Which lights the black wall.

Black shadows are running
Across the pink hill
They grin as they sweat
They beat the black bell.

You suck the wet light
Flooding the cell
And smell the lust of the lusty
Flicking its tail.

For the lust of the lusty
Throws a dark sound on the wall
And the lust of the lusty
- its sweet black will -
Is caressing you still.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!— An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Nightwalk

by Franz Wright

(I rarely find poems where I personally intervene and praise their “amazingness,” but for this one, I must. If I ever felt like stopping, ending, this piece has often been the song, the mantra, the psalm that helped me put one foot in front of the other, and move.)

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper —
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

, said the shotgun to the head

by Saul Williams

she had eyes
like two turntables
mix(h)er
in between
my dreams and reality
blend in
ancient themes

the bass is of isis
(basis)
cross-faded to ankh
the beat drops
like a cliff
over looking
my heart

and you
never loved her
for what she
possessed

you powdered
her face
and came
on her
head dress

oil slicked feathers, putrid stenched water bed
“mother nature’s a whore,” said the shotgun to the head.

“Which Shakespeare answered very badly…”

Oxford University’s professor of poetry, A.C. Bradley’s, influence on Shakespearean criticism was so great that the following anonymous poem appeared:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.

(Hawkes 1986 as cited in Taylor 2001: 46)[1]

My Great-Grandmother’s Bible ( a sonnet)

by Spencer Reece

Faux-leather bound and thick as an onion, it flakes—
an heirloom from Iowa my dead often read.
I open the black flap to speak the “spake”s
and quickly lose track of who wed, who bred.
She taped our family register as it tore,
her hand stuttering like a sewing machine,
darning the blanks with farmers gone before—
Inez, Alvah, Delbert, Ermadean.
Our undistinguished line she pressed in the heft
between the Testaments, with spaces to spare,
smudged with mistakes or tears; her fingers left
a mounting watchfulness I find hard to bear.
When I saw the AIDS quilt, spread out in acres,
it was stitched with similar scripts by similar makers.

Real or Unreal

Every night, before going to sleep,
I don’t need it. I set it down, my phone.
This is something towers can’t transfer;
no text message has such use.

Instead, I open my imaginary pill case,
and let out winged, imaginary happys—
i send them to all, to descend midst
the mush of brains, unclasping for dreams.

© 2009 Constantine Kulakov