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Winter Stars

My father once broke a man's hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.

I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.

Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars

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poem by Larry Levis
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How doth the Bee Improve His Salary? - Parody Isaac WATTS – How doth the Bee

How doth the Bee Improve His Salary?

How doth the busy little bee
prepare for flower power,
when honey garnered, daily spree,
will wax, - no waning hour?

The answer’s plain as plain can be,
hive votes for poll_en_dower,
for feathered nests with polity
Reps wait to line their bower...

Those set up in authority
elected seem to scour,
for “cash and carry” not to be
declared, - gold’s welcome shower.

As Tweedle Dum(b) and Tweedle Dee
In, Out, Out, In, they lobby,
when crime’s unmasked, like rats we see

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poem by Jonathan Robin
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Pictures On Enamel

When Astraled was lying, like to die
Of love's green sickness, all his bed was strown
With buds of crocus and anemone,
For other flowers yet were barely none,
And these he loved. And so it came to pass
That, when they deemed he slept, then one by one
The watchers left him for the Candlemas;
And thus he chanced upon his bed alone
When the day broke. You might have deemed he was
An image of Hope slain by drear Oblivion.

The chamber where he lay was hushed as sorrow,
Which is joy's anteroom. The holy night,
In silent expectation of the morrow,
Gazed on the moon, as some fair anchorite
On her own chastity, until the sight
Made her heart ache. But, as the morning broke,
Down the dim lobby came Somandolin,
With her thick hair around her like a cloak,
Even to her feet. I wot she might have been

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poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
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A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived,
impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of
rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse
from whose cage kept sifting down and then
germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around
the saucers on the windowsill—and an inexorable
cohort of roaches she was too nearsighted to deal
with, though she knew they were there, and would
speak of them, ruefully, as of an affliction that
might once, long ago, have been prevented.

Unclassifiable castoffs, misfits, marginal cases:
when you're one yourself, or close to it, there's
a reassurance in proving you haven't quite gone
under by taking up with somebody odder than you are.
Or trying to. 'They're my friends,' she'd say of
her cats—Mollie, Mitzi and Caroline, their names were,
and she was forever taking one or another in a cab

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poem by Amy Clampitt
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A Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor

The hands of the clock were reaching high
In an old midtown hotel;
I name no name, but its sordid fame
Is table talk in hell.
I name no name, but hell's own flame
Illumes the lobby garish,
A gilded snare just off Times Square
For the maidens of the parish.

The revolving door swept the grimy floor
Like a crinoline grotesque,
And a lowly bum from an ancient slum
Crept furtively past the desk.
His footsteps sift into the lift
As a knife in the sheath is slipped,
Stealthy and swift into the lift
As a vampire into a crypt.

Old Maxie, the elevator boy,
Was reading an ode by Shelley,

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poem by Ogden Nash
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Don't Be Fooled

When my twin brother was dying of cancer the insurance company pulled his insurance then the bank foreclosed his house. i hate them! I hate the right wing of today and corporate insurance companies and the rich get richer off the middle class and the union busting etc. i will always fight them no matter what happens. I love people with empathy and compassion and courage and real love. We are in a very bad chapter in American history and even if we do not pull out of it I still will fight because I am a universalist with spiritual ethics based on God is love and love thy neighbor as thyself. I know both parties are in the hands of money and lobby dollars but the right wing is way worse and the tea party even crazier. They won't tax the rich back to the Clinton years while they watch tuitions going up so the rich get to send their kids to school and the poor or lower middleclass can't send their kids to college. The tea party sides with banks and the oil companies and tax breaks for the wealthy not the working class and poor. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just came out with a report showing that since 1979 the top 1 percent increased wages and wealth a staggering 275%. This inequality and massive distribution of wealth is ruining our economy. The right wing spins this and blames the victims, accuses people of being lazy etc when the truth is they take from the poor to give to the rich and then they turn around and accuse everyone of starting class warfare. They are the class warefare oppressors! These mobsters and political cronies for the rich use evangelicals. Side with the poor and the working class. Remember in the feast of Jubilee the land went back to the original tribe every 50 years in Israel. The fields were to remain fallow and unplowed every seven years for one year and the poor only could glean. During harvest the fields could only be gone over once then the poor could go in. There was always justice and social justice and distribution of wealth. Jesus healed them all. Today we have cattle that don't graze but are fed on corn filled with growth hormones and antibiotics, chickens never seeing the sun with broken legs after a few months because of rapid growth for profit, pigs that never stand up though they are smarter than dogs all for the food industries. The grain companies feed these animals and it all goes for MONEY while corporate Christianity is more worried about the rapture and Armageddon then love and justice. Regulations let down increase lead, mercury, toxic chemicals and cancers and the evangelicals get used by the republican gangsters and rhetoric. GMO’s everywhere that are being questioned by more and more scientist and the right wing church is mum. Ministers preaching right out in the open, vote for these right wing gang leaders and not loosing their tax exempt status! Don't be fooled. It is the rich and major companies that have shipped the jobs out of here; it is not the poor and the middle class. They won’t tax the rich and still give exemptions to the OIL COMPANIES! C’mon folks! ! ! Don’t be fooled!
Big Oil just posted multibillion-dollar profits – AGAIN – and what are Republicans doing? Filibustering a jobs bill. Refusing to make billionaires pay their fair share. Basically anything they can do for the benefit of their wealthy buddies in the top 1% - and at the expense of the middle class. They don't want the middle class strengthened in any way as to give any credit to the left because they don't love their country. They love their power, the rich, the elite and all they do is grandstand and block help for hurting people.
I am for the party that distributes the wealth, that helps kids get to college, that supports women, that supports the mentally ill and doesn’t cut funding, that doesn’t allow companies to pollute and ruin the environment, that is green and wanting clean technology for our children, that leaves the rivers and lakes and wilderness in tact for future generations, that supports unions and good wages for working people with good benefits and a future, that believes is social security, that wants healthcare for every single citizen. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Do onto others as you would want them to do unto you. Do you want healthcare for you and yours, do you want college for your children, do you want clean water, do you want a good job for you and your children? ? ? Then fight these greedy, evil republicans of today who support the 1% of the filthy rich while they dismantle and take away the middle class in a horrible battle of class warfare. See what the Bible preaches about the rich and oppressors. The Scriptures constantly lift up the poor and working people and condemn the rich and those that do not share the wealth. I don’t care about names or tags but as a Christian I cannot see the 1% have all the marbles and allow our country to be taken over by these gangsters and liars. These right-wingers of today support the rich. Powerful and greedy and they are trying for the evangelical vote and bubba while taking bread off everyone’s table except their own. DON’T BE FOOLED

poem by Joseph Narusiewicz
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The Revolution is a Whore

The revolution is a whore and is over! all secular humanist movements have failed, it's over on a physical plain. The biggest lie of all is that the problem is always political and the system when in it is actually human nature. All modern philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology tries to say it is the environment and the system from Marx on ward thru the sixties. This modern view of a more perfect union and the perfectibility of man is totally wrong because mankind as a whole and as an individual is fallen and now with modern technology the genocidal capacity is here and will stay until he deals or is dealt with by God as a whole. Modern man is not going to get better but only worse.
Look at our food industry, chicken that can’t walk after a few months loaded with growth hormones, cattle that should graze but are fed corn, everything filled with preservatives and chemicals, fertilizers running into watersheds and rivers and the sea. Meat washed with ammonia and chemicals. Talk about cruelty too animals…Pigs that can’t even stand up when they are more intelligent than dogs, FDA and EPA regulators that worked for the major corporations and go back and forth between big business and government, huge amounts of lobby dollars to sway special interests. Don’t you hate it or are you just to numb to care anymore? It needs to come down and its power is to strong through out the world and will only come down by war along with every other false greedy ideology and false religion that undermines humanity and love. Genetic diseases are coming as well from these masters of reality who tamper. Monsanto and genetically modified corn and soybeans already are band in many places but not in the USA. DON’T FALL ASLEEP! They want us like cattle.
My faith sustains me with the vision of Christ not the vision of a revolt or a turning around of things by some movement of man. It is like Sodom and Gomorrah out there and brave new world where everyone is drugged and then your telling me this is the fodder of CHANGE? Forget it! I will keep trying as an individual but my hope is no longer in political or ideological movements of man. Do you actually think it is getting better? LOL! Do you think that globalization is going to create one big happy family as we ruin the planet going into the future? I see the entire world heading for more and more trouble and no works of technology or ingenuity by mans hand stopping it. The answers are not in the physical or the material realm. Secular humanism as a solution is a failed system and I suggest you learn to pray and open your heart up to the cross of Jesus Christ and start reading the Bible.
This whole dilapidated culture has left God in the name of a false freedom and I see it imploding more and more, men with men, women with women, no longer boundaries and the freedom is major chaos, cheating marriages, it is all so lost and unproductive, it is so close to war, it is actually happening like watching a movie. In Huxley's 'Brave New World' the outside man was born on a reservation from a natural mother and when he came to Brave New World he had dignity and his language represented dignity with depth and soul. Huxley wrote in 1931 'as real freedom dissipates sexual freedom and drug abuse will rise' angst and loss of soul takes compensation for hollowness of a freedom without universals. Huxley said the states in the world would use sex and drugs as a compensation. The savage in Brave New World liked a woman who was poly with all kinds of partners conditioned by the state and every time they or she felt angst they would take soma(a state desighner drug) and go find another partner never waking up. The savage was trying to read Shakespeare to her and finally he told he loved her-she started taking off her clothes and saying why didn't you say so! He screamed at her and slapped her and said 'I didn't mean that! They had no commitment, no sense of true love, no real freedom and depth of soul. The savage left and the book ends with him hanging. All his life Huxley tried to get him off that tree being the representation of mans soul in a modern world losing grip on the very concept of soul. His last book 'Island' was a Tibetan Buddhist colony off an island in China still trying to say humanity could survive in post modernism and genocidal technology.
I see more more rot and lost culture in the name of a sick shallow gross freedom. Does it ever surprise you, the lack of political will? It is like the invasion of the body snatchers, more and more people are taken over by this crass commercial superficial culture that plays into the hand of the ultra state while they are deadened and ruled with pleasure and compensations such as anti depressants, materialism, pornography and a false sense of belonging just like Dostoevsky's 'Grand Inquisitor' his master piece 'The Brothers Karamazov'. I see Orwell's boot in the face as the image of man turns into Sodom and Gomorrah. The system sells everything from guns to phony change and revolution while pacifying its victims with phony freedom that leaves us beyond comfortably numb, more like comatose in the sleep of death with a loss of fundamental humanity and conscience

poem by Joseph Narusiewicz
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Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap-
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

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poem by Gregory Corso
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The Cock And The Bull

You see this pebble-stone? It’s a thing I bought
Of a bit of a chit of a boy i’ the mid o’ the day —
I like to dock the smaller parts-o’-speech,
As we curtail the already cur-tail’d cur
(You catch the paronomasia, play ’po’ words?),
Did, rather, i’ the pre-Landseerian days.
Well, to my muttons. I purchased the concern,
And clapt it i’ my poke, having given for same
By way o’ chop, swop, barter or exchange —
‘Chop’ was my snickering dandiprat’s own term —
One shilling and fourpence, current coin o’ the realm.
O-n-e one and f-o-u-r four
Pence, one and fourpence — you are with me, sir? —
What hour it skills not: ten or eleven o’ the clock,
One day (and what a roaring day it was
Go shop or sight-see — bar a spit o’ rain!)
In February, eighteen sixty nine,
Alexandrina Victoria, Fidei
Hm — hm — how runs the jargon? being on throne.

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poem by Charles Stuart Calverley
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Promethean Contentions

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I'm tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I'm weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I've exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they'll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

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poem by Patrick White
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