Poems that make your heart explode.

[tookish]

What are the poems that hurt in a good way?

I'll start with just a couple of poems, all of which make me feel as though my soul has been torn out, in a fucking beautiful way:

Blue Blanket:
(TW rape:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cEc3aQOP-o

Maya Angelou:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqOqo50LSZ0

Sylvia Plath:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hz1ar58BIM

Seamus Heaney:
http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/postscript.html

And of course, I can't start a thread about poetry without mentioning the works of the Professor:
http://www.poetfreak.com/158547/i-sit-beside-the-fire-and-think-by-john-ronald-reuel-tolkien.html

[madhair60]

there once was a man from nantucket

[Don_Preston]

My Grandfather was
Like a bottle of brandy
Special, old and pale.

[Queneau]

there once was a man from nantucket

that took out a mint to suck it

[syntaxerror]

there once was a man with angina.

[Sam]

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig

The last Poetry Thread, with plenty of selections from Norman MacCaig.

[The Boston Crab]

All poems are gay.

No comebacks.

- The Boston Crab

[Queneau]

I don't really know much about poetry but I love that one where he says he wandered lonely as a clown. The trappings of success. And he ends up performing to a crowd of flowers or something. I don't really know. It's good though.

[tookish]

This is not quite the thread I'd hoped for. I'm gonna write a sad poem about it now.

[BlodwynPig]

Kate Bush stooped low
and placed a kiss on your forehead
50 words for snow
but just one for jizzfest

[Queneau]

I was reading some Larkin on the train today. The graffiti is much better on National Rail these days.

[Wentworth Smith]

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

[Birdie]

Swinbourne's A Leave Taking
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174563

Tennyson's Tithonus
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174656

Jon Silkin Death of a Son
(It's quoted in full in the body of this blog)
http://moiramcpartlin.blogspot.co.nz/2007/08/notebook-season.html?m=1

[Urinal Cake]

you don't know how it felt to be in the womb but it must have been at least a little warmer than this.

you don't know how intimately they're recording your every move on closed-circuit cameras until you see your face reflected back at you through through the pulp.

you don't know how to stop picking at your fingers.

you don't know how little you've been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

you don't know how many times you can say you're coming until they just stop believing you.

you don't know how orgasmic the act of taking in a lungful of oxygen is until they hold your head under the water.

you don't know how many vietnamese soft rolls to order.

you don't know how convinced your parents were that having children would be, absolutely, without question, the correct thing to do.

you don't know how precious your iphone battery time was until you're hiding in the bottom of the boat.

you don't know how to get away from your fucking parents.

you don't know how it's possible to feel total compassion in one moment and total disconnection in the next moment.

you don't know how things could change so incredibly fast.

you don't know how to make something, but the instructions are on the internet.

you don't know how to make sense of this massive parade.

you don't know how to believe anyone anymore.

you don't know how to tell the girl in the chair next to you that you've been peeking at her dissertation draft and there's a grammatical typo in the actual file name.

you don't know how to explain yourself.

you don't want two percent but it's all they have.

you don't know how claustrophobic your house is until you can't leave it.

you don't know why you let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown.

you don't know where your friends went.

you don't know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.

you don't know how your life managed to move twenty six miles forward and twenty eight miles back.

you don't know how to pay your debts.

you don't know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.

you don't know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.

you don't know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.

you don't know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.

you don't know how to adjust the rearview mirror.

you don't know how to mourn your dead brother.

you don't know how to drive this car.

you don't know the way to new york.

you don't know the way to new york.

you don't know the way to new york.

you don't know the way to new york.

Amanda Palmer

[Sam]

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life's work, at one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
Damp stones and syllables, then as it grows dark
And you go home past overgrown vineyards and
Chestnut trees, suppliers once of crossbeams, moon-
Shaped nuts, flour, and crackly stuffing for mattresses,
Leave them here, on the page, in your mind's eye, lit
Like the fireflies at the waterfall, a wall of stars.

[kittens]

poems are just novels for cowards

[kittens]

poems are just noel coward

[Birdie]

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life's work, at one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
Damp stones and syllables, then as it grows dark
And you go home past overgrown vineyards and
Chestnut trees, suppliers once of crossbeams, moon-
Shaped nuts, flour, and crackly stuffing for mattresses,
Leave them here, on the page, in your mind's eye, lit
Like the fireflies at the waterfall, a wall of stars.

The Waterfall by Michael Longley.

Thought it should be credited:)

I am very fond of this part of Kahil Gibran's The Prophet (I know it's become a bit cliched mind you) referenced in my avatar text:

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

And I remember the impact Eliot's Portrait of a Lady had on me the first time I read it:

http://www.bartleby.com/198/2.html

The October night comes down; returning as before   
Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease          
I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door   
And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

I hope this is more of what you expected, tookish:)

[Melodichaze]

ee cummings
Richard Brautigan
Thomas Hardy
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Sometimes Dylan Thomas if I'm in the mood

[alcoholic messiah]

ee cummings
Richard Brautigan
Thomas Hardy
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Sometimes Dylan Thomas if I'm in the mood

Call that a poem?

It barely scans.

[Queneau]

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 flound'ring 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.

Or have an old Doctor Who read it to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB4cdRgIcB8

[ziggy starbucks]

I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
and I'll punch the man who says I'm not

[Queneau]

I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
I'm happy
and I'll punch the man who says I'm not

You missed the vital closing line, "Oi! Oi! Oi!"

[NattyDread]

The Waterfall by Michael Longley.

Thought it should be credited:)
[/b]:)

New book due shortly.

[gloria]

I love the poem "Falling" by James Dickey (author of "Deliverance" (!))  It's about an air stewardess who falls from a plane.

Falling  By James L. Dickey   A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her
death tonight when she was swept
through an emergency door that sud-
denly sprang open ... The body ...
was found ... three hours after the
accident.                                             
                              —New York Times
The states when they black out and lie there rolling    when they turn  To something transcontinental    move by    drawing moonlight out of the great  One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip    some sleeper next to  An engine is groaning for coffee    and there is faintly coming in  Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks  Of trays    she rummages for a blanket    and moves in her slim tailored  Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew 
The door down with a silent blast from her lungs    frozen    she is black  Out finding herself    with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat  The undying cry of the void    falling    living    beginning to be something  That no one has ever been and lived through    screaming without enough air  Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged    girdled by regulation    her hat  Still on    her arms and legs in no world    and yet spaced also strangely  With utter placid rightness on thin air    taking her time    she holds it  In many places    and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems  To slow    she develops interest    she turns in her maneuverable body 
To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her  Self    in low body-whistling wrapped intensely    in all her dark dance-weight  Coming down from a marvellous leap    with the delaying, dumfounding ease  Of a dream of being drawn    like endless moonlight to the harvest soil  Of a central state of one's country    with a great gradual warmth coming  Over her    floating    finding more and more breath in what she has been using  For breath    as the levels become more human    seeing clouds placed honestly  Below her left and right    riding slowly toward them    she clasps it all  To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways    and  Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide    wider and suck  All the heat from the cornfields    can go down on her back with a feeling  Of stupendous pillows stacked under her    and can turn    turn as to someone  In bed    smile, understood in darkness    can go away    slant    slide  Off tumbling    into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread  Or whirl madly on herself    in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth  Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon.    There is time to live  In superhuman health    seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing  An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it    arriving  In a square town    and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches  The moon by its one shaken side    scaled, roaming silver    My God it is good  And evil    lying in one after another of all the positions for love  Making    dancing    sleeping    and now cloud wisps at her no  Raincoat    no matter    all small towns brokenly brighter from inside  Cloud    she walks over them like rain    bursts out to behold a Greyhound  Bus shooting light through its sides    it is the signal to go straight  Down like a glorious diver    then feet first    her skirt stripped beautifully  Up    her face in fear-scented cloths    her legs deliriously bare    then  Arms out    she slow-rolls over    steadies out    waits for something great  To take control of her    trembles near feathers    planes head-down  The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head    gold eyes the insight-  eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops    a taste for chicken overwhelming  Her    the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars  Freight trains    looped bridges    enlarging the moon racing slowly  Through all the curves of a river    all the darks of the midwest blazing  From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white    the smothering chickens  Huddle    for over them there is still time for something to live  With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop    a hurtling    a fall  That is controlled    that plummets as it wills    turns gravity  Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon    shining  New Powers    there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing  But the whole night    time for her to remember to arrange her skirt  Like a diagram of a bat    tightly it guides her    she has this flying-skin  Made of garments    and there are also those sky-divers on tv    sailing  In sunlight    smiling under their goggles    swapping batons back and forth  And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving  Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion    white teeth    nowhere  She is screaming    singing hymns    her thin human wings spread out  From her neat shoulders    the air beast-crooning to her    warbling  And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world    now  She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape    watching it lose  And gain    get back its houses and peoples    watching it bring up  Its local lights    single homes    lamps on barn roofs    if she fell  Into water she might live    like a diver    cleaving    perfect    plunge 
Into another    heavy silver    unbreathable    slowing    saving  Element: there is water    there is time to perfect all the fine  Points of diving    feet together    toes pointed    hands shaped right  To insert her into water like a needle    to come out healthily dripping  And be handed a Coca-Cola    there they are    there are the waters  Of life    the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir    so let me begin  To plane across the night air of Kansas    opening my eyes superhumanly Bright    to the damned moon    opening the natural wings of my jacket  By Don Loper    moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water  One cannot just fall    just tumble screaming all that time    one must useIt    she is now through with all    through all    clouds    damp    hair  Straightened    the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing  New darks    new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos 
And night    a gradual warming    a new-made, inevitable world of one's own  Country    a great stone of light in its waiting waters    hold    hold out  For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body  And fly    and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned  Water    stored up for her for years    the arms of her jacket slipping  Air up her sleeves to go    all over her? What final things can be said  Of one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night  Air    to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself  Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward    the blazing-bare lake  Her skirts neat    her hands and face warmed more and more by the air  Rising from pastures of beans    and under her    under chenille bedspreads  The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding  On the scratch-shining posts of the bed    dreaming of female signs  Of the moon    male blood like iron    of what is really said by the moan  Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight    passing  Over brush fires    burning out in silence on little hills    and will wake  To see the woman they should be    struggling on the rooftree to become  Stars: for her the ground is closer    water is nearer    she passes  It    then banks    turns    her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls  Out to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must  Do something with water    fly to it    fall in it    drink it    rise  From it    but there is none left upon earth    the clouds have drunk it back  The plants have sucked it down    there are standing toward her only  The common fields of death    she comes back from flying to falling  Returns to a powerful cry    the silent scream with which she blew down  The coupled door of the airliner    nearly    nearly losing hold  Of what she has done    remembers    remembers the shape at the heart  Of cloud    fashionably swirling    remembers she still has time to die  Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour  Of cornfields    and have enough time to kick off her one remaining  Shoe with the toes    of the other foot    to unhook her stockings  With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair  Near death    when the body will assume without effort any position  Except the one that will sustain it    enable it to rise    live  Not die    nine farms hover close    widen    eight of them separate, leaving  One in the middle    then the fields of that farm do the same    there is no  Way to back off    from her chosen ground    but she sheds the jacket  With its silver sad impotent wings    sheds the bat's guiding tailpiece  Of her skirt    the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse    the intimate  Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost  Of a virgin    sheds the long windsocks of her stockings    absurd  Brassiere    then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming  Off her: no longer monobuttocked    she feels the girdle flutter    shake  In her hand    and float    upward    her clothes rising off her ascending  Into cloud    and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe  Like a dumb bird    and now will drop in    soon    now will drop 
In like this    the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas    down from all  Heights    all levels of American breath    layered in the lungs from the frail  Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly  And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after  Her last superhuman act    the last slow careful passing of her hands  All over her unharmed body    desired by every sleeper in his dream:  Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart's blood  Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves  Arisen at sunrise    the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn  Toward clouds    all feel something    pass over them as she passes  Her palms over her long legs    her small breasts    and deeply between  Her thighs    her hair shot loose from all pins    streaming in the wind  Of her body    let her come openly    trying at the last second to land  On her back    This is it    this                                                            All those who find her impressed  In the soft loam    gone down    driven well into the image of her body  The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep  In her mortal outline    in the earth as it is in cloud    can tell nothing  But that she is there    inexplicable    unquestionable    and remember  That something broke in them as well    and began to live and die more  When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth  Caught her    interrupted her maiden flight    told her how to lie she cannot  Turn    go away    cannot move    cannot slide off it and assume another  Position    no sky-diver with any grin could save her    hold her in his arms  Plummet with her    unfold above her his wedding silks    she can no longer  Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife  Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls    or all the back-breaking whores  Of Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one  Breath    it is all gone    and yet not dead    not anywhere else  Quite    lying still in the field on her back    sensing the smells  Of incessant growth try to lift her    a little sight left in the corner  Of one eye    fading    seeing something wave    lies believing  That she could have made it    at the best part of her brief goddess  State    to water    gone in headfirst    come out smiling    invulnerable  Girl in a bathing-suit ad    but she is lying like a sunbather at the last  Of moonlight    half-buried in her impact on the earth    not far  From a railroad trestle    a water tank    she could see if she could  Raise her head from her modest hole    with her clothes beginning  To come down all over Kansas    into bushes    on the dewy sixth green  Of a golf course    one shoe    her girdle coming down fantastically  On a clothesline, where it belongs    her blouse on a lightning rod: 
Lies in the fields    in this field    on her broken back as though on  A cloud she cannot drop through    while farmers sleepwalk without  Their women from houses    a walk like falling toward the far waters  Of life    in moonlight    toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms  Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands    that tragic cost  Feels herself go    go toward    go outward    breathes at last fully  Not    and tries    less    once    tries    tries    ah, god—

[thraxx]

"Rob gobs Bob's knob.  Bob flobs, Rob sobs".
E.A Poe (1929)

[Queneau]

Nevermore. Gobble.

[Raging Falco]

This one struck me when my friend recited it to me, though she has a breathless, seraphic way of saying lines that would even make the Daily Mail sound sublime. It was a pair of quatrains by an obscure 19th-century poet called Francis William Bourdillon. For a reason that's mysterious to me, it reminds me of Gibran or Khayyam.[nb]The stanzas of the Rubaiyat have the same form, I suppose.[/nb]

The night has a thousand eyes
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

[Artemis]

Land Rover
Go faster
Bye, Dover
Sad mother

[DangledTeeth]

When you endeavour to meet, you say that you will be there.
Will you be or be be there.
Ah... mhm.
There you are, drunk, drunken on the spirit of time.
It's time for you to imbibe
Absorb every facet of your dreams as you lie.
Telling untruths in a deep slumber. Why?
Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z .

Cornelia-Anne Redfern


You sat on a hill one day.
You sat elsewhere, some say.
The strength of the afternoon sun made you bright.
White as a sheet... almost.
Like a very proud crooked goal post.
Standing. Hurting. Watching. Observing.
A gust went past majestically
And that lifted my spirit including the rest of me.
But... 
The clouds stretched on as wide as a simile.
Then I was taken away, and that made you smile.

Felicity Bainbridge