A Collection of Somewhat Relevant Poems

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If You Could Go Back

I know, I know If you could go back you would walk with Jesus You would march with King Maybe assassinate Hitler At least hide Jews in your basement It would all be clear to you But people then, just like you were baffled, had bills to pay and children they didn’t understand and they too were so desperate for normalcy they made anything normal Even turning everything inside out Even killing, and killing, and it’s easy for turning the other cheek to be looking the other way, for walking to be talking, and they hid in their houses and watched it on television, when they had television, and wrung their hands or didn’t, and your hands are just like theirs. Lined, permeable, small, and you would follow Caesar, and quote McCarthy, and Hoover, and you would want to make Germany great again Because you are afraid, and your parents are sick, and your job pays shit and where’s your dignity? Just a little dignity and those kids sitting down in the highway, and chaining themselves to buildings, what’s their fucking problem? And that kid That’s King. And this is Selma. And Berlin. And Jerusalem. And now is when they need you to be brave. Now is when we need you to go back and forget everything you know and give up the things you’re chained to and make it look so easy in your grandkids’ history books (they should still have them, kinehora) Now is when it will all be clear to them. 

- Danny Bryck

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Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks. 

-Billy Collins (x)

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The Return of Odysseus

When Odysseus finally does get home he is understandably upset about the suitors, who have been mooching off his wife for twenty years, drinking his wine, eating his mutton, etc. In a similar situation today he would seek legal counsel. But those were different times. With the help of his son Telemachus he slaughters roughly one hundred and ten suitors and quite a number of young ladies, although in view of their behavior I use the term loosely. Rivers of blood course across the palace floor. I too have come home in a bad mood. Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting, when I ended up losing my choice parking spot behind the library to the new provost. I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag in this particular way I have perfected over the years that lets my wife understand the contempt I have for my enemies, which is prodigious. And then with great skill she built a gin and tonic that would have pleased the very gods, and with epic patience she listened as I told her of my wrath, and of what I intended to do to so-and-so, and also to what's-his-name. And then there was another gin and tonic and presently my wrath abated and was forgotten, and peace came to reign once more in the great halls and courtyards of my house.

- George Bilgere (x)

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no help for that

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled

a space

and even during the best moments and the greatest times times

we will know it

we will know it more than ever

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and

we will wait and wait

in that space.

-Charles Bukowski (x)

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only the crossing counts

It's not how we leave one's life. How go off the air. You never know do you. You think you're ready for anything; then it happens, and you're not. You're really not. The genesis of an ending, nothing but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting of furniture with a remnant of the revenant's shirt. Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face. O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light. Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove the butterflies home. You must know how it goes, known all along what to expect, sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity. Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

-C.D. Wright (x)

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quirk

You are one of life’s anomalies and this is how I fell.

-Yrsa Daley-Ward, (x)

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Alone

I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody's dalmation. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around, I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends. That makes her happy the way it always did.

-Jack Gilbert (x)

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And tell me this — I must be absolutely sure — this place I've reached, is it truly Ithaca?

Homer, The Odyssey

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Pole Dancer

"anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go.

...

I am not looking for roses. I want to break like a fever. I want to break like the Berlin Wall. I want to break like the clouds so we can see every fearless star, how they never speak guardrail, how they only say fall." -Andrea Gibson, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

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The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother’s body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water. This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d say, What? And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I’d say, What? And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

-Marie Howe, What the Living Do (x)

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Michiko Dead

He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm which is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down. -Jack Gilbert, (x)

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Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you I think I did not even know I was looking how would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did naked offering yourself entirely at that moment and you let me breathe you touch you taste you knowing no more than I did and only when I began to think of losing you did I recognize you when you were already part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made

-W.S. Merwin (x)

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This Is Just To Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold -William Carlos Williams (x)

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Roma

Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, you know, the way bodies do after spending the afternoon having sex on an old couch while responsible people are suffering with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries. He had that look vegetables get in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren't just red they're goddamn red! He was like that. Like a glowing, off-the-vine Roma sitting in his living room picking pineapple off a Hawaiian pizza and telling me about his father who was a real mother fucker. I ask him if he still loved his dad, or if he loved him more now that he is dead. Sure, he says, I love anything that's dead. Someone's hand floats up onto the beach while the body is still lost below the current, a vase of lilacs turned brown, the black archipelago of mourners marching up the hill. My neighbor is there to greet each of them with a box of chocolates and a barbershop quartet in the background. When my father died, he says opening a beer, he was no longer my father. He was no longer a man. It's easy to love things when they're powerless, like children and goldfish. This is the way with enlightened people. They say things that are so infuriatingly simple when the world is not. So I put down my Pepsi and pull out the big card. What about Hitler? I ask. You can't love Hitler! My neighbor puts a piece of pineapple on his tongue like a sacrament, sucks the juice out of it, chews it up, then turns his head slow like a cloud and says I can love anybody I feel like loving. And I say that's ridiculous. And he says what's ridiculous is that you don't. And there he is again, shining in the grocery store, pulling the bow off the heart-shaped candies and putting one softly into his father's mouth. -Matthew Dickman, All-American Poem (x)