Other People's Poems

I have always had a fondness for poems about death. About the aging process. I wrote an entire thesis on entropy built around the work of A. R. Ammons' Garbage.

What I'm trying to say, is that I have a love of decay. The beauty in the moment of no longer being.

The USS Guardian stuck on the Tubbataha Reef being cut into four sections so it could be safely removed. It is stark. Poetic.

I have also always been fascinated by the image of a cut out tongue. The muting of a person. From Titus Andronicus to this:


I'm Charles

Swaying handcuffed
On an invisible scaffold,
Hung by the unsayable
Little something
Night and day take turns
Paring down further.
My mind's a ghost house
Open to the starlight.
My back's covered with graffiti
Like an elevated train.
Snowflakes swarm
Around my bare head
Choking with laughter
At my last-minute contortions
To write something on my chest
With my already bitten,
Already bleeding tongue.

-Charles Simic

Other People's Poems

This poem has one of my favorite stanzas ever in it. The first stanza in section 4 is possibly one of the most beautiful thoughts on modern life ever written. I mean this.

J and I watched the end of the second season of Mad Men tonight and it reminded me how much I love this poem. Enjoy.

Mayakovsky

1

My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

- Frank O'Hara

Other People's Poems

from Fable of the Last Untouched Town

4.

A storm raged for a week and our town was erased

by hills of snow.

Afar, our one story chambered apartments

look like concrete harmonicas. It's easy for snow to swallow us.

But after the storm, a gigantic glacier appeared inside

the king's most cherished open-air stadium.

It took up the whole arena.

Our leader launched a campaign.

Defunct factories suddenly produced heat lamps

and they strung a ceiling of scalding tubed bulbs over the stadium,

but the glacier only glistened.

So he demanded legions of laborers to come

chip away at this offensive glacier.

I was drafted to help.

When I arrived, I was awed, I was so awed, I began to cry

but when someone questioned my tears,

I said I was crying for our king and cursed

the imperialist-plotted ice.

The sheer sapphire cliffstone towered so high,

the whole ocean seemed frozen inside it.

Under its shellacked panes of ice were marblings of color

I'd long forgotten: tangerine, topaz,

canary and rose.

Like fluorescing cuttlefish,

the colors pulsed, swirled and bloomed

into contracting rings. The ice breathed.

We slowly chipped away with our picks.

As soon as we gathered a pile,

the wind burst in and scattered the powdery snow far

into the air like spores.

One laborer accidentally swallowed ice

and it caused him to hallucinate, blither in another language.

He was immediately exterminated.

We were forced to wear masks.

One day, I decided to steal some.

I pocketed one grain.

The snow glowed bluely in my hovel.

My little lamp.

Then one night I don't know why I swallowed it.

And this is what I saw.

- Cathy Park Hong

Other People's Poems

Breaking Glass

God of gas station bathrooms
And of girls held hostage
Inside their own bedrooms -

Girls driven in the ambulance
Of their mother's car
To the nearest lockdown.

Half-girls turned tom-
Boys turned zombie,
Drool, beauty-child. And memory

That warm slop of honey,
Seeping. No way to stop it

and its gorgeous hurricane of bees.

- Cynthia Cruz