Alone With Everybody by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)





the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.







Bukowski, like many writers, had his ups and downs. He was first published in the 1940s. Soon after, he gave up writing and joined the work force and bars. Myth says he didn't write or publish anything for nearly 20 years. READ MORE

poet, poems, bukowski

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Wilson by Deborah White

His smile was
dawn's slip
into a darkened room.

The hat he wore
(syrup sticky
from the dumpster
outside the local Waffle-House)

sat cocked to the left
on his head,

the mimic of Pisa
a dream never seen.

His hands slick as a greased
hairless feline, rummaged

my purse with hope
that its void could spare
a dollar or two.

His voice purred, hypnotic
baritone, sensuous as Flack's croon
of promised sunrises.

But, it was the speak
of his eyes that engaged me,
telling a story of way when.

Portals to swirled
Coffee-House yesterdays,
highs of maryjane,
taps of beatnik pads,
delusions of petal power.

Cool Cat Wilson
gorged with peace,
love and happiness.

He's boarded here
and now's bus, taking rides
that fray his pants,
tatter his hat,
gray his beard,

ride man, ride
there's no getting off.


poetry

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What is Poetry.

There are two basic types of poetry.

1. Traditional - follows standard rules of grammar and syntax with a regular rhythm and rhyme scheme.
2. Modern - avoids rhyme and standard grammatical organization and seeks new ways of expression.
   

One Rule!

Read a poem several times. That way you can "hear" the piece and feel its emotion.


The poetry here on WANDERER'S NOOK is mainly the "modern" form of poetry.

I consider myself a modern writer of poetry.

I refuse to really call myself a "Poet" because I haven't matured enough in writing in order to have the honor to sit at a desk next to Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, etc. So, I tap, tap, tap on, at this key board until the Poet in me breaths life.

Basics of Poetry: READ MORE

poetry, writing

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The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton 1928-1974



Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.


We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings i like an iron gate
and we touch.. In another country people die.


My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the white-hearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knuckle bone.


Read About Anne Sexton


Personal Note: Anne Sexton is so Plath-like with her writing. The sadness in her life mirrors Plaths too.

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Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Personal Note: I haven't posted a poem by Sylvia Plath in quite a while. She's another of my favorite poets. She paints her depression in a vivid and moving way.

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice" by Billy Collins

Billy Collins former U.S. Poet Laureate

And I start wondering how they come to be blind.
If it was congenital, they would be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.


Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?

If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,


how did thy ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?


And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.


Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass


or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.


By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"


which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.




[Personal Note: I absolutely ADORE this poet. I had the pleasure of seeing Billy read this poem in person up at Kent State. It was then I fell in love with his poetry. It was then I fell in love with poetry period.]

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A Lemon by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Pablo Neruda




Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) born in Chile. His real name was Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. His poems have been translated into English. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. You can tell Mr. Neruda was a lover. His poems are of love, love, love. Read More

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and so... by Deborah White

I wait for this evening
then I will blanket
you with my flesh;

and remove each breast
to tuck under you,
one under your head,
another stuffed under your feet,

to make you comfortable
as you absorb the moon's
push and pull
pull and push

Much later within
blindness of sky

I will crack open my rib cage
remove my heart
place it upon
the nightstand
then you can watch its walls
pulsate,

thump thump,
as it morphs to predominant blue;

(not pretty periwinkle
or poetic indigo)

insidious blue,
the color slovenly
hovering over ash’s hue.

and so,
I will wait--

till then

for your consumation
with this peeve that's
taken over me;

night within night,
night within day,

perversion's permeation

assimilation
again and again. . .

I Want to Die While You Love Me by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson
September 10, 1880 -- May 14, 1966

I want to die while you love me,
While yet you hold me fair,
While Laughter lies upon my lips
And lights are in my hair.
I want to die while you love me
And bear to that still bed
Your kisses turbulent, unspent
To warm me when I’m dead.

I want to die while you love me;
Oh, who would care to live
Till love has nothing more to ask
And nothing more to give?

I want to die while you love me,
And never, never see
The glory of this perfect day
Grow dim, or cease to be!

Mrs. Johnson was one of the many little known poets, meaning her name was not as well known as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and the like. She was well known with her peers. Although she wrote many poems, plays and newspaper articles I believe she wasn't give the acclaim to the likes of the fore mentioned writers.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, harlem renaissance, poet, writer

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