Your favourite poem?

Discussion in 'The Artist's Corner' started by Adam G, Aug 3, 2002.

  1. Mine is kinda like a short story/poem and it's mega famous. I love poetry though, I like all kinds.

    Anyway it's called "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. I loved this since I was a wee nipper . :D


     
  2. Mine is Howl by Allen Ginsberg. It's long as hell so this is just part of it.




    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

    dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

    angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night,

    who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water fiats 'doating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

    who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

    who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

    who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

    who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

    who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

    who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night,

    with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

    incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

    Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

    who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

    who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

    who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

    a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
     
  3. i love ginsberg, kerouac, the beat generation of poets... but my ALL-TIME favorite is "Endymion:A Poetic Romance" by Keats.
    It's a very long poem and I can't find my book that I have it in, so I will post part of it here later.
    xo~
     
  4. The Raven Has to be my favorite!
     
  5. A couple of stanzas from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," written in 1898 by Oscar Wilde, reflecting on his imprisonment in 1895-1897, sentenced to hard labor for the crime of sodomy. That it was consentual sex made no difference. The law was the law.
    The words are timeless enough to be written today.


    I know not whether Laws be right
    or whether Laws be wrong;
    all we know who lie in jail
    is that the wall is strong;
    and that each day is like a year,
    a year whose days are long.

    The vilest deeds like poison weeds
    bloom well in prison air;
    it's only what is good in Man
    that wastes and withers there.
     
  6. im not gona post mine, buts is KUBLA KHAN by Samuel t. Coleridge

    Its about this amazing, perfect, beautiful dream world with fountains and mountains and silver linings etc etc etc

    if you understand it, it is absolutely amazing

    i always dreamed of living in a place like that which coleridge describes....but only in dreams, sadly enough, only in dreams!
     
  7. Here is one of my favs...

    Sometimes, for a moment of bliss
    And the passion, we're craving
    There's a message we miss
    Sometimes when, the spirits left alone
    We must believe in something
    To find if we've grown

    Tragic reflex, shattered calm
    Static progress, senses gone
    Numb awareness, final psalm

    Swept away with the tide
    Through the holes in my hands
    Crown of thorns at my side
    Drawing lines in the sand

    Sometimes, if you're perfectly still
    You can hear the virgin weeping
    For the savior of your will
    Sometimes, your castles in the air
    And the fantasies you're seeking
    Are the crosses you bear

    Sacred conflict, blessed prize
    Weeping crosses, stainless eyes
    Desperate addict, faith disguised

    Swept away with the tide
    Through the holes in my hands
    Crown of thorns at my side
    Drawing lines in the sand

    We fabricate our demons
    Invite them into our homes
    Have supper with the aliens
    And fight the war alone
    We conjure up our skeletons
    Enlist the den of thieves
    Frightened from our closets
    Then sewn upon our sleeves

    In the stream of consciousness
    There is a river crying
    Living comes much easier
    Once we admit
    We're dying

    Sometimes, in the wreckage of our wake
    There's a bitterness we harbor
    And hate for hatred's sake
    Sometimes we dig an early grave
    And crucify our instincts
    For the hope we couldn't save

    Sometimes a view from sinless eyes
    Centers our perspective
    And pacifies our cries
    Sometimes the anguish we survive
    And the mysteries we nurture
    Are the fabrics of our lives

    Swept away with the tide
    Through the holes in my hands
    Crown of thorns at my side
    Drawing lines in the sand


    -John Petrucci
     

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