Charles Bukowski – Sway With Me

sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers steaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shell
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.

Charles Bukowski – Poetry

it

takes

a lot of

desperation

dissatisfaction

and

disillusion

to

write

a

few

good

poems.

it's not

for

everybody

either to

write

it

or even to

read

it.

Charles Bukowski – The Poetry Reading

at high noon

at a small college near the beach

sober

the sweat running down my arms

a spot of sweat on the table

I flatten it with my finger

blood money blood money

my god they must think I love this like the others

but it's for bread and beer and rent

blood money

I'm tense lousy feel bad

poor people I'm failing I'm failing

a woman gets up

walks out

slams the door

a dirty poem

somebody told me not to read dirty poems

here

it's too late.

my eyes can't see some lines

I read it

out-

desperate trembling

lousy

they can't hear my voice

and I say,

I quit, that's it, I'm

finished.

and later in my room

there's scotch and beer:

the blood of a coward.

this then

will be my destiny:

scrabbling for pennies in tiny dark halls

reading poems I have long since become tired

of.

and I used to think

that men who drove buses

or cleaned out latrines

or murdered men in alleys were

fools.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge – We Never Said Farewell

We never said farewell, nor even looked

Our last upon each other, for no sign

Was made when we the linkèd chain unhooked

And broke the level line.

And here we dwell together, side by side,

Our places fixed for life upon the chart.

Two islands that the roaring seas divide

Are not more far apart.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge – Our Lady

Mother of God! no lady thou:

Common woman of common earth

Our Lady ladies call thee now,

But Christ was never of gentle birth;

A common man of the common earth.

For God’s ways are not as our ways:

The noblest lady in the land

Would have given up half her days,

Would have cut off her right hand,

To bear the child that was God of the land.

Never a lady did He choose,

Only a maid of low degree,

So humble she might not refuse

The carpenter of Galilee:

A daughter of the people, she.

Out she sang the song of her heart.

Never a lady so had sung.

She knew no letters, had no art;

To all mankind, in woman’s tongue,

Hath Israelitish Mary sung.

And still for men to come she sings,

Nor shall her singing pass away.

‘He hath fillàd the hungry with good things’—

O listen, lords and ladies gay!—

‘And the rich He hath sent empty away.’