Violets are red
Roses are blue
When you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUEThis Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Two Headed Calf makes me cri every tim
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature,
they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother.
It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.
Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About by Mary Oliver
The cricket doesn’t wonder if there’s a heaven or, if there is, if there’s room for him. It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings. If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door. Then the house grows colder. He sings slower and slower. Then, nothing. This must mean something, I don’t know what. But certainly it doesn’t mean he hasn’t been an excellent cricket all his life.A poem my brother wrote
Nothing changes, and it changes all at once. Nothing moves, nothing exists. Nothing is important, so we should learn nothing, we should study nothing, get close to nothing, be kind to nothing. We must come to understand nothing so well that we could maybe even see nothing in ourselves. Because nothing matters, nothing is important, and I think that’s something.
Tell your brother that I enjoyed that 👍
Your brother may either enjoy or hate a movie called The Night House.
Poor moth, I can’t help you,
I can only turn out the light.Even though Yates himself called it “the way to lose a lady”, I still like Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.The Clock Man by Shel Silverstein
“How much will you pay for an extra day?” The clock man asked the child.
“Not one penny,” the answer came.
“For my days are as many as my smiles.”
“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the child was grown.
“Maybe a dollar or maybe less, for I’ve plenty of days of my own.”
“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the time came to die.
“All of the pearls in all of the seas, and all of the stars in the sky.”
This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos WilliamsI have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxand which
you were probably
saving
for breakfastForgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so coldBesides that, I have a book of poetry that I’m not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.
I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn’t live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I’ve pieced together about them.
Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn’t a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven’t found any issues with her father.
She’s very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.
A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn’t see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn’t something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)
Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.
They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother’s insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn’t heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn’t remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like “I’m worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]” but she can’t tell me what’s supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.
I’ve given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter’s home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.
During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.
I of course had to search out what she had written.
At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn’t actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I’d pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.
Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It’s more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.
This may come off as really pretentious, but when I’m feel a wistful melancholy for the past, I hear this short poem I wrote a few years ago called Still Here:
I thought this feeling cast away
Though here it is, perhaps to stay
Though years have passed and I have cried
My inward plea is still denied
Oh pointy birds
Oh pointy pointy
Anoint my head
Anointy nointy
-Steve Martin
Each year on the anniversary of when I got back my stem cells to cure my cancer, I read Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
I read it a bit early this year for this - this July 12th it will be 20 years unbowed.
I don’t know about favorite, but I keep coming back to “If-” by Rudyard Kipling at different points in my life.
Forever shut and made of wood,
That’s what I am. My head’s no good
now that it by a stone was struck.
Old spectacles bewitched with muck
repose within me by the score.
I’m just a cupboard, nothing more.
-Dancelot Wordwright
Featured in the novel The City of Dreaming Books, written by his authorial godson Optimus Yarnspinner. Translated from Zamonian and Illustrated by Walter Moers
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
