Dedication: To an unknown reader

Like rays once shed
By a spent star
The words of a dead
Poet are,
That through bleak space
Unchecked fly on,
Though hand, heart, face,
To dust are gone;
And you who read
Shall only guess
What thorn-sharp need,
What loneliness,
What love, lust, dream,
Shudder or sigh
Lit the long beam
That meets your eye:
Nor, guess you never
So well, so true,
Shall comfort ever
Reach from you
To me, an old
Black shrivelled sphere,
Who has been cold
This million year.


by Jan Struther

This Be The Verse

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.


by Philip Larkin

Deliberate

So by sixteen we move in packs
learn to strut and slide
in deliberate lowdown rhythm
talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat
because we want so bad
to be cool, never to be mistaken
for white, even when we leave
these rowdier L.A. streets—
remember how we paint our eyes
like gangsters
flash our legs in nylons
sassy black high heels
or two inch zippered boots
stack them by the door at night
next to Daddy’s muddy gardening shoes.

by Amy Uyematsu

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled
with important papers to read after
dinner; she does not want to return
phone calls. When she gets home, she
wants to kick off her shoes and waltz
around her kitchen singing, "I am a piece
of work."


by Beverly Rollwagen

Essential

She just wants to keep her essential
sorrow. Everyone wants her to
be happy all the time, but she doesn't
want that for them. There is value in
the thread of sadness in each person.
The sobbing child on an airplane, the
unhappy woman waiting by the phone,
a man staring out the window past his
wife. A violin plays through all of them,
one long note held at the beginning and
the end.


by Beverly Rollwagen

Vigil

Life is too short to sleep through.
Stay up late, wait until the sea of traffic ebbs,
until noise has drained from the world
like blood from the cheeks of the full moon.
Everyone else around you has succumbed:
they lie like tranquillised pets on a vet's table;
they languish on hospital trolleys and friends' couches,
on iron beds in hostels for the homeless,
under feather duvets at tourist B&Bs.
The radio, devoid of listeners to confide in,
turns repetitious. You are your own voice-over.
You are alone in the bone-weary tower
of your bleary-eyed, blinking lighthouse,
watching the spillage of tide on the shingle inlet.
You are the single-minded one who hears
time shaking from the clock's fingertips
like drops, who watches its hands
chop years into diced seconds,
who knows that when the church bell
tolls at 2 or 3 it tolls unmistakably for you.
You are the sole hand on deck when
temperatures plummet and the hull
of an iceberg is jostling for prominence.
Your confidential number is the life-line
where the sedated long-distance voices
of despair hold out muzzily for an answer.
You are the emergency services' driver
ready to dive into action at the first
warning signs of birth or death.
You spot the crack in night's façade
even before the red-eyed businessman
on look-out from his transatlantic seat.
You are the only reliable witness to when
the light is separated from the darkness,
who has learned to see the dark in its true
colours, who has not squandered your life.


by Dennis O'Driscoll

At the Mystic Aquarium

Still sun blind, I wheel your chair
through the darkened room
to the largest tank, where hammerheads swim
in the aquamarine glow, the torpedo of their bodies
sleeking past you beyond the glass.
Wanting respite from the heavy pushing,
wanting unburdened time to take in
the small brilliant lives of darting reef fish,
for once, I leave you, brake on and safe.
But when I turn away into the milling crowd,
it is I who fall—only a few feet from you, tripping
over a small girl, my body old, heavy,
coming down on her, her arms flailing,
trying to fight it back.
She lets out a cry that rips straight through
and her mother snatches her up, snaps at me in anger.
Sorry. Sorry. I say again and again
as I try with no luck to struggle to my feet,
straining against the dark and the gravity,
thinking how hard it is to rise
from the downthrust of weight and age,
aware of shame's bloodrush, tears beginning
as if I were the hurt child, the one who needed saving.
Suddenly I hate your wheelchair,
the knees that will not hold you, your blocked heart.
I want you here at my elbow, your hand pulling me up,
your arm gripping my shoulder, comforts in my ear.
But you've never even noticed, hooked as you are
to the aqua light, flashing points of the teeth,
the flat implacable eyes.


by Patricia Fargnoli

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin

This jungle poem is going to be my last.

This space walk is.

Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,

I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.

The stars above my bed at night are vast.

I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.

My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,

And all the dogs begin to bark.

My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,

And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,

And all the foam and fevers shiver.

And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!

Between my legs it's Baudelaire.

He wrote about her Central Park of hair.



I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,

In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.

I'm on a timer that will give me time

To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.

The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance

A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.

Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.

We're squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!

It's like a shout.

It's what minuterie is all about.

Just getting to the landing through the dark

That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.

And she's so happy. It is grand!

I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.

The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.

I don’t remember poems I write.

I turn around and they are gone.

I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.

Pierre Leval, we loved those years!

We knocked back shots of single malt all night.

Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—

Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.

A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.

I live flap copy for a children’s book.

He wants to lick. He wants to look.

A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.

Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!

Democracy in Baghdad makes men think

Monstrosity was not so bad.

I followed Gandhi barefoot to

Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.

The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink

The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had

A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,

But that was when it mattered. Do

I matter? That is true.

I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,

And after never finding it I never was the same.

I roared into the heavens and I soared,

And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.

I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.

I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,

And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.

It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean

Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.

I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”

The right schools taught me how to tock.

I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.

These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.

They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.

That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.

Their arrows entered red meat in the glory

Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.

I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.

It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.

You were so blond in Rue de l’Université!

The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game

For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

One cannot be the way one was back then today.

It went away.

I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

by Frederick Seidel