People of the future
while you are reading these poems, remember
you didn’t write them,
I did.
20th Century American poetry
t.v. (2) by Anselm Hollo
funny
nazis!
twenty-five years
pass.
then,
more funny nazis!
Star Motel by Bill Berkson
Inside I could hear
a party of people
the aimless cars
and in the middle distance
inexorable murmurs
of the ice machines.
Dispersion and Convergence by Tom Clark
Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings
Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined
Never to occur
You don’t mind
You feel spiritual and alert
As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like
You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do
big dog by Anselm Hollo
i bring you
this head,
full of breath–
takingly beautiful
images of yourself
& put it in
your lap.
now i breathe
more quietly.
now you pat me.
now i sign.
in a moment or two
i’ll get up and
be a man again.
What There Is by Kenneth Patchen
In this green world
Flowers birds are hands
They hold me
I am loved all day
All this pleases me
I am amused
I have to laugh from crying
Trees mountains are arms
I am loved all day
Children grass are tears
I cry
I am loved all day
Everything
Pompous makes me laugh
I am amused often enouıgh
In this
My beautiful green world
O there’s love all day
Do Me That Love by Kenneth Patchen
Do me that love
As a tree, tree
Where birds and wind
Sing though they know
How real night is
And no one can
Go on for long
In any way
Do me that love
Do me that love
As the rain, rain
That has voices
In it, the greats’
The fools’, poor dead
From old weathers—
Lives considered
And rejected
As ours will be.
The rain comes down
And flowers grow
On the graves of
Our enemies
Do me that love
She Is The Prettiest Of Creatures by Kenneth Patchen
She is the prettiest of creatures
All like a queen is she
I have made a paper wheel
And I pin it to her dress
We lie together sometimes
And it is as nice as music
When you are half asleep
And then we want to cry because
We are so clean and warm
And sometimes it is raining
And the little drops scuttle
Like the feet of angels on the roof
something that strikes me as quite relevant today: from Paul Blackburn
“. . .. . . You
put that much life in it, baby,
you know you can’t win . . .”
At A Window by Carl Sandburg
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
Leonard Durso 