Far and Away

by Fanny Howe
copied and pasted by Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

The rain falls on.
Acres of violets unfold.
Dandelion, mayflower
Myrtle and forsythia follow.

The cardinals call to each other.
Echoes of delicate
Breath-broken whistles.

I know something now
About subject, object, verb
And about one word that fails
For lack of substance.

Now people say, He passed on
Instead of that. Unit
Of space subtracted by one.
It almost rhymes with earth.

What is a poet but a person
Who lives on the ground
Who laughs and listens

Without pretension of knowing
Anything, driven by the lyric's
Quest for rest that never
(God willing) will be found?

Concord, kitchen table, 1966.
Corbetts, Creeley, a grandmother
And me. Sweater, glasses,
One wet eye.

Lots of laughter
Before and after. Every meeting
Rhymed and fluttered into meter.
The beat was the message. . . .

To those who look at the night sky in wonder...

Poetry
by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that time... Poetry came
to find me. Don’t know, don’t know from where,
it leapt, winter or the river.
Don’t know how or when
no, not words, not
voices, not silence,
but I was called from the street,
from the branches of the night,
suddenly, from the others,
in violent flames,
or coming back alone,
I, without a face,
it touched me.

I did not know how to say, my mouth
no names,
my eyes
were blind,
and something began in my soul,
fever or lost wings,
and I made it alone,
deciphering,
that fire,
and I wrote the first, vague line,
vague, without a body, pure
nonsense,
pure knowledge,
of he who knows nothing,
and suddenly saw
the sky
unlock

and open,
planets,
pulsating spaces,
perforated shadows,
riddled
with fires, flowers, flights,
the revolving night, the universe.
And I the smallest thing,
made drunk by the great void,
starred,
in the image, likeness
of mystery,
felt myself pure part
of abyss,
turned with the starlight,
my heart broken loose in the wind.

Ode to Joy

Each day brings that which was not here before
And takes away what shall be here no more;
For every grief the snows of winter make,
The gleam of spring a thousand joys awake.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, IX

The Last Nickel

A father walks into a restaurant with his young son. He gives the young boy 3 nickels to play with to keep him occupied. Suddenly, the boy starts choking, going blue in the face.

The father realizes the boy has swallowed the nickels and starts slapping him on the back. The boy coughs up 2 of the nickels, but keeps choking. Looking at his son, the father is panicking, shouting for help.

A well-dressed, attractive, and serious looking woman in a blue business suit is sitting at the coffee bar reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the commotion, she looks up, puts her coffee cup down, neatly folds the newspaper and places it on the counter, gets up from her seat and makes her way, unhurried, across the restaurant.

Reaching the boy, the woman carefully drops his pants; takes hold of the boy's' testicles and starts to squeeze and twist, gently at first and then ever so firmly. After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the last nickel, which the woman deftly catches in her free hand.

Releasing the boy's testicles, the woman hands the nickel to the father and walks back to her seat at the coffee bar without saying a word.

As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no ill effects, the father rushes over to the woman and starts thanking her saying, "I've never seen anybody do anything like that before, it was fantastic. Are you a doctor? "

"No," the woman replied, "I'm with the Internal Revenue Service".

Flowers and News

When I speak

of flowers

it is to recall

that at one time

we were young.

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

By: William Carlos Williams
Copied and loved by: Homeless with a Laptop, That is My Name ... in the end

In the End
all we want is to be slippery,
smooth,
strained
into silk--
is what I thought,
when I saw
you there
enjoying seasons that had
passed us, seasons
that came out of turn.
I know you
wanted me to judge you, but
there was no jury to decide
your guilt. Anyway,
what could I charge
for the dirty crime
of making me wait,
like words
scrambling for euphony
in an endophasic embryo?
We are never right or wrong.
All we can hope is to be
less than dull, shiny
like well kept cars,
in need of no refinement.
You
and I were not lovers,
but assassins.
The most recent kill
always the hardest,
each time,
less and less
coated
by the shock.

By: Gabriela Anaya Valdepeña
Copied and loved by: Homeless with a Laptop, That is My Name in the end...

Sonnet No. 1

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

By: William Shakespeare