Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,   
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   
(Still the dead one lay moaning)   
I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.

Storm Night by Georg Trakl

O the red evening tide!
Gleaming at the open window swing
vine leaves wound madly into sky
and spirits of fear nestling within.

Dust shimmies in the stench from drains.
The wind presses its shards and rustles.
Advance of wild horses, blitz-framed
in garish flash of cloud bustle.

Loud cracks the pond’s glaze.
Seagulls shriek in window frames.
The rider explodes out of the hill
and crashes among the pines in flames.

The sick cry out in hospital.
The evening’s plumage buzzes blue.
At once descends the booming glitter
of rain onto the rooves.

You and your whole race by Langston Hughes 

You and your whole race.
Look down upon the town in which you live
And be ashamed.
Look down upon white folks 
And upon yourselves 
And be ashamed
That such supine poverty exists there,
That such stupid ignorance breeds children there
Behind such humble shelters of despair—
That you yourselves have not the sense to care
Nor the manhood to stand up and say
I dare you to come one step nearer, evil world,
With your hands of greed seeking to touch my throat, 
I dare you to come one step nearer me:
When you can say that
you will be free! 

Cut by Sylvia Plath

For Susan O'Neill Roe

What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

Snowdrop by Ted Hughes

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

RIP

Along With Youth by Ernest Hemingway

A porcupine skin, 
Stiff with bad tanning, 
It must have ended somewhere. 
Stuffed horned owl 
Pompous 
Yellow eyed; 
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig 
Sooted with dust. 
Piles of old magazines, 
Drawers of boy's letters 
And the line of love 
They must have ended somewhere. 
Yesterday's Tribune is gone 
Along with youth 
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach 
The year of the big storm 
When the hotel burned down 
At Seney, Michigan. 

you know and I know and thee know by Bukowski

that as the yellow shade rips
as the cat leaps wild-eyed
as the old bartender leans on the wood
as the hummingbird sleeps

you know and I know and thee know

as the tanks practice on false battlefields
as your tires work the freeway
as the midget drunk on cheap bourbon cries alone at night
as the bulls are carefully bred for the matadors
as the grass watches you
and the trees watch you
as the sea holds creatures vast and true

you know and I know and thee know

the sadness and the glory of two slippers under a bed
the ballet of your heart dancing with your blood
young girls of love who will someday hate their mirrors
overtime in hell
lunch with sick salad

you know and I know and thee know

the end as we know it now it seems such a lousy trick
after the lousy agony but

you know and I know and thee know

the joy that sometimes comes along out of nowhere
rising like a falcon moon across the impossibility

you know and I know and thee know

the cross-eyed craziness of total elation
we know we finally have not been cheated

you know and I know and thee know

as we look at our hands our feet our lives our way
the sleeping hummingbird
the murdered dead of armies
the sun that eats you as you face it

you know and I know and thee know

we will defeat death.

oh, yes by Bukowski

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.

Oil & Steel by Henri Cole

My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead,' he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful. 

Fog by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes 
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking 
over harbor and city 
on silent haunches 
and then moves on.

A Last Word by Ernest Dowson

LET us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be 
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, 
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, 
   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; 
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, 
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; 
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, 
   That I shall never look upon thee more, 
Never have relish in the faery power 
   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore 
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy 
Who grinned at life in empty joy, 
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, 
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum, 
With crumps and lice and lack of rum, 
He put a bullet through his brain. 
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye 
Who cheer when soldier lads march by, 
Sneak home and pray you'll never know 
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Consummation of Grief by Bukowski

I even hear the mountains 
the way they laugh 
up and down their blue sides 
and down in the water 
the fish cry 
and the water 
is their tears. 
I listen to the water 
on nights I drink away 
and the sadness becomes so great 
I hear it in my clock 
it becomes knobs upon my dresser 
it becomes paper on the floor 
it becomes a shoehorn 
a laundry ticket 
it becomes 
cigarette smoke 
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . . 
it matters little 
very little love is not so bad 
or very little life 
what counts 
is waiting on walls 
I was born for this 
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe: 
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe, 
“The fact has not created in me 
A sense of obligation.”

Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes 

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

The Jaguar by Ted Hughes

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Because I could not stop for Death By Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste 
And I had put away 
My labor and my leisure too, 
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove 
At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed Us – 
The Dews drew quivering and Chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed 
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet 
Feels shorter than the Day 
I first surmised the Horses' Heads 
Were toward Eternity –