Poems that you love

[rowens]

As a teenager, I used to model my poems on Keats, Byron, Shelley, and early Yeats poetry. And I'd bring girls bouquets of flowers, and write them long letters about what I felt to be their best qualities and detailed reasons how they made life worth living just by subtle movements they made, or facial expressions and so on. And they would tell their friends about it, and their friends would say it was weird to do that kind of thing these days, and the other boys that wanted the girls would say that what I was doing was faggot stuff, and the girls would agree and go with them. Then those girls all became teenage mothers with drug problems. So I figured that idealizing women was a deadend road. So I started writing poems that many people say make no sense. And I can't really say I love any of my poems, or any poems by anybody else. I sat and thought of any one poem, and couldn't do it. The closest thing I can figure would be good for this thread is the poem that keeps coming back to mind the most by Walt Whitman that goes

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.




I don't often read poems critically unless that's what's wanted. So most of these famous poems, I simply accept. Because the poet isn't going to revise them, and I wouldn't want them to, even if I didn't like the poem.

Another thing about those boys that got all the women, I remember they would use poems like "She Walks in Beauty" to describe her, because they learned that poem in school. It was a famous, legitimate poem; opposed to any poem I'd specifically made about the girl. All the women I've known since have all tended to go for men that abuse them and lie to them and that wouldn't know how to write a poem. I think I know where I went wrong, I should have wrote them the poems and letters about how much I loved them, then lied about it all. That's what girls tend to get excited about. So Rose Love, it doesn't pay to be a sensitive man.