Poems that you love

[ChristopherSea]

Emily Dickinson's other 1,869 poems aren't bad either, but don't try to use all of those dashes here, as you will be bashed!

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Too many favorites, but this may be in the top 50:

Birthplace Revisited

Gregory Corso

I stand in the dark light in the dark
street
and look up at my window, I was
born there.
The lights are on; other people are
moving about.
I am with raincoat; cigarette in
mouth,
hat over eye, hand on gat.
I cross the street and enter the
building.
The garbage cans haven't stopped
smelling.
I walk up the first flight; Dirty Ears
aims a knife at me…
I pump him full of lost watches.

A beats fan? I wouldn't have guessed it.

Not so much the poetry pontificating on sphincters, but I liked their counter-culture excitement in that gang. Corso and Ferlinghetti were my favorites from that group.

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by RICHARD HUGO

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

This is a great piece and makes me want to read more of Richard Hugo!