Tess's Typewriter.
That year they gave Tess
her first typewriter. She'd
not need to borrow her
brother's battered old piece
or write down her fragile
poems in her spiderlike
scrawl as her father called it.
The promise came while
she was getting her mind
together in that mental
asylum, after the mucky
love affair that went no
place and left her hanging
there, like one crucified
for all to see and most
to softly mutter and stare.
Get yourself mended girl,
Father said, and we'll buy
you your own typewriter,
so you can stab away on
the keys to your heart's
content and bring out
those poems of yours.
He never read her poems,
never read much apart
from the back page sport
or gawked at page 3 girls
with a tut tutting tongue.
That year she gazed out
of the wide barred window
of the asylum at the snow
on fields, at the seagulls
gathering and feeding behind
the faraway tractor as it
ploughed, at the grey
depressing sky, wondering
what it'd be like to not be,
wondering what the woman
with a cast in her eye, was
doing to herself in the toilets,
one night when she'd gone
in to pee unable to sleep.
The typewriter idea
and promise kind of got her
through the dark hours and
the ECT, and the following day
headaches and numbness.
After slitting her wrists (mildly,
a cry for help) she said on the
phone to her father, Come get
me out of this place, help me
get back together. Ok, he said,
Miss Humpty Dumpty, and he
put down the phone, and she
stood in the hall of the asylum
with the receiver in her hand,
the image of the typewriter
before her eyes, those poems
banging on the inside of her
head, new ones wanting to
get out, old ones left for dead.
poem by Terry Collett
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Related quotes
Poems About.
There are poems that you will never see
Marked in a folder titled 'privacy'
Poems of hate and anger and personal pain
Poems about greed and hunger and personal gain
Poems about people I would love to see dead
Poems about women I met
Poems about relationships that have gone bad
Poems about issues with mom and dad
Poems about me, the person no one knows
Poems about places where only my soul goes
Poems I wish I could place in the clouds for all to read
Poems about lust, selfishness and greed
Poems I know will hurt those I hate
Poems I write by complete mistake
Poems I have hidden in my heart and my head
Poems about things that are better left unsaid
Poems I want to share and poems I want to retract
Poems of shame and how others might act
They stay in my psyche, they are a part of me
These poems I write, but you will never see.
poem by Mahfooz Ali
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Do not read my poems…. [for YOU ]
Do not read my poems…
After I am dead
As a lament, a wail
An elegy, a requiem
Do not read my poems…
After I am gone
When no more I can
Hear your velvet voice.
Do not read my poems…
Alone without me
To comment along
And read with you
But, do read my poems
When I beside you lie
With my head resting
On your supporting arm
Listening to you read
In whisper, in kisses
In silence, in love
In sleep, in dream
Watching you feel
Every word I wrote
I’ll close my eyes - Love
Brush aside my hair
With your breathe
Which half veils my face
Sleepless fevered I wrote
Read me my poems
Now sing me a lullaby
Rock me to sleep
On your broad chest
Diving into your eyes
A thousand times
I am refreshed
By your smile
I’ll write on you a poem
Traced by my fingertips
To be etched in your heart
And burnt into your soul!
So, do not read my poems…
poem by Angelina Pandian
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The Poems Of John Clare
For years in Northampton mental asylum he battled his ghosts of despair
His Nation's finest poet of Nature the marvellous wordsmith John Clare
So many of his poems are relevant today
The one who loved Nature with words had a way.
The Helpston he grew up in not a cultural place
And though in that old Village his was a known face
They little realized the fame to them he'd bring
That poetry lovers World wide his praises would sing.
Without him less people of Helpston would know
The great poet of Nature of centuries ago
He died in Northampton mental asylum in dire poverty
Yet is there one greater Nature poet than he?
His flora and fauna poems have passed scrutiny's test
And as a Nature poet he was surely the best
Into the soul of Nature it seemed he could see
And his verses have outlived his mortality.
He never did enjoy his literary renown
And he died in the asylum in Northampton Town
But he was a true poet and his type are so rare
And old Helpston lives on in the poems of John Clare.
poem by Francis Duggan
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I Have Chinaski In My Mind
so you like chinaski
i like chinaski
too
i see him make love to many women
and drink his wine
and write his poems
somewhere
in the dark, damp corners
of the post office
or in the attic
or even in the park while
he strolls alone
drinks more than
what his mind
can take
and then
he arrives in his
apartment
gets his typewriter
and writes his thousand
poems as though
he is just talking
mumbling
to himself
all his sighs
and disappointments
of this world
now
well spoken
in verse and he
signs each
with this
bukowski, the man
you will never forget
he shies away
from fame but he
takes
the money just the same
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Gratis Et Amore
for the poems that i have written
and which you read
by heart, i bless you with a prayer for luck
for another year
for the poems which i have not written yet,
i wish you a longer life, so you may read them
when they become finally written
for the poems i have in mind and which i will not write
i wish you patience i wish you some prayers
may these poems realize their worth
may they decide to become truths
with you i pray that God may be also kind
for those still unspoken
and may God bless your mind
may they open up like tight buds to become the flowers
of the world, the sun to warm them, the rain to shower them
may these poems live and linger
may they be like grass always unswerving to grow and cover everything
alive and loving.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Oh The Poems
OH THE POEMS AND THE POEMS AND THE POEMS
Oh the poems and the poems and the poems
Oh the love of Literature
Oh all that stuff
I have given my life to-
Words and meanings and feelings
Pages and pages and pages –
What it is all this literary life for?
When out the window out the door
With our eyes we see in an instant other worlds other dreams?
I don’t know and I will never know
And Literature is certainly far more than I can say it is-
Oh the poems and this poem and this day turning grey
And all my life old and old and more old and more old-
Oh why oh why oh why
And always back to God
My last rescue and refuge and escape
I who have read so much Great Literature
And can only write this-
Oh the why and the oh oh oh and the words
And the whole world of Literature
I would belong to and do not.
Oh the words oh the world oh the Literature
Oh God help me please can’t you please help me a little or not?
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Open Stage Poetry Reading
After the one that sings, and after the one
that can make up poems of a kind right on the spot;
after a girl who didn't . . . walk very well,
took five minutes to get from her seat to the stage
then read one poem with hardly any words in it
and halted the whole way back in a staggering silence;
after the bald one's rhymes about this teeth;
a woman got up whose poems won't write down,
it's all in the way the voices in her come out.
We went to a medium once, and a woman locked
in a trance let a dead man come inside her and talk.
She held herself like . . . a woman being a man.
That's what it was at the open stage poetry reading,
and I left without talking, I hadn't come expecting it.
What could I have told her, I think it's a dead man?
It wasn't something I wanted to get that close to.
I could never do it myself, let a dead man come in-
or would it be, into me, a dead woman that would come?
poem by Eric Torgersen
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I Have Read Many Poems I Know I Never Could Have Written
I have read many poems I know I never could have written
Poems whose language was far richer and more remarkable than mine
Poems that saw as I cannot see and sounded as I cannot sound
Poems of magnificent music and many hidden meanings
I have read many poems greater than those I could ever write
And have been humbled and saddened and inspired by them
Out there somewhere else
There have been real poets
And I in my own little lines
Love and respect them.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
quote by Steve Wozniak
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Spring Piece Left In The Middle
Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING...
And me -- poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras--
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged
black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
I fly out of the printer's,
I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
SPRING IN THE AIR...
In the barbershops
they're powdering
the sallow cheeks
of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
three-color bookcovers
flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell...
I don't look back,
the lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
SPRING IN THE AIR...
*
The piece got left in the middle.
It rained and swamped the lines.
But oh! what I would have written...
The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page
three-volume manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm...
The sea would start smelling sweet.
Spring would rear up
like a sweating red mare
and, leaping onto its bare back,
I'd ride it
into the water.
Then
my typewriter would follow me
every step of the way.
I'd say:
"Oh, don't do it!
Leave me alone for an hour..."
then
my head-my hair failing out--
would shout into the distance:
"I AM IN LOVE..."
*
I'm twenty-seven,
she's seventeen.
"Blind Cupid,
lame Cupid,
both blind and lame Cupid
said, Love this girl,"
I was going to write;
I couldn't say it
but still can!
But if
it rained,
if the lines I wrote got swamped,
if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,
what the hell...
Hey, spring is here spring is here spring
spring is here!
My blood is budding inside me!
20 and 21 April 1929
Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)
poem by Nazim Hikmet
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The History Poems Have Not Been Written
The history poems have not been written
The poems after Milosz
The Wallace Stevens poems will never be written
I can’t come close
I have tried the Blake poems
But of course I am not near them either
I would like to the ironic intellectual poems
I might be able to do them
I could do a kind of surrealistic association mind poem a prose poem
But I don’t like that very much
The poems of Jerusalem have not been good enough
Poems of propaganda are awkward and unacceptable
The small poems that tell of my life
They are for me the chance at real poetry
And I will continue as best I can with them
The American poems I have not yet found the idiom for
I can be epigrammatic in Emerson Thoreau fashion
But not with the hard New England observing eye
Borges poems I love
And the stories of mind and literature
Making the drama of a life of a storyteller
Interest me
But I doubt I could truly do them well
Imitation can only take one so far
And through it one may lose one’s way entirely
I can really do only what I am
Not the Dickinson poems nor the Hopkins poems nor the Wordsworth poems nor the Keats poems nor the Amichai poems nor the poems of many others whose poetry I love
The Biblical poems have been tried
The poems of cosmic and scientific reflection
I could try to improve them
There are too many different kinds of poems to write
And I cannot write almost all of them
This is another poem about poems and poetry
I have written many for a long time now
Perhaps I need to go elsewhere and write in a new way
A way I have not dreamed or even remotely understood possible before.
The poems of the unknown poetry await me
I will go on but I am not sure now I know in which wa
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I Take My Poems With Me Wherever I Go
I take my poems with me wherever I go-
I write and read them inside myself
Sometimes I try to recall them and cannot
And most are forgotten
And live elsewhere on pages little or never read -
But inside myself
I have poems
I write and rewrite
Read and reread.
I am poems
And wherever I go they are with me
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Which Poems Are True and Which Poems Only A Story?
WHICH POEMS ARE TRUE AND WHICH POEMS ONLY A STORY?
Which poems are true
and which poems only a story?
There are poems I have to write
They are the heart of who I am-
And other poems that tell a story my mind makes
And takes me where I do not know I'll ever really be-
There are real poems and there are imaginary poems-
And there are poems-in- between like this one.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Dream Miracles God Speaks To Soul Mine
I gave God two more poems today
two perfectly harmonic resonating poems
two poems dream mind writ
two poems never to write out
two poems never to public post
the first fruits the best
I vowed to give God
in awaiting dreams I gift
poems to God is gifted best poems
God smiles I watch heaven’s eyes
across cosmos God’s love is given
across created God space prayer given
love gifted given God’s love shines
dream miracles God speaks to soul mine
poem by Terence George Craddock
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Dont Ya Rile Em
Im seeing how boring it gets
Back where the sun never sets
And a day is really two days
I was feeling so tired inside
My eeys were stitched open so wide
It was making me kind of uptight
Oh yeah
All right
And the power man says
Dont ya rile em
Going asylum
Dont ya rile em
Going asylum
Tonight
Tonight
Ive been working my way back to sane
Its coming back to me again
Old navigational ways
Back in time where I belong
Theyre playing my favorite song
That whistling meteorite
Oh yeah
All right
And the power man says
Dont ya rile em
Going asylum
Gont ya rile em
Going asylum
Gont ya rile em
Going asylum
Tonight
Tonight
song performed by by Frank Black
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The aged poet. For Kealan if
When he was young
and life was poetry
and poetry was life
and girls made poetry
in his heart
he’d showed his poems to
an aged poet who
was quiet a while then
nodded his head and
smiled and
said ‘keep writing’
and he swore that day
as long as he could hold a pen
he’d write some sort of poetry
and so he did and so he did
and when he was
too old to hold a pen
he spoke his poetry
some say in an Irish pub
and people came from miles around
and said sure it was a t’ousand times
better than to read his poems on the page
which was itself worth –
and that last phrase was poetry
for who is not Irish and a poet
and when he was too old
to walk down to the pub
they came and listened
at his door and at his window
and when he was too old to speak
they came to see his silence
and left as poets
for their head
had joined their heart
poem by Michael Shepherd
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A Blank Page Blues
I know we have all done it,
sat in front of a pristine white sheet of paper
and got ready to write something down,
and then we are confronted
with the blank page blues.
The words of inspiration
then scurry and hide away.
You are left with pen in hand,
scratching your head
wondering what to say.
There is no cure for this syndrome;
writers get it all the time.
Some call it a writer’s block,
when nothing comes into your head.
You sit in front of a blank page.
You know what you want to write,
then someone disturbs you
and the words disappear out of sight.
How many times have we had that?
We sit down to write our masterpiece
and the telephone rings,
or someone shouts your dinner is getting cold.
You feel like screaming,
but you take it on the chin.
You lay down your pen,
answer the phone or have your dinner,
and when you come back,
the blank page confronts you.
Still you cannot write anything on it.
You stare at it for hours,
until finally you get tired
and journey off to bed.
Hoping and hoping tomorrow
a little peace, it will bring
and your words on that blank page
will really begin to sing.
10 May 2008
poem by David Harris
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One Hundred
To all those who have read my poems,
this poem is just for you.
This is my hundredth poem this year
and I feel like celebrating too.
You see for years and years,
I did not want to write anymore,
until I came along here and met all of you.
For some reason I cannot explain,
you took me under your poetic wing.
You made me want to write again,
with your comments by the score.
You brought life back to me,
took my hand,
and guided me from the wilderness,
from which I ran.
You gave me injection,
and my confidence once more flowed.
My pen was put to paper again,
and out the poems came,
one after the other,
but never one the same.
I took a little time out to write a novel too.
All this and more is all thanks to you.
Without that hand of friendship,
which you’ve all shown to me,
I’d still be wandering like a lost soul,
in that wilderness out there.
Therefore, I am taking this opportunity
with this my hundredth poem this year,
to send you a special thanks,
from the bottom of my heart,
to each and every one of you out there.
poem by David Harris
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The Poems Bring Me Back To Myself
THE POEMS BRING ME BACK TO MYSELF
The poems bring me back to myself
I begin to live again –
Without the poems
I would have to make a new life-
I do not know if I am capable of it-
A life without poems without poetry
With other words perhaps-
I am too old to slowly write the long narrative
I never was capable of before
Little poems
Little lines
What I am capable of now.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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The guy who ones us..
and there’s this guy,
hits my poems every day
devotedly
that’s a lot of poems
doesn’t read them,
just hits them
to dropp another 1 in the voting box
on new poems, or ones he’s already oned, alike
he or she no surely he
girls have better things to do
saw some poems had rated 10
naturally assumed that this was faked
because he’s like that, decided
it was time to take me down a peg
but adding his comments – no,
too public, better do it secretly
then announce it publicly
as an act of holy justice..
if a poem’s got no rating – bliss!
a very public 1 like a steaming turd…
if it’s already got a 10, a 1
will bring that down to 5.5..
and there’s always tomorrow..
a 10, two ones make 4.0..
a 10, three ones, make 3.3.. and so on…
alas for him, he can’t ever reduce my score
with 10 plus 1 to the xth, to lower than 1.0…
funny, I still feel the same me in my poems…
I hope there’s only one of him,
it’s an awful waste of time, chasing
a paper power, a passing screen…
fun though it is, to spread childish smears
across the adult world…
needless to say, his many weeks of work
have served to elevate our hit-rate…
and as we sink on one list, then we rise
on another… the injustice of it all…
now the real false figures are his, not ours…
and then, he thought, it’s time for Frank..
and then, for Tara.. and who next?
maybe some I haven’t spotted?
That high scorer above all,
Nikki, so far, has escaped his attention…
But then, Nikki has no poems to one!
last year, he was called Joe Fazio or some such,
this year, he’s called ‘Poet Watch’..
if only… I’d be happier, as a poet,
if he had read the poems he oned…
poem by Michael Shepherd
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