User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /wedding/ This is robots.txt. Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye mighty and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley pity this busy monster, manunkind pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go -- e. e. cummings Five Ways to Kill a Man There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood To the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this Properly you require a crowd of people Wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak To dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one Man to hammer the nails home. Or you can take a length of steel, Shaped and chased in a traditional way, And attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, At least two flags, a prince and a Castle to hold your banquet in. Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind Allows, blow gas at him. But then you need A mile of mud sliced through with ditches, Not to mention black boots, bomb craters, More mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs And some round hats made of steel. In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly Miles above your victim and dispose of him by Pressing one small switch. All you then Require is an ocean to separate you, two Systems of government, a nation's scientists, Several factories, a psychopath and Land that no one needs for several years. These are, as I began, cumbersome ways To kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat Is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle Of the twentieth century, and leave him there. -- Edwin Brock Dulce Et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! --- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime --- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. -- Wilfred Owen The Panther His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. -- Rainer Maria Rilke To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -- William Shakespeare A Supermarket in California What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? -- Allen Ginsberg This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold. -- William Carlos Williams Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams 1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing. 3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor! -- Kenneth Koch Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night, with dreams, and drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time in between Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in the submarine light of Bickford's, floated out and sat through the stale beer afternooon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago... -- Allen Ginsberg The Subway Piranhas Did anyone tell you that in each subway train there is one special seat with a small hole in it and underneath the seat is a tank of piranha-fish which have not been fed for quite some time. The fish become quite agitated by the shoogling of the train and jump up through the seat. The resulting skeletons of unlucky passengers turn an honest penny for the transport executive, hanging far and wide in medical schools. -- Edwin Morgan To a Cat Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences nor the arriving dawn more secretive ; you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure which we can only spy at from a distance. By the mysterious functioning of some divine decree, we seek you out in vain ; remoter than the Ganges or the sunset, yours is the solitude, yours is the secret. Your back allows the tentative caress my hand extends. And you have condescended, since that forever, now oblivion, to take love from a flattering human hand. you live in other time, lord of your realm - a world as closed and separate as dream. -- Jorge Luis Borges Daddy You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time--- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Tarot pack and my Tarot pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of *you*, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two--- The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat, black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always *knew* it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. -- Sylvia Plath The Jungle Husband Dearest Evelyn, I often think of you Out with the guns in the jungle stew Yesterday I hittapotamus I put the measurements down for you but they got lost in the fuss It's not a good thing to drink out here You know, I've practically given it up dear. Tomorrow I am going alone a long way Into the jungle. It is all grey But green on top Only sometimes when a tree has fallen The sun comes down plop, it is quite appalling. You never want to go in a jungle pool In the hot sun, it would be the act of a fool Because it's always full of anacondas, Evelyn, not looking ill-fed I'll say. So no more now, from your loving husband Wilfred. -- Stevie Smith The Elements There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium, And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium, And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium. There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium, And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium. There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium, And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium, And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium, Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium. And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium, Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium. There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium, And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium, And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium, And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard, And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard. -- Tom Lehrer The Gift Thinking she was the gift they began to package it early. They waxed its smile they lowered its eyes they tuned its ears to the telephone they curled its hair they straightened its teeth they taught it to bury its wishbone they poured honey down its throat they made it say yes yes and yes they sat on its thumbs. That box has my name on it, said the man. It's for me. And they were not surprised. While they blew kisses and winked he took it home. He put it on a table where his friends could examine it saying dance saying faster. He plunged its tunnels he burned his name deeper. Later he put it on a platform under the lights saying push saying harder saying just what I wanted you've given me a son. -- Carole Oles The Former Miner Returns from His First Day as a Service Worker (at a McDonald's somewhere in Appalachia) All day he crushed the spongy buns, pawed at The lids of burger boxes and kiddie pacs As if they were chinese puzzles. All day long his hands ticked, ready to latch on Or heave or curl around a tool Heavier than a spatula, All day he rubbed his eyes in the crisp light. All day the blue tile, the polished chrome, said Be nimble, be jolly, be quick. All day he grinned while the public, with bland Or befuddled faces, scowled over his head And mumbled, whispered, snarled, and snapped. All day his coworkers, pink and scrubbed, Prattled and glided and skipped while he, All bulk and balk, rumbled and banged. Near shift’s end he daydreamed - of the clang Of rock on steel, the skreel Of a conveyer belt, the rattling whine Of the man-trip, the miner’s growl of gears As if gnarled, toothing at the seam. He makes his slow way home, shadow among Roadside shadows, groping back in himself For that deep, sheltering dark. He has never been so tired. His hands have never been so clean. -- Mark Defoe Overheard on a Salmarsh Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush, I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I want them. No. I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No. -- Harold Monro Marriages Are Made My cousin Elena is to be married The formalities have been completed: her family history examined for T.B. and madness her father declared solvent her eyes examined for squints her teeth for cavities her stools for the possible non-Brahmin worm. She's not quite tall enough and not quite full enough (children will take care of that) Her complexion it was decided would compensate, being just about the right shade of rightness to do justice to Francisco X. Noronha Prabhu good son of Mother Church. -- Eunice deSouza Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody 1 PATRIOTIC May I borrow your wheelbarrow? I didn't lay down my life in World War II so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow. 2 SNOBBISH May I borrow your wheelbarrow? Unfortunately Lord Goodman is using it. 3 OVERWEENING May I borrow your wheelbarrow? It is too mighty a conveyance to be wielded by any mortal save myself. 4 PIOUS May I borrow your wheelbarrow? My wheelbarrow is reserved for religious ceremonies. 5 MELODRAMATIC May I borrow your wheelbarrow? I would sooner be broken on its wheel and buried in its barrow. 6 PATHETIC May I borrow your wheelbarrow? I am dying of schizophrenia and all you can talk about is wheelbarrows. 7 DEFENSIVE May I borrow your wheelbarrow? Do you think I'm made of wheelbarrows? 8 SINISTER May I borrow your wheelbarrow? It is full of blood. 9 LECHEROUS May I borrow your wheelbarrow? Only if I can fuck your wife in it. 10 PHILOSOPHICAL May I borrow your wheelbarrow? What is a wheelbarrow? -- Adrian Mitchell Gift You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say "This is not silence this is another poem" and you would hand it back to me. -- Leonard Cohen The Hug It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who'd showed us in the end To a bed I reached in one drunk stride. Already I lay snug, And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side. I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, Suddenly, from behind, In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed: Your instep to my heel, My shoulder-blades against your chest. It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial. My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place. I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace. -- Thom Gunn I wish to leave the world I wish to leave the world By its natural door; In my tomb of green leaves They are to carry me to die. Do not put me in the dark To die like a a traitor; I am good, and like a good thing I will die with my face to the sun -- José Martí