put it to paper
Sometime in the early sixties, my mother clipped this poem from a newspaper and gave it to me. Since then, I have recited it aloud and to myself 1,000 times. Way to go, Mom.
In youth it was a way I had
To do my best to please
And change with every passing lad
To suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do.
And if you do not like me so
To hell, my love, with you.
–Anonymous
There’s nothing more debauched than thinking.
This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed
on a plot laid out for daisies.
Nothing’s sacred for those who think.
Calling things brazenly by name,
risque analyses, salacious syntheses,
frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,
the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,
discussion in heat—it’s music to their ears.
In broad daylight or under cover of night
they form circles, triangles or pairs.
The partners’ age or sex are unimportant.
Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.
Friends leads friend astray.
Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.
A brother pimps for his little sister.
They prefer the fruits
from the forbidden tree of knowledge
to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines—
all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.
The books they relish have no pictures.
What variety they have lies in certain phrases
marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.
It’s shocking, the positions,
The unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn’t know.
During these trysts of theirs, the only thing that’s steamy is the tea.
People sit on their chairs and move their lips.
Everyone crosses only his own legs
so that one foot is resting on the floor
while the other dangles freely in midair.
Only now and then does somebody get up,
go to the window,
and through a crack in the curtains
take a peep out at the street. -Wislawa Szymbroska
It’s National Poetry Month! Share the love.
HER
There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:
the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing
one leaf around an enormous house with columns,
on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck
equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.
There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes
or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.
How can the birds get a peep
or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?
But this morning is different,
only a soft clicking sound
and the low talk of two workmen working
on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.
Otherwise, all quiet for a change,
just the clicking of tiles being handled
and their talking back and forth in Spanish
then one of them asking in English
“What was her name?” and the silence of the other. – Billy Collins, Horoscopes for the Dead
art: American Gardeners by Ramiro Gomez, a spin on David Hockney’s American Collectors