No ideas but in things

Today (Frank O'Hara)

                       

   Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
   You really are beautiful! Pearls,
   harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
   the stuff they've always talked about

   still makes a poem a surprise!
   These things are with us every day
   even on beachheads and biers. They
   do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

just sayin'

the students are justified.  nyu is occupied.

(or at least was an hr ago when i walked past kimmel to the library)

every day should have a little bit of pablo neruda.

Meanwhile Indians are falling

into the sugared chasms

of the harbors, wrapped

for burial in the mist of the dawn:

a body rolls, a thing

that has no name, a fallen cipher,

a cluster of dead fruit

thrown down on the dump.

from The United Fruit Co. translated by Robert Bly

sharon olds thought this was, quote, a "super poem"

Working title: JULY

The night you were arrested at Food Not Bombs

I watched from across the street as the light

shifted the sky, as the red sign from the tire place

touched your skin, reddened it along

with the lights from their sirens.  I sat

with children who brought parents, and the parents

spoke in halting English to me until the children,

who were full of pity, translated.

You returned to my house without asking

hands dirty with food, sweat

I lay you down and took off my own clothes

placed my red bandana over your faced, wanted

you to smell me as I kissed you, fingers

over flesh followed by mouth.  It was summer,

but we did not sweat.  My lungs

filled with sea water, you arched

like a boat’s hull, and when your hands

moved to find me I was already there.

form: almost-haiku (missing one syllable at the end!)

she said “no one will

ever love you the way I

do.”  yeah, thank god.