The greatest poem I ever wrote
was the note I left to a future friend,
a wish, I hoped, that would project
my hopeful mind, and sense of depth.

The greatest thought I ever spared
a future in a dream I'd shared.
A piece within a scene complete,
the place where mind and spirit meet.

The greatest step I ever took,
to take the time enough to look,
to raid my thoughts and scour my mind,
and on my trail my friend I find.

The greatest friend I ever knew.
The friend a thousand times consumed.
By glowing screen and jingling bell.
My friend, I wish, would be myself.

To me it's strange, the way they speak.
The poets of the ivory peaks.
The ivory's gone, but it's some other thing
I can't afford. That luck won't bring.

Their words are nonsense, their tales obscure,
and I endure
strange sentences and structures
to be a part, and perhaps procure
an understanding of the
heavy handed
application of articulation.
The inebriation of contemplation
of words and rhymes.
Perhaps it will come to me in time.

It is the story of my life.
An unavoidable,
like pain, like light.
The door is open, the hands invite
but the hearts are frozen, with hands that write
about love and romance, pain and longing
where is the tale of the brothers belonging
and sisters working the marathon strings
of shifts to pay to raise a child.
The horrors of a society gone wild.

Where is the working class writer of poems
the wordsmith trained on the limited knowing
where is the voice of those rarely heard?
Where are their stories? Where are their words?

I don't care what other people think,
the only opinion I need is my own.
And I form it in the echo chambers
of my cold and lonely home.

I don't trust what other people say.
I've been hurt by everyone I've known.
People are mostly out for themselves.
I'm better off working alone.

People don't listen when I talk.
Don't hear my dreams and fears.
And when I share the things I think,
people often disappear.

And when I give a friend advice
and they don't do what I say,
well how can I help my friends through life?
I don't know another way.

People and I have nothing in common.
They don't understand my pain.
I used to want people around me,
but now I just move away.

Please feel free to leave some critical feedback on the poem.

This is poem written by Lisel Mueller (according to google). I just wanted to share it because I couldn't find it on here and it's one of my favourite poems ever.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

I'd rather be with friends
than on the receiving end
of another certification
of my value in the tainted nation
fated to find its way back to masters
who offer no explanation
as to why they cast this draining paper
into a world that could be castless
if only we checked our own behaviour.

I'd rather be with friends
than working on a promised future
my abuser talking of a nuisance youth
and pointing fingers saying 'useless'
while they stuff us into suits
and boots that bare no resemblance
to the feet that marked our ascendance,
I seek not vengeance for the things we lost
I simply wish to reduce the cost
of being what we've become
cold and lost
and to continue what we've begun
to press on despite the cost and animosity
and all the atrocities
despite this we strive to build a world
that tempers its ferocity
and lets me be.

With friends.

I have found them, once or twice.
A search that lasts for all my life.
Sorrow comes from such small numbers.
But the finding happens more as I wander.

I have found them. They have spoken.
They are aliens, but not from space.
Solar silence they have broken.
Voice of sunshine, ray of hope in this darkened world.
To light a path, or a hurtful past. I climb my way out at last.

I have found them.
They surround when
I call out into the night.
When I am truthful, when I set right
the seating of my heart
the beating tears apart
a door that stood for all of time, the eternity of the past.
And now the cold is in
it's this thing, it's fast.
Like crystal lightening,
it's heightening my senses,
and numbing the frightening memories of past offences.

I have found them, my forlorn friends.
My fickle feelings.
Their weary voices, honest.
An echo still believing.
Together we talked, words held forever.
I have found them.
And never will they leave me.

When water became water, not lemon and lime,
I drank for the pleasure, not to pass time.

When bread became bread, not pizza and cake,
I'm hearing my stomach, and it needs a break.

When danger becomes danger, not fear on a screen,
I stopped checking corners for foes unseen.

When fire becomes fire, not mirrors and smoke,
my friends sit together, and nurture our hope.

When food becomes famine, and future unknown,
we'll treasure our friends, instead of our homes.