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Chase Graham Nov 2014
Leaving Minnesota on train or buses,
crowded and alone, were you fearful
to sleep on couches and of the Village
people with a rhapsody of dreams

and cacophony of chords, under rain
and sewer stank was it hard,
to step inside and play
the first time for glistening eyes
and stage lights and to let melody
escape your belly-throat

for them, or did you know
more, that words can sculpt
delicacy as smooth
as Donatello and that life can be bought
without wrinkled greens and pressed

threads? Walking under a hard-rain
of assumption and change, did Greenwich
birth a demon-sadness, so you hid
your neck beneath collars and dark
glasses and smoky rhyme, when the ship

comes in will you be onboard or escape
to Louisiana, misunderstood, working
a river boat after you give Lennon
a puff and Warhol a tight-fist?

Did sad-eyed Sara send you back
leather spanish boots or forget,
and was Christ able to mend that
broken love, and did you later kick his idiot
wind away and in 2009 on stage when I could
see emptiness and heartbreak
hidden underneath your creased stetson,
were you still singing
it ain't me, babe?
Said The Raven
To The Raven
Which Raven are you?


I said The Raven
Am The Raven
Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.


And I said The Raven
Am The Raven
Of Edgar Allan Poe.


Apparently there's a rave on -
Shall we go?


Yes - let us go then you and I
As the evening is spread out
Against the sky.


But not like a patient
Etherised upon a table.


Let us like Thunderbirds
Not gentle go into this dark night.


So dressed in sable
White gloves
And whistles
They went on their way -
Not looking forward
To conversations about
Michelangelo at all.


For as we all know
Old age should rave and burn
At close of day.
And not just fizzle out.


More big shout...........................................


And rave until you fall.
Both Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge did both write poems called The Raven. The latter's is one of the most dispiriting and disconcerting pieces of vindictive revenge in the English language.T S Eliot and Dylan Thomas did write poems called The Love Song of J Alfred Purfrock and Do Not Gentle Go Into That Good Night respectively and lines from both poems appear here in various guises. If you know niether both would make most anthologies of 20th century poetry.

And honestly white gloves and whistles were common on the rave scene in the early days.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
The plane is emotion.
The form is a gentle rider,
she pushes bullets off cliffs, she hugs the stars.
Catches the moon eyeing her with one
great big hand wrapped on its ****;
spins the bell of her dress
round and round.

Sifted from the Earth, man moody
cleft in heaps of his entrails,

no progress has been made.

My metal mother pulls hula hoops for zulu,
she rips down the shelves and pulls
Bobby Dylan from the wall. She says,
"grrrplleeopzhrka." And the smoke gets into
my eyes and burns my nostrils too.

In the great wind screen, footprints of man,
Native American blood weeps on my bright
Summer burning, no regency cleared. The
outlook denied. It sits stagnant, maddening
with its blockhead on sideways. Heavy, old
mutter hubbard wilting gold in her stare.

Mess comes. She spoils, her skin is loud
and anointed, her fecund white placard
is thinner than air. People look at each other,
a goblin, two trollops, the green woolen winter-wear
of a soldier in despair. Only a putrid noon, escaping,
cuts the flesh from the garden. Cuts out all the weakness,
the hope, the love, every thing owned, every one cleared.

The skin trap and oyster flap. The rich mixture of voices,
nothing holds common that bond, that few could look upon,
that youth could-

none of the old things work anymore.

Just a wicked boredom trickling in blood down her legs, just
the lust trickling down her legs, dear mommy, I obey.
And when the summer months set in mahogany, and the icicle
feat swallows us up, dear-
death
Winter
lips
moths buzzing
mouths
fuzzz
your sweet bomb
bon bon
Sean Flaherty Apr 2014
I want this to be about you, 
But it's not

It resides in the hours
That I spent wide awake
When I couldn't sleep so I smoked
And I couldn't dream so I wrote
What I hoped I'd see

For the metaphors 
I couldn't keep churning out
So I smoked some more
And I spurted out
Lines about lines

For the driver on the dented highway
With the window cracked
To feel the chills of the air blowing past
Listening to Bob Dylan tell her
The person she was supposed to be but
Never was
And never will

I want this to tell you how I feel,
But it won't

And if she drives far enough she'll reach that
Looming exit
The one she knows she must take
Back to the life she's sick of living
But fights through the pain
For the same reasons that I
Fight through, because
I want to meet a pretty girl
With great vocabulary,
And a smile like Rita Heyworth

I'm still looking for that girl
To drive me across that highway
And recycle old Dylan lines
As if they were personal dictums
She had synthesized herself
And we can freewheel this road together

See I'll never be that great poet that
Three hundred and twenty-nine thousand people
Have watched on the Internet
And that is a comfort

Because the truth resists simplicity
And in my heart of hearts I am a simple man
And telling the truth through words in meter
Or in stanzas
Will never come as naturally to me
As it does to Dylan
But in my acceptance of my ignorance
I become more powerful
Than I'd ever need to be 
Poetic.

So if writing is always my hobby
And never my workhorse
If I can self-satisfy through 
Strict stanzas that I will
Seldom share
If it is only to a girl 
Driving on a highway
Singing songs about formerly-modern America that I
Recite these rehearsed thoughts of mine
Than I will have succeeded

Because my career will have been love
And maybe I can write this 
About you.
And then, and only then, it will be.
Again, years old.
But different. I wrote this... almost like people write in their diary.
The Genesis of the Queen.
The day I knew I was a poet.
Steven Fortune Apr 2014
I tried to be cordial with inactivity
washing it with weeping juice like a pardoned effigy
but the diamonds of determination were so wrapped in mind debris
that I threw away a fortune in potential

The smiles of the platitudes are louder than their laughs
An appeasing of their attitudes I warrant with the gaffes
of an undertaker's underling bestowing upon epitaphs
another deadened and deprived credential

Seeing days in ways that never did occur to me
Every end a mending by default, a sour recipe
for compromise eroding in a rusty *** of empathy


The dentist rubbed his fingers when he saw my gritted teeth
No sermon on the mount from me, more a mumble on the heath
My incisor is a tack that would support a giant's wreath
Thorns of novocaine will numb my Christmas wish

For the sake of universal order I will freeze a yawn
Mostly harmless said a hitchhiker of Earth so I can spawn
a batch of clones to live on hold where all the battle lines are drawn
I'll zip up and in the universal order I'll languish

Seeing nights in ways that never did occur to me
Every satellite a telecast of fault, a sour recipe
for sleeping juice to boil over in Big Dipper's empathy


Where's a pound of flesh when needed? I've grown tired of these ribs
On the grill of soggy marrow, hungry haunts will have first dibs
Call on William Blake to send the weepers to their cribs
Wishful thinking I'll preserve beneath the floorboards

With a hand in nothing new and an incisor in the usual
intestine chains surround my motivation's hot pursual
Don't read too much into my implied acceptance of a dual
with a messenger of fact's implicit hoards

Seeing days in ways that never did occur to me
Every end a mending by default, a sour recipe
for compromise eroding in an empty *** of sympathy


Sound the bugle for my bed is made, I'm rested for detention
Solitaire I'll play in my confinement for the crime of sought attention
I revolted the philosophers in plugging my intention
I would not concede that lab rats had it worse

The satellites are full and bright, the shadows walk on lakes tonight
I'll dream of sleep but eyes will play me in my bedroom's voided sight
Lay with me and sigh and the elastic laws of nature might
halt the quivering continuum of fate's forsaken course

Seeing nights in ways that never did occur to me
Every channel plays the same old cooking show's ensoured recipe
Compromise a minor seasoning in liver-flavoured empathy


04 15 14
There may be a couple of spelling errors...the rhyme scheme was inspired by Dylan's Tombstone Blues, and the title was inspired by another Dylan song, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  I tried to capture a bit of his rambly style as well.

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