"alfred" poems
In the last months of March 2014,
Soldier Othello the Moroccan moor
Was in Stratford-upon-Avon at the graveside
Of William Shakespeare the English bard,
He was observing the anniversary
Of Shakespeare and his European brother Cervantes,
He had in his pocket another charm and amulet
Given to him by his paternal grandfather,
This time round not a charm for love portion,
But a mystique totem to raise the dead from dusts,
As Othello himself has hitherto over-matured
Above the painful torture of *** with aristocrats,
He has left it for the Jewish aristotrash; Frantz Kafka,
Whose torturous appetite for *** with German women,
Was the sorriest eyesore of his thespic efforts.
Like Jesus at the grave of Lazarus
Othello groaned by shouting; William the son of John!
No response, he shouted again; Shakespeare the bard!
Then the mystique powers of Othello’s amulet
Electrified Shakespeare back to life,
What is your problem you black moor,
The ***** of Morocco, the soldier
Who beguiled Desdemona into betrothal,
Not because of glory of your work,
But due to charms of your love portion
Bequeathed to you by your witch mother,
What brings you to my sepulchre,
For only to perturbed my purgatorial peace,
What brings you!?
Questioned Shakespeare the bard.
Am no longer the moor, blackness is class
But not the race, as race is bankrupt,
I come here to salute you with good news,
That your European brother, Alfred Nobel,
Currently rewards thespic bards like you,
Whether black or white, blue or green,
The ***** bards from the natural forest,
He also rewards, so wake up and pick the prize!
Retorted Othello in virtue of truth,
And also tell me the native bricks
Of your beautiful architecture;
Where and how did you mold thy bricks?
Your brown English bricks that walled your culture;
***** clown, leapfrog, mercurial, oxymoron,
Falsitafity, Shyllocking, colleaguery and window,
Cauldron, graymalkin, woo, betroth, infatuation and so on.
From underneath his sepulcher Shakespeare broke
A violent gaggle of laughter as if he was ten English skeletons,
You Othello you are still a beautiful moor
Whose foolishness time has not condemned to oblivion,
You are as a fool as I created you ; I will only teach you
One brick, the window , that you go and put on
Your wind disturbed African huts,
Put the wind door on your hut,
And be flexible in your tongue
To give it English elegance
Combine and shorten wind and door
To get your cultural brick of; window !
Apr 11, 2014
Apr 11, 2014 at 9:39 AM UTC
En l’an trentiesme do mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues…
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
. . . . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit’s experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.
. . . . .
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s
10.6k
The beauty of comatose can only be seen through
the eyes of a wizard in a blizzard
strutting in garlic slippers,
or Christ with knees bent at the tabernacle
peeling bananas and kicking prayers
farther than eternity with each gapping second,
or like Basquiat slumped back to the wall,
with ounces of speedball dancing through his veins,
eating 80’s free-based fried chicken *******
as his eyelids paints beautiful nightmares of lemon flowers
and Bacchus bacon over a glycopyrrolate desert
of flagrant cuckold buffoonery.
Or like leprechauns burning chocolate ******* candles
on the mantle of Zion, sipping oatmeal sprinkled
with Staten Island malt liquor bacon.
or like Tupac reading the thoughts of Mother Shipton
through the daze of California cannabis
and hearing the ominous voice of Plutarch sing death assignments
from heaven to Assassins on horsebacks goggling ***** water
to wet the dry bones of their throats as they prepare to fulfill
the gospel of self-fulfilling prophecies of being fell by ***** bullets.
Or like sophisticated wallets of spice and kitchen characters in a bald head
cooking chemical kisses and 18 February nights under Moloch’s skin,
where constitutions are written in charcoal diaries with Egyptian ciphers and razors.
“I had rain sowed into the pockets of my sneakers and composed 1310 eulogies
at the basement of king David’s tower,” said the Kraftwerkian caricature,
as he dangles cigarettes in remembrance of Klaus Nomi and philosophizes on the proliferation
of poetic vandalism at urinals where modernism failed under the phosphorescence of coloration at the avenue of no trees where Picasso's "Guernica" **** Lies All.
Jul 17, 2012
Jul 17, 2012 at 6:01 PM UTC
“Angelica arguta”,
He shows her his wildflowers
“Angelica Susannah”, he says.
And prodded further by her
His heart.
Lingers briefly with the night;
Her affection has power,
But not enough
To keep him
From marching off to fight.
Tristan, son of One Stab,
Brings wildness from the mountains.
Lovely woman from the East,
Fascinated by her,
His passion.
Revels in her bridal bower,
And stops her
Loving any other.
Alfred, eldest son of his father,
Full of rectitude and romance.
Angelica abandoned,
Adrift between the mountains
Becalmed far from the sea.
He takes advantage,
Snatches her soul with riches,
But never captures
Her longing heart.
Years pass and one son gone,
The other lost and mad.
Year of the red grass and
Happiness found
Is felt too soon.
Tristan loves young Isabel,
But Angelica is his doom.
Yet only he survives
The waves that lash her shore,
“Like water in the ice,
She breaks them.”
And in the Spring,
Is gone once more.
Angelica Susannah is buried
Above the box canyon in the meadow
Among the many dead.
Near Samuel’s heart,
The executed Isabel,
And others who follow soon.
Until only Tristan remains,
Left to hunt his nemesis,
The bear inside him.
And dream of one wife lost,
And a lover left behind:
Angelica Susannah
Beside whom he should lie.
He is slain by the bear in Sixty-three,
After forty years of solitude.
And laid to rest in the plot
Between two women he loved,
Isabel, his ingenuous wife
And Susannah, his tragic love.
Do their spirits meet at last
And wander the golden fields,
Or ride out to bathe in the hot springs,
Under the moon of the falling leaves?
Aug 6, 2018
Aug 6, 2018 at 10:37 AM UTC
Except for the Nobel Peace Prize,
Which carries a hefty prize money,
No other Nobel Prize is given by the rich Norwegians,
Presented are the rest by the Swedish,
And the Norwegian award just the Nobel Peace Prize.
Alfred Nobel had died in the guilt,
The guilt of inventing such death.
Oct 18, 2016
Oct 18, 2016 at 6:46 AM UTC
I come from haunts of coot and hern;
I make a sudden sally;
I sparkle out among the fern
To bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
At last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I chatter over stony ways
In sharps and trebles;
I bubble into eddying bay;
I babble on the pebbles.
I chatter, chatter as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a ***** trout,
And here and there a grayling.
And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,
And draw them all along, and flow
To joing the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I steal by lawns and grassy plots;
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeams dance
Against my sandy shallows.
I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
~Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892~
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 31, 2012 at 9:24 AM UTC
“Top of the Morning to ‘Yuh, Guv’nuh.”
Oh, to be father of a
Cockney flower girl,
To be Eliza Doolittle’s
Dear old Dad,
Alfred P. of that surname.
Oh, to be a cockney dustman,
On this fine day,
Another fine day in
Northern New Mexico, as I
Sell my daughter to
‘Enery Iggins, or
Some equivalent
Princeton poofter.
I am Rhett Butler,
Daring blockade-runner,
Persona –non-grata
For any decent
Family—including my own,
Charleston Carolina.
In time, I crave
Social acceptance for
Bonnie Blue—my ill fated
Would-be equestrian offspring;
I surrender my daughter to the
Upper Class.
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 1:40 PM UTC
The Kraken
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
3.8k
“*who
would cry
being loved,
when even such tinkling
comes of the loving?*”
“Grasses” by Alfred Kreymborg
<•>
we all make lots of love
in the same way as billions of others
grunting huffing noises of neural tissues torn and reborn
but the notes and noises we make, keep, unique no one else’s
the bored and the low thinkers saying “honey, you just wrong,”
the tinkling sounds are the silent mitosis of cells splitting
and then rejoicing rejoining, definable only as unique
so we both weeping, side by side, only we together can
hear the sounds of our life becoming and being,
no one else quite can be so specific
you could be there and still not hear the heat of our love making
who
would cry
being loved,
by the creative silences we have just written?
we would. we do. we are the noisiest lovers ever. tinkling laughter. creating.
____________________________________
http://academyofamericanpoets.cmail19.com/t/ViewEmail/y/8D7DB5963FD3CE00/98E58011B0AFF2EF20B193FBA00ED1DB
Aug 19, 2018
Aug 19, 2018 at 2:38 PM UTC
Ring Out, Wild Bells
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkenss of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
3.4k
The forgotten gem among the precious
Your love is too dark for a child
Also precious
Yet pure like a diamond
Diamonds are so common
Garnet, you are rich
Richer than most in quality
Perhaps a banker or lawyer would remember you
But no, sapphires are rich
Richer than dull gold, not rich enough I say
You reach new depths, Garry
Like an ocean trench filled with the remains of the unknown's lunch
Not as deep as the amethyst, apparently
That is spiritually charged and better for the soul
Your violence is a stain, but I say it is a warning
Garnish, you lack value
Topaz is the quality they seek
The eye of the sun, so bright
Too bright
The eye of Jupiter is too much, I say enough
Oh Garnet
Forget Ruby, your sister
Forget Emerald, your opposite
Forget Opal, all in one, the God of the gems
You are Alfred the Great, so great, yet forgotten
Mar 16, 2016
Mar 16, 2016 at 4:31 PM UTC
His silhouette, as he stood by the stone,
Resembled a thoughtful Alfred Hitchcock
With fine cane in hand, slightly stooped
Fingers from his free hand, touching lightly
The carefully carved grey marbled stone
Lost in thought and dying sunshine
A single tear falls, as he smiles
Then cane in hand, turns, walks away
Carrying the name on the stone with him.
Mar 21, 2015
Mar 21, 2015 at 10:12 AM UTC
[Being an humble address to Her Majesty's Naval advisers, who sold Nelson's old flagship to the Germans for a thousand pounds.]
WHO says the Nation's purse is lean,
Who fears for claim or bond or debt,
When all the glories that have been
Are scheduled as a cash asset?
If times are bleak and trade is slack,
If coal and cotton fail at last,
We've something left to barter yet--
Our glorious past.
There's many a crypt in which lies hid
The dust of statesman or of king;
There's Shakespeare's home to raise a bid,
And Milton's house its price would bring.
What for the sword that Cromwell drew?
What for Prince Edward's coat of mail?
What for our Saxon Alfred's tomb?
They're all for sale!
And stone and marble may be sold
Which serve no present daily need;
There's Edward's Windsor, labelled old,
And Wolsey's palace, guaranteed.
St. Clement Danes and fifty fanes,
The Tower and the Temple grounds;
How much for these? Just price them, please,
In British pounds.
You hucksters, have you still to learn,
The things which money will not buy?
Can you not read that, cold and stern
As we may be, there still does lie
Deep in our hearts a hungry love
For what concerns our island story?
We sell our work -- perchance our lives,
But not our glory.
Go barter to the knacker's yard
The steed that has outlived its time!
Send hungry to the pauper ward
The man who served you in his prime!
But when you touch the Nation's store,
Be broad your mind and tight your grip.
Take heed! And bring us back once more
Our Nelson's ship.
And if no mooring can be found
In all our harbours near or far,
Then tow the old three-decker round
To where the deep-sea soundings are;
There, with her pennon flying clear,
And with her ensign lashed peak high,
Sink her a thousand fathoms sheer.
There let her lie!
3.2k
Abbie hailed a yellow top cabbie
Brenda had a sister in-law named Glenda
Cate ran late on her first date
Delly ate seven bowls of lemon jelly
Edwina drove to the town of Catalina
Fran burnt her finger on the very hot frying pan
Gwen had a strong yen to go and see her aunty Jen
Hope bought her husband a towing rope
Isobel fell under the magician's spell
Joann took her mother on a holiday in a caravan
Kylie went to the dentist with her brother Wylie
Lesley liked listening to Elvis Presley
Marcia enjoyed eating a freshly baked focaccia
Nell saw a turtle coming out of his shell
Olga lived at the top end of the river Volga
Primrose had a Pinocchio nose
Queenie knitted a multicolored beanie
Ruth could never tell the whole truth
Stacey loved playing dress ups with her friend Tracey
Tilly behavior was always rather silly
Una bought a house in the suburb of Yagonna
Verity wanted to be a well known celebrity
Winifred never stopped taking about Alfred
Xena was presented with a court subpoena
Yale told her teacher a tall tale
Zealand ventured out into the bushland
Aug 25, 2013
Aug 25, 2013 at 8:30 AM UTC
Mariana in the Moated Grange
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The **** sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!"
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!"
3k
alfred burnt the cakes forgot that they were there
all he saw was smoke rising in the air.
every cake was burnt everything was gone
burnt down to a crisp he was left with none.
this is what they say about this famous king
for such a famous ruler such a silly thing
Apr 4, 2015
Apr 4, 2015 at 8:37 AM UTC
Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he's not like Tennyson.
I'd rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.
2.2k
There once was a zombie named Alfred,
Who couldn't believe he was dead.
But brains desired,
Common sense backfired.
So he did as the gruesome dead.
Jun 23, 2013
Jun 23, 2013 at 9:43 PM UTC
The look of sane
and perfect skin
Comes your way
well within
Take the step
but don't look down
Vertigo spinning
Madness sound
Beauty kills
with steps of cold
Off the edge
boldness goes
Insanity sinks
the devilish plot
Watch again
Alfred Hitchcock
Jul 13, 2015
Jul 13, 2015 at 3:21 PM UTC
On my usual flight
from Dallas to Boston,
I saw her,
a perfect belle
a white summer dress
red roses in print
Alfred Dunner perhaps?
Lips pouting,vermillion red
delicate nose, dark sun glass
a Gucci, I could see,
scent of Nina Ricci perfume
reached my nose
"Lucky lady", I told myself.
Me in modest clothes
wondered how happy she was,
sure as looks do tell;
diamond ring
perfectly poised,
commuting to work place
has a good job for sure!
On a sudden impulse
glanced at her face,
and was just in time to see
large drops of tears
slide lazily
from behind the dark glasses
roll over the cheeks
and fall on the lap,
and then another
and another.
Yet she sat still
faintest tremor on the lips
I imagined a volcano
erupting in her heart.
I looked at my faded skirt
and closed my eyes,
wondering, wondering;
joy and sorrow
elusive indeed,
where do they strike
how do they ****
Jun 18, 2014
Jun 18, 2014 at 10:10 PM UTC
There is, one supposes, a certain nobility
In simply carrying on with the whole **** thing,
Though that assumes some epiphany,
Some clawing toward grace, or at least common decency.
He had, in some once upon a time,
Cast his lot with a better class of people, so to speak;
It had not ended well, though,
In line with how such things are resolved,
His fall not a spectacular, tempestuous thing,
But a gradual, veiled affair, not a fiery spectacle
With metaphorical medals cut away, epaulets stripped,
But a shaded silence, a shrouded yet palpable shunning.
And so he is here, in this fading little city
Perched forlornly on the banks of a nondescript little river,
Having taken an apartment above a pair of offices
(One occupied by a seemingly ancient and disinterested lawyer,
The other by an ostensible private investigator)
Which is sufficiently large and reasonably warm
Come the seemingly perpetual winter.
He lives, if not in such a manner
As he was once accustomed to, comfortably enough:
He has his practice, and an adjunct position
At the little cow college down the road in Alfred,
And there are the occasional women,
Sad divorcees marooned in this hill country,
Dewy-eyed undergraduates unable to discern
Suit coats that are a bit shabby and somewhat passe
(There is a haberdasher in Buffalo whose garments
Are in the neighborhood of up-to-snuff,
And he could certainly manage a trip
Down to New York for better tailoring,
Though he would be traveling in places and circles
Where he is not remembered fondly.)
Stepping outside, he encounter snowflakes,
Light and unprepossessing,
But he studies the sky anxiously, apprehensively
(One learns that he must pay Nature its due fealty in these climes,
And give into the primal, the instinctual)
For he knows what can transpire
When the wind blows off the big lake out west just so,
Turning innocuous flurries into a malevolent blankness,
Making the landscape inscrutable, alien, utterly terrifying.
Aug 7, 2018
Aug 7, 2018 at 10:01 AM UTC