"ought" poems
What is the hardest part
Of being alone?
It's the quietness,
A stillness making
What ought have been a home-
a house.
It's filled with beds,
But those lover's nests
Are Empty.
And the thought is
As occupying as a dream.
A dream you cannot feel
Because the loneliness is keeping you awake
With no one to hold down your fears
And keep you safe.
Sep 27, 2011
Sep 27, 2011 at 11:45 PM UTC
Tap, tap, tap on your little device
Do you wish to hear my insightful advice?
Look up, not down
Take a walk into town.
Throw your phone away,
you won't need it today.
Appreciate the yellows, greens, and blues
Mother Nature won't mind if you use her bed for a snooze.
Tap, tap, tap on your useless device
You ought to hear my insightful advice.
Stop damaging your eyes
There's a much bigger prize.
Be wholly alive and tough,
You'll be dead soon enough.
Jul 30, 2015
Jul 30, 2015 at 10:44 PM UTC
#*It's at the point of desperation that the soul finds its deepest desire,
and in that desire lies everything of which true life is made.
Perhaps the first and central question concerning surrender
ought not to be, “What am I willing to give to God?”
but “What am I willing to receive from Him?”
For it's only in the realization that I have nothing to give Him and
He has everything to give me that true humility and surrender come.
If I would simply receive all He offers me and let Him fill me up
I would have no room in my hands to hold onto anything else.
But how often it is that we won't receive it until everything else is lost.
It's the secret and inexpressible dreams of the soul
which are the hardest things of all to let go and the last to go.
When they are finally gone we have nothing left to run to but Him,
and when we do we find that He is the beginning,
the end and the center of every secret dream.
Ah, blessed Peniel—that mysterious and holy ground
where heartache collides head-on with romance,
that deep and shadowed land where we struggle
with God and with men and we overcome,
that painful yet glorious place which we may leave limping
with a wrenched hip but we do not care, for we have seen God’s face—
like Jacob, may we not pass you by without being forever changed.*#
Jul 2, 2016
Jul 2, 2016 at 2:06 PM UTC
There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.
23.7k
#*It's at the point of desperation that the soul finds its deepest desire,
and in that desire lies everything of which true life is made.
Perhaps the first and central question concerning surrender
ought not to be, “What am I willing to give to God?”
but “What am I willing to receive from Him?”
For it's only in the realization that I have nothing to give Him and
He has everything to give me that true humility and surrender come.
If I would simply receive all He offers me and let Him fill me up
I would have no room in my hands to hold onto anything else.
But how often it is that we won't receive it until everything else is lost.
It's the secret and inexpressible dreams of the soul
which are the hardest things of all to let go and the last to go.
When they are finally gone we have nothing left to run to but Him,
and when we do we find that He is the beginning,
the end and the center of every secret dream.
Ah, blessed Peniel—that mysterious and holy ground
where heartache collides head-on with romance,
that deep and shadowed land where we struggle
with God and with men and we overcome,
that painful yet glorious place which we may leave limping
with a wrenched hip but we do not care, for we have seen God’s face—
like Jacob, may we not pass you by without being forever changed.*#
Nov 14, 2015
Nov 14, 2015 at 12:48 AM UTC
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my *******
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
17.4k
(for Christopher Isherwood)
Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasure She bestows.
*** is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.
Lifted off the *****
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.
Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.
All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers' lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.
Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.
Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.
Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-notish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.
(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)
Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.
13.9k
During one of my recent internet travels,
I came across a picture of a “minor”,
posing with tinted lips
and exposed *******
What got my eyes
pinned were the thousand number of likes
by virtually hooting “boys”
and comments by other group of “gentlemen”
telling her how to dress.
HUMILITY: I have been asked to repeat the word
too many times to recall what it means:
the man on the subway cat-called
and accused me of showing too much skin
but instead of fighting back, I smiled
because girls ought to be nice.
I have been taught to survive
by using my body as a swiss army knife,
and I convince myself that
there is protection in being polite.
H-U-M-I-I am forgetting the rest.
The smoke curled up from between his fingers
and he blew out toxic, blurring my vision.
I gasped and wheezed
but I held my sneeze,
I cannot slap him across his face. HUMILITY.
So, I just pretended to cough, hoping he’ll feel ashamed.
I have been trained to flutter my eyelash,
clench my jaw at a whiplash
and business school boys,
who manifest success by refusing to take “NO” for an answer.
And for every time his prying eyes
scan down by body,
as if rating my inexperienced assets on a scale of one to five,
and every time his touch trails a chill down my spine,
I wonder:
Male kindness is so alien to us; we confuse it with seduction every time.
HUMILITY: the quality of having a low view of one’s importance
but, I fail to understand
when did it become synonymous to diffidence;
there is a subtle difference between
papercuts and shattered integrity,
holding hands and chaining souls,
building houses and creating homes,
humiliation rotting down to bones and humility.
HUMILITY, have you spelled it too many times to know what it looks like?
Sep 15, 2014
Sep 15, 2014 at 9:59 AM UTC
Just be real friend.
Be who you are,
and where you are at.
That's enough,
and it's the only way
forward.
Most of us have put on enough masks
in our life time,
to have completely forgotten
our original face.
We've become far too clad
with the heavy coats of expectation,
suffocating under the weight
of the ways we think we ought to be.
You can drop that garb.
There's always mystery
at the naked core of who you are,
and that's just fine.
It's not that we must rediscover
some definable self,
and hand that image over
for validation.
Rather, those solid definitions we
cart around with us
are heavy enough as it is,
but we've continued pushing them
despite the distress.
We've gotten so used
to that awkward play
of needing to be a somebody,
as if that somebody
were other than
who we already are.
We've forgotten how to let go
with all the spontaneity
of a flowers growth;
forgotten the beauty
of our own personal bloom.
That we are a fluid sweep
of light and dark.
That our faces,
like the moons,
wax and wane.
You don't have to be any which way,
other than the way you are.
That sort of self acceptance
is the innate flourish,
is the fluid self cycle,
is the way back into life.
Don't fool yourself
into believing
there is a better disguise.
Strip down to the bare beauty
of your authentic state
in this moment,
and move from there.
Mar 21, 2014
Mar 21, 2014 at 3:05 PM UTC
I use to write of pain and tribulation
mmm I've always just been looking to feel the greatest sensation
senses at peaks, they peak when they peek at the sight of elation
I've always taken to sealing all my stories away
in notebooks with binding finally looking to fray
because the pressure they hold brings such a dismay
Binded in between faded blue lines
I swear im fine
I swear im fine
in these lines of what could have been mine
and I'll lose it all in this glass of wine
where red bleeds to black
and I've done away with that
The great purge of endless words
heard by no one other than the mad man
running through my head screaming that I can
do anything I thought my mind and limbs had banned
from the realm of possibilities
Because pain ought not be sealed to live an endless life
So I now write of hope and dreams
and the endless possibilites
that stretch from the cities and into the trees
finally dancing down into these seas
but I'm also writing
of wishes and laughs and smiles too
because what else can you do
there are only a few
who know everything is new
everything we knew
can be lost in the great blue
that paints our skies and seas
carrying away the bundle of keys
that locks pandora's box
and leaves us with happiness and cheer
Because happiness can be carried in anything as simple as a tear
racing down the lines of your cranial
that houses your greatest fears
From the lines of light blue to the minds of the hopeful and the true
And words of optimism should live
And breathe and smile and laugh
In the hearts of the world for a lifetime and I digress
In a habitat so vast
With horizons reaching from sky to sky
Drowned in blues and red
I'm glad to of found you at last
We're left to defy all that society presents as lies
I wanna speak at an intimate decibel
Acknowledge your flaws, don't be bound by them
Open your mouth to nothing coming own
Settle down in your head and make a home
I just want to compliment your soul
Jun 19, 2014
Jun 19, 2014 at 6:28 PM UTC
Oh Language, where hast thou hid thyself?
Thy once-bright spires decline to dust.
The calm, well-reasoned flow of wisdom
a bygone memory. I’ll not trust
these tween-to-twenty-something’s prattle;
endless babble of self-absorption
centered in pleasure-maximizing:
narcissistic thought-abortion.
Dude—they’re SO not app’ed for language
used by dad ten years ago.
I’m totally DONE with their, like, verbiage
They’re all: Smartphone Teenage Show.
It’s just, like, TALKING—without words
in language ghettos; texting proud . . .
Their lack of precision offends my brain—
They ought to be ashamed (out loud).
Vygotsky’s vaunted Z.P.D,
and Bakhtin’s heteroglossic crack
along with Roland Barthe’s pet parrot
Are SO like totally talking smack.
Oct 4, 2015
Oct 4, 2015 at 3:00 PM UTC
Remember all you see each day
All the things that are around you and
Keep close to all the friends you have
in the bubble that surrounds you
Simple gestures, little things
The stuff that's out of sight, most days
it flows on by without a look
in the bubble that surrounds you
Don't ever take for granted anything you have and hold
It's only through respect and love, that straw can turn to gold
You're my first though in the morning dear, up with the rising son
You're the last thing that I think about, when the moon says day is done
I never say "I love you" dear
not as much as I guess I should do
After time it is an unsaid thing
although you know I still do
A gentle kiss upon the lips as you are on your way
forgotten in the winds of time, but just enough to say
the words now left unspoken as we trundle through our life
Now, a touch, or look's "I love you for saying yes to be my wife"
Breathing, seeing, hearing things
the smell of coffee brewing
things we never think about
and vows that need renewing
There'll be a day when I wake up
And you just might not be there
If I don't treat you like I ought to now
I have to show you that I care
Don't ever take for granted anything you have and hold
It's only through respect and love, that straw can turn to gold
You're my first though in the morning dear, up with the rising son
You're the last thing that I think about, when the moon says day is done
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 5:40 PM UTC
How to start writing
How to keep writing
Write, write, write
Writing
Pick a subject for writing
Make sure you reference your writing
Write, write, write
Keep writing
This amount of words for writing
Plus or minus 100 word max leeway for writing
Write, write, write
Still writing
Quotes in your writing
Punctuation for writing
Write, write, write
Writing
Title for writing
Page numbers for writing
Underline, paragraph, CAPITALISE
Your writing
Margin your writing
Spell check your writing
Re write, research, rephrase
Your writing
Is this your writing?
Question your writing
Read
Hate
***** up
Start again
Your writing
Check your writing
Get a friend to check your writing
Panic, stress, just write
Your writing
****** writing
This will do, writing
Print, bind, hand in
Your writing
Write some more as you sign off your writing
Sigh
Feel sick
Crash
Sleep
Writing
Wait, wait, wait
Wait for someone to read your writing
Judge your writing
Mark your writing
Wait, wait, wait
Receive your writing
Read another's writing about your writing
Their writing, writing about your writing
To write whether the words in your writing are good writing
Therefore RIGHT writing
Or
Infact writing that ought not to have been written in the first place.
Now tell me
From this writing
And writing
And writing
And more writing
How do you write the words that you now want to be written?
Sep 4, 2018
Sep 4, 2018 at 7:09 PM UTC
Feel empty in your post apocalyptic City of Angels,
Where not even your pets are real!
An electric android, a sheep or a frog,
The whir-flutter of micro-electrical wings of a butterfly.
Good, and so you ought.
Now grab the handles of your empathy box,
And in a shared virtual hallucination –
Feel: empathy, depression, pain, delusion and despair,
The outré myriad gifts of consciousness.
Billions of discombobulated and disconnected wrecks:
Adam's sons; Eve's daughters,
And among them simulations too,
Fakes! androids!
A phony circuit of implanted semi-conscious memories,
A hive of neural malaise!
Welcome to our world;
know how dead inside I am.
You, yes, you:
Need a pet to make you more complete?
Maybe you can afford
A Fake Fakir Flake like me who looks like Jude Law,
Sounds like Richard Burton,
And silently romances you like Rudolph Valentino.
Come and stick what’s left of your mind,
In here,
In hair,
Hear her:
har, har, har…
A box of lies...
A voice, Mercer's,
With texture from an age you neither lived in nor dared in:
Al Jerry's, a TV actor,
Droning on in pre-selected tones.
The real thing, the men, the women, the children - their animals -
Made in the wild, wild desert,
In the green pulsing savannah,
On the open crusted sea;
Now too, washed, choked, and drained,
Too many spliced and diced mutations,
Iterating your image:
The thing that was my heart,
My Child, now its imitation.
Oct 15, 2017
Oct 15, 2017 at 7:42 AM UTC
Gemma~: Autres Temps, Autres Vertus~~
A young girl, so innocent, so new,
Cheerful and happy in any place,
Sat alone in her room, beneath the argent glow of the moon
And whispered to the jewels that glittered the sky
“I am beautiful, I am me.”
Now that she's older, the world around her has become colder.
As she sits in her bed, beneath the lunar glare,
Silver turns to red,
While she whispers to her familiar jewels
“Am I beautiful, am I me?”
The moons go by, and her jewels remain ever changeless.
This time she stands on a chair, illuminated by the metallic gleam of the moon she held so dear
With one last breath and one last glance, arms wide open, she whispers
“I want to be beautiful, I want to be you,”
And welcomes death.
The moon continued through its phases, and the stars stayed their course.
He sits alone in her room, in the argent glow of the moon
And whispers to her jewels that glitter the sky
***“To me, you were always beautiful, to me you were always you.
There is no one to blame, but the world who ought to hang her head in shame.”***
Mar 9, 2015
Mar 9, 2015 at 8:11 PM UTC
Did you ever love someone and know they didn't love you?
Did you ever feel like crying and wonder what good it would do?
Did you ever look into his eyes and say a little prayer?
Did you ever look into his heart and wish you were there?
Did you ever whisper, "God, I love him". And never say a word?
Please don't fall in love my friend, you'll see it doesn't pay.
Although it causes broken hearts, it happens everyday.
Love is fun, but it hurts so bad, the price you pay is high.
If i could choose between love or death, i think i'd rather die.
so, i say to you my friend, don't fall in love, you'll be hurt before it's through.
You see my friend, i ought to know, i fell in love with you.
Apr 3, 2013
Apr 3, 2013 at 5:23 PM UTC
*I ponder of something great
My lungs will fill and then deflate
They fill with fire
Exhale desire
I know it's dire
My time today
I have these thoughts
So often I ought
To replace that slot
With what I once bought
'Cause somebody stole
My car radio
And now I just sit in silence
Sometimes quiet is violent
I find it hard to hide it
My pride is no longer inside
It's on my sleeve
My skin will scream
Reminding me of
Who I killed inside my dream
I hate this car that I'm driving
There's no hiding for me
I'm forced to deal with what I feel
There is no distraction to mask what is real
I could pull the steering wheel
I have these thoughts
So often I ought
To replace that slot
With what I once bought
'Cause somebody stole
My car radio
And now I just sit in silence
I ponder of something terrifying
'Cause this time there's no sound to hide behind
I find over the course of our human existence
One thing consists of consistence
And it's that we're all battling fear
Oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here
Oh my,
Too deep
Please stop thinking
I liked it better when my car had sound
There are things we can do
But from the things that work there are only two
And from the two that we choose to do
Peace will win
And fear will lose
There's faith and there's sleep
We need to pick one please because
Faith is to be awake
And to be awake is for us to think
And for us to think is to be alive
And I will try with every rhyme
To come across like I am dying
To let you know you need to try to think
I have these thoughts
So often I ought
To replace that slot
With what I once bought
'Cause somebody stole
My car radio
And now I just sit in silence
I ponder of something great
My lungs will fill and then deflate
They fill with fire
Exhale desire
I know it's dire
My time today
I have these thoughts
So often I ought
To replace that slot
With what I once bought
'Cause somebody stole
My car radio
And now I just sit in silence*
Aug 25, 2014
Aug 25, 2014 at 10:13 PM UTC
1
What my brother-in-law said to me:
*Hey, bro…glad to talk to you…
I’m flying in all the way from Canada
in 30 days’ time…yeah, whole family
Wife and the 3 kids
Hey, you ought to get leave for a week –
we’ll stay in your place,
and you can drive us about Victoria…
it’s really my sis and you we want to see…
Yeah, get back to me after you speak
to the people at your workplace*
2
What I told my brother-in-law:
*I asked my boss,
and he said leave’s not possible…
He needs me to be at work
says he can’t manage without me*
What my brother-in-law said back to me:
*Oh, we’ll try my wife’s side then
You know, the ones who live in Mauritius
We’d really like to see them…*
3
What actually happened
Well, to be honest,
I asked my boss for the week off
and he said:
*You’ve let so much work hang for so long
you’d need a whole year to finish
Let me make it plain, you shirker:
This year, you get NO days off*
And I shook his hands enthusiastically,
and I said to him:
Thanks, boss – I knew I could always count on you
...and now I've got my bro-in-law languishing in Canada - and my boss, my colleagues tell me, feeling perplexed in his office...
Oct 1, 2012
Oct 1, 2012 at 3:14 AM UTC
732
She rose to His Requirement—dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—
If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold
In using, wear away,
It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and ****
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—
8.7k
Time is moving
In a stream of wonderous murderous intending, sacrificing sadness,
My ****** devotion, ought to shed blood in a distorted dark was but an perishable spring dream, looping without an end through nights,
On sleepless nights, the ghosts of the past gets stuck within a river of pure thoughts, a lake birthing memories in secret, subsconsciously,
Discard your common sense, sacrifice your sanity for just this second,
When the moon stands high in the sky, a bonfire seals the nights start
To its creeping shadows, they do not crackor sparkle under the twinkling stars of this celestial ceiling of pure majesty for nyctophiles,
Even our natural satelite agrees, dying itself into a lunatic scarlet red,
Darkness upon darkness, with layers of shadows overlapping one another as the light begins to dim, thanks to the disappearing moon,
An imaginated landscape, created from only pure rage and fury,
But whereabouts of the heart, are likely to be lost to the thought of love I carry within a broken chest of treasury, losing all emotions,
Even if my scarlet eyes were to be losing their ability yet to see,
I would be able to count on you to guide me, through the everlasting,
The dream I awoken from, was a moonlit night turning crimson, losing its radiance through the soft eclipse of the moon, gently, slowly
But you were there, within the far away landscape drawn in my heart
~ Umi
Mar 30, 2018
Mar 30, 2018 at 7:36 PM UTC
They say home is where the heart is
I think they're right
But they don't tell you
that you don't just feel the hole it leaves
When you're alone at night
Home is not a hole that can be filled easily
And the constant little reminders really get to me
Like looking at the hills
Where mountains ought to be
I left my heart in Colorado
With my friends and family
There I had my first kiss
And I learned how to read
Learned to ride a bike
And how to climb a tree
A lifetime of memories
Eight hundred miles away
I guess you can say
I'm feeling a bit homesick today.
Aug 31, 2014
Aug 31, 2014 at 2:30 AM UTC
“What do you think
The bravest drink
Under the sky?”
“Strong beer,” said I.
“There’s a place for everything,
Everything, anything,
There’s a place for everything
Where it ought to be:
For a chicken, the hen’s wing;
For poison, the bee’s sting;
For almond-blossom, Spring;
A beerhouse for me.”
“There’s a prize for every one
Every one, any one,
There’s a prize for every one,
Whoever he may be:
Crags for the mountaineer,
Flags for the Fusilier,
For English poets, beer!
Strong beer for me!”
“Tell us, now, how and when
We may find the bravest men?”
“A sure test, an easy test:
Those that drink beer are the best,
Brown beer strongly brewed,
English drink and English food.”
Oh, never choose as Gideon chose
By the cold well, but rather those
Who look on beer when it is brown,
Smack their lips and gulp it down.
Leave the lads who tamely drink
With Gideon by the water brink,
But search the benches of the Plough,
The Tun, the Sun, the Spotted Cow,
For jolly rascal lads who pray,
Pewter in hand, at close of day,
“Teach me to live that I may fear
The grave as little as my beer.”
8k
I say to my woman, "Jeffers was
a great poet. think of a title
like Be Angry At The Sun. don't you
realize how great that is?
"you like that negative stuff." she
says
"positively," I agree, finishing my
drink and pouring another.
"in one of Jeffers' poems, not the sun poem,
this woman ***** a stallion because her
husband is such a gross spirit. and it's
believable. then the husband goes out
to **** the stallion and the stallion
kills him."
"I never heard of Jeffers," she
says.
"you never heard of Big Sur? Jeffers
made Big Sur famous just like D. H. Lawrence
made Taos famous. when a
great writer writes about where he
lives the mob comes in and takes
over."
"well you write about San Pedro," she
says.
"yeah," I say, "and have you read the
papers lately? they are going to construct
a marina here, one of the largest in the
world, millions and billions of dollars,
there is going to be a huge shopping
center, yachts and condominiums every-
where!"
"and to think," my woman says smiling, "that you've only
lived here for three years!"
"I still think," I say,
changing the subject,
"you ought to read Jeffers."
8k
If rightly tuneful bards decide,
If it be fix’d in Love’s decrees,
That Beauty ought not to be tried
But by its native power to please,
Then tell me, youths and lovers, tell—
What fair can Amoret excel?
Behold that bright unsullied smile,
And wisdom speaking in her mien:
Yet—she so artless all the while,
So little studious to be seen—
We naught but instant gladness know,
Nor think to whom the gift we owe.
But neither music, nor the powers
Of youth and mirth and frolic cheer,
Add half the sunshine to the hours,
Or make life’s prospect half so clear,
As memory brings it to the eye
From scenes where Amoret was by.
This, sure, is Beauty’s happiest part;
This gives the most unbounded sway;
This shall enchant the subject heart
When rose and lily fade away;
And she be still, in spite of Time,
Sweet Amoret in all her prime.
7.6k
Oh you may not think I’m pretty,
But don’t judge on what you see,
I’ll eat myself if you can find
A smarter hat than me.
You can keep your bowlers black,
Your top hats sleek and tall,
For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat
And I can cap them all.
There’s nothing hidden in your head
The Sorting Hat can’t see,
So try me on and I will tell you
Where you ought to be.
You might belong in Gryffindor,
Where dwell the brave at heart,
Their daring, nerve, and chivalry
Set Gryffindors apart;
You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true
And unafraid of toil;
Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
if you’ve a ready mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind;
Or perhaps in Slytherin
You’ll make your real friends,
Those cunning folks use any means
To achieve their ends.
So put me on! Don’t be afraid!
And don’t get in a flap!
You’re in safe hands (though I have none)
For I’m a Thinking Cap!
Jan 13, 2013
Jan 13, 2013 at 6:18 PM UTC