Bound to whims,
bred solely for
circuses of desire.
To hell with savannahs,
towns like Rosewood.

Domestics or domesticated,
one name or surnamed, creatures
the dominant ones can't live without
would truly flourish
without such devious love,
golden corrals.

Harnessed....Read more

My friend a writer and scientist
has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He's been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk's teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to ...Read more

Darkness wounds the barley,
etching it with denser clouds. A herd sends its
envoy out to nose the garbage at
road's edge before creeping into the expanse.
And the rest follow with cheap hunger-
ten at once through the swaying curtain, heads
tipped, disappearing in the dim.
Wrong to think of them as ...Read more

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.


About This Poem
"Amaze" was published in "Verse" (The Manas Press, 1915).

About Adelaide Crapsey
Adelaide Crapsey was born on Sept. 9, 1878, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her collections of ...Read more

Every day brings a ship,
Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear,
Looking seaward well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.

About This Poem
"Letters" was published in "May-Day and Other Pieces" (Ticknor and Fields, 1867).

Ralph Waldo...Read more

A honey badger's skin can
withstand multiple blows
from machetes, arrows,
and spears, but these rusted
weapons haven't killed
anything in years, so that may
be the lesson there, that
there is no there there, like
many poems, like many
revolutions, and maybe there
isn't a there there in ...Read more

I tell my father about the way
I collect small things
in the sacs of my heart-

thick juniper berries
apple cores that retain their shape
and the click of shells
that sound like an oven baking.

He presses the mole on my shoulder
that matches his shoulder,
proof that I was not ...Read more

The news this morning
said that Ramadi
and that the president
did not have a plan
to push them back
into the Anbar province
though I have a plan
to walk down to the
beach in silence perhaps
where I will stand
in water the temperature
of most corpses
and look out over
...Read more

Concerning the lost and so
much of it, the Professor of Antiquities
Think about that.

I love the word oxymoron like I love the word
hope loving him back such a long way.

The ancients then, via digital pulse. But never
to know except with shovel, brush,
magnifying glass. He dreams out the ...Read more

wake up when he mentions colors
and light, streets they've walked-
Second Avenue, West 20th, Park.
This guy is happy, right? they ask;
who am I to answer. What I like
about Schuyler is the way sonatas
and Coca-Cola flourish in the same stanza,
morning glories opening
their bright mouths, and ...Read more

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, ...Read more

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.

About This Poem
"Tender Buttons [Nothing Elegant]" was published in "Tender Buttons" (Claire Marie, 1914).

About Gertrude Stein ...Read more

There's a father sleeping it off in every master bedroom
of the cul-de-sac the morning after, so Saturday
morning is a snooze. The moon is still out, eyeballing
the quiet street like Sun Ra did his Arkestra. Somebody
has to be a father figure for all of those musical notes.
No school busses to huff after, no mothers...Read more

Sisyphus punches in, each morning,
At a mountain he must face all day,
In hell, for eternity, and at night,
Having not reached the summit
Again, he walks down slow, where
The rock rushed by, careful to see,
With new eyes, where it all went
Wrong, again, and then later,
At the bar in town, sits ...Read more

every chair in the strip mall
salon where she rents
a little space of her own
reflects a face waiting

to make a change. Another
mother next to me rips an ad

for the full Hollywood wax
& here the best graffiti:

They'll grow back, my own

mom on the bangs I butchered ...Read more

Little megaphones,
we hang out in the garden center and gossip
with the petunias three seasons a year.

With leaves too small to resemble
thumbs or hands or hearts, too soft
for any parts
of our threadable stems to grow thorns,
we prefer to pretend we are horns,
cornets and alto sax, prepared...Read more

He perches in the slime, inert,
Bedaubed with iridescent dirt.
The oil upon the puddles dries
To colours like a peacock's eyes,
And half-submerged tomato-cans
Shine scaly, as leviathans
Oozily crawling through the mud.
The ground is here and there bestud
With lumps of only part-burned coal.
...Read more

Once from a big, big building,
When I was small, small,
The queer folk in the windows
Would smile at me and call.
And in the hard wee gardens
Such pleasant men would hoe:
"Sir, may we touch the little girl's hair!"-
It was so red, you know.
They cut me coloured asters
With shears so sharp and...Read more

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad,
And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.

What is it gilds the trees and ...Read more

The mirror is dirty from the detritus of dailiness-
I look in the mirror and am freckled.
A week out from being cleaned, maybe two, maybe more,
The Milky Way shows itself in the secret silver,

This star chart in my own bathroom,
Aglow not in darkness but with the lights on,

Everything suddenly so...Read more