It's the last day for National Poetry Month, and while I'm going to be kind and put a cut-tag so you don't have the entire thing on your friendspage, here are two poems. Since I posted my favorite poems by each of these poets last year, you get other poems this year:

I Am Waiting
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

( I am waiting for the Second Coming... )

America
Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
( Your machinery is too much for me. )

Aesthetic
Charles Tomlinson 

Reality is to be sought, not in concrete,
But in space made articulate:
The shore, for instance,
Spreading between wall and wall;
The sea-voice
Tearing the silence from the silence.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

So it seems I no longer have to write a love poem. The only one I've ever wanted to write has already been written.


To Say Before Going to Sleep
Rainer Maria Rilke


I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the woods.
The clocks are striking, calling to each other,
and one can see right to the edge of time.
Outside the house a strange man is afoot
and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.
Beyond that there is silence.
My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;
and they hold you gently, letting you go
when something in the dark begins to move.

Many things are highly distracting. Here are two of my favorite poems, since this seems to be a place where I post poetry because I have nothing else to say. Also, April is National Poetry Month.

The World Is a Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

( The world is a beautiful place... )

---

You may be confused because I have professed to hate poetry. This is because I do hate most poetry. Most of it is pretentious, or boring, or trite, or completely self-absorbed in a bad way. It makes more sense to say "I hate poetry" and have exceptions than to say nothing and have people send me poetry and expect me to like it. This has happened, I mean, the sending poetry. Please, don't send me poetry.

Most poems should be like music without the notes. They should have a rhythm and a cadence, be read aloud. (Or they should be like a painting with words, in the case of e e cummings, whose poetry is like a picture, with two people on a grassy knoll smiling privately, or a young woman dancing under an awning in the rain)

Anyway, I don't know anything about poetry, so ignore this interlude.

---

A Supermarket In California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam-
ilies shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you,
García Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?

( I saw you, Walt Whitman... )

I am sucking it up on NaNo lately, though my definition of "sucking it up" may differ vastly from yours. Mine, you see, is "I have written only 2000 words the past two nights, and each of those words was like drawing blood from a stone, and only wrote another 120 or so tonight, and am saying 'buggre all this' and writing tomorrow".

All this is to say that I'm at 19,410, and would have liked to be at more like 21,500 by bedtime tonight, so that getting halfway tomorrow would be easier. I am so trudging along on this because I actually have no idea what's going to happen next.

19,410 / 50,000 (38.0%)

***

I don't really have anything to say. I just felt like a post was in order.

I'm a little bit infatuated with this poem.

( Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses )

Today I found out I was the only one to get an A on our GTX midterm, and it made my entire day. I was expecting an 85, at best.

I haven't posted in a while, and I refuse to apologize.

(We might be scheming to get a kitten. Hidden, out of sight being out of the mind of our CL. Yes? Kitten? Kitten!)

I look fabulous in this skirt.

( Photo & a poem )

Why, no, I haven't updated since July. I didn't feel I had anything to say all summer, and now I've not had a free moment since last Tuesday.

I did have a temp job during the summer, and made some decent money, and bought a v. nice digital camera. The business, as I knew would happen, is going to stay in planning and readying mode probably until next summer.

And now, a poem I heart:

Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In
Raymond Carver

( You simply go out and shut the door )