ScottN wrote: 

Why are you posting this drivel?  Is there some reason that you like to hear an 18-year-old whine about how hard life is for him?  This poet is first person obsessed in this putrid excuse for a poem— 13 first person references in 10 lines, and the only second or third person reference is to an ambiguous "true friend"— and the reference shows no empathy for the friend—  it just demonstrates the putrid poet's demands for this "true friend"...  according to this putrid poet, a true friend is somebody who only thinks about what this putrid poet desires...

this is abstract dull emotively-dead drivel where the poet whines about what he wants out of the world...  this is a textbook example of bad poetry...  a good poem under this title would demonstrate why life is hard with vivid, concrete details, rather than crybaby exposition of desires...  life is so hard he marks his calendar with a check...  yawn...

as real writers say, "Show, don't tell..."

what— did this poem crawl out of your ass and die on the floor so you just had to share it with everybody??

 

Rough Life

These days are coming to a slow and painful end
But all I need in life is that one true friend
Who can understand and respect me for who I am
who can care and love me for who I am
I'm always on the run and living from place to place
I don't have a bedroom, I live out of my suitcase
Another day, Another day I live to see the next
I mark the days on the calender with a check
A check to show that I live on to survive
And hopefully become someone in this world all before I die. .

(Life is not easy)

Jacob Guinn

Loving the Hands

Family Stories

Chiller Pansies

The Silver Fish

a couple easy bucks _________________________ Mya and me, we sold love cards at the flea market, hand drawn Tennessee dawns and a poem, hand lettered under the fold, sacred words everyone recognized, five dollars with a pastel envelope, her best grin. guys who knew their wives soft spots bought two or three, the radio played all summer 'love the one you're with' as she drew mornings swiftly through nights as wide as sin. -beau blue

Preview #127168

Clover by Tennessee Williams These are fragrant acres where Evening comes long hours late And the still unmoving air Cools the fevered hands of Fate. Meadows where the afternoon Hangs suspended in a flower And the moments of our doom Drift upon a weightless hour. And we who thought that surely night Would bring us triumph or defeat Only find the stars are white Clover at our naked feet.

I had a vision
of snails racing over the pavement
as the sun traced their shadows
from crack to crack
as the truck wheels raced by
but it was just a vision
I had
as I scraped the shell
from the tire of my truck
while filling her up
with more gas.

Belief is a murmur in the heart of truth
Projecting our faith in so knowing our proof
At one with the innocence and calamity of youth
But a pilgrim in search of full sails...

b
 

Dogs And Wolves

Across eternity, across its snow,
I see my unwritten poems:
I see the spoor of their paws dappling 
the august whiteness of the snow:
bristles raging, bloody-tongued,
lean greyhounds and wolves, 
leaping over the dykes,
running under the shade of the trees of the wilderness,
taking the narrow defile of glens,
making for the steepness of windy mountains;
their baying yell shrieking
across the hard barenesses of the terrible times,
their everlasting barking in my ears,
their hot onrush seizing my mind;
career of wolves and eerie dogs
swift in pursuit of the quarry,
through the forests without veering,
over the mountain tops with sheering;
the mild mad dogs of my poetry,
wolves in chase of loneliness,
loveliness of soul and face,
a white deer over hills and plains,
the deer of your gentle beloved beauty, 
a hunt without halt, without respite.

Translation from Gaelic

Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

 fuzzy wrote: 

Sonnet XCIV: They That Have Power to Hurt and Will Do None

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare

Ogden Nash was one of my mother's favorite poets and this is one of my favorite poems by him.

Are You a Snodgrass, Too?

It is possible that the most individual and international, social and economic collisions
Result from humanity's being divided into two main divisions.
Both of which are irreconcilable.
And neither is by the other beguilable
Their lives are spent in mutual interference
And yet you cannot tell them apart by their outward appearance.
Instead the only way in which you are able to tell one group from the other
Is to observe them at the table.
Because the only visible way in which one group from the other varies,
Is in the treatment of the cream and sugar on cereal and berries.
Group A, which we will call the Swozzlers
Because it is a very suitable name I deem
First applies the sugar, then swozzles it all over the place
Pouring on the cream;
And as fast as they pour the sugar on, they swozzle it away
but such thriftlessness means nothing to ruthless egotists like they.
They just continue to scoop and swozzle and swozzle and scoop,
Until there is nothing left for the Snodgrasses or second group.
A Snodgrass is a kind handsome intelligent person
Who pours on the cream first
And then deftly sprinkles the sugar over the cereal or berries
After they have been properly immersed,
Thus assuring himself that the sugar will remain on the cereal and berries
Where it can do some good—which is his wish
Instead of being swozzled away to the bottom of the dish.
The facts of the case for the Snodgrasses are so evident
That it is ridiculous to debate them.
But this is unfortunate for the Snodgrasses as it only causes
The sinister and vengeful Swozzlers all the more to hate them.
Swozzlers are irked by the superior Snodgasses' intelligence and nobility,
And they lose no opportunity of inflicting on them every kind of incivility.
If you have read that somebody has been run over by an automobile,
You may be sure that victim was a Snodgrass and a Swozzler was at the wheel.
Swozzlers start wars and Snodgrasses get killed in them.
Swozzlers sell waterfront lots and Snodgrasses get malaria when they try to build in them.
Swozzlers invent fashionable diets and drive Snodgrasses crazy
With tables of vitamins and calories
Swozzlers go to Congress and think up new taxes
And Snodgrasses pay their salaries.
Swozzlers bring tigers back alive and Snodgrasses get eaten by anacondas;
Snodgrasses are depositors and Swozzlers are absconders.
Swozzlers hold straight flushes and Snodgrasses hold four of a kind.
Swozzlers step heavily on the toes of Snodgrasses' shoes as soon as they are shined.
Whatever achievements Snodgrasses achieve,
Swozzlers always top them;
Snodgrasses say stop me if you've heard this one
And Swozzlers stop them.
Swozzlers are teeming with useful tricks of the trade
That are not included in a standard university curricula.
The world in general is their oyster,
And the Snodgrasses in particular.
So I hope that for your sake dear reader that you are a Swozzler,
But I hope for everybody's that you're not.
And I also wish that everybody else was a nice amiable Snodgrass too,
Because then Life would be just one sweet, harmonious mazurka or gavotte.

I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter's house
helping her expand their garden by at least ten times.
We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as
best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the
pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over
again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch
and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well
that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.

I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I'd done
enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on
the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.

All this made me remember my father forty years ago
helping me with my garden. My father's dead now, and
has been dead for many years, which is how I'll be one
of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child,
who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching
and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.

So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.

 fuzzy wrote: 
Really a great SONG!!!