my november guest - robert frost

My November Guest
by Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

life story - tennessee williams

Life Story

by Tennessee Williams

After you've been to bed together for the first time,

without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,

the other party very often says to you,

Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,

what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up

a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you

lying together in completely relaxed positions

like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story

as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,

       Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

each time a little more faintly, until the oh

is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up

with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee

and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.

And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time

to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,

they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming

no more than an audible sigh,

as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,

draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion

and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep

and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,

and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

fireflies in the garden - robert frost

Fireflies in the Garden
by Robert Frost

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

the unknown citizen - w.h. auden

The Unknown Citizen
by W. H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
   saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
   generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
   education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

"i would describe myself..." - rilke

"I would describe myself..."
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I would describe myself
like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I'm coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

youth and art - robert browning

Youth and Art
by Robert Browning

“It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumb’d, thrust, patted and polish’d,
Then laugh’d, “They will see, some day,
Smith made, and Gibson demolish’d.”

My business was song, song, song:
I chirp’d, cheep’d, trill’d and twitter’d,
“Kate Brown ’s on the boards ere long,
And Grisi’s existence embitter’d!”

I earn’d, no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster;
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.

We studied hard in our styles,
Chipp’d each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air, look’d out on the tiles,
For fun, watch’d each other’s windows.

You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse—nay, a bit of beard too;
Or you it, rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adher’d to.

And I—soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.

No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turn’d your eye’s tail up
As I shook upon E in alt,
Or ran the chromatic scale up:

For spring bade the sparrows pair,
And the boys and girls gave guesses,
And stalls in our street look’d rare
With bulrush and watercresses.

Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it?

I did look, sharp as a lynx,
(And yet the memory rankles)
When models arriv’d, some minx
Tripp’d up stairs, she and her ankles.

But I think I gave you as good!
“That foreign fellow,—who can know
How she pays, in a playful mood,
For his tuning her that piano?”

Could you say so, and never say,
“Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
And I fetch her from over the way,
Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?”

No, no: you would not be rash,
Nor I rasher and something over;
You’ve to settle yet Gibson’s hash,
And Grisi yet lives in clover.

But you meet the Prince at the Board,
I ’m queen myself at bals-parés,
I ’ve married a rich old lord,
And you ’re dubb’d knight and an R. A.

Each life ’s unfulfill’d, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sigh’d deep, laugh’d free,
Starv’d, feasted, despair’d,—been happy;

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever;
This could but have happen’d once,
And we miss’d it, lost it forever.”

cause and effect - charles bukowski

Cause and effect
by Charles Bukowski

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

be kind - charles bukowski

be kind
by Charles Bukowski

we are always asked
to understand the other person’s
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.

one is asked
to view
their total error
their life-waste
with
kindliness,
especially if they are
aged.

but age is the total of
our doing.
they have aged
badly
because they have
lived
out of focus,
they have refused to
see.

not their fault?

whose fault?
mine?

I am asked to hide
my viewpoint
from them
for fear of their
fear.

age is no crime

but the shame
of a deliberately
wasted
life

among so many
deliberately
wasted
lives

is.

tough cob - charles bukowski

tough cob
by Charles Bukowski

we tend to like those artists
who starved or went mad or killed themselves
and were discovered afterwards.
it happens often
because great talent is usually fifty to
one hundred years ahead of its
time.

most of those acclaimed in their
lifetime
are mediocre performers.
of course, this is common knowledge,
so common that many of those who are not
recognized in their time
believe that this is a sign of their own true
genius
and countless wives, children, relatives,
friends and bystanders
must suffer
because of this illusion.

to laugh truly is to continue anyhow.

tobacco shop - fernando pessoa

Tobacco Shop
by Fernando Pessoa (tr. Edwin Honig and Susan M Brown)

I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dreams inside me.

Windows of my room,
The room of just one of millions in the world nobody
     knows
(And what would they know, if they knew that?),
You open on the mystery of a street people are constantly
     crossing,
A street blocked off to all thought,
A street that's real, impossibly real, and right,
     unconsciously right,
With the mystery of things lying under live beings and
     stones,
With death spreading dankness on walls and white hair on
     heads,
With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness
     road.

Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth.
Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die,
Having no more brotherly feeling for things
Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of
     the street
Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle
     shrieking good-bye
From inside my head,
And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.

Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought
     something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me -- the Tobacco Shop across
     the street,
And something real inside me -- the feeling that it's all a
     dream.

I failed in everything.
Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really
     nothing.
From learning and training for anything for anything useful I escaped
By slipping out the back window.
I went off to the country with great plans,
But found only grass and trees there,
And when there were people, they were just like any
     others.
I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I
     think about?

How can I tell what I'll be, I who don't know what I am?
Be what I think? But I keep thinking I'm so many
     things!
And so many people think of being the same thing, there
     just can't be that many!
Genius? At this moment
A hundred thousand heads are dreaming they're geniuses
     like me,
And who knows if history will remember even one of
     them.
From all those dreams of glory there'll be nothing but
     manure in the end.
No, I don't believe in myself.
In every asylum there are madmen sure of so much!
I, sure of nothing, am I more sure or less sure than they?
No, not even of myself...
In how many garrets and nongarrets of the world
Are there self-styled geniuses dreaming now?
How many high-minded aspirations, noble and lucid --
Yes, really high-minded, noble and lucid --,
And who knows, even practicable,
Will ever see the real light of day or get a hearing?
The world is made for those born to conquer it,
Not those who dream of conquering it, right though they
     may be.
I've dreamt of more things than Napoleon went and did.
I've taken to my so-called heart more humanity than
     Christ ever did.
I've secretly thought up more philosophies than Kant ever
     wrote down.
Yet I am, and maybe always will be, the man in the garret,
Though I don't live in one;
I'll always simply be the one with all the promise;
I'll always be the one waiting for the door to open at the
     wall without a door,
Who sang his anthem to Infinity in a chicken coop,
Who heard the voice of God in a covered well.
Believe in myself? No, I don't, nor in anything.
Let Nature pour down upon my burning head
Her sun, her rain, the wind ruffling my hair,
And let the rest come, if it will or must, or not at all.
Cardiac cases enslaved by the stars,
We've conquered the world before getting out of bed,
But we wake and the world is opaque,
We get up and the world looks strange,
We go out in the street and there's the whole earth,
Plus solar System, Milky Way, and the old Indefinitude.

(Eat your chocolates, little girl!
Eat your chocolates!
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.
Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach
     us than a candy store does.
Eat, dirty little girl, eat them up!
If only I could gobble down those chocolates as trustily as
     you do!
But then I think, peeling off the silver wrapper, it's only
     tinfoil,
And toss it on the floor, just as I've tossed away my life.)

But at least, out of my bitterness at what I'll never be,
There's the quick calligraphy of these lines,
The broken archway to the Impossible.
And at least I reserve for myself this dry-eyed contempt --
Noble, at least, in the grand gesture I make
Flinging out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list,
     into the drift of things,
And stay at home, shirtless.

(Oh, my comforters, who don't exist and so may comfort,
Whether Greek goddess, conceived as a statue that springs
     alive,
Or Roman matron, impossibly noble and ominous,
Or Princess of the troubadours, so blushing and so gentle,
Or eighteenth-century marchioness, so décolletée  and cool,
Or famous courtesan back in our parents' time,
Or modern whatever -- since I can't imagine what --
All of it, whatever it may be, if you can inspire, do it!
My heart's an emptied pail.
Like someone who can call up spooks calls up spooks,
I call myself up, and nothing's there.
I go the window and see the street in perfect clarity.
I see the shops, I see the pavement, I see the passing cars.
I see the dressed-up living passersby.
I see the dogs too, also alive,
And all of it weighs on me like a verdict of exile,
And all of it's strange to me, like everything else.)

I lived, I studied, I loved, I even believed,
And now there's no beggar I don't envy simply for not being
     me.
In each I see the rags, the sores, the lies,
And think: maybe you never lived, studied, loved, believed
(Because people can go through the motions without
     doing any of it);
Maybe you barely existed, like the lizard whose tail's been
     snipped
And is just a tail, apart from the lizard, and beating
     frantically.

I made of myself something I didn't know,
And what I could become, I didn't.
The fancy costume I put on was wrong.
They saw me straight for what I wasn't; I didn't disabuse
     them, so I lost myself.
When I tried taking off the mask,
It stuck to my face.
When I pulled it off and looked in the mirror,
I'd grown older.
I was drunk and couldn't get into the fancy costume I
     hadn't taken off.
So I threw away the mask and slept in the cloakroom
Like a dog they let stay in the house
Because it's harmless,
And I'm about to write this story to prove I'm sublime.

Musical essence of my useless poems,
If only I could find you in something I'd really made,
And not forever fixed by the Tobacco Shop across the
     street,
Stamping my feet on the consciousness of being alive,
Like a rug some drunkard stumbles over
Or a doormat the gypsies stole not worth a dime.

But the Tobacco Shop Owner has come to his door and
     stands there now.
I look at him, straining my half-turned neck,
Straining my half-blind soul.
He'll die and so will I.
He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave poems.
After a while his signboard will perish too, and so will my
     poems.
A little later the street will die where his signboard hung,
And so will the language my poems were written in.
Then the spinning planet where all this happened will die,
In other satellites in other systems something like people
Will go on making things like poems and living under
     things like signboards,
Always one thing against another,
Always one thing as useless as another,
Always the impossible thing as stupid as the real thing,
Always the fundamental mystery as certain as the sleeping
     surface mystery,
Always this thing or that, or neither one nor the other.
But now a man's gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy
     tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I'm getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
and about to try writing these lines, which say the
     opposite.

I light a cigarette and think of writing them,
And in the cigarette I savor my liberation from all
     thoughts.
I follow the smoke like a lane of my own,
For one sensitive dexterous moment enjoying
The freedom from all speculation
And the consciousness that metaphysics comes from
     feeling out of sorts.

Then I fall back in my chair
And go on smoking.
As long as fate permits, I'll go on smoking.

(If I married my washwoman's daughter,
Maybe I'd be happy. )
I think of this, get up from my chair. I go to the window.
The man is leaving the Shop (putting change into his
     pants' pocket?)
Ah, I know him: it's nonmetaphysical Stevens.
(The Tobacco Shop Owner comes back to the door. )
As if by divine instinct, Stevens turns around and sees
     me.
He waves me a hello, I shout back, Hello Stevens! and the
     universe
Reorganizes itself for me, without hopes or ideals, and the
     Tobacco Shop Owner smiles.


(1928)