Business poems
/ page 39 of 49 /You, Doctor Martin
© Anne Sexton
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
The Poet Of Ignorance
© Anne Sexton
I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?
Said The Poet To The Analyst
© Anne Sexton
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
The Ambition Bird
© Anne Sexton
So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine
The Dirty Old Man
© William Allingham
In a dirty old house lived a Dirty Old Man;
Soap, towels, or brushes were not in his plan.
For forty long years, as the neighbors declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.
Hurry Up Please It's Time
© Anne Sexton
What is death, I ask.
What is life, you ask.
I give them both my buttocks,
my two wheels rolling off toward Nirvana.
The Kiss
© Anne Sexton
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!
The Ivy Crown
© William Carlos Williams
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
The Princess (part 2)
© Alfred Tennyson
At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
Sailing Home From Rapallo
© Robert Lowell
[February 1954]
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....
How The Helpmate Of Blue-Beard Made Free With A Door
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
The Moral: Wives, we must allow,
Who to their husbands will not bow,
A stern and dreadful lesson learn
When, as you've read, they 're cut in turn.
Epitaph For Joseph Blackett, Late Poet And Shoemaker
© George Gordon Byron
Stranger! behold, interr'd together,
The souls of learning and of leather.
Poor Joe is gone, but left his all:
You'll find his relics in a stall.
Reverie, with Fries
© Marilyn L. Taylor
Straight-spined girlyes, you of the glinting earrings,
amber skin and sinuous hair: what happened?
youve no business lunching with sticky children
here at McDonalds.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter VIII - Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis
© Robert Browning
(Virgil, now, should not be too difficult
To Cinoncino,say the early books . . .
Pen, truce to further gambols! Poscimur!)
Solomon on the Vanity of the World, A Poem. In Three Books. - Pleasure. Book II.
© Matthew Prior
My full design with vast expense achieved,
I came, beheld, admired, reflected, grieved:
I chid the folly of my thoughtless haste,
For, the work perfected, the joy was past.
Bacchanalia
© Matthew Arnold
The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
To A Friend
© Matthew Arnold
Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?--
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.