Business poems

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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

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In Excelsis

© Anne Sexton

It is half winter, half spring,

and Barbara and I are standing

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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?

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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,

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The Ambition Bird

© Anne Sexton

So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine

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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.

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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.

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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!

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A Corymbus For Autumn

© Francis Thompson

Hearken my chant, 'tis

As a Bacchante's,

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The Ivy Crown

© William Carlos Williams

The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,

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The Princess (part 2)

© Alfred Tennyson

At break of day the College Portress came:

She brought us Academic silks, in hue

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The Degenerate Gallants

© Victor Marie Hugo

[HERNANI, Act I., March, 1830.]


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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....

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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.

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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.

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Reverie, with Fries

© Marilyn L. Taylor

Straight-spined girl—yes, you of the glinting earrings,
amber skin and sinuous hair: what happened?
you’ve no business lunching with sticky children
here at McDonald’s.

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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!)

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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.

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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,

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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.