The Revelation

The same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut;
Chained all day to the same old desk, down in the same old rut;
Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train:
Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever get back again?

We've bidden good-bye to life in a cage, we're finished with pushing a pen;
They're pumping us full of bellicose rage, they're showing us how to be men.
We're only beginning to find ourselves; we're wonders of brawn and thew;
But when we go back to our Sissy jobs, -- oh, what are we going to do?

For shoulders curved with the counter stoop will be carried erect and square;
And faces white from the office light will be bronzed by the open air;
And we'll walk with the stride of a new-born pride, with a new-found joy in our eyes,
Scornful men who have diced with death under the naked skies.

And when we get back to the dreary grind, and the bald-headed boss's call,
Don't you think that the dingy window-blind, and the dingier office wall,
Will suddenly melt to a vision of space, of violent, flame-scarred night?
Then . . . oh, the joy of the danger-thrill, and oh, the roar of the fight!

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poem by Robert William Service
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Sustain

1.
My love plays piano and his foot hovers above the pedal.
Sustain, they call it when the note floats
like a basketball player suspended in air,
or a question whose purpose is to remain unanswered.
Theres only this low keening urgency,
the sound of mourning doves,
drone and descant, murmur and coo.
I am learning to rest inside the word enough
its rough leathery consonants, its f of finitude.

2.
To bear up under
pain, or the memory of pain
repeating itself, like scales, as if we were practicing
to never do again what
of course we will do again

3.
I love you

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poem by Alison Luterman
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The Song OF The Cities

BOMBAY

Royal and Dower-royal, I the Queen
Fronting thy richest sea with richer hands --
A thousand mills roar through me where I glean
All races from all lands.


CALCUTTA

Me the Sea-captain loved, the River built,
Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold.
Hail, England! I am Asia -- Power on silt,
Death in my hands, but Gold!


MADRAS

Clive kissed me on the mouth and eyes and brow,
Wonderful kisses, so that I became

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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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Southern Heroes

One day the South will recognize its real heroes,
Martin Luther King Jr wrote a letter to white men from jail,
Who would rather that the courts settle racial segregation,
Where white judges make sure that they don't prevail.

After years of always hearing the word 'wait',
Which almost always meant never instead,
The bomb that exploded a church filled with children,
All for not being what the white men considered 'purebred'.

One day, the South will have to see the real heroes,
Like the man fresh from war when he took a bus to go home
Corporal Roman Duckworth Jr went to see his sick wife,
Killed because they thought he was a freedom rider who didn’t drone.

A full measure of truth and justice,
Is what they wanted to figure out
So many heroes like Dahmer killed,
Who gave a job to any colour without any doubt.

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poem by Danielle Schneider
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Soul Cleansing

Rescued in chains of solemn ice
Balance pivots on the fence
Walk where things do not exist
Universal mind coherent in blue
Solomon’s Porch resides in gold leaf
Peace and dharma exalts the weary
Everything is separate and out of tune
Caldrons of Asian finance
Platforms of forums, Philo writes
Placid monasteries with Gregorian eyes
Jackson Pollack is inebriated
Back to the broken base
Slaves build the union
He writes an ode to his pride
She garbles words of veneer
Walls higher than the tower of Babel
Everything bathed in pretense
Sophistry shines like a Greek oracle
Alliances between the mundane
Mars gleams with angry throats

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poem by Joseph Narusiewicz
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Any Soldier To His Son

What did I do, sonny, in the Great World War?
Well, I learned to peel potatoes and to scrub the barrack floor.
I learned to push a barrow and I learned to swing a pick,
I learned to turn my toes out, and to make my eyeballs click.
I learned the road to Folkestone, and I watched the English shore,
Go down behind the skyline, as I thought, for evermore.
And the Blighty boats went by us and the harbour hove in sight,
And they landed us and sorted us and marched us "by the right".
"Quick march!" across the cobbles, by the kids who rang along
Singing "Appoo?" "Spearmant" "Shokolah?" through dingy old Boulogne;
By the widows and the nurses and the niggers and Chinese,
And the gangs of smiling Fritzes, as saucy as you please.

I learned to ride as soldiers ride from Etaps to the Line,
For days and nights in cattle trucks, packed in like droves of swine.
I learned to curl and kip it on a foot of muddy floor,
And to envy cows and horses that have beds of beaucoup straw.
I learned to wash in shell holes and to shave myself in tea,
While the fragments of a mirror did a balance on my knee.
I learned to dodge the whizz-bangs and the flying lumps of lead,

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poem by Anonymous English
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Gioconda And Si-Ya-U

to the memory of my friend SI-YA-U,
whose head was cut off in Shanghai

A CLAIM

Renowned Leonardo's
world-famous
"La Gioconda"
has disappeared.
And in the space
vacated by the fugitive
a copy has been placed.

The poet inscribing
the present treatise
knows more than a little
about the fate
of the real Gioconda.
She fell in love
with a seductive

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poem by Nazim Hikmet
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The Last Trip To Tulsa

Well, I used to drive a cab, you know
I heard a siren scream
Pulled over to the corner
And I fell into a dream
There were two men eating pennies
And three young girls who cried
The west coast is falling,
I see rocks in the sky.
The preacher took his bible
And laid it on the stool.
He said: with the congregation running,
Why should I play the fool?
Well, I used to be a woman, you know
I took you for a ride,
I let you fly my airplane
It looked good for your pride.
cause youre the kind of man you know
Who likes what he says.
I wonder whats its like
To be so far over my head.

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song performed by Neil Young
Added by Lucian Velea
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A Day Of Writing

A day of writing, trying to clarify myself
to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,
trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash
without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions
of my apparent magnitude off
like the dead undergrowth
of a plausible star to try as an antidote
to the junkmail perfume samplers
that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep
like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,
mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.

Tonight I like the windows black, starless,
but keep the company mellow with my rendition
of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime
someone asks me what I feel most when I write.
I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel
that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note
they’ve moved since I last looked at them,
and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Cant Stop

Intro: uhh, yo, get off me
Get off me
[chorus 1]
I cant stop, da da da da da da da
I cant stop, da da da da da da da
I cant stop, da da da da da da da
[verse 1]
Get your hands off me
Stop tryin to hold me down
Let me just move around
Girl somethin done happened to me
Swear to god
Somethin done snapped in me
I need the whole floor for us
Im bout to bust, mami
And its glorious
I cant seem to stop my feet
You hear my heart beat, digga digga digga digga digga digga
Oh lord, ima bout to pass out
But when the night is over ima be the last out

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song performed by Will Smith
Added by Lucian Velea
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Gremlin!

He was posted to Squadron 74
With ten hours flying time,
He knew that he needed a hundred more
Or his life was on the line,
For Biggin Hill was a shambles then,
All craters and UXB's,
As fast as they ferried the Spitfires in
They were beaten down to their knees.

They were hit with Junkers 88's
And Dornier 17's,
They came in high and they came in low,
Like a swarm of angry bees,
They got the workshops, hit the stores,
In an all-out, mass attack,
While Michael Shaw bit his lip, and swore
He was going to get them back.

For a week or so he was on patrol
In a Spitfire group of six,

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poem by David Lewis Paget
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Deft

Though both of my two hands are deft,
I do not want to use the left;
when I between your thighs tonight
slide one, I think I’ll use the right.

Directly as a rocket flies,
your private places I’ll surprise
and then, exploding, plan to enter
not right or left, your deadly center.

Deft as hands will be my heft
when entering your secret cleft,
far smarter than the magic wand
of which you’ve told me you are fond.

Like a rocket I’ll direct
myself towards your hole, erect,
and as soon as I explode,
leave you behind, and take the road.
Inspired by Ali Smith’s article on the lives and poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland in the TLS, January 2,2009 (“Unrhymed Couplet”) .

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Path Of Mirrors

They walk so close to you, yet so far away
Their eyes are lost, their faces fixed like stone
They walk behind the mirrors and here they shall stay
You walk with other souls liveng, breathing, yet for them they are alone

You walk through the hall way down the path of glass
You watch as they walk on into eternity, into the dark
They walk there behind the glass,
People around you going through leaving their mark.

They walk past your reflection as if you never saw
They walk through time as if time weren’t there
They know you would never aproach them
They know you would never dare.

They walk through the glass and look straight ahead,
They know nothing lies ahead, yet they know they can not turn back,
So they walk into nothing instead,
Passing you so all you see is their back.

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poem by Bethany Maxwell
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116

Your escapades and your having to wear red

So you have gone to Burma
Blending with the natives in the jungle there
You trembled in East Timor
Afraid that you cannot return home
You were like a louse
Hiding in the eye of the storm
In the middle of their war
In your escapades

Shocks!

And all the rest were also shocked
Mr. Takahashi
Has become your new name
While you bade goodbye
To the French journalist
At the airport
If the plane somehow crashes

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poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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The 'Utopia

The table was filled with many objects

The wild tribesmen in the hills,
whose very robes were decorated with designs
of a strangeness & upsetting beauty
that went much further than the richly coloured silks embroidered there could ever suggest; . . .

There were piles of books, yet each one
was of a different size and binding.
The leathers were so finely dyed. The blues
& purples, contrasting with the deceptive simplicity
of the 'natural' tans.
And this prism & arrangement of colours
cannot be set down - the fresh arrangements
& angles possible can only point through a door
to the word 'infinite' made of white puffy clouds
floating high in a blue summer sky;
this has been written there by a small airplane
that is now returning to its green landing field.

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poem by Lee Harwood
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Our Canal

To Colonel Goethals and the Other Laborers in the Canal Zone

In lazy laughing Panama—
O flutter of ribbon 'twixt the seas!—
The low-roofed houses lie afloat,
White foam-drift of the Caribbees.
Under lithe palms that fan the sky
Down in each drowsy plaza there,
Brown-footed girls go glancing by
With red hibiscus in their hair.
Low mountains, trailing veils of cloud,
In the two oceans dip their feet,
And hear the proud tides roaring loud
Where Andes with Sierras meet.
O Panama! O ribbon-twist
That ties the continents together,
Now East and West shall slip your tether
And keep their ancient tryst.

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poem by Harriet Monroe
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Jackop Zuma, South Africa, The World's Greatest News Ladies And Gentlemen Stop Anything Hear Is Your Invitation

JACKOP ZUMA JACOP ZUMA
South Africa is about to become a tolerable nation
South Africa is about to be born anew
Can you imagine a tolerable state?
The Deputy President of South Africa
They said you are the rapist
But the man kept silent
The man nodded silent
The court proved you to be not guilty.
They first started by saying you fraud the state money.
Now and then you brought the weapons illegal from abroad
But the man kept silent
The case was closed and it is then again open.
The court will then again close it
It will close it again because there is no fossil evidence that you were any fraudster.
Yes we as the Proudly South African agree
We agree that you are innocent
Today I am making the History
This is the History that will remain to be red by the millions of future generations
In Africa there once lived a man

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poem by Mthokozisi Ntokozo Maphumulo
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Not Dead Yet

Written by ralph covert
Lead vocals by dennis deyoung
Well I was born too late to be a rolling stone
I dont know jerry lee I never me john & yoko
Standin with a strat, Im rock n rolls bastard son
Go out get drunk get wild have fun
I dont got a million dollars dont drive a cadillac
Give me half a chance cause Im not dead yet
Im not dead yet
Im not dead yet
Im a mad dog fighting with the wall against my back
You better get a bigger gun Im not dead yet
Ive been machine-gunned handgunned hijacked left for dead
Dive-bombed napalmed nuclear warheaded
Dropped from a jet plane with no parachute
Shot by a firing squad & raped by a business suit
Im dancin on a land mine baby one leg left
And I can still crawl and Im not dead yet
Well youre bigger tougher meaner rougher
Dirtier and uglier and sneakier and trickier

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song performed by Styx
Added by Lucian Velea
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Choice Channels Choice Channels Choice Current Version

Is Man Free Will or karmic puppet strung
upon Fate's juggling whim with sting or stung
dependant on some déjà vu song sung
by Time's wind blown?

Thus, 'What is Truth? ' if logic's made to fit
some preconceived ideas, Cartesian kit:
'The moving finger writes, and having writ
moves on' to clone

another pawn whose dawn is followed soon
by blight or boon, pride's sunny afternoon
is swift supplanted by black night. Buffoon
who would gold own!

Who seeks control, spurns writing on the wall
is often role-reversed, flight's final fall,
who takes theme 'dream supreme', who 'hears the call'
may be just drone.

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poem by Jonathan Robin
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The Country Clergyman's Trip To Cambridge -- An Election Ballad

As I sate down to breakfast in state,
At my living of Tithing-cum-Boring,
With Betty beside me to wait,
Came a rap that almost beat the door in.
I laid down my basin of tea,
And Betty ceased spreading the toast,
'As sure as a gun, sir,' said she,
'That must be the knock of the post.'

A letter-and free-bring it here-
I have no correspondent who franks.
No! Yes! Can it be? Why, my dear,
'Tis our glorious, our Protestant Bankes.
'Dear sir, as I know you desire
That the Church should receive due protection,
I humbly presume to require
Your aid at the Cambridge election.

'It has lately been brought to my knowledge,
That the Ministers fully design

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poem by Thomas Babbington Macaulay
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