I couldn’t call either a favorite, but there are two that have stuck with me my whole life.

###The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It feels as relevant to our time as it was for WW1.

###Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Violets are red
Roses are blue
If you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUE

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

A girlfriend came in built me a bed scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor scrubbed the walls vacuumed, cleaned the toilet, the bathtub, scrubbed the bathroom floor and cut my toenails and my hair. Then all on the same day the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet and the toilet and the gas man fixed the heater and the phone man fixed the phone.

Now I sit in all this perfection.

It is quiet. I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends. I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can’t even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rythm. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

-c. bukowski

Marie Howe, New York State’s Poet Laureate:

Practicing By Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought: That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.

Two Headed Calf makes me cri every tim

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature,

they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother.

It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

l(a by e.e. cummings

l(a

le af

fa

ll

s) one l

iness

Look at my instance name

Ozymandias by Percy Bysh ShelbyI met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Each year on the anniversary of when I got back my stem cells to cure my cancer, I read Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

Read it a bit early this year - this July 12th it will be 20 years unbowed.

Even though Yates himself called it “the way to lose a lady”, I still like Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Fire and Ice

by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

A Coat

By William Butler Yeats

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

First they came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About by Mary Oliver

The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.

It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

A poem my brother wrote

Nothing changes, and it changes all at once. Nothing moves, nothing exists. Nothing is important, so we should learn nothing, we should study nothing, get close to nothing, be kind to nothing. We must come to understand nothing so well that we could maybe even see nothing in ourselves. Because nothing matters, nothing is important, and I think that’s something.