Thursday, August 23, 2012

Aubade by Philip Larkin

 

Aubade  by Philip Larkin 

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Philip Larkin :

 

Thursday, August 9, 2012

"The Policeman" By Clive Sansom


Clive Sansom was born on 21 June 1910 in East Finchley, London and educated at Southgate County School, where he matriculated in 1926.[1] He worked as a clerk until 1934, and then studied speech and drama at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the London Speech Institute under Margaret Gullan. He went on to study phonetics under Daniel Jones at University College London, and joined the London Verse Speaking Choir. He lectured in speech training at Borough Road Training College, Isleworth, and the Speech Fellowship in 1937-9, and edited the Speech Fellowship Bulletin (1934-49). He was also an instructor in the Drama School of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Sansom married the poet Ruth Large, a Tasmanian, in 1937, at the Quaker Friends Meeting House in Winchmore Hill, and subsequently joined. Sansom was a conscientious objector

Friday, August 3, 2012

Sexpot by Charles Bukowski


you know," she said, "you were at
the bar so you didn't see
but I danced with this guy.
we danced and we danced
close.
but I didn't go home with him
because he knew I was with
you."
"thanks a bunch," I
said.
she was always thinking of sex.
she carried it around with her
like something in a paper
bag.
such energy.
she never forgot.
she stared at every man available
in morning cafes
over bacon and eggs
or later
over a noon sandwich or
a steak dinner.
"I've modeled myself after
Marilyn Monroe," she told
me.
"she's always running off
to some local disco to dance
with a baboon," a friend once told
me, "I'm amazed that you've
stood for it as long as you have."
she'd vanish at race tracks
then come back and say,
"three men offered to buy me
a drink."
or I'd lose her in the parking
lot and I'd look up and she'd
be walking along with a strange man.
"well, he came from this direction
and I came from that and we
kind of walked together.  I
didn't want to hurt his
feelings."
she said that I was a very
jealous man.
one day she just
fell down
inside of her sexual organs
and vanished.
it was like an alarm clock
dropping into the
Grand Canyon.
it banged and rattled and
rang and rang
but I could no longer
see or hear it.
I'm feeling much better
now.
I've taken up tap-dancing
and I wear a black felt
hat pulled down low
over my right
eye.
Charles Bukowski

Sexpot by Charles Bukowski

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by E. E. Cummings


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands