Empires - Charles Simic

Empires
by Charles Simic

My grandmother prophesied the end
Of your empires, O fools!
She was ironing. The radio was on.
The earth trembled beneath our feet.

One of your heroes was giving a speech.
“Monster,” she called him.
There were cheers and gun salutes for the monster.
“I could kill him with my bare hands,”
She announced to me.

There was no need to. They were all
Going to the devil any day now.
“Don’t go blabbering about this to anyone,”
She warned me.
And pulled my ear to make sure I understood.

-Charles Simic

"Read them or don't read them, you will regret both."
~Kierkegaard

Travel (Jack)

 

We need to take
                Everywhere into                                                                                                              Join
                                Consideration:

India,
                Taiwan,
                                The plateau
                in Peru.
Holy Islam,                                                                                                                                          Me,
                Don’t forget
                                Israel,
Jerusalem,
                Bethlehem.
The winds blow trade
                Through infernos.                                                                                                            My
                                                Two
Toppled towers in
                Bologna. Lets
Give Spain a try,
                                Why not London                                                                                              Holy
While we’re there?

Countries I will
                Only know by their
                                Curve on the map.                                                                                          Brothers.
Perfectly flat world.

Pjc jr 92212

Unconscious Activity

Most of your unconscious
Activity is struggle.
Systems making assertive
Efforts to remain stable.
It's just evolution.
Metabolic cap breached.
Excessive post exercise
Oxygen consumption.
Lag for stabilization.

After car crashes,
Screaming children,
Showdowns with
Power hungry capitalists,
Avoiding cracks for
Six years,
Viewings and binges;
Why would you expect anything
Different from any
Other part of your life?

pjc jr 9812

On Turning Ten - Billy Collins

On Turning Ten - by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-Billy Collins

 

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-turning-ten/

Spines and Ribs

I'm running out of room on my little bed
It fills from head to foot with books
I don't read them
I sit and stare
Eyeing their spines and ribs

-PJC jr 82812

The Lake Isle - Ezra Pound

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time

-Ezra Pound, The Lake Isle
www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16179