Bill Dungsroman wrote:

So I was thinking it would be an entertaining exercise to post your favorite poem as well as maybe post a poem of your own. You don't have to go into any gory detail about the meaning of either of the poems you post if you don't want to. It's just of interest to me to see what people consider meaningful poetry - I have written poetry for years upon years, I have two little journals full of them. I constantly cycle through different perspectives on what constitutes "good" or "meaningful" poetry. It must adhere to a certain meter! It must rhyme! Fuck that, it should have no conventional restraints! But that's lazy! And so on.

Whatever, it's the middle of winter and that's excellent poetry time. Anyway.


EDIT: I'd rather you did not post song lyrics as poetry. Not that they aren't nor cannot be, it's just a little too easy.



"Romance" --Edgar Allen Poe

Romance, who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child—with a most knowing eye.

Of late, eternal condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky;
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings,
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things—
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.





"Dude Voodoo" --Bill Dungsroman

Moves like hemorrhages, my dripsteps
In cadence with bones chatter teeth;
Shrunken balls knock'd heads hung
From the gallows of my penis as
Wolf-calls press against my spine.

The Devil's scripture in my head,
Mind a fluttered parchment jungle
And its denizens spook and growl
No Man's Land hand servants.

The clay pots of ash all line up with
Spearchucker trips and ticks of time
Lamenting an echoing precious machine;
But those are all just giggling midgets
In phantom castles anyway, away.

Tom-tom beats sticks flick my eyes twitch
As corpses caress in dirt orgasms and I
Let the fresh chickens cluck their farewells
Because it's only my blood running fast and alone.