Poetry

Off Topic
1

Perhaps not everyones cup of tea, but often insperation can be found where least expected and in a single line.
Feel free to post any verse you have found insperational or aspiriational I’ll start.

IF

By Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
’ Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

2

Good topic. I’m sure most have read this one but I’ll post it anyway.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

  • Robert Frost
3

Reflections on Ice-Breaking
By Ogden Nash

Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

^ Dunno how motivating that was…

4

Those first two poems are probably the only two I really care about , except more Robert Frost stuff. He never seemed whiny and depressed to me.

5

I Sit and Look Out
By: Walt Whitman

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husbandâ??I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hidâ??I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyrannyâ??I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at seaâ??I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be killâ??d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All theseâ??All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

6

To be is to do
To do is to be

uh

Do be do be do

7

HERE,
With my beer
I sit,
While golden moments flit:
Alas!
They pass
Unheeded by:
And, as they fly,
I,
Being dry,
Sit, idly sipping here
My beer.

O, finer far
Than fame, or riches, are
The graceful smoke-wreathes of this cigar!
Why
Should I
Weep, wail, or sigh?
What if luck has passed me by?
What if my hopes are dead,–
My pleasures fled?
Have I not still
My fill
Of right good cheer,–
Cigars and beer

Go, whining youth,
Forsooth!
Go, weep and wail,
Sigh and grow pale,
Weave melancholy rhymes
On the old times,
Whose joys like shadowy ghosts appear,
But leave me to my beer!
Gold is dross,–
Love is loss,–
So, if I gulp my sorrows down,
Or see them drown
In foamy draughts of old nut-brown,
Then do wear the crown,
Without the cross!

8

Here’s one of my own:

MAN OF MEASURE

I wanna shout ‘movie’ at a crowded fire
Shoot a blank from the gun-for-hire.
Make my mark, after dark
Drink black water from a junkyard tire.

Better head for the hills have eyes
Buy some stock for my alibis
Take a stance, I can’t dance
Make this matter 'cuz it’s just my size.

Will you cry when the mourning comes?
Left a loan for the lonely ones
Faking pleasure, man of measure
Standing daughters versus setting sons.

I’m gonna paint the west wind blue
Short on cash, but long overdue
Coining phrases, burning pages
Looks like Bradbury’s words ring true.

MCC

9

Liberty

Today is the day we mourn liberty
For most of us have blindly sided with tyranny
The perception of misconception is perpetuated
While the essence of our being is alienated
The world which we see is a world that cannot be
Providing a false reality, giving no apology
The unknown is known, but those that know feel alone
Like a dog without a bone, a kite never flown

The architect of doom, concocts a plan to make the world go boom
We are off, concerned less of the world and more of a burger eating David Hasselhoff
Stand up and make some noise
If you are a being that has an ounce left of poise
They lie to no end to defend
The world they have created around the bend
Reach out your hand and they will lend
The pills, the bills, the corrupted good will

As we walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Know that it is, but our soul which we will have left
So do something with your life, do not trife
Bring joy and delight, not sorrow and blight
We are beaten to a pulp
Our last gasp of air, our last gulp
Do not fear to stand up and say â??Heyâ??
For god is always at your side, till the very last day

This is not a scripture of despair
Share, be fair, show some compassion and care
Wake up before our world begins to decay
Do not always obey, let your spirit be put on display
Know there is always time for change
Evil into good we must rearrange
Liberty must be resurrected, before we let ourselves
Be so affected by the people which we have elected

10

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
“Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act to each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
11

Couraegous cowardice cradles cadence,
onwards of overwhelming onus,
to trouble tainted tastes,
dread derived delicious danger,
allowing all another angle,
mangled misshapen motives mishandled,
for four forgetting fools,
into inept intellect indeed.

  • Me

Also I like haikus if you don’t know what a haiku is look it up. If you do I apologise for the noviceness.

Fire flickers
warm night,
illuminates

  • Me
12

In my own words:
I thank the Romans for ending an insoluble fog, that which still plagues incessant minds of today.A cryptic sheild comforts most, while an audacious few seek the truths of a factual evident reality…
Cruel or not. … …

-Me

I wrote this a few years ago.

13

Constantly Risking Absurdity
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he’s the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Weird
By Radric “Gucci Mane” Davis

my swag turned up, my swag got an amp
your tramp seen the champ and her pussy got damp
chickens with the stamp
i count so much money that my fingers got a cramp
if you’re not with that camp i suggest you better vamp
i’m rollin up the plant
gucci mane’s an alien and you’re not even ant
never say can’t, ball, kevin durant
camp shine like lamps; guns, grass game gramp
crack a egg, that’s my charm, like an omelette on my arm
cuz my diamonds are my sons, yellow diamonds for my mom
he’ll go to the prom, sellin dope what i was doin
lamborghini, beemer, corvettes and my ten year class reunion

14

The Living Dead by Count Rockula

Break my bones and reset me
Piece by piece replace me
I’ll carry that Cross you’ve had it once
and now its mine

I will not scream, the pain is my fuel for courage
Life is your dream, but death is where I’ll flourish
Glory only comes after I have been punished

Inhaling your emotion
It’s so wickedly righteous
It’s in my soul, conflicted tightness
With this I might just…

Needing your energy
Flee to the pain you give
Turn their fear into my peace
Inhabits my blood
Enter me
In death’s grip is where I live
You know my weakness, now give me that release.

It started off a a song I was writing for my girl but turned into a song about my coaches. This was my acceptance speech for “Wrestler of the Year” my senior season of high school. A Goth athlete, no way!