SMBC Comics Forum

I don't really go out of my way to read poetry, but I like Robert Frost and epic poems like the Iliad/Odyssey.

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

By James Tate.

I like this poem:

How to greet death (2009)

Greet death
with your hands in your pockets,
slouched back, cool,
collected, and confident.
Wear a hint of a grin
and a dash of cologne.
Say What took you so long?
Say You’re behind the times, man.
Say Dead is the new black.
Coffin is the new condo.
Pallor is the new tan.
La vida muerta.

Greet death
with a fistful of black-eyed susans,
butterflies in your stomach,
and two tickets to tomorrow’s sunrise.
Wear your father’s cufflinks
and your mother’s wedding ring.
Say I brought these for you, babe.
Say Kiss me, kiss me.
Say But wait until the sun comes up.
Just until daybreak.
I want to show you something.
Hasta la muerte, te amo.

Greet death
with a knife at your own neck,
chin up, throat bared,
cardiac in overdrive.
Wear nothing.
Wear nothing.
Say Bring it on motherfucker!
Say Only on my terms.
Say nothing
and open your throat.
and bleed to completion.
El final, el final, el final.

~~~~Gabriel Gadfly

Felstaff wrote:I like this poem:

How to greet death (2009)

Greet death
with your hands in your pockets,
slouched back, cool,
collected, and confident.
Wear a hint of a grin
and a dash of cologne.
Say What took you so long?
Say You’re behind the times, man.
Say Dead is the new black.
Coffin is the new condo.
Pallor is the new tan.
La vida muerta.

Greet death
with a fistful of black-eyed susans,
butterflies in your stomach,
and two tickets to tomorrow’s sunrise.
Wear your father’s cufflinks
and your mother’s wedding ring.
Say I brought these for you, babe.
Say Kiss me, kiss me.
Say But wait until the sun comes up.
Just until daybreak.
I want to show you something.
Hasta la muerte, te amo.

Greet death
with a knife at your own neck,
chin up, throat bared,
cardiac in overdrive.
Wear nothing.
Wear nothing.
Say Bring it on motherfucker!
Say Only on my terms.
Say nothing
and open your throat.
and bleed to completion.
El final, el final, el final.

~~~~Gabriel Gadfly

me too. deep. thanks for sharing

says poetry is dead but stumbles arms-out grasping from the grave while twitterliterate frankensteins lure lightning to their own stitched prose and perhaps its poetry, and perhaps it's the swamp-bog thing that came from a blog, vaguely radioactive, somebody's goldfish that got flushed down the drain and adapted and evolved; says poetry is dead but perhaps only in washington, and it's strange to say that poetry is dead when paint is dead and cars aren't exactly living and a movie's only moving if you actually pay attention; implies the programs/grants/journals and societies of oetry with a capital P are deadening, like only ever eating fastfood or country club dinners, always the same yawning gawping decor of turkey-stuffed faces trying to succeed at swallowing their own tail/like their own self-regard, while a manic sonneteer commits seppuku (or hari-kiri, depending on if this is chapbook or open mic) with a butterknife and somebody's drunk uncle who lobbies for newspapers (can we just get a subsidy like farmers to keep our pages fallow?) shouts "fore!" and then giggles and asks for another penile colada (slurring a joke which he got from Grisham's The Firm which was the last book he read because the novel is dead anyway), and the sonneteer's body is wrapped-up in the table linen and carried away; and outrage in the comment section and the occasional poem which of course nobody bothers to read, because we are all too busy swallowing our own tale; and of course we are all stumbling towards poetry half dead all of the time, look at your own mother's facebook page, look at your own self texting, because of course it's a poem just not a very good one, except when the lightning strikes and Ben Franklin's high as a kite/ that's been made from recycled newspaper and pop-sticks and horses' hooves and Ginsberg's best minds of his generation/ and he had a vision of T.S. Eliot peeling away in a Ford Thunderbird with the top down and his toupee scalped by the wind/Hieronymo!