This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

They  %#@! you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were %#@ed up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

YOU TOOK THE LAST BUS HOME

By Brian Bilston

you took
the last bus home

i still don’t know
how you got it through the door

but you’re always doing amazing stuff

like the time
when you caught that train

13 Very Short Ones By Billy Collins (From his Musical Tables)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Trouble was not

his middle name.

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Reflections On An Amish Childhood

I was a little square

in a round hat.

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Adolescence

The gulf widened between my parents and me

but that doesn't mean they lived on a houseboat.

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Another Hotel

Unlike the breakfast menu

I have no desire to be hung outside before 3AM

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Corridor

I've grown old.

Now my own name

rings a bell.

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Elegy

I have turned over

all 52 cards

on the kitchen table.

Still, I think

you must be hiding

somewhere in the deck.

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Carbon Dating

He tried it once

as a last resort

but most of the women

were a million years old

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3 A.M.

Only my hand

is asleep,

but it’s a start.

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Flaubert

As he looked for the right word,

several wrong words

appeared in his window.

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Dog

When she runs in her sleep,

eyelids twitching,

legs churning sideways on the floor,

I wonder if she's chasing a squirrel

or being chased

by an angry farmer waving a rake.

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Morning Walk

The dog stops often

to sniff the poems of others

before reciting her own.

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The Exception

Whoever said there's a poem

lurking in the darkness of every pencil

was not thinking of this one.

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Children

There’s a movie out

titled Children

I don’t know what it’s about

but I like the voice

on the radio

when it says:

“Children now playing everywhere.”

I am bravery.
I am courage.
I am valor.
I am daring.
I am holding a thesaurus.

- Demitri Martin

You’re probably expecting something dramatic,
Something ecstatic, something traumatic
To cry out your tears until you can’t no more.
Thing is, my life’s kinda a bore:

I’m as normal as anyone could be,
I have good friends, and a good family,
With two legs, and I use them to stand,
Five fingers on each of my hands,

Want to hear about my life plans?
Of course you don’t.
That’s the curse of being happy:
No one knows a thing about me;

After hearing this, would you want to stay?
There’s more interesting people not so far away,
Broken kids you think you can fix,
And heroes you worship, add that to the mix;

And once you have this big, giant pit,
Where do all the normal people fit?
I know, I’m being ungrateful,
I don’t mean to sound so hateful;

It’s just, when everyone tells you you’re special,
what do you do when you’re not?
There’s a moment in your favorite book
Where the troubled girl takes a look

At me and wishes she had my life,
Free of troubles, free of strife,
Then she carries on and it never comes up again:
The normal girl gets forgotten

'Cause you’re not the main character, you’re the life she longed for
A what-if and nothing more,
Your fate was sealed long ago,
So know your place and keep your head low.

Next time you see a normal girl, don’t walk away;
Make her feel special for just one day,
Because we want our own stories, but try as we might,
Normal girls just don’t get the spotlight."

 - Adira Rose Koffsky - of blessed memory

THE BLUES by William Matthews

What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet
and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve

you think the heart and memory are different.
"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.

Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon -- torpor rising from the river -- and listen
to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive as a fox
who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars -- they were enough -- of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember --

but this can't be; how could I bear it? --
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues.

(Discovered via Billy Collins reading it on his Facebook Live Show)

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Emily D