Ask Lemmy

London

By William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls, 

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse 

"The Chaos"

Because English will fuck you up.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

How much shit could a dipshit dip if a dipshit could dip shit.

The poop that took a pee - Butters

There was a young lady from Venus, Whose body was shaped like a - DATA!

-Star Trek TNG & Picard

Here I sit, same as ever. Took a dump, pulled the lever. The toilet clogged. The water flowed. Look out world, it's a motherload!.

Why is it my favorite? I have no idea... Probably because I'm awful.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus

Toughen up

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturitions are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,

That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles,
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming]

Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles,
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts,
And living glupules frart and slipulate,
Like jowling meated liverslime,

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turling dromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
With crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,

See if I don't.

-- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

So wie die Ordnung stets in Chaos geht,
wenn keine Kraft dagegen steht,
so herrscht das Chaos nie allein:
Es braucht die Ordnung, um zu sein.

I like these two a lot. Mainly because they're the only two that stuck with me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L(a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock

Billy Connolly's "Mary Rose"

Mary Rose
Sat on a pin
Mary rose

Rainer Maria Rilke
Der Panther/ The Panther.
(I don't really feel the english translation does the poem justice. In german the words create a certain rhythm, nearly like a melody, that I find utterly enchanting)

_His gaze against the sweeping of the bars has grown so weary, it can hold no more. To him, there seem to be a thousand bars and back behind those thousand bars no world.

The soft the supple step and sturdy pace, that in the smallest of all circles turns, moves like a dance of strength around a core in which a mighty will is standing stunned.

Only at times the pupil’s curtain slides up soundlessly — . An image enters then, goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs — and in the heart ceases to be._

----- The original German‐------

_Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille – und hört im Herzen auf zu sein._

The Charge Of The Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson!

Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

It's been my mantra and my battlecry for the past few years now. Love it.

Teeny tiny axolotl

There is really not a lotl

Of you. Not a jot or tittle

So I'll call you axolitl

— anon

Subh Milis (Sweet jam). It's a short and powerful Irish poem reminding parents to be kind to their kids.

English translation below. Can't seem to get the formatting correct on mobile...

Bhí subh milis ar bháscrann an doras

ach mhúch mé an corraí

ionaim a d’éirigh

mar smaoinigh mé ar an lá

a bheadh an bháscrann glan

agus an lámh beag – ar iarraidh…”

There was jam on the door handle

But I quelled the anger

That rose inside me

Because I thought of the day

That the handle would be clean

And the little hand - longed for

Baudelaire- la beauté

It's a beautifully worded sonnet on the nature of beauty, but meta as in how the poet is swayed by it and how he both loves that and is annoyed by the ease with with he's enthralled

No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend’s were. Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.

Schiller's song of the Bell is his longest poem, a 430 stanza epic about building a church bell that describes the process in technical detail and uses it as a metaphor for society. Here's an English translation:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89081025074&seq=13

My favorite poem is the condensed version. Loosely translated:

dig a hole
pour bronze in
bell is done
ding dong ding

It's a tie tbh.

Between "the bells" for sheer joyous onomatopoeia, and "oh captain, my captain" because of the flow of it.

Both of them are poems I read out loud to myself, and there's not many of those. They both resonate inside me in different ways, and both are associated with my initial exploration of poetry.

I've never been able to pick one over the other.

And yeah, they're pretty basic poems rather than some more deeply personal things. It isn't an emotional connection to them, it's more of a sensory thing, if that makes sense (pun intended).

But, they both represent the way words can affect us, move our minds. They're an experience when you hear them. They're immersive and fulfilling, though in different ways.

"The View From Halfway Down" by Alison Tifel has always resonated with me:

The weak breeze whispers nothing
The water screams sublime
His feet shift, teeter-totter
Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

Toes untouch the overpass
Soon he’s water bound
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
The view from halfway down

A little wind, a summer sun
A river rich and regal
A flood of fond endorphins
Brings a calm that knows no equal

You’re flying now
You see things much more clear than from the ground
It’s all okay, it would be
Were you not now halfway down

Thrash to break from gravity
What now could slow the drop
All I’d give for toes to touch
The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done
Silence drowns the sound
Before I leaped I should’ve seen
The view from halfway down

I really should’ve thought about
The view from halfway down
I wish I could’ve known about
The view from halfway down

It's not DNS,
There’s no way it’s DNS,
It was DNS

lighght

because it messes with my brain just righght

If-, by Rudyard Kipling.

Different stanzas of the poem have given me strengths through different challenges and I keep coming back to it.

A Supermarket in California by Ginsberg. Idk why it just always has stuck with me

I find it almost impossible to pick a favorite poem of hers, but if I had to it'd probably be "Tutaj" ("Here" in English) by Wislawa Szymborska.

https://medium.com/illumination/here-671e29357dcc

"Starvation Camp Near Jaslo" and "Foraminifera" are two other favorites and Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak have done an amazing job at the translations.

I can't remember the number but it's a sonnet by (of course) Shakespeare but it's the one where he's ruminating about how he's eventually going to die.

It starts off by comparing the fleeting short existence of a person to the summer season.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44049/a-man-said-to-the-universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Written in like the 1890s. So straight forward. Feels modern.

I think about this often.

I do not belong here.

Futility by Wilfred Owen.

Im not really too much into poetry, Im more of a song person, so obviously I found about it through a song that uses the poem as lyrics. I think I somewhat relate to to it, the feeling of futility expressed in it, even tho I havent seen the horrors he must have seen. All of his poetry is quite good, and it was written during WWI and from the trenches which makes it way more powerfull and sad IMO

I also like The Sleeper by Edgar A. Poe but that its mostly because I was a bit of a goth kid and its also been turned into a song

As I walked out one evening by W.H. Auden

https://poets.org/poem/i-walked-out-one-evening

Or for the lazy who want to hear the poet himself read it:

The why is that long ago, when I was in college in Maine, my girlfriend's English step-dad read it to his wife after attempting to prove he was American by driving their VW Jetta around the garden in the snow. Alcohol was involved and when everyone assembled finally convinced Tony to come back inside, an English teacher friend compelled him to read a poem as proof that he had come to terms with the car stuck in the snow out back. A life-long fan of Auden he chose As I Walked Out One Evening. As it opens, the imagery and fantastic feats of love are obviously spoken by a young man, but "time coughs when you would kiss" signalling that "time will have his fancy, tomorrow or today." You can break down what it means to you but the undeniably great lines I continue to quote on a weekly basis, albeit in my head so as not to annoy others. As I get older I stare in the basin and wonder what I've missed, but I also know that I will love my best friend, and wife 'till the salmon sing in the street.

"No te salves " from Mario Benedetti. It's beautiful in Spanish. Does not translate well to English but here it is

https://pleasansenmarais.tumblr.com/post/575992977

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It always struck me as both humble and proud and it only becomes more meaningful as I age.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

We Wear the Mask by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I remember reading it in middle school. Poetry hadn’t done much for me at that point of my life but that one got through to me and helped me appreciate the medium much more in general

Pale Fire, because I'm a try hard poser I think