Favourite lines of poetry/verse?

[WDC]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

[M2d]

and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful

edit: actually, any line(s) from this poem make my top ten.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

Written in an outhouse:

Here I sit, broken hearted,
Paid a nickel and only farted.

Next time, take a chance.
Save the nickel and crap your pants.

[steviej1717]

Rilke is awesome.

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

And another one that I couldn't find an author for.

When God comes to me I will be shaking. Gun loaded on my knee, my fingers waiting. Gonna tell him I was born, mistaken, then I´m gonna let my fingers slip. God help my shaking hand, I can see your light, they´re lining up the dead. Gonna take another sip of your soul, my favorite sinner.

[kitaristi0]

This is amazing. A post in OOT about poetry that has gone about 80 replies with little-to-no haters.

[diebitter]

OOT can move you sometimes.

Or your bowels, at least.

[steviej1717]

More favorites

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just
Ourselves And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had.

Gary Jules

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities; that the world is brutal and coarse, that God, in fact, has not saved us.



Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page.
They fade into the emptiness, another dark gray day.
Dreams are only memories of the plans I had back then.
Dreams are eraser dust and now I use a pen

[rory]

THEMES ON LOVE
Grading themes on love at M.I.T.,
one-man Symposium at 3
a.m., across the court I saw a light;
another office-holder working late.
While Plato on a silver pillow rode
above the waves of pre-sophistic prose,
I jotted teacher's notions that were not
as brave as our two lamps against the glut
of dawn. But when I clicked mine off
his too at once was gone, had been
my echo in a distant sheen
of glass; had been my own, and I
was lonely then, and wrote
these English words.

[Georgia Avenue]

Lot of great poems in this thread... This one combines my two favorite things:

Ooh My Soul

—Little Richard
By Charles Harper Webb

By night, ghosts roam Aunt Ermyn’s
elm-shrouded, hundred-year-old home.
By day, my cousin Pete, just out of high school,
combs his ducktail and keeps time
to records with his creaky rocking chair.
I’m in the hall, creating all-star teams
of baseball cards when, blaring
through Pete’s open door, I hear . . .
war drums? Or is it a runaway train?
Keepa knockin’ but you cain’t come in,
then squeals like tires around a curve.
Those chugging drums, smoking piano,
squawking duck-call saxophones
make me feel like an oil rig ready to blow.
I see wells pumping, teeter-totters bumping,
giant turtle-heads working out and in
as bronco riders wave tall hats in the air.
I see girls twirling, dresses swirling
high over their underwear,
guys doing splits, or inch-worming
across the floor.
It makes me want
to slam my head back and forth
like a paddle ball—to jump, shout, bang
my hands on walls, and flap them
in the air—to fall onto the ground
and writhe, flail, roar like Johnny Cerna
in his famous Kiddieland tantrum.
Keepa knockin’ but you cain’t come in,
the preacher howls. But I am in.
I’m in the living room, Bandstand on tv,
Dad ranting, “. . . goddamn Congo beat!”
I’m in the back seat of his Ford
a decade later, learning what that beat
could be. I’m in my first band, hoarse
from screaming “Long Tall Sally.”
I’m in my college dorm, trying to jam
that wild abandon into poems.
I’m in my car, heading for work,
when “Good Golly, Miss Molly!”
catapults out of my Blaupunkt stereo.
I’m walking into Pete’s bedroom,
where I’ve never dared to go. Oh,
womp bompalumomp, a lomp bam boom!
I’m not thinking in words, but I know
I’ve spent my seven years rehearsing
how to feel this way. It’s more exciting
than a touchdown any day, or a home run,
a gunfight, hurricane waves at Galveston,
a five-pound bass on a cane pole.
“What is that?” I ask Pete. He says,
“Rock-and-roll.”