Failure poems

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It is these sunless afternoons, I find
Install you at my elbow like a bore
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I'm
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.

Toads Revisited

© Philip Larkin

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

To My Wife

© Philip Larkin

So for your face I have exchanged all faces,
For your few properties bargained the brisk
Baggage, the mask-and-magic-man's regalia.
Now you become my boredom and my failure,
Another way of suffering, a risk,
A heavier-than-air hypostasis.

Carol Of Occupations

© Walt Whitman

COME closer to me;
Push close, my lovers, and take the best I possess;
Yield closer and closer, and give me the best you possess.

Offering

© Kenneth Allott

I offer you my forests and my street-cries
With hands of double-patience under the clock,
The antiseptic arguments and lies
Uttered before the flood, the submerged rock.
The sack of meal pierced by the handsome fencer,
The flowers dying for a great adventure.

De Tea Fabula

© Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Do I sleep? Do I dream?

Am I hoaxed by a scout?

Apology

© Joyce Kilmer

(For Eleanor Rogers Cox)For blows on the fort of evil
That never shows a breach,
For terrible life-long races
To a goal no foot can reach,

An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion

© Yehuda Amichai

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

The Improvisatore

© Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Eliza. Ask our friend, the Improvisatore ; here he comes. Kate has a favour
to ask of you, Sir ; it is that you will repeat the ballad [Believe me if
all those endearing young charms.--EHC's ? note] that Mr. ____ sang so
sweetly.

The Ring And The Book - Chapter VII - Pompilia

© Robert Browning

There,
Strength comes already with the utterance!
I will remember once more for his sake
The sorrow: for he lives and is belied.
Could he be here, how he would speak for me!

Dream Song 105: As a kid I believed in democracy: I

© John Berryman

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative'âteaching at The Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a voteâ
Gone with the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No'
and we sat down with War & Peace.

Faces In A Crowd

© Barry Tebb

The women are all wearing imitation silk scarves,

An Evening With John Heath-stubbs

© Barry Tebb

Alone in Sutton with Fynbos my orange cat

Incompatabilities

© Barry Tebb

For Brenda Williams

Vers De Société

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I'm afraid-

Twenty-One Love Poems XV

The Mary Gloster

I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim --
Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!
Good for a fortnight, am I? The doctor told you? He lied.
I shall go under by morning, and -- Put that nurse outside.

The Man Who Could Write

Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen,
Is a dismal failure -- is a Might-have-been.
In a luckless moment he discovered men
Rise to high position through a ready pen.