VICIOUS POEMS

Poem Dedicated To Every Girl Rapped In Kashmir

In a vicious country, and a distant age
A girl was born of biddable and
penniless parentage,
The moon that glittered upon her
.....

Adnan Shafi

We Are But Different

As the time ticks,
A tale, fantasy or real unfolds.
As we share these sips,
Like our cups, these words pour.
.....

Az Mo

Wounded

Is it not strange? A year ago to-day,
With scarce a thought beyond the hum-drum round,
I did my decent job and earned my pay;
Was averagely happy, I'll be bound.
.....

Robert Service

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Absalom And Achitophel

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:
.....

John Dryden

The Prostitute

Woman of weeping eye, ah! for thy wretched lot,
Putting on smiles to lure the lewd passenger,
Smiling while anguish gnaws at thy heavy heart;

.....

Henry Kirk White

The Race

On the hill they are crowding together,
In the stand they are crushing for room,
Like midge-flies they swarm on the heather,
They gather like bees on the broom;
.....

Adam Lindsay Gordon

To Interrupt His Yellow Plan

591

To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
.....

Emily Dickinson

Sword Blades And Poppy Seed

A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
.....

Amy Lowell

Lancelot 05

Gawaine, his body trembling and his heart
Pounding as if he were a boy in battle,
Sat crouched as far away from everything
As walls would give him distance. Bedivere
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Merlin Iv

The tortured King-seeing Merlin wholly meshed
In his defection, even to indifference,
And all the while attended and exalted
By some unfathomable obscurity
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Portent

Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
.....

Robert Service

Damætas

In law an infant, and in years a boy,
In mind a slave to every vicious joy;
From every sense of shame and virtue wean'd;
In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;
.....

George Gordon Byron

For A Dead Lady

No more with overflowing light
Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another's fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Old King's New Jester

You that in vain would front the coming order
With eyes that meet forlornly what they must,
And only with a furtive recognition
See dust where there is dust,-
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Lady's Dressing Room

Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
.....

Jonathan Swift

Passion And The Skull

An Old Colophon

Passion sits on the skull
Of Humanity,
.....

Charles Baudelaire

Largo E Mesto

Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent Influence released
From the most squalid cellarage of hell,
.....

William Ernest Henley

The Traveller-heart

(To a Man who maintained that the Mausoleum is the
Stateliest Possible Manner of Interment)


.....

Vachel Lindsay

Waltz

I touch hatred like a covered breast;
I without stopping go from garment to garment,
sleeping at a distance.

.....

Pablo Neruda

The Lady Of La Garaye - Part I

ON Dinan's walls the morning sunlight plays,
Gilds the stern fortress with a crown of rays,
Shines on the children's heads that troop to school,
Turns into beryl-brown the forest pool,
.....

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

The Choir Invisible

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
.....

George Eliot

Lost

"He ought to be home," said the old man, "without there's something amiss.
He only went to the Two-mile -- he ought to be back by this.
He would ride the Reckless filly, he would have his wilful way;
And, here, he's not back at sundown -- and what will his mother say?
.....

Banjo Paterson

The Lady's Dressing Room

By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void
.....

Jonathan Swift

Ned The Larrikin

A SONG that is bitter with griefâ??a ballad as pale as the light
That comes with the fall of the leaf, I sing to the shadows to-night.

The laugh on the lyrical lips is sadder than laughter of ghosts
.....

Henry Kendall

A Retort

As vicious women think all men are knaves,
And shrew-bound gentlemen discourse of slaves;
As reeling drunkards judge the world unsteady
And idlers swear employers ne'er get ready
.....

Ambrose Bierce

Becoming A Dad

Old women say that men don't know
The pain through which all mothers go,
And maybe that is true, and yet
I vow I never shall forget
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

The Bestiary: Or Orpheus-s Procession

(Le Bestiaire ou Cortège dâ??Orphée)

Orpheus

.....

Guillaume Apollinaire

The Old King's New Jester

You that in vain would front the coming order
With eyes that meet forlornly what they must,
And only with a furtive recognition
See dust where there is dust,â??
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Portent

Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
.....

Robert William Service

To John Ruskin

(After reading his 'Modern Painters')
YES, you do well to mock us, you
Who knew our bitter woe â??
To jeer the false, deny the true
.....

Francis William Lauderdale Adams

George Mullen's Confession

For the sake of guilty conscience, and the heart that ticks the
time
Of the clockworks of my nature, I desire to say that I'm
A weak and sinful creature, as regards my daily walk
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode On The Birth Of Lincoln

I

O, fairest Dame of sylvan glades,
We come to pay thee homage due,
.....

Edward Smyth Jones

War Is A Vicious Cycle

Civil Wars, World Wars
Mass Killings, Killing Fields
Genocide, Terrorism
War is inevitable
.....

Rose Marie Juan Austin

Brer Rabbit, You's De Cutes' Of 'em All

Once der was a meetin' in de wilderness,
All de critters of creation dey was dar;
Brer Rabbit, Brer ‘Possum, Brer Wolf, Brer Fox,
King Lion, Mister Terrapin, Mister B'ar.
.....

James Weldon Johnson

Joseph's Dreams And Reuben's Brethren (a Recital In Six Chapters)

CHAPTER I

I cannot blame old Israel yet,
For I am not a sage,
.....

Henry Lawson

The Leech

Apart from its voracious appetite for mammalian blood
little is known of the leech's ways. Does it know love or
family life? is there communication?
Leaf litter's monster weapon, what can you say
.....

S. K. Kelen

An Essay On Criticism

'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
.....

Alexander Pope

Metamorphoses: Book 06

Pallas, attending to the Muse's song,
Approv'd the just resentment of their wrong;
And thus reflects: While tamely I commend
Those who their injur'd deities defend,
.....

Ovid

Paradise Lost: Book 12

As one who in his journey bates at noon,
Though bent on speed; so here the Arch-Angel paused
Betwixt the world destroyed and world restored,
If Adam aught perhaps might interpose;
.....

John Milton

There Was An Old Person Of Bude

There was an old person of Bude,
Whose deportment was vicious and crude;
He wore a large ruff,
Of pale straw-coloured stuff,
.....

Edward Lear

The Great Adventure Of Max Breuck: 49

“Why, Max! Stop, Max!” And out they came pell-mell,
His old companions. “Max, where have you been?
Not drink with us? Indeed you serve us well!
How many months is it since we have seen
.....

Amy Lowell

Hero And Leander: The Second Sestiad

By this, sad Hero, with love unacquainted,
Viewing Leander's face, fell down and fainted.
He kissed her and breathed life into her lips,
Wherewith as one displeased away she trips.
.....

Christopher Marlowe

Avon's Harvest

Fear, like a living fire that only death
Might one day cool, had now in Avon's eyes
Been witness for so long of an invasion
That made of a gay friend whom we had known
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Merlin Vii

By Merlin's Rock, where Dagonet the fool
Was given through many a dying afternoon
To sit and meditate on human ways
And ways divine, Gawaine and Bedivere
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The New Tenants

The day was here when it was his to know
How fared the barriers he had built between
His triumph and his enemies unseen,
For them to undermine and overthrow;
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Damætas

In law an infant, and in years a boy,
In mind a slave to every vicious joy;
From every sense of shame and virtue wean'd,
In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;
.....

George Gordon Lord Byron

A Litany

I.

THE FATHER.

.....

John Donne

In Making Marjorie God Hurried

in making Marjorie god hurried
a boy's body on unsuspicious
legs of girl. his left hand quarried
the quartzlike face. his right slapped
.....

E. E. Cummings

Faust In Old Age

“Poet and veteran of childhood, look!
See in me the obscene, for you have love,

For you have hatred, you, you must be judge,
.....

Delmore Schwartz