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Best Famous Bums Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Bums poems. This is a select list of the best famous Bums poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Bums poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of bums poems.

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Written by Allen Ginsberg | Create an image from this poem

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of your railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.


Written by Peter Orlovsky | Create an image from this poem

Frist Poem

 A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified. 
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills 
 the air. 
I look for my shues under my bed. 
A fat colored woman becomes my mother. 
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap. 
I grow a beard in one day. 
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut. 
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to 
 talk to me. 
I empty the garbage on the tabol. 
I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them. 
I use the typewritter as my pillow. 
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes. 
Bums give all their money to me. 
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life. 
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough 
 bacon. 
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of 
 blue beards. 
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed. 
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a 
 bullet. 
I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me. 
My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning 
 of life 
All I needed was ink to be a black boy. 
I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face. 
I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven. 
I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for 
 fresh butts. 
My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed. 
I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street, 
 look up at my window and see nobody. 
So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears 
 then I do?" 
Nobody around, I piss anywhere. 
My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies, 
 my gay jubilation.

Nov. 24th, 1957, Paris
Written by Rg Gregory | Create an image from this poem

thirteeners

 18
if you want a revolution attack
symbols not systems - the simple forms
that (blithely) give the truth away
tying down millions to their terms
quietly with no one answering back

where the stage is makes the play
keeps actors (meanings) to those norms
stability requires - change tack
(remove the stage) violent storms
will sweep the old regime away

eventually there'll be no going back
once new symbols breed new germs
and strange hopes redesign the day

29
fresh hope stems from a dead conclusion
high art is a fraud - a provider of pap
for suckers happy to give up their own
longings to beauty in a cellophane wrap
spending their rights for a rich illusion

people demean themselves before a throne
but sooner or later have to let the sap
earthed in them rise to a new extrusion
art's not in the show (a lovely touch of clap)
but in the tough fusion of blood and bone

dreams may be soured in the drab confusion
but everywhere's the making of a map
charting today's unimaginable zone

42
what appals me daily is the unintelligence of those
who sit on the commodes of power debowelling scented ****
public- and grammar-school yokels wet-nursed oxbridge bums
(meet them where your own world breathes you'd have the urge to spit)
their great debates are full of puff their insights comatose

but they concoct the standards in their painted kingdom-comes
they pass down the judgments draped in tongues of holy writ
the people are a mass disease an untissued runny nose
disdained (but somehow soared above) as they subscribe their wit
to the culture of the stately tree (and to pilfering its plums)

they've got there by a rancid myth - that a nation's wisdom blows
from the arseholes of the clever (the odiferously fit)
as they guzzle in their spotlit windows tossing off the crumbs

65
far deeper than the wounds on egdon heath
its proud moroseness scales across the time
tinting all after-thought - where hardy gloomed
(wringing ironic bloodtones from sublime)
a host of worms have nibbled through belief

faith-riddled souls have other faiths exhumed
a pagan dissonance has reached for rhyme
a void (dismissed) has sprouted from the wreath
that science laid - a self-inflicted crime
unknifes itself and bleaker hope has bloomed

what hardy touched on sombre egdon heath
the wasted world now touches - midnights prime
the last condition be frugal or be doomed
Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

Layover

 Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men- poor folks-
work.
That moment- to this. . .
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind-
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.
Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

Examples (August 27)

 The last Campbell's tomato soup can 
of the twentieth century is going to 
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh 
That is an example of a sentence 
Another is this from a CEO in Fortune 
"You die in either case, but this way you get 
to do it proactively," where the adverb 
makes the sentence I'm walking amid 
the tourists on Bleecker Street the riffraff 
the students with backpacks the bums and 
a good old-fashioned New York feeling 
hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl 
the urge to kick a stranger in the pants, 
and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do


Written by William Henry Davies | Create an image from this poem

All in June

 A week ago I had a fire 
To warm my feet, my hands and face; 
Cold winds, that never make a friend, 
Crept in and out of every place. 

Today the fields are rich in grass, 
And buttercups in thousands grow; 
I'll show the world where I have been-- 
With gold-dust seen on either shoe. 

Till to my garden back I come, 
Where bumble-bees for hours and hours 
Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums, 
To wriggle out of hollow flowers.
Written by James Wright | Create an image from this poem

A Poem About George Doty In The Death House

 Lured by the wall, and drawn
To stare below the roof,
Where pigeons nest aloof
From prowling cats and men,
I count the sash and bar
Secured to granite stone,
And note the daylight gone,
Supper and silence near.

Close to the wall inside,
Immured, empty of love,
A man I have wondered of
Lies patient, vacant-eye.
A month and a day ago
He stopped his car and found
A girl on the darkening ground,
And killed her in the snow.

Beside his cell, I am told,
Hardy perennial bums
Complain till twilight comes
For hunger and for cold.
They hardly know of a day
That saw their hunger pass.
Bred to the dark, their flesh
Peacefully withers away.

The man who sits alone,
He is the one for wonder,
Who sways his fingers under
The cleanly shaven chin,
Who sees, in the shaving mirror
Pinned to the barren wall,
The uprooted ghost of all:
The simple, easy terror.

Caught between sky and earth,
Poor stupid animal,
Stripped naked to the wall,
He saw the blundered birth
Of daemons beyond sound.
Sick of the dark, he rose
For love, and now he goes
Back to the broken ground.

Now, as he grips the chain
And holds the wall, to bear
What no man ever bore,
He hears the bums complain;
But I mourn no soul but his,
Not even the bums who die,
Nor the homely girl whose cry
Crumbled his pleading kiss.
Written by David Wagoner | Create an image from this poem

Wallace Stevens On His Way To Work

 He would leave early and walk slowly
 As if balancing books
 On the way to school, already expecting
To be tardy once again and heavy
 With numbers, the unfashionably rounded
 Toes of his shoes invisible beyond
The slope of his corporation. He would pause
 At his favorite fundamentally sound
 Park bench, which had been the birthplace
Of paeans and ruminations on other mornings,
 And would turn his back to it, having gauged the distance
 Between his knees and the edge of the hardwood
Almost invariably unoccupied
 At this enlightened hour by the bums of nighttime
 (For whom the owlish eye of the moon
Had been closed by daylight), and would give himself wholly over
 Backwards and trustingly downwards
 And be well seated there. He would remove
From his sinister jacket pocket a postcard
 And touch it and retouch it with the point
 Of the fountain he produced at his fingertips
And fill it with his never-before-uttered
 Runes and obbligatos and pellucidly cryptic
 Duets from private pageants, from broken ends
Of fandangos with the amoeba chaos chaos
 Couchant and rampant. Then he would rise
 With an effort as heartfelt as a decision
To get out of bed on Sunday and carefully
 Relocate his center of gravity
 Above and beyond an imaginary axis
Between his feet and carry the good news
 Along the path and the sidewalk, well on his way
 To readjusting the business of the earth.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Hymn

 How I love the working-class girls of Leeds,

Their mile-wide smiles, eyes bright as beads,

Their young breasts bobbing as they run,

Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs

Bare as they scramble over the Hollows

With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums

Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks

Full of flowers and their delicate ears,

Perfect teeth and flickering tongues, the

Fragile bones of their cheeks, the soft

Sweetness of their soprano voices dying

Away into the unforgotten magenta and

Yellow-ochre of innumerable twilights.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry