10 Best Famous Everybodys Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Everybodys poems. This is a select list of the best famous Everybodys poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Everybodys poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of everybodys poems.

• All Famous Everybodys Poems

 America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 
 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb. 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I 
 need with my good looks? 
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not 
 the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me. 
You made me want to be a saint. 
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back 
 it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical 
 joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday 
 somebody goes on trial for murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid 
 I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses 
 in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. 
You should have seen me reading Marx. 
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 
I won't say the Lord's Prayer. 
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle 
 Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by 
 Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner 
 candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
 men are serious. Movie producers are serious. 
 Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again. 

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of 
 marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable 
 private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour 
 and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of 
 underprivileged who live in my flowerpots 
 under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers 
 is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that 
 I'm a Catholic. 
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly 
 mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as 
 individual as his automobiles more so they're 
 all different sexes. 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 
 down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
 munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a 
 handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
 speeches were free everybody was angelic and 
 sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
 cere you have no idea what a good thing the 
 party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand 
 old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me 
 cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody 
 must have been a spy. 
America you don't really want to go to war. 
America it's them bad Russians. 
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. 
 And them Russians. 
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power 
 mad. She wants to take our cars from out our 
 garages. 
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' 
 Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. 
 Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
 tions. 
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. 
 Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us 
 all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 
America this is quite serious. 
America this is the impression I get from looking in 
 the television set. 
America is this correct? 
I'd better get right down to the job. 
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes 
 in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and 
 psychopathic anyway. 
America I'm putting my ***** shoulder to the wheel. 

 Berkeley, January 17, 1956

 I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way.
She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly.
Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful --
Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.
Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case
Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.
She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp --
I had forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

 Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! 
 Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! 
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! 
 The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand 
 and ******* holy! 
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is 
 holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an 
 angel! 
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is 
 holy as you my soul are holy! 
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is 
 holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! 
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy 
 Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas- 
 sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering 
 beggars holy the hideous human angels! 
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks 
 of the grandfathers of Kansas! 
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop 
 apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana 
 hipsters peace & junk & drums! 
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy 
 the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the 
 mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! 
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the 
 middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell- 
 ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! 
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & 
 Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow 
 Holy Istanbul! 
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the 
 clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy 
 the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! 
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the 
 locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina- 
 tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the 
 abyss! 
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! 
 bodies! suffering! magnanimity! 
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent 
 kindness of the soul! 

 Berkeley 1955

 They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom 
For trying to change the system from within 
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens 
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin 
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I'd really like to live beside you, baby 
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes 
But you see that line there moving through the station? 
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those 
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I
just might win 
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the
discipline 
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 
I don't like your fashion business mister 
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin 
I don't like what happened to my sister 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 
I'd really like to live beside you, baby 
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes 
But you see that line there moving through the station? 
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those 
And I thank you for those items that you sent me 
The monkey and the plywood violin 
I practiced every night, now I'm ready 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 
Remember me? I used to live for music 
Remember me? I brought your groceries in 
Well it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded 
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

 I -- A Pleasant Afternoon

 for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup


One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
 tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
 words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest -- the wild wind blew thru
 blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
 Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion's Club lunchwagon microwave
 mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
 Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
 out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
 & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
 tent flapped happily open spacious & didn't fall down.


 June 18, 1978


II -- Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
 over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
 -- am I going to stop that?

 *

Rocky Mountains rising behind us
 Denver shining in morning light
-- Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

 *

Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
 to the greyhaired Sheriff's van -- 
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
 Come back!


III -- Golden Courthouse

Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
 Prisoners, witnesses, Police -- 
the stenographer yawns into her palms.

 August 9, 1978


IV -- Everybody's Fantasy

I walked outside & the bomb'd
 dropped lots of plutonium
 all over the Lower East Side
There weren't any buildings left just
 iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to 
 stinking sewer waters

There were people starving and crawling
 across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
 Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the 
 waters

Charred Amazon palmtrees for
 hundreds of miles on both sides
 of the river

 August 10, 1978


V -- Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant

"Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!"
 the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
 -- whap!

 *

A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall!
 "Life is fragile. Handle with care" --
My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
 triggers.


 August 17, 1978


VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born

 Summer 1978

 there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

 When people aren't asking questions 
They're making suggestions 
And when they're not doing one of those 
They're either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes 
And then as if that weren't enough to annoy you 
They employ you. 
Anybody at leisure 
Incurs everybody's displeasure. 
It seems to be very irking 
To people at work to see other people not working, 
So they tell you that work is wonderful medicine, 
Just look at Firestone and Ford and Edison, 
And they lecture you till they're out of breath or something 
And then if you don't succumb they starve you to death or something. 
All of which results in a nasty quirk: 
That if you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work.

 1)

Sleeping birds, lead me,
soft birds, be me

inside this black room,
back of the white moon.

In the dark night
sight frightens me.


2)

Who is it nuzzles there
with furred, round headed stare?

Who, perched on the skin,
body's float, is holding on?

What other one stares still,
plays still, on and on?


3)

Stand upright, prehensile,
squat, determined,

small guardians of the painful
outside coming in --

in stuck in vials with needles,
bleeding life in, particular, heedless.


4)

Matrix of world
upon a turtle's broad back,

carried on like that,
eggs as pearls,

flesh and blood and bone
all borne along.


5)

I'll tell you what you want,
to say a word, 

to know the letters in yourself,
a skin falls off,

a big eared head appears,
an eye and mouth.


6)

Under watery here,
under breath, under duress,

understand a pain
has threaded a needle with a little man --

gone fishing. 
And fish appear.


7)

If small were big,
if then were now,

if here were there,
if find were found,

if mind were all there was,
would the animals still save us?


8)

A head was put
upon the shelf got took


by animal's hand and stuck
upon a vacant corpse

who, blurred, could nonetheless
not ever be the quietly standing bird it watched.


9)

Not lost,
not better or worse,

much must of necessity depend on resources,
the pipes and bags brought with us

inside, all the sacks
and how and to what they are or were attached.


10)

Everybody's child 
walks the same winding road,

laughs and cries, dies.
That's "everybody's child,"

the one who's in between
the others who have come and gone.


11)

Turn as one will, the sky will always be
far up above the place he thinks to dream as earth.

There float the heavenly
archaic persons of primordial birth,

held in the scan of ancient serpent's tooth,
locked in the mind as when it first began.


12)

Inside I am the other of a self,
who feels a presence always close at hand,

one side or the other, knows another one
unlocks the door and quickly enters in.

Either as or, we live a common person.
Two is still one. It cannot live apart.


13)

Oh, weep for me --
all from whom life has stolen

hopes of a happiness stored
in gold's ubiquitous pattern,

in tinkle of commodious, enduring money,
else the bee's industry in hives of golden honey.


14)

He is safely put
in a container, head to foot,

and there, on his upper part, wears still
remnants of a life he lived at will --

but, lower down, he probes at that doubled sack
holds all his random virtues in a mindless fact.


15)

The forms wait, swan,
elephant, crab, rabbit, horse, monkey, cow,

squirrel and crocodile. From the one
sits in empty consciousness, all seemingly has come

and now it goes, to regather,
to tell another story to its patient mother.


16)

Reflection reforms, each man's a life,
makes its stumbling way from mother to wife --

cast as a gesture from ignorant flesh,
here writes in fumbling words to touch,

say, how can I be,
when she is all that was ever me?


17)

Around and in --
And up and down again,

and far and near --
and here and there,

in the middle is
a great round nothingness.


18)

Not metaphoric,
flesh is literal earth.

turns to dust
as all the body must,

becomes the ground
wherein the seed's passed on.


19)

Entries, each foot feels its own way,
echoes passage in persons,

holds the body upright,
the secret of thresholds, lintels,

opening body above it,
looks up, looks down, moves forward.


20)

Necessity, the mother of invention,
father of intention,

sister to brother to sister, to innumerable others,
all one as the time comes,

death's appointment,
in the echoing head, in the breaking heart.


21)

In self one's place defined,
in heart the other find.

In mind discover I,
in body find the sky.

Sleep in the dream as one,
wake to the others there found.


22)

Emptying out
each complicating part,

each little twist of mind inside,
each clenched fist,

each locked, particularizing thought,
forgotten, emptying out.


23)

What did it feel like
to be one at a time --

to be caught in a mind
in the body you'd found

in yourself alone --
in each other one?


24)

Broken hearts, a curious round of echoes --
and there behind them the old garden

with its faded, familiar flowers,
where all was seemingly laced together --

a trueness of true,
a blueness of blue. 


25)

The truth is in a container
of no size or situation.

It has nothing
inside.

Worship --
Warship. Sail away.

 Shell-shocked from Korea

A grenade that left him

The platoon’s only survivor,

Put him in Stanley Royd

For thirty years.

He tailored there

And out on weekend leaves

He made and mended

Everybody’s clothes,

Crying copiously

While he sewed.

When they cleared out

The chronic cases

Uncle Bob came home,

Shopping for Edna,

Doing the garden;

When the lodger left

Without a word, the police

Searched his room,

The garden shed,

Even the chest freezer.

Oesophageal cancer

Is very final.

John, his son, waiting

To take the house,

Departed for a month’s fishing

Until it was all over.



As a last rite

They put him in the LGI

But I spoke to the houseman privately,

Pulling together the bits of a life

Wholly given over to others,

Fallen comrades, Edna,

The grandchildren

His pension went on.

The houseman agreed to speak

To the surgeon privately.

Edna went first and

At her funeral John,

In frustrated fury,

Hit him over the head

With an empty fish tank.

When secondaries started

I was not told

And in the hospice

He barely lasted

His first weekend.

 I ain't the kind of bloke as takes to any steady job; 
I drives me bottle cart around the town; 
A bloke what keeps 'is eyes about can always make a bob -- 
I couldn't bear to graft for every brown. 
There's lots of handy things about in everybody's yard, 
There's cocks and hens a-runnin' to an' fro, 
And little dogs what comes and barks -- we take 'em off their guard 
And we puts 'em with the Empty Bottle-O! 

Chorus -- 
So it's any "Empty bottles! Any empty bottle-O!" 
You can hear us round for half a mile or so 
And you'll see the women rushing 
To take in the Monday's washing 
When they 'ear us crying, "Empty Bottle-O!" 

I'm driving down by Wexford-street and up a winder goes, 
A girl sticks out 'er 'ead and looks at me, 
An all-right tart with ginger 'air, and freckles on 'er nose; 
I stops the cart and walks across to see. 
"There ain't no bottles 'ere," says she, "since father took the pledge," 
"No bottles 'ere," says I, "I'd like to know 
What right 'ave you to stick your 'ead outside the winder ledge, 
If you 'aven't got no Empty Bottle-O!" 
I sometimes gives the 'orse a spell, and then the push and me 
We takes a little trip to Chowder Bay. 
Oh! ain't it nice the 'ole day long a-gazin' at the sea 
And a-hidin' of the tanglefoot away. 
But when the booze gits 'old of us, and fellows starts to "scrap", 
There's some what likes blue-metal for to throw: 
But as for me, I always says for layin' out a "trap" 
There's nothing like an Empty Bottle-O!