Best Famous Joked Poems

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

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Written by Rita Dove | The Bistro Styx She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness as she paused just inside the double glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape billowing dramatically behind her.What's this, I thought, lifting a hand until she nodded and started across the parquet; that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray, from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl down to the graphite signature of her shoes. "Sorry I'm late," she panted, though she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel. We kissed.Then I leaned back to peruse my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole. "How's business?" I asked, and hazarded a motherly smile to keep from crying out: Are you content to conduct your life as a cliché and, what's worse, an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde? Near the rue Princesse they had opened a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt, plus beared African drums and the occasional miniature gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had carved at breakfast with a pocket knife. "Tourists love us.The Parisians, of course"-- she blushed--"are amused, though not without a certain admiration . . ." The Chateaubriand arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy; one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming. "Admiration for what?"Wine, a bloody Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks."Why, the aplomb with which we've managed to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced her to pose nude for his appalling canvases, faintly futuristic landscapes strewn with carwrecks and bodies being chewed by rabid cocker spaniels."I'd like to come by the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff." "Yes, if you wish . . ."A delicate rebuff before the warning: "He dresses all in black now.Me, he drapes in blues and carmine-- and even though I think it's kinda cute, in company I tend toward more muted shades." She paused and had the grace to drop her eyes.She did look ravishing, spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue, or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace peering through a fringe of rain at Paris' dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral. "And he never thinks of food.I wish I didn't have to plead with him to eat. . . ."Fruit and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes. I stuck with café crème."This Camembert's so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair," mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig onto a heel of bread.Nothing seemed to fill her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear, speared each tear-shaped lavaliere and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth. Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted vines and sun poured down out of the south. "But are you happy?"Fearing, I whispered it quickly."What?You know, Mother"-- she bit into the starry rose of a fig-- "one really should try the fruit here." I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.

Written by Anne Sexton | The Division Of Parts 1. Mother, my Mary Gray, once resident of Gloucester and Essex County, a photostat of your will arrived in the mail today. This is the division of money. I am one third of your daughters counting my bounty or I am a queen alone in the parlor still, eating the bread and honey. It is Good Friday. Black birds pick at my window sill. Your coat in my closet, your bright stones on my hand, the gaudy fur animals I do not know how to use, settle on me like a debt. A week ago, while the hard March gales beat on your house, we sorted your things: obstacles of letters, family silver, eyeglasses and shoes. Like some unseasoned Christmas, its scales rigged and reset, I bundled out gifts I did not choose. Now the houts of The Cross rewind. In Boston, the devout work their cold knees toward that sweet martyrdom that Christ planned. My timely loss is too customary to note; and yet I planned to suffer and I cannot. It does not please my yankee bones to watch where the dying is done in its usly hours. Black birds peck at my window glass and Easter will take its ragged son. The clutter of worship that you taught me, Mary Gray, is old. I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own. I trip on your death and jesus, my stranger floats up over my Christian home, wearing his straight thorn tree. I have cast my lot and am one third thief of you. Time, that rearranger of estates, equips me with your garments, but not with grief. 2. This winter when cancer began its ugliness I grieved with you each day for three months and found you in your private nook of the medicinal palace for New England Women and never once forgot how long it took. I read to you from The New Yorker, ate suppers you wouldn't eat, fussed with your flowers, joked with your nurses, as if I were the balm among lepers, as if I could undo a life in hours if I never said goodbye. But you turned old, all your fifty-eight years sliding like masks from your skull; and at the end I packed your nightgowns in suitcases, paid the nurses, came riding home as if I'd been told I could pretend people live in places. 3. Since then I have pretended ease, loved with the trickeries of need, but not enough to shed my daughterhood or sweeten him as a man. I drink the five o' clock martinis and poke at this dry page like a rough goat. Fool! I fumble my lost childhood for a mother and lounge in sad stuff with love to catch and catch as catch can. And Christ still waits. I have tried to exorcise the memory of each event and remain still, a mixed child, heavy with cloths of you. Sweet witch, you are my worried guide. Such dangerous angels walk through Lent. Their walls creak Anne! Convert! Convert! My desk moves. Its cavr murmurs Boo and I am taken and beguiled. Or wrong. For all the way I've come I'll have to go again. Instead, I must convert to love as reasonable as Latin, as sold as earthenware: an equilibrium I never knew. And Lent will keep its hurt for someone else. Christ knows enough staunch guys have hitched him in trouble. thinking his sticks were badges to wear. 4. Spring rusts on its skinny branch and last summer's lawn is soggy and brown. Yesterday is just a number. All of its winters avalanche out of sight. What was, is gone. Mother, last night I slept in your Bonwit Teller nightgown. Divided, you climbed into my head. There in my jabbering dream I heard my own angry cries and I cursed you, Dame keep out of my slumber. My good Dame, you are dead. And Mother, three stones slipped from your glittering eyes. Now it's Friday's noon and I would still curse you with my rhyming words and bring you flapping back, old love, old circus knitting, god-in-her-moon, all fairest in my lang syne verse, the gauzy bride among the children, the fancy amid the absurd and awkward, that horn for hounds that skipper homeward, that museum keeper of stiff starfish, that blaze within the pilgrim woman, a clown mender, a dove's cheek among the stones, my Lady of first words, this is the division of ways. And now, while Christ stays fastened to his Crucifix so that love may praise his sacrifice and not the grotesque metaphor, you come, a brave ghost, to fix in my mind without praise or paradise to make me your inheritor.

Written by Carolyn Kizer | American Beauty For Ann London As you described your mastectomy in calm detail and bared your chest so I might see the puckered scar, "They took a hatchet to your breast!" I said. "What an Amazon you are." When we were girls we climbed Mt. Tamalpais chewing bay leaves we had plucked along the way; we got high all right, from animal pleasure in each other, shouting to the sky. On your houseboat we tried to ignore the impossible guy you had married to enrage your family, a typical ploy. We were great fools let loose in the No Name bar on Sausalito's bay. In San Francisco we'd perch on a waterfront pier chewing sourdough and cheese, swilling champagne, kicking our heels; crooning lewd songs, hooting like seagulls, we bayed with the seals. Then you married someone in Mexico, broke up in two weeks, didn't bother to divorce, claimed it didn't count. You dumped number three, fled to Albany to become a pedant. Averse to domesticity, you read for your Ph.D. Your four-year-old looked like a miniature John Lennon. You fed him peanut butter from your jar and raised him on Beowulf and Grendal. Much later in New York we reunited; in an elevator at Sak's a woman asked for your autograph. You glowed like a star, like Anouk Aimee at forty, close enough. Your pedantry found its place in the Women's Movement. You rose fast, seen suddenly as the morning star; wrote the ERA found the right man at last, a sensitive artist; flying too high not to crash. When the cancer caught you you went on talk shows to say you had no fear or faith. In Baltimore we joked on your bed as you turned into a witty wraith. When you died I cleaned out your bureau drawers: your usual disorder; an assortment of gorgeous wigs and prosthetic breasts tossed in garbage bags, to spare your gentle spouse. Then the bequests you had made to every friend you had! For each of us a necklace or a ring. A snapshot for me: We two, barefoot in chiffon, laughing amid blossoms your last wedding day.

Written by Charles Bukowski | Like A Flower In The Rain I cut the middle fingernail of the middle finger right hand real short and I began rubbing along her **** as she sat upright in bed spreading lotion over her arms face and breasts after bathing. then she lit a cigarette: "don't let this put you off," an smoked and continued to rub the lotion on. I continued to rub the ****. "You want an apple?" I asked. "sure, she said, "you got one?" but I got to her- she began to twist then she rolled on her side, she was getting wet and open like a flower in the rain. then she rolled on her stomach and her most beautiful ass looked up at me and I reached under and got the **** again. she reached around and got my cock, she rolled and twisted, I mounted my face falling into the mass of red hair that overflowed from her head and my flattened cock entered into the miracle. later we joked about the lotion and the cigarette and the apple. then I went out and got some chicken and shrimp and french fries and buns and mashed potatoes and gravy and cole slaw,and we ate.she told me how good she felt and I told her how good I felt and we ate the chicken and the shrimp and the french fries and the buns and the mashed potatoes and the gravy and the cole slaw too.

Written by Gary Snyder | For Lew Welch In A Snowfall Snowfall in March: I sit in the white glow reading a thesis About you. Your poems, your life. The author's my student, He even quotes me. Forty years since we joked in a kitchen in Portland Twenty since you disappeared. All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text. But life continues in the kitchen Where we still laugh and cook, Watching snow.

Written by Robert William Service | Death In The Arctic I I took the clock down from the shelf; "At eight," said I, "I shoot myself." It lacked a minute of the hour, And as I waited all a-cower, A skinful of black, boding pain, Bits of my life came back again. . . . "Mother, there's nothing more to eat -- Why don't you go out on the street? Always you sit and cry and cry; Here at my play I wonder why. Mother, when you dress up at night, Red are your cheeks, your eyes are bright; Twining a ribband in your hair, Kissing good-bye you go down-stair. Then I'm as lonely as can be. Oh, how I wish you were with me! Yet when you go out on the street, Mother, there's always lots to eat. . . ." II For days the igloo has been dark; But now the rag wick sends a spark That glitters in the icy air, And wakes frost sapphires everywhere; Bright, bitter flames, that adder-like Dart here and there, yet fear to strike The gruesome gloom wherein they lie, My comrades, oh, so keen to die! And I, the last -- well, here I wait The clock to strike the hour of eight. . . . "Boy, it is bitter to be hurled Nameless and naked on the world; Frozen by night and starved by day, Curses and kicks and clouts your pay. But you must fight! Boy, look on me! Anarch of all earth-misery; Beggar and tramp and shameless sot; Emblem of ill, in rags that rot. Would you be foul and base as I? Oh, it is better far to die! Swear to me now you'll fight and fight, Boy, or I'll kill you here to-night. . . ." III Curse this silence soft and black! Sting, little light, the shadows back! Dance, little flame, with freakish glee! Twinkle with brilliant mockery! Glitter on ice-robed roof and floor! Jewel the bear-skin of the door! Gleam in my beard, illume my breath, Blanch the clock face that times my death! But do not pierce that murk so deep, Where in their sleeping-bags they sleep! But do not linger where they lie, They who had all the luck to die! . . . "There is nothing more to say; Let us part and go our way. Since it seems we can't agree, I will go across the sea. Proud of heart and strong am I; Not for woman will I sigh; Hold my head up gay and glad: You can find another lad. . . ." IV Above the igloo piteous flies Our frayed flag to the frozen skies. Oh, would you know how earth can be A hell -- go north of Eighty-three! Go, scan the snows day after day, And hope for help, and pray and pray; Have seal-hide and sea-lice to eat; Melt water with your body's heat; Sleep all the fell, black winter through Beside the dear, dead men you knew. (The walrus blubber flares and gleams -- O God! how long a minute seems!) . . . "Mary, many a day has passed, Since that morn of hot-head youth. Come I back at last, at last, Crushed with knowing of the truth; How through bitter, barren years You loved me, and me alone; Waited, wearied, wept your tears -- Oh, could I atone, atone, I would pay a million-fold! Pay you for the love you gave. Mary, look down as of old -- I am kneeling by your grave." . . . V Olaf, the Blonde, was first to go; Bitten his eyes were by the snow; Sightless and sealed his eyes of blue, So that he died before I knew. Here in those poor weak arms he died: "Wolves will not get you, lad," I lied; "For I will watch till Spring come round; Slumber you shall beneath the ground." Oh, how I lied! I scarce can wait: Strike, little clock, the hour of eight! . . . "Comrade, can you blame me quite? The horror of the long, long night Is on me, and I've borne with pain So long, and hoped for help in vain. So frail am I, and blind and dazed; With scurvy sick, with silence crazed. Beneath the Arctic's heel of hate, Avid for Death I wait, I wait. Oh if I falter, fail to fight, Can you, dear comrade, blame me quite?" . . . VI Big Eric gave up months ago. But seldom do men suffer so. His feet sloughed off, his fingers died, His hands shrunk up and mummified. I had to feed him like a child; Yet he was valiant, joked and smiled, Talked of his wife and little one (Thanks be to God that I have none), Passed in the night without a moan, Passed, and I'm here, alone, alone. . . . "I've got to kill you, Dick. Your life for mine, you know. Better to do it quick, A swift and sudden blow. See! here's my hand to lick; A hug before you go -- God! but it makes me sick: Old dog, I love you so. Forgive, forgive me, Dick -- A swift and sudden blow. . . ." VII Often I start up in the dark, Thinking the sound of bells to hear. Often I wake from sleep: "Oh, hark! Help . . . it is coming . . . near and near." Blindly I reel toward the door; There the snow billows bleak and bare; Blindly I seek my den once more, Silence and darkness and despair. Oh, it is all a dreadful dream! Scurvy and cold and death and dearth; I will awake to warmth and gleam, Silvery seas and greening earth. Life is a dream, its wakening, Death, gentle shadow of God's wing. . . . "Tick, little clock, my life away! Even a second seems a day. Even a minute seems a year, Peopled with ghosts, that press and peer Into my face so charnel white, Lit by the devilish, dancing light. Tick, little clock! mete out my fate: Tortured and tense I wait, I wait. . . ." VIII Oh, I have sworn! the hour is nigh: When it strikes eight, I die, I die. Raise up the gun -- it stings my brow -- When it strikes eight . . . all ready . . . now -- * * * * * Down from my hand the weapon dropped; Wildly I stared. . . . THE CLOCK HAD STOPPED. IX Phantoms and fears and ghosts have gone. Peace seems to nestle in my brain. Lo! the clock stopped, I'm living on; Heart-sick I was, and less than sane. Yet do I scorn the thing I planned, Hearing a voice: "O coward, fight!" Then the clock stopped . . . whose was the hand? Maybe 'twas God's -- ah well, all's right. Heap on me darkness, fold on fold! Pain! wrench and rack me! What care I? Leap on me, hunger, thirst and cold! I will await my time to die; Looking to Heaven that shines above; Looking to God, and love . . . and love. X Hark! what is that? Bells, dogs again! Is it a dream? I sob and cry. See! the door opens, fur-clad men Rush to my rescue; frail am I; Feeble and dying, dazed and glad. There is the pistol where it dropped. "Boys, it was hard -- but I'm not mad. . . . Look at the clock -- it stopped, it stopped. Carry me out. The heavens smile. See! there's an arch of gold above. Now, let me rest a little while -- Looking to God and Love . . .and Love . . ."

Written by Robert William Service | The Smoking Frog Three men I saw beside a bar, Regarding o'er their bottle, A frog who smoked a rank cigar They'd jammed within its throttle. A Pasha frog it must have been So big it as and bloated; And from its lips the nicotine In graceful festoon floated. And while the trio jeered and joked, As if it quite enjoyed it, Impassively it smoked and smoked, (It could now well avoid it). A ring of fire its lips were nigh Yet it seemed all unwitting; It could not spit, like you and I, Who've learned the art of spitting. It did not wink, it did not shrink, As there serene it squatted' Its eyes were clear, it did not fear The fate the Gods allotted. It squatted there with calm sublime, Amid their cruel guying; Grave as a god, and all the time It knew that it was dying. And somehow then it seemed to me These men expectorating, Were infinitely less than he, The dumb thing they were baiting. It seemed to say, despite their jokes: "This is my hour of glory. It isn't every frog that smokes: My name will live in story." Before its nose the smoke arose; The flame grew nigher, nigher; And then I saw its bright eyes close Beside that ring of fire. They turned it on its warty back, From off its bloated belly; It legs jerked out, then dangled slack; It quivered like a jelly. And then the fellows went away, Contented with their joking; But even as in death it lay, The frog continued smoking. Life's like a lighted ***, thought I; We smoke it stale; then after Death turns our belly to the sky: The Gods must have their laughter.

Written by Siegfried Sassoon | To Any Dead Officer Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say, Because I’d like to know that you’re all right. Tell me, have you found everlasting day, Or been sucked in by everlasting night? For when I shut my eyes your face shows plain; I hear you make some cheery old remark— I can rebuild you in my brain, Though you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark. You hated tours of trenches; you were proud Of nothing more than having good years to spend; Longed to get home and join the careless crowd Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend. That’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire: No earthly chance can send you crawling back; You’ve finished with machine-gun fire— Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack. Somehow I always thought you’d get done in, Because you were so desperate keen to live: You were all out to try and save your skin, Well knowing how much the world had got to give. You joked at shells and talked the usual ‘shop,’ Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine: With ‘Jesus Christ! when will it stop? Three years ... It’s hell unless we break their line.’ So when they told me you’d been left for dead I wouldn’t believe them, feeling it must be true. Next week the bloody Roll of Honour said ‘Wounded and missing’—(That’s the thing to do When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow, With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache, Moaning for water till they know It’s night, and then it’s not worth while to wake!) . . . . Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God, And tell Him that our Politicians swear They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod Under the Heel of England ... Are you there?... Yes ... and the War won’t end for at least two years; But we’ve got stacks of men ... I’m blind with tears, Staring into the dark. Cheerio! I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.