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Best Famous New York City Poems

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Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Suicide Note

 "You speak to me of narcissism but I reply that it is 
a matter of my life" - Artaud

"At this time let me somehow bequeath all the leftovers 
to my daughters and their daughters" - Anonymous

Better, 
despite the worms talking to 
the mare's hoof in the field; 
better, 
despite the season of young girls 
dropping their blood; 
better somehow 
to drop myself quickly 
into an old room. 
Better (someone said) 
not to be born 
and far better 
not to be born twice 
at thirteen 
where the boardinghouse, 
each year a bedroom, 
caught fire. 

Dear friend, 
I will have to sink with hundreds of others 
on a dumbwaiter into hell. 
I will be a light thing. 
I will enter death 
like someone's lost optical lens. 
Life is half enlarged. 
The fish and owls are fierce today. 
Life tilts backward and forward. 
Even the wasps cannot find my eyes. 

Yes, 
eyes that were immediate once. 
Eyes that have been truly awake, 
eyes that told the whole story— 
poor dumb animals. 
Eyes that were pierced, 
little nail heads, 
light blue gunshots. 

And once with 
a mouth like a cup, 
clay colored or blood colored, 
open like the breakwater 
for the lost ocean 
and open like the noose 
for the first head. 

Once upon a time 
my hunger was for Jesus. 
O my hunger! My hunger! 
Before he grew old 
he rode calmly into Jerusalem 
in search of death. 

This time 
I certainly 
do not ask for understanding 
and yet I hope everyone else 
will turn their heads when an unrehearsed fish jumps 
on the surface of Echo Lake; 
when moonlight, 
its bass note turned up loud, 
hurts some building in Boston, 
when the truly beautiful lie together. 
I think of this, surely, 
and would think of it far longer 
if I were not… if I were not 
at that old fire. 

I could admit 
that I am only a coward 
crying me me me 
and not mention the little gnats, the moths, 
forced by circumstance 
to suck on the electric bulb. 
But surely you know that everyone has a death, 
his own death, 
waiting for him. 
So I will go now 
without old age or disease, 
wildly but accurately, 
knowing my best route, 
carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years, 
never asking, “Where are we going?” 
We were riding (if I'd only known) 
to this. 

Dear friend, 
please do not think 
that I visualize guitars playing 
or my father arching his bone. 
I do not even expect my mother's mouth. 
I know that I have died before— 
once in November, once in June. 
How strange to choose June again, 
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies. 
Of course guitars will not play! 
The snakes will certainly not notice. 
New York City will not mind. 
At night the bats will beat on the trees, 
knowing it all, 
seeing what they sensed all day.


Written by Gregory Corso | Create an image from this poem

Gregory Corso

 Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
 Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
 Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
 The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
 Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
 Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart
 And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling
 Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you're no crueller than cancer
 All Man hates you they'd rather die by car-crash lightning drowning
Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old age old age O Bomb
 They'd rather die by anything but you Death's finger is free-lance
 Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
 categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
 Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
 with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
 O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
 No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
 Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
 And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own
 I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is I can only imagine
 Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview I scope
 a city New York City streaming starkeyed subway shelter 
 Scores and scores A fumble of humanity High heels bend
 Hats whelming away Youth forgetting their combs
 Ladies not knowing what to do with their shopping bags
 Unperturbed gum machines Yet dangerous 3rd rail
 Ritz Brothers from the Bronx caught in the A train
 The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
 Impish death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath
 Turtles exploding over Istanbul
 The jaguar's flying foot
 soon to sink in arctic snow
 Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
 The top of the Empire state
 arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
 Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
 St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
 O athletic Death Sportive Bomb
 the temples of ancient times
 their grand ruin ceased
 Electrons Protons Neutrons 
 gathering Hersperean hair
 walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
 joining marble helmsmen
 entering the final ampitheater
 with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
 heralding cypressean torches
 racing plumes and banners
 and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
 Lo the visiting team of Present
 the home team of Past
 Lyre and tube together joined
 Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
 gala galaxy robed and uniformed 
 commissary O the happy stands
 Ethereal root and cheer and boo
 The billioned all-time attendance
 The Zeusian pandemonium
 Hermes racing Owens
 The Spitball of Buddha
 Christ striking out
 Luther stealing third
 Planeterium Death Hosannah Bomb
 Gush the final rose O Spring Bomb
 Come with thy gown of dynamite green
 unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
 Before you the wimpled Past
 behind you the hallooing Future O Bomb
 Bound in the grassy clarion air
 like the fox of the tally-ho
 thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
 Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag
 The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
 Stick angels on your jubilee feet
 wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
 You are due and behold you are due
 and the heavens are with you
 hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
 BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
 Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
 spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
 set forth awful agenda
 Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
 Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
 over its long long dead Nor
 From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
 exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
 From thy appellational womb
 spew birth-gusts of of great worms
 Rip open your belly Bomb
 from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
 Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
 along the brink of Paradise
 O Bomb O final Pied Piper
 both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
 God abandoned mock-nude
 beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
 He cannot hear thy flute's
 happy-the-day profanations
 He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
 His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
 Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
 Sealed angels unsing Him
 A thunderless God A dead God
 O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
 That I lean forward on a desk of science
 an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
 half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs
 That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love 
 That I can't exist in a world that consents
 a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair
 That I am able to laugh at all things
 all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain
 That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
 knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
 and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
 That I am manifold
 a man pursuing the big lies of gold
 or a poet roaming in bright ashes
 or that which I imagine myself to be 
 a shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams
 I need not then be all-smart about bombs
 Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
 I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
 There is a hell for bombs
 They're there I see them there
 They sit in bits and sing songs
  mostly German songs
 And two very long American songs
 and they wish there were more songs
 especially Russian and Chinese songs
 and some more very long American songs
 Poor little Bomb that'll never be 
 an Eskimo song I love thee 
 I want to put a lollipop
 in thy furcal mouth
 A wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
 and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
 along the Hollywoodian screen
 O Bomb in which all lovely things
 moral and physical anxiously participate
  O fairylike plucked from the 
 grandest universe tree 
 O piece of heaven which gives
 both mountain and anthill a sun
 I am standing before your fantastic lily door
 I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk
 Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
 Welcome me fear not thy opened door
 nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
 nor the pimps of indefinite weather
 their cruel terrestial thaw
 Oppenheimer is seated
 in the dark pocket of Light
 Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
 Einstein his mythmouth
 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
 Let me in Bomb rise from that pregnant-rat corner
 nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
 O Bomb I love you
 I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
 You are a paean an acme of scream
 a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
 O resound thy tanky knees
 BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
 BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
 BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
 nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
 BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
 go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
 Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
 Ubangi BOOM orangutang 
 BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon
 ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
 the tail the fin the wing
 Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall
 Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
 Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
 Pinkbombs will blossom Elkbombs will perk their ears
 Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
 Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall
 or even contend celestial fire goes out
 Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
 that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
 magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
 and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
 fierce with moustaches of gold
Written by Audre Lorde | Create an image from this poem

Inheritance—His

 I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in the house of Lord's
your hollow voice changing down a hospital corridor
 yea, though I walk through the valley
 of the shadow of death
 I will fear no evil.

II.
I rummage through the deaths you lived
swaying on a bridge of question.
At seven in Barbados
dropped into your unknown father's life
your courage vault from his tailor's table
back to the sea.
Did the Grenada treeferns sing
your 15th summer as you jumped ship
to seek your mother
finding her too late
surrounded with new sons?

Who did you bury to become the enforcer of the law
the handsome legend
before whose raised arm even trees wept
a man of deep and wordless passion
who wanted sons and got five girls?
You left the first two scratching in a treefern's shade
the youngest is a renegade poet
searching for your answer in my blood.

My mother's Grenville tales
spin through early summer evenings.
But you refused to speak of home
of stepping proud Black and penniless
into this land where only white men
ruled by money. How you labored
in the docks of the Hotel Astor
your bright wife a chambermaid upstairs 
welded love and survival to ambition
as the land of promise withered
crashed the hotel closed
and you peddle dawn-bought apples
from a push-cart on Broadway.

Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?

When my mother's first-born cries for milk
in the brutal city winter
do the faces of your other daughters dim
like the image of the treeferned yard
where a dark girl first cooked for you
and her ash heap still smells of curry?

III.
Did the secret of my sisters steal your tongue
like I stole money from your midnight pockets
stubborn and quaking
as you threaten to shoot me if I am the one? 
The naked lightbulbs in our kitchen ceiling
glint off your service revolver
as you load whispering.

Did two little dark girls in Grenada
dart like flying fish
between your averted eyes
and my pajamaless body
our last adolescent summer?
Eavesdropped orations
to your shaving mirror
our most intense conversations
were you practicing how to tell me
of my twin sisters abandoned
as you had been abandoned
by another Black woman seeking
her fortune Grenada Barbados
Panama Grenada.
New York City.

IV.
You bought old books at auctions
for my unlanguaged world
gave me your idols Marcus Garvey Citizen Kane
and morsels from your dinner plate
when I was seven.
I owe you my Dahomeyan jaw
the free high school for gifted girls
no one else thought I should attend
and the darkness that we share.
Our deepest bonds remain
the mirror and the gun.

V.
An elderly Black judge
known for his way with women
visits this island where I live
shakes my hand, smiling.
"I knew your father," he says
"quite a man!" Smiles again.
I flinch at his raised eyebrow.
A long-gone woman's voice
lashes out at me in parting
"You will never be satisfied
until you have the whole world
in your bed!"

Now I am older than you were when you died
overwork and silence exploding your brain.
You are gradually receding from my face.
Who were you outside the 23rd Psalm?
Knowing so little
how did I become so much
like you?

Your hunger for rectitude
blossoms into rage
the hot tears of mourning
never shed for you before
your twisted measurements
the agony of denial
the power of unshared secrets.
Written by Etheridge Knight | Create an image from this poem

A Poem For Myself

 (or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
But, when I reached the age of twelve
I left that place for good.
My daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
Said my daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
When I left that Sunday morning
He was leaning on the barnyard gate.
Left my mama standing
With the sun shining in her eyes.
Left her standing in the yard
With the sun shining in her eyes.
And I headed North
As straight as the Wild Goose Flies,
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
Said I done strolled all those funky avenues
I'm still the same old black boy with the same old blues.
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good-
Gonna be free in Mississippi
Or dead in the Mississippi mud.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Rapunzel

 A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young. 
The mentor 
and the student 
feed off each other. 
Many a girl 
had an old aunt 
who locked her in the study 
to keep the boys away. 
They would play rummy 
or lie on the couch 
and touch and touch. 
Old breast against young breast... 
Let your dress fall down your shoulder, 
come touch a copy of you 
for I am at the mercy of rain, 
for I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti 
for I have left the long naps of Ann Arbor 
and the church spires have turned to stumps. 
The sea bangs into my cloister 
for the politicians are dying, 
and dying so hold me, my young dear, 
hold me... 

The yellow rose will turn to cinder 
and New York City will fall in 
before we are done so hold me, 
my young dear, hold me. 
Put your pale arms around my neck. 
Let me hold your heart like a flower 
lest it bloom and collapse. 
Give me your skin 
as sheer as a cobweb, 
let me open it up 
and listen in and scoop out the dark. 
Give me your nether lips 
all puffy with their art 
and I will give you angel fire in return. 
We are two clouds 
glistening in the bottle galss. 
We are two birds 
washing in the same mirror. 
We were fair game 
but we have kept out of the cesspool. 
We are strong. 
We are the good ones. 
Do not discover us 
for we lie together all in green 
like pond weeds. 
Hold me, my young dear, hold me. 

They touch their delicate watches 
one at a time. 
They dance to the lute 
two at a time. 
They are as tender as bog moss. 
They play mother-me-do 
all day. 
A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young.


Once there was a witch's garden 
more beautiful than Eve's 
with carrots growing like little fish, 
with many tomatoes rich as frogs, 
onions as ingrown as hearts, 
the squash singing like a dolphin 
and one patch given over wholly to magic -- 
rampion, a kind of salad root 
a kind of harebell more potent than penicillin, 
growing leaf by leaf, skin by skin. 
as rapt and as fluid as Isadoran Duncan. 
However the witch's garden was kept locked 
and each day a woman who was with child 
looked upon the rampion wildly, 
fancying that she would die 
if she could not have it. 
Her husband feared for her welfare 
and thus climbed into the garden 
to fetch the life-giving tubers. 

Ah ha, cried the witch, 
whose proper name was Mother Gothel, 
you are a thief and now you will die. 
However they made a trade, 
typical enough in those times. 
He promised his child to Mother Gothel 
so of course when it was born 
she took the child away with her. 
She gave the child the name Rapunzel, 
another name for the life-giving rampion. 
Because Rapunzel was a beautiful girl 
Mother Gothel treasured her beyond all things. 
As she grew older Mother Gothel thought: 
None but I will ever see her or touch her. 
She locked her in a tow without a door 
or a staircase. It had only a high window. 
When the witch wanted to enter she cried" 
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. 
Rapunzel's hair fell to the ground like a rainbow. 
It was as strong as a dandelion 
and as strong as a dog leash. 
Hand over hand she shinnied up 
the hair like a sailor 
and there in the stone-cold room, 
as cold as a museum, 
Mother Gothel cried: 
Hold me, my young dear, hold me, 
and thus they played mother-me-do. 

Years later a prince came by 
and heard Rapunzel singing her loneliness. 
That song pierced his heart like a valentine 
but he could find no way to get to her. 
Like a chameleon he hid himself among the trees 
and watched the witch ascend the swinging hair. 
The next day he himself called out: 
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, 
and thus they met and he declared his love. 
What is this beast, she thought, 
with muscles on his arms 
like a bag of snakes? 
What is this moss on his legs? 
What prickly plant grows on his cheeks? 
What is this voice as deep as a dog? 
Yet he dazzled her with his answers. 
Yet he dazzled her with his dancing stick. 
They lay together upon the yellowy threads, 
swimming through them 
like minnows through kelp 
and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. 

Each day he brought her a skein of silk 
to fashion a ladder so they could both escape. 
But Mother Gothel discovered the plot 
and cut off Rapunzel's hair to her ears 
and took her into the forest to repent. 
When the prince came the witch fastened 
the hair to a hook and let it down. 
When he saw Rapunzel had been banished 
he flung himself out of the tower, a side of beef. 
He was blinded by thorns that prickled him like tacks. 
As blind as Oedipus he wandered for years 
until he heard a song that pierced his heart 
like that long-ago valentine. 
As he kissed Rapunzel her tears fell on his eyes 
and in the manner of such cure-alls 
his sight was suddenly restored. 

They lived happily as you might expect 
proving that mother-me-do 
can be outgrown, 
just as the fish on Friday, 
just as a tricycle. 
The world, some say, 
is made up of couples. 
A rose must have a stem. 

As for Mother Gothel, 
her heart shrank to the size of a pin, 
never again to say: Hold me, my young dear, 
hold me, 
and only as she dreamed of the yellow hair 
did moonlight sift into her mouth.


Written by Erica Jong | Create an image from this poem

Henry James in the Heart of the City

 We have a small sculpture of Henry James on our terrace in New York City.

Nothing would surprise him.
The beast in the jungle was what he saw--
Edith Wharton's obfuscating older brother. . .

He fled the demons
of Manhattan
for fear they would devour
his inner ones
(the ones who wrote the books)
& silence the stifled screams
of his protagonists.

To Europe
like a wandering Jew--
WASP that he was--
but with the Jew's
outsider's hunger. . .

face pressed up
to the glass of sex
refusing every passion
but the passion to write
the words grew
more & more complex
& convoluted
until they utterly imprisoned him
in their fairytale brambles.

Language for me
is meant to be
a transparency,
clear water gleaming
under a covered bridge. . .
I love his spiritual sister
because she snatched clarity
from her murky history.

Tormented New Yorkers both,
but she journeyed
to the heart of light--
did he?

She took her friends on one last voyage,
through the isles of Greece
on a yacht chartered with her royalties--
a rich girl proud to be making her own money.

The light of the Middle Sea
was what she sought.
All denizens
of this demonic city caught
between pitch and black
long for the light.

But she found it
in a few of her books. . .
while Henry James
discovered
what he had probably
started with:
that beast, that jungle,
that solipsistic scream.

He did not join her
on that final cruise.
(He was on his own final cruise).
Did he want to?
I would wager yes.

I look back with love and sorrow
at them both--
dear teachers--
but she shines like Miss Liberty
to Emma Lazarus' hordes,
while he gazes within,
always, at his own
impenetrable jungle.
Written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan | Create an image from this poem

The Moment I Knew My Life Had Changed

 It was not until later
that I knew, recognized the moment
for what it was, my life before it,
a gray landscape, shapeless and misty;
my life after, flowering full and leafy
as the cherry trees that only today
have torn into bloom.
Imagine: my cousin at 19, tall,
slender. She worked in New York City.
For my thirteenth birthday she took me
to New York. We ate at the Russian Tea Room
where I was uncertain about which fork to use,
intimidated by the women in their hats and furs,
by the waiters who watched me
as I struggled with the huge hunk of bread
in the center of the onion soup in its steep bowl.
When we were ready to leave, I tried to give the tip
back to my cousin. I thought she had forgotten it.
She said, "No, it's for the waiter!"
On 57th Street a man in a camel coat bumped into me,
rushed on by. My cousin said, "That was Eddie Fisher,"
but I said, "He's too short. It can't be."
I felt let down that Eddie Fisher,
the star I was in love with that year, was so rude
he never even said "excuse me." Then we went into the theater
sat in the front row. the stage sprang into colored light, and
the glittery costumes, the singing, the magical story,
drew me in, made me feel in that moment,
that I would learn again and again,
the miraculous language, the music of it.
My life, turning away from the constricted world
of the 19th Street tenement, formed a line 
almost perpendicular to that old life,
I moved toward it, breathed in this new air,
racing toward a world filled with poems and
music and books that freed me from everything
that could have chained me to the ground.

Copyright © by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Rapunzel

 A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young. 
The mentor 
and the student 
feed off each other. 
Many a girl 
had an old aunt 
who locked her in the study 
to keep the boys away. 
They would play rummy 
or lie on the couch 
and touch and touch. 
Old breast against young breast... 
Let your dress fall down your shoulder, 

come touch a copy of you 
for I am at the mercy of rain, 
for I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti 
for I have left the long naps of Ann Arbor 
and the church spires have turned to stumps. 
The sea bangs into my cloister 
for the politicians are dying, 
and dying so hold me, my young dear, 
hold me... 
The yellow rose will turn to cinder 

and New York City will fall in 
before we are done so hold me, 
my young dear, hold me. 
Put your pale arms around my neck. 
Let me hold your heart like a flower 
lest it bloom and collapse. 
Give me your skin 
as sheer as a cobweb, 
let me open it up 
and listen in and scoop out the dark. 
Give me your nether lips 
all puffy with their art 
and I will give you angel fire in return. 
We are two clouds 
glistening in the bottle galss. 
We are two birds 
washing in the same mirror. 
We were fair game 
but we have kept out of the cesspool. 
We are strong. 
We are the good ones. 
Do not discover us 
for we lie together all in green 
like pond weeds. 
Hold me, my young dear, hold me. 
They touch their delicate watches 

one at a time. 
They dance to the lute 
two at a time. 
They are as tender as bog moss. 
They play mother-me-do 
all day. 
A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young. 
Once there was a witch's garden 
more beautiful than Eve's 
with carrots growing like little fish, 
with many tomatoes rich as frogs, 
onions as ingrown as hearts, 
the squash singing like a dolphin 
and one patch given over wholly to magic -- 
rampion, a kind of salad root 
a kind of harebell more potent than penicillin, 
growing leaf by leaf, skin by skin. 
as rapt and as fluid as Isadoran Duncan. 
However the witch's garden was kept locked 
and each day a woman who was with child 
looked upon the rampion wildly, 
fancying that she would die 
if she could not have it. 
Her husband feared for her welfare 
and thus climbed into the garden 
to fetch the life-giving tubers. 

Ah ha, cried the witch, 
whose proper name was Mother Gothel, 
you are a thief and now you will die. 
However they made a trade, 
typical enough in those times. 
He promised his child to Mother Gothel 
so of course when it was born 
she took the child away with her. 
She gave the child the name Rapunzel, 
another name for the life-giving rampion. 
Because Rapunzel was a beautiful girl 
Mother Gothel treasured her beyond all things. 
As she grew older Mother Gothel thought: 
None but I will ever see her or touch her. 
She locked her in a tow without a door 
or a staircase. It had only a high window. 
When the witch wanted to enter she cried" 
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. 
Rapunzel's hair fell to the ground like a rainbow. 
It was as strong as a dandelion 
and as strong as a dog leash. 
Hand over hand she shinnied up 
the hair like a sailor 
and there in the stone-cold room, 
as cold as a museum, 
Mother Gothel cried: 
Hold me, my young dear, hold me, 
and thus they played mother-me-do. 

Years later a prince came by 
and heard Rapunzel singing her loneliness. 
That song pierced his heart like a valentine 
but he could find no way to get to her. 
Like a chameleon he hid himself among the trees 
and watched the witch ascend the swinging hair. 
The next day he himself called out: 
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, 
and thus they met and he declared his love. 
What is this beast, she thought, 
with muscles on his arms 
like a bag of snakes? 
What is this moss on his legs? 
What prickly plant grows on his cheeks? 
What is this voice as deep as a dog? 
Yet he dazzled her with his answers. 
Yet he dazzled her with his dancing stick. 
They lay together upon the yellowy threads, 
swimming through them 
like minnows through kelp 
and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. 

Each day he brought her a skein of silk 
to fashion a ladder so they could both escape. 
But Mother Gothel discovered the plot 
and cut off Rapunzel's hair to her ears 
and took her into the forest to repent. 
When the prince came the witch fastened 
the hair to a hook and let it down. 
When he saw Rapunzel had been banished 
he flung himself out of the tower, a side of beef. 
He was blinded by thorns that prickled him like tacks. 
As blind as Oedipus he wandered for years 
until he heard a song that pierced his heart 
like that long-ago valentine. 
As he kissed Rapunzel her tears fell on his eyes 
and in the manner of such cure-alls 
his sight was suddenly restored. 

They lived happily as you might expect 
proving that mother-me-do 
can be outgrown, 
just as the fish on Friday, 
just as a tricycle. 
The world, some say, 
is made up of couples. 
A rose must have a stem. 

As for Mother Gothel, 
her heart shrank to the size of a pin, 
never again to say: Hold me, my young dear, 
hold me, 
and only as she dreamed of the yellow hair 
did moonlight sift into her mouth.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

The Fury Of Abandonment

 Someone lives in a cave
eating his toes,
I know that much.
Someone little lives under a bush
pressing an empty Coca-Cola can against
his starving bloated stomac,
I know that much.
A monkey had his hands cut off
for a medical experiment
and his claws wept.
I know tht much.

I know that it is all
a matter of hands.
Out of the mournful sweetness of touching
comes love
like breakfast.
Out of the many houses come the hands
before the abandonment of the city,
out of hte bars and shops,
a thin file of ants.

I've been abandoned out here
under the dry stars 
with no shoes, no belt
and I've called Rescue Inc. - 
that old-fashioned hot line -
no voice.
Left to my own lips, touch them,
my own nostrils, shoulders, breasts,
navel, stomach, mound,kneebone, ankle,
touch them.

It makes me laugh
to see a woman in this condition.
It makes me laugh for America and New York city
when your hands are cut off
and no one answers the phone.
Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

Who In The Hell Is Tom Jones?

 I was shacked with a
24 year old girl from
New York City for
two weeks- about
the time of the garbage
strike out there, and
one night my 34 year 
old woman arrived and
she said, "I want to see
my rival." she did
and then she said, "o,
you're a cute little thing!"
next I knew there was a 
screech of wildcats-
such screaming and scratch-
ing, wounded animal moans,
blood and piss. . .
I was drunk and in my
shorts. I tried to 
seperate them and fell,
wrenched my knee. then
they were through the screen
door and down the walk
and out into the street.
squadcars full of cops
arrived. a police heli-
coptor circled overhead.
I stood in the bathroom
and grinned in the mirror.
it's not often at the age
of 55 that such splendid
things occur.
better than the Watts
riots.
the 34 year old
came back in. she had
pissed all over her-
self and her clothing
was torn and she was
followed by 2 cops who
wanted to know why.
pulling up my shorts
I tried to explain.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry