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Best Famous Servility Poems

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

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Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

Something For The Touts The Nuns The Grocery Clerks And You . .

 we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you .
.
.
something at 8 a.
m.
, something in the library something in the river, everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it -- one two three and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead meat, its bones against your bones something and nothing.
it's always early enough to die and it's always too late, and the drill of blood in the basin white it tells you nothing at all and the gravediggers playing poker over 5 a.
m.
coffee, waiting for the grass to dismiss the frost .
.
.
they tell you nothing at all.
we have everything and we have nothing -- days with glass edges and the impossible stink of river moss -- worse than ****; checkerboard days of moves and countermoves, fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as in victory; slow days like mules humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed up a road where a madman sits waiting among bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights in alleys, fat legs of women striving around your bowels buried in moans, the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves that robbed you.
days when children say funny and brilliant things like savages trying to send you a message through their bodies while their bodies are still alive enough to transmit and feel and run up and down without locks and paychecks and ideals and possessions and beetle-like opinions.
days when you can cry all day long in a green room with the door locked, days when you can laugh at the breadman because his legs are too long, days of looking at hedges .
.
.
and nothing, and nothing, the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent, men who'd kill you because they're crazy and justify it because it's the law, men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good .
.
.
and nothing, getting your last paycheck at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a barbershop, at a job you didn't want anyway.
income tax, sickness, servility, broken arms, broken heads -- all the stuffing come out like an old pillow.
we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and then give way.
fame gets them or disgust or age or lack of proper diet or ink across the eyes or children in college or new cars or broken backs while skiing in Switzerland or new politics or new wives or just natural change and decay -- the man you knew yesterday hooking for ten rounds or drinking for three days and three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now just something under a sheet or a cross or a stone or under an easy delusion, or packing a bible or a golf bag or a briefcase: how they go, how they go! -- all the ones you thought would never go.
days like this.
like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to get through to you.
what do you see today? what is it? where are you? the best days are sometimes the first, sometimes the middle and even sometimes the last.
the vacant lots are not bad, churches in Europe on postcards are not bad.
people in wax museums frozen into their best sterility are not bad, horrible but not bad.
the cannon, think of the cannon, and toast for breakfast the coffee hot enough you know your tongue is still there, three geraniums outside a window, trying to be red and trying to be pink and trying to be geraniums, no wonder sometimes the women cry, no wonder the mules don't want to go up the hill.
are you in a hotel room in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more good day.
a little bit of it.
and as the nurses come out of the building after their shift, having had enough, eight nurses with different names and different places to go -- walking across the lawn, some of them want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a hot bath, some of them want a man, some of them are hardly thinking at all.
enough and not enough.
arcs and pilgrims, oranges gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of tissue paper.
in the most decent sometimes sun there is the softsmoke feeling from urns and the canned sound of old battleplanes and if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge you'll find dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window there will be the day, and as you get older you'll keep looking keep looking sucking your tongue in a little ah ah no no maybe some do it naturally some obscenely everywhere.


Written by Francois Villon | Create an image from this poem

The Ballad Of The Proverbs

 So rough the goat will scratch, it cannot sleep.
So often goes the pot to the well that it breaks.
So long you heat iron, it will glow; so heavily you hammer it, it shatters.
So good is the man as his praise; so far he will go, and he's forgotten; so bad he behaves, and he's despised.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.
So glib you talk, you end up in contradictions.
So good is your credit as the favors you got.
So much you promise that you will back out.
So doggedly you beg that your wish is granted; so high climbs the price when you want a thing; so much you want it that you pay the price; so familiar it gets to you, you want it no more.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.
So, you love a dog.
Then feed it! So long a song will run that people learn it.
So long you keep the fruit, it will rot.
So hot the struggle for a spot that it is won; so cool you keep your act that your spirit freezes; so hurriedly you act that you run into bad luck; so tight you embrace that your catch slips away.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.
So you scoff and laugh, and the fun is gone.
So you crave and spend, and lose your shirt.
So candid you are, no blow can be too low.
So good as a gift should a promise be.
So, if you love God, you obey the Church.
So, when you give much, you borrow much.
So, shifting winds turn to storm.
So loud you cry Christmas, it comes.
Prince, so long as a fool persists, he grows wiser; so, round the world he goes, but return he will, so humbled and beaten back into servility.
So loud you cry Christmas, it is here.
Written by Robert Lowell | Create an image from this poem

For the Union Dead

 "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.
" The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now.
Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back.
I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile.
One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common.
Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked ***** infantry on St.
Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze ******* breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gently tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now.
He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year-- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns .
.
.
Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers.
" The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast.
Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of ***** school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the bless?d break.
The Aquarium is gone.
Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things