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Best Famous Switch Poems

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

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Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Another Reason Why I Dont Keep A Gun In The House

 The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast but I can still hear him muffled under the music, barking, barking, barking, and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking, sitting there in the oboe section barking, his eyes fixed on the conductor who is entreating him with his baton while the other musicians listen in respectful silence to the famous barking dog solo, that endless coda that first established Beethoven as an innovative genius.


Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Introduction To Poetry

 I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light 
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Picnic Lightning

 It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home.
Pedestrians are flattened by safes falling from rooftops mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore.
This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens -- the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.
Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.
Written by Andre Breton | Create an image from this poem

Five Ways To Kill A Man

 There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince, and a castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him.
But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch.
All you then require is an ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no-one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
Written by Stephen Dunn | Create an image from this poem

Welcome

 if you believe nothing is always what's left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies-
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal, like a voice,
If you believe there's no correct response
to death, as I do; that even in grief
(where I've sat making plans)
there are small corners of joy
If your body sometimes is a light switch
in a house of insomniacs
If you can feel yourself straining
to be yourself every waking minute
If, as I am, you are almost smiling .
.
.


Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

Eleventh Hour

 The bloom was off the economic recovery.
"I just want to know one thing," she said.
What was that one thing? He'll never know, Because at just that moment he heard the sound Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there, It was dark.
His hand went to the wall But the switch wasn't where it was supposed to be Which felt like déjà vu.
And then she was gone.
And now he knew how it felt to stand On the local platform as the express whizzes by With people chatting in a dialect Of English he couldn't understand, because his English Was current as of 1968 and no one speaks that way except In certain books.
So the hours spent in vain Were minutes blown up into comic-book balloons full Of Keats's odes.
"Goodbye, kid.
" Tears streamed down The boy's face.
It was a great feeling, Like the feeling you get when you throw things away After a funeral: clean and empty in the morning dark.
There was no time for locker-room oratory.
They knew they were facing a do-or-die situation, With their backs to the wall, and no tomorrow.
Written by Seamus Heaney | Create an image from this poem

Casualty

 I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman's quick eye And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, BOGSIDE NIL.
That Wednesday Everyone held His breath and trembled.
II It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown Surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe's complicity? 'Now, you're supposed to be An educated man,' I hear him say.
'Puzzle me The right answer to that one.
' III I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling out of his lane To the respectable Purring of the hearse.
.
.
They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine, The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat, The screw purling, turning Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond.
.
.
Dawn-sniffing revenant, Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again.
Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

Music To Me Is Like Days

 Once played to attentive faces 
music has broken its frame 
its bodice of always-weak laces 
the entirely promiscuous art 
pours out in public spaces 
accompanying everything, the selections 
of sex and war, the rejections.
To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans it transmits an ideal body continuously as theirs age.
Warrens of plastic tiles and mesh throats dispense this aural money this sleek accountancy of notes deep feeling adrift from its feelers thought that means everything at once like a shrugging of cream shoulders like paintings hung on park mesh sonore doom soneer illy chesh they lost the off switch in my lifetime the world reverberates with Muzak and Prozac.
As it doesn't with poe-zac (I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak).
Music to me is like days I rarely catch who composed them if one's sublime I think God my life-signs suspend.
I nod it's like both Stilton and cure from one harpsichord-hum: penicillium - then I miss the Köchel number.
I scarcely know whose performance of a limpid autumn noon is superior I gather timbre outranks rhumba.
I often can't tell days apart they are the consumers, not me in my head collectables decay I've half-heard every piece of music the glorious big one with voice the gleaming instrumental one, so choice the hypnotic one like weed-smoke at a party and the muscular one out of farty cars that goes Whudda Whudda Whudda like the compound oil heart of a warrior not of this planet.
Written by Erica Jong | Create an image from this poem

Climbing You

 I want to understand the steep thing
that climbs ladders in your throat.
I can't make sense of you.
Everywhere I look you're there-- a vast landmark, a volcano poking its head through the clouds, Gulliver sprawled across Lilliput.
I climb into your eyes, looking.
The pupils are black painted stage flats.
They can be pulled down like window shades.
I switch on a light in your iris.
Your brain ticks like a bomb.
In your offhand, mocking way you've invited me into your chest.
Inside: the blur that poses as your heart.
I'm supposed to go in with a torch or maybe hot water bottles & defrost it by hand as one defrosts an old refrigerator.
It will shudder & sigh (the icebox to the insomniac).
Oh there's nothing like love between us.
You're the mountain, I am climbing you.
If I fall, you won't be all to blame, but you'll wait years maybe for the next doomed expedition.
Written by Edwin Brock | Create an image from this poem

Five Ways To Kill A Man

 There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince, and a castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him.
But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch.
All you then require is an ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no-one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things