Famous Bums Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Bums poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous bums poems. These examples illustrate what a famous bums poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...car and found
A girl on the darkening ground,
And killed her in the snow.
Beside his cell, I am told,
Hardy perennial bums
Complain till twilight comes
For hunger and for cold.
They hardly know of a day
That saw their hunger pass.
Bred to the dark, their flesh
Peacefully withers away.
The man who sits alone,
He is the one for wonder,
Who sways his fingers under
The cleanly shaven chin,
Who sees, in the shaving mirror
Pinned to the barren wall,
The uprooted ghost of all:
Th...Read more of this...
by
Wright, James
...on either shoe.
Till to my garden back I come,
Where bumble-bees for hours and hours
Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums,
To wriggle out of hollow flowers....Read more of this...
by
Davies, William Henry
...erb
makes the sentence I'm walking amid
the tourists on Bleecker Street the riffraff
the students with backpacks the bums and
a good old-fashioned New York feeling
hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl
the urge to kick a stranger in the pants,
and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...tles into my room, June bugs I call them.
I use the typewritter as my pillow.
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes.
Bums give all their money to me.
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life.
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough
bacon.
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of
blue beards.
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed.
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a
bullet.
I met ...Read more of this...
by
Orlovsky, Peter
...un,
Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs
Bare as they scramble over the Hollows
With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums
Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks
Full of flowers and their delicate ears,
Perfect teeth and flickering tongues, the
Fragile bones of their cheeks, the soft
Sweetness of their soprano voices dying
Away into the unforgotten magenta and
Yellow-ochre of innumerable twilights....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops....Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...rettes lying all over the orchard, near
the john and around the trees and down the rows.
Then she hired half-a-dozen bums to pick cherries be-
cause the picking was going too slowly. Rebel picked the
bums up on skidrow every morning and drove them out to
the orchard in a rusty old truck. There were always half-a-
dozen bums, but sometimes they had different faces.
After they came to pick cherries I never saw any more of
her half-smoked cigarettes lying around. They ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...inal Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead b...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ast!"
I drove her to the beach that day. It was a weekday and not yet summer so things were
splendidly deserted. Beach bums in rags slept on the lawns above the sand. Others sat on
stone benches sharing a lone bottle. The gulls whirled about, mindless yet distracted. Old
ladies in their 70's and 80's sat on the benches and discussed selling real estate left
behind by husbands long ago killed by the pace and stupidity of survival. For it all,
there was peace in the air and we...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...f those
who sit on the commodes of power debowelling scented ****
public- and grammar-school yokels wet-nursed oxbridge bums
(meet them where your own world breathes you'd have the urge to spit)
their great debates are full of puff their insights comatose
but they concoct the standards in their painted kingdom-comes
they pass down the judgments draped in tongues of holy writ
the people are a mass disease an untissued runny nose
disdained (but somehow soared above) as they su...Read more of this...
by
Gregory, Rg
...distance
Between his knees and the edge of the hardwood
Almost invariably unoccupied
At this enlightened hour by the bums of nighttime
(For whom the owlish eye of the moon
Had been closed by daylight), and would give himself wholly over
Backwards and trustingly downwards
And be well seated there. He would remove
From his sinister jacket pocket a postcard
And touch it and retouch it with the point
Of the fountain he produced at his fingertips
And fill it with his never...Read more of this...
by
Wagoner, David
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