Famous Cents Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Cents poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cents poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cents poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...itself,
I fly out of the printer's,
I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
SPRING IN THE AIR...
In the barbershops
they're powdering
the sallow cheeks
of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
three-color bookcovers
flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell...
I don't look back,
the l...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...oin' to cry no more, no more!
An' I clumbed up an' nen failed off the fence,
An' Herbert he ist laugh at me!
An my fi'-cents
It sticked in my tin bank, an' I ist store
Purt' nigh my thumbnail off,
a-tryin to get
It out - nen smash it! - An' it's in there yit!
But I ain't goin' to cry no more, no more!
Oo! I'm so wickud! - An' my breath's so hot -
Ist like I run an' don't res' none
But ist run on when I ought to not;
Yes, an' my chin
An' lip's all warpy, an' teeth's so fast,...Read more of this...
by
Riley, James Whitcomb
...America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you b...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...m have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ese.
He never heard of chivalry,
He longs for no heroic times;
He thinks of pickles, olives, tea,
And dollars, nickles, cents and dimes.
His world has narrow walls, it seems;
By counters is his soul confined;
His wares are all his hopes and dreams,
They are the fabric of his mind.
Yet -- in a room above the store
There is a woman -- and a child
Pattered just now across the floor;
The shopman looked at him and smiled.
For, once he thrilled with high romance
And tuned to love h...Read more of this...
by
Kilmer, Joyce
...wind.
Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.
Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?
I took it.
It wasn't the money I needed.
But I took it....Read more of this...
by
Wright, James
...nd joyous shouts of children does rend the air,
While the boats sail along with them o'er Lohengrin Lake,
And fare is 5 cents for children, and adults ten is all they take.
And there's also summer-house shades, and merry-go-rounds
And with the merry laughter of the children the Park resounds,
During the live-long Sabbath day
Enjoying themselves at the merry-go-round play.
Then there's the elevated railroads abont five storeys high,
Which the inhabitants can hear night and...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...knucks
In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store
On Second Street.
I went in and asked, “How much?”
“Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman.
And taking a box of new ones off a shelf
He filled anew the box in the showcase
And said incidentally, most casually
And incidentally:
“I sell a carload a month of these.”
I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,
Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,
And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:
Mister...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...
mum purchase of ten feet of stream. "
"How much are you selling the stream for?" I asked.
"Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot, " he said. "That's for
the first hundred feet. After that it's five dollars a foot."
"How much are the birds?" I asked.
"Thirty-five cents apiece, " he said. "But of course
they're used. We can't guarantee anything."
"How wide is the stream?" I asked. "You said you were
selling it by the length, didn't you?"
"Yes, " he said. "We're...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...nted hour.
They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows and
pool tables and bicycles.
They would charge fifty-cents admission for their flea circus.
The business was certain to have a future to it. Perhaps they
would even get on the Ed Sullivan Show.
They of course did not have their fleas yet, but they could
easily be obtained from a white cat.
Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese
Cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...harmonica in its mouth.
I was a scholar until the mud puddles went dry and then I
picked cherries for two-and-a-half cents a pound in an old
orchard that was beside a long, hot dusty road.
The cherry boss was a middle-aged woman who was a real
Okie. Wearing a pair of goofy overalls, her name was Rebel
Smith, and she'd been a friend of "Pretty Boy" Floyd's down
in Oklahoma. "I remember one afternoon'Pretty Boy' came
driving up in his car. I ran out onto the front por...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...there for a long time.
We decided that we were too young to camp at Big Redfish
Lake, and besides they charged fifty cents a day, three dol-
lars a week like a skidrow hotel, and there were just too
many people there. There were too many trailers and camp-
ers parked in the halls. We couldn't get to the elevator be-
cause there was a family from New York parked there in a
ten-room trailer.
Three children came by drinking rub-a-dub and pulling
an old granny by her l...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...y phone number your shirt size
the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three sixth floor
number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade and a code,
in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!
and please remain calm,
and heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not pi, that won't happen,
it still has an okay five,
and quite a fine eight,
and all but final seven,
prodding and prodding a plodding eternity
to last....Read more of this...
by
Szymborska, Wislawa
...melons.. . .
Niggers play banjos because they want to.
The explanation is easy.
It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen’s masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers’ picnic with a fat man’s foot race.
It is the same as why boys buy a nickel’s worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel’s worth.
Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved.
The jockey in a yellow satin s...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...Seen
through a telescope:
ten cents worth of fog....Read more of this...
by
Issa, Kobayashi
...ng too much money now.
I sit and look at our backyard
and find it very hard.
What have we got for all his dollars and cents?
--A pile of bottles by the fence.
He's faithful and he's kind
but he sure has an inquiring mind.
He's seen a lot; he's bound to see the rest,
and if I protest
Le Roy answers with a frown,
"Darling, when I earns I spends.
The world is wide; it still extends....
I'm going to get a job in the next town."
Le Roy, you're earning too much money now.
I...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...
And bein' as sheriffs was hard to face,
Two dollars an acre would git the land.
They closed at a dollar and fifty cents,
And Jones he bought him a waggin and tents,
And loaded his corn, and his wimmin, and truck,
And moved to Texas, which it tuck
His entire pile, with the best of luck,
To git thar and git him a little land.
But Brown moved out on the old Jones' farm,
And he rolled up his breeches and bared his arm,
And he picked all the rocks from off'n...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...naire.
The burden's heavy on our backs -- you're thinking of your rents,
I'm worrying if I'll invest in five or six per cents.
We've limousines, and marble halls, and flunkeys by the score,
We play the part . . . but say, old chap, oh, isn't it a bore?
We work like slaves, we eat too much, we put on evening dress;
We've everything a man can want, I think . . . but happiness.
Come, let us sneak away, old chum; forget that we are rich,
And earn an honest appetite, and scratch a...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty
black or whatever the prevailing bottom is
getting thirty cents an hour to make sure
no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door.
Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources
for the greatest good of the smallest number
where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean
and at the end of the row one free toilet
oozes from under its crooked door,
while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies
wait and wait...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...All the older children in the
family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking
beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family
going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn't
because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation.
There wasn't even enough money to buy him a truss.
So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.
One morning in August I went over to his house. He was
still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a ta...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
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