Famous Dirty Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Dirty poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous dirty poems. These examples illustrate what a famous dirty poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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O We Are The Outcasts

by Charles Bukowski
 ah, christ, what a CREW:
more
poetry, always more
P O E T R Y .

if it doesn't come, coax it out with a 
laxative. get your name in LIGHTS,
get it up there in
8 1/2 x 11 mimeo.

keep it coming like a miracle.

ah christ, writers are the most sickening
of all the louts!
yellow-toothed, slump-shouldered,
gutless, flea-bitten and
obvious . . . in tinker-toy rooms
with their...Read more of this...

Sunflower Sutra

by Allen Ginsberg
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by...Read more of this...

The Vagaries of Fishes

by Judith Skillman
 After they passed beneath us I could tell
more would be coming, beneath the sand,
under the bejeweled sky, under the first
layer of earth where water exists 
in flutes and eddies. I lay there with you,
not wanting to leave your side even
for them, the miraculous creatures of sex
and sediment, the ones who obey currents 
and ladders, blindly seeking out their own
individual...Read more of this...

Rhyming Poem

by Charles Bukowski
 the goldfish sing all night with guitars,
and the whores go down with the stars,
the whores go down with the stars 
I'm sorry, sir, we close at 4:30,
besides yr mother's neck is dirty,
and the whores go down with the etc.,
the whrs. go dn. with the etc. 
I'm sorry jack you can't come back,
I've fallen in love with another sap,
3/4 Italian...Read more of this...

Out Back

by Henry Lawson
 The old year went, and the new returned, in the withering weeks of drought, 
The cheque was spent that the shearer earned, 
and the sheds were all cut out; 
The publican's words were short and few, 
and the publican's looks were black -- 
And the time had come, as the shearer knew, to carry his swag Out Back. 

For...Read more of this...

There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty

by Gary Snyder
 There are those who love to get dirty
 and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
 beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
 just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
 and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
 they drink tea....Read more of this...

Every Dead One Has a Name

by Taja Kramberger
Every dead one has a name,
only the names of the living make us falter.
Some names are impossible to utter
without a stammer and a fidget,
some can only be spoken 
through allusion,
and some, mostly women’s,
are forbidden in these parts.

Every dead one has a name,
engraved in stone,
printed in obituary or directory,
but my name must be undermined,
every few years
soiled and substituted
with another one.

A decade...Read more of this...

Old Schooldays

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Awake, of Muse, the echoes of a day 
Long past, the ghosts of mem'ries manifold -- 
Youth's memories that once were green and gold 
But now, alas, are grim and ashen grey. 
The drowsy schoolboy wakened up from sleep, 
First stays his system with substantial food, 
Then off for school with tasks half understood, 
Alas, alas, that cribs should...Read more of this...

Omaha

by Carl Sandburg
 RED barns and red heifers spot the green
grass circles around Omaha—the farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon loads of cheese.

Shale hogbacks across the river at Council
Bluffs—and shanties hang by an eyelash to
the hill slants back around Omaha.

A span of steel ties up the kin of Iowa and
Nebraska across the yellow, big-hoofed Missouri River.
Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,
Eats and swears...Read more of this...

Chemin De Fer

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Alone on the railroad track
 I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
 or maybe too far apart.

The scenery was impoverished:
 scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
 I saw the little pond

where the dirty old hermit lives,
 lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
 lucidly year after year.

The hermit shot off his shot-gun
 and the...Read more of this...

Always Unsuitable

by Marge Piercy
 She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.
They were grinning politely and evenly at me.
Unsuitable they smirked. It is true

I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts
too big for the silhouette. She knew
at once that we had sex, lots of it

as if I had strolled into her diningroom
in a dirty negligee smelling gamy
smelling fishy and sporting a...Read more of this...

This dirty -- little -- Heart

by Emily Dickinson
 This dirty -- little -- Heart
Is freely mine.
I won it with a Bun --
A Freckled shrine --

But eligibly fair
To him who sees
The Visage of the Soul
And not the knees....Read more of this...

The Fruit Shop

by Amy Lowell
 Cross-ribboned shoes; a muslin gown,
High-waisted, girdled with bright blue;
A straw poke bonnet which hid the frown
She pluckered her little brows into
As she picked her dainty passage through
The dusty street. "Ah, Mademoiselle,
A dirty pathway, we need rain,
My poor fruits suffer, and the shell
Of this nut's too big for its kernel, lain
Here in the sun it has shrunk again.
The baker down...Read more of this...

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty

by Ogden Nash
 Unwillingly Miranda wakes, 
Feels the sun with terror, 
One unwilling step she takes, 
Shuddering to the mirror. 

Miranda in Miranda's sight 
Is old and gray and dirty; 
Twenty-nine she was last night; 
This morning she is thirty. 

Shining like the morning star, 
Like the twilight shining, 
Haunted by a calendar, 
Miranda is a-pining. 

Silly girl, silver girl, 
Draw the...Read more of this...

Praying Drunk

by Andrew Hudgins
 Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
about the woman, whom I taught, in bed,
this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form
keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes.
Do you? And after love,...Read more of this...

Sonnet 104 - A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece

by John Berryman
 A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,
Diminutive, but room enough . . like clay
To finger eager on some torrid day . .
Who'd throw her black hair back, and hang, and tease.
Never, not once in all one's horny lease
To'have had a demi-lay, a pretty, gay,
Snug, slim and supple-breasted girl for play . .
She bats her big, warm eyes, and...Read more of this...

from imperfect Eden

by Rg Gregory
 (1)
and off to scott's (the dockers' restaurant)
burly men packed in round solid tables
but what the helle (drowned in hellespont)
this place for me was rich in its own fables
i'll be the lover sunk if that enables
an awesome sense of just how deep the spells
that put scotts for me beyond the dardanelles

lace-curtained windows (or memory plays me false)
no capped odysseus could...Read more of this...

The City Bushman

by Henry Lawson
 It was pleasant up the country, City Bushman, where you went, 
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; 
And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, 
Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; 
But we lately heard you singing of the `plains where shade...Read more of this...

87. The Twa Dogs

by Robert Burns
 ’TWAS 1 in that place o’ Scotland’s isle,
That bears the name o’ auld King Coil,
Upon a bonie day in June,
When wearin’ thro’ the afternoon,
Twa dogs, that were na thrang at hame,
Forgather’d ance upon a time.
 The first I’ll name, they ca’d him Caesar,
Was keepit for His Honor’s pleasure:
His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs,
Shew’d he was nane o’...Read more of this...

I Sing The Body Electric

by Philip Levine
 People sit numbly at the counter 
waiting for breakfast or service. 
Today it's Hartford, Connecticut 
more than twenty-five years after 
the last death of Wallace Stevens. 
I have come in out of the cold 
and wind of a Sunday morning 
of early March, and I seem to be 
crying, but I'm only freezing 
and unpeeled. The waitress brings 
me...Read more of this...

Gunga Din

by Rudyard Kipling
 You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The...Read more of this...

Repetition of Words and Weather

by Ruth Stone
A basket of dirty clothes
spills all day long
down the mountain
beating the rocks
with a horrible washer-woman's cry.
Now two riders go by
horseback on the dirt road.
Young women talking of antique latches,
blind to the dirty linen,
smells of urine, bedsores,
bowels of old women
left on their backs,
fat and lye,
lies of doctoring men.
Strange weather mid-summer
is summer spent.
I open a book of poems.
All lies on the psalter,...Read more of this...

Homework

by Allen Ginsberg
 Homage Kenneth Koch


If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
 scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
 the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all...Read more of this...

The Spirit Medium

by William Butler Yeats
 Poetry, music, I have loved, and yet
Because of those new dead
That come into my soul and escape
Confusion of the bed,
Or those begotten or unbegotten
Perning in a band,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

Or those begotten or unbegotten,
For I would not recall
Some that being unbegotten
Are not individual,
But copy some one action,
Moulding it of dust or...Read more of this...

The Ladys Dressing Room

by Jonathan Swift
 Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void
And Betty otherwise employed,
Stole in and took a strict survey
Of all the litter as it lay;
Whereof, to make the matter clear,
An inventory follows here.
And first a dirty smock appeared,
Beneath the...Read more of this...

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