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Famous Gasoline Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...ow.
Iridescent, watery 

prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soap-bubble sphere, 

think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor, 
and not a one in any way 

distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality. Instead 

they're all exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfillment 

of heaven's template,
mackerel essence. As if, 
after a lifetime arriving 

at this enameling, the jeweler's
made uncountable examples
each as i...Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark



...on 
he would be at her door 
to wake her gently, he thought, 
with a hand at her nape, shaking 
to and fro, smelling of gasoline 
and whispering. Then he left. 
Now she shakes her head, shakes 
him away and will not rise. 
There is fog at the window 
and thickening the high branches 
of the sycamores. She thinks 
of her own kitchen, the dishwasher 
yawning open, the dripping carton 
left on the counter. Her boys 
have gone off steaming like sheep. 
Were they here last night? ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...on and steadied down
They gave me a job in the canning works,
And every morning I had to fill
The tank in the yard with gasoline,
That fed the blow-fires in the sheds
To heat the soldering irons.
And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,
Carrying buckets full of the stuff.
One morning, as I stood there pouring,
The air grew still and seemed to heave,
And I shot up as the tank exploded,
And down I came with both legs broken,
And my eyes burned crisp as a couple of eggs.
For som...Read more of this...
by Masters, Edgar Lee
...e night comes small fires go out. 
Blood runs to the heart and finds it locked. 

Morning is exhaustion, tranquilizers, gasoline, 
the screaming of frozen bearings, 
the failures ofwill, the TV talking to itself 

The clouds go on eating oil, cigars, 
housewives, sighing letters, 
the breath of lies. In their great silent pockets 
they carry off all our dead. 

3 

The clouds collect until there's no sky. 
A boat slips its moorings and drifts 
toward the open sea, turning and...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it....Read more of this...
by Collins, Billy



...f Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,

The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"

He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students gave him,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their c...Read more of this...
by Pinsky, Robert
...gashed my baldness when it fell --
(Somehow I think it was shaken loose
By the heave of the air all over town
When the gasoline tank at the canning works
Blew up and burned Butch Weldy) --
But let us argue points in order,
And reason the whole case carefully:
First I concede my head was cut,
But second the frightful thing was this:
The leaves of the docket shot and showered
Around me like a deck of cards
In the hands of a sleight of hand performer.
And up to the end I saw th...Read more of this...
by Masters, Edgar Lee
...ide of forty days.

Tractors and songs can pass below the cemetery --
in the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline,
fields held in common, water in canals,
no drought or fear of the police.

Of course, we won't hear those songs:
the dead lie stretched out underground
and rot like black branches,
deaf, dumb, and blind under the earth.

But, I sang those songs
before they were written,
I smelled the burnt gasoline
before the blueprints for the tractors were drawn....Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim
...ct site for a lean-to

where the wind and dust travel easily along my skin,

and I'm no longer satiated by the scent of gasoline. I'll arrive there

out of balance, untaught; ready for something called home....Read more of this...
by Rich, Susan
...hours in a row, "

the other kid said. "That's a lot of twisting. "

 I got off the bus right next to an abandoned Time Gasoline

filling station and an abandoned fifty-cent self-service car

wash. There was a long field on one side of the filling station.

The field had once been covered with a housing project dur-

ing the war, put there for the shipyard workers.

 On the other side of the Time filling station was the Cleve-

land Wrecking Yard. I walked down there to have ...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...told the attendant to fill it up.

 "How about some wild flower seeds?" the attendant said.

 "No, " her husband said. "Gasoline."

 "I know that, sir, " the attendant said. "But we're giving

away wild flower seeds with the gasoline today. "

 "All right, " her husband said. "Give us some wild flower

seeds, then. But be sure and fill the car up with gasoline.

Gasoline's what I really want. "

 "They'll brighten up your garden, sir."

 " The gasoline 7"

 "No, sir, the flow...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...pitch.) 
--A pity not to have heard 
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird 
who sings above the broken gasoline pump 
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: 
three towers, five silver crosses. 
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered, 
blurr'dly and inconclusively, 
on what connection can exist for centuries 
between the crudest wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies o...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth
...es combine
And fuel gives out in my road-machine
And it's sixteen miles to that home of mine--
Then ho! For a gallon of gasoline!

When our coach rides smoothly on iron-shod wheel
With a deft touch guiding each taut drawn line
And the inn ahead holds a royal meal,
We may carol the praises of ruby wine;
But when, on some long and steep incline,
In a manner entirely unforeseen
The motor stops with a last sad whine--
Then ho! For a gallon of gasoline!

When the air is crisp and ...Read more of this...
by Butler, Ellis Parker
...by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline....Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth
...e sunrise burns.
I see great flashes where the far trail turns.

Its eyes are lamps like the eyes of dragons.
It drinks gasoline from big red flagons.
Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,
It comes like lightning, goes past roaring.
It will hail all the wind-mills, taunting, ringing,
Dodge the cyclones, 
Count the milestones,
On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills—
Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills. . . . 
Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel
...at likes the city--
    Grass that's curried smooth and green,
  Theaytres and stranglin' collars,
    Wagons run by gasoline--
  But for me it's hawse and saddle
    Every day without a change,
  And a desert sun a-blazin'
    On a hundred miles of range.

  _Just a-ridin', a-ridin'--_
    _Desert ripplin' in the sun,_
  _Mountains blue along the skyline--_
    _I don't envy anyone_
        _When I'm ridin'._

  When my feet is in the stirrups
    And my haws...Read more of this...
by Clark, Badger
...of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow. 

 Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, 
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

 Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gut...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...That tree said
 I don't like that white car under me,
 it smells gasoline
That other tree next to it said
 O you're always complaining
 you're a neurotic
 you can see by the way you're bent over.


 July 6, 1981, 8 p.m....Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...h corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the
 night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist
 houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds,...Read more of this...
by Neruda, Pablo
...over Denver 
Oil red dung colored smoke 
level to level across the horizon 

blue tainted sky above 
Oil car smog gasoline 
hazing red Denver's day 

December bare trees 

sticking up from housetop streets 

Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over 

radar wheels, black smoke 

drifts from tailfins 

Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains 
Oil from Texas, Bahrein, Venezuela Mexico 
Oil that turns General Motors 

revs up Ford 
lights up General...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

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