Famous Grease Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Bill Awkins

..."Now what in the devil would I care?"
"'E's the livin', breathin' image of an organ-grinder's monkey,
 With a pound of grease in 'is 'air --
 Gawd -- bless 'im!
 An' a pound o' grease in 'is 'air."

"An' s'pose you met Bill 'Awkins,
 Now what in the devil 'ud ye do?"
"I'd open 'is cheek to 'is chin-strap buckle,
 An' bung up 'is both eyes, too --
 Gawd -- bless 'im!
 An bung up 'is both eyes, too!"

"Look 'ere, where 'e comes, Bill 'Awkins!
 Now, what in the devil will you s...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard


Filling Station

...thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color-
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I t...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

For the Union Dead

...s?d break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease....Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert

Gareth And Lynette

...weasel, nipt her slender nose 
With petulant thumb and finger, shrilling, 'Hence! 
Avoid, thou smellest all of kitchen-grease. 
And look who comes behind,' for there was Kay. 
'Knowest thou not me? thy master? I am Kay. 
We lack thee by the hearth.' 

And Gareth to him, 
'Master no more! too well I know thee, ay-- 
The most ungentle knight in Arthur's hall.' 
'Have at thee then,' said Kay: they shocked, and Kay 
Fell shoulder-slipt, and Gareth cried again, 
'Lead, and I foll...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

...tchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, O corpse-to-be ...

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
...Read more of this...
by Kinnell, Galway


Love Of The Woodland

...ve arms like furies drunk; 
 Winsome Will, 'neath Windsor Oak, 
 Eyed each elf that cracked a joke 
 At poor panting grease-hart fast— 
 Obese, roguish Jack harassed; 
 At Versailles, Molière did court 
 Cues from Pan (in heron port, 
 Half in ooze, half treeward raised), 
 "Words so witty, that Boileau's 'mazed!" 
 
 Foliage! fondly you attract! 
 Dian's faith I keep intact, 
 And declare that thy dryads dance 
 Still, and will, in thy green expanse! 


 

...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

New Farm Tractor

...y says hello to you instead of twenty mules—he sings to you instead of ten span of mules.

A bucket of oil and a can of grease is your hay and oats.

Rain proof and fool proof they stable you anywhere in the fields with the stars for a roof.

I carve a team of long ear mules on the steering wheel—it’s good-by now to leather reins and the songs of the old mule skinners....Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

O We Are The Outcasts

...on't know).

they were born with money and
they don't have to dirty their hands in
slaughterhouses or washing
dishes in grease joints or
driving cabs or pimping or selling pot.

this gives them time to understand
Life.

they walk in with their cocktail glass
held about heart high
and when they drink they just
sip.

you are drinking green beer which you
brought with you
because you have found out through the years
that rich bastards are tight-
they use 5 cent stamps instead of...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Pauls Wife

...e had a guilty expectation
Something was going to go with their slambanging.
Something bad left a broad black streak of grease
On the new wood the whole length of the log
Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.
But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
"First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to bell for me," the sawyer said.
Everyone had to h...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

Please Master

...feels the breath of 
 your spit and your thumb stroke
please master make my say Please Master **** me now Please
Master grease my balls and hairmouth with sweet vaselines
please master stroke your shaft with white creams
please master touch your cock head to my wrinkled self-hole
please master push it in gently, your elbows enwrapped round my breast
your arms passing down to my belly, my ***** you touch w/ your fingers
please master shove it in me a little, a little, a little...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Questions of Travel

...had to stop for gas and heard 
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune 
of disparate wooden clogs 
carelessly clacking over 
a grease-stained filling-station floor. 
(In another country the clogs would all be tested. 
Each pair there would have identical 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 ha...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Ballad of the Kings Jest

...p,
And he who never hath tasted the food,
By Allah! he knoweth not bad from good.

We cleansed our beards of the mutton-grease,
We lay on the mats and were filled with peace,
And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south,
With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth.
Four things greater than all things are, --
Women and Horses and Power and War.
We spake of them all, but the last the most,
For I sought a word of a Russian post,
Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword
And ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Fairy Temple; Or Oberons Chapel

...other knacks;
Their holy oil, their fasting-spittle,
Their sacred salt here, not a little.
Dry chips, old shoes, rags, grease, and bones,
Beside their fumigations.
Many a trifle, too, and trinket,
And for what use, scarce man would think it.
Next then, upon the chanter's side
An apple's-core is hung up dried,
With rattling kernels, which is rung
To call to morn and even-song.
The saint, to which the most he prays
And offers incense nights and days,
The lady of the lobster is...Read more of this...
by Herrick, Robert

The General Prologue

...full much her lest*. *pleasure
Her over-lippe wiped she so clean,
That in her cup there was no farthing* seen *speck
Of grease, when she drunken had her draught;
Full seemely after her meat she raught*: *reached out her hand
And *sickerly she was of great disport*, *surely she was of a lively
And full pleasant, and amiable of port, disposition*
And *pained her to counterfeite cheer *took pains to assume
Of court,* and be estately of mannere, a courtly disposition*
And to be h...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Geranium

...g on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Thre...Read more of this...
by Roethke, Theodore

The Red Dance

...oop umbrellas.
And a black man who asked this Sappho the time,
the time, as if her watch spoke.
Words were turning into grease,
and she said, "Why do you lie to me?"
And the waters of the Charles were beautiful,
sticking out in many colored tongues
and this strange Sappho knew she would enter the lights
and be lit by them and sink into them.
And how the end would come -
it had been foretold to her -
she would aspirate swallowing a fish,
going down with God's first creature
da...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Sash

...Thee, Hannah!
borrowed from her be-ribboned friend
and hid in a drawer and got salve on it,
salve on a sash, like bacon grease on a snake,
God's lard on the ribbon a Quaker girl
should not want, Satan's jism on
silk delicate as the skin of a young girl's genital.
When Hannah gave up satin her father
told her she was beautiful
just as God made her. But all sashes
lead to the sash, very sash of
very sash, begotten, not made, that my
aunt sent from Switzerland—
cobalt ripple of ...Read more of this...
by Olds, Sharon

The Unpromised Land Montgomery Alabama

...archers took. The walk is blistering--
the kind of heat that might make you recall
Nat Turner skinned and rendered into grease
if you share my cheap liberal guilt for sins
before your time. I hold it dear. I know
if I had lived in 1861
I would have fought in butternut, not blue
and never known I'd sinned. Nat Turner skinned
for doing what I like to think I'd do
if I were him.

Before the war
half-naked coffles were paraded to Court Square,
where Mary Chesnut gasped--"seasick"...Read more of this...
by Hudgins, Andrew

The Wife of Baths Tale

...him of the same wood a cross;
Not of my body in no foul mannere,
But certainly I made folk such cheer,
That in his owen grease I made him fry
For anger, and for very jealousy.
By God, in earth I was his purgatory,
For which I hope his soul may be in glory.
For, God it wot, he sat full oft and sung,
When that his shoe full bitterly him wrung.* *pinched
There was no wight, save God and he, that wist
In many wise how sore I did him twist.20
He died when I came from Jerusalem,
An...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

William Street

...ly, I find it lovely. 

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish 
and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose, 
of grease that blesses onions with a hiss; 
You find it ugly, I find it lovely. 

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze 
(death at their elbows, hunger at their heels) 
Ranging the pavements of their pasturage; 
You Find this ugly, I find it lovely ....Read more of this...
by Slessor, Kenneth

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