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Famous Long Brooklyn Poems

Famous Long Brooklyn Poems. Long Brooklyn Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Brooklyn long poems


by Anne Sexton Rumpelstiltskin Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out. No bigger than a two-year-old whom you'd call lamb chop yet this one is old and malformed. His head is okay but the rest of him wasn't Sanforized? He is a monster of despair. He is all decay. He speaks up as tiny as an earphone with Truman's asexual voice: I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. No. I am not the law in your mind, the grandfather of watchfulness. I am the law of your members, the kindred of blackness and impulse. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware . . . Beware . . . There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. She wept, of course, huge aquamarine tears. The door opened and in popped a dwarf. He was as ugly as a wart. Little thing, what are you? she cried. With his tiny no-sex... Read the rest of this poem... Poems are below...
by Walt Whitman Centenarian's Story The GIVE me your hand, old Revolutionary; The hill-top is nigh—but a few steps, (make room, gentlemen;) Up the path you have follow’d me well, spite of your hundred and extra years; You can walk, old man, though your eyes are almost done; Your faculties serve you, and presently I must have them serve me. Rest, while I tell what the crowd around us means; On the plain below, recruits are drilling and exercising; There is the camp—one regiment departs to-morrow; Do you hear the officers giving the orders? Do you hear the clank of the muskets? Why, what comes over you now, old man? Why do you tremble, and clutch my hand so convulsively? The troops are but drilling—they are yet surrounded with smiles; Around them, at hand, the well-drest friends, and the women; While splendid and warm the afternoon sun shines down; Green the midsummer verdure, and fresh blows the dallying breeze, O’er proud and peaceful cities, and arm of the sea between. But drill and parade are over—they march back to quarters; Only hear that approval of hands! hear what a clapping! As wending, the crowds now part and disperse—but we, old man, Not for nothing have I brought you hither—we... Read the rest of this poem...
by Walt Whitman Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 1 FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. 2 The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme: The similitudes of the past, and those of the future; The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river; The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away; The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others. Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;... Read the rest of this poem...
by Walt Whitman Sleepers The 1 I WANDER all night in my vision, Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping. How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still! How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles! The wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates, The night pervades them and infolds them. The married couple sleep calmly in their bed—he with his palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband, The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed, The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs, And the mother sleeps, with her little child carefully wrapt. The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep, The prisoner sleeps well in the prison—the run-away son sleeps; The murderer that is to be hung next day—how does he sleep? And the murder’d person—how... Read the rest of this poem...
by Allen Ginsberg Howl For Carl Solomon I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles... Read the rest of this poem... Poems are below...

Rumpelstiltskin

 Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
whom you'd call lamb chop
yet this one is old and malformed.
His head is okay
but the rest of him wasn't Sanforized?
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman's asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
No. I am not the law in your mind,
the grandfather of watchfulness.
I am the law of your members,
the kindred of blackness and impulse.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware . . . Beware . . .

There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.

She wept,
of course, huge aquamarine tears.
The door opened and in popped a dwarf.
He was as ugly as a wart.
Little thing, what are you? she cried.
With his tiny no-sex...
Read the rest of this poem...

Poems are below...

by Walt Whitman

Centenarian's Story The

 GIVE me your hand, old Revolutionary; 
The hill-top is nigh—but a few steps, (make room, gentlemen;) 
Up the path you have follow’d me well, spite of your hundred and extra years; 
You can walk, old man, though your eyes are almost done; 
Your faculties serve you, and presently I must have them serve me.

Rest, while I tell what the crowd around us means; 
On the plain below, recruits are drilling and exercising; 
There is the camp—one regiment departs to-morrow; 
Do you hear the officers giving the orders? 
Do you hear the clank of the muskets?

Why, what comes over you now, old man? 
Why do you tremble, and clutch my hand so convulsively? 
The troops are but drilling—they are yet surrounded with smiles; 
Around them, at hand, the well-drest friends, and the women; 
While splendid and warm the afternoon sun shines down;
Green the midsummer verdure, and fresh blows the dallying breeze, 
O’er proud and peaceful cities, and arm of the sea between. 
But drill and parade are over—they march back to quarters; 
Only hear that approval of hands! hear what a clapping! 

As wending, the crowds now part and disperse—but we, old man,
Not for nothing have I brought you hither—we...
Read the rest of this poem...

by Walt Whitman

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

 1
FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face; 
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. 

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! 
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious
 to
 me
 than you suppose; 
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my
 meditations, than you might suppose.

2
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; 
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet
 part
 of the scheme: 
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future; 
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk in the
 street, and
 the passage over the river; 
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; 
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others. 

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; 
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;...
Read the rest of this poem...

by Walt Whitman

Sleepers The

 1
I WANDER all night in my vision, 
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, 
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, 
Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, 
Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still! 
How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles! 

The wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of
 drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, 
The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door’d rooms, the
 sacred
 idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates, 
The night pervades them and infolds them.

The married couple sleep calmly in their bed—he with his palm on the hip of the wife,
 and
 she
 with her palm on the hip of the husband, 
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed, 
The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs, 
And the mother sleeps, with her little child carefully wrapt. 

The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison—the run-away son sleeps; 
The murderer that is to be hung next day—how does he sleep? 
And the murder’d person—how...
Read the rest of this poem...

by Allen Ginsberg

Howl

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles...
Read the rest of this poem...

Poems are below...