Famous Pills Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Up At A Villa— Down In The City

by Robert Browning
 (As Distinguished by an Italian Person of Quality)

I

Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare,
The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!

II

Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least!
There, the whole day long, one's life is a...Read more of this...

An Island

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Take it away, and swallow it yourself. 
Ha! Look you, there’s a rat. 
Last night there were a dozen on that shelf, 
And two of them were living in my hat. 
Look! Now he goes, but he’ll come back—
Ha? But he will, I say … 
Il reviendra-z-à Pâques, 
Ou à la Trinité …
Be very sure that he’ll return again;...Read more of this...

The Final Tax

by Ellis Parker Butler
 Said Statesman A to Statesman Z:
“What can we tax that is not paying?
We’re taxing every blessed thing—
Here’s what our people are defraying:

“Tariff tax, income tax,
Tax on retail sales,
Club tax, school tax,
Tax on beers and ales,

“City tax, county tax,
Tax on obligations,
War tax. wine tax,
Tax on corporations,

“Brewer tax, sewer tax,
Tax on motor cars,
Bond tax, stock tax,
Tax on liquor bars,

“Bridge tax, check...Read more of this...

Justification

by William Strode
 See how the Rainbow in the skie
Seems gaudy through the Suns bright eye;
Harke how an Eccho answere makes,
Feele how a board is smooth'd with waxe,
Smell how a glove putts on perfume,
Tast how theyr sweetnesse pills assume:
So by imputed Justice, Clay
Seemes faire, well spoke, smooth, sweet, each way.
The eye doth gaze on robes appearing,
The prompted Eccho takes our hearing,
The board...Read more of this...

45 Mercy Street

by Anne Sexton
 In my dream, 
drilling into the marrow 
of my entire bone, 
my real dream, 
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill 
searching for a street sign -- 
namely MERCY STREET. 
Not there. 

I try the Back Bay. 
Not there. 
Not there. 
And yet I know the number. 
45 Mercy Street. 
I know the stained-glass window 
of the foyer, 
the...Read more of this...

Impossible To Tell

by Robert Pinsky
 to Robert Hass and in memory of 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...Read more of this...

Roulette

by Robert William Service
 I'll wait until my money's gone
Before I take the sleeping pills;
Then when they find me in the dawn,
Remote from earthly ails and ills
They'll say: "She's broke, the foreign *****!"
And dump me in the common ditch.

So thought I, of all hope bereft,
And by my evil fate obsessed;
A thousand franks was all I'd left
Of that fair fortune I possessed.
...I throw it...Read more of this...

Los Angeles 1954

by David St John
 It was in the old days,
When she used to hang out at a place
Called Club Zombie,
A black cabaret that the police liked
To raid now and then. As she
Stepped through the door, the light
Would hit her platinum hair,
And believe me, heads would turn. Maestro
Loved it; he'd have her by
The arm as he led us through the packed crowd
To a private...Read more of this...

For A Depressed Woman

by James A Emanuel
 I
My friends do not know.
But what could my friends not know?
About what? What friends?

II
She sleeps late each day,
stifling each reason to rise,
choked into the quilt.

III
"I'll never find work."
She swallows this thought with pills,
finds tears in the glass....Read more of this...

The History Of One Tough Motherfucker

by Charles Bukowski
 he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed 
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and...Read more of this...

The Difference Between Pepsi And Coke

by David Lehman
 Can't swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat
 intolerable feelings of inadequacy;
Won't admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind
 numerous marital infidelities;
Looks fat in jeans, mouths clichés with confidence,
 breaks mother's plates in fights;
Buys when the market is too high, and panics during
 the inevitable descent;
Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference
 between Pepsi and Coke,
Has...Read more of this...

Oh! Mr Best Youre Very Bad

by Jane Austen
 Oh! Mr. Best, you're very bad
And all the world shall know it;
Your base behaviour shall be sung
By me, a tunefull Poet.-- 
You used to go to Harrowgate
Each summer as it came,
And why I pray should you refuse
To go this year the same?-- 

The way's as plain, the road's as smooth,
The Posting not increased;
You're scarcely stouter than you were,
Not younger...Read more of this...

A Game Of Chess

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
  Glowed on the marble, where the glass
  Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
  From which a golden Cupidon peeped out                        ...Read more of this...

8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain

by Jim Carroll
 1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance 

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift 

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese...Read more of this...

Stretcher Case

by Siegfried Sassoon
 He woke; the clank and racket of the train 
Kept time with angry throbbings in his brain. 
Then for a while he lapsed and drowsed again. 

At last he lifted his bewildered eyes 
And blinked, and rolled them sidelong; hills and skies,
Heavily wooded, hot with August haze, 
And, slipping backward, golden for his gaze, 
Acres of harvest. 

Feebly now...Read more of this...

Flee On Your Donkey

by Anne Sexton
 Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in...Read more of this...

Scars on Paper

by Marilyn Hacker
 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...

Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law

by Adrienne Rich
  1

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering,...Read more of this...

Whats The Use Of A Title?

by Charles Bukowski
 They dont make it 
the beautiful die in flame- 
sucide pills,rat poison,rope what- 
ever... 
they rip their arms off, 
throw themselves out of windows, 
they pull their eyes out of the sockets, 
reject love 
reject hate 
reject,reject. 

they do'nt make it 
the beautiful can't endure, 
they are butterflies 
they are doves 
they are sparrows, 
they dont make it. 

onetall...Read more of this...

This My Song Is Made For Kerensky

by Vachel Lindsay
 (Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)


O market square, O slattern place,
Is glory in your slack disgrace?
Plump quack doctors sell their pills,
Gentle grafters sell brass watches,
Silly anarchists yell their ills.
Shall we be as weird as these?
In the breezes nod and wheeze?

Heaven's mass is sung, 
Tomorrow's mass is sung 
In a spirit tongue 
By wind and...Read more of this...

Adventures Of Isabel

by Ogden Nash
 Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.
Once in a...Read more of this...

Lullaby

by Louise Gluck
 It is a summer evening.
The yellow moths sag
against the locked screens
and the faded curtains
suck over the window sills
and from another building
a goat calls in his dreams.
This is the TV parlor
in the best ward at Bedlam.
The night nurse is passing
out the evening pills.
She walks on two erasers,
padding by us one by one.
MY sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it...Read more of this...

That Distance Apart

by Jackie Kay
 I am only nineteen
My whole life is changing

Tonight I see her
Shuttered eyes in my dreams

I cannot pretend she's never been
My stitches pull and threaten to snap

My own body a witness
Leaking blood to sheets milk to shirts

My stretch marks
Record that birth

Though I feel like somebody is dying

I stand up in my bed
And wail like a banshee

II
On the second night
I shall...Read more of this...

Dream Song 107: Three coons come at his garbage. He be cross

by John Berryman
 Three 'coons come at his garbage. He be cross,
I figuring porcupine & took Sir poker
unbarring Mr door,
& then screen door. Ah, but the little 'coon,
hardly a foot (not counting tail) got in with 
two more at the porch-edge

and they swirled, before some two swerve off
this side of crab tree, and my dear friend held
with the torch in his tiny...Read more of this...

Gentle Gaoler

by Robert William Service
 Being a gaoler I'm supposed
 To be a hard-boiled guy;
Yet never prison walls enclosed
 A kinder soul than I:
Passing my charges precious pills
 To end their ills.

And if in gentle sleep they die,
 And pass to pleasant peace,
No one suspects that it is I
 Who gave them their release:
No matter what the Doctor thinks,
 The Warden winks.

A lifer's is...Read more of this...

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