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Famous Screw Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...Babel’s streams we’ll weep,
 To think upon our Zion;
And hing our fiddles up to sleep,
 Like baby-clouts a-dryin!
Come, screw the pegs wi’ tunefu’ cheep,
 And o’er the thairms be tryin;
Oh, rare to see our elbucks wheep,
 And a’ like lamb-tails flyin
 Fu’ fast this day.


Lang, Patronage, with rod o’ airn,
 Has shor’d the Kirk’s undoin;
As lately Fenwick, sair forfairn,
 Has proven to its ruin: 8
Our patron, honest man! Glencairn,
 He saw mischief was brewin;
An’ like a g...Read more of this...



by Voznesensky, Andrei
...ol and crooked, resembling bills, 
 they're squeezed in doors, 
 get hurt by boxers, 
 however, our neighbour's noses 
 screw into keyholes, just like drills! 

 (Great Gogol felt by intuition 
 the role they play in man's ambition.) 
 My friend Bukashkin who was boozy 
 dreamed of a nose 
 that grew like crazy: 
 above him, coming like a bore, 
 upsetting pans and chandeliers, 
 a nose 
 was piercing 
 the ceilings 
 and threading 
 floor upon the floor! 

 "What's that?...Read more of this...

by Estep, Maggie
...T CAN'T SEE."
And suddenly, I start to wonder: What does that mean anyway? 

"LOVE ME TIL I JUST CAN'T SEE"

What?

Screw me so much my eyes pop out, I go blind, end up walking down 2nd Avenue
crazy, horny, naked and blind? What?

There's a glitch in the tape and it starts to skip.

"Borderl...ooop.....Borderl....ooop...Borderlin.....ooop"

I stumble and twist my ankle. My g-string rid...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...--Alas, friend, here's the agent . . . is't the name? 
The captain, or whoever's master here-- 
You see him screw his face up; what's his cry 
Ere you set foot on shipboard? "Six feet square!" 
If you won't understand what six feet mean, 
Compute and purchase stores accordingly-- 
And if, in pique because he overhauls 
Your Jerome, piano, bath, you come on board 
Bare--why, you cut a figure at the first 
While sympathetic landsmen see you off; 
Not afterward, when...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...d in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep togeth...Read more of this...



by Heaney, Seamus
...ifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again....Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...ger-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions

End in the mud-flat detritus of death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Hungarian workmen give their blood
For the martyrs Stephen who was stoned to death.

Black Myd, a name to conjure with: O mud
For watermelons gutted to the crust,
Mud for the mole-tide harbor, mud for mouse,
Mud f...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look 

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through. 

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now. 

There's a stake...Read more of this...

by Webb, Charles
...d yelled, watching me
Play shortstop, collect stamps and shells,
Roll on the grass laughing until I peed my pants.
"Screw him," I said, and grabbed every cowry

I could find, hogged all the books I could
From Heights Library, wore out the baseball
Diamond dawn to dusk, and—parents in Duluth—
Gorged on bountiful Candy dusk to dawn.

Not until a Committee wrote of my poems,
"Enthusiasm should be tempered,"
Did I change my song. I write now
The way I live: calm and s...Read more of this...

by Newbolt, Sir Henry
...he da?is serene.

He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam,
He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw.
He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home,
He saw the flag she flew.

And now it was dawn. He rose strong on his feet,
And strode to his ruin’d camp below the wood;
He drank the breath of the morning cool and sweet:
His murderers round him stood.

Light on the Laspur hills was broadening fast,
The blood-red snow-peaks chill’d to ...Read more of this...

by Padel, Ruth
...ler shape
Beneath a snake
Of in-betweening light. "I feel like this. I hope that you do, too, Black crater. Screw you. Kiss" And sees a voodoo flicker, where two worlds nearly touch
And miss. That flash, where white
Lets black get close, that dagger of not-quite contact,
Catspaw panic, quiver on the wheat
Field before thunder -
There. That's it. That's her own self, in paint, Splitting what she was from what she is. As if everything that separa...Read more of this...

by Graham, Jorie
...ose of the cedar wd. roughly be called horizontals 
and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards 
jutting points. But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating 
there is a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve-pieces. And since the 
end shoots curl and carry young scanty leaf-stars these clubs are tapered, and I 
have seen also pieces in profile with chiseled outlines, the blocks thus made 
detached ...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...erything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at,i had no male
freinds,

I changed jobs and
cities,I hated holidays,
babies,history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color 
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.

peace an happ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...hen you deliberately take your
forefinger and point it at my temple,
saying, "You suicide *****!
I'd like to take a corkscrew
and screw out all your brains
and you'd never be back ever."
And I close my eyes over the steaming
tea and see God opening His teeth.
"Oh." He says.
I see the child in me writing, "Oh."
Oh, my dear, not why....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...hant chanting.

The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not; 
The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, 
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; 
But in my soul I plainly heard. 

Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, 
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, 
That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the pas...Read more of this...

by Duffy, Carol Ann
...back hooves of a mule.
Wild. I hold the red rag to a bull.
Mad. I spread the feathers of a gull.

I screw a tight snarl to a weasel.
Fierce. I stitch the flippers on a seal.
Splayed. I pierce the heartbeat of a quail.

I like her to be naked and to kneel.
Tame. My motionless, my living doll.
Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell....Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...nt only for my eyes

About a grief I can’t let go

But I want to, want to throw

It away like an old worn-out cloak

Or screw up like a ball of over-written

Trash and toss into the corner bin.

I said it must come up or out

I don't know which but either way

Will do, I know I can't write in the vein

Of ‘Bridge’ this time, it takes an optimistic view,

Bright day stuff, sunlight on

Roundhay Park's Childrens’ Day 

Or just wandering round the streets

With Margaret, occ...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...e blowing the fiercest of trebles,
(Just a sea-shore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles,)
Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end,---
And so she awaited her annual stipend.
But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe
A word in reply; and in vain she felt
With twitching fingers at her belt
For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt,
Ready to ptlt what he gave in her pouch safe,---
Till, either to quicken his apprehension,
Or possibly with an after-intention,
Sh...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...the heel of the North-East Trade.
 Can you hear the crash on her brows, dear lass.
 And the drum of the racing screw,
 As she ships it green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
 As she lifts and 'scends on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new?

See the shaking funnels roar, with the Peter at the fore,
 And the fenders grind and heave,
And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,
 And the fall-rope whines through the sheave;
 ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ny Gloster, that goes on 'is wedding-trip,
Lashed in our old deck-cabin with all three port-holes wide,
The kick o' the screw beneath him and the round blue seas outside!
Sir Anthony Gloster's carriage -- our 'ouse-flag flyin' free --
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll and forty freighters at sea!
He made himself and a million, but this world is a fleetin' show,
And he'll go to the wife of 'is bosom the same as he ought to go --
By the heel of the Paternosters -- there isn't a ...Read more of this...

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