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Famous Sticky Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Bukowski, Charles
...my father's garage, how child-like
I would brush the corpses of flies
from the windows they thought were escape-
their sticky, ugly, vibrant bodies
shouting like dumb crazy dogs against the glass
only to spin and flit
in that second larger than hell or heaven
onto the edge of the ledge,
and then the spider from his dank hole
nervous and exposed
the puff of body swelling
hanging there
not really quite knowing,
and then knowing-
something sending it down its string,
the wet we...Read more of this...



by Gregory, Rg
...karen's birthday)

fancy having a birthday on a thursday
when you do the buying of the doughnuts
and others lick their sticky fingers
thinking good old karen letting
us share the eating of her birthday

not me of course - i sit at home (alone)
reflecting it is purification day
today and i do not have a doughnut
thank you karen for letting me have
a taste of self-denial on your birthday

and such a spiritual gain- in this way
you and i share the high-church position
while oth...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...fore
I could discover - were we wed?

Alas! Those dreams of broken bliss,
Of wakenings too sadly soon!
With memories of sticky kiss,
And limbs so languidly a-swoon!
Alas those nightmares devil driven!
Those pantless prowlings in Pall Mall!
Oh why should some dreams be like heaven
And others so resemble hell?...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...inox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses....Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...w,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people,
Sick of the city, wanting the sea;

Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness
Of the strong wind and shattered spray;
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound
Of the big surf that breaks all day.

Always before about my dooryard,
Marking the reach of the winter sea,
Rooted in sand and dragging drift-wood,
Straggled the purple wild sweet-pea;

Always I climbed the wave at morning,
Shook the sand from my sho...Read more of this...



by Plath, Sylvia
...ons.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planet...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the s...Read more of this...

by Guillen, Rafael
...the offspring of fear.

It's a narrow, interminable street
with all the windows darkened,
a thread spun out from a sticky hand,
friendly, yes, not a friend.
It's a nightmare
of polite ritual wearing a frightwig.
Not fear. Fear is a door slammed in your face.
I'm speaking here of a labyrinth
of doors already closed, with assumed
reasons for being, or not being,
for categorizing bad luck
or good, bread, or an expression
— tenderness and panic and frigidity ...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married...Read more of this...

by Ayres, Pam
...Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth,
And spotted the dangers beneath
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food.
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.

I wish I’d been that much more willin’
When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To give up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers,
And to buy something else with me shillin’.

When I think of the lollies I licked
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All that hard ...Read more of this...

by Wylie, Elinor
...le under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting....Read more of this...

by Belieu, Erin
...right! Sin
is everywhere in Massachusetts, hell-bound

in the population. it bothers me
because it's summer now and sticky - no rain
to cool things down; heat like a wound
that will not close. Too hot, these shameful
percolations of the body that bloom
between strangers on a train. It bothers me

now that I'm alone and singles foam
around the city, bothered by the lather, the rings
of sweat. Know this bay's a watery animal, hind-end
perpetually raised: a wanti...Read more of this...

by Aldington, Richard
...g irregular flight. 

The water is cold to the eye 
As the wind to the cheek. 

In the budding chestnuts 
Whose sticky buds glimmer and are half-burst open 
The starlings make their clitter-clatter; 
And the blackbirds in the grass 
Are getting as fat as the pigeons. 

Too-hoo, this is brave; 
Even the cold wind is seeking a new mistress....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...a ponderous axe. 

(Whom have you slaughter’d lately, European headsman? 
Whose is that blood upon you, so wet and sticky?)

I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs; 
I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts, 
Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers, rejected kings, 
Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains, and the rest. 

I see those who in any land have died for the good cause;
The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never ...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...beautiful
As Japanese drawings, intricate as clocks, strong as rocks:
Others construct traps which consist only
Of two sticky and tricky threads. Yet this ambush is enough
To bind and chain a crawling ant for long
 enough:
The famished spider feels the vibration
Which transforms patience into sensation and satiation.
The handsome wolf spider moves suddenly freely and relies
Upon lightning suddenness, stealth and surprise,
Possessing accurate eyes, pouncing upon his v...Read more of this...

by Kinnell, Galway
...xt groaned out, 
the next, 
the next, 
the rest of my days I spend 
wandering: wondering 
what, anyway, 
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that 
poetry, by which I lived? 

from Body Rags, Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). ...Read more of this...

by Kizer, Carolyn
...clean careful mouth
Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor
Remained, of all my my mother's tender, wounding passion
For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life
Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,
Whose denizens can turn upon the world
With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw
To sting or soil benevolence, alien
As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot,
She swept to t...Read more of this...

by Clampitt, Amy
...orous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
 that either
a First Cause said once, "Let there
be sundews," and there were, or they've
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
 But the sun
under...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...I dance in circles holding
the moth of the marriage,
thin, sticky, fluttering
its skirts, its webs.
The moth oozing a tear,
or is it a drop of urine?
The moth, grinning like a pear,
or is it teeth
clamping the iron maiden shut?

The moth,
who is my mother,
who is my father,
who was my lover,
floats airily out of my hands
and I dance slower,
pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring,
pulling off the elopement w...Read more of this...

by Graham, Jorie
....

When will they feel for the hole in your chest 
 (never). 

Up, go. Let being-seen drift over you again, sticky kindness. 

Those wet strangely unstill eyes filling their heads-


thinking or sight?-

all waiting for the true story-

your heart, beating its little song: explain. . .

Explain requited

Explain indeed the blood of your lives I will require

explain the strange weight of meanwhile

and there exists another death in regards to which...Read more of this...

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