Long Omnibus Poems
Long Omnibus Poems. Below are the most popular long Omnibus by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Omnibus poems by poem length and keyword.
One from the 1850s,
I bought it from a Scotsman thrifty,
on the windswept Isle of Skye,
its browning cover caught my eye,
old paper that’s weathered to tan,
each leaf thick and dry in my hands,
an imperious title-page,
and the high English of that age,
once a proud showpiece for a home,
when books were pricey, barely known.
Early western, 1914,
full of villains and bandits mean,
black and while plate on the first sheet,
basic Roman fonts, cold and neat,
scratchy fabric on the cover,
like crack to an old book-lover,
small publisher, long ago lost,
tales forgotten, so cheap the cost,
a curio, few know it’s here,
the fun that enthralled yesteryear.
Paperback, 1946,
bright cover, like posters for flicks,
first seen in the pulp magazines,
tales of dastardly doings and fiends,
pocket-sized so it slips away,
it seems small in the modern day,
the teachers once scoffed in disdain,
“It only sought to entertain…”
Falling apart, bring out the tape,
since this kind of reading is great.
Bound classics, 1952,
enshrine time-tested points-of-view,
matched series, no pictures, all words,
print so tiny it seems absurd!
Bible-paper to fit it all in,
ancient scribes, philosophers grim,
spines crack when you open the tome,
once made young college students groan,
few were read, and yet they still sell,
’cause they look real nice on a shelf.
An omnibus from ’83,
the best of Jack London for me,
received it as a Christmas gift,
public domain brings good profits,
smooth cover, in two colors cast,
dust jacket with wolves, running fast,
buffet of a dead author’s work,
tales told from all over the earth,
read half, but I mean to get back,
if I ever find time for that.
Now our ‘books’ are screens with blue light,
one more device, it never feels right,
and I have used them, I attest,
yet I still think ‘How is this progress?’
Ghoulish shadow
macabre evening
eerie footfall
metamorphosis
hourglass swallows
collage
roseate rubicund
orange citrus
gold simoleon
tincture berserk
hover
wolfram wainscot
symmetry saturated
pigment pabulum
conspirator
mercurial monkeyshine
amorphous antics
sphinxlike skulk
amid clandestine
nocturnal nascent
twilight threshold
of
opaque canopy
weird whisper
jaded jabberwocky
jitters
flamboyant fairy
figurine
butterfly bounce
damp dimension
perfunctory paradigm
perilous
die-stamp subterfuge
teether
hazardous lingering
ointment fly
foggy flit
dusted
dousing soiled
signage
terse augury
of
alarm bell
behemoth boom
sanitised steel
enwreathes
aghast alien
caper squall
of
invisible inchoate
mordant malarky
furtive squeak
from
rusty dribble
faucet leak
smothered feline
whine
hair-raising hunch
blackened envelope
contortion
brume brickyards
death discotheque
devilish divas
funnel “fun”dament
whilst
trumpet blasting
trenchant tessitura
abrasive tin’s
gusty shrill
rasp ricochet
beneath
moon mirror
roquefort cheese
projects
apparitional squint
ominous omnibus
edition
obfuscate oddment
omniscience onomatopoeia
eldritch
Forbears,Edie,Kate and Ann furnished apiece with brush and pan.Each
Victorian 'Miss' tied in service's abyss.Far off days,now long gone,their toil each
day was lengthy and long.With fires to light,floors to scrub,and carpets to brush
and drub.Mops forbidden,as they smeared the dirt and begrimed their prim
alpaca aproned skirt.They cleaned 'his' tub,emptied 'her' commode,a regular
chore in a housemaid's daily load.Must rise at six but never to mix and no matter
what,keep a stiff upper lip.Never lose your cool,a formal curtsey the perpetual
rule.Half day off once per month,so free to roam and catch the omnibus home.No
other opportunities in store except a marriage at eighteen or before.Upstairs and
down stairs ,no in between,starting out at just thirteen and just there to please as
Master and his Lady take their ease.
"cor meum"
Within the end of "IT" all
no matter gender, cause, colour, creed,
place in life, entitled or without title,
healthy or diseased, or
the choice of who we are,
who we lay in life with and
Love –
yet must never harm a child -
when that time comes,
water in the blood
blood in the water,
there will be great misspellings
of misread meanings
the talking in tongues
of minds in idle
treading water
with all
the lost and found
bemoaning
vaccuous ghostings
and small trolls time wasting
the Woolfish hours in small ponds
on great tidal waves of walls,
the message, poetically
is clearly spelt –
within the End
of IT all,
Love is Love is Love
perfectum imperfectum
immaculatum cor meum
in omnibus
arcanum penetrabile
gemma Christi
the decoded glistening read jewel
found in that dark place
embedded in every heart
Love is Love is Love
then, as One
cor meum
One has won
Candide Diderot. ‘25
(for Gahan Wilson)
Mushroom stew, mushroom stew
Nothing more or less will do
Needs no spice, no barley rice,
Laced with wine would not be nice.
Every morning, noon and night
Mushroom buttons grace my plate
With my fork and spoon and knife
Feasting till the hour is late.
A tasty brew is mushroom stew
Makes you dream and makes you scream
Eat some and I promise you
You'll become a mushroom, too.
"Mushroom Stew" appeared in my newsletter Mushroom Stew 1, 1975. It was collected in the big omnibus Anthony Shriek: His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (Centipede Press, 2017), containing the horror novel plus a second book's worth of short stories, novelettes, poems, and "odd end pieces."
Forbears,Edie,Kate and Ann furnished apiece with brush and pan.Each
Victorian 'Miss' tied in service's abyss.Far off days,now long gone,their toil each
day was lengthy and long.With fires to light,floors to scrub,and carpets to brush
and drub.Mops forbidden,as they smeared the dirt and begrimed their prim
alpaca aproned skirt.They cleaned 'his' tub,emptied 'her' commode,a regular
chore in a housemaid's daily load.Must rise at six but never to mix and no matter
what,keep a stiff upper lip.Never lose your cool,a formal curtsey the perpetual
rule.Half day off once per month,so free to roam and catch the omnibus home.No
other opportunities in store except a marriage at eighteen or before.Upstairs and
down stairs ,no in between,starting out at just thirteen and just there to please as Master and his Lady take their ease.
—The Virtues I Could Not Bear—
He bore those virtues I had schooled my heart
To flout—the mercy tardive as a bell
That tolls when judgement hath already writ
Its iron sentence; and the fortitude
That, having neither warrant nor reprieve,
Still stood, as though endurance were decree.
His papers sodden, rain-black at the cuffs,
He watched the departing omnibus grow small;
Defeat had docketed him among the lost,
Yet some unlicensed morning stirred in him—
A pertinacious ember without name,
Which would not let the ruin have the last word.
A rumour traversed the town ere Truth
Had found her raiment, fastened up her throat;
By vesper it had gathered testimonial,
By night, a hundred tongues had canonised
Its falsehood. Truth came mud-foot, unadorned,
And found the lie enthroned where fact should sit.
I watched him exhaust the stratagems—
The specious plea, the venial compromise,
The facile alibi by which we varnish
Our abdications into innocence;
Till every avenue of self-release
Lay shuttered—and he chose the steeper way.
I had imagined triumph a resplendent
Heraldry, some aureate certification
Affixed to what the world elects as worthy;
His triumph was the wreckage underneath:
Each failure divested him of borrowed names,
Each rising made the ruin less his own.
Then, inexplicably, the firmament
Descended—not as vision, but as fact:
The stars lay rooting underneath our feet,
And darkness flowered upward through the stone.
I understood no doctrine, only this—
The road was not discovered. It was made.
Let Hell prolong its jurisdiction; let
The false arrive before the true, and let
Our virtues wound the very hands that bear them.
We are not promised passage, nor reprieve;
Yet where the last conceivable way is closed,
the footfall itself becomes the road.
Amuck in this life, she fights and bumbles
Onward and forward she kicks and stumbles
Easily, angrily, quickly she grumbles
While in the distance dark thunder rumbles.
At last she falters, listens, then mumbles
“Good God!” and into oblivion tumbles.
“Soul’s Battle” first appeared in the Dead of Night Newsletter, July 1994, then collected in Lake of the Devil: Poems of Morosity and Jest (Duck's-foot Tree Productions, 1995) limited to 75 copies. It was included in the poetry section of the omnibus edition of novel, poems, and tales Anthony Shriek: His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (Centipede Press, 2017). It is also included in my forthcoming Hippocampus Press collection The Ghost Garden and Further Spirits.