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Best Poems Written by James Brown

Below are the all-time best James Brown poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | James Brown Poem

Bomb-Song

They taught us what to do if there's a bomb.
A big bomb.
A bomb they removed in a biopsy on a God
A big God
Scooped it out in armfuls from the body of a God
My God the blood hanging on the tresses where the speshes operated they
Taught us what to do if there's a bomb.
No point working out who it came from;
Cus wherever it came from is gone.
They taught us what to do if there's a bomb:
A big bomb:
Get the rubber round your face.
Then you radio the base.
Lie down on the ground
While your pants get browned
Are you closer to the cloud
Or the sound that pounds like a house shutting down
My god who lives, who lives to see me live a life as terrible as this my God!
Get drenched in the fear
Too thirsty to tear
Up your ears disappear
And the skies won't be clear for a long time
Peek up through your goggles for the last time
That's it soldier step up and take your prize,
And pray that you don't get vaporized My Eyes!?
My Eyes!?
Can't remember if my mom had me baptized!?
I swore I'd rather die, the great evac-in-the-sky but
Would I!?
I want to live but not like that with my tissue-pissing body like a sieve
To live is terrible
It's terrible man to survive
And you feel like you did when you were five
Tummy hurts, full of earth, where the hell is the earth
I'm rising from the ash like an afterbirth
In the mist missing what used-to-be 
The mist is made of my mother and its killing me - 
What was it they told us, told us, soldiers
What was it they told us, sold us, soldiers:
They said survive to fight.
My lungs are always tight!
They said survive to fight.
There's never any light!
Survive to fight.
Before I wasn't brave enough but now I just might!
Survive to fight.
Give her arm a bite!
Survive to fight.
Keep the squad white! 
They started this mess it's what's best it's what's
Survive to fight.
Not for what you need
Not for what is right
Not for what your dad said when you woke him late at night but what's left!
In the unlikely event that there's a bomb;
We fight for what little is left, not right!
And left right left!
Right left right!
In the unlikely event that there's a bomb;
In the unlikely event that there's a bomb;
In the unlikely event that there's a bomb;
...

Details | James Brown Poem

A True Account of Writering

Slug letters in love,
Worms in a lurch,
Failing to match my own mark.

Each penning a bluff,
A skull-twistic irk,
Like landscaping turds in a car-park.

But shock! Some light! We simmer simile, and Cat at that cunning Rat, Rhyme -
And that ice rink sketched, with wretched wurds, looks sudd -ernly - utt -erly - 
sublime.

like piano doves
like silver birch
like yanging ying - light loving dark

like books far above
from a planetary perch
look to copy proper Plato, who copies Cooper Clarke.

Details | James Brown Poem

The Grandladder Clock

My Gentlemen, 
I have done all it takes.
Made fore my man, was a formless frame
Worked by a wombsman, unplaned, clear of grain
A brittle whittled acorn piece, I had his insides changed.
Had him brained by belts and boy-bits, riveted and drilled;
To the hands upon his face, wound round bruises I distilled;
His carpentry I cornered; the correct prescriptions pilled ~
Milled, burnished, furnished yet -
The Key could not be turned
and the soul resisted it.

That is til by will I discovered, under black and covered night,
In the smothered tomb of my dead dad's dad, strange and ancient rites.
Those underground, unstudied artistries, spurned rightly though they are, Good sirs -
Nevertheless got my boy to tick.
These were the measures what got my boy learned.
And he crunched straight into manhood, his new teeth fistfully earned
A good boy then, and a gentleman now
No secrets kept from fellow men; I made him – such is how.

My Gentlemen,
With my methods though some have disagreed,
None can deny that they demonstrably succeed.
I broke a babe from a song shell, the bell of a flowerpot seed
And locked him quick with a magic trick to the tick of our masculine breed.
My Gentlemen.

Details | James Brown Poem

How To Kill a Cow

We use to know
Howt o put thinggs down.
People gowin roundd,
Their lives tied behindt em by a spyne of brown strings.

You know we use to know howter kill cows
Wid the back af wharrever, hacking instrument hong at hande
D blunt end woul send your bovine friend awai
So she will not com back fora longg tyme.
So in that tyme as longe, you took excellent care ov her estaite
The horns and steaks te table ate
While shi's gone, til she returns
When you're old ant your world's all yor young wone learns
An told cow come back an says she, 'thanks'
'I appreciated the efficient dispatch'.
How she gloons to see them, kids completed
Kids that cow-Madame herself haz fedd.

And be it forehead uf god, or the middle of d brow of ya reldest cow,
We use to know
D special spots.
The places fork cortingg, and lovingg, and dyingg
The spot betweeain dose dopey grass-my-eyes,
Staring back at yer in e abattoir 
Or th slightly reddedd board in d smokey olt barn.
And yu knew
That if you 'it that spot juss righ
D eyes die inside, no feel, no figh,
Wonn touch, noi much,
An owt went the lights.

Details | James Brown Poem

The Orphers' Inferno

Two true taboo nocturnal friends
Bedeviling the vernal places;
Un-men unto un-town's undead ends,
Under wrinks in mansworld's faces;

Take care me boys, wear Wolfrat clothes - 
Make sure you're tooled - tooths fully bloodied?
Put yer foot in ther gutter that 'Overworld' loathes,
Splosh mirror truths Ministers muddied.

Rah, in the street-wright night-boy club!
Be prey, but with Lionheart essence! 
The hungry punk-hunt shade that coin-eye pub;
Beware those sado-mermaid's fluorescence!

Beware those sirens, strident scribes,
Evade the Lamp-rayed Hag of Hoar!
Abhor the barb'ry boo's of the Boozeblooded Tribes,
Fear the Head-Rider's ritual roar!

And hide from those trackening opal eyes, 
through which blind the Lopeful Coghagi pries -
You must weather the trail of the Bufferjudge Snail,
Whose pregnant tongue licked dead your railbridge braille.

  *

Go, but beware every towner! fearless be, me boys!
Your game plays real monsters, that dread light-world's lost toys.
Go, snuck under covers, worlds without Mothers, going down,
Below bewildered barrowers in semi-detached mounds -

Over crows' roads, to ausider's ground
To un-town's electrical woods
To the alleycaves icebound ancestor's found
Where Messy-'A's were named in saints hoods.

In those estates of homeless air,
Cracktheadrals of drizzle in stars,
Go, urchins - nuke town to show you are there,
Re-score the old world's oldest scars!

Bring plaster peace, scrawl boundaries,
Two Pilgrim imps watch n sign posts -
Dripped under zipped walls of all crawling sundries, 
Crossing the Freightmines of neon-roped ghosts.

With your chats, plans, laughs, paths run,
Why do it, ink 'round them Weird Wenders?
You scorned ghouls fly there for glorious fun
As humans - not those over-town pretenders.

Then, minxing in, to light world
Where un-town and-town blend
Hide your goblin masks, your darkness of pens - 
And part home with big hugs, as any-world friends.

Details | James Brown Poem

Poem For Ma Who Liked Poetry

Ma,
Leaping off the crown of a candle,
A hot bead without hold or handle,
Blobbed as us all on the bee-smell body of a star.

Air,
Shushing from the womb of her shell room,
The leant lung's slow snore looping her loom,
Muddled with the booze which bruised her peaceful as a pear.

Hands,
Holding normal knowings in knot-roots,
Splaying through the spokes of new cahoots,
All gusts must rust and turn to dust ~ as Felixstowe pebbles will wave to wax; fast towed, fed lights, we the festooned elixir of ocean-spanned sands.

Details | James Brown Poem

Conversation With the Park Shaman

A woodhacker rattles like wolf-jaws, 
A dog's appetite has just died 
There's blood in those graphite-green curtains 
Duck Islanders howl of a homicide. 
There's a murder of crows in The Three Trees, 
Where the Sky's Ties are tethered away 
The water's been kissed for the first time 
And the sun's lips have no more to say.

But the Stormwood has hissed back to sleeping 
Gunpowder Grove murmurs, 'match'
The Twig-Ink is scrawling black symbols
Like Maggie Pie scratched on our latch.
Grandad William keeled like a lever,
Dug his heels sprung the Wheels in Giant's Back
And the Red Cave began to make music 
And the timber talked in Tumble-Down Shack. 

It means that the summer is humming
Its footpeople wait on my hands
The Silkwitch is building a ladder 
Rippling gold rungs through the grass. 
When the light's right, like now, you can climb it
Through Horruary's cheek to the sun
Til the Fat-Ranch and chewing of winter
Are just gold stuff below 
In the land of the How Far We've Come.

Details | James Brown Poem

Bad-Year Obituary

Well the Will of twenty twenty
Did not favour its kids gently.
Was the smirk in in that jerk's dying breath a gest left to make us unfriendly?
Or did it point at his suffocators, through pillows of plastic-made plenty?

Forget that loud death - there's quiet hordes
Bricked under this scene in front-room wards
Trapped, trialed, trickling up - put down by the order of the Always Of Lords
The mines that bind those poor prole's souls, extracting human oil like whale-ships boards.

Two and two's evils struck many by surprise
Some felt for necks, asked what's next, tried to open eyes
Saw cruelty crawl from Antique times, muffled in masks, found ways to rise
Saw profiteers who murdered years, bombs built below the pier in snake-sweat and lies

At the wake we'll say they died a crap uncle, and showed us good and sad.
The instant that first twenty waltzed in, it proclaimed itself to be mad.

Details | James Brown Poem

Sickness of the Inside

I wandered through the walls alone
Where cut stones curse and split stumps groan.

The Quacks couldn't cure me. 
I was an anomaly. 
A case lost in baggage by the tyrants of science
A link that isn't missink from The Giant Appliance.
They probed me with tests
Disrobed me with shoes
They spared me no rest,
Spoonfed me new issues.
And finding no funding to type a new tick-list,
They could only conclude that I was without sickness.

Under purple skies that promised high precipitation,
Owning nout but a gown and a frowning prescription,
Discharged and dishevelled to the drooling city
Diagnosed with statistical disproportionality.
'The patient is advised, avoid dog hair and doctors'.
I walked home in the rain, under the eyes of helicopters.

Details | James Brown Poem

Mausoleum Man

Oh longest time it seems yiv dreamt, me Mausoleum Man,
Coffed in Mummy's charnel home stove 'round your stonewings' span.

You Monk brod in yar bunkous cell, 'tween sellow stone sainwalls,
All hued in Olden Woldic green by lichen spattered greenfalls.

You Embalm-ee bequested: just unnatural light for me;
So acid lamps cast all he's shades and the flotsome seeds of 'is swampless trees.

'Fore Lindo it seems he writ naivic skrit, entranslatid his laundrous floor;
But en wake of 'is ex-excavation, e'll read none of 'at the same, nevermore.