May you find help from action figures I keep.
May you find them in the top drawer
And bring them out while you sleep
And I welcome darkness--
The flickering TV, helicopters
hopscotched overhead.

May these nightdolls help you,
When every... (Read full poem)

2. There's Got To Be A Morning After - written by Daniel Nester
From http://www.caffeinedestiny.com/poetry/nester.html. Read 2160 times on American Poems.

I heard it once, smoothed-out
by gallons of coffee,
chest husking like a plow
and pulled it into a basement.
Cardigan-wrapped the next morning
and only then was it true, only then
was I so hungry I could eat at the roots of it,

and lay down like a... (Read full poem)

Lately I've sat here afternoons
just listening to the
gluttonous newsmen argue

about fathers who kill
their wives and kids
then spirit off to Mexico.

My life's knee-deep
in fathers, embedded
in my own shaky tenor,

and though mine's as good as... (Read full poem)

4. Dharma - written by Billy Collins
From http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue18/poetics.shtml. Read 5451 times on American Poems.

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example 
of a life without... (Read full poem)

Soon I'll hear your voices, people,
and you'll sound like Donald Duck.
I'll hear every car horn honk,
every plink and plunk and plonk.
And you'll sound like Donald Duck--
one voice, indistinguishable, under God.
Every plink and plunk and... (Read full poem)

6. Rough Beast - written by Jean Monahan
From http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/monahan/roughbeast.htm. Read 649 times on American Poems.

Don't tell a camel about need and want.

Look at the big lips
pursed
in perpetual kiss,
the dangerous lashes
of a born coquette.

The camel is an animal
grateful for less.

It keeps to itself
the hidden spring choked with grass,
the sharpest... (Read full poem)

after Rene Char

Let's agree that the night is a blank canvas, a station 
     break, a bridge of a song.

Let's agree further that activities at night—movies, 
     campfires, reading by a lamp—are all
basically an homage to the day.... (Read full poem)

8. To The Whore Who Took My Poems - written by Charles Bukowski
Read 26814 times on American Poems.

some say we should keep personal remorse from the 
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out... (Read full poem)

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
"Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants."(Read full poem)

10. Her -- "last Poems" - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 22493 times on American Poems.

Her -- "last Poems" --
Poets -- ended --
Silver -- perished -- with her Tongue --
Not on Record -- bubbled other,
Flute -- or Woman --
So divine --
Not unto its Summer -- Morning
Robin -- uttered Half the Tune --
Gushed too free for the Adoring... (Read full poem)

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie --
True Poems flee --(Read full poem)

12. As The Poems Go - written by Charles Bukowski
Read 11741 times on American Poems.

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line... (Read full poem)

(After Rilke)


Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!

Teacher was strict. We delighted in the... (Read full poem)

14. Judson Stoddard - written by Edgar Lee Masters
Read 8938 times on American Poems.

On a mountain top above the clouds
That streamed like a sea below me
I said that peak is the thought of Budda,
And that one is the prayer of Jesus,
And this one is the dream of Plato,
And that one there the song of Dante,
And this is Kant and... (Read full poem)

OF what I write from myself—As if that were not the resumé; 
Of Histories—As if such, however complete, were not less complete than the preceding
	poems; 
As if those shreds, the records of nations, could possibly be as lasting as... (Read full poem)

16. The Planet On The Table - written by Wallace Stevens
Read 6430 times on American Poems.

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of... (Read full poem)

The great poems of
our elders in many
tongues we struggled

to comprehend who
are now content with
mystery simple

and profound you
in the night your
breath your body

orbit of time and
the moment you
Phosphorus and

Hesper a dark... (Read full poem)

18. Indications, The. - written by Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass. Published in 1900. Read 4715 times on American Poems.

THE indications, and tally of time; 
Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs; 
Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts; 
What always indicates the poet, is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their
	words; 
The... (Read full poem)

Ithaca, October 1993: Jorie went on a lingerie
tear, wanting to look like a moll
in a Chandler novel. Dinner, consisting of three parts gin 
and one part lime juice cordial, was a prelude to her hair.
There are, she said, poems that can be written... (Read full poem)

20. Trees - written by Joyce Kilmer
From Trees and Other Poems. Published in 1914. Read 35493 times on American Poems.

(For Mrs. Henry Mills Alden)

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree... (Read full poem)

Snowfall in March:
I sit in the white glow reading a thesis
About you.  Your poems, your life.

The author's my student,
He even quotes me.

Forty years since we joked in a kitchen in Portland
Twenty since you disappeared.

All those years and their... (Read full poem)

22. Part 9 of Trout Fishing in America - written by Richard Brautigan
Published in 1950. Read 1695 times on American Poems.

SANDBOX MINUS JOHN

     DILLINGER EQUALS WHAT?





Often I return to the cover of Trout Fishing in America. I

took the baby and went down there this morning. They were

watering the cover with big revolving sprinklers. I saw some

bread lying on... (Read full poem)

the phone rang at 1:30 a.m.
  and it was a man from Denver:
   
   "Chinaski, you got a following in
  Denver..."
    "yeah?"
   "yeah, I got a magazine and I want some
  poems from you..."
    "FUCK YOU,... (Read full poem)

24. Poems, Potatoes - written by Sylvia Plath
From The Collected Poems. Published in 1963. Read 5125 times on American Poems.

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line
Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt.  Sturdy as potatoes,
Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,
Given an inch.  Not that they're... (Read full poem)

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain... (Read full poem)