Your Favorite Poem/Poet

I'm going to try to put this down from memory, a poem by a Scottish poet whose name escapes me, but I may insert it later.

Suttie

One plangent thigh of his tartan trousers
rubbing the tableleg
The goshawk on his wrist
laying a slob of creaming hawk#
along my carpet
This is Suttie
this manmountain
this one-eyed, redbearded, monomaniac, pseudomystic
pontificating with a high-pitched "ha!"
on God's quaternity, Lake Chad, Matisse
the habits of red deer, and tonight:
the high, bland, neglegently overarching cosmic okay

[maybe not exact, but it's close]

Well, mostly right, but here's how it goes, now that I'm home and have Tom Buchan's slim volume Dolphins at Cochin in front of me:

Suttie

One hirsute paw stuck in the pocket
of his tartan trousers
one plangent thigh rubbing the tableleg

the goshawk on his wrist
laying a slob of creaming hawksh#t
along my carpet

this is Suttie this manmountain this
redbearded one-eyed monomaniac pseudomystic
pontificating with a highpitched ha

on God's quaternity Lake Chad Matisse
the habits of red deer and tonight
the high bland negligently overarching cosmic okay

Billy Collins

"The Best Cigarette"


"Some Days"

reply to post by Tasty Canadian


I have an affinity for Thom Gunn I really don't know why, maybe it was because he is one of the first poets to really strike a nerve with me. Here's one of his poems for your viewing pleasure:
Black Jackets

In the silence that prolongs the span
Rawly of music when the record ends,
The red-haired boy who drove a van
In weekday overalls but, like his friends,

Wore cycle boots and jacket here
To suit the Sunday hangout he was in,
Heard, as he stretched back from his beer,
Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.

Before him, on a coal-black sleeve
Remote exertion had lined, scratched, and burned
Insignia that could not revive
The heroic fall or climb where they were earned.

On the other drinkers bent together,
Concocting selves for their impervious kit,
He saw it as no more than leather
Which, taught across the shoulders grown to it,

Sent through the dimness of a bar
As sudden and anonymous hints of light
As those that shipping give, that are
Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in sight.

He stretched out like a cat, and rolled
The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue,
And listened to a joke being told:
The present was the things he stayed among.

If it was only loss he wore,
He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,
Complicity and nothing more.
He recollected his initiation,

And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:
The group's name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.

www.poemhunter.com...

here's more about him mind you his poem's aren't for everyone they just speak to me for some reason. www.poets.org...

"The Solution"
by Sharon Olds

Finally they got the Singles problem under
control, they made it scientific. They opened huge
Sex Centers-you could simply go and state what you
want and they would find you someone who wanted that
too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to
Be Touched and Held and when someone came and
stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and
Hold they would send the two of you off
together.

At first it went great. A steady stream of
people under the sign I Like to Give Pain
paired up with a steady stream of people from under
I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only-No
Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only-No
Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal
Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign
Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a
Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in
Berkeley-but he stood there a long time in his lonely
blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung
to While White Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been
there weeks without a reply.

Things began to get strange. The Love
Only-No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only-No
Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out
together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but
the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly,
shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or
Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up
everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet-No
Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.

The din rose in the vast room. The line
under I Want to Be #ed Senseless was so long
that portable toilets had to be added and a minister
brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the
line. Over under I Want to # Senseless-no
one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the
enormous gym. More and more people began to move over
to Want to Be #ed Senseless. The line snaked
around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into
the fields. More and more people joined it, until
#ed Senseless stretched across the nation in
a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they
had to name it they named it, they called it the
American Way.

I heard Sharon Olds read this on a video cassette of her giving a reading at some college. There are so many parts that are funny, but the end is so hollow and empty. This poem really makes you feel.