Poem by John Bennett

dear rick.
dear grant.
dear abe?
oh dear.
my god.
deer bambi
dear rudolph the rain-nosed red dear
dear santa:
what i want for christmas is out.
i dont want to be doing this anymore.
just drop it down the chimney.
drop cicanery down the canary's throat
drop metaphysics over vietnam.
drop your gun or i'll shoot.
soot or i'll drop your gun.
have fun.
kids.
money.
an act of congress is the most accurate phraseology i've ever heard.
cindy is in cleveland and i'm drunk.
sometimes I capitalize, sometimes I don't.
it's a matter of knowing what to capitalize on.
on record.
let it go on the record that I mispnelled this.
let it go on record that I am insane
Let it go.
here we go.
again.
frozen like a dinosaur bone.
like a midget's hard-on.
on, and on, and on.
turn it off before it gives me a headache.
too late.
it has given me a headache.

this girl is on the roof giving me a headache.
must tell her to go.
her and all the others who leave the door open behind them.
all the funny people with no rearview mirrors.

when you leave things in the typewriter,
people always read it before they read
what's scattered around the desk.

everyone is programmed to current events.

I Know I Have Been Happiest by Dorothy Parker

I know I have been happiest at your side;
But what is done, is done, and all's to be.
And small the good, to linger dolefully-
Gayly it lived, and gallantly it died.
I will not make you songs of hearts denied,
And you, being man, would have no tears of me,
And should I offer you fidelity,
You'd be, I think, a little terrified.

Yet this the need of woman, this her curse:
To range her little gifts, and give, and give,
Because the throb of giving's sweet to bear.
To you, who never begged me vows or verse,
My gift shall be my absence, while I live;
But after that, my dear, I cannot swear.

I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar make of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips back in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it - she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to die. I want to go
up to them there in the at May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang then together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

truth by james hearst

how the devil do i know
if there are rocks in your field.
plow it and find out.
if the plow strikes something
harder than earth, the point
shatters at a sudden blow
and the tractor jerks sidewise
and dumps you off your seat -
because the spring hitch
isn't set to trip quickly enough
and it never is - probably
you hit a rock. that means
the glacier emptied his pockets
in your field as well as mine,
but the connection with a thing
is the only truth that i know of,
so plow it.