OCD by Neil Hilborn. His performance has to be seen.
Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me.
Black as the pit, from pole to pole.
I thank whatever gods may be,
for my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
my head is bloody but unbowed.Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms but the horror of the shade.
And yet the menance of the years
finds and shall find me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
It’s the only (english) poem I know by hard.
Many people know the last 2 lines.Do not go gentle into that good night.
From a Hungarian poet, Endre Ady:
Sem utódja, sem boldog őse, Sem rokona, sem ismerőse Nem vagyok senkinek, Nem vagyok senkinek.
Vagyok, mint minden ember: fenség, Észak-fok, titok, idegenség, Lidérces, messze fény, Lidérces, messze fény.
De, jaj, nem tudok így maradni, Szeretném magam megmutatni, Hogy látva lássanak, Hogy látva lássanak.
Ezért minden: önkínzás, ének: Szeretném, hogyha szeretnének S lennék valakié, Lennék valakié.
I couldn’t call either a favorite, but there are two that have stuck with me my whole life. Edit to fix formatting.
The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?It feels as relevant to our time as it was for WW1.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Violets are red
Roses are blue
When you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUELook at my instance name
Ozymandias by Percy Bysh Shelby
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Came here to find this.
Marie Howe, New York State’s Poet Laureate:
Practicing By Marie Howe
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basementof somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouthshow to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned outthe lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholesinstead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it waspracticing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned whothe first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a songfor that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we’d made ourselves stop.This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Two Headed Calf makes me cri every tim
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature,
they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother.
It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.
Sorry if this was already posted, but I didn’t see it:
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
There’s also a short story by Ray Bradbury with the same title that quotes the poem.
These are what I came to post. This has always stayed on my mind. Given what is going on in the world, the fact that the short story takes place in 2026 is very timely…
The Ray Bradbury story always makes me so sad.
I have the short story as read by Leonard Nimoy. it’s one of my most favorite Bradbury tales read by one of the best narrators of my childhood.
I’m happy I downloaded it, as it seems to not be found on YouTube anymore…
Even though Yates himself called it “the way to lose a lady”, I still like Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.A girlfriend came in built me a bed scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor scrubbed the walls vacuumed, cleaned the toilet, the bathtub, scrubbed the bathroom floor and cut my toenails and my hair. Then all on the same day the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet and the toilet and the gas man fixed the heater and the phone man fixed the phone.
Now I sit in all this perfection.
It is quiet. I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends. I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can’t even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rythm. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I have been robbed of my filth.
-c. bukowski
Photo of C. Bukowski:

This is exactly how I felt as a kid when my mom cleaned my room while I wasn’t there.
First they came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a CommunistThen they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a SocialistThen they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a JewThen they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for meFire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.








