if this should be, i say if this should be--
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing fuck you, clown.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, fuck you, clown.
So I will eat them in a box.
And I will eat them with a fox.
And I will eat them in a house.
And I will eat them with a mouse.
And I will eat them here and there.
Say! I will eat them ANYWHERE!
I do so like green eggs and ham!
Fuck you!
Fuck you, Clown-I-am!
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame:
"Fuck you, clown."
The above is totally unfair, of course, since I believe Auden's early drafts ended each stanza with "fuck you, clown".
...Nor wilt though then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woords and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Fuck you, clown."
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 that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But fuck you, clown, it's just a tree.
But most thro' midnight street I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
O fuck, o fuck you all you clowns
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way,
Fuck you, Satan.
I mean, clown.
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, and fuck you, clown.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
to bear your body's weight upon my breast
So subtly is the fume of life designed
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, this poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity. Let me make this plain:
Fuck you, clown.
They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."
And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ash tray is more easily--
The lake a lilac cube.
He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before
We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.
Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.
"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.
"You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during
the most trying periods of my life
there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most,
you have not been there for me?"
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was fun like me?
Fuck you, clown.
And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
'God,' said I, 'be my help and stay secure;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!'
He spoke! 'Get off my hill--and, hey, fuck you, clown!"
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.
Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.
Fuck you, Clown!
And with them eke, O Goddesse heauenly bright,
Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine,
The argument of mine afflicted stile:
The which to heare, vouchsafe, O fuck you, clown.
When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always fuck off, clown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, so fuck off, clown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
I loved you: love still, perhaps
Is not quite extinguished in my soul,
But let it no longer alarm you;
I do not want to distress you in any way.
I loved you silently, hopelessly,
Tortured now by shyness, now by jealousy;
I loved you sincerely, so tenderly,
May God grant you be so loved by another.
Fuck you, clown.
I so need to stop posting Wordsworth poems--somebody else telling him to fuck off is so clearly the perfect ending to everything he wrote, and Lewis Carroll already made that joke so much better.
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.
Fuck you, clown!
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting:
"Fuck you, clown."
"I'll deliver all,
And promise you calme Seas, auspicious gales,
And sail, so expeditious, that shall catch
Your Royal fleet far off: My Ariel; check
That is thy charge. Then to the Elements
Be free, and fare thou well--"
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, thinking, "Fuck you, clown!"
Orpheus with his Lute made Trees,
And the Mountaine tops that freeze,
Bow themselues when he did sing.
To his Musicke, Plants and Flowers
Euer sprung; as Sunne and Showers,
There had made a lasting Spring.
Euery thing that heard him play,
Euen the Billowes of the Sea,
Hung their heads, & then lay by.
In sweet Musicke is such Art,
Killing care, & griefe of heart,
Fall asleepe, or fucke you, clowne.
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard, fuck you, clown!
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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Fuck you, clown!"
43: do you mean reading them in the thread, or in some other context, in their original inferior versions?
also:
I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these ices.
Dolce & Gabbana,
Fendi and their Donna
Karan, they be sharin'
All their money got me wearin' fly
Brother I ain't askin,
They say they love my ass in
Seven Jeans, True Religion,
I say no, but they keep givin'
So I keep on takin'
And no I ain't taken
We can keep on datin'
I keep on demonstrating.
My love, my love, my love, my love
You love my lady lumps,
fuck you, clown.
Everybody else: An especially fun thing to do would be to work into your poem a link to the source, which some percentage of readers will not know. Obvs easy for them to Google but still.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So fuck you, clown!'
Setting the V.C.R. when we go to bed
to record a night owl movie, some charmer we missed
we always allow, for unprogrammed unforeseen,
an extra half hour. (Night gods of the small screen
are ruthless with watchers trapped in their piety.)
We watch next evening, and having slowly found
the start of the film, meet the minors and leads,
enter their time and place, their wills and needs,
hear in our chests the click of empathy's padlock,
watch the forces gather, unyielding world
against the unyielding heart, one longing's minefield
laid for another longing, which may yield.
Tears will salt the left-over salad I seize
during ads, or laughter slow my hurry to pee.
But as clot melts toward clearness a black fate
may fall on the screen; the movie started too late.
Torn from the backward-shining of an end
that lights up the meaning of the whole work,
disabled in mind and feeling, I flail and shout,
"I can't bear it! I have to see how it comes out!"
For what is story if not relief from the pain
of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?
Minds in their silent blast-offs search through space--
how often I've followed yours!--for a resting-place.
And I'll follow, past each universe in its spangled
ballgown who waits for the slow-dance of life to start,
past vacancies of darkness whose vainglory
is endless as death's, to find the end of the story.
Fuck you, clown.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry of "Fuck you, clown,"
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on, saying, Fuck you, Daedalus.
...thanks all. I mean, Ozymandias and Ariel are pretty strong clues, of course...but I had to google my way to 38 before I could think straight again. I hadn't seen those lines in a decade or more, and it was nice to get them back.
But hey, I'm lazy! And besides, Name That Poet is a different game entirely...
No linked clues or googling! I'm still trying to figure some (many) out. But Google is necessary for making the comments, of course—no one's memorized Faerie Queen.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man,
You, with your fresh thoughts
Care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is "Fuck you, clown" you mourn for.
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room
Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Fuck you, Clown!
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! fuck you clown.
I am loving this poetry exercise, BUT am I the only one who doesn't think the ending to the 3rd poem linked has absolutely no "fuck you, clown" overtones? Am I reading the right poem?
. . . .
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains, "fuck you, clown."
So on we worked and waited for the laughs,
And went without the jokes, and cursed and frowned,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home, and put a bullet through a clown.
I ain't lookin' to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is, clown, fuck you.
Brother, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother
Not for years, anyhow;
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
Then I will warm you,
Hold you close, wrap you in circles,
Use you and change you--
Fuck you, clown.
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking
Fuck you, clown.
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing. Fuck you, clown.
Sitting on a park bench
eyeing little girls with bad intent.
Snot from his red, round nose
greasy fingers smearing giant shoes.
Hey, fuck you clown!
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run.
Feeling like a dead duck
Wishing he could get a little clowny fuck.
In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, well, fuck you, clown.
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and that other fucking clown.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and to fuck you, clown.
68: This was how I ran across the poem, if that helps at all (check the first hit).
Or, to change things up slightly:
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Knock Knock" to dirty ears.
"What is that noise? Who's there?" The wind under the door. "The wind under the door who?" I didn't know that you could yodel.
I still vote for 5, though 72 and others are fine.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the timb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you. No? Fuck you, clown.
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no grain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning. Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura
nor was "La Callunia" painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed: Fuck you, clown.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Fuck you, clown! Fuck you, clown!
Thank God Almighty, fuck you clown!
Gr-r-r---there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims---
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
II.
At the meal we sit together: Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for ``parsley''?
What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?
III.
Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps---
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
IV.
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
---Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
V.
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp---
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.
VI.
Oh, those melons? If he's able
We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!---And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
VII.
There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
VIII.
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?
IX.
Or, there's Satan!---one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ..._
'St, there's Vespers! _Plena grati
Ave, Virgo! Fuck you, Clown!
I'll fuck you up the ass, and you can blow me,
you cocksucker Aurelius and you faggot Furius,
for suggesting that my little verses
are effeminate and not pure enough.
A good poet should be virtuous,
but his verses don't need to be.
Who cares if verses that have spice and wit
are soft and not very pure?
They can also get you going.
I'm not talking to boys here, but to two hairy men
who can't even move their creaky old loins.
Are you two putting me down
just because you've read about my thousands of kisses?
Fuck you Clowns. You can blow me.
When can their poems drown?
O the wild verse down!
All the site wonder'd.
Honor the comment's crown
And fuck you, clown--
Noble one hundred.
(and three).
Then cease, bright Nymph! to mourn the ravish'd Hair
Which adds new Glory to the shining Sphere!
Not all the Tresses that fair Head can boast
Shall draw such Envy as the Lock you lost.
For, after all the Murders of your Eye,
When, after Millions slain, your self shall die;
When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,
And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,
And mid'st Stars write your clownish fucking Name!
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, fuck you, clowne.
BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due, 5
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you fuck mee, clowne.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me.
Fuck you clown.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the clown fucks,
He fucks for thee.
well, you moved out from the city
how come out there?
for a calm, for a calm
did I recall from somewhere
So I could smell the plain old wind
without fabric softener blent in
so i could see a landscape without a fence
so I could hear those clown fucking gents?
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should fuck you, clown.
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"Fuck you, clown"
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"Fuck you, clown"
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
I will print this thread so that I can give full throat to my laughter tonight. Fuck these poorly-suppressed workplace giggles, they have no place in a healthy, vibrant life. The passengers on the train this evening can shoot me bemused looks of perplexity and annoyance.
Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
Fuck you, clown.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
So fuck you, clown.
The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling
Way down in the valley tonight
There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye
And a blade shining oh so bright
There's evil in the air and there's thunder in the sky
And a killer's on the bloodshot streets
And down in the tunnel where the deadly are rising
Oh I swear I saw a young boy
Down in the gutter
He was starting to foam in the heat
Oh baby you're the only thing in this whole world
That's pure and good and right
And wherever you are and wherever you go
There's always gonna be some light
But I gotta get out
I gotta break it out now
Before the final crack of dawn
So we gotta make the most of our one night together
When it's over you know
We'll both be so alone
Like a bat out of hell
I'll be gone when the morning comes
When the night is over
Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone gone gone
Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone when the morning comes
When the day is done
And the sun goes down
And the moonlight's shining through
Then like a sinner before the gates of heaven
I'll come crying out, "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by
Poorly-suppressed workplace giggles |
Link to this comment |
07-21-06 2:17 PM
128
Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.
Also, fuck you, clown.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The clownless again shall be fucked.
Fuck you, clown.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The clown cannot hear the clown-fucker;
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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 a clown, to fuck it?
Clowns have fucked me when we've met,
Loosening their red suspenders.
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, remember.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;
Say that I'm no lucky-ducky;
Say I'm growing old, but add-
Clowns have fucked me!
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might fuck you, clown!
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is fucking clowns.
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am fucking this clown.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“Fuck you, clown.”
Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and command the fates to fuck that clown!
Why you dissing Eazy?)
'Cause the boy ain't shit
Chew him with tobacco, an' spit him in shit
I crush Ice Cube, I'm cool wit Ice T
But NWA ain't shit to me
Dre beating on Dee from Pump it Up
Step to the Dog and get fucked up
I'm simplistic, imperialistic, idealistic
And I'm kicking ballistics
Having that gang war
We want to know what you're fighting for
Fighting over colors?
All that gang shit is for dumb muthafuckas
But you go on thinking you're hard
Come to New York and we'll see who gets robbed
Take your jeri curls, take your black hats
Take your wack lyrics and your bullshit tracks
Now you're mad and you're thinking about stomping
Well I'm from the South Bronx
Fuck you clown
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
Fuck you clown.
Whats your favorite posish?
That's cool with me
Its not my favorite
But I'll do it for you
Whats your favorite dish?
Im not gonna cook it
But ill order it from Five Star
And then I'm gonna love you completely
And then I'll fuckin fuck you discreetly
And then I'll fucking bone you completely
But then I'm gonna fuck you clown
C L O W N
know it - and to know it is despair
To one who loves you as I love, sweet Fanny!
Whose heart goes fluttering for you every where,
Nor, when away you roam,
Dare keep its wretched home,
Love, love alone, his pains severe and many:
Then, loveliest! keep me free,
From torturing and fucking a clown.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Clowns
Fucked the six hundred.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Guess I'll just fuck your skull then, clown.
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when the new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music,
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to fuck the clown.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free."
Fuck you, clown)
Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."
Said the old man, "I do that, too."
The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."
"I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry."
The old man nodded, "So do I."
"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems
Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"Fuck you clown," said the little old man.
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Fuck you, clown
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have fuck you, clown.
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse and a clown to fuck!
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, 'Fuck you, clown!'
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fuck, my
lord, fuck! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old clown
to have had so much blood in him.
On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Fuck clowns 'for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married clowns, for thus sings he:
'Fuck you!
Fuck you, fuck you!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a clownish ear.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Fuck you, clown.
Clown I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
Clown two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
Clown when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, just 'fuck you, clown.'
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying Fuck you Clown!
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Fuck you, clown.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for a clown to fuck
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--fuck you, clown!
Alone stood brave Horatius,
But constant still in mind;
Thrice thirty thousand foes before,
And the broad flood behind.
"Down with him!" cried false Sextus,
With a smile on his pale face.
"Now yield thee," cried Lars Porsena,
"Now yield thee to our grace."
"FUCK YOU, clown," replied our ace.
. . . for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle wigs and say
I nearly died,
A dozen clowns got fucked.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
-An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl -and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That fucking a clown can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And all these fucking clowns.
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent,
Except to say, "Fuck you, clown."
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has fucked the clown.
O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' fuck you clown.
The Bishops and the party
That tragic story made,
A husband that had sold his wife
And after that betrayed;
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell fucked his clown.
Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn
Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand
As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,
Here’s a window in the walls of cloth I’ve torn.
With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer
With endless leaps, disowning the sickness
Hamlet! It’s as if I began to build in the ocean depths
A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there.
Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists,
The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness
That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre,
Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me,
Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up,
My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.
Fuck you, clown.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Futuere Maccum.
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands, so fuck you, clown.
On longer evenings,
Light, shill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of clowns fucking,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and fuck you, clown.
The music almost died away . . . then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill . . . then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and to that clown I say fuck you."
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Fuck you, clown.
LXXIII
With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read:
Fuck you, clown.
J.J.
M.M.
W.G.Du P.
Took great
C/0 his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J.J. said to his M*****
"M*****," he said, said he:
"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-
if-you-don't-go-fuck-a-CLOWN!"
I hear Gilbert & Sullivan occasionally played this game:
(Pirates of Penzance)
I know the Kings of England and I quote the fights historical,
From Waterloo to Marathon in order categorical,
In short in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,
Fuck you, clown.
(The Mikado)
I am so proud,
If I allowed
My family pride
To fuck you, clown.
As someday it may happen
That a victim must be found,
Fuck you, clown.
And there is a secret history of Japanese haiku in this vein:
In the center ring
The Ringmaster sweeps his arm,
Shouting: "Fuck you, clown."
someone up there says it works for any Auden poem. Same goes for Dylan.
Go melt back into the night, babe,
Everything inside is made of stone.
There's nothing in here moving
An' anyway I'm not alone.
You say you're looking for someone
Who'll pick you up each time you fall,
To gather flowers constantly
An' to come each time you call,
A lover for your life an' nothing more,
But it ain't me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe,
Fuck you, clown
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and fuck you, clown.
I've got no deeds to do, no promises to keep
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Clown I fuck you, all is groovy
To-day we have fucking of clowns. Yesterday,
We had barely legal teens. And to-morrow morning,
We shall do it in schoolgirl outfits. But to-day,
To-day we have fucking of clowns. The Japanese
Market can’t get enough of clown-porn.com,
So to-day we have fucking of clowns.
This is the bondage sling chair. And this
Is the other bondage chair, which we will not be using,
Not with the clowns. Bondage is a different fetish,
For which the clowns must be paid extra. Joe the cameraman
Trains on the clowns his camera, silent, uncomplaining,
For which he too will have to be paid extra.
This is the waiver, which is always signed
Before we get started. And please do not tell me
That any of the clowns are backing out. It is not at all easy
To find clowns for these videos. This is a business
Not a game, sunshine. I won't let anyone tell
The clowns they’re free to back out.
And this you can hear is the fucking. There’s going to be some
High-pitched squeaking, as you can imagine. One clown is thrusting
Rapidly backwards and forwards. The clowns are getting
Really into it. And rapidly backwards and forwards
Joe’s fumbling his camera. How embarrassing and unprofessional;
Joe’s getting really into it.
People get really into it; there are stranger fetishes
Out there on the Internets; like the furries,
Or the vores, or the dickgirl-people, or the amputee thing,
Which is where I draw the line; and the clowns don’t mind
Fucking in the back garden while the videotape rolls and rolls
For today we have fucking of clowns.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Fuck you, clown.
(Sorry that it's not strictly poetry, but it just seemed to fit.)
Teofilo, if you haven't already figured out you're New York sleeping arrangements, I meant to say awhile back that you could e-mail me. I also forgot what dates those arrangements would be for.
Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood,
My darling little child?
We know because we wish it so
That is enough, they cried.
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride.
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.
Then tell me, darling little ones,
What's dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.
Oh sweet it was to leave them
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that said
fuck you, you little clowns,
And never yet drowned me.
In the great green room
there was a telephone
and a red ballon and a picture of
the cow jumping over the moon.
And there were three little bears
sitting in chairs and a little toyhouse
and a young mouse
and two little kittens and a pair of mittens
and a comb and a brush
and a bowl full of mush
and a quiet old lady who was whispering,
"Fuck you, clown."
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next to last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent,
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (fuck you, clown!) like disaster.
How softly and gently
he smiles,
how sweetly
his eyes open -
can you see, my friends,
do you not see it?
How he glows
ever brighter,
raising himself high
amidst the stars?
Do you not see it?
How his heart
swells with courage,
gushing full and majestic
in his breast?
How in tender bliss
sweet breath
gently wafts
from his lips -
Friends! Look!
Do you not feel and see it?
Do I alone hear
"Fuck you clown"?
Some say the world will end in fucking,
Some say in clowns.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fucking.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction clowns
Are also great
And would suffice.
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
thought, O fuck you, O clown!
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
and how the wind doth ramm,
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Fuck you, clown, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Good night cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
Fuck you, Clown
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:19 PM
if this should be, i say if this should be--
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:24 PM
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, fuck you, clown.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:26 PM
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And fuck you, clown.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:26 PM
l(f
uc
k
u
cl
o
wn)
one
l
iness
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:27 PM
So I will eat them in a box.
And I will eat them with a fox.
And I will eat them in a house.
And I will eat them with a mouse.
And I will eat them here and there.
Say! I will eat them ANYWHERE!
I do so like green eggs and ham!
Fuck you!
Fuck you, Clown-I-am!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:32 PM
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Fuck you, clown!
Posted by NCProsecutor | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:34 PM
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame:
"Fuck you, clown."
The above is totally unfair, of course, since I believe Auden's early drafts ended each stanza with "fuck you, clown".
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:34 PM
...Nor wilt though then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woords and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
Dorothy Wordsworth: Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:35 PM
candy
is dandy
but liquor
fuck you, clown!
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:36 PM
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:37 PM
Aw, I wanted that last line indented, to indicate it belonged rhythmically with the second to last, but the indentation didn't work.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:37 PM
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately edict thus decree:
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:37 PM
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:38 PM
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
That sat down beside her
And said, "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:40 PM
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:40 PM
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 that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But fuck you, clown, it's just a tree.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:41 PM
But most thro' midnight street I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
O fuck, o fuck you all you clowns
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:42 PM
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way,
Fuck you, Satan.
I mean, clown.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:42 PM
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch. Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:42 PM
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, and fuck you, clown.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:45 PM
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
to bear your body's weight upon my breast
So subtly is the fume of life designed
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, this poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity. Let me make this plain:
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:46 PM
They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."
And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ash tray is more easily--
The lake a lilac cube.
He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before
We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.
Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.
"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.
Fuck you, clown."
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:47 PM
"You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during
the most trying periods of my life
there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most,
you have not been there for me?"
The Lord replied,
"Fuck you, clown."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:47 PM
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was fun like me?
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:48 PM
And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
'God,' said I, 'be my help and stay secure;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!'
He spoke! 'Get off my hill--and, hey, fuck you, clown!"
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:48 PM
There once was a man from Nantucket,
whose dick was so long he could suck it.
He said with a grin,
as he wiped of his chin,
"Fuck you, clown."
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:49 PM
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.
Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.
Fuck you, Clown!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:49 PM
of s/b off.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:50 PM
And with them eke, O Goddesse heauenly bright,
Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine,
The argument of mine afflicted stile:
The which to heare, vouchsafe, O fuck you, clown.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:51 PM
When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always fuck off, clown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, so fuck off, clown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:52 PM
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Fuck you, Mister Clown
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:52 PM
4: They fuck you, clown, your mum and dad.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:52 PM
I loved you: love still, perhaps
Is not quite extinguished in my soul,
But let it no longer alarm you;
I do not want to distress you in any way.
I loved you silently, hopelessly,
Tortured now by shyness, now by jealousy;
I loved you sincerely, so tenderly,
May God grant you be so loved by another.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:52 PM
I so need to stop posting Wordsworth poems--somebody else telling him to fuck off is so clearly the perfect ending to everything he wrote, and Lewis Carroll already made that joke so much better.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:53 PM
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And fuck you, clown.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:53 PM
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.
Fuck you, clown!
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:53 PM
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting:
"Fuck you, clown."
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:53 PM
"I'll deliver all,
And promise you calme Seas, auspicious gales,
And sail, so expeditious, that shall catch
Your Royal fleet far off: My Ariel; check
That is thy charge. Then to the Elements
Be free, and fare thou well--"
"Fuck you, clown!"
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:55 PM
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, thinking, "Fuck you, clown!"
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:56 PM
Orpheus with his Lute made Trees,
And the Mountaine tops that freeze,
Bow themselues when he did sing.
To his Musicke, Plants and Flowers
Euer sprung; as Sunne and Showers,
There had made a lasting Spring.
Euery thing that heard him play,
Euen the Billowes of the Sea,
Hung their heads, & then lay by.
In sweet Musicke is such Art,
Killing care, & griefe of heart,
Fall asleepe, or fucke you, clowne.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:56 PM
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard, fuck you, clown!
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:58 PM
Am I the only one here not too proud to admit I haven't read every poem in this thread?
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:59 PM
43: Fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:59 PM
Or am I the only one who in fact has not read every poem in this thread?
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:01 PM
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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Fuck you, clown!"
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:01 PM
43: do you mean reading them in the thread, or in some other context, in their original inferior versions?
also:
I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these ices.
Dolce & Gabbana,
Fendi and their Donna
Karan, they be sharin'
All their money got me wearin' fly
Brother I ain't askin,
They say they love my ass in
Seven Jeans, True Religion,
I say no, but they keep givin'
So I keep on takin'
And no I ain't taken
We can keep on datin'
I keep on demonstrating.
My love, my love, my love, my love
You love my lady lumps,
fuck you, clown.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:03 PM
43/45: No.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:05 PM
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy clownèd fuckery?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:05 PM
48: me too.
Everybody else: An especially fun thing to do would be to work into your poem a link to the source, which some percentage of readers will not know. Obvs easy for them to Google but still.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:08 PM
I haven't even read all the comments on this thread.
I nominate "clpwned!" as a word of the future.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:09 PM
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So fuck you, clown!'
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:11 PM
Setting the V.C.R. when we go to bed
to record a night owl movie, some charmer we missed
we always allow, for unprogrammed unforeseen,
an extra half hour. (Night gods of the small screen
are ruthless with watchers trapped in their piety.)
We watch next evening, and having slowly found
the start of the film, meet the minors and leads,
enter their time and place, their wills and needs,
hear in our chests the click of empathy's padlock,
watch the forces gather, unyielding world
against the unyielding heart, one longing's minefield
laid for another longing, which may yield.
Tears will salt the left-over salad I seize
during ads, or laughter slow my hurry to pee.
But as clot melts toward clearness a black fate
may fall on the screen; the movie started too late.
Torn from the backward-shining of an end
that lights up the meaning of the whole work,
disabled in mind and feeling, I flail and shout,
"I can't bear it! I have to see how it comes out!"
For what is story if not relief from the pain
of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?
Minds in their silent blast-offs search through space--
how often I've followed yours!--for a resting-place.
And I'll follow, past each universe in its spangled
ballgown who waits for the slow-dance of life to start,
past vacancies of darkness whose vainglory
is endless as death's, to find the end of the story.
Fuck you, clown.
Mona Van Duyn needed TiVo.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:11 PM
you guys obviously aren't gifted & talented.
...and I think it should be spelled "clpwnæd!"
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:12 PM
oh my: clownpoetry.com. can't get the link to the actual poetry to work, but the front page alone makes the site worthwhile.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:12 PM
And someone has to be a little bitch: which poems build towards "Fuck you, clown" and which only end that way?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:14 PM
45: Sweetie, I'm with you. I recognize most, but nothing even like all.
Also, check your voicemail.
Also, here's a link to the MVD poem I used. I remembered the poem, but had to look it up to quote it.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:16 PM
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a "Fuck you, clown!"
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:16 PM
I am annoyed that 19 took my poem. Fuck you, JAC. I mean, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:16 PM
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry of "Fuck you, clown,"
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on, saying, Fuck you, Daedalus.
Posted by Wrenae | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:17 PM
Jack and Jill
ran up the hill
to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
and broke his crown
and Jill yelled, "Fuck you, clown!"
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:17 PM
...thanks all. I mean, Ozymandias and Ariel are pretty strong clues, of course...but I had to google my way to 38 before I could think straight again. I hadn't seen those lines in a decade or more, and it was nice to get them back.
But hey, I'm lazy! And besides, Name That Poet is a different game entirely...
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:17 PM
"Clpwned" should be connected to this sentiment.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:20 PM
No linked clues or googling! I'm still trying to figure some (many) out. But Google is necessary for making the comments, of course—no one's memorized Faerie Queen.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:22 PM
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man,
You, with your fresh thoughts
Care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is "Fuck you, clown" you mourn for.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:26 PM
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room
Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Fuck you, Clown!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:26 PM
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! fuck you clown.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:26 PM
I am loving this poetry exercise, BUT am I the only one who doesn't think the ending to the 3rd poem linked has absolutely no "fuck you, clown" overtones? Am I reading the right poem?
Posted by Wrenae | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:28 PM
apostropher clearly wins this; both 24 and 49 are teh awesome.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:28 PM
. . . .
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains, "fuck you, clown."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:29 PM
Onward, anyway:
These hips are big hips.
They need space
to move around in.
They don't fit into little
petty places.
These hips are free hips.
They don't like to be held back.
These hips have never been enslaved.
They go where they want to go.
They do what they want to do.
These hips are mighty hips.
These hips are magic hips.
I have known them to put a spell on a man
and spin him like a fucking clown.
Posted by Wrenae | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:31 PM
So on we worked and waited for the laughs,
And went without the jokes, and cursed and frowned,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home, and put a bullet through a clown.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:31 PM
I'm actually voting for Beck's 5.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:32 PM
I ain't lookin' to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is, clown, fuck you.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:32 PM
Also, I'm a little concerned that we're this deep in and no one has called anyone a clown fucker, or made any jokes about clowns fucking little kids.
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:32 PM
72: out-loud laughter.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:34 PM
Sommer, we're only at comment #75. Be patient, you clown-fucker!
(feel better now?)
Posted by Wrenae | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:35 PM
Brother, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother
Not for years, anyhow;
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
Then I will warm you,
Hold you close, wrap you in circles,
Use you and change you--
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:35 PM
Au contraire, Silvana -- 72 takes top honors.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:35 PM
I hadn't seen 72 yet when I said 5. 72 is pretty good indeed.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:37 PM
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:37 PM
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing. Fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:39 PM
Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, fuck you, clowns.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:39 PM
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
Then fuck you, clown.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:39 PM
Sitting on a park bench
eyeing little girls with bad intent.
Snot from his red, round nose
greasy fingers smearing giant shoes.
Hey, fuck you clown!
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run.
Feeling like a dead duck
Wishing he could get a little clowny fuck.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:41 PM
In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, well, fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:41 PM
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and that other fucking clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:44 PM
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for fucking a clown.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:44 PM
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and to fuck you, clown.
Posted by reuben | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:44 PM
I hope it fucks
I hope it fucks
I hope it fucks you clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:46 PM
68: This was how I ran across the poem, if that helps at all (check the first hit).
Or, to change things up slightly:
I still vote for 5, though 72 and others are fine.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:46 PM
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the timb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you. No? Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:46 PM
This is quickly moving into my favorite threads of all time. Excellent work, clowns.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:48 PM
I like 89 very much.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:48 PM
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no grain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning. Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura
nor was "La Callunia" painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed: Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:49 PM
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Fuck you, clown! Fuck you, clown!
Thank God Almighty, fuck you clown!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:49 PM
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He cried: Oi! Fuck you, clown!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:55 PM
apostropher: did he who fucked the clown fuck thee?
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:55 PM
SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER.
I.
Gr-r-r---there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims---
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
II.
At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for ``parsley''?
What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?
III.
Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps---
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
IV.
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
---Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
V.
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp---
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.
VI.
Oh, those melons? If he's able
We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!---And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
VII.
There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
VIII.
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?
IX.
Or, there's Satan!---one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ..._
'St, there's Vespers! _Plena grati
Ave, Virgo! Fuck you, Clown!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:56 PM
I'll fuck you up the ass, and you can blow me,
you cocksucker Aurelius and you faggot Furius,
for suggesting that my little verses
are effeminate and not pure enough.
A good poet should be virtuous,
but his verses don't need to be.
Who cares if verses that have spice and wit
are soft and not very pure?
They can also get you going.
I'm not talking to boys here, but to two hairy men
who can't even move their creaky old loins.
Are you two putting me down
just because you've read about my thousands of kisses?
Fuck you Clowns. You can blow me.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:56 PM
L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Va t'en faire foutre, clown
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:56 PM
A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"Go fuck yourself clown," replied the Universe,
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:57 PM
When can their poems drown?
O the wild verse down!
All the site wonder'd.
Honor the comment's crown
And fuck you, clown--
Noble one hundred.
(and three).
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:58 PM
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a clown assfucked upon a table
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:59 PM
Then cease, bright Nymph! to mourn the ravish'd Hair
Which adds new Glory to the shining Sphere!
Not all the Tresses that fair Head can boast
Shall draw such Envy as the Lock you lost.
For, after all the Murders of your Eye,
When, after Millions slain, your self shall die;
When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,
And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,
And mid'st Stars write your clownish fucking Name!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:59 PM
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, fuck you, clowne.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:00 PM
101--That's the one poem that really acts as an earworm on me. Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:01 PM
Ooh, I like 106.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:01 PM
BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due, 5
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you fuck mee, clowne.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:02 PM
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me.
Fuck you clown.
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:03 PM
Crap. Last line should read:
Nor ever chast, except you clowne, fuck mee.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:03 PM
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the clown fucks,
He fucks for thee.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:03 PM
111 to 109, obvs.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:03 PM
well, you moved out from the city
how come out there?
for a calm, for a calm
did I recall from somewhere
So I could smell the plain old wind
without fabric softener blent in
so i could see a landscape without a fence
so I could hear those clown fucking gents?
Posted by Cangrejero | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:04 PM
The calm
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:04 PM
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,-John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
fuck, he sd, you
clown.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:04 PM
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:04 PM
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:06 PM
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"Fuck you, clown"
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"Fuck you, clown"
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:07 PM
Every
Good
Boy
Deserves to
Fuck clowns.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:09 PM
I will print this thread so that I can give full throat to my laughter tonight. Fuck these poorly-suppressed workplace giggles, they have no place in a healthy, vibrant life. The passengers on the train this evening can shoot me bemused looks of perplexity and annoyance.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:09 PM
Fuck these
poorly-suppressed workplace gigglesclowns, they have no place in a healthy, vibrant life.Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:11 PM
Yes! 21 lovely pages of clown-fucking in my backpack.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:11 PM
Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:13 PM
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
So fuck you, clown.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:14 PM
The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling
Way down in the valley tonight
There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye
And a blade shining oh so bright
There's evil in the air and there's thunder in the sky
And a killer's on the bloodshot streets
And down in the tunnel where the deadly are rising
Oh I swear I saw a young boy
Down in the gutter
He was starting to foam in the heat
Oh baby you're the only thing in this whole world
That's pure and good and right
And wherever you are and wherever you go
There's always gonna be some light
But I gotta get out
I gotta break it out now
Before the final crack of dawn
So we gotta make the most of our one night together
When it's over you know
We'll both be so alone
Like a bat out of hell
I'll be gone when the morning comes
When the night is over
Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone gone gone
Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone when the morning comes
When the day is done
And the sun goes down
And the moonlight's shining through
Then like a sinner before the gates of heaven
I'll come crying out, "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:16 PM
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Poorly-suppressed workplace giggles | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:17 PM
Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.
Also, fuck you, clown.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:17 PM
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The clownless again shall be fucked.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:18 PM
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Get down. We
Fuck clowns.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:18 PM
Every time I'm walking down the street
Some pretty momma stop breaking down on me
Stop breaking down, won't you please stop breaking down
Stuff I got'll bust your brains out baby,
Won't you please stop breaking down.
Fuck you clown.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:20 PM
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it fuck you, clown?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:21 PM
Ooh I like 132.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:22 PM
131 was mine, with some help from Robert Johnson
Posted by TomF | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:23 PM
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The clown cannot hear the clown-fucker;
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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 a clown, to fuck it?
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:25 PM
Clowns have fucked me when we've met,
Loosening their red suspenders.
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, remember.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;
Say that I'm no lucky-ducky;
Say I'm growing old, but add-
Clowns have fucked me!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:25 PM
OK, I'm a little surprised at not seeing this one yet. Perhaps because it's been done to death, but someone's got to.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so fuck you, clown
Posted by Chris Clarke | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:31 PM
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might fuck you, clown!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:32 PM
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Clown of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Clowntenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was a Circus Tent builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Nose of plastic red;
Bring me my Greasepaint of Desire;
Bring me my Wig; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Volkswagen of Fire!
I will not cease from Clownish Fight,
Nor shall Balloons sleep in my hand,
Till we have built a Circus Tent
In England’s clownèd fucking Land.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:34 PM
137:
I have fucked
the clowns
that were in
the VW
and which
you were probably
saving
for yourself...
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:34 PM
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is fucking clowns.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:37 PM
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:38 PM
As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land is mine so fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:45 PM
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am fucking this clown.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:47 PM
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“Fuck you, clown.”
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:49 PM
Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and command the fates to fuck that clown!
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:49 PM
142 and 143 are genius.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:50 PM
Why you dissing Eazy?)
'Cause the boy ain't shit
Chew him with tobacco, an' spit him in shit
I crush Ice Cube, I'm cool wit Ice T
But NWA ain't shit to me
Dre beating on Dee from Pump it Up
Step to the Dog and get fucked up
I'm simplistic, imperialistic, idealistic
And I'm kicking ballistics
Having that gang war
We want to know what you're fighting for
Fighting over colors?
All that gang shit is for dumb muthafuckas
But you go on thinking you're hard
Come to New York and we'll see who gets robbed
Take your jeri curls, take your black hats
Take your wack lyrics and your bullshit tracks
Now you're mad and you're thinking about stomping
Well I'm from the South Bronx
Fuck you clown
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:50 PM
I realize 148 stepped out of the strict poetry real, but I hadda.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:52 PM
We become. We hum a story as tune,
in sonata form that runes this sphinx-
riddle sequence as notes that the pharynx
fluctuates, to mean.
So “This Nearly Was Mine” assuages,
braced against old loss and war.
Emile de Becque sounds rich with knowledge
of clowns and fucks, before.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:53 PM
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
Fuck you clown.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:56 PM
Whats your favorite posish?
That's cool with me
Its not my favorite
But I'll do it for you
Whats your favorite dish?
Im not gonna cook it
But ill order it from Five Star
And then I'm gonna love you completely
And then I'll fuckin fuck you discreetly
And then I'll fucking bone you completely
But then I'm gonna fuck you clown
C L O W N
Posted by zilla7030 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:56 PM
know it - and to know it is despair
To one who loves you as I love, sweet Fanny!
Whose heart goes fluttering for you every where,
Nor, when away you roam,
Dare keep its wretched home,
Love, love alone, his pains severe and many:
Then, loveliest! keep me free,
From torturing and fucking a clown.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:58 PM
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And clowns to fuck before I sleep,
And clowns to fuck before I sleep.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:58 PM
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My clown's countenance
Could not unfuck itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a clown fucked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:00 PM
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Clowns
Fucked the six hundred.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:02 PM
O clown, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret fuck
Does thy life destroy.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:03 PM
Fuck you, clown —
Standing amidst the blossoms
Is a cypress tree.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:06 PM
The apparition of the face of this clown;
Fucking a wet black bough.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:09 PM
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Guess I'll just fuck your skull then, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:10 PM
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when the new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music,
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to fuck the clown.
Posted by Wrenae | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:16 PM
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free."
Fuck you, clown)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:17 PM
Fucking marvellous. I salute you all.
Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."
Said the old man, "I do that, too."
The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."
"I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry."
The old man nodded, "So do I."
"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems
Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"Fuck you clown," said the little old man.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:18 PM
I heard a clown fuck - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Porn -
The Mimes around - had wrung them dry -
And Threads were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
I willed my Logins - Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Clown -
With Day-glo - uncertain stumbling Fuck -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:19 PM
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Fuck you, clown
Posted by TomF | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:20 PM
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have fuck you, clown.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:23 PM
Razors stain pain me
Rivers are damp
Acid stains me
Drugs cause cramp
Guns aren't lawful
Nooses give
Gas smells awful
Fuck you clown.
Posted by Brian | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:26 PM
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse and a clown to fuck!
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:26 PM
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, 'Fuck you, clown!'
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:37 PM
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Fuck you, clown!
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:39 PM
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fuck, my
lord, fuck! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old clown
to have had so much blood in him.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:40 PM
On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Fuck clowns 'for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:43 PM
Once more into the [clown's] breeches!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:45 PM
Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all with clowns?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:46 PM
We few, we happy few, we clowns of buggered...
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:46 PM
Because I did not stop for death
He kindly fucked a clown
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:48 PM
176 - "did" s/b "could"
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:49 PM
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married clowns, for thus sings he:
'Fuck you!
Fuck you, fuck you!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a clownish ear.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:51 PM
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby,
Don’t you know that I love you?
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey,
Don’t you know that I’ll fuck you, clown?
Oh won't you come with me
and take my hand?
Oh won't you come with me
We'll walk this land
Please fuck you, clown!
Posted by reuben | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:09 PM
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Kreskin | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:11 PM
Clown I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
Clown two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
Clown when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:15 PM
154 made me howl.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:17 PM
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, just 'fuck you, clown.'
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:23 PM
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying Fuck you Clown!
Posted by blissonbliss | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:24 PM
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Fuck you, clown.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:26 PM
jinx!
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:27 PM
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths ... fuck you, clown.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:29 PM
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Fuck you, clown
Posted by jenofiniquity | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:33 PM
To Fedward. Coke!
Posted by blissonbliss | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:33 PM
Well struck, jenofiniquity. (And a big "Fuck you, clown!" to all the new commenters!)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:35 PM
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for a clown to fuck
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:42 PM
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--fuck you, clown!
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:49 PM
Alone stood brave Horatius,
But constant still in mind;
Thrice thirty thousand foes before,
And the broad flood behind.
"Down with him!" cried false Sextus,
With a smile on his pale face.
"Now yield thee," cried Lars Porsena,
"Now yield thee to our grace."
"FUCK YOU, clown," replied our ace.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:50 PM
. . . for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle wigs and say
I nearly died,
A dozen clowns got fucked.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
-An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl -and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That fucking a clown can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:56 PM
But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And all these fucking clowns.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:57 PM
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 fuck any clowns yourself.
Posted by Bill Stilwell | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:58 PM
Two roads diverged in a wood and I
Took the one less traveled by
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:59 PM
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent,
Except to say, "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by peter snees | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:02 PM
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has fucked the clown.
Posted by reuben | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:08 PM
O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' fuck you clown.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:11 PM
The Bishops and the party
That tragic story made,
A husband that had sold his wife
And after that betrayed;
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell fucked his clown.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:19 PM
not too much creativity necessary on this one:
The Clown Chastised
Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn
Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand
As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,
Here’s a window in the walls of cloth I’ve torn.
With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer
With endless leaps, disowning the sickness
Hamlet! It’s as if I began to build in the ocean depths
A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there.
Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists,
The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness
That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre,
Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me,
Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up,
My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by sarah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:24 PM
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Futuere Maccum.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:30 PM
Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, but
Not if you fuck a clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:33 PM
Typing. Too slow! Brain. Too full! My hour in the Garden is posted here.
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:33 PM
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands, so fuck you, clown.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:40 PM
Rah, I thought about the Rubaiyat, but only got as far as:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou, Clown.
When you got wine and verse and a romantic garden and a clown I think we all know there's only way the evening's gonna go.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:46 PM
What poet would not grieve to see
His breth'ren write as well as he?
But rather than they should excel,
He wished the fucking clowns in hell.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:49 PM
On longer evenings,
Light, shill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of clowns fucking,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
Posted by jenofiniquity | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:49 PM
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and fuck you, clown.
Posted by atm | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:51 PM
The music almost died away . . . then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill . . . then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and to that clown I say fuck you."
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:52 PM
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, &c.
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain, &c.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, &c.
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain, &c.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, &c.
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain, &c.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, &c.
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to fuck you every day.
(The Clown is implied.)
Posted by Rah | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:03 PM
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
fuck you clown
Posted by anon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:21 PM
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Ledasmom | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:26 PM
LXXIII
With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read:
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by PK | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:32 PM
I think that I shall never fuck
A woman lovely as a clown.
A clown whose shiny nose glows red;
A jingly clown-hat on its head.
A clown that juggles pies for hours;
Climbs in and out of tiny cars.
A clown that may on-duty wear
An orange fright-wig for its hair;
Upon whose feet enormous shoes
Are really desperate to amuse.
The girls are boring in this town,
Oh God I want to fuck a clown.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:36 PM
My apologies to Ogden Nash.
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Sheila | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:27 PM
One cuckoo sings
Then responds another
Between two mountains
Fuck you, clown
Hmm. The haiku limps at bit at the end there, doesn't it?
Posted by Jupiter | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:29 PM
One cuckoo sings
Then responds another
Between two mountains
Fuck you, clown
Hmm. The haiku limps at bit at the end there, doesn't it?
Posted by Jupiter | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:29 PM
Oops. Sorry about that. Hit it twice.
To make it up to you:
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young--fucking a clown.
Posted by jupiter | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:30 PM
216 is pretty awesome.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:36 PM
J.J.
M.M.
W.G.Du P.
Took great
C/0 his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J.J. said to his M*****
"M*****," he said, said he:
"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-
if-you-don't-go-fuck-a-CLOWN!"
Posted by Jay | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:42 PM
Buying The Whore
Anne Sexton
You are the roast beef I have purchased
and I stuff you with my very own onion.
You are a boat I have rented by the hour
and I steer you with my rage until you run aground.
You are a glass that I have paid to shatter
and I swallow the pieces down with my spit.
You are the grate I warm my trembling hands on,
searing the flesh until it's nice and juicy.
You stink like my Mama under your bra
and I vomit into your hand like a jackpot
its cold hard quarters.
So Fuck you, clown.
Posted by blissonbliss | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:44 PM
I hear Gilbert & Sullivan occasionally played this game:
(Pirates of Penzance)
I know the Kings of England and I quote the fights historical,
From Waterloo to Marathon in order categorical,
In short in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,
Fuck you, clown.
(The Mikado)
I am so proud,
If I allowed
My family pride
To fuck you, clown.
As someday it may happen
That a victim must be found,
Fuck you, clown.
And there is a secret history of Japanese haiku in this vein:
In the center ring
The Ringmaster sweeps his arm,
Shouting: "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by S L | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:02 PM
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
Fuck you, clown
Posted by TomF | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:06 PM
someone up there says it works for any Auden poem. Same goes for Dylan.
Go melt back into the night, babe,
Everything inside is made of stone.
There's nothing in here moving
An' anyway I'm not alone.
You say you're looking for someone
Who'll pick you up each time you fall,
To gather flowers constantly
An' to come each time you call,
A lover for your life an' nothing more,
But it ain't me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe,
Fuck you, clown
Posted by TomF | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:09 PM
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and fuck you, clown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:21 PM
I've got no deeds to do, no promises to keep
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Clown I fuck you, all is groovy
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:25 PM
To-day we have fucking of clowns. Yesterday,
We had barely legal teens. And to-morrow morning,
We shall do it in schoolgirl outfits. But to-day,
To-day we have fucking of clowns. The Japanese
Market can’t get enough of clown-porn.com,
So to-day we have fucking of clowns.
This is the bondage sling chair. And this
Is the other bondage chair, which we will not be using,
Not with the clowns. Bondage is a different fetish,
For which the clowns must be paid extra. Joe the cameraman
Trains on the clowns his camera, silent, uncomplaining,
For which he too will have to be paid extra.
This is the waiver, which is always signed
Before we get started. And please do not tell me
That any of the clowns are backing out. It is not at all easy
To find clowns for these videos. This is a business
Not a game, sunshine. I won't let anyone tell
The clowns they’re free to back out.
And this you can hear is the fucking. There’s going to be some
High-pitched squeaking, as you can imagine. One clown is thrusting
Rapidly backwards and forwards. The clowns are getting
Really into it. And rapidly backwards and forwards
Joe’s fumbling his camera. How embarrassing and unprofessional;
Joe’s getting really into it.
People get really into it; there are stranger fetishes
Out there on the Internets; like the furries,
Or the vores, or the dickgirl-people, or the amputee thing,
Which is where I draw the line; and the clowns don’t mind
Fucking in the back garden while the videotape rolls and rolls
For today we have fucking of clowns.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:32 PM
Wow.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:34 PM
This thread makes me realize how little poetry I've read.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:38 PM
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Fuck you, clown.
(Sorry that it's not strictly poetry, but it just seemed to fit.)
Posted by Lurkerr | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:42 PM
Teofilo, if you haven't already figured out you're New York sleeping arrangements, I meant to say awhile back that you could e-mail me. I also forgot what dates those arrangements would be for.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:45 PM
So that's the kitten everyone's always talking about. Delurking is fun!
Posted by Lurkerr | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:46 PM
Thanks w/d. Thanks also to everyone else who offered. It looks like I'll be okay, but I'll let you know if something changes.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:47 PM
Oh, and it'll be the first weekend in August. Specifically the Friday night.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:49 PM
Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood,
My darling little child?
We know because we wish it so
That is enough, they cried.
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride.
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.
Then tell me, darling little ones,
What's dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.
Oh sweet it was to leave them
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that said
fuck you, you little clowns,
And never yet drowned me.
Posted by trystero49 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:10 PM
PS 229 rocks!!!
Posted by trystero49 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:12 PM
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end with "Fuck you, clown."
Posted by liz | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:13 PM
In the great green room
there was a telephone
and a red ballon and a picture of
the cow jumping over the moon.
And there were three little bears
sitting in chairs and a little toyhouse
and a young mouse
and two little kittens and a pair of mittens
and a comb and a brush
and a bowl full of mush
and a quiet old lady who was whispering,
"Fuck you, clown."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:19 PM
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next to last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent,
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (fuck you, clown!) like disaster.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:24 PM
240: Awww, that was PK's favorite when he was small. Did you do it from memory?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:27 PM
The Libestod from Tristan and Isolde:
How softly and gently
he smiles,
how sweetly
his eyes open -
can you see, my friends,
do you not see it?
How he glows
ever brighter,
raising himself high
amidst the stars?
Do you not see it?
How his heart
swells with courage,
gushing full and majestic
in his breast?
How in tender bliss
sweet breath
gently wafts
from his lips -
Friends! Look!
Do you not feel and see it?
Do I alone hear
"Fuck you clown"?
Posted by Mark | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:27 PM
Some say the world will end in fucking,
Some say in clowns.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fucking.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction clowns
Are also great
And would suffice.
Huh?
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:41 PM
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
thought, O fuck you, O clown!
Posted by trystero49 | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:43 PM
Felix is kicking some serious but very weird ass.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:44 PM
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
and how the wind doth ramm,
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Fuck you, clown, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:51 PM
242: Yes. It's part of Noah's bedtime ritual. I can also do Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb and The Going to Bed Book.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:52 PM
248: Dum diddy dum diddy dum dum dum. Oddly, I still know that from my own childhood; PK doesn't have it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:09 PM
Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Good night cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:12 PM
It occured to me earlier today that that book might be responsible for PK's mouse obsession.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:14 PM
What about If you give a mouse a cookie?
(Fuck you, clown.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:16 PM
Remember, remember, the fifth of November