The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and ...
Snail Poem
Peter Orlovsky
Snail Poem
Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired
& handsome felt,
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at
blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
o...
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Harlan Ellison
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung ...
The Big Space Fuck
Kurt Vonnegut
The Big Space Fuck
KURT VONNEGUT / AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS, HARLAN ELLISON, ED., 1972
“What was the dirtiest story I ever wrote?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in Palm Sunday, his 1981 “autobiographical collage.” “Surel...
I Sing the Body Electric
Walt Whitman
I Sing the Body Electric
—1—
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge ...
The Twilight of Freedom, a poem by Osip Mandelstam
Jenny Wade
Let us praise, brothers, freedom’s twilight,
The great diminishing year!
A heavy forest of nets is lowered
Into the turbulent waters of night.
You are ascending in desolate years,
Oh sun, judge, people.
Let us prai...
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
"The Red Wheelbarrow," a classic poem by the great William Carlos Williams. You don't need to say much to say a lot.
Hay For the Horses
Gary Snyder
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We s...
The World Is A Beautiful Place
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The World Is A Beautiful Place - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
jus...
October in the Railroad Earth
Jack Kerouac
October in the Railroad Earth is a long, flowing prose poem recounting Jack Kerouac’s memories of his experiences as a “student brakeman” on the Southern Pacific Railroad in California. In his interview with Paris Revi...
The First Surrealist Manifesto
André Breton
The First Surrealist Manifesto
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his des...
The Joan Anderson Letter
Neal Cassady
In December 1950, Jack Kerouac received the so-called "Joan Anderson letter" from Neal Cassady. Kerouac later said the letter inspired his new writing style in On The Road. Kerouac thought the letter was lost when somebody d...
The Night I Fucked My Alarm Clock
Charles Bukowski
starving in philadelphia
i had a small room
it was evening going into night
and i stood at my window on the 3rd floor
in the dark and looked down into a
kitchen across the way on the 2nd floor
and i saw a beautiful blo...
William S. Burroughs Fan Letter to Truman Capote, 1970
William S. Burroughs
Truman Capote once famously said of the work of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." A decade or so later, William S. Burroughs returned the favor with this epistolary riposte.
July 23, 1970
My Dear Mr. T...
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
