An away of practice the other is Like a river out of acts the other is Hapless, unheard, with marks upon him Having dallied in tarrying unwisely Backlit at an undecidable remove In a house of marks the other is Useless deciding whether to go Or wait in best practices like a child A hapless river filled with sand
poem index
occasions
- Anniversary
- Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month
- Autumn
- Birthdays
- Black History Month
- Breakfast
- Breakups
- Chanukah
- Christmas
- Dinner
- Earth Day
- Easter
- Election Day
- Farewell
- Father's Day
- Fourth of July
- Funerals
- Graduation
- Halloween
- Hispanic Heritage Month
- LGBTQ Pride Month
- Lunch
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Memorial Day
- Mother's Day
- Native American Heritage Month
- New Year's
- September 11
- Spring
- Summer
- Thanksgiving
- Vacations
- Valentine's Day
- Veterans Day
- Weddings
- Winter
- Women's History Month
themes
- Afterlife
- Aging
- Ambition
- America
- American Revolution
- Americana
- Ancestry
- Anger
- Animals
- Anxiety
- Apocalypse
- Audio
- Beauty
- Beginning
- Birds
- Body
- Brothers
- Buildings
- Carpe Diem
- Cats
- Childhood
- Cities
- Clothing
- Cooking
- Creation
- Dance
- Daughters
- Death
- Deception
- Desire
- Despair
- Divorce
- Dogs
- Doubt
- Dreams
- Drinking
- Drugs
- Earth
- Eating
- Economy
- Enemies
- Environment
- Existential
- Family
- Fathers
- Flight
- Flowers
- For Children
- For Mom
- For Teens
- Friendship
- Future
- Gardens
- Gender
- Ghosts
- Gratitude
- Grief
- Gun Violence
- Happiness
- Heartache
- Heroes
- High School
- History
- Home
- Hope
- Humor
- Identity
- Illness
- Immigration
- Infidelity
- Innocence
- Jealousy
- Landscapes
- Language
- LGBTQ
- Loneliness
- Loss
- Love
- Love, Contemporary
- Luck
- Lust
- Marriage
- Math
- Memories
- Migration
- Miracles
- Money
- Mothers
- Mourning
- Movies
- Moving
- Music
- Myth
- National Parks
- Nature
- New York City
- Night
- Nostalgia
- Oblivion
- Oceans
- Old Age
- Pacifism
- Parenting
- Past
- Pastoral
- Patience
- Pets
- Plants
- Politics
- Popular Culture
- Public Domain
- Reading
- Rebellion
- Regret
- Religion
- Romance
- Sadness
- School
- Science
- Self
- Sex
- Silence
- Sisters
- Social Justice
- Sons
- Space
- Spanish
- Spirituality
- Sports
- Storms
- Suburbia
- Survival
- Teaching
- Technology
- Theft
- Thought
- Time
- Tragedy
- Travel
- Turmoil
- Underworld
- Vanity
- Violence
- Visual Art
- War
- Weather
- Work
- Writing
forms
- Abecedarian
- Acrostic
- Anaphora
- Ars Poetica
- Ballad
- Ballade
- Blues Poem
- Bop
- Cento
- Chance Operations
- Cinquain
- Doha
- Dramatic Monologue
- Ekphrastic
- Elegy
- Epic
- Epigram
- Epistle
- Erasure
- Found Poem
- Ghazal
- Haiku
- Limerick
- Ode
- Pantoum
- Prose Poem
- Renga
- Rondeau
- Sapphic
- Sestina
- Sonnet
- Tanka
- Terza Rima
- Triolet
- Villanelle
schools & movements
- Nuyorican Poetry
- Objectivists
- OULIPO
- Poets of Exile
- Romanticism
- New York School
- New Formalism
- Misty Poets
- Modernism
- Modernismo
- Négritude
- San Francisco Renaissance
- Slam/Spoken Word
- Surrealism
- Symbolists
- Translators
- Victorian
- Metaphysical Poet
- Language Poetry
- Confessional Poetry
- Contemporary
- Cowboy Poetry
- Dark Room Collective
- Concrete Poetry
- Conceptual Poetry
- Augustan
- Beat
- Black Arts
- Black Mountain
- Ethnopoetics
- Fireside Poet
- Harlem Renaissance
- Imagism
- Jazz Poetry
- Kanaka Maoli poetry
- Futurism
- Fugitives
- First World War
- Flarf
- Formalism
- Acmeism
poet
Geoffrey G. O'Brien


Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), Metropole (University of California Press, 2011), Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002). He teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, California.
by this poet
poem
2011
poem
2007
The winter, it was the winter all the usual things happened, I have forgotten what would travel from the north as a series seen from above or from below, and the followers, the flowers, I tore them up the next summer, or rather before or immediately after and thought no more about it. But then the summer, plans
poem
2017
This is a love poem. It has no business.
It happens in that anyway world
Where the bodies are by now decided
To get all the way up, accompanied
By changes in temperature and light
Welcome and unwelcome both,
Lie down, get up, go prone again,
2