Verbatim found poetry is an intriguing collection of found poems. Poems found in ordinary, and not so ordinary places. Submit yours.
A five-hundred-pound US Navy practice bomb.
A stolen Frederic Remington sculpture.
Customized Air Jordans made for Spike Lee.
The first stamp issued in the US.
More than 5000 used blood vials.
Three pounds of marijuana.
Live Japanese grenades.
A mastodon tooth.
A live puppy.
People.
Items found in donation bins, according to The Death of a Superman.
When fear crawls out in the evenings
from all four corners,
when the winter storm raging outside
tells you it is winter,
when my soul trembles at the sight
of distant fantasies,
I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat,
every pulse, every piece of my soul.
Time, go ahead.
Time, which carries liberation
and its unknown tomorrow.
The result is certain.
Everything comes to an end.
Spring will come.
From the diary of Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942.
I deeply regret the current state
of Central Park. What was intended
as a controlled, educational exhibit
entitled “Jurassic Jaunt:
A Stroll Through Prehistory” has…
clearly exceeded its design parameters.
Rest assured, mitigation is underway:
All park-goers have been evacuated
to dinosaur-tree zones, such as
the Upper West Side and Staten Island.
We’re deploying a fleet of robotic
ducks to lead the T. Rexes peacefully
out of the park. (It worked on the goats.
It might work again.) Replacement carousels
are being 3D-printed as we speak
–now with anti-chomp polymer coating.
I fully acknowledge the inconvenience
and mild panic this has caused. I owe
the city, and especially the small dogs,
a heartfelt apology. Would you be willing
to accept a formal letter of regret,
plus complimentary tickets to our next event,
“Penguins on Parade: No Cloning This Time,
We Swear”?
Suppose, said the Universe,
that I don’t care about being understood.
Suppose that I care more about being?
You are wrong again, then, said the Philosopher.
For being that is not conscious being
can scarcely be called being at all.
Can’t we just lie down in the shade
the rest of the afternoon
and watch the wheels go round?
I made nearly everything spherical
in the beginning so it would roll
when I kicked it.
You are absurd! cried the Philosopher.
Uh-huh, said the Universe.
I’d like to see a whole thousand of giraffes
walking along in a row,
with their heads in the air,
thinking, thinking, thinking …
with tail coats and horn-rimmed goggles.
From Noah An’ Jonah An’ Cap’n John Smith, Don Marquis, 1921.
Anna, the old nurse,
her passion for idiots and corpses,
for wolf-stories;
gets it hot;
shakes chocolate from a tree;
not old at all.
Brunnenmacher (father) mountaineer,
presumably hirsute;
his smile and his blasphemies;
takes author in hand.
Grandfather, maternal,
a feudal monster, always spick-and-span;
excavates in imagination the Akropolis of Athens;
tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria;
sometimes mistaken for an angel;
dominates his harem;
vicious to the last.
Poets, should avoid towns;
generally born naked.
From the index of Together by Norman Douglas, 1923.
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself
all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
At night the barracks sometimes lay in the moonlight
made out of silver and eternity: like a plaything
slipped from God’s preoccupied hand.
From Etty Hillesum’s diary, 23 September 1942.
it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells
the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home
and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow
i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off
From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.
It depends on where you give it from
you can give it from the Church of Escazú
from the tied-up donkey, 200 metres
from the María Auxiliadora school
The poem of my childhood would begin with Super Aguimar
or the one a Nicaraguan gave to Ștefan Baciu
from Las Delicias del Volga
the old fig tree of San Pedro
there’s also a dog lying outside
There is a Welsh word hiraeth
a deep nostalgia for the landscape we were raised in
in Portuguese they say saudade, in Galician morriña
in German sehnsucht, in Romanian dor
In the Colón promenade there used to be an obelisk
people still stay, from the obelisk’s scar…
the butterflies that embark on that expedition die along the way
and it’s their great-granddaughters who finish the journey
Subtitles from Navigating a City Without Street Addresses.
heaps of fibered glass and twisted steel
to send a DM to that cute French boy
from your year abroad.
And it takes
thousands of miles of laid cable,
traveling at impossible speeds
through the depths of our oceans,
for him to leave you on read.
From Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something, March 2024.
England is by many
objective measures
a terrible country
ruled by terrible people
with a terrible past
and a terrifying future,
and I support England.
None of my forebears
were born in England,
and I support England.
When I watch the news
or follow England games abroad
or read about politics
I often feel utterly
disconnected from this country,
and I support England.
It was an Englishman
who snarled at me
on the street last month
while I was taking
my daughter to nursery:
Fuck off Chinaman,
take your Covid patient with you.
Nevertheless, I support England.
The supermarket is selling
something called “meatless burgers”.
There are women on Match of the Day.
You hear vague noises about “defunding the police”.
You suspect, on some sinister level,
that something you love is being taken away
And so amid this landscape
of shifting plates and cultural norms,
you have a choice: you can get with the programme
or you can stand your ground and fight.
I am not one of you
and you are not one of us.
But for this month,
for these 90 minutes,
for these sunlit days in June and July,
let’s pretend we are.
Let’s build a house together
and watch it fall.
Let’s pick apart Southgate’s 3-4-3
and debate the merits of Jack Grealish.
Let’s elate and commiserate together.
The past is the past
and the future is the future.
From My cross to bear, June 2021.
Verbatim Poetry 
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