I couldn’t call either a favorite, but there are two that have stuck with me my whole life. Edit to fix formatting.

The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It feels as relevant to our time as it was for WW1.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Violets are red
Roses are blue
When you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUE

A girlfriend came in built me a bed scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor scrubbed the walls vacuumed, cleaned the toilet, the bathtub, scrubbed the bathroom floor and cut my toenails and my hair. Then all on the same day the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet and the toilet and the gas man fixed the heater and the phone man fixed the phone.

Now I sit in all this perfection.

It is quiet. I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends. I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can’t even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rythm. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

-c. bukowski

Look at my instance name

Ozymandias by Percy Bysh Shelby

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Even though Yates himself called it “the way to lose a lady”, I still like Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Sorry if this was already posted, but I didn’t see it:

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There’s also a short story by Ray Bradbury with the same title that quotes the poem.

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

First they came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Each year on the anniversary of when I got back my stem cells to cure my cancer, I read Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

I read it a bit early this year for this - this July 12th it will be 20 years unbowed.

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning’s levelled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser’s reproach,
And love’s best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

—W. H. Auden

For Life I had never cared greatly, As worth a man’s while; Peradventures unsought, Peradventures that finished in nought, Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately Unwon by its style.

In earliest years - why I know not - I viewed it askance; Conditions of doubt, Conditions that leaked slowly out, May haply have bent me to stand and to show not Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour It courted me then, Till evasions seemed wrong, Till evasions gave in to its song, And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller Than life among men.

Anew I found nought to set eyes on, When, lifting its hand, It uncloaked a star, Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar, And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon As bright as a brand.

And so, the rough highway forgetting, I pace hill and dale Regarding the sky, Regarding the vision on high, And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting My pilgrimage fail.

• Thomas Hardy

The Clock Man by Shel Silverstein

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” The clock man asked the child.

“Not one penny,” the answer came.

“For my days are as many as my smiles.”

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the child was grown.

“Maybe a dollar or maybe less, for I’ve plenty of days of my own.”

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the time came to die.

“All of the pearls in all of the seas, and all of the stars in the sky.”

A poem my brother wrote

Nothing changes, and it changes all at once. Nothing moves, nothing exists. Nothing is important, so we should learn nothing, we should study nothing, get close to nothing, be kind to nothing. We must come to understand nothing so well that we could maybe even see nothing in ourselves. Because nothing matters, nothing is important, and I think that’s something.

l(a by e.e. cummings

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af

fa

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one
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iness

A Coat

By William Butler Yeats

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.