Richard Brautigan
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FollowAbout Richard Brautigan
Short, whimsical, deceptively slight poems that arrive like jokes and frequently turn out to be about loneliness — a few lines, an unlikely comparison, and a stop before anything is explained.
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He was enormously popular in the counterculture and then critically dismissed as a period artefact, which undersells the precision of the best pieces. The famous poem imagining a forest tended by machines of loving grace is either a utopia or a warning and is deliberately left as both. Read a handful; they are over almost before they start.
Read next
- James Tate — The deadpan American absurd.
- Ron Padgett — Comedy with a serious floor under it.
- Gary Snyder — The other side of that West Coast moment.
10 poems
04/28/2026 14:58h
This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown.
By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
Empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes
It was lonely.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce,
the name and drawing of a detective
with magnifying glass on the sides
of the crates of lettuce,
form a great cross in man’s imagination
and his desire to name
the objects of this world.
I think I’ll call this place Golgotha
and have some salad for dinner.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
It’s a star that looks
like a poker game above
the mountains of eastern
Oregon.
There are three men playing.
They are all sheepherders.
One of them has two pair,
the others have nothing.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
A girl in a green mini-
skirt, not very pretty, walks
down the street.
A businessman stops, turns
to stare at her ass
that looks like a moldy
refrigerator.
There are now 200,000,000 people
in America.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
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04/28/2026 14:58h
Driving through
hot brushy country
in the late autumn,
I saw a hawk
crucified on a
barbed-wire fence.
I guess as a kind
of advertisement
to other hawks,
saying from the pages
of a leading women’s
magazine,
“She’s beautiful,
but burn all the maps
to your body.
I’m not here
of my own choosing.”
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04/28/2026 14:58h
At 1:03 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.
I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
I don’t care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I’m bored.
It’s been raining like hell all day long
and there’s nothing to do.
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