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Derrek Estrella Oct 2017
He walked into the bar, a buzz in the corner
With fists upon each other
A self-appeaser, a demonizer
With a picture of Christ in the corner

A ****** posing as a mannequin
For the lost kids from the suburbs
A rockstar singing testimonies 
To its significant others

Careful, they might criticize your point of view

Its just the neons and gutters
The mundane-marveled life
The signs only omit what you realize
Its how we deal with each other
Its how we share our beds
With the promise that we're stars, no less
Its not a sign

Radio beats on null-head streets
And monotonous synchronizing
People pummel oil drums
Emphasize on heavy flooding

The local drug store is the place
For sanity verification
Latex gloves deem what we'll find
In the underbelly of this nation

Careful, they might criticize your point of view

Its just the neons and gutters
The written, free life
We see it all, but thats not realized
Why do we act as fodder?
Its how we share our beds
With the promise that we'll come back to a caress
Its not a sign

I'm not you, you're not me
I've no clue, maybe that's alright
I love peace, you hate war
We clash heads, maybe that's alright
I'm getting paid, you're a star
I don't bother, maybe that's alright
I've got kids, you're alone
We're all doomed, maybe that's alright

We'll be fine
We're divine
We've no crimes
We save our dimes
We keep time
We'll be fine
ryn Sep 2014
Destination home...
Making my way
Sleepy heads leaning
End of the day

Different people
Diverse ethnic races
Same endpoints
For us nameless faces

Where we're headed
Timeless cues
Rain-stained windows offer
Only blurred views

Beautiful display
Droplets colliding
Like liquid missiles
Crashing and merging

Yellow street lamps
Neons on buildings
Vehicular signals
Intermittent flashings

Reds, greens and ambers
Fighting for attention
Blues, whites and their hues
Feast for perception

Myriad colours
Refracted and broken
Prism induced dispersal
Little light show haven

Quite the spectacle
This dance and flight
Kaleidoscopic effect
Between water and light

Rain didn't abate
Unleashing full fury
All of us still safe
Capsule of tranquillity

Watching the chaos
Still silently looking
Overwhelming wonder
Heart is choking

Found myself tearing
At the sight of this view
Realised for certain
That I'm missing you...
Bus ride home in a rainstorm. Beautiful...
Simon Obirek May 2015
Keen little neons
playfully jump around, colliding with her mind
and she sits there, legs crossed, her ***** aroused,
but it gets doused as the Wall Street pinstripe type walks by
she utters a sigh, looks at the sky, the ending's nigh, and it's night.

Skyline looks pretty
beams and lighted apartment block kitchens and real pop-up ads,
them keen little neons,
her eyes flicker like those hanging lights in horror films,
perpetuate fear, the skeletons are in the clear.
I told you, you schmuck, the end is near.
JR Potts  Sep 2014
The Long Drive
JR Potts Sep 2014
Streaks

from worn out wipers

dented cans, plastic wrappers

the glow of a cigarette ****

lying comfortably 
in the ashtray

white knuckles tight

on a weathered wheel

empty roads

cold and black

eyes tired but open

like trucker stops

or roadside diners

with the neons

still on

I keep driving

teetering between

my existence

and a sweet dream

I’d slip into that slumber

if not for the passengers

still fast asleep
in my back seat

So I keep driving

as quiet 
and as lonely

as it may be

I keep driving

because 
somebody

is putting
 their trust
 in me
Ylang Ylang Jul 2018
‌  ‌‌The desperate pounding
  ‌          on the wall can be heard


"Love Love Love"
I can't believe you're so shallow.
   You refuse. You die.
   You vanish like a burning hay,
   right here, on the blackened way.
Candy peaks, monotonous points in the sea

      Let me descend
    Open you a bit


                        River,
                        Sun,­­
   ­                     foamy stream,
                        You drown,
                        Love, dream, dream!
                        TV screens
                        Times square
                        Light-ants
                       ­ Electric signals through wires
                        deep dark night flooding rush
                        Volcano erupting
                        Surface! Screammm!
                          Neons
                       ­ A­lcohol on glass
                        Old charwoman rubs it
                        with rag
                        Hands shake you
                        in the foamy stream
                        Ha!
                        Who was right?


     The night staggers you
     with thousand stars
     Wolves howling
     Moon
     Mushrooms
     Dew & violet & knights
     & Mysteries
     Welcome to the old days
     Tomorrow you will be introduced
     to the wise King of England


A rocker picks up stuff
and scatters the TV screen
bottles of liqour are smashed
in his house
Glass scattered, guitars wrecked - he's crazy,
pulling out hair, gnashing teeth
-You all killed him
    and You are not even aware


     Meanwhile a man strolls the woods
      searches for mushrooms
       on sunny autumn day
       he smells moss, bark and undergrowth
       He's contemplating the topics of
             childhood & ******


        Red lipstick smears all over her lips
                 She's the animal queen
                     All belongs to her
                   Thanks to her claws,
                     cat-moan, and the
                          short living
                     aggressive cinder
                            she owns.
            Leather jacket be her weapon,
                  Night be her moment.





I am the Eye,
and what I see
is a child picking yellow petals
of sow-thistle
kneeling in the sun
in his timeless summer.
Who would know,
that this chapter
would be closed
one day
and the brown leather book
would become dusty
someday
Rondu McPhee Aug 2010
I look out the window--an endless sky. The clouds are like nothing else--bold explosions and everywhere in the sky, infinite, above and still in time and space--Madness and Horror are said to have their own faces and names. Can't Beauty? Beauty has its own life--not a distinctive face, not a concrete identity--Beauty is breathing, standing, growing above us--the Clouds. I know that it's a bit foggy, I know what is actual is only actual for the one time and standing moment that it is there--maybe the Clouds move, travel, fade--but they never leave us. They're long, still and colossal enough to be viewed, admired, stricken, crushed beneath. I'm on a bus, travelling through San Francisco--a mystery on its own, mad like a spiral or giant--one with a heart and soul that is difficult to pinpoint and seemingly jolting, constantly moving throughout--down streets, through alleys, intensifying in the dazzling Golden Gate Bridge and boundary-less San Francisco Bay--a testament Olympian and profoundly simple, such a straightforward bridge with so many possibilities and tragedies. It's my destination, too.

I go to the Podesta Baldocchi--a flower shop, quaint, small, almost non-existent in the vertigo of San Francisco, but immortalized in another Vertigo--and inspiring search and enigma on its own--the vision of James Stewart chasing hills, corners, all the trails and paths for Beauty--a Beauty with two feet, a name, experiences--Beauty named Kim Novak. He follows Her, from the shores to the grave--She, praying at a cemetery, a faded figure in grief, He, watching obsessively like a predator--He finds Her on the cold shores, of the endless, alien seas--along the Golden Gate Bridge--on the verge of jumping. He saves Her, a metamorphosis of prey and personal freedom is triggered.

That's one of the many beautiful passages of Vertigo that I remember--passion, memory, disappearance, insanity, aggression. "Here I was born, and here I died", says the woman, named Madeline--a fatal, empowering woman of Beauty and melancholy, complex and deceiving. Chris Marker saw this too--a reservoir of thought from his Sans Soleil--the movie, the moment in time where memory and the Great Enigmas had finally been touched by skin and light. February, 1983.

Memory works that way.

That is one of the things I love most; memory. Memory is fading and escaping from me. I look down at my wrinkled hands--grief and nothing else--losing myself. I step onto the cliff where Madeline, where Grace stood. The sea is a rapture. Endless, everywhere, surrounding me from all corners--dozens of people have taken their life here. They jump from the bridge, they slip into the water and drown. Their entire breakdown and loneliness and humanity is silenced and stated in a small slip into the bay, or a thin, white splash--a miniature, but Greater Fall--beneath the bridge in all its magnificence and profundity, beneath the clouds, a silent act of Tragedy and Horror with a face, surrounded and drowned in Beauty and Rapture--breathtaking and cruel.

I am tired and lifeless. I can't stand it. I remember all the beaches, skies, nights, visions of the sun and daughters I've seen in my life, all the smiles I've faked, breaths I took--I hadn't thought of this until the nineties or so, in my wrinkled, tired years. I was remembering Marie--my only girlfriend and wife one I had met in the 40's--compassionate, dangerous, magnificent she was, like Madeline. Perfection and grace and danger. I had grown, loved, lived, watched everything and took every step with her--before she had died in 1989. She was my only care, my only love. I couldn't grip myself then. I hear my parents speaking, my mum and dad--dead now--my children, beautiful things--I couldn't keep them. I couldn't. I couldn't, their eyes porcelain--I went insane over all of it, a time to foggy to look back on. Time is the same stretch, place is the same and distilled--but memory is everywhere--one thing I love and can't stand.

And now I am here. The beauty is pastoral, distant, glowing and also deadly--like cloudy figures of steel and glass, concrete with fountains and blood in the shape of landscapes and towers--branches, cold, in a lonely place, fading from truth and Truth, identity and Greater Life--a thousand misty passions and poses stretched and scattered. I'm hopeless, I'm lonely, I'm cold. I'm wary, tired, confused with nothing left in me. I'm leaving, Reconciling beneath, below, and everywhere around Beauty.

I understand any doubts. I cannot take my nerves or my senses. They've failed, broken down on me--I've lost myself, very permanently this time.

I fall. I see nothing, feel everything crushing, me lying in the crystal bay--it fades. I can't see. I can't speak--I can't love, embrace, understand--I open my eyes, dizzy and faded, in a house, a rather cluttered, yet homely one. I believe I am small, looking up to my great pale towering mother, breats and lips and glowing limpid eyes... a fireplace, some warmth, some haze and some tears of joy. It is falling apart, where I am, but it is of embracing memory. I'm being looked and smiled at. I don't know where this is.

I close my eyes, I stand and open them seven years later. Cold water at my feet and sand--I look around to see a beach, stretched infinitely--past boundaries or understanding. The sea is dizzying. I look up to see that Beauty--still standing, moving across and thinning--that Beauty is sunless. Nothing but Clouds--an illusion, foggy and slippery of sorts--impossible and unbearable to experience. I stumble.

I look up, and there's now a ceiling--tall, blazing gold, marmalade and kaleidoscope--everything is blurring and melting. I'm in a hallway, with parents--a father and mother, loving, caring and safe; the only thing in front of me is a painting, swirled and swerved shore to thunder and graceful and passionate so distant--Holy, Andalusian girls from a Utamaro madman; thinly, finely lined, velvet in color and delicacy, colliding and cracked in shape, memory or sense. The painting falls, crashes, and the ceiling falls and opens to voices and laughs. I stumble, tremble, get knocked staggering, look down the hallway. It's crashing to black--I stumble to anyone; my father, the mad size of him, I rush and cling still around his arms--a shadow--then his terrible branches rising, fading, and everywhere--complete pitch black--coming for me? Far and off and a way a place cold and a lone in the Fall long and thundering--rippled--moving--then white--then clearly.

My next vision I can comprehend without running terrified is in Japan. It's 1964, I am 25. A television set, murky like playing out my dazed oxygen-starved hallucinatory real-fake mindbursting memories. Headlines, people, looking down at me. I can feel my knees again, and my heart. It's the Year of the Dragon, I'm nervous uncontrollably. Night after night, each one passing by as I blink, walking, everything changing, changing from me, I can feel. Or maybe I can't. I keep my eyes open, and don't lose my breath, hiding in rooms and feeling and apart torn so vast. I look at my surroundings--I don't know where I am--I think in my last passage? passed on through a thousand miles and faces and every conscious and spirit. My last one. I can't hide, though. I'm dying, my last breath and vision being me fading through time--such a quick thing--spinning and burying the Earth As I Have Watched It Through The Years in snow and rain and static and the Dead--I can only stare at the streets. I'm with my girlfriend Marie, it's November 28th, 1975.

She says to me, "What's wrong? You're on the balcony alone. You've been there for hours."

Marie, hold on tight, please. I'm lonely, terrified, frightened--I made a mistake, life is coming and going with all radiance and fleeting and darkness and closing doors. I've witnessed my birthday from another room. I've thought of my life again. I've seen it, distorted, everywhere, in colors and in heaps of broken fragments, images and ruins. I need your help--

"Nothing, just enjoying the city. It's beautiful," I say. It's nightfall, blinding rain, in Paris. That's where we spent our vacation, me and Marie. I love her; she'll be gone the next morning.

Then I go back. Different times, warm times, times like beauty and solid, everything going racing and wayward that I can't see a color and then white then eyes pale and hyacinths all over the place--I see Marie in the distance, oh Yes like poised like drips like canvas all around surround floating laying, kissing me, the Day I'd wrapped gently around her now I can see it like a reflection, and O I can't take it--that very last look, her face vivid--and I can't look back and I can't look down or up--just her face, lovely, wrapping more and Closer and oh Yes all around me and my mouth is going insane so tired and limpid losing words and tract and

And I can see you so lovely so gracefully and yes I will kiss you and gently cradling and your skin like rose and blossoms with the smooth touch from an Eve in flesh shrouded red and raw and when I feel anything else running through my veins like clockwork oh Yes it blazes all lovely like a reflection and the last lonely place left to fade to is only the Clouds and Sea and oh yes with all the magic of the Rite of Spring and the fogs and streaks of August O but then now I see I see O Lord I see the one-thousand-one dead poses and faces like this marie not the one I know but her Beauty erased a lying a loft a living Girl a shape a branch and yet still loving in her stone face-without-a-face so Anonymous so Kiss Me Deadly leave me taking me sprawling around me creeping crouching touching growing up my skin and veins and conscious watching all the artifice leave me and all colors and thought coming up lashing melting seething roiling yes oh yes just like a reverie like genuine insanity haunting and boiling like sweet crazed Narcissus in all the Moorish vines so thorny so lost so complicated and savage rose gardens is all one can see like solid waves--in the distance, the bold-coifed Wooden Duke, the blue Queen, away from the warped, whirling war scape outside and cold and I'm taken back a bit now bundled away from all the rows and thorny laces of buildings among buildings way in the distance out the window like crooked Van Gogh details and the noir jagged edges and tete-a-tete feeling of Life and Hope that the neons floating down streets give you when all seeping and spraying in your eyes and O the tangled webs and thorns and spiders of the panes and glass and shards and sharp'n'smooth curls and spiraling rings of it all and O the strewn of flesh like insect and myth and negative space and city all coated and sprawled I'm going to explode and I look up to see every bit of sand, waves, bold lines and streaks above and beyond me, all those curves and rods very dizzying and all beating and throbbing like mad and my vision went like some frothing beast held and dissected under light and shape oh Yes I say and I tell you while being dragged through all the Andalusian flowers and raindrops beside and above me and the Universe and the Love that could've been it's all above me too like a rose growing and blossoming with all the melting grace of a Holy girl oh Yes I say and state as clear again so rapturously like a living poem and as I leave everyone and leave this illusion I can sigh and pause and oh my goodness it's all spinning and apart and transcendent like the first Clouds and Grace above a monochromatic world--a speck--Nothing in its embrace--I stop, gaze with the recollection of every gesture of love and love's death in my life--I'm somewhere, everywhere, from the cosmos to the sea--and the ****** comes before me--Marie, Marie--and I burst and split like dust--she speaks to me. She listens, she hears, the only thing, milky, porcelain eyes and skin like nothing else--I ask her where I am. She opens her mouth, bestridden and humbled like a shadow or a monument. Glowing like birth, she told me--solemn, silent, fuzzy--she told me that I'm dying. "Life is slipping--all of you, your raw hands, your face, your memory--everything is slipping, gently. You're being erased from the world, experienced, dismaying--you're far from it."

I asked, "Where?"

She stared, bled, disappeared into thin air and continued, "I always get lost, thinking or looking into the sea or sky. Infinite, lovely. It never ends. Never, ever ends. I look at it and cannot help but forget about every bit of land, forget any shore, stone, or war, or the clearest whisper--because it fades away from me, so clearly, and I can't help but stare down the endless waves and curls, because they go on forever. They're everything. They're all mist and unbearable, simple and Everything--I think you're at the end of Everything."

My last Beauty.
Brianna Oct 2015
I am cursing the rain in bright black and grey ink in beautiful cursive writing. I know you're questioning how black and grey can be bright but If you don't know, you'll never know.

I am painting sunsets on canvas but with pastels instead of neons. It's almost a bit too sad instead of a bit to happy; so fitting for a sun that's disappearing, right ?

I am swallowing pills mixing them with liquor, testing out theories to see if I can find the right way to write. All I see is blurry candle light and a dragon on my wall telling me my writing *****.

And it's sad to think how pessimistic this poem started but how within a 15 minute drive home I've come to see....

That all the rain cleared up the night sky and out came those glimmering ***** of fire we call stars. I've caught myself staring but I always have different emotions with each glance.

Tonight..I guess the world isn't so sad after all.
Adasyev Nov 2015
Water is reeked with nicotine
The souls are reeked with Ginsberg
but the heads and the thoughts have both pungent smell like
hot rooster comb flowers
I slept last time the day before yesterday
I saw the ****** Mary so beautiful
in that glow of blue & gold
                                           neons of Bethlehem
thumbing a lift near a cadillac with CD plate
& the jazz was caroling in wet sand
there were twelve bars in the honour of that boy
who has to come here one day finally, ****
he has to come just for jamming in this world
as it's said he could /!/ get all that mess of ours
off ourselves gentlemanly playing the part.
From Stop-time (published 1969)
grumpy thumb  Sep 2018
She sleeps
grumpy thumb Sep 2018
She sleeps
I'm outside under the eaves sheltering little from the rain
smoking late into the a.m. wide awake,
coffee for company and her scent
clinging to my skin.
There's isolated bouts of traffic  
late night revellers
returning
shadows
there to witness between
lamplight neons,
but I'm cocooned away
restless in the washes of rain
thinking of one in slumber within
the walls on which I lean
Budhaditya Bose Sep 2016
It was late at night, And
It was dark outside, where
the lights from the train were
flashing and flickering on
the underground walls.
The station arrived,
We were alone.
The empty station walls
were illuminated with
broken, glimmering neons
along with its buzzy sound,
As we were walking down
with our grasped hands
towards the exit on
a shutdown escalator.

It was so silent a time,
Even, our thoughts
could be heard, as
mine was saying
of the station. The station,
Where it all started someday,
ended once for a while,
But will now end soon.
For ever.

We left the station,
Where she went another way,
And I waited for a ride to home,
which never came, But
The streets, the bridge, The trains
were sighing on me. The ones,
I will never arrive, never ride.
Still, the long whistle, will
once more, force me back,
Down the memory lane
As a tear will wash the dust,
off my old shoes, that I will
Never wear again.....
When we were returning from a party to our homes, and she went off the other way, I was wandering through my vision, whats gonna happen soon. A story I know, We both decided. But still, tears don't need permission to fall. I cried. Nothing to do but feel the present good times, I still have......
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2016
artist working by candle light,
neon lights, coffee shop lights...

~~~

to, for & from SJR
~

this force,  
burnt soul kindling,
rampant urges that bow a man's
spine

write write rite right

consumption of the soul
straighten up, flex,
flex to the curvature of the Earths
invitation to

write write rite right

cast my eyes to the mountains,
from whence will come my help?

street prowler, heart growler,
Art Deco lampposts,
the mountain range of east seventy second street,
begs the baggers question,
each a post
begging each other,
from whence will come my inspiration?

lick the stubbled sidewalks,
fall down living in their caverned cracks,
light needed needy soft heated
orange and green pizza neons
say here,
if you see upon what be,
your homelands colors of veracity

from
candle light,
neon lights,
coffee shop lights.

all queries so queer,
so cheerfully answered
in the ***** air,
in warped woof of
city write lights

he goes home
in the dark of a green moon,
and its delighting inviting
moonlight,
he composes
what is his eyes have
decomposed into a single memory,

and is satisfied
unto sleep

praising the eyes,
light lidded, but eager closing,
that
had wisdom given
to observe
light various by which to

write write rite right




4/16/16
10:30am
nyc
artist working by candle light,
neon lights, coffee shop lights...

from a comment to me from
SJR

months ago, a title
  that lay fallow
until
I tilled
my city streets
chitragupta Oct 2021
The sky exploded red that evening
as the sun descended on the valley
and in the silhouette
I remember
the oil lamp lit up by her door

With cold winds and tired legs
I made it up the stony trail
and through the fatigue
I remember
her little hut puffing chimney smoke


A simple meal to fill me,
a fire to remedy the frost
and in the light of the flame
I remember
her eyes adorned with a desolate shine

Night fell soon after
stars danced in the naked sky
and as the moonlight kissed the peaks
I remember
her warm hands subtly grasping mine


On the morrow
we said our farewells
but as I started my descent
I remember
a sudden pang of insoluble woe

and I rushed back
the path of green and stone
with all the nerve I could muster
I remember
leaving a letter in a makeshift envelope


As often as I was entitled
I found myself back in the lone hamlet
as if to keep an unspoken vow, every time
I remember
her eyes of sadness, her smile of greeting

until the day we broke tradition
for there was no familiar face
where the trail ended
I remember
the cruel north wind cutting me open


A decade since,
of prayers to false gods in prodigal shrines
and with eyes shut
I remember
her hair billowing before the winter snow

In the monotony of city lights,
of skyscrapers and street neons
rising cigarette smoke up in the sky
I remember
the dance of the stars, the warmth of her hold


--

Every time
I dare go up the hill since
and gaze at the empty summit,
These memories seem to keep waning

So as I move across the highway this time
I remember
to forget the trail route to heaven.


-X-
love is not multi dimensional.
its just a multitude of single dimensions.

— The End —