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Conor Letham Apr 2014
Coming home from a fair,
cusped between your lap
a globe of darting eyes,
your hands rested atop
the thin film of a world
as you endlessly peer in.
Are you scrying over
your future career?

Here a tungsten bulbous
body, a chunk of flame,
swills itself in spins
and mindless dances,
as you think you could
be so careless like them
to live hazily in a framed
bubble of treasured youth,

fed by some divine fate
looking over you. Golden
scales make your skin,
binds you as if you were
a chocolate in a wrapper
for people to circus over–
every flicker being edible.
Or maybe you're like

those tinned peach slices,
posing in a cage for all  
as a marvel to feast with
until you end up rotting,
there in your tomb-space,
muttering an open mouth,
“help me” before they serve
you up on a silver-lined dish.

I assure you, you'll forget
these childish thoughts
of aspirations and dreams
sooner than you think:
no matter how much
you think they want you,
I'll bet they'll let yourself
drown in coming weeks.
This one's a long one, and I apologise in advance for the kind of depressing topic.
What went from the subject of children getting goldfish from a fair (that, as everyone knows, don't last very long) became a critique about the aspect of female sexualization that some girls may grow up to want to employ the use of.
Terry O'Leary Jun 2015
Someday I'd like to wander free
like butterfly, like bumblebee,
perhaps to plant a willow tree
beside the silent solemn sea,

before these things exist no more,
from mountain top to shifting shore,
when, soon, bald eagles cease to soar
and build their aeries nevermore,

and fish forsake polluted streams
(where sulfur swims and typhoid teems
since no one really cares it seems)
to die inside our toxic dreams
while ice caps melt and winter steams,

and all the air surrounding reeks
as children choke, for no one speaks
of fracking wells or oily leaks
(Big Brother's silenced all critiques!),

and rancid rains acidify
so woods no longer multiply
(for God so wills, we can't deny,
which is, of course, our alibi).

And as the deepest ocean fills
with plastic bags, and garbage spills
upon the plains, across the hills
and turns to poison dust that kills
wild dingo dogs and daffodils
which sink in swamps’ forsaken swills,

the mocking bird makes light and trills
(midst waning wails of whippoorwills)
"Behold the surreal scene that chills
and greet the dread that death distills!
You've had your day with all the frills
that brought the flood and final ills
that can't be cured with bitter pills
nor yet undone with further thrills
of profit gained that grinds and fills
dead desert sands with dollar bills."

              EPILOGUE

Though swaddled still in infancy,
we feel we’ve reached our primacy
(aloof, though preaching piously,
disdaining deeds of decency)
and have no need of augury.

But in the pit of prophecy
the crucial questions seem to be:

“Is doom Earth’s fate, our destiny
to twist in tides of agony
destroying nature’s progeny
with no return a certainty
assured by death’s finality?”

and

        ”Should we plant a willow tree
to someday weep for you and me?”
Paul Butters Sep 2016
Languid lakes levitate my soul.
Mists hang low upon those hills,
While mountains scratch the surface of the sky.

The world is whole,
So full of thrills.
No time to reason why.

Galaxies spiral, out of control,
Stars swirling in milky swills.
Scenes I hope will never die.

Yet time, I’m sure, will take its toll.
And do whatever our God wills.
Oh no! I hear you cry.

Yet look at coal, or any tree bole.
And look at fields of daffodils.
Life’s next cycle is always nigh.

Paul Butters
Conor Letham Jul 2015
We own a pond;
mottled bluebottle,
flecked in freckles
when the sunlight
skims the surface
between the moss.

I dip a finger inside
and stir. A nebula
swills, swirling like
a whisk of spilt oil
from a water spot
sometimes found
underneath a car.

My fist plunges in,
embalming a gulp;
moss bandages
around the orb that,
withdrawing in drips,
I see a new world
set alight upon it.
Patina: noun
1. a film or incrustation, usually green, produced by oxidation on the surface of old bronze and often esteemed as being of ornamental value.

2. a similar film or colouring appearing gradually on some other substance.

3. a surface calcification of implements, usually indicating great age.
Julian Feb 2017
In the cavernous expanse gilded out of silicon robes of Greece flattened into the diminutive spaces between crags and rock, the swimmers of the natatorium embrace to plunge in transparency where they erred in covert chivalry
Knighted partially by association but yet unofficially born of sentiments rebarbative to the well-heeled, I linger like tar heels lamenting that the supernova eventually bequeaths the death of the ultimate chapel hill a shining city on a valley masquerading as a hill
From past and repast, the nurture of former presidents calumniates if also embraces the possibility of unfettered liberty and prosperous futurity, they simper in silent lugubrious reflection at lives shortened by liberty prolonged, of hearts opened but death devolved
Latitude and the caress of brazen attitudes corners the ***** in a tightened alcove of a restrictive forest of livid and limpid dastardly deeds, the arm of hunched idiots grazing with dumbfound idiocy at their own protective duty to shepherd the forest only for the singular trees as though disease itself is only a tease in a flirtation too exposed to believe
I joust with giants in a town that brooks lions and lyon estates with too many GrayZe superintending too many fain and valiant graves littering the stream besides the Pennsylvania forest in a past sunken in intrigue slipping in and out of an ethereal time invented by a harvest moon too attuned to be a lunatic any time soon
Whither is the outcome of a Shakespearean demise of prattle becoming the pasture of specious but solid skies, gleaming that a science fiction theater isn’t hailing a fuhrer or jingoistic furor any time soon hopefully I do too croon.
Militant tapestries of unhinged madmen craven in their disregard for every bent temptation, we witness the downfall of scrounged indecency and lonely hearted thieves contemned as they condemn perdition upon an unsuspecting victim
The victim is the hope of galvanized promise, a regal flutter of liberty tracing the skies elaborately for the flight plan most likely volitant and most destined to succeed
Corporate heads shake hands with desperate beds that Damocles himself wishes blood himself was yet shed or never shed but cutthroat collapse is avoidable with the recrudescence of provident relapse and rejoinder, asunder the ships may seem but now aimed so directly like a laser pointer
Titanic is a father to founding fathers only in the regress of avoidant times, sheepish of the whispered grime of inutterable blithe sublime time, limpid in partial acknowledgment of a wretched fate as avoidable as possible with the proper introduction and the right heeded date of a love better than choice wine and the wineskins of an indian province live as well just as much in a Skinnerian time.
Read the palimpsest, pittance proferred for every skeptical and undeclared bet that skewers the coffers of a criminal ring of Barnum Brothers in bed with burned asylum, a sanitarium wider and menacing like the most minatory lion
But the jaws of these aliens in time, whether specious or not thrill only those susceptible to the flattery of swank and the travesty to which we thank our deliverance and suspected exoneration
Flanking the outstripped malls that sprawl in the orbit of cities engorged like a skyscraping promise littered by Walled Ease and regaled bleats that belay down the cliffs of rigid insurrection only partially courageous to noble and partial inflections.

The courage of a wistful day slipping into the fathomless depths of dudgeon and pain the dungeons clamoring of insanity willfully reign, we clip the newspapers to the walls and scrawl our loves into the fallen scrawl.

Crimson red beneath the spangled spars, the author of debauchery immemorial that swills and wassails its own heartrending blues. And this movie squandered in limelight but buttressed by blithe regards for morally debased frights. Sting me the police and see the wasps nest infest your hollow diatribe to the extent you are hobbled in the depths, ennobled aboveground but nevertheless widely pitied.
The mathematics of love and loss, cravings for distrusted sacraments on a blue bus swiveling though the recesses of aleatory or controlled time. But then I lament that fully loved and fully lived is a fluff of sacerdotal emulation rather than the true authorship of heaven blanketing the earth.
Polished polity renegades and the rumpus of crumbled heaped ashes in a cremated time, where sand itself is eternal and sentience is somehow the door to nothing but despair, in their blinkered hubris that scales the lizards back in order to be lifted by olfactory graft.
In that light I see a bright whisked wind carrying the secrecy of portentous spared revelations and the spate of intermittent lightheardedness blows away my skepticism, but sides have been chosen and the bluster of the past emulating the culmination of an amenable future scares the birds from their chavish
Chiliads chill like excellency dissembled as the husk of an eternal monument of punctuated emphatic glory lingering above the ground with intransigent resistance to gravity and an slaver of better sincerity in the attempt to become beyond guileless tourists.
Dressed rankled blue swayed news, always operative in militant conformity to an eradicated sentience but simulatenously a wider sing song enlightenment. I struggle for words in this debased state of pitiable futures plastered all over every billboard that ever matters rather than the closure of closed doors trampled by intermittent dreams and seamless cows becoming the heifers of unified peace.
Smaller that the ants the infest the hills but more glorified than the quiet pristine ponds that outskirt the skirts that need less descent and more ascendancy.

Blitzkreig of cosmic wars swelters the torrid desiccation of a languor existing in human platitude but defiled of human gratitude. We swiftly wait for the erosion of sanity to become the author of a novella of craven deeds and bolted brimstone, serenading a rush towards sensation and an abandonment of rivers libation
Beneath which rivers flow, scrounged glowers endemic to a ruddy blush of sun-stricken grace, I clasp every remedy and every catholicon becomes more ecumenical and more rabid with stricken gaze of disordered streets in festivity but inured of nothing but lazy passions rather than sought rations
Dickens and hard hammers scribble the parched concrete with Chinese depths masqueraded as a suburban muse for canned applause and raucous crews relishing everything crude.
In the refinement the poet slings his garment over his shoulders and buys coffee for his ***** queen, and how to outfox such gallantry and how to temper so much enthusiasm. Only by the skullduggery of dead hands anointed with Greenwich bands.
MereCat Feb 2015
In my town
    The streets are paved
         With gold
              Because the rain
            Runs an infinitely unfinished race
        And the streets
   Are run thick with sky
       That swills above blocked drains
            And the street lamps
               Take a bathe in the puddles
                  And their lights
                       Unravel and swim
                     And sometimes
                  The wind gusts through
              And lacerates the
           Rivers of hoarded treasure
       So that our good fortune
           Is molten and fickle
             But somehow viscous
                  And the promises
                        Of our childhood
                            Wrinkle like
                               Aging skin

In my town
       The streets are paved with gold
           And so are the broken pieces
   Of their beer bottles.
ju Aug 2011
Beer trickles between my toes. And I stare. You.
You glance at the drink in your hand. Assess the damage.
Direction is lost to your possible moves.
Did you see me yet?
Behind this stranger. This quantity unknown.
A lifetime grabbed hold of me and
I ran. Now- faced with you- seconds keep splitting.
Did you see me yet?
Beer swills round your mouth. Then you swallow.

Recognition slips through your slurred-to-**** vision.
No harm done.
Molly Apr 2015
Paradoxical paradise
I love
drugs - and I hate them.
I hate
staring at myself in the mirror
of a dark bathroom
drowning in my own big eyes
stretched pupils
I hate the smell of *****
the chemical taste of MDMA
and the non-taste numbness
of speed
or *******.
I hate the emptiness,
I hate the crowd that swills around me-
hundreds of them
and I'm still ******* lonely.

But I love
getting so high that I'm just
numb
empty and lifeless and childlike,
kissing strangers,
forgetting the meaning of love.

So I love being drunk
I love casual *** and doing what I want
I love the facade
I love to forget everything else.
emily webb Apr 2010
02.
One day I will find my way back to normality
With a glass in hand, holding the swills of selves
Whether I’m loose or on my toes
I swing back and forth as acceptable
If anything feels balanced, it’s blasted
And you like a crooked smile before I scrap all scrutiny
And so do I, washing up on mornings like I’d practiced all my life
Jessica Fowler Mar 2012
Splash and slosh to be sipped.
Red as blood and just as thick,
it swills in the glass.
Glugging at the bottle neck,
smelling sour sweet of summer fruit gone stagnant.

Let lose between your lips
Roll its redness round your tongue.
Rough as tobacco, or black coffee
smouldering in your throat,
like coal or soot.

And fill yourself up! Pour
into yourself this other blood;
more and more.
Until your eyes are heavy
and deathly sadness flows.
Megan Sherman Dec 2015
to you my head
a tulip, bends
its' rolling tongue

in odd directions
where light wends,
akimbo to the sun

to you my heart,
a bulbous bud,
swills the sunlight shards

of love,
splintering the petal tongue
which longs to learn its beau regard

to you my bones
a scaffolding,
buttresses a staunch shell

inside we'll move
in lazy arcs
and dance ethereal
Nick Jan 2019
The rage that swills,
The calm that falters,
Ever do the emotions alter,
Mad one minute,
Sad the next,
Daring to be vexed,
Depression rolls in,
On a stormy cloud,
Making it hate the crowd,
Petty problems all around,
Nobody's love to be found,
Chaos insues,
Emotions misused,
The mind strains,
Inner conflict reigns,
Clouds of doubt circle high,
While you just stand by,
Looking in,
Wishing I could be out,
Heard enough of this clout,
Need to feel,
But I rant,
They say let go,
But, I can't
Let me know what you think.

— The End —