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7d · 176
Seraphine Scream
Surfing mind's midnight Sibylline sea
in my pandemonial Promethean quay,
caught in a creamy host, this countenance floats
-off the teary coast of my briny thoughts.

Once she waded pale down a ghostly vale
    -kept a frozen stare from an elven tale.
Tossed to a tempest then this enchantress,
    -strewn to spray, sanity no fortress.

              "How she stalled the spumy steeds
                                  storming her cherub cheeks!"
              "How she fought kraken fears
                                  from the rifts to the peaks!"

Neptune nabbed in the nooks in nymphal eyes;
silent seagull-cries swim the rain-sodden skies.
A Bragolin gleam on a Mona Lisa meme;
hanging loose on the brim, succumbs to a stream.

Cast to the thalassic tides of this mystery,
        bobbing in memory's Venusian locks.
How this Seraphine gaze knocks in query-
        on the Lethean tyranny of clocks!

Locked in a bottle "in an Apollonian deluge,"
    truth on Pandoran shores shares no refuge.
Lost in a look "dabbed with a Babylonian gleam,"
    what she'd screamed to say, now nothing than a dream.

Tossed to a tempest in her Seraphine scream.
Home now Avalon, beyond the creamy rim.
Lost on a gaze in an Olympian gleam.
This silent scream in my Sirenic dream.

27/04/2025
Hirondelle
This is on a live, Bragolin version of Mona Lisa I saw and have ever been haunted with: a version with eyes pooling with chagrin yet in a cryptic Seraphine chemistry. 'Bragolin eyes imbued with pain.' Yet, both serenity and desperate anguish which I have little idea as to why it was there pooling in the eyes had somehow managed to be in the same two pools altogether.

Ever since my curiosity had the better of me to steal a furtive glance at this person, who I knew wouldn't rather me to have seen them in the plight, I have been cast to a bitter mental tempest, rudderless, at the sporadic hauntings of the moment.

We were in a place with other people, and they were summoned to go out. When they came back, they went to their place as if wading in the blur of their eyes. Ignoring would have been unkind, yet seeing, not even watching, would have been heartbreaking. What would you have done? Walking out was not an option. You knew nothing -nothing more than you were the best person to help, but the last one to do so all the same.

My furtive millisecond glance was met with a steady poignant gaze, screaming volumes from across an unknown sea at me. It had been there for a time and I don't know how much it lingered afterwards. It was not meant to be seen but it was necessary all the same.

Not being able to help, my conscience has ever been in a bottle at a troubled sea with the deafening silence of the scream.

Human expressions are so subtle, or as far as we prefer to look at the world with blind imagination, they will always be poetic. The real question is about where we would rather live. Not in a rabbit’s hole, but not without emotions, either.

Some Cultural Notes about the Images I Used:
Giovanni Bragolin is the Italian painter famous for the haunting portraits of crying children he painted.
Venusian locks are inspired by Boticelli's iconic painting of the Greek Aphrodite (one born from sea foam) under a Roman name (Venus)
Apollo is referred to for his poetic prowess
Other mythological images include Sibylline for mystery, Promethean for the pain knowledge brings, Seraphine for angelic, Lethean for slipping into oblivion, Pandoran for chaos and destruction, Babylonian for forbidden nature of things, Olympian for divine qualities and Sirenic for troublesome nature of things.
Apr 19 · 284
Frantic Fret
How we never relent believing
     even in the clutches of doubt!
    
How we withold living
     -without the hues of dreaming  
     -and the nurturing arms of loving,
      both nursing suffering into healing!

How we move the quill to see more,
     and more to love what is essential in things,
     -even the things that fall and crumble
     amidst the ravenous roar and the rampant rumble!

How we defy the Frantic Fret of a hollering sky
     with a hued cry hovering over this raucous choir!

19/04/2025
Hirondelle
A dutiful reaction to Patty m on her 'Frantic', whose vibrant voice has ever been well carried above all tumult and thunder cajoling many fellow poets.

Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's Amor Fati: "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.”

The more we write, the more we learn about the hodgepodge ensemble and discover a voice within; then, the less we start despairing and the more we begin to love. Thus, we raise our voices above the cacophony.

How our ink strikes to and fro;
Above dark skies wielding light,
no one is alone!
Nov 2024 · 462
Poetry Popping Pillow
Arif Hifzioglu Nov 2024
What a day!
Cats and dogs at a gray soggy play!
And I,
wet like a rat in a bucket emptied spray,
afloat in some other soggy boggy day
when love sloshed in a dismal pool of gray,
floundering in a fiendish feline fray,
stuck and struck in her seismic, sonic sway…

Oh, that catty countenance with fanged sustenance,
turbid turbulence and lurid malevolence,
that midnight ambulance in horrid remembrance!

Hunting stare hunched in her browbeating brow.
Puny purring powwow met with caterwaul and yawl.
Sweet savannah meow gone in  hellish growl.

Alarming anger on an angular arch.
Claws bared in a mad menacing march.
Crisscrossed with a seeping scratch and such!

What a row!
Rage, a full bent feline bow,
ready to lash a claw; or ready just to throw
fire flicking arrows through two slits narrow,
hissing, spitting, screeching and scratching
over my poetry popping pillow!

           Ripping, rooting, pawing and clawing
           my chuffy, puffy, poofy and goofy
           poetry popping pillow!

Insults stood on end at verbal animosity.
No reciprocity to my purring grandiosity.
No curiosity to quell her feral ferocity.

Such feline a fever...
I’m aligned to see cats never.

My cattish brunette, now a silhouette,
bitter a vignette from seismic a duet,
smoldering a briquette on blank a palette.

24/11/2024
Hirondelle
Written for a good laugh. I'm curious about the speaker, though. Has he given up so easily? :)
Oct 2024 · 1.1k
Heavenly Honey
Arif Hifzioglu Oct 2024
Once, stood I
by this sleepy sunset sea.
His sour gaze gone,
the sun;
eventually on his knee,
in mellow mutiny
upon molten melancholy.

Calmly, buoyed he
her creamy dreamy canopy
in colored, cuddled company
on the momentary brink
of honey coated eternity.

Gently,
         the ***** of Rán
his flames of mead swam;
         Kvasir's mythical lore,
         dripping the mead of yore
o'er her pewter poverty
mulling the briny sore
of this late afternoon sea
from divine a golden door.

Thus, poetry laden
this marine a maiden,
now merry and awaken,
mulled with love molten,
sprawled into eternity,
in resplendent mutiny,
haunting and holden
with heavenly honey…

03/11/2024
Hirondelle
Rán is a mythological Norse goddess, whom I alluded to with deference when I had to close in on the intimacy between fire and water in the poem. Though not related to the depicted serene panorama in the poem, she has nine daughters, who personify waves. Hence, the phenomenon of the 'ninth wave', I guess.
Kvasir, on the other hand, was born of the saliva of the two warring families of Old Norse Gods, Æsir and the Vanir. When the war eventually ended, Gods from both lineage chewed berries and spat out the mush into a cask. This is how god Kvasir was created in the tale 'Mead of Poetry'.
Being the wisest one in Midgard, extraordinarily perceptive, sophisticated and poetic, he traveled far and wide, learning evermore and spreading his art. As fate would have it, his itchy feet brought him to the two murderous dwarfs Fjalar and Galar, who killed him afor his divine blood. Then, the notorious duo mixed it with honey, thus creating the Mead of Poetry.
Odin eventually redeemed Kvasir's legacy, the Mead of Poetry, after long a journey through testing tribulations. Since then, it is believed that Odin shares part of this drink with the very privileged human beings, bestowing upon them the divine ability, poetry.
Etymologically, Norwegian 'kvase' and Russian 'kvas', both mean 'fermented berry juice'.
:))
May 2019 · 1.9k
The Boy and the Girl
Arif Hifzioglu May 2019
Boy:      You love me back...
              you do, don’t you?
Girl:      I can’t be so bold,
              neither can I sling a single ‘not’,
              nor hurl to you a hurting bolt.

Boy:      Won’t we meet again by the grace of Luck?
              Won’t these ticks of Luck tock us a tittle knock?
Girl:      My time for you won’t tick that tock,
              nor shall yours be the tickles you sought.

Boy:      Don't let tiny ticks clip love with cutting clicks.
              Every scented rose sure has its piercing ******
              though love's tricks shall, too, mull soul's briny creeks
              for a rainbow glow on your rain swept cheeks.

Girl:      Don't you see we're buffed in baffling bricks
              and Time has caged us in her muffling ribs?

Boy:      But, I guess you know of poems of want,
              lines love-wrought which Defiance sought?
Girl:      That, too, I can tell you not
              whether I can read a single word love wrote.

Boy:      Love’s capriciously wrought in this plot.
              You can’t be of the same selfish sort!
Girl:     .....

Boy:     No, a shimmering story bestowed
             from the gone old days of gold...
Girl:     : ))

Boy:     Why! Shouldn’t smiles bend Time’s knee
             and in glee thus be free?
             Could love only ever be a wee old fantasy?
Girl:   .....

Boy:     We can speak of it not.
             All the same, can deny it not.

             Longingly locked in Luck’s ill-fitting frock!
Girl:   .....

Boy:     My heart is bold; can’t tame it, I fought.
             And, without it, would I be the man I sought?
Girl:   .....

Boy:     With or without you I’m not.
             Blind a barbed knot!
             How I wish I cared not a single jot.
Girl:     That’s a terrible knot.
             You must curl to it not.

Boy:     Yes, no;
             if you here shall ever be not,
             and Time’s silver I sought
             in your hair be forgot,
             I’ll upon thee more love allot.
Girl:     ?!

Boy:     The stars in thine eyes I’ll never be.
             Nor the silver in your hair shall I stay ‘n see.
             But,
             there’s this in me Time is green with envy:
             this deity on the knee who loves loving thee.
             This heart for thee shall heed no decree;
             that which makes this sorry boy you see
             the very divine friend that he will ever be.
Girl:      : ))))))
Fate and the human heart are enemies; their battles we fight.
Dec 2018 · 2.1k
FireFlies
Arif Hifzioglu Dec 2018
There in FarBliss,
the land fed by dreams
where nothing poofs amiss,
there are sauntering ThinkSees:

-the children of ValleySeeps
who sip, sip, sip grins
from the sad, sad, sad streams
they call TearsTearsWeSeizeSeize.

In River ByeYou, they snare SighWoeWoo
and like to bathe in the sea LonelyBlue.
How they climb the hazy Mount NothingTrue,
to pray the dour deity NothingButYou!

When they play,
they chase FireFlies
on the wings of ButterRhymes;
they skim the gleaming ImagePools,
under the bright moon LadyMoves,
then plunge into the lost lake LetLoose.

Their day-flight’s a FeatheryFrenzy
on a gull’s SillySyllableSpree;
to catch the lofty eagle HearMe,
they test the terrible talons TearMe.

They labor behind the FathomFalls,
spinning FrothyMusic from TumblingBoughs
mulling melancholy in MoonlessGroves;

or, spin HeartStrings for all groans and grins,
dip them deep in dye in dongs and dings,
darning dreams by star-sipping streams,
struming the strings Nothing'sAsItSeems.

When the digy-dongy nights come
and you hear HeartyLonelyChime,
seize the sizzle of the time
and let it loose in your rhyme;

‘cause like Time, FireFlies.

©️Hirondelle (01/12/2018)
I love my fire, keep it dear and write in rhyme, so it never flies.

I know it doesn’t sound like Hirondelle; he let loose the child inside to write this, and I dread the boy played it rampantly. I hope it’s not a disappointment...

— The End —