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in the blindness of night darkness is a form of light falling into itself
there's so much to be seen but the eye has blue limits
I watch how I am pushed inside
by the centrifugal force of breathing
these women in me, known and unknown
they insist, whisper, shout, smile, dance, cry, they carres the echoes of shadows they want to tell me
what love is in the dreamed language of the blind
I say to them: no, you don't know
what love is
Yet
We play on the corner till the streetlights thin
and stars pinprick a corkboard sky.

Dinner is anytime: bologna on white;
Kool-Aid cut thin with tap.

No hurry home unless for the news -we don’t.
We want what’s coming, not what’s been.

Paper fortune tellers flutter open / close.
She writes the answers first.

Lift one flap: your dog dies. Another: a prince.
Another: best party in town, no dress required.

He lifts a flap: her name-
“meant for you,” her sister whispers.

Then rain- blue-lined paper caves;
ink loosens, futures wash mid-fold.

At This Street & That Road, a drunk witch
swears Saturn and Jupiter will make us rich.

She forgets conjunctions come every twenty years.
Lunch money turns to lottery slips.

Rounding the corner, the futures
sign their names where ours should go.
There was an older man who was not very liked.
He sits and draws cartoon characters based on his childhood abusers, often saying their names out loud.

He remembers people who have passed away and calls them "*******."
He sometimes feels like crying but holds back, worried he might not like the taste of his tears.  "his tears taste like bitter memories of his parents' criticism:

I haven’t seen my friend Eugene for several weeks. He is in the hospital with pain no one can explain. I miss our chats in the dayroom. I especially loved seeing his face light up when we talked about his Aunt Harriet and Uncle Jack, about her favorite cookies and his fishing trips at the lake with them.

Eugene never had good things to say about his parents. His father told him to ******* to relieve pressure, and his mother told him to run from the bullies. His therapist constantly told him he wouldn’t amount to anything, which made him angry and sad.
He sometimes wishes he had never been born because he feels rejected and looked down upon.

I care about my friend. Sometimes we talk about poetry. I gave him my favorite pen to help him express his feelings.
Poetry is important to me, and I choose to show empathy.
We need to share the stories of those who cannot defend themselves.

That was in 2017; he is long gone, my friend Eugene; however, I will never forget our small talk.  

Continue to rest in peace, my dayroom friend.
The living reality of a metaphor, almost every ounce in-taken,
Every nuance, every pronounce, measured, weighted and weighty,
Fluid or firmament, each encapsulated, prior to release, scaled,
Tabulated, ordered, noted, recorded, and ultimately judg-ed.
Totality of it all, the varied quantities of the ingested nutrients,
even the forecast of the future, if every day was a metaphor for
like today

DO

I speak of the day's headlines?
Of the quantity and nutrition that passes through my lips?
Or
The surround sound of the surrounding sounds of this day,
the flocks of bandito geese who exist only to torment,
the landscape working crews, with their tools, like a 7::00an wake up buzzing about, for the entire street, going house to house, looking for itinerant grassy knolls of patches of bright green,
overnight sprung up and needy to be
guillotined,
laundry to do, rugs needy for clothesline screaming/beating or merely super fast vacuuming;
they, hawking their skills available for the old and infirm,
or the fatty catty cattle lazy, (somewhere in there is moi);
and the decibels of their machines, the rat-a-tat of their rapido, voluble speech that feeds me poetry by the ounce of their laughter, but more exactly of,

What do I speak, to what do I allude?

Why all and none, everything and specifically nothing,

for the metaphor is meta! (1)
It is life itself, from the quarter teaspoon
to the overflowing bath, it is life at its most incremental,
the moment
of flushing face,
the second
of ah ha! recollection, the,
long term trends
trending,
the flatline of my EKG,
the weighty pronouncement of my talking scale (you've been bad),

IT IS THE EVERYTHING
that is measurable, weighable, isolatable, defined; 
it is our existence of our each & every of action and inaction strung together like a necklace and a chain

We are metaphor, reality, is, the script,
which is the product of you.
scriptwriter…/
(1) Meta …refers to the prefix "meta-", meaning "about," "change," or "beyond". In a more specific context, "meta" can describe something that is self-referential or reflective, like a joke about jokes
I hope you didn’t come here,
To be satisfied,
By pretty words so plain.

I do not entertain.
I share the experience,
No matter how profane.

Did you suffer?
Was it a burden?
Do you regret not seeking entertainment,
In prettier things?

Those who started at the beginning,
Why did you stay,
Until the end of this temporary gaze,
Into what persists for eternity?

Fate got what she wanted. She has all his attention.
The Wind got what he wanted. Oblivion remembers the beloved.
Alcyone and Ceyx got what they wanted. They’ve been reunited.


Everyone got what they wanted.

Does that make this a happy ending?


Or was it,

Too unsatisfying?


Were you hoping for someone to pay?

Were you hoping for a victory?


Did you,

Get what you wanted?


Could we say the journey was worth it,
For this fleeting glimpse into eternity,
Where the story does not please,
Where it repeats with little progress made,
Towards that resolution, indefinitely delayed?


Everyone got what they wanted.  

But no one is happy.

So tell me,

Is this still a happy ending?


Then what does it mean?
What did they expect?
They got what they can.

If that’s not enough,
Then shame on them,
For being such idealists.

Ungrateful brats.
I’m sure some would argue that.


This is the best they can have.
No resolution, no justice, no revenge.
Just a legacy filled with inaccuracy.

Together at last,
Free to do as they may,
But not as they please.

Is that the compromise?
To be free to choose,
When there is only,
One choice?


But they all,

Got what they wanted.


BUT NO, NOT LIKE THIS.


They got what they wanted.

But no one is happy.


So can we say,

This is a happy ending,

Or not?


It doesn't matter.
Just that it's over.

Except, it's not.
Only for us.


Not even for us,
Not when we return to reality,
And we all see,
It is us trapped in this cycle repeating.


Go and search for your own answers,
In what's real and what's not,
Through joy and through pain,
They are all the same.

Reflect and recall, who does the thinking.
Reflect and reclaim, who does the talking.


Stop gazing upon their story.

It will go on,

Like this,

Forever.



But you,
Are not forever.

Your gaze is needed elsewhere.
THEY GOT WHAT THEY WANTED.
THEY ALL GOT WHAT THEY WANTED.

IT'S A HAPPY ENDING.
ISN'T IT A HAPPY ENDING AFTER ALL?

THEY DO AS THEY MAY. I WRITE AS I SEE FIT.
I DID WHAT I NEEDED, BUT NOT WHAT I WANTED.

YOU GOT WHAT I GAVE.
ARE YOU ENTERTAINED?

I TOLD THE STORY AS IT HAPPENED.
YOU READ IT WITH YOUR OWN FREEDOM.

THEY GOT WHAT THEY WANTED.
YET WHERE IS OUR HAPPY ENDING?

WHAT WAS THE POINT,
IF NOT FOR A HAPPY ENDING?

WELL, I’M NOT THE ENTERTAINER,
I’M JUST THE REPEATER.

YOU'VE REACHED THE END OF YOUR JOURNEY,
BUT NOT YOUR DESTINATION,
BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST.

I’M NOT THE ENTERTAINER,
I’M JUST THE REPEATER,
AND I’VE GIVEN MY WITNESS STATEMENT.

SO TAKE ALL YOUR DISPLEASURE BACK,
TO THE WORLD FROM WHICH YOU’VE FLED,
AND CAST UPON THAT WORLD, ALL YOUR JUDGMENT.

I’VE REPEATED THIS STORY SO YOU WILL NOT REPEAT THIS TRAGEDY.
BUT YOU WILL. YOU WILL.
BECAUSE THIS IS NOT A STORY. THIS IS REALITY.

I HAVE WITNESSED IT.

AGAIN. AND AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

SO YOU HAD BETTER LISTEN.


https://hellopoetry.com/collection/136314/the-wings-of-waiting/
new day, long time
no write, not right,
but humming flushing rhyming
sensory compulsion asking why,,
being bummed rhymes with hummed
and the kissing cousin connectivity, cannot
bee denied, delied, nor contradicted,
the humming is brief,
the bumming is long in the tooth
Stumbling into ancient scripts, authored a decades plus ago,
ago being a modifier of time quantities, minute or large, unspecific
without an objective adjective additive, that faucets a stream of an interlocutory elocution of a batter of rooted emotional histories,
but not histrionics

fanciful words for dredged up memories, acute, but tarnished,
powered yet worn by a cousin of ago, a/k/a,
age
and yet
renews as of,

at this very second, as if it were a first, a tumult of visions, swelling of remembrances, embodied scars, and I weep anew but not
for me, as much for the resonating simpatico souls with whom
they even  now vibrate with resonance of the immediacy of
If not now, When?

Aside: The exterior environment is noisy wet pelting of thunderstorms and ****** sheets of bulleting rain, piercing projectiles, but I am safe in the sunroom, sadly happy my dog is no longer here to shiver and tremble, cuddle and be soothed by steady stroking

But I am here, wrestling with this dredging operation, digging up
tons of sand that require dumping, and I ask, inquire, beg:

Who will take this detritus off my hands, once more, now uncovered,
now recovered, the soil is already soaked and can absorb no more,
the soul is already soaked and can absorb no more, the weakened
heart, damaged and occluded, suffer cannot bare twice the

outrageous misfortune

of unbared recollections, twice, or thrice, and I feel myself drowning in revisiting pain, **** **** ****, these old poems, not nuggets, but boulders dropping from night skies, shot from a pitching machine, without letup, piercing of agonies that once ago  
freshly desecrated and decorated my basic training in humanity.

Enough whining:
I wrote those poems to
eject out those pains,
and I write this now, once more,
to realize that so so many still face
uncertain and unrelenting similarities,
doing their own sums,
and I wish them easing,
strength to compose and
thereby dispose of
the ineloquent
and eloquent
words of staining suffering


3:30am
Thur
July 10
2025
Shackled each one hand and foot
They’re loaded roughly onto
Transport planes like cattle
On their way to slaughter.

No luggage goes aboard with them -
Not a toothbrush in a pocket
Or a candy bar to hold them.
Were they even notified- of course not.

What country are they they going to
And what is it they’ll do there?
Who is going to meet their plane?
Who will remove their shackles?

Are there concentration camps
For lack of else to send them?
Will they be caged like chicken farms
Or stacked like hay in barn lofts?

Music for this grim tableau:
“The Plane wreck at Los Gatos”
Sung mournfully by Joan Baez
Who’s seen this debacle before.

Who ordered up this travesty -
This evil on TV Paraded?
Why was there no better way
To send unwelcome people home?
                   ljm
The above song is also called "deportees" and is from the 1960's when they were deporting farm workers from California. Some things never change.
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