Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
1
I am blinded by stupidity
as though drunk on it
stupidity made to look normal
to me
teetering on toes
unbalanced and moving along
this rough road
I am trying to find a way through to
myself
by the seat of my pants

a hand stretches to me
large and meaty, strong and gentle
yet I hesitate to take
it in mine
what woozy stupidity sees
is always wrong and never true

                    2
my heart is breakened
the way a wave breaks on a wall
shatters into tatters and shards
releases into the outstretched hand
all the hard surface it was
all the soft torn sheets
of love saved in hardness
all the gentled pieces of me sharpened
by betrayal
into shards
and the floods of salted tears
from verbal slaps and punches, stored
like holy water

my heart becomes a cabinet with locks
stuffed with
broken
sharded
pieces of me
in need of kintsugi

                         3
I float
am buoyed by the salted tears
in the Sea of Forgetfulness
the sea where sins are thrown
never to resurface
a riptide of Love
drowns me
tumbles me about
washes me clean
rounds and smooths
my edges
puts me back together
ashore - safe, sound of body
and mind

                       4
I find my way through
with help from
the Eternal Force
warm as heated, crystalline air
soft as a spring breeze
safe as breath on skin
secure as the spirit of a mountain


c. 2023 Roberta Compton Rainwater
 Nov 2023
Crow
among the lean and
narrow hours
when the brutal minutes
aggrieve
like the protruding ribs
of an emaciated animal

abandoned things shuffle
into dark unkempt little rooms
littered
with the manifested debris
of a life

unspoken thoughts
in rusted cans
stacked heedlessly
on overused shelving
bowing perilously under the weight

mangled hopes
kicked into the corners
stuck to the floor
foul and fetid
vitiated with wasted time

black mold
leaking from dilapidated hearts
creating pointillism art
across the sagging plaster
overhead

consuming an ersatz
Sistine Chapel ceiling

saints and angels
prophets and devils
sepia toned
in their water stain media
disappearing
into corruptions artistic virtuosity

only God remains visible
reaching out
to give life

if any are left
to receive it
 Oct 2023
beth fwoah dream
the night’s stones weigh
heavy like the cloud -

everything sinks.  

the cry of a bird -
eerie like a ghost -

the night speaks
of autumn, of windows
now shuttered to the
stars, of leaves painted
silver and gold.

a cat wires his claws to the
dark, drops down from a wall,
lands with his fur full of sky.
 Oct 2023
Nat Lipstadt
Why Men Cry in the Bathroom

For so many reasons.
I will tell you the why.
I think you know,
Or perhaps, you think you know.

Men are always O.K.,
Even when not.

We expect the worse,
Accept the worse,
Nonetheless,
We are forever unprepared.

Wearily, we cry,
In the bathroom, in private,
Lest sighs slip by,
We be unmasked,
Early warring, strife signs warning.

Copious, tho we weep
Before the mirror confessor,
It is relief untethered,
Unbinding of the feet,
An uncounting
Of beaded rosaries,
Of freshly fallen hail stones,
Of night times terrors
By dawn's early edition's light,
and welcomed.

But look for the mute tear,
The eye-cornered drop,
*** tat, that never drops,
But never ceases formation and
Reforming, over and over again,
In a state of perpetuity of reconstitution,

The tippy tear of an iceberg revealing,
And I see you peeping, wondering,
What is beneath


Look for:
the torn worm-eaten edges of spirit,
thrift shop bought, extra worn,
grieving lines neath the eyes,
where the salt has evaporated,
discolored the skin.
worry lines,
under and above,
browed mapped, furrowed boundaries.
the laugh line saga,
where better days are stored,
recalled, as well as recanted,
publicly, privately.

Why just men?

I don't know,
Perhaps,
it is all I know.


Jan 6, 2013
your effusive and lengthy comments are each a poem in their own right.  

Tinkered with June 22, 2013
With a push from Bala,
A serial peeper, thank God!
 Sep 2023
Evan Stephens
H----,
You leave for the broad south
in four days, to rasp a new curl

from old timber. Your destiny
is obliged to subdivide again,

fresh and wild. In the basement
of your goodbye I was filled

with a familiar senescence:
old wreaths, nerve-headed,

are hammered to inner doors
where I hide atomic thoughts

and hot-heart steam valves;
muffled click-clacks ricochet

in a containing pink sarcophagus.
How appropriate that I left

in the melting middle of the rain,
the road seething and spitting,

puddled rugs of mercury skating
across Saturday's lap.

H----, this life is strange and brief
& your escape to far sun country

is high adventure; but I lament
your absence, all the same.
Yours, Evan
 Sep 2023
A W Bullen
Long time - no sea

and feelings of the ocean-pull
have gained the upper hand,

There is nothing here
in writing,

just pigeon- breasted
righteousness,
increasing stipulations

All that meadowsweet
and moonshine ran,
to desert sand androgony

sank lower
than the daily dip
of fire's head in middle distance

Dizzy social densities
imported inner-city syndromes
proffer only impotence
of temporary reprieve

seems hard to bed
the disenchanted,
sickening for cigarettes
for solitary epithets

-ennui-

So, hide away
demands that breed
the need to know the answers

Been peeking
round the prism bars
empowered sense of self defeat

For sugared-melon hedonism
far too many lines have soured

Long,

Long time - no sea...
Next page