Unkind Dreams - Hello Poetry

Apr 2020

Jacob Dunstan

Storeys

Sheets of linen, palls of grey
Old bathroom walled
Scrawled dismay

School of halls, rooms of beige
Sheets of linen, palls of grey

Old bathroom walled
Stalls, dismay.

Memories of waiting for my father to finish up work as a teacher, I'd spend afternoons pensive, wandering about the mostly deserted schoolgrounds. There was a hymn like repetition to it all.

Apr 2020

Charles Bukowski

sit and endure

well, first Mae West died
and then George Raft,
and Eddie G. Robinson's
been gone
a long time,
and Bogart and Gable
and Grable,
and Laurel and
Hardy
and the Marx Brothers,
all those Saturday
afternoons
at the movies
as a boy
are gone now
and I look
around this room
and it looks back at me
and then out through
the window.
time hangs helpless
from the doorknob
as a gold
paperweight
of an owl
looks up at me
(an old man now)
who must sit and endure
these many empty
Saturday
afternoons.

Apr 2020

Agatha Prideaux

Dahlia Alley

Dried-out sweat, tired-out eyes
Placards coated in reds and blacks
Hair strands wet, vermillion skies
Whiteout sneakers underneath slacks

Chipping bricks adorned with dusk's glow
Soft thuds drown in bustling sidewalks
Concrete walls enrobed in guised woes
Like calls of Cincinnati clocks

Down the path's lead, an alley lies
Only known by a few handful
An easy shortcut for the wise
A definite route for the fool

Empty blocks pampered in ruins
Grow dahlia shrubs in feeble soil
Yet cherished by passing humans
As they perceive in gleeful toil

Click, clack. Tip, tap.
Echoing the narrow pathway
Click, clack. Tip, tap. Click, clack. Tip, tap.
Reverberating the walkway

Gush of summer coldness trickles
Playing with thin skin's hair to stand
Along evening's hazy drizzles
Until lips' beam's closed by a hand

Frozen. Motionless. Absolute.
Pulsating ears, vibrating fears
I, the troubled, straightaway mute
Searching for comfort in fresh tears

Frigid, sharp blade graze flesh through clothes
Algid, rough palms tightened their grip
With trembling mouth, whimpers in lows
Time's ticking, closer to the tip

"How dare you go against!?" he yells
His voice falling on deaf pavements
Alike encaging prison cells
Beneath wretched, worn-out basements

Writhed free from his desperate hold
Unclasped myself, away I go
Yet burly hands grab my shirt's fold
On my side, planting the grand blow

The night weakens, the knife deepens
Meeting downcast eyes as I stare
Remorseless, the demon wakens
No plans—this petty soul—to spare

Deafening shrieks still ring my ears
The masses' cries of unjustness
Voices crystal clear amid tears
Demur of headstrong robustness

Earlier's protest fresh in mind
Echoing as I reminisced
Realized the shrills' suit unfeigned
Are screams from my own throat's abyss

Away from the hustling streetscape
For anyone to hear my plea
In desperate crawls to escape
He lifts the wood in counts of three

Bashed head meet placards to shatter
Jagged splinters abrade my face
Entwined with rain's pitter-patter
To finish me off, just in case

Each and every breath nears to none
Boulevard of dreams come broken
The mist douse this limp body done
I take my last, eyes wide open

Dried-out life, tired-out cries
Pebbles coated in reds and blacks
****** palms rife, obsidian skies
Lone witnessed—mum dahlias on cracks.

Day 5 of #NaPoWriMo 2020. This woke me up all night, and definitely not regretting. Yes, I love dahlias.

#napowrimo #napowrimo2020 #dahlia #alley #suspense #sad #activism #****** #death #traditional

Apr 2020

Miracle Beyond Me

The Truth Beyond Reunions

I hide behind a great stone
hoping that the adoration
that my beloveds wish
to shower upon me
will be forgotten and neglected.

It is terrifying the manner
in which such sincere love
will purify me into anonymity,
just the same way tranquility
always threatens to do.

Aug 2019

Craig Verlin

A Shadow, An Image, A Man

It is an image of a man.
Behind him, a shadow stretched long and thick—
like tar. Like shoulder blades. Like a feeling you could lay in.
The shadow is a well, a pit, a grave.
The shadow is a hole the artist forgot to fill.
The image is a sadness, dark and shoulder-width.

The image is a child at the beach,
a toy plastic shovel in his hand.
The image is his brown cap with the strap and
the gold embossed letters “Lowry Park Zoo,”
the sand from the shovel flying forever
backwards without a glance—
tiny diamonds caught by the wind and small hands,
flowering downward into great mountains.

The image is a child in a hole shoulder-width,
sand in a landslide behind him,
resting for only a moment before cascading back
into the shadow again.

The image is a false progress.
The child is an old man, the beach a graveyard.
Watch the shovel. Watch the sand as diamonds as dirt as time.
Watch the wind. Watch the crooked hands.
Watch it trickle down again, again. The child is an old man.
The sand is a hole. The shadow is a sadness.
Do they lay in it?

The image is a regression.
In off-pitch impressions I wonder the comforts of the grave—
satin in the coffin. The feeling when there is none.
Do they lay in it?

The image is a man.
The image is a shoulder-width sadness.
The image is a boy and an old man laying in the same shadow.
The image is a hole I forgot to fill.

May 2019

Arcassin B

******* / A Love For One

By Arcassin Burnham

Spoken like a true iron monger, stilling thunder,
the pain and the gain of it,
you get any ounce of it,
just don't let the clowns get it,
they laugh and they're mad with it,
but theres no harm in it,
cause these fakes are counterfeit,
pulling through illusions like they're tug-o-war with
guiding force and true teachings of a king to hold the
floor,
prepare to leave defeated some more,
don't want scalawags and your ******,
real lessons of a *******.
don't care for mother's day at all.
father's day was put there to remind us.
that the ones that birth us will not find us...

/

..Is that the only thing you want me to do?
is walk all over you?
eat you like rations of food,
do what what all those men just did to you?
then throw away the crumbs like I never
knew you,
use to getting hurt so much huh?
I wasn't trying to catch a quick night stand,
because I really wanna be with you,
is it hard to have me confess what you mean to me?
in this moment didn't really think I would ever be,
In love with a special someone just like me in the streets.

©abpoetry2019

https://arcassin.blogspot.com/2019/05/*******-love-for-one.html

#words #******* #life #man #boy #love #another #harm

Apr 2019

Skaidrum

catalysts & hangovers

——————
i.
a dragon's claw;
merely leftovers of the moon
from last night's revolution,
and he beseeched a god long absent:
"how'd you forget my name in the grave
last week?"

ii.
i break bones like i break bread,
and hell recoils at the rare mention of me;
"—we're using blood for watercolors baby—"
'cause sometimes,
i don't think they understand
my heart.

iii.
god took the world to the doctor,
and asked for a cure he couldn't afford;
for the sun has already set in the palms
of my hands, o' father...
and there can only be so many
bones knitted together in this womb.

iv.
recall that,
reality only reveals itself when it feels
like making a fool out of someone;
and i don't know what stage of grief
i'm in—
or if I'm even in one
at all.

v.
i drink tea with ghosts
every other tuesday,
trying to make sense of it all;
because at some point,
—i'll stop eating bullets for
people's whose eyes
pull triggers.

vi.
mama always did raise me to be a sword,
and i killed when she told me to.
because, you see—
the fragile things die
in the cold, and what i find interesting
is that i've remained;
and ultimately?
it's a beautiful thing.

vii.
and when will i learn?
that mercy is false hope amongst all else, darling,
but enough already;
this poem's got universes full
of emotional baggage.

viii.
you said
you're a dreamer?
great, get in line kid,
you'll get a chance to change the ******* world,
just take a number
—like the rest of us;
but, then again...
"the world has always been ready
to receive you, hasn't it?"

#lost #drunk #and #long #talks #with #god

Apr 2019

Craig Verlin

A Posthumous Window

Thin tendrils of splintered glass.
An empty mirror reflecting
an empty sky of asphalt and
pavement and what once
was smoke but is now
only air again.

Thin fingers of shattered glass.
An empty mirror reflecting
an empty sky of sawdust and
strangeness and what once
was sorrow but is now
only me again.

Feb 2019

Craig Verlin

A Broken Dawn

A misting veil,
two incandescent lights
in parallel beams
reflect individual droplets—
a stream of not-quite-rain.

Among the morning shroud
live a host of furtive sounds:
gravel steps, inaudible susurrus,
a turning, silenced not-quite-heartbeat.

Oct 2018

Craig Verlin

Watercolor Lover

Paint ourselves a picture:
cold, white winds up against
winter coats and puffs of breath
in dotted lines leaving cursive lips.
Two pink hands held without
gloves, fingers twisted together
despite the cold.

Oils and pastels that blend bright
blue smiles and sharp white-teeth
fences, shaping toward the gilded
hues of a forever sunset that is
never quite ready to go yet.

Colors huddle in thick pools
of a future sketched out in long
ochre strokes on canvas—
a million shades of purple and
orange tell a life that
skipped its ‘if’ and moved
headlong into ‘when.’

A million colors, a million shades.
A sunset, an oak tree turned to autumn,
a crayon drawing on a refrigerator:
two big ones and three little ones,
a slanted red pentagon house,
a yellow scribble of fur.

Paint ourselves a picture: jagged dark lines. Sleepless ink that sits and thinks and can’t quite seem to get through to itself. Dreamless ink that runs down pages in opaque streams and gets nowhere. Thick, blackened tar that covers everything with shadows, covers everything with long stretches of black, a stain:
Hands held in the cold,
Red houses on a hill.