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Jon Martin Dec 2012
Say it to my face.
Most venoms are potable.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
How would you behave,
If the world would end tonight ??
Would you tell youself you've mended
Pretend everthings alright ??
Have all your thoughts been righteous ??
Have you prayed to the right god ??
Have you had enough that's normal,
Have you had enough that's odd ??
If all the journeys end
In one swiftly sweeping smite,
Would you cry a lover's tears ??
Or would you try to last the night ??
Can you look me in the eye
And say there's no one else ??
Because if you can I'll let you
Watch me end the world myself....
Jon Martin Dec 2013
Soothe livid thought
give cool, quiet birth.
See with one time,
across solitary dawn.
You voice sound,
yet give rain color.
This storm rhythm,
meager, though soft,
over stone could not hold.
Brilliant music beside,
celebrate every drink of wicked wind.
Imagine red.
Taste. Dance. Sing.
Through winter night,
and summer morning.
Slip by like water,
not under myself,
or beneath love,
but remember after who & what you are.
dance through change,
& leave life happy.
When music is poetry,
hear with love.
A heart must speak
between language & thought.
A poet will use
lightning & dirt.
Sound is vision,
light is word...
This was, no lie, written on a magnet board with the little word-magnets people buy for their refrigerators(I left the ampersands for authenticity). Poetry and art are everywhere...if you look for them. It was actually done in the art studio at a UW(isconsin) extension college, that was, I guess, the inspiration for it.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Tracing every line
Of the picture that you drew,
The flesh I'd give, to have you back,
The needle digs into.
I will gladly bear the mark
Of the burden that you bore,
I'm sorry if I let you down,
The price I'd pay for one day more...
It's too late now to show the things
I tried so hard to hide,
I'm glad I said I love you,
While you were still alive.
Jon Martin Dec 2013
Have you ever had really high hopes for a thing,
And then, when it happened, didn't know what it means ??
And you find your mind running to every extreme
But somewhere on the way, you just left the scene.
All these delusions, I call self-identity
And something that's lost, in the path, right ahead of me
Terrible nightmares, my own mediocrity,
Fighting for air, as I'm losing my sanity.
Hoping for hope, or for something forgiven
Losing my faith, or having it driven
There's only so much, one mind can envision,
And mine's all but full with the ***** I have given.
This terrible feeling called dying inside,
The sweet, sweet release of losing your mind,
These sharp, broken bits are the dreams that you find,
And sometimes I wonder, which one was mine ??
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Someday, you will find these words,
And I hope you find them wise.
Someday you will read this verse,
With old, and tired eyes.
One day I will write a song,
That's happy, just for you.
And if you've ever known me, love,
You'll see me in that, too.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
I had to write for you, love,
Because sometimes a father must
Hide the things that hurt you,
And your pure unflinching trust.
The gentle hugs, the softest laugh,
I take in all I can.
But now I must be honest, dear,
Your father's just a man.
I've loved and laughed, cried and hurt,
I've seen miracles come true,
But know this child, from all I've seen,
There's no miracle like you.
I'll always try to be there,
To be everything you need
I'll always fight beside you,
And for you gladly bleed.
But when the watchman comes,
And it's time to say goodbye,
Know this then, when I am gone -
You're the reason I'm alive.
This was written in a very dark time. The last two lines are pretty literal.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Spend another night in dreaming,
Someday you'll be here.
Spend another day believing,
Love will dry my tears.
I'll tell you all what I've discovered
Lying here tonight,
That all the dreams that I have stolen
Cannot make it right.
Another chance to break tomorrow,
Waking with the sun.
Another chance to sleep forever,
Looking for the gun...
Jon Martin Oct 2017
So, we must, again, face the inevitable human dark age. When the filthy, diseased hand of dogma closes it's fingers around the throat of logic and reason. Science bowing it's weary head to the masses of religious ignorance, and the intellectual giving way to the impassioned imbecile. What course is reason, when we can simply shout down that which disagrees with our bias, and predetermination ?? Why think, when we merely have to scream ?? What apes have we become that volume supersedes reason ??
Another one I will add to, as I see fit. I do write politically every now and then. The extremism I see in our society chagrins me, and breaks my heart. I do not agree with either side. So much is so wrong....
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Mind bent - Mood altered
It's all because of you I faltered.
Needle digs - ease the pain
Feel the burn, forget the stain.
Morning dawns - Daylight starts
With stolen dreams from broken hearts.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
This coffee-stained late night existence, an experiment
in progressive technocracy. An amazing, affluent proverb
of modern disfunction. So many late nights swilling the
mis-brewed staple of societal vampirism. Those forgone,
unsung antithesis of the conscious, diurnal homosapien.
To pretend problems non-existent, to daydream as that lazy
star sleeps, to truly feel sibling to the moon. Mood is the
monster that begat me, these creatures of the ambience of
dark. Nowhere - NOW. I give thanks to have finally hidden
from the beast that can't find me. I am what I decide, a dawn
of infinite potential, and the opportunity to spend an entire
night in preparation....
No, seriously, this has no title.
Jon Martin Jul 2013
It was like holding everything I'd been seeking,
It was like having a lost part of me asleep on the pillow
It was like a million lost dreams coalesced into the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen
It was like nothing I had ever dreamed
It was like nothing had ever gone wrong
It was like some gift, given by an uncaring universe, just to make sure I was ok
It was like I had never been awake, and every cognition was sleeping next to me
It was like I had never even known what beauty was
It was like a conspiracy of everything I never deserved
It was like watching everything I ever wanted walk away
It was like losing things I never knew I wanted
It was like pretending you were with me now
It was like forgetting your smell
It was like wishing I knew you...
Jon Martin Dec 2013
What happens to the stars when there are no words
to write, no songs to sing, no pictures to paint ??
What happens to the stars, when thought stops, and
flow breaks, and vision blurs ??
What happens to those great galactic giants, when
the world turns upside down ??
The sojourners of galaxies, spinning time itself out
before us, in the wake of eternity, left silent in
some poets dream...
Titanic powers of fusion fire, burning for the
lifetimes of a thousand humankinds, churning
with the gravity and desire to hold the universe
together, invisible,
because the painter cannot see...
Stardust, everything, the gears of immortality
turning useless, marching on in solid state
remembrance of romance, and lust, and love.
What happens to the stars when you leave
a poet speechless ??
What happens to the stars,
when you leave me nothing to say...
Yep, TOTALLY written for a girl.
Jon Martin Dec 2013
And then she knew,
And all of a sudden
Every touch
meant something different.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
So many things I thought I'd find,
But never here, and never mine.
Left alone to find my way,
These prices I could never pay.
So all I ask is help me stand,
'Cuz I don't know how much I can.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
I can't bear the weight
Of all these things inside.
The rivers made of all the tears,
That I still haven't cried.
The dreams that haunt my longing
The fears that I can't see,
The mountains all are lain to waste,
And all that's left is me.
Jon Martin Dec 2013
And then you stopped and smiled, pretty girl,
painted in blonde hair. "Pretty city", she says,
and the only place my mind turns is the lonely
light, left on in the apartment across the avenue.
What if it was our light ?? What would our world
be, if that lamp lit our home ?? These vacations
we'd taken, memories we'd shared. The sand of
the thousand beaches we'd walked on, hand in
hand. That light left on, after the fight last night.
When we walked away. her clothes still on our
floor. Her smell...still in our bed.
Notes from an actual event. Sometimes this happens when people say "Hi" to me...
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Tonight these pictures flashing past
Souls repose, and lying last,
To quiet down my minds desire,
And let this silent prayer expire.
My heart keeps pumping, blood and thought,
How never any ending wrought
The dreams I chased in days of youth,
And in this ending softly soothe
My bent and old, and brittle mind,
This peace brought forth for just a time.
As silent pounds the rain outside,
So my giving slowly dies.
To pour myself from out this cup,
One silent tear seems not enough...
I do not remember writing this...thus the title. Kinda wish I did, tho'...
Jon Martin Dec 2012
I can't begin to tell you
All the pain that haunts my night.
I feel my dreams, they're breaking,
And falling from my sight.
If there were any way to take it back,
Anything to say,
The thousand tears I've bled tonight
Would drown the words I pray.
Just some old scribbles...
Jon Martin Dec 2012
Don't pretend
Don't sit here with your prtty eyes
and bore me with your sentiment
I've got a million miles to run tonight,
and no idea where my baggage went
Too many turns to try to hide
From things inside my lost lament
I'm drowing in the things you say
with no hope to save my precident.
Am  I lost, am I the one
that just can't start again,
Or is it you and your paltry lies
that brought me to this end ??
I'm not the type to run away, I love too much to fight,
But I've no other choices, if I survive tonight.
So this wall I've built, and the things inside,
I blame it all on you,
I'd try to bear the burden,
but what good would it do ??
It leads me to another time, another waiting end
Another lonely evening,
trying to pretend.....
It's nice to have a forum like this.....something hits me, and I can literally just regurgitate it onto the screen.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
It's safer this way,
If we don't talk.
If you won't listen
And I won't walk.
There's no leaving,
And no fighting
A perfect seeming peace
There's no passion,
And no loving
No sense of loss, or grief.
Just biding time,
'Til one more line
Writes my memory.
With all we've lost,
And all we've done
Reduced in clarity.
My god we once were lovers
Daring life itself.
Now we wait for life to die,
Because it's all that we have left.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
As the music starts, these songs I feel
This dream I've lived becomes too real.
I look inside, so deep within,
And see that's not what I have been.
The fears, the hurt, the pain, the loss,
Are not the toll my life has cost.
When all this time my heart's been blind,
As tears well up, behind closed eyes
I finally begin to see the true,
With eyes reopened, and renewed,
Looking now with brand-new sight
So ends the tunnel, comes the light.
But now I see it, deep inside,
So many things, so much alive.
I've tried so long to start to heal,
As the music starts, these songs I feel.
Jon Martin Dec 2013
Time crumbles over the years, eroding
under the weight of "I should have been
theres", and "backwhens", and "I miss
yous". And, as it erodes, it leaves the
bittersweet smell of what was, complete
with a little taste of memory on the back
of your tongue that will never quite go away...
Apparently, I wrote this in my sleep. I hate it when I do that.
Jon Martin Dec 2012
I don't know how to say this,
What mincing words to write
I wish that I could write it,
And it wouldn't sound so trite.
I wish it all made sense again,
Like so long it used to do.
I could have kept my happy thoughts,
And you could have them, too.
There are mortal wounds appearing
In the love that we professed,
And a heart that's barely beating
All alone within my chest.
I locked the door so softly,
So you wouldn't hear it click.
And I know the clock is counting,
Though I cannot hear it tick.
My muse is pain, she writes my song,
I'm so firmly in her grasp,
You've fallen for a poets love...
A slowly closing trap.
Jon Martin Dec 2013
I'm relatively sure
That you don't know how it works.
And I'm absolutely certain
That you don't know how it hurts.
There's a little scar inside,
That twists up when I write,
And, as deeper digs the wound,
The pain begins to bite.
But tasting all the dreams,
And their shards of broken glass,
Leaves you wan, and wanting,
For a sweet, imagined past
That there's no way to recapture,
because it wasn't really there.
And you remember that you're lying,
And the wound begins to tear.
So many poems to the muse...
Jon Martin Dec 2012
These are the moments poets write about, paintings waiting. Quiet city streets at sunset, building, highrise sentinels of man's unquenchable thirst for conquest, and all of us together under one sky, waiting.... This radio screaming in my ear, Bon Iver, Conner Oberst, the other poets that wander these lost, lonely alleys. Sun's rays fading, as city lights rise. The soft blue becoming the strange azure, that fades to my indigo incandescent familiarity. This nighttime refuge of lost souls, wandering the frozen streets, and becoming something more than the sun can make them. That soft, ragged, imagined power coming from within each of us, in the open darkness of a concrete river. Nothing has changed but the light, and the new light makes each of us something more than we were in the rays that preceeded it. There is nothing to take away, nothing to subtract, nothing to glean. Just this place, this almost-lostness, betraying in itself the proclaimed divinity of dark. Stepping back, without looking behind, not knowing that the fear in front of you cowers before the monster behind your back. Just. Live. Be, let the being become you, and embrace this inner-self so few have seen, so few have touched, so few have truly loved. realize that all things wear a darker form, and the things that lay in wait under these city streets are dangerous. The way a chainsaw is dangerous in the hands of a child. There is no way to know who will get hurt, and once the chain of events is initiated, there is no way to safely remove the weapon from the hands of the naïve. Things that bite, hiding in dark corners, and laying wait for the lost, weary, and heartbroken. Lighted hallways, entrances into the other realm of indoors, torch-lit passages into forbidden and mysterious kingdoms. Every stairwell lit. The bannister to the lower, and upper, a stripe on walls as I drive on. Two million bulbs of nightlight security, and still this city finds shadows in which to hide fear. Dark corners for the lonely, and blind alleys for the lost. Every heart beating, fresh hot blood, and no warmth to share. Scared and alone, wanderers all, until the burn of the light we call home beckons us there. This passing of time, a gift, from gods unseen, and hands unheld. Colded fingers for want of a lovers touch, or the precious gift of familiarity in a foreign land. Alien landscape, and this, my unfettered direction of ambiguity. Directionless wandering for want of a chosen path, and no choice but to take the offered road. The fear secondary only to the loneliness, oh that curse that comes again.
If you want to know what my writing process looks like, check back. This will be chewed on over the next several days, or weeks. Revised and changed, until I like it. I wanted to show my writing in the rough. This is the painter's art, on raw canvas....
Jon Martin Dec 2012
As weather starts to turn
And softly falls the sky,
A winter spent indoors,
As days with you go by.
The lovers warm embrace
Sweet sighs to kiss again,
And snow that can't erase
What I've seen within.
A season passes on,
And the years are not that rough,
I've not the time in all my life
To love you near enough...
The first snow of the year can be almost as magical as the first kiss of a new love...
Jon Martin Dec 2012
I don't know what to write anymore,
This boring list, this loathsome chore.
Letters to words, and never sent
With no question what they meant.
No way now to see the trail
Of where those words went off to sail
Catch them now, or forever gone,
One more line for which I long.
The forever phrase stuck in my throat
Lies the poets flattened note.
I worry that the journey ends,
And then the muse, salvation sends.....
I've tried to title a poem this for YEARS. It finally happened, just now. You saw it here, first, folks.

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