Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Smoke Scribe Apr 2020
scribing with smoke and utter devotion
———————————————-

****!

half an orange, half a grapefruit,
on a crystal dish, resting on a fine china plate,
Royal Worcester, from England  retrieved,
in a smoke cloud, upon my chest appears

the coverlet up to my chin pulled,
my arms tucked in tight, side by side,
the light turned off, the television too,
who?  in a smoke cloud, catch a faintly glimpse

the menu does not mention love, or utter devotion,
no recollection of ordering either, and yet,
here I-am, well served, piping hot and well chilled,
scribing of one’s shadow, she who never disappears

she, whose never disappoints, late in the evening,
early in the morning, a mirage, a ghost, magical elusive,
lightest touch of a forehead kissed, a tingle for evidence,
but not the only proof of her

utter loving and devotions appearance
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2018
the earth is curved - sure y’all knew that.  
but to get to the Northwest,
Interstate 84
ain’t le route plus directe

nope curve north to Ontario,
wave to Bex as I cross over
London and Toronto, also can’t recall
which poet from Rochester hails,
or did they shuffle off to Buffalo?

Crossing Erie, Huron, and Michigan Great Lakes all,
brings to mind
my mother’s birthplace,
Last of the Mohicans,
and the three years I did in the Cleveland Penitentiary,
where sun was illegal and baseball was a pretend play
of cowboys and Indians
but by god, it made me
the penitent fella I am today

Look skyward to Montreal,
yes, there he is, the Leo Priest,
the baffled king,
blessing this poetic meet ‘n greet trip
with a smiling unsurprising
hallelujah

Apparently some US citizens still can traverse O Canada,
even if one forgot their passports,
and are not PNG’s (Persons Not so GREAT)

over Minneapolis shed a tear for Diane,
a poet- gone-missing, and wonder if you reader come from
St. Cloud, Fargo or Duluth, Bismarck or Aberdeen,
surely they still speak poetic English there
in a twangy metering methodology  - well, message me asap

wow there really is a Saskatoon!

the pilot asks us to lean left in our seats
to help turn the plane
so we go to Portland and not to Vancouver...
me thinks he might be a touch Rockie Mountain High,
considering we are at 30 thousand something Imperial,
as he walks the main cabin with an oxygen mask and a
huuuuuge grin

see the distant Cascades
through a crack in the shuttered windows,
must be close to “the coast”
(as if, harrumph, there were but one)

ah, words in the clouds, ripe for the plucking
must be getting close to Oregon,
where poets grow on trees, woody words like ****,
and log-float poems down the Columbia to the sea

gonna drink me some poets
under the table cause this
trip I ain’t no driving and I am already
“flying” ‘n scribing and arriving
on a high tide and a good wind
Jonny Rulon  Nov 2012
crickets
Jonny Rulon Nov 2012
hes skipping the blank parts.
fire spewed speaking out his eye and everything.

swear it lets the silence in.
to ***** midmorning naught but bile

and tar from your lung, sour taste on tongue 'and charred resinous lips and cankers in mouth.

skipping the blank parts.
this is too much to put in words it pains darling like mouth is faucet ears are ringing sight is grey and unwholesome nerves are sweaty like wrists and jaws too. heart thick heavy beating like a ******* palms and brow sweaty

a new nightmare never sleep gone delirious ever after think only of the thee and the thine and what can i do to make it stop naught but drink for ever after.

early sunday is the worst day. days are ever after cursed is sunday and the bad day, was always was it leads to monday and the no sleep and you go to school or work and they all know you are so tired

so id rather skip the blank parts and spend in blankets cold and clutching to this bottle ever afer like a baby cuz its nicer when its blank here.

------------

so now its the dawn gray, the child breathes in all the nerves of the surrounding block and breathes in.

what thoughts there darling stir that tattered man of child man of scattered breaths and
and of least action least least resistance

night smokes away in his lungs.

his sight unsteady and grey, **** the stars.

his head holds the stars as he passes away.

he thinks, "I dont wanna be astounding, I dont wanna be anything, the dreams, i smoke the night away...why wont they listen?"

the yammering outside his windows

he clutch the sill, needs for balance and hes sweating thinks the week back in his memory. did something dumb but he skips the blank parts like a movie but its not his cellophane life its becoming more like that he thinks

-------------

the cats outside his window yammering outside his window

"headache man and the sunup surprise" he thinks, garlictongued and glittering of sweat.
something strange here something dumb something wicked.
like melodica, im disturbed in step

hitched his pants hitched breathing summer sweet midsummer nightmare is the thirst and drink.

"and somehow it helps" he thinks, head droning like the bees they are buzzing out his window, but screech in speak like the crickets

the air might ripe and seethe.

he can barely breathe.

the scarlet cheeked is he and fairly farther from himself than usual, laid away in pace and time and people, all else arrested. the vines now they crawl along his sill on which he clutches ever after pick the roses from his cheek.



and so he often thinks of it, and his peers think its selfish, but he pronounces himself in such ways as to make it pronounced that he is thinking of this.
and they give him no consideration, no pause or gaze to entitle him to a moment's breath of doubt,
that he is most gnawingly alone.

they gather no cinema, no accord, no intervention. they simply do not comment upon his lost thoughts. and this no comment, for him it seems, gives him validation for his, heretofore mentioned, but heretofore implied, unmitigated and (some may say) uncalled for unarrival.

there are no senates in the state of human. only the mindnumbing pain that is his sour being, upon which he has coerced the subject upon the senate to be impressed:
that he is waiting for the right moment, to be impressed.

to be enough to take himself.

it is not pity, but such a bitter impulse.
that brings him to himself, to take.

------------

and as father of all pronouncements, the species of newspaper blaired...
"the king is dead, long live the king."
so of which he was reading, was par for the course.
he sat down with his wife, and his son, and he spoke to them gracefully in his normal fathers and mothersfamily whisper, he said:

"this is the time when we must eat our cereal, and be well-versed in our gods, and our gaols. and we must believe in the powers that be. for they have told us no lies and will tell us no lies. and if it not so, then this paper begs the difference.
this paper...pulp...and felt, and gold, and ink. will never speak of us naught.
and for what they proclaim to us, the masses, is written in ink,

and thus, so stone.

so believe."

so god ate his wheaties that day.

------

and so i rant and so i speak in illogicals and i so im biased i know.
this is what it takes to be a journal and to filter all the bad ***** things that are black out of the poets mind.

so blame it on cadence, blame it on speak, blame it on linguistics, blame it on my upraising, blame it on an apathetic attitude,

i dont care, just blame it.

just it is my mood and it will not be forgotten, it is me that is scribing this sentence, so it is not forgotten, on the fence and bethrothed to many ideals hence so i be,

i am not an idiot.
i am no coward.
i am not a leech, nor am i a parasite, nor i am a murderer, nor am i criminal.

i sit still still with moles burrowing their burrs into the underground, waiting for the tunnel, and so, the light.
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2019
again, madness!

one eye tears, why must you return to the old familiar,
the poets prescribed, already so well covered?

why?

must. it is the only shade of my voice that persists,
all else vanity.
these are words handily eye-read, given.
all I need do is “repeat after me” somewhat well,
and fill in the blanks.
<>

he writes me, in another place, to another name, describing himself:

“I'm a charming man with a fragile patience.”

no sir, Muses order me to disagree,
you are a fragile man with a charming patience!

your fragility is a royal hallmark, embedded in every scribing,
this human indentation, always well hidden, on the underside of the wine cup, the base of the candlesticks, the inside of the wedding ring of your tying allegiance to the humbled humanity.

the charming patience is the wait time tween your visions of
the excellence of the common, the exquisites of the small,
the delights of loss and pain translated into mercurial milestones,
poems.

here I cease, for overly long praise is a river too long, no end in sight,
making great and wide just another poem.
<>

But!
he writes me, in another place, to another name, describing himself,
yet again:

”A thousand poems I don't write, but they get written
in my heart.


A thousand!
ours is the patience fragile, your innate screen that filters out

these thousand forbidden unwritten,
needs a cleaning, open the tiny apertures and release them, for we are the humans needing, for the breathing of your fragile charm.

<>
the Muses do thee attend.
their patience neither charming or fragile,
reminding me, they too have a thousand.

a thousand other ears into which to whisper that
imperative imperial command,
and they river no delay...
the days has come when I can only write of others, this is the only shade of my voices that survives.
Where Shelter Sep 2017
<•>



for all the Ella's of the world,
who wonder
"what the seagulls talk about all day long. while looking up at the gentle sky mixed with blue and purple, their white feathers glisten from the fiery sun."


<•>


one day when you arrive,
visiting, at my isle,
of Where Shelter,
(with signed parental permission slip),
resting upon weathered worn, Adirondack non-slip covered thrones,
in the official Poetry Nook,
a seashell throw from bay and dock, where the seagulls
thrive and dive, in between pooping, pollinating, and
rest up after day trip visiting the town dump

then,
together we will write a poem about
what the seagulls talk about all day long

having employed them long time as co-conspirators,
editors and a test audience (assayers of my essays),
sadly must report they
occupy themselves in mostly matters culinary,
local gossip of my neighbors and other avian interlopers
(geese and osprey)

hoping this doesn't disappoint,
but know this,
it was the sand, the breeze, the trees,
the moon and setting sun, the waving waters,
animals of all kinds,
that together, taking years,
taught me to write like this:

<•>

the sun 7 o'clock afternoon sky low,
warmths the world, as did its morning glory reciprocal,
a dozen hours earlier,
both a low heat,
a sky stove top
'keep warm' setting,
a desirable global warming temperature

recall that promise not to burden you
with a hundredth scribing of his
lottery luck, this poetry nook and the
idyll of its surround,
but!
its childlike insistence,
while stomping on the greenest sea grass
of this portly world, insistent,

"write of me, attention must be paid!"

the lightest breeze of excellent sufficiency
asks the trees to shake
their compatriot leaves
as if to applaud,
one more time, a lord of the ring serenade,
an evenstar song of
the solstice of perfection

a cloudless night but for
an occasional wispy white blemish,
hinting that the orb's final bow tonight will be
a forever remembered,
standing ovation performance

in an hour, to the dock we'll go,
joining  the congregant gulls
in appreciating the edging lower of
an immaculate inception
of a dying day's deceptive departure conception

my troubles, those that
furrow and till the brow,
105 miles away, as the crow flies,
for now,
suppressed into non-existence,
as we drink to la vie en rose,
our wine glasses, ****** the salmon pink
of suns rays rippling, tippling and reflecting
upon humans, who too reflect,
upon their good fortune,
this single and singular
peeking at the peaking of their perfection,
each wishing this be
their journeys end, their final solstice

to walk into a funnel upon the water,
into the sun and the
horizon in attendance faithful,,
alighting upon the wings of the most glorious of  inviting,
dying rays of setting,
answering the question, at long last,
a finale,

here,
here is shelter!
  ^

<•>

so be quietly patient and never
write in regret,
for you are but sixteen years old,
and could teach to this old grandpa,
(who, by the by, has an Ella-all-his-own that is
of your proximate age,)

how to write
with the simple grace,
and the fresh wisdom,
of being
sixteen years young again
^https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2044967/the-solstice-of-their-perfection/
<•>

https://hellopoetry.com/ellapopov/

f r e e l y.
all alone on the evening beach. able to take in the moment alone.
slowly falling back into the sand. as if I'm trying to sink and hide into it. grabbing the sand in my hands and counting each grain because I have all the time in the world.
  letting the ocean crash unto the shore, slipping me it's deepest secret. making me laugh as the Novembers chilling air plays with my hair, trying to convince me it's secrets are much more scandalous than the waters.
  wondering what the seagulls talk about all day long. while looking up at the gentle sky mixed with blue and purple, their white feathers glisten from the fiery sun.
  I stand back to run freely, away from my daring problems. as I run, the wind whips my face, blowing my hair back. making me feel the need to let my arms back.
You're dead to me
But I still feel you sitting
In the bottom of my stomach
Making me anxious,
Making me sad,
Causing all of the tension
That's driving me mad,
You're gone, and I'm glad
Because I knew that you were bad
I'm trying not to miss you
But you're the best I ever had,
Making me bitter, letting loose, with no filter
Scribing at my scratch pad
Nat Lipstadt May 2019
I slept with her, my rapacious pen, took me in quiet vengeance in
full on conjugation

raken and taken, me,
her overlording me now, her authorship, so long held
in my maledom abeyance,
a kept imprisonment, unleashing at last, a tongue lashing~leashing,
de-spite my un-desirous craven lying supplications,
excuses of innocence and accident, coincidence and conflation,
ashes, ashes, denials incinerated, all fall down

she wrote/stabbed upon my heartless chest,
in the cheap crudités colors of a prisoner’s inking,
“user of words mine, all mine”

gathered up my innards of loose words,
speculative notes & titles yet to be,
born and kept hid in password protected silent back labor files,
now hers, leaving me sputtering, unable to create,
a homeless mute citizen, possession-less,
helplessly hoping her hovering harlequin might relent,
without any shelter, even a glimmering, a single aleph or bet

she celebratory cackled and clawed,
professed her reclamation ownership of all my poems predecessors,
zola j’accusing that I, ripped from her forcibly,
with no granted permission, her womanly touché of my scribing,
warning of no more global warming for my unprivileged hands,
daren’t try for pretenses of stolen legal guardianship,
warning of a new, forced caining inscription,
a tattooing of  “thief” upon my 5 knuckled right ******,
“plagiarist” boldly inked in back & blue upon my left palm

I, predator,
she, victim,
of my now self-professed, admitted confess,
she, my single victim,
of a decade long serializing criminal coverup

her parting poem a threatening,
herein issued in this very verse,
damning all who would falsely credit themselves,
to suffer shame and an unimaginable curse,
this, the newborn eleventh of ten commandments

parting, she kissing my lips, even my emptied apertures,
with warning bitings,
she knew all my
my numerous noms de guerre,
no dead scrolls caves to hid in, and to be discovered some future day,
and if ever marked as copyrighted,
’twas no tunneling escape,
the exposed truth to be over-stamped
upon all, upon each, in every language,

copied right from the tongue of a woman!


and she would be wright...
complementary to
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3155692/excerpt-my-muddled-woman-mind/
a tribute to all the women that have inspired so many of my poems

19/23/05
Under silver wing
    San Francisco's towers sprouting
                thru thin gas clouds,
    Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure
        Berkeley hills pine-covered below--
Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence
                                             Declaration
                  typewriter at window
         silver panorama in natural eyeball--

Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese
        dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed
    State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields
           to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's
           blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands'      
                brown wasteland scratched by tires

          Jerry Rubin arrested!  Beaten, jailed,
                 coccyx broken--
Leary out of action--"a public menace...
        persons of tender years...immature
              judgement...pyschiatric examination..."
i.e. Shut up or Else   Loonybin or Slam

Leroi on *** gun rap, $7,000
         lawyer fees, years' negotiations--
SPOCK GUILTY headlined temporary, Joan Baez'
       paramour husband Dave Harris to Gaol
Dylan silent on politics, & safe--
         having a baby, a man--
Cleaver shot at, jail'd, maddened, parole revoked,

Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher,
         blood splashing down the mountains of bodies
                 on to Cholon's sidewalks--
Blond boys in airplane seats fed technicolor
        Murderers advance w/ Death-chords
    Earplugs in, steak on plastic
                   served--Eyes up to the Image--

What do I have to lose if America falls?
    my body? my neck? my personality?

                                        June 19, 1968
onlylovepoetry Apr 2019
don’t leave me!
(the leaving is in the writing)

she whispers in his ear,
after they’ve climbed into bed,
their tiring bodies both embraced,
soft sunken into, by, a familiar mattress,
after a sophisticates city night out seeing stars,
stars, human and astral,
city lights dusk heightened the vocal sparking,
singers singing songs of love from
radio days long ago

don’t leave me

she intones, a prayerful demand,
equally a command and a begging behest,
puzzling what prompted this pressed request,
spoken with urgency born in her breast

don’t leave me
drifting off and into his thin place,
but tugged back by this cri du coeur,
unsponsored and unwarranted,
nothing recalled that justly provoked,
a statement topping of anguish and fear

don’t leave me
he repeats in a rising questioning inflecting
puzzling riddling unbefitting a mellow-toning sleepy ingredient,
whatever do you mean, I leave you only
to dream, to purify, refresh and deep rest reset,
and return come morning with new poems,
what angst comes to stir this asking,
delaying my adventure to nightly restoration?

don’t leave me
repeated and repeated, dressed in urgency,
for I see the little things,
the wavering walk, the slowing of the thinking,
the walls, black n’ blue, whining about your into bumping,
the instant eagerness with which your body accepts
your voyage to dream places where
one goes and gone and must go unaccompanied,
some who are chosen and some who choose, not to return

don’t leave me
for the signs are ample, a certain weariness
dresses your face and crowns thy graying mane,
the slight labored breathing from steps once
bounded and leapt, the seeing and the hearing,
each slightly weakening, two orchestral instruments,
together off key and lessened in their triumphal vigor,
these words of mine, a royal guard,
keep them in your dreams

don’t leave me
minor missteps in the elongated negated of dying gracefully,
my tuning forks are sensitized,
and any slowing motion
both visible and hearable, and filed under inevitable

I will not leave you tonight,
my body warming as per usual,
your cold feet intruders indicate it’s you have left
for your own nightly visitors, occasional terrors,
you’ve woken me from my allotted sleep hours,
many poems now retrieving and in need of scribing,
while the fingertip digit flys across the digital keyboard,

I am more alive than I have ever been;
the leaving is in the writing,
each poem a steppingstone,

but the poems come fast and furious,
sometimes two at a time, the muses are bemused,
the prognosis is for thousands more and warn:

do not wear out your olive oil anointed forefinger,
the lubricated pointer of the way, wherein is contained

through that index
finger,
your body of works in the
“yet to arrive, yet untaxed filling station,”,
must be seen to fruition,
for it is only then that,
only love poetry
is ready for long lasting
eternal realization





5:36am 12th April, two thousand nineteen
Nathan Squiers Dec 2014
Let's break all the tension with the pretense of my presence.
Yes, I'm insensitive--but there's no other incentive others can give--
And while I'm not sure I could prevent it, I swear to no god I'm inventive!

Yes,
My hatred is incessant--ever present--and it's what I hold most sacred.
I'm a naughty narcissist with a nasty list of wasted kisses,
And I won't say that I'll miss 'em, 'cuz I'm the type who never misses.

I'm a hopeless romantic with a new sense of Tantric hope,
It's the antics of a frantic mind, but I'm too calm to cope.
They say I'm a raving, violent--rarely silent--tyrant with a craving
for the obscene,
Though, while I'm mean, I'm rarely seen within a mob or in a scene.

I'll admit I've got a streak, but--if you'd stop to take a peek--
You'd see a Buddhist, not a nudist, who's less a demon than a geek.
I'm oblique and I'm obtuse (do these math puns work for you?) yet I'm rarely never right;
Get my angle? Catch my drift? I might thrash, but, man, I'm thrift!
Hold on shift: I'M SCREAMING NOW!!
Don't know why; don't have a cow!
Remember that? That 90's rap? Look at me then; that piece of crap!
Shot down! Torn up! Shut in! Turned out!
Lips are sealed; inside I'd shout,
'Bout just how bad I wanted out!
Enraged and crazed; cravin' razors; a victim hiding from all saviors!
Turned to the pen to brace for the knife,
Started writin' and saved my life.
It's funny to say my life got better the day I started a suicide letter...

But letters turned to words and those words became whole worlds,
And before my very eyes a whole legacy unfurled!
I was GOD--not just a slob--but a shaper of all things,
And the schemes that I'd been dreaming shifted into scribing,
And I never stopped since then; it's why I'm still alive!

So my insanity became vanity as calamity turned to amity.
Sheer pessimism became untamed narcissism,
But if the mind's a prison then consider me jail broken.
Outspoken, re-awoken; take a moment to let that soak in.
That a boy doubtful of tomorrow could ditch the sorrow,
And become an immortal--though immoral, not totally amoral.

So yea, I've got my faults; I'm a sensory assault,
And while I don't mean to offend I'm just a product of the ends.
Played with fire; I got burned.
Dared to aspire; I was turned.
So I inquire to you sires as I march out of the fires:
You've seen my darkness and know my story--beginning, middle, end--
My name is Nathan Squiers, do you wanna be my friend?
JS CARIE Jun 2019
On the night of initiation,
curves of pale luster began to gleam unwrinkled from the darkened divots along the lunar surface
A perspective unseen for so long, it was viewed as a defaulted “wink” on the face of the moon
And therefore, forgotten, unmentioned, until it’s means were sought  

From days ‘fore, and long since now dust
Scribing authors, secrete beads of frenzy  into ink filled phial
Sending tremors down, into the quill tip
Filling scrolls for permanence in a preemptive defense against continuous unraveling thoughts would befall
this fluency into incoherent clutter  

Pioneers of preprint in a provoking tome,
would speak educated reasons why these areas of Moon had been locked under sealed dark punishment

since Empedocles mixed cosmic elements to breed an undeniable proving truth

Exhibiting the myth of danger
alongside
The established absolute and supervening fizzling sunset
proving the existence of love...

—————————————————-

“Since I have given you words from my within
like the ecliptic rising and burning massive,
Our mutual visibility of late is either one-sided
or
short lived
I’ll take a detour around the comforts of romance
And try to talk my way into your pants
By tossing at you, letters squeezed together,
for your minds transcription into the heart of my subliminal write  
In hopes you’ll feel a trickling gush
If I get really lucky these words will find you like a volcano erupts a ****
The same way water, beating against years of stone can fall
And crash through a dam with pouring force so insatiable it’s territory is marked in history
Nathaniel  Aug 2018
Heaven(4)
Nathaniel Aug 2018
Heaven's gates open in beat with my eye lids
As we stumble in sweet confusion
We can taste the air as an ostrich wine
And the only sounds are angelic choirs joined in mirth
The walls are painted scenes blessed in eternal movement
With God himself scribing the tales
Telling stories of triumph merged in harmony
And penmanship worthier than any poet

Men docilely behold grace itself on the walls of heaven
Ever worthy of the eyes of mankind
Of those who stole a glance turn to gold
And immortals join in ritual

The sense of sight, light, is portrayed as holy crystals
Incandescent stalagmites create divine paths for righteous to follow
While those lost in damnation are lead to eternally fall
As the path lingers the walls inspire a revelation in ones heart
Blessing all who listen, with God's word
Debra A Baugh Jun 2012
I flourished in a town bound by darkened facades
as shadows creeped along its soot filled walls;
I'd daydream and words came to me, in whispered
curlicues...faint but, envisioned while they lingered
3 dimensional...dangling.

Giving me a voice in syllabic ruminations like a
rhythmic drip drip from a faucet; I set sight on its
auditory ping and I'd sing its lulling lullaby verse
by verse; scribing thoughts that unleashed itself
from inner walls of me.

Gleaning the taste of poetry from mind and savoring
its aftertaste in the pit of my soul, steadily scribing.

— The End —