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Yue Wang Yitkbel Sep 2018
There is a ghost in your voice
Haunting me through the silence



Through every droplet of memory
Dotting my otherwise starless night

I tried to gather them
With my words, my fear, my soul
And yet they remain forever bond
To a place I cannot reach
A being I cannot see
And a love I can never hear

Your flowering existence sheds invisible petals
I seem to be able to find
Yet, I'm ever uncertain
All these pieces of your soul
Did you left them for me to find
A breadcrumb trail leading only
To a chance in the future
To an uncertain promise
Or did I just stole the traces
Of your existence you left for the universe
Claiming them as something I could own

Should I keep them or scatter them

Or are they even yours
Could it be that they are the pieces of my soul
Still clinging on to you
That you're finally shedding away
To be complete on your own

What could I do
Standing in pieces
Holding someone's soul
That may or may not be my own
If they weren't
I'd still be missing all the chunks I've given to you
If they were
I'd still be empty
Because
I'm forever hollow without you
Edward Coles  Oct 2015
On A Diet
Edward Coles Oct 2015
On A Diet

The country is on a diet,
drinking coke with no sugar,
eating burgers with no bun,
running on the treadmill;
it's powdered protein for lunch.
It's straight tequila in the evening,
a light head and guilty fries at night.

The country is on a diet,
doing yoga over yoghurt pots,
training their minds with sudoku and solitaire,
rubbing salt and condition into their hair.
It's 6 a.m. gym sessions,
it's squats on the living room floor,
the country is on a diet, my friends,
and so we have no time for truth, or war.

The country is on a diet,
avocado in the breadcrumb,
aspirin in the salt-shaker,
food numb on the tongue
and those slim-shakes always failed to deliver.
Thigh gaps and mind-the-gaps,
all these signposts for a cleaner living,
no dust on the shelf,
no bags 'neath your eyes to hide
the lack of sleep
and your ailing mental health.

The country is on a diet,
drinking tea with no milk,
eating carrot sticks with best-value dip,
running on the treadmill,
we never get too far.
It's straight tequila in the evening,
it's "anything goes" in the dark.
C
You can hear a spoken word version of it here: https://soundcloud.com/edwardcoles/poetry-and-music (4th performance in)
Eslam Dabank Jan 2023
A breadcrumb I am - the morsel of my old dough,
     a piece of chewed bread rotten, missed near a toe,
shredded by the sons of righteousness and “normality”,
     entombed I am under the carpet to fulfil “morality”.

Mum added the yeast for me to grow, as well as flour,
     Hoping my crust would golden as a vivid live flower,
She sprinkled little salt into me, to know the grimes,
     Sugar too, for life brings out the salt to eyes, at times.

Dad poured the water, to soften toughness uncalled,
     For man is kind too, not merely clay masked, walled -
And above all, they added affection and compassion,
     They wanted me to satisfy mineself, not one’s ration.

Into the oven, 9 minutes, under fire: I show colors,
     The warmth turned the heart warm for all others;
I am left to rest, to harden the shell and eternal body,
     To be perfect as ma and pa wish: not adverse, shoddy.

But the stale, unpuffed, unfresh bread of this world,
     covets but loathes what is good and not yet twirled,
It wishes for me to inhibit mold and evict dignity,
    Mais allez, étrange moi, expose me not to malignity.

The least of their gurgling sounds puncture heads,
     And the weakest of their advice the spirit dreads;
The making of me is the capacity of mine flexes,
     Your ingredients suit not me, mortals and sexes.

Days yearn for you, not this battle of complexes:
     You, mine old dough who suddenly “complex” is,
My parents baked me on low heat nice and gentle,
     And they sear me with words not for me, mental!

Know you: Pita, Kmajj, Brioche, Shrak, or Baguette,
     Bread is bread, could be different, but it is no threat.
Jo  Dec 2013
Breadcrumb
Jo Dec 2013
I am the queen of the unfinished
series, conversations, books, hearts, and paintings
are the few that lie in my wake

Breadcrumbs that can't be followed
the trail that offensively goes cold
Yet, all I have been told

Is that I am
Just an instantaneous tornado
That leaves everyone reeling.
DieingEmbers Feb 2012
He sails a sauce pan in the sink
a mast made from a spoon,
and maps his ocean black as ink
beneath a light bulb moon.

He is searching for the islands
that they call the ***** Plates,
with golden beach of breadcrumb sands
beyond the Gravy Straits.

Where macaroni dolphins leap
beyond French Fries Lagoon,
and sing their songs as sailors sleep
beneath a light bulb moon.

Beware the corn cob crocodiles
that lurk beneath the foam,
betraying folks with welcome smiles
within their bone strewn home.

He navigates the boiling oil
and safely through the ice,
to find a place to hide his spoil
away from other mice.

So island claimed x marks the spot
his sailing days at end,
and I at last wash up my pots
that so amused our friend.
H L Godden  Sep 2015
Gaddings Dam
H L Godden Sep 2015
The sky lies on the horizon
like a smoke-coloured cat
draped over a sofa of heather,
purple as pansies but sharper,
scratching against boots and paws.
It washes across the landscape
in a swathe of paint,
broken by breadcrumb rocks.

Up here, the wind gallops,
almost spins me round
to face home again.
Water framed by narrow paths
like battlements, flicking
onto grey stones and sand,
smell of earth, damp air.

Our path drops down
like the side of a ship and the dog,
ginger beacon in a sea of bog-grass,
skids on his front paws.
I shuffle sideways, crab steps
slipping from mud to puddle.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
talk of empire can be a tedium to say the least,
the Maharajahs of India never felt more
at home with european literature and
culture overall, but class system doubly
emphasised - or as the television series proved -
hardly an affair for the pithy concerns of
pitiable folk - first season i never bothered to
sense a tightening -
you see, looking at colonialism is not looking
at racism - racism has a dynamic to it,
colonialism has a hierarchy - the two differ,
second season in i sense colonialism as the
intelligent form of racism, presuppositions too many,
racism for the poor and the idiotic and
colonialism for the rich and cultured and
Gentlemanly - pork buttocks for the fork to my care,
i said once i'm not into these post-colonial
dynamics in England - the only winners are
Australians, former convicts who care much about
preservation of the populace of crocodiles -
this 2nd season is really piling it in to differentiate
between barbaric discrimination and civilised
discrimination - i guess a prior history of instilled
hierarchy made the Maharajahs akin to the Brits
(the caste system, untouchables in Bengali),
the "great rulers" didn't mind, they were actually
trying to be kept in the commonwealth -
such aristocracy easily scared and even more easily
scarred - the aristocrats of communism came from
the intelligentsia - bookworms and hardly the
pompous old farts ready to hunt tigers replacing
goats with little children tied to wooden poles -
that's what capitalism fears, a coerced class of
intelligent people, coerced into a class, they fear this,
it's hard to control such people, collective ignorance
is too easily dissected and denied, via doubt -
hardly a reason to be a recipient of existence (out of
every instance per se, hence the sigma unfathomable) -
and to only be rewarded with entertainment?
these far-left intellectuals breed on thought to be
the sole existential reward, and subsequently entertainment;
i too find thinking a pleasure, when you assume that
there's no reward for it, or a reliability to it
being a kindred of an ***** phallus -
never mind - you see, this talk of empires has given
me an ideal conclusive remark:
landlocked empires, or, should i say,
empires that thrive on spreading via land alone,
ref. e.g. to the Mongol or the Alexandrian empire...
they're short lived, they increase landmass exponentially
and very successfully - their motto:
strike the iron while it's hot -
they depend on constant success - they require
a bacterial like membrane of being seemingly
invincible - these land locked empires come and go
very quickly -
unlike the second type of empire building,
those which also require more than horse hoofs
at a gallop, the ones that treat the power of the seas
as its arteries, and land as their veins -
the British empire, the Roman empire -
once an empire is dependent on sea and subsequently
trade, it will be convincingly successful and will
outlast all those brutal empires that spread via land alone -
russia is indeed an anomaly - but then again hardly
an anomaly given the harsh terrain it encompasses -
no one wants to live there, who in their right state
of mind would, anyway?
the russian pride has a weakness - siberia -
oh **** looks great, a 12" protruding **** of geography,
but it's Siberia, -40°C... the way i see it, Russia
is the size of from its borders with Ukraine
Belarus and the Baltic states and the Ural mountains...
the rest is Mongolia - the peoples are steppe Eskimos.
so to summarise - ambitions of empire building that
do not utilise the power of the sea are indeed
the largest but also of the shortest lifespan -
like that old fable of an old farmer dividing his land
among his sons - sooner or later it ends up
a complex intricacy akin to the Holy Roman Empire -
or as the Romans said: dub the germans holy
and you're going straight to hell! little princes that became
major beggars and leeches - the louse jealousy took over...
breadcrumb like land ownership:
20 kilograms of potatoes a year for each son,
enough to feed a pig for a month...
and yes, doubly conclusive, i don't know why
Christianity is blamed for the desecration of greek
culture, the so called "robbing of the greek culture" -
i can't imagine any singled out people
to be infused with ****** and keep it up -
Nietzsche blamed Socrates, the modern intellectuals
blamed Jesus of Nazareth... you know who i blame?
Alexander the great, a Macedonian after all,
and Aristotle (partially) -
that's the greeks though - the Mongols had nothing
prior and nothing after of note on the blank page
or care for a library, and perhaps that's all the better,
you hardly hear news from Mongolia in our
present age... they had the wind to write their history
in that great Genghis Khan Stampede;
i did tell you that the communist experiment took
place in Mongolia, didn't i? before it was accepted
as counter-Tsar pyramidal and later in the satellite states
it was first tested in Mongolia...
if you don't believe me, believe the guy who
sat in the UCL history library and was writing up
essay notes roughly 9 years ago.
soul in torment Sep 2013
He sails a sauce pan in the sink
a mast made from a spoon,
and maps his ocean black as ink
beneath a light bulb moon.

He is searching for the islands
that they call the ***** Plates,
with golden beach of breadcrumb sands
beyond the Gravy Straits.

Where macaroni dolphins leap
beyond French Fries Lagoon,
and sing their songs as sailors sleep
beneath a light bulb moon.

Beware the corn cob crocodiles
that lurk beneath the foam,
betraying folks with welcome smiles
within their bone strewn home.

He navigates the boiling oil
and safely through the ice,
to find a place to hide his spoil
away from other mice.

So island claimed x marks the spot
his sailing days at end,
and I at last wash up my pots
that so amused our friend.
An oldie reposted as was my first kids poem
Carlo C Gomez Aug 2021
a falling boy's
measured out footprint,
slipping in vain search
for a breadcrumb of solace

lost is spring, and green,
and bird nesting,
lost is his mother's smile,
he breathes in deeply

a memory of trees,
an afternoon sun
emptied of fertility:
a high wood on its last, teetering legs

urban air is everywhere
and wishes to be free,
but we are all carbon emissions,
separate living-dying pieces

polluted hieroglyphics
with nothing to convey,
fragments of a prayer
with nothing left to say
Poetic T May 2016
I lay breadcrumbs of my emotions
for you to follow. Each was nourished
with essence that enticed your heart onward.

I lay breadcrumbs of my thoughts
for you to listen too. Each sustained
with true meaning of delicate spoken words.

I lay breadcrumbs so many times,
some got lost along the way, others
never interested stale crumbs then faded away.

I lay breadcrumbs, but I started to follow
yours, and with each morsel grazed upon
I found the door to your heart & love had won.

"A breadcrumb trail to a hearts beating path,
*"Who's trail will you follow today,
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
i'll be honest, i lost the second volume  of Kant's critique
in the house, i lost the rhythm of reading the first volume,
but then i found the second volume
like a breadcrumb, where i left off:
the thesis v. antithesis section,
accurately
                 antimonia of pure reasoning
(the fourth conflict between
                   transcendental ideas)
cf. the only dualism allowed is a bilingualism,
no mono-lingual dualism is verifiable,
it's too abstract and therefore non-practical /
non-practisible - missing adjective
            i.e. without having an allowance
    to be practised, indeed almost every single
word cannot transverse all grammatical classification,
a zebra cannot be a noun, a verb, an adjective,
an adverb etc., hence what i tried to experiment
with was whether a mono-linguistic system
could practice dualism purely, no, it couldn't,
mono-linguistic systems abstracted dualism
without a useful process within them,
the whole good and evil, chaos and order dichotomy,
such dichotomy that never approached a dialectics,
hence mono-linguistic systems could not convene
dualism, because they were mono-linguistic and
not bilingual...
in reference to translating
                                            the fourth conflict between
                   transcendental ideas,
i.e. czwarty konflikt miedzy ideami transcendentalnymi,
English stress of articles / vectors, meaning
a point be made, or the point can be made,
one is wishy-washy wave of the hand (dispersion),
the other is definite, microscopic, vector
from co-ordinates (0, 0) leading to (23, 12) of the (x, y)
graph; i went among the Celts and learned to write
drunk and be happy;
                                      ironic though as to why
Darwinism gained such popularity given the English
use of indefinite and definite articles: a-      -the    
end up with some sort of ism.
there's a warning about the fourth antimony, and there's
also this poem, indeed i was bemused by the antimony
i'm not surprised that he didn't understand the narrative too,
narrating philosophically is a hard craft,
you can't really engage with dialectics, cartwheels sure,
ouroboros (snake eating itself) sure,
it's hard to reach the Pre-Socratics, but almost every
philosopher after Socrates is doing just that...
to internalise dialectics (i'd rather criticise the lack
of diacritical marks in English), and that's why
philosophy compared to standard literature of fiction
and novel can be termed pure, narration.
it is pure narration, the practice of -
hence off character study, hence hardly memorable,
but an antidote to what the present system of education
prescribes the young: dates (1066 a.d., 1945, 1914),
or Pythagoras... qwen the queen was born (on purpose, and
why? exactly, q / queue, why / i, etc.)... it's like they're
taking a test on becoming Britain's residential candidates
with questionnaires that no one talks about in pubs
over pints. i mean the warning against the fourth antimony
in the antithesis ends up stating poetically:
both proposals were sound. depending on how one
peeled the vantage point, from which want came to
observe the lunar motion.

— The End —