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Bad Luck Mar 2013
I scream to drown the noise,
            And fight to hold my poise
Against this sonic wave
            That dismantles and destroys.

This place that I called home…
            It’s all that’s left of what I own.
I fear I’m destined to the desert,
           Or somewhere desolate to roam.

Tried to convince my brain this wasn’t real –
           That lies are all I feel.
I’m not sure why I fear this noise;
           There’s nothing left for it to steal.

                        -         -         -

Yet, I plug my ears and scream;
         Tear the stitching from my seams . . .
I find it difficult to sleep,
         And near-impossible to dream.
I scream so hard it makes me sweat,
And my skin begins to gleam

                        This heat turns smiles into tears,
                         Like water into steam


My head begins to ache.
My hands begin to shake.
If I chose the wrong path,
             I made one hell of a mistake.
While my lungs still permit,
             I’ll keep their volume set on high,
Lifting my head to the clouds,
             To scream at the sky.

I have yet to hear an answer,
        And while I’m not much of dancer
I learned some steps from Lady Luck
        In hopes to cure me of this cancer.

                        -         -         -

Now, I don’t believe in luck –
But she still left me with something . . .
While we danced I took notice;
The noise dulled slightly to a humming.

I looked back to Lady Luck
– and I’m sure this wasn’t just a dream –
But she had vanished to the air,

                             Like water into steam.

I said “I don’t believe in luck.”
She still left me something, though.

She said:
                   “You can’t predict the world –
                      I assume this much you know…
                      But if a farmer plants a seed,
                      In that spot, a plant will grow.”


One day, my throat gave out.
For no longer, could I shout.
And I don’t believe in luck,
             So I was simply left with doubt.

I cursed that lady’s words.
I told myself that she was crazy.
       When something caught my eye…
       There - at my feet - grew a daisy.
A daisy… In the desert…
So despite how bad my head hurt,
I thanked God for Lady Luck.
         I thanked God that I had met her.

The noise I heard was her opposite.
               It was the presence of chance.

I've learned the farmer can’t predict the world,
But, as surely as seeds grow into plants . . .
                     My only choices are my actions.
                     So, I think I’ll take today to dance.
"Bad Luck: In a Wakeful Contradiction" is now available on Amazon in paperback!

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1691941182
Styles 12 Apr 2017
She comes from everywhere delivering fat snowflakes.

enthralled, I stare out.

Is this what hope looks like?

She comes from everywhere delivering me from stifle.

She knows me.

Her voice landed like this.

A vast white knowing, a delicious dish of eternity seeking you.

Turn the world off.
Calm your mind.
Amputate whatever fights you.

She comes from everywhere,
suddenly strikes with long awaited snows I haven't seen for 5 years.

She makes me appreciate my overgrown beard, a scraggly scrub of black and red as I walk 6 a.m. roads, almost too dark to gamble your life on.


She dismantles rainbows
scatters it out into snow,

my eyes are transfixed in her scope
everywhere she flashes, her masterpiece guns me down like a piece of writing finding your secret love.

She lifts me from self imposed entrapment, she knows my true identity completely, better than me.

She is a manifestation of our dreams.

I grew wise by reacting too much to darkness.

If you want to **** a beast don't feed it.

She dismantles rainbows
scatters it out into snow, her message of love couldn't be clearer.

she drips from heights
be a empty vessel to contain her.
You hide me in your cloak of Nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of Being
I am nothing, yet appear; transparent dream
Where your Eternity briefly trembles.


Reconciled to myself, I emerge into the world
Bare of all thought, clear love in which
The sun on my doorstep dances to your drum.
The ant walking into it is no less than You.

Wild, peaceful days where the slightest wind
Soars perfumed with your traces...
I am in a heaven of One.
Unable to talk, not to talk

No-one will know me until they climb
Where I and they are no more.
Final Mountain where mind goes white
To melt in garden after garden.

No heaven or earth, just this mysterious place
We walk in dazedly, where being here or there, in time, or not, are only
Two motions of the same ecstatic breathing.

The image in the mirror seems different
But sublime days arrive when you know
Viewer, image, and mirror are one: the same
Silent Calm Eternal Shimmering.

One Moon blossoming in a thousand bowls
One water laughing in a thousand thousand fields
One Sun with a million electric shadows
One Silence with these love-cries for children.

-Rumi
bleh  Dec 2014
whimper
bleh Dec 2014
'i've only ever really read one poem. i, i have to admit.*  
You know, that, that one poem that everyone’s read, whatsit,
Howl by Ginsberg, 'best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness,-starving-hyste­rical-naked,' , yeah, that one;'
'It's just, I identify with it so strongly.' she says,
'That poem is soo me.'
It's funny how commentary on a generation 60 odd years ago come across as timeless insights..
how we learn that true spirit of rebellion and counterculture three generations ago,
  as it is taught to us by two generation ago countercounterculture academics.
but I guess, inevitably
                                         we
                                                  return,
  to those half drowned pontifications inevitably decried into transcendental truth by the onward spilling ratchet of cultural recognition;
  that sense of universal oneness generated by the unwashed ramblings of beat-generation hipsters dense innuendo in run on sentences running, running from their upper-lower-middle-class New York homes and their privilege of true vacant meaninglessness and despair,
   to those nervous tucked in shirted clean shaven scholars swooning over the same seme drugged, melancholic bearded men profussing the deepest of opaque truths only found up the furthest reaches of their own *****.
  As we push through to our lectures, the mosaic in motion of blazer wearing mac-users and mac-pac wearing blazers,
  As we hysterically interpret the formatting conditions for our reports, which could hang in the balance of whether the dreams we once had will ever be actualised,
  As we felt lost and found and found and lost at those park benches under the stars, where occasional strangers strolled by offering sessions and life-stories,
  As we paid exorbitantly to get out of our parents homes, and into tin-can flats with broken windows, absentee landlords and cracked paint only held together by all the moss, (the empowerment that is wage slavery,) for in our youth, poverty is not an ever-present pejorative, but the rite of passage to show that we are alive,
  As rituals of manhood are defined by two things and two things only; how much insomnia one can accumulate to meet insane and inane deadlines, and how much one can illuminate the walls in ***** from all the beers, spirits, cheap wines and questionable home-brews,
  As the government dismantles the human-rights commission, and we nervously attend the rallies initiated by the radicals, and the man on the megaphone calls on the crowd to chant and we can only mumble and laugh nervously at ourselves,
  And when the next speaker runs onto stage feeling the need to plead to this already nervous, placid mass that this is in-fact a PEACEFUL PROTEST, and that we are all true patriots and they insist everyone start singing the national anthem and we all look down and we again mumble, or pretend somehow not to hear them,
  and when, in this biggest independent rally around a unified cause our generation's ever seen, we have never felt so alone ,
  and isolated,  
                                  we
                                             remember,
                                                                    those earlier days,
  When we'd bleach our hair; we'd poison ourselves white, in the vain mystic hope that this was just the transition period to the time when we'd get true colour into our lives,
  Remember our wonder at the Eurocentric Asiatic television representations of the Abrahamic faiths, given transubstantiated holy revival by the medium of Saturday morning digital pastel pasture; when we were children staring excited and wide eyed into the Metatrons Fire of Sinai 'Random Almighty Mega Damage'; as Dante and the seraph class Tyrant-infused-Michael inevitably made battle with YHWH, -in the one True End,- as we grinded within the monolithic emerald obsidian halls, Mystical wonderment spilling forth from our reddened hollow eyes, at the beautiful unlimited expansive world contained within our console/consoling digital unit discs; conformally mapped and etched into the convex hull of our minds,
  Where we were gods, doing battle with every possible creature in morphospace, filleted into overpriced cards and cartridges, for which our strategies meant so much to us though none of us really understood the game,
  When we could quote verbatim every piece of dialogue in GTA2, and get concerned glances from our parents as we conjured veiled imagery of bukake-ladled innuendo which we didn't really understand until six or seven years later,
  When sexuality was a special secret club our elders and the kids in the years above came across so wise for being a member of, rather than an anti-turing test; a farcical ritual where everyone tries their best to imitate the hyper-reality of MTV while hiding the nervous feelings that this whole thing was really meant for someone other than us,
  When creating a whole new lexicon for our self-hood (be it artistic, ******, political or philosophical) felt like existential emancipation; a transcendental rebellion against the normalising identities and semantics of old, rather than an impenetrable circle-**** taxonomy,
  When one day we'd unveil a new term in some text, and it would completely change our outlook on every corner of our lives,
  Or, the next day, when we'd give up and just sit back on rolling banks, and look out at a veil of stars,
  Or the next day, when we'd wonder desperate and painfully, which of the last two was the real pursuit and which was wasted time? (Or was it this day, the day spent building an illusory dialectic between them?)
  Remember when we were in kindergarden, and you had to pass through the kitchen, -the adults zone,- to get to the toilet, and you'd feel both shame and wonderment listening in of the snippets of conversation muttered by these titanic figures; discussing abstruse issues from the newspaper in foreign yet noble tongues?
  Remember when we were teens, and every form-checking observation and question from these same adults was so painstakingly pedantically banal and asinine, that one could only respond with monosyllabic grunts and silent hysterics?
  And remember as 'young adults', when we'd inevitably entered this same dull Aristotelian world of forms, how we'd ask the same adults for advice on filling these paperworks, at once still asemic gibberish, and at once the fine-print that contained and predicted our lives?
  Remember when our dreams for the future were not bounded by the economy of our grade point averages and just how much debt we were willing to incur
                                …
I've seen the best minds of my generation climb into pre-packaged little boxes; and pay through the teeth for the privilege of doing so.  
  Akin to a 'Howl' they call it? Our cry for selfhood? What a scream.
It's not even a cry. Barely a whimper.
More of a zombified groan, completely aware our intrepid Journey of Self is just a pricey guided tour. (Tv Ad's static commodified existential emancipatory platitudes; 'your place in the world' / 'well it's my place and it's my time' urgh.)
And so we march asleep; all lame all blind.
  Trudging through the mind-fields; arguing, unravelling the semantic distinctions between the empty boundaries and the boundaries of emptiness.
  Transcribed down for essay deadlines,  /  assessing our lives trajectory as dead lines,
Becoming increasingly aware,
  We are not the living beings, the dasein, the Übermenschen being actualised; we are the machinery through which the institutions, the factories, the markets and education facilities actualise themselves.
  (While the only acceptable language we can breathe in opposition to these ratcheting pedagogical machines is the lexicon they provide us..
  ('oh, you hate systemic neoliberal alienation; the deestablishment of ontological anthropocentrism? Tell me more about the esoteric uselessness of academic culture.') bluh.)

But

       the more we follow those phantom images we built of ourselves,
the more we become aware they are but sirens; hypnotic dreamlike figures luring us to our doom,
  and as this awareness dawns; and the cognitive dissonances and schizophrenia grows,
       We


                                just try to keep calm and carry on regardless.

Can we really claim the arrogance of having a better path?
The conceit that there's a better cliff we should be guiding ourselves to to top ourselves off?
I don't know,
I reaally
really
just don't know.
..i think i started out with a theme here, but it mostly devolved into venting.
      i finished another year of university recently. i'm not really sure to what extent higher education's given me perspective on life, and what extent it's simply annihilated what little i had.
   from my experiences of student culture, i feel our generation views itself as abandoned by the world, but to good for it anyway. We aren't the bohemians or beatniks or hippies or punks; our drinking and drugging ourselves to death isn't a counter-cultural high-minded rebellion. It's more a prideful self destructive egotism, a self derisive narcissism.   or something. i dunno.
  whether it's from cowardice or a more genuine scepticism, i certainly have no idea what i am (or ought to be) doing in/with/about this world.
Tim Knight Nov 2012
Wait for the door by the pillar
because she’ll be back again,
with an arm around her neck
to keep her warm against cold
eyes looking down, from the surrounding guys from around the bar.
Every jackpot ever, was won in their hearts that night
in that shadow of time that they called light.
Single girls will always be watched,
and those girls with a man attached
will always seem unmatched in the eyes of the lonesome.

I waited by the door and joined in with her stride,
a pace set with vigour and pride.
Did I speak?
No, never spoke up, just let it carried on
until it lit and flared up.
When that match hit okra runway slip
everything comfortable flipped and switched
into a cushion of stone that now dismantles backs,
blisters fingers and causes calluses that stop and linger.

Hate myself?
Increasingly.
Personification was me, to her
and to me, she was just that.
I should really get in contact,
and apologise.
Akemi  Nov 2013
skinned rabbits
Akemi Nov 2013
Blood come, blood lust
Pulse and closed trickle
Pledged and disloyal
Come beckon her closer

The red grin dismantles
Flesh as well as the cleaver
Pain left drowned within
Infinite desire

And heir blackens and boils
Skin softer than petals
Split apart for the curious /
The insatiable

Come beckon her closer
Come beckon her closer
We all die in the moment
And live for nothing.
8:17pm, November 28th 2013

Desire, attachment, replacement.


When FATE and DESTINY
Makes BELOVEDz-LOVERZ meet
And when they Open up
Their hearts & SOUL
To show their ETERNAL AGAPE LOVE
On display to the society and world

It'll be an apocalypse moment of LOVE

*

The modern age we live in
Where each person is hidden behind
A fake mask of artificial shallow-ness
Speaking parroted knowledge
Of ineffectual education

When LOVING dismantles
Such faulty veils of life

It'll be an apocalypse moment of LOVE



BELOVEDz-LOVERz always shower
Joy and happiness to one-another

Only they understand
The hidden POWERS of LOVE

Read between the lines of these words
Understand what LOVER-Z eyes are saying

Once LOVERz-BELOVEDz eyes
Blink in synchronized ONENESS
The world will wake-up from
Their wasted slumber of
Rat-racing success, power & wealth

It'll be an apocalypse moment of LOVE

*

When the heart of flowers
Will burn with LOVE
Those times the dew drops
Will emit insatiable LOVE fire

This season
When the Nature will nurture
LOVE flowers to bloom
In every corner of planet earth

The sky will adore itself
With a billion color rainbows

It'll be an apocalypse moment of LOVE



APOCALYPSE - meaning "An Uncovering"
Disclosure of knowledge or revelation
Nicole Jul 2014
Have you ever met that person
Or those people
Who touch your life in such a way
That nothing is ever the same?
Those who,
When gone,
Leave you tattered in pieces,
Rotting into nothing?
They turn their backs without one worry for your sake
And you die inside.
Every time they come up in life,
A little piece of your soul dismantles from the rest
And you are never the same again.
I act solid as stone
Cold and strong
No fear, and no worry
Only silence and concrete
But image only exists to others
Those of the outside world
Watching,
And you're blind.
In actuality,
In true, depraved reality,
I worry about myself.
I am afraid of who I will become
And who I have became.
All because of those ones
Who have destroyed my entire being
Time, and time again:
I am not strong,
I am not impenetrable,
I am vulnerable and weak hearted,
And I am not me.
Transformed, now I stand
A shadow of my old self
Breathing but not living
Moving and getting nowhere
Silence without peace.
And the sick reality is
I did it to myself
Because no matter how cold I act
The foundation will still fall
When you allow even the smallest nail
To break through your walls,
Even with good intentions.
Marco Batista Nov 2013
I Jammed the pain inside, to wait for the defects to reside. Today strays and wanders away until it's stuffed down inside the void of discomfort. Let's roll our imagination onto light able paper, light it, and watch it burn..

See because that's what addiction does. It overrides your body latching on your inner artistry for its fuel. Pretty soon you become a machine, something mindless. Fasten your seatbelt because your on auto-pilot.

Now the transactions of your body really start to inaugurate. Your internals no longer has what it takes to fight, to resist, so now come the alterations.The tips of your fingers go hand in hand with the tip of your tongue. How your saliva's lust for substance dismantles the chemical compounds. Your taste buds loving that all too familiar feeling. Your greed full blood consuming every inch of it. As the destruction slowly trickles down your throat your anxious. Then the finale comes, the moment you've been waiting patiently for  the manipulation and overhaul of your brain and your reality remodeled, your home.

In those seconds pain is never an option, never a thought. Your lost out at sea. But that's all it really is, seconds, minutes, sometimes hours, just a little more time to stick the dysphoria on the back burner. When in truth you've just deepened the scar and exposed it to infections. When it's gone your left with broken thoughts that feel unrepairable.

Addiction doesn't just come from pre-packaged materials, they come from every entity you wish that blocks the truth out. They come from unfulfillment , pain, and soak themselves until you are left with no control. You have to fight, fight for your life. Face the music
Effortlessly the great life-giver dismantles the frozen tranquility of the Night.
First, the immaculate tears the blue-black curtain to reveal the crimson scars of daybreak.
Soon after, her warming touch reaches the frosty moss on the trees: vapor arises.
Seeming to defy gravity, her disk of pure selflessness rises in the sky,
peeling yet further back the veil of darkness.
Her oranges,
then pinks,
then finally hues of soft blue
stretch ahead of her, as if to warn us of her impending, unbiased gaze.

She keeps us and our friends warm
just as she does the same for our enemies.
She doesn't care who you are, where you're from, what you believe,
whom you love, nor what you do at home when you think you're alone.
She just gives all of us, each day, every one of us
unbiased, unconditional, relatively unending
sustenance.
This poem is from over a year ago, I just decided I oughtta upload and share it.
Lawrence Hall Mar 2021
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                Socrates on the Courthouse Lawn in Liberty, Texas

                         “Strong minds discuss ideas,
                          average minds discuss events,
                          weak minds discuss people.”

                     -attributed to Socrates, but no one knows

Imagine if you will old Socrates
On an old wooden bench on the courthouse lawn
Playing checkers with all the other old men
On an old picnic table throughout the day

He lifts his old straw hat in the leafy shade
With his old bandana he wipes his old bald head
And sagely asks the old questions of us
And through his dialectic dismantles old cant

And that must be why, as the ages pass
They’ve made for him a monument here in the grass



(While passing through Liberty, Texas I saw on the courthouse lawn a marble slab engraved only with “Socrates”.)

Liberty County Courthouse - TexasCourtHouses.com
Liberty, Texas, Bed & Breakfast Hotels (usatoday.com)
Socrates (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
A poem is itself.
preston Mar 2021

When Love's scalpel  comes
towards my beautiful Gloria--

  she leans in to it

What is it that makes  this one
  believe
at such a tremendous  cost
to to herself

and yet, so many others
turn and run..
turn and hide?

I was built-- from the ground,  up
to help  hold ones
such as yourself,  up

as the bright   healing light  
of loves ache

dismantles  the intricacies  of our
once-necessary, life-built  
war machines..

yes, my beauty--
down to the very  core

of  your  foundation,
where you can finally  
have the chance

     to become  rebuilt:

from the ground's  true bedrock,
up

xoxo

— The End —