I have become as steel, forged within frigid winters heart

With a hardness, no desert summer could hope to rust

Sharpened to a fine edge between shifting sands

And grinding glaciers, which, given millennia have honed

Shaping my geometry in such a way as to cut inward

Carving jagged crevasses at right angles to the core

Whose arrhythmic pattern resembles a diseased damascus

Indistinguishable from the delaminations of a failed weld

Running down the length of my spine with spiderweb cracks

Covered by a clever fuller designed to distract the eye

With a stylized straight line, slowly tapering at the tip

Rounded by the blunt force trauma of repeatedly stabbing

The anvil on which I had been so hastily hammered

He's a stable smithy
Thinks his genius words are pithy
As he pounds, pounds, pounds
Into the night

Swings his big word-hammer
Never minding lies and grammar
Cuz he's gotta, gotta, gotta
Fuel the fight

With his bellowslike ire
He stokes the fire
As it burns, burns, burns
To his delight

On his huge word-anvil
Pounds rumor and scandal
As they sizzle, sizzle, sizzle
Burning bright

Hones his words untoward
Like a two-edged sword
As they stab, stab, stab
Like a knife

As his words extrude
They can get really rude
As he pushes, pushes, pushes
Wrong as right

He's a stable smithy
Thinks his genius words are pithy
As he pounds, pounds, pounds
With all his might




© 2019 Mark Toney. All rights reserved.

The Forge
by Michael R. Burch

To at last be indestructible, a poem
must first glow, almost flammable, upon
a thing inert, as gray, as dull as stone,

then bend this way and that, and slowly cool
at arm’s-length, something irreducible
drawn out with caution, toughened in a pool

of water so contrary just a hiss
escapes it—water instantly a mist.
It writhes, a thing of senseless shapelessness ...

And then the driven hammer falls and falls.
The horses ***** their ears in nearby stalls.
A soldier on his cot leans back and smiles.

A sound of ancient import, with the ring
of honest labor, sings of fashioning.

Published by The Chariton Review, The Eclectic Muse, Trinacria, Poetry Life & Times, and  Famous Poets and Poems

NOTE: This is a sonnet about forging sonnets. The gray "anvil" is the human brain. The fiery "glow" is the poetic imagination. The cooling and shaping are the process of revision. The hammer is the poet's pen, producing order out of chaos. Keywords/Tags: Sonnet, poem, indestructible, irreducible, hammer, anvil, forge, labor, fashioning, shape, smithy, blacksmith, ironworker, sword, pen

He's a stable smithy
Thinks his genius words are pithy
As he pounds, pounds, pounds
Into the night

Swings his big word-hammer
Never minding lies and grammar
Cuz he's gotta, gotta, gotta
Fuel the fight

With his bellowslike ire
He stokes the fire
As it burns, burns, burns
To his delight

On his huge word-anvil
Pounds rumor and scandal
As they sizzle, sizzle, sizzle
Burning bright

Hones his words untoward
Like a two-edged sword
As they stab, stab, stab
Like a knife

As his words extrude
They can get really rude
As he pushes, pushes, pushes
Wrong as right

He's a stable smithy
Thinks his genius words are pithy
As he pounds, pounds, pounds
With all his might

Your silence
Sits
On my chest
Like
An anvil.

My attention is hammered into being,
           as the anvil of my motions
                      are moulded into  formation.

Heated in the furnace of
                                       my subconscious.
What once was just white heated noise
       now moulds with each hit of reasoning..

Our thoughts are always being sculpted
               in the milliseconds of there creation.
Some aren't as we wished,
             misshapen syllables are reheated
to verses later hammered into cognitive thoughts.

*"Our perceiving is moulded with wielded
                    blows that form our every sentence,

Your mouth is made of metal,
Your kisses taste like gold.
Your lies they strike like bullets,
But I enjoy the holes.

Your mouth is made of metal,
Your truths begin to rust.
Your blade edge may be jagged,
But I love the way it cuts.

Your mouth is made of metal,
Your words feel like steel.
Your smile strikes like a hammer,
But I’ll still be your anvil.