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Maria Shabalin Feb 2022
These streets are awake
The lights offer a path to follow
Look up and not down to see
The treetops and brims of sky
Look out to see the painted houses
Of brick and melted yellow
Nowhere to be seen is order
The chaos is what makes it
Beyond words, beyond eyes.
It houses nostalgia of youth
It fears and celebrates death.
This city is mine but not for long
How I'll miss its descendants
Its language of old
The battered, the beaten
All the untold
Brooklyn. My city, my home. I hated you for so long- only because I could not find the strength to find the beauty within me. Brooklyn, you're alright;)
Dark n Beautiful Nov 2020
When a poem speak in confidence
That is how I am as I walk the street of Brooklyn

me, a poem of mystery, a bite senility though
in my sensate world:

I know ones pride, can over shadow them
Never ride ones pride.  Especially when the
price of victory is high but so are the rewards.

Did our former leader congratulate the new President?

Maybe I missed his speech,
pride is born in the heart
Ego is born in the mind
today is November 10th 2020:

My job can be so frustrating at times,
during these times of uncertainty

I have to push on daily,
to have a joyful moment,
at the work place
Give thank in all circumstances,
but I will never uttered those words
That is was God work:
it was because of my inner fears.
That led me to stay as long
as I did at the seafront:

The world feels lighter these days,
Satan power is lessening,
Death has lost its sting ( 1 Corinthians 15:55

For the first time in this country
A black female is the vice president of America
And what bring a smile on my face,
She attend the same college as my younger daughter
Howard University.. Thumps up !

When I was a teenager,
I went swimming late one night
In the cold water down the harbor Road,
A poem was created that night, little did I knew
Here I am rehashing those memories…..
A happy mood clouds our judgement
Words, words, images and the truth
Michael might not remember, but I remember,

The city lights and the whispering of the wind:
My shivering slender body was a poem inside and out:
When my poems speak in confidence,  I walk, the walk
In the street of Brooklyn..
Meat Stevens Jan 2020
Microdosing mushrooms and brandy  
Pots and pans to bang
Walking round gallery’s and show rooms
You say no I say dang
I’m whacked out and bleeding garlic
I stank like frat boy boat shoe
You look disheveled and I love it
I unoriginally ask about your tattoo

You know I really want to *******
I want you to take me home
Don’t want you to see my apartment
Don’t want you to see my zone
Living in ***** laundry and unopened letters
Allstate  insurance and catalogs
When’s the last time I took the trash out
When’s the last time I walked the dog

You ask me if it’s *******
I say no it’s ketamine
You ask me if you can try it
You ask me if it’s clean
I say baby there ain’t nothing better
It’s the bees knees and the bugaloo
Just stay away from the edge now deary
Or I’ll have to go fishing for you
Anthony Pierre Nov 2019
In the weirdest turn of events that day
As a cop toting guns and pepper spray
I gathered an urge to pen my first ode
In my lunch hour, before hitting the road

To sirens and light of my precinct's space
not a stanza wrote, yet my mind's apace
the pen's the problem; confidence recede
Pondered a visit to a friend, indeed

Thoughtful I'm moving, this old clue I'd act
on Brooklyn's pen thief; kleptomaniac
acquired from him, an ink dipping quill
of Huia birds, still boxed with its bill

Case solved; on the back of the bill it hints
"Dear Mayor, pen's for poems; lead's for thugs."
A Peculiar Pen's Poem...still beating the street
N.B. Huia (pronounced HOO EE UH) birds feathers cost $10,000 a single pluck
Mark Toney Oct 2019
John Winston Ono Lennon
From Britain to Brooklyn, decked in denim
Controversial through his political and peace activism
Felled by Mark David Chapman's act of barbarism
5/22/2019 - Poetry form: Clerihew - Copyright © Mark Toney | Year Posted 2019
Remember when this used to be a bodega where you could by an egg a few cigarettes and some *******?
I only bought **** there
a couple of times
I really went in there for milk or coffee
or an Entenmann’s raspberry danish in the big long rectangle.
I don’t remember the brand I smoked then
but they didn’t sell them.

The guy next door in my building had a thing for rich girls with flash cars
who would buy him clothes and other such presents
He was from the OC
and what he was doing in Brooklyn
I don’t even know
He got involved with some local
Columbians
Through the corner bodega
And of course proceeded
to date one of their women.
The OC Romeo.
Lady Lover.
Irresistible.
Pink Lacrosse shirt.
Turned up collar.
Leisure slacks.

I had to tell him once to not slap his thigh at me
When I passed him
on that corner
Posing with his newfound buddies.
And to give me back my cassette.
He tells me he left it out on the window sill
And it rained and got wet.
I said give it back anyway.

Not too long after he was gone.
Both he and his yuppie roommate
I heard he moved back to Newport Beach.
I wondered why he ran
Cuz I know he ran
Fast
I had some crazy neighbors in Hollywood
who disappeared
into the Russian night.
Someone spotted them a year later.
Playing with the wrong people.
Taking liberties.
Conning a con.
Your life really is not worth
very much
in those circles
so you’d better be quick on your feet.
Jim Davis Nov 2018
He came as an orphan
June 26th, 1865
Having seen
the death of his mother
Chased and speared by a hunter

First African elephant
in Europe
At the London Zoo
All alone
in all of Europe

How he broke and wore his tusks
In the iron of his enclosure
In night pain from toothaches
From many rotten teeth
Caused by his only grass hay diet

Given whiskey and beer to calm
Shared with his keeper
Matthew Scott, a difficult man
With no close friends
But with a deep empathy for animals

Who drank whiskey
with Jumbo
Into the late, lonely night
Jumbo liked whiskey, beer
and lots of sticky buns

A problematic elephant
With a Jekyll and Hyde character
Sold for 2,000 pounds
To PT Barnum
as a star attraction

Jumbo tearing his chains away
Then sitting like a mule
Until he knew his keeper
Would also ride the boat
Across the big pond

Barnum’s Scott
Made a deal
Queen Victoria wasn’t happy
Her children had sat
And rode upon his back

Jumbomania in America
Accompanied his arrival
20 million saw him alive
Brooklyn bridge opened in 1882
A year before Jumbo arrived

Then 17 May, 1884
Twenty elephants
marched across
All the way to Brooklyn
led by Jumbo

The bridge vibrated and rebounded

In St Thomas, Ontario, Canada
was his suffering demise
The day the circus train came to town
Tom Thumb and Jumbo
Were waiting to get loaded

Perhaps bumped in the ****
By the speeding freight locomotive
Internal bleeding
and a slow death
Tom Thumb only a broken leg

Jumbo in a slow death
Scott in a slow death afterwards
Having witnessed
the last breath
Of his best friend

Photographed (a recent novelty)
just after his death in B&W
Poor dead Jumbo
Scott at his head
Weeping inconsolably

Although PT Barnum
In pure PT Barnum invention
Says Jumbo ran headfirst
Into the freight locomotive
To save his keeper and Tom Thumb

Jumbo died
at twenty-four
still young
and growing
in size and girth

His stuffed mounted skin
burned at Tufts University
except the unbroken bones
plus the end of his tail
“And this is what remains of Jumbo”

Yesterday, I saw wild elephants on the banks of the Zambezi river
near Victoria Falls
Tomorrow I’m hoping to touch Jumbo’s bones in New York City
And walk the Brooklyn Bridge

©  2017 Jim Davis
Jumbo in Swahili means Hello

Written on an UAE Emirates flight from South Africa to New York.  With all credit due for words and most phrasing to David Attenborough’s documentary.  
“Attenborough and the Giant Elephant”

A few years ago, I heard Barnum and Bailey stopped having elephants as part of their shows!
I really wondered why!
Now I really know!
duang fu Aug 2018
brooklyn, new york
is not just a place

brooklyn, new york
is sunshine caught in sandy blonde hair
it is the light dusting of eyelashes
it is a pair of deep, hypnotising blue irises
it is a warm smile and a pair of strong arms

brooklyn, new york
is morning kisses across the cheek
it is the smell of sweet syrup on pancakes
it is the sound of 70s music in the background
it is the taste of vanilla ice cream from a tub
it is the feeling of a smooth bubble bath against your skin
it is the view of earthy undertones wherever you turn

brooklyn, new york
is my lover's embrace.
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