#characterization poems

little lion Feb 2021

Fishbowl

My life has become a bit like a fishbowl:
the glass is thick and durable, it's supposed to
be smudge-proof, but you never fail to leave your finger-
prints behind. There are rocks at the bottom, a blend of neons:
blue and orange and pink and green and yellow, painted with the
cheap kind of paint that eventually chips away and gathers at the tip-top of the water...always mixing in with the the flimsy food flakes you toss in at mealtimes before watching with disinterested fascination as I swim to the top and sort through what's edible and what's not, as if the food is much better than the chips of paint and the dust bites that gather after a few days of sitting on the counter. My bowl stays in the sun as though the pink and purple fake plants you've given me require time spent in
the light to grow and prosper, although it is fun to check every
now and then to see how much you really care when I let
myself drift to the top of the water to bask in the glow
of either the sun or the artificial lamp that's been
placed next to my bowl. Some nights you
forget to turn it off, but I don't mind
so much because at least then I
can watch over you at night
the way you watch over
her, instead of me.

#fish #personification #characterization #metaphor #descriptive #shape #bowl #concrete #poem

Orchid T Aspen Dec 2019

The marbled Carcass.

If I could save even one person, maybe I would speak.

、、、、

Her flesh wrapped around her like kudzu on a tree, parasitically engaged in what others yearned for.

If you can't rely on blood, who do you have left?

So I stayed. Because no one would come near. How kind she was. How gracious and loving and loved.

、、、、

Her skin became cold. The very ***** dedicated to masking her advanced structure became like a marble slab left in the snow. That flesh that cradled her meaningless meanings hardened like the exoskeletons she imitated.

She was an insect through and through.

、、、、

And even if cold was the absence of heat, the left-behind contraband someone else came to cherish, she emanated the very invasion that enveloped her.

She radiated her icy salvation.

、、、、

And so when the time came that I was able to touch her...
When it was upon my own flesh I would feel what she refused to feel, she grasped onto me.

As if she longed to drag me into her abyss with one last throe, one last labor of love for her blood.

、、、、

My fingers never fell off, but I was frost bitten. My organs never failed, but I was shredded apart by the sting of the sobbing wind.

、、、、

I didn't become her marble carcass like I should have.

、、、、

She didn't take me with her.

I couldn't save her anymore.

Not even if I had devoted my life to doing so. Never again. She left me behind, and I was cold too.

、、、、

My skin is not chilled to the touch. My muscles are not the remnants of a frozen cicada shell. My skeleton is not made of the icicles left to melt in the sun's triumph.

My tendons ache in the wake of an ancient breeze that blew by far too late.

、、、、

I am not a slab of cold marble.

、、、、

I am a starkly darkened visage to behold and not be held, forever turning over and over,
never ceasing and always yearning for that which never was, and that which will never be.

I was only for their sake. Never mine, even if I pretended.

、、、、

This endless daydream that expands before and behind me, that twists in tendrils that are deplorably mine and

soak in the oily water that inisists on being my keeper... I will not let go of the ribcage it offers to my grasping hands.

I will bear who I am. I am my sickness.

、、、、

I will plunge into the needy and engorged expanse of shifting flowers and lodged viscera.

I will continue to encase and cease.

、、、、

Forever in my head.
Forever in my skull. Forever tapping in my cage. Forever clipping my scrawny wings. Forever sincere.

、、、、

I loved her, and I couldn't
save her.

She was dead, and I couldn't save her.

She was alive, and I couldn't save her.

、、、、

What remains?
Irreparable me.

#psychosis #despair #family #fear #relationship #toxicity #trauma #characterization #affirmation #pleading

Àŧùl Dec 2016

Setup|Upset

They Call It Heresy,
We Call It Genuine Science

We designed the genes' primers,
Ordered them along the oligomers.
Our aim is an elaborate one,
It involves molecular cloning,
Sequence characterization, and
Relative expression analysis of
Bovine Trefoil Factors.

Now we hope to clone the gene,
The gene which is of a bovine origin,
By extensive working hours input,
And bearing in mind the risks,
Of not getting the desired output,
The possibility of failure always therein,
But pregnancy, healing & immunity it's governing.

Three types of trefoil factors there are,
TFF1: It suppresses gastric carcinoma,
And also helps in pregnancy,
TFF2: Helps exclusively in cancer research,
TFF3: Helps exclusively in pregnancy maintenance,
And also our prime interest.

After cloning the genes,
We have to sequence them,
And after characterization,
We have to analyse them,
After relative expression.

My M.Tech dissertation research topic is molecular cloning, sequence characterization, and relative expression analysis of Bovine Trefoil Factors and we will be working with water buffalo species.

I completed this work under the guidance of Dr AK Mohanty with additional working guidance from my dear elder sisterly lab mate Dr S G Chaudhary neé Rana.

The complete 2nd year was a research year.

HP Poem #1306
©Atul Kaushal

#love #science #true #patience #genuine #genes #heresy #characterization #cloning

Vamika Sinha Sep 2015

Wide-Eyed

The poet looks
and delves.

She wonders if he ever stops,
him, this rushing-forward-breathlessly train,
if he did park himself in fantastical paragraphs;
the poet is dumbfounded at him
ceasing.

In construction sites of grammar,
where free ideas float in ruins,
poet wonders how,
how, how
he came to plan to live
up
to an exclamation mark.
And condensed so many dribbles and strikes
of strange and fruitful, even withered
paragraphs into one line and pointer -
a smile and a lope-stagger dance of a walk -
an exclamation mark.

The poet stares, once again
astounded by the little streaks of the universe
and longs to hold on to something.
Disarmed,
she can't quite put a finger on it,
his gaping honesty and his quiet one,
that contradiction
shouting in her face
while whispering in her eyes.

The poet laughs -
laughs of, in, out
of sleep.
Summer is here.
And she chooses to notice.
He laughs too,
but he's always been noticing
and the poet writes down how
she learnt to bite and chew into the fruit of the world
and taste

it sour runny sweet cold explosive lingering
just as him.
The poet saw all
colours rolling in one
strange song of limbs.
She did not like the music
but she made herself a blank white canvas

and listened
and laughed

clean, silly laughs
fluting out of the incongruity
of simple,
simple
moments.

Fun life, easy stretch of the mouth -
it is possible to smile down at
what a clown pain is.
He declares this boldly
without saying a word
or two.
The poet is dumbfounded at him
being.

She did not see and had not seen and now only began to picture
but she was blind.
He said he was blinder and that
was true. The poet
did not smirk but giggle at the irony -
he lived in pop-bold spectacles,
she slept in black and white films.
But both were blind.

We cannot see and
we
are blurs.

The poet likes that life scrapes away at her
because she can see chinks of white sunshine
through all the sheared-off layers.
Clean, clean,

bright, bright -
he teaches her in a beam
without a hello.

The poet writes poetry
on breathing action prose.
And she laughs -

You are everything I don't want
but I'm curious.

Something different, hey?

#happiness #perception #wonder #colour #laughter #curiosity #ideas #speculation #characterization #incredulity

Alba Mar 2015

Untitled

She was the strangest football fan I'd ever met,
Between match programmes and leaflets she hid Nietzsche and Thoreau;
Philosophy being a bright passion of hers,
It all seemed so natural in her visage.
On days, she'd hum You'll Never Walk Alone
While turning delicately the pages of a new text,
Smiling at the words that appeared before her on the page.
Dorian Gray, she took time to point out,
Kept her fascinated—
But it was always going to be Nietzsche,
And the first time she strummed the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra it was as if the humming had turned to fire,
And she was melded with the page.
I would believe only in a god who could dance.
If you asked her who she favoured,
she would reply back with a chirp,
the Russians!
And hold to you a copy of Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment, she said, was her fascination
And she'd as fluidly as ever switch back to the fixtures.
Never passion, always fancy.
It was as if viewing herself through a third party lens.
Her passion for the game,
As mysterious as her gentle touch on softer pages.
How could she love so drastically?
Football, her passion,
But her books were her mystery to all, to even herself,
And the quiet murmur of Nietzsche, her nectar.

#philosophy #books #prose #football #nietzche #soccer #humankind #characterization #dostoyevsky #zarathustra

— The End —