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

Mysterious night
Soft and heavy with promise
A velvet hammer!

Imagine, I'm laying in your bed. Beneath your covers.
On your pillow.
In your arms.
Imagine, you press your thumb to
my lower lip, and you can hear my heart
beating like a hammer.
You remake my ribcage with your fingertips, and
you teach me a new language with your mouth.
You touch me with intention.
Imagine, I let you. I uncurl.
Moonlight filters in through the window and pours over us. That silky-white illumination is reflected in your eyes and it touches
you so softly, I could scream.
And the exquisite truth of it all is,
that if you ever did get to touch me,
I think I would die.

My joints ache inside my body

Heart is pounding like a hammer in my chest

Veins are itching with emptiness

It is lonely without the company of chemicals to converse with my cloudy thoughts

Come home
Need you now more than ever

I am waiting for you to make me feel alright

I never drove by that was the ***** way,
             half time trying to hit a wet spot blind.
or killing the time of those who were never
meant to fall...

Got honor between the lines, I'll stop the car,
              open the door, walk out suited
not you average gangster, look like the others
and no one running till I pulls out your
friend it anit here for a meet and greet.


More like say hello to, goodbye...
   you bleeding on the floor, I'm a good shot...
One to the chest, you fell now one to the head,
   you aint paid you bills now your blood
                                           stained in the wind.


Casually walking back to the car signing
         autographs of his followers.  
This meet and greets been productive,
   Family signing you off on the morgue...

I aint going to lie the only necktie I be
           tightening is yours...

Tied to a chair, if I need information,
   asking as politely with a ball hammer
                                   and some pliers...


I had a few mouths shout off,
now they walk the street silently,
  never **** disrespect.

Show what silence sounds like,
respect is fear
         and I'm the scarecrow in the
field.

And you crows,
    you worm eaters ain't seen nothing yet..

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