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Faith Jan 2019
In front of my eyes
My greatest fears arise
Everything I thought I knew
Has got up and flew

To far away lands
It's all slipping through my hands
Plans I had made
Are now beginning to fade

My already broken life
Continues to tear me up inside
This news has left me trembling
And now my life is crumbling
Lately I've received some pieces of big news after big news and I'm caught in the middle of a war between everything. The plans from a few years ago have been thrown out the window. Can I get some encouragement maybe?
Keiya Tasire Dec 2018
The question rings as a rattle on my cage.
"I am writing poetry" I answered.

He mumbled, "I thought you were playing Mahjong."

I exhaled hard, "I was. I won two games. " I said  with a little aggravation.

"Hum..." he said, then all fell silent.
I did not respond.

Only the sound of my fingers typing on the keyboard continued
Until he could not stand it anymore, "There's news today. The USA is pulling out of Syria."

"Hum, that's good." I said.

He said, "I am sure the families of the soldiers that are coming home are happy."

"Yeah, they probably are." I said halfheartedly as I continued to write.

"Israel is still worried about their borders."

Sarcastically I replied, "Maybe they will build  a wall."
The sounds of tap-tap-tap on the keyboard, continuing...

He said, "Yeah, maybe Trump will help them."
I stopped typing.
We laughed and I continued to write.

It was quiet for just a moment.
Then he said, "What'cha doing now?
We both laughed out loud!!!
And I finished this writing.
Humor goes a long ways in soothing rough edges.
Anya Dec 2018
There are certain words...
Like, depression
Cancer
That become the mascot
For their particular affliction
An all encompassing bubble,
Hepatoma,
Doesn’t mean much
But liver cancer, now that’s a whole nother matter

Just simply using the word
Gives rise to panic.         Anxiety
It makes sense,
That non experts can’t know every type of
Illness or mental disorder out there
So they associate it with a mascot

But,
It’s all the unessesary hype
And fear
The baggage that comes with it
Not as many, knew about zeka
But Ebola?
That was all over the news
Despite being far less of a threat
Simply because,
It became the mascot
Nis Dec 2018
Donde mis pasos resuenan
en el eco de mi mente
una mariposa se calla
y parpadea.

La luna me mira
y sonríe,
apiadándose con benevolencia
como sólo ella sabe hacerlo.

Me tumbo en mi cama
y lloro
lágrimas de amor
por ese alguien que no existe.

La miel de mis labios
es agria y salvaje.
Por eso tal vez cada beso que doy
miente
y cada cosa que digo
duele.

Sólo nadie puede entenderme,
por eso estoy sola.
Sólo nadie puede amarme,
por eso te quiero.

Sólo la luna de mis labios resuena en mi cama.
Sólo aquí me lloro,
y el azabache de mis ojos
enturbia la realidad
con sus fluídos azulados.

//

Where my steps echo
in the echo of my mind
a butterfly shuts up
and blinks.

The moon looks at me
and smiles,
taking pitty with benevolence
as only it knows how to do it.

I lie on my bed
and cry
tears of love
for that one who doesn't exist.

The honey from my lips
is sour and wild.
Maybe that's why each kiss I give
lies
and each thing I say
hurts.

Only noone can understand me,
that's why I'm alone.
Only noone can love me,
that's why I like you.

Only the moon from my lips echoes on my bed.
Only here I cry for myself,
and the jet from my eyes
muddies reality
with its bluish fluids.
B Sonia K Dec 2018
Sit Still,
Try to Relax
I’m only just beginning...
Tyler Matthew Dec 2018
Gunshot, blood pool,
black body, yellow tape,
white chalk, white cop.
"White America."

Tattoos, white hood,
tight rope, black hearse,
red flag, white stars.
"White America."

Blue sky, black sun,
bluebird, blue song,
black stripe, white light.
"White America."

Blue lips, white teeth.
"White America."
Red brick, green grass
"White America."
White coat, black button.
"White America."
I am CRITICIZING racist culture, not glorifying it.
Nico Reznick Nov 2018
Well, it’s winter.
Feels like it has been for
oh, a few years now, and there’s
not enough vitamin D in the universe.
I’m sticky with a low-grade fever I’ve been
running since forever.
My hands still sweat too much
gripping a steering wheel, heart caught
somewhere unsustainable and
treacherous between over-revving and
stalling.  There are
dead things at the side of every road; my
foreshortened sense of future is
written in the entrails of
creatures who never learned
to look both ways.  Incidentally,
I’m still off meat.
I’m not sleeping right.  I keep having this same
cold, lurching dream; night after night,
we’re boarding the dark, sinister hulk of a ship
squatting low in a hostile harbour, refugees on
an ill-fated voyage, borne by
violent winds and poisoned tides.
Awake, I make the mistake of clinging to
facts and reason, when apparently we’re
guided now by phrenology, comets
and hate.  The news cycle spins away like
some fairytale spinning wheel, one
poisonous ***** after another, until we all
wish we could sleep for a hundred years, or
at least until Brexit is over.  
I suspect my cat of being a
deep state agent and myself
of being a crisis actor (I’m always
showing up on the periphery of these
seemingly unrelated catastrophes).
In this house, we drink spirits when
a comrade dies; I’ve got a handle on the
drinking, but the grief
is getting to be a destructive habit.  Altogether
Too
many
deaths.
It gets noisy in here, in my
head (train station noisy; busy, but transient; cold
and ***** and full of strangers).
I look at butterflies, orchids, tigers, roadkill,
x-rays of tumour-riddled lungs, and see
only Rorschach blots.  Shrug.  It’s not like
any of it matters.  It’s impossible to take
this carnival of absurdity seriously anymore.  
In any event, while I thank you for your kind invitation,
for these and other reasons, I will not
be coming to your
New Year’s Party.
Girard Tournesol Nov 2018
The wind is full of shallow nothings
Drought, fire, vermin, climate, poverty
Rustling the leaves with a gossip
Deep roots will never hear
Offered in the age of "alternative facts."  Peace.
Ira Desmond Nov 2018
The downward momentum is clear to me now.
The engine has built up a full head of steam.
I’d try to stop it, if I knew how.

The fires of industry must burn on somehow;
they tend to burn brightest when fuel is extreme.
The downward momentum is clear to me now.

When currents are surging, we shouldn’t allow
the jingoist fringe to swim in the mainstream.
I’d try to stop them, if I knew how.

Civility means more than I can avow,
but poems can only allude to a theme:
The downward momentum is clear to me now.

Each click of a mouse that shouts holier than thou
is a cog in a treacherous clockmaker’s scheme.
I’d try to stop him, if I knew how.

We worshipped the circuit and forsook the plow
in search of a false technological dream.
Our downward momentum is clear to me now.
I’d try to stop us, if I knew how.
Ken Pepiton Oct 2018
I put my hand in the hand of the man from galilee

Or I thought I did, I imagined he would walk with me
and talk with me

and help me fill the darkness behind my eyes,
which i think may have been blind, at one time,

I have memories like that guy, Gold-something
color maybe, Goldfarv? Bloom. Right, my augmentatious savant
looked it up and I sorted what I recalled

Google The Global Brain, where he named a kind of
category of knowability. Memes, he called them.

And I thought, memes mean something more,
not Dawkins's, nor Bloom's, but
these, heteromemes bubbling out my belly button,
look real close.

Fractally featureless by the time a clock could have been imagined,

the point of the story was made, and there is no end in sight.

Pop. Another apocalypse bubble eclipsed by mortality. Whaddyaknow?

What remains when a bubble pops at a positron level,
after the charge is touched and
the tensionpowerloss collapses the bubble?

You should think you know atoms work, like
not a cloud of super positioning, elect-
tric-magi-tech, touch screen at the quantum accounting point,
not that, but
a bubble, powered, one way or another, with a single charge,
Go, that's it.
What an electron does. It goes,
as soon as any sense can be made of it,
oughtaouta hear
ping. No charge, no bubble, but next sure as...

Hell,
somethi' from nuthin must ahapt one time,
but ya'll take no heed, m'fallin angel droppin' in olfren, tricky hybridbast...

Noah was a tellin' Ham the truth found in wines that moved themselves
aright, slurry tongued, but pisstoff

The idea of somethin' goin' south in a family,
that started up again when
ever Noah started drinkin' old wine, sayin' sbetter'n...

Who told you I was naked?

-- aye, ye know, Noah was drunk,
No excuse, but you know.

Things were said, that maybe were forgotten, after a while,

But those father wounds a man imagines worst
are the one's his son's forgot.

The story being told is complicated. See,
the Bible is a lens,
not a map.

It got me much farther than this, should you ever
visit me.
No,
that's not in the stack,
that card's about as relevant as McLuhan's hair of the dog.

Somethin', ain't it?  All them three meter dishes shrunk down
to the size of a spoon, a teeny weeny spoon, a coke spoon,
like on Miami Vice, back when.

Satellite TV changed the desert, fer sher, but 4g, brohan,

that was the trick.
Future, on demand, where outhouses are still de rigueur.

Before you know it, country kids,
too poor for any but outlaw dreams,
can audit courses at MIT,
if somebody
shows him, it can be done, prove t' him
it works, faith can make things happen,
but
happening is sorta hard to nail down to one thing,
until the very last
Planc-sec.  Astrophysics is part of the metagame, fer sher.
But
there's some stuff that takes some patience,

everything that's old is only old, not rotten.

Olde time religion, at the oldfo'k dayroom,
where the clock runs the whole show.
It's another game show. Saint Bob Barker takes a bow,
and declares the worth of all your eyes behold,

If, if, if you are alucky winner and you arise when I call your name
to come on down
fall on your knees and declare the worth...

pure gamesmanships required here, golf whispers only,
worship, smuch more difficult to aim for than praise.
I agree.
Praise, appraisal, worthyness, worthship, prize,
how do you declare such a thing worthy,

A feeling? What's it worth? Depends. Safe? Priceless. Don't shout.

So we sell walls. We'll be rich and powerful wallbuilding,
citi-zen warriors fed and fattened by those we make
feel safe.

That's the idea. It's worked for years, at least
since
we
capitalized Campbell's bliss and Sagan's billions and billions of stars.

Workers will work for food and a feeling. And Facebook.
They choose, believe what's easiest, they are told,
you are absolutely co-rectallatime, tekayepeel.

There are such wishes being made, on all manner of stars
for happy ever afters. If wishes were asked for, whatif
connecting to the source of haps that are
all happiness can possibly
consist of...
Oh, consist is a sticky, gluten idea stuck in my daily bread.
It's related to resist, desist and the command to stand. Sistere.

This is that bomb, this is a dam buster Jesus H Christ Bomb!

Something's bound on earth to go wrong,
ever since Eve bit that apple, if she'da left that apple on the apple tree
Nah, that ain't how it went down and
songs about it don't change it none.

But, maybe this is me interrupted..
Whatif, nothing is immaterial, as an idea, it can't go wrong,
and Murphy's law, obeyed, is good, all the time.
Ask the pilot. What if,
asking for help helps? Was that a message? A touch by an angel?
Spirit, the idea?
Are you familiar with its role in reality?
Something makes these bubbles spin, y'know.

Ignoring is bliss, nay,
No more,
precisely, nevermore, quotheraven, shall the man who can read
be locked away from all the stories of all the things that
men, wombed and un,
have told and tested for ever, it seems,
when ya stop
striving for perfection and let patience have her way witcha,

whatcha learn can change the world.

Look back. Good news from a far country come our way.
In my younger days, I visited folks in county homes, the rest homes that once were called the po house, and sometimes I'd just sit and watch Jeopardy, and hold her hand, while listening to conversations with angels, all around me.
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