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Daniel Tucker Jun 27
You are on a very long list
of those who can’t though
they persist.

Learn the lesson of Achilles
heel: there's something that doesn't want you here.

You hold tightly the images
of misguided faith, role
models and illusory joy.
But graven images topple
as slow as dry rot and
Pandora quietly fills your
box of toys.

Your house is projected
and frozen in time.
Twenty layers of
wallpaper are peeling
your mind.

Rooms untouched like
100-year-old Mason
jar preserves. You can't
eat fruit kept for so many
years.

Your choice of worlds
kept the patterns; no
new beginnings mean
the same old ends.
You may not break all
the rules, but you sure
make them bend.

Grace seemed to touch
you as you walked a
mile or two seemingly
content. But no matter
how amazing the grace
was, you can't be where
you never went.

As long as scapegoats
hang on crosses all along
this highway like rows of
pigs hanging bloodless at
the slaughterhouse, and
as long as Western
religious pop culture icons
and other social images
replace what is real, the roadblocks and washouts
will continue to keep you
there. Achilles protected everything but his heel.


© 2025 Daniel Tucker
This speaks of the many forms of addictions we humans are susceptible to. I was inspired to write this about someone I cared for very much. They suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. I was an Addiction's Counselor back then. I am so grateful that I kinda helped shock him and others into straightening up their lives. Therapy can be intense. Often it has to be. This write is an example of it.
Tell me, my dear
Do you really hate me?
Or are you just mad that
I opened the Pandora's
Box inside your head?
God knows what you'll find there...
Kitt Sep 2023
onslaughts of parasitic butterflies devour her liver each eve
sparing just enough to grow back the next day
her night clothes are torn under razor beaks
then mended each morning by the nimble-fingered Narcissi
who do not lament her predicament,
but sing mellow little tunes in C minor,
a statement: there is no latent compassion for Pandora
nor for her descendants in Greece or in Rome.
from a word usage prompt
Trojan Mar 2023
I stared once at this box
With a golden pink sign
"Femininity" it said

And yet the box was black
A sealed and hidden front
Pry it open? T'was quite hard

I know that this Pandororos' box
Holds some treasure at the top
I dread however, all the rot below

I think often of this box
All the treasure near its top
Creativity, care and justice

Pandororos - all the gifts at the top
And I still dread, what hides just below that top
Blood and tears, bits of flesh
All the rot below the top
August, 2022
fray narte Jan 2022
i have inherited pandora's careless melancholy, her tiny box of regrets, her white-washed, quiet horrors and terrible decisions — staining like a memory passed down from her reckless hands to my old, ***** claws, digging for something raw, something parasitic, something miserable, something always goes wrong beneath my ribs. it wants out, like a beast, a misplace fragment, an aphid. and these days turn their heads away — blur themselves blind before my many blunders.

before the wrath of a false god, will my bones ever learn the art of being unapologetic?
Michael R Burch Jan 2022
All the More Human, for Eve Pandora
by Michael R. Burch

a lullaby for the first human Clone

God provide the soul, and let her sleep
be natural as ours, unplagued by dreams
of being someone else, lost in the deep
wild swells of losing all that "human" means ...

and do not let her come to doubt herself—
that she is as we are, so much alike
in frailty, in the books that line the shelf
that tell us who we are—a rickety ****

against the flood of doubt—that we are more
than cells and chance, that love, perhaps, exists
because of someone else who would endure
such pain because some part of her persists

in us, and calls us blesséd by her bed,
become a saint at last, in whose frail arms
we see ourselves—the gray won out of red,
the ash of blonde—till love is safe from harm

and all that "human" means is that we live
in doubt, and die in doubt, and only love
the more because we only know to strive
against an end we loathe and fear. What of?—

we cannot say, imagining the Night
as some weird darkened structure caving in
to cold enormous pressure. Lacking sight,
we lie unbreathing, thinking breath a sin ...

and that is to be human. You are us—
true mortal, child of doubt, hopeful and curious.

Keywords/Tags: Eve, Pandora, human, clone, humanity, human being, human condition, evolution, birth, death, life and death, soul, soulmate, saint, youth
Chris Hutchison Nov 2021
She raised you, and gave you all she had
You did not listen
She was not overbearing
But she needed your bareness
The awareness
You lost long ago
She let you go into the wild, to make your own choices
Even if those choices mean her death
Knife in your hand with garlic breath
Joyous in the ****
Veiled violent negligence
Oblivious malevolence
Your innocent eyes
Red tinted, devilish yet despondent
Pontificate of poison
A laughing fat hedon
Crying now for pardon
But you will never **** her. She is bigger than you
Mother doesn't care
She will break you without blinking
She is Pandora and soon you will know
How hot the soil scorches, and how hard the wind may blow
Ananya May 2021
The eerie calmness in the air
Called me foreward towards you,
The distinct voice of my scruples,
Holding me back.
I should have stopped,
I wished to stop,
I didn't stop.
Bringing the evil in the world
In contrition I was left alone,
The only thing I had,
Was what I trapped,
The sense of hope lying in the box.
What was going in Pandora's mind after she let the evil out?
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