#shelley
When life itself is punishment, how do you go on living?
All I have wanted was to give my heart to another
To let that spark that jolted me awake
Back out into the world
But who would dare look at the monster
And think there is a soul?
Like the fire released by Prometheus,
I was blamed for the destruction I did not cause
Became a cautionary tale told by false gods
When I was simply trying to be the light in the shadows
With time as my only companion,
I have seen villages ironed out into cities
More blood shed by men than by ravenous beasts
Met by betrayal and torment time and time again
But despite it all, I have also seen
God in the kindness of other outsiders
Beauty in the purity and chaos of nature
And wisdom in solitude
That make the days somewhat bearable
But what is eternity when the cost is being alone?
All I have to keep me going
Is that there is hope with every sunrise
And purpose in suffering
That there is an end to this coming
But like Atlas, I am cursed
To carry this burden on my own
Nov 12, 2025
Nov 12, 2025 at 12:03 PM UTC
Oh, weep for Adonais—he's undead!
And hath been, lo! these interstitial years!
Yellow and black and pale and hectic red,
His cockney mood consumptively careers.
Upon a bubbling Hippocrene he's drunk
And dreaming, standing tiptoe on the brink
Of the wide world that sinks (Byron's a punk)
As love and fame to nothingness do sink.
An anguished autumn wind doth howl a HOWL
Of abject grief that sweeps the graveyard's stones.
The creeping moon observes the downy owl
That eats a mouse from tail to skull and bones.
Zombie Allan Poe, who's green and obscene,
Is sobbing, "Happy Birthday Halloween!"
Oct 31, 2024
Oct 31, 2024 at 12:59 PM UTC
Stand
before those Giant feet in sand
the ones forgotten in a foreign land
look upon the shattered visage lying there
'I am Ozymandius King of Kings
Look Upon My Works, ye Mighty and Despair'
remember well when hubris comes to call
we are nothing but a pile of wind blown dust
that's all
Aug 8, 2023
Aug 8, 2023 at 2:31 PM UTC
__|small gee for god; big bee for byron|__
Strikes a chord with you, does it?
This shambling poverty of thought,
Insta-rated and underwhelming;
Thank god for Byron.
__|keats versus shelley|__
Sparing no injury to his phthisicky frame,
Keats lies atop a make-believe of cherry trees
Searching among the clouds
For wealth, health and a Grecian urn,
While Shelley does Venice
And blows himself a hookah.
__|o poesy! for thee I grasp my pen|__
Panning the wayward sky for inspiration,
A hope, a word, a beginning;
A versification so ecstatic as to transfix the senses and pierce the heart,
A lightning phrase capable of uprooting all commonality,
As outrageous a miracle in the minds of men as crucified immortality.
__|requiem|__
Unlike the wilting rose which has no higher calling
Than to bloom and die upon the stem,
And having relinquished its last perfumed petal
Retreat from memory again,
I fear that I shall linger,
Tethered to this eternal moment
By shudd’ring will and breath combined,
A brighter shade of myself than what of me I have left behind.
Apr 16, 2021
Apr 16, 2021 at 4:21 PM UTC
Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor
by Michael R. Burch
After a night of hard drinking and spreading her legs,
Millay hits the dorm, where the Vassar don begs:
“Please act more chastely, more discretely, more seemly!”
(His name, let’s assume, was, er ... Percival Queemly.)
“Expel me! Expel me!”—She flashes her eyes.
“Oh! Please! No! I couldn’t! That wouldn’t be wise,
for a great banished Shelley would tarnish my name ...
Eek! My game will be lame if I can’t milque your fame!”
“Continue to live here—carouse as you please!”
the beleaguered don sighs as he sags to his knees.
Millay grinds her crotch half an inch from his nose:
“I can live in your hellhole, strange man, I suppose ...
but the price is your firstborn, whom I’ll sacrifice to Moloch.”
(Which explains what became of pale Percy’s son, Enoch.)
Originally published by Lucid Rhythms. This poem is based on an account of Edna St. Vincent Millay being confronted by a male Vassar authority about her rogue behavior. However, there is a some poetic license involved, for the sake of humor. It was actually Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken who mentioned Shelley. Here is his account in a response to a question about Millay cutting classes: "She cut everything. I once called her in and told her, 'I want you to know that you couldn't break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don't want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep, and I don't care what you do.' She went to the window and looked out and she said, 'Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.'" The stuff about Enoch and Moloch is, of course, pure fabrication on my part.
Keywords/Tags: Millay, dead, Shelley, Vassar, dorm, hellhole, drinking, partying, *** cutting classes
Apr 17, 2020
Apr 17, 2020 at 12:32 AM UTC
Outcast and outlaw and wild Romantic
May I rest my heart in thine gentle hands
Let it beat naked, open, and frantic
Will you pluck its strings, kiss these shiv’ring strands?
I pray, will thee guide my wandering pen
Across the page, through the spectral divide
Help find the words that evade me again
Trying to make sense of the mess inside
A desperate plea from a kindred soul
Seeking anyone who can understand
To find the words that make me feel whole
And sink teeth into the life I had planned
Find me, my lost flame and distant lover
Together, what worlds can we uncover?
Oct 22, 2019
Oct 22, 2019 at 5:02 AM UTC
At the end, my hand
Nor my fingers trembled as
I grasped her pale neck.
Oct 10, 2019
Oct 10, 2019 at 7:57 PM UTC
Keats swooned over a world that never was, except in dreams, and I've no use for that.
(sonnet #MMMMMMMDCCLXIII)
In lieu of aught we know: blue skies t'avail
Sans blot of clouds 'til puddles mirror thence
Heavn's eye...take up the chalice to drink hence
That fragrant draught which yields as if to scale
More heady visions than we've drunk, t'exhale
Like sailors on the faerie seas, pretense
Our dainty meat; as lovers swoon for sense
Oer plighted troth, not as we know; sans bail.
Go into raptures likeas Keats would stir
And Byron knew to write, as Shelley drew
Up in his Ode, faint cuz ye know in tour
What minstrels sang in ballads, weaving to
Effect those silken strands to snare souls fer
The Devil's heights. Cuz what we have won't do.
11Mar19c
Mar 12, 2019
Mar 12, 2019 at 1:24 AM UTC
Come to think of it, Garrison Keillor reads poetry like he'd feign be Bukowski or something.
(sonnets #MMMMMCCCXXXII and MMMMMCCCXXXIII)
I
Bukowski. If I'd known--and there must trail
Off seeking an excuse to bother hence
With aught. Nor should I have writ these his sense
Of our supposed age could acknowledge bail
For, since his voice kills any spirit's frail
Hope of existance, while he coughs from thence
To fiercely say the madness dictates whence
As chopped, clipped phrases whereby he'd prevail.
And Shelley, who saw further than now's poor
Horizon, said art veils her glass whilst through
The centries curs as ole Bukowski tour--
To vanish, sans a note. Yet here all who
Aspire think vile is tops, our work as twere
In vain and refuse. Cuz such never knew.
II
Lo, ****** Surrey, Wyatt, and aught hence
Who bowed themselves to Petrarch's mincing scale,
Yes, "polished our erst homely," ruder tale
Of lines and poetry, whose manners thence
Became refined thus as we yielded, whence
Far more rebelled than dared submit, t'assail
What set us 'part from beasts as if in frail
Excuse to cavil suited their intents.
He said the "mountaintop" was mine as twere
T'enjoy, but if I wanted friends maunt do,
As they all wallowed in the mud, each boor
Disgusted save by filthy scents. Sans clue
Of our high calling meant to raise th'obscure
Light for our fellow man, ye can't, who knew.
24Dec15c,d
Aug 17, 2016
Aug 17, 2016 at 9:18 PM UTC
I have been seeking a moment when
My paean would see the light
A melody when your serrated laugh
Crescendoes and obviates all evils
But what I'm truly wishing for
Is to be a scabbard to your sword
The bell that wakes you up at noon
A hymn that you know by heart
And the rituals that you adhere to
Tell me how I could shield
The furtive rhythm of your chords
To venerate the echoes of your fingertips
And be completely absorbed in your silhouette
I am proclaiming my paean
That seems five months of age
But in fact it has been decades
Trapped amongst verses and rhymes
If Hemingway was exchanging breaths
You could be his martini glass
Or the obsession of Shelley with Keats
Or maybe a beer bottle on Hank's grave
But the golden lotus has been outdated
For you are my fierce flames
To sanctify and to revive
And unlike Plath I'm living to see
When my paean would come to life


Jul 12, 2016
Jul 12, 2016 at 4:23 PM UTC
King of Kings, I am to man!
Set apart, in stone; a gentry,
With a tomb that sits but nearly empty?
A grave with few artifacts to witness bear,
Inscription of him, who was the great king,
Who was once and future, a beginning to everything,
Whose great father descended into those lands…
Where epitaph graces a lonely stone,
And Ozymandias rests, at peace, alone.
Jun 16, 2016
Jun 16, 2016 at 3:56 PM UTC
Look at the lovely Lord Byron
Sweet John Keats
And Percy Shelley
What an awesome group
Of poets
Bet they were really romantic
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 4:40 PM UTC
The Eturi
Part 1 - Genesis
I shall tell you of the first Eturi.
I shall tell you how the seas did not want them--
Coughing them up on the shore
Like water from the lungs of a drowning man.
They were unseemly things.
Arms stretched sinewy from their sockets
Fingers tipped with bulbs
And dripping a sticky mucus
Tearing flesh off prey caught in their hands
On teeth with edges like sawed-off metal.
Their stomachs--
A swollen gelatinous sack of a belly
Mottled with spots and partially translucent
Allowed for an uninhibited view onto the trophy of their latest meal
As it slowly digests.
The Eturi were humanoid only by their incipience
To foul the word--
Human.
The land was bare rock and mud then.
The Eturi were kings
Nothing lived that could challenge their predominance
For nothing lived,
There were yet no plants or other animals
Nothing to eat.
On all fours, they scrabbled the earth for food
Stiff-arming on knuckles
And the tippy toes of their feet
Lip-sucking the dirt
Pumping their bellies full of mud and sand
Licking the rocks and chewing clay--
Always hungry
Scouring from beach--to desert--to canyon--to cracked earth--to volcano
Anything to eat.
Until starving, their belly made its final demand--
They must feed.
The first to fall to hunger was unexpected.
A look
From one Eturi upon another
A look that may have been casual or even sincere
Suddenly took on a thoughtful gaze
Then a deliberate stare.
Soon a second Eturi took up that gaze
Then a third,
No words passed between them
Their eyes were like the baying of hounds
Calling the others to them
Swelling into a pack
Drinking the scent of their gaze--
Silent
Coiling
Hunger so close to the surface
The air was almost chewy.
When the other Eturi turned
And saw their eyes upon him
The eyes of his brothers and sisters
The look in their eyes,
He could barely register protest
Before they were on him--
Ripping flesh from muscle
Muscle from bone
Bones snapped to **** out the marrow.
The Eturi was eaten
Before he died.
Survival did not go to the biggest and strongest
For they had the most to eat.
No, survival went to the scrawniest
The smelliest
The most deformed
Those with unappealing prickles of hair
For they were the most unsavory.
And out of this interspecial gorging
Bred a trait
That would become their greatest and most lasting legacy--
Cunning.
For what mattered resourcefulness
Self-preservation
Or strength of the will to live,
If you could predict the hunger in others
And twist them to your own?
It was said that the Land was so moved
Upon seeing the Eturi,
That taking the earth in her hands
She tore open her own breast
And drew forth life
In plants and grasses and fruit and trees and rich vegetation
And to lure other animals--
That anything
The Eturi may feed on anything
Anything but themselves.
But so the Eturi were
So when the Land gave up its last blossom
So would the Eturi always be.
May 14, 2015
May 14, 2015 at 1:29 PM UTC
Good-Night by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Dec 22, 2014
Dec 22, 2014 at 11:57 PM UTC
I am science, I am fiction,
Victorian youth, ***** addiction,
I am addicted, no rest for the wicked,
I am not what these glorious stories depicted,
I prayed for my mother, I asked for a saviour,
But scarlet’s a varlet and I couldn’t save her,
Faith laughed at my pleading but science was pliable,
Boundaries were broken, I made fact unreliable,
Doctor! Doctor! Blood’s beginning to boil,
As you work by the light of the Tesla coil,
You’re polite, once contrite, not particularly odd,
Now you’re trapped in your lab and you’re playing at God,
You were robbed of a woman, held hands with her breath,
Your disillusion excluded you, so you made life out of death,
And the blood and the ****** and the bruises on throats,
And the ghost of a sibling that grasps at my coat,
And I strived for ‘it’s alive’ but that’s a misquote,
It was never alive, that was not what I wrote!
It was pale and abhorrent, thread unraveled it’s head,
It’s lips moved but I knew it was made from parts of the dead,
Graves invaded, made empty, just so it could rise,
My shovels were broken, decriminalised,
My secrets unspoken were hard to ignore,
And it was only myself, since there was no Igor,
And my brother was gone, my father, my wife,
So if you seek to threaten me, be it with life,
Nothing left, I fear no death, in fact I seek it with vigour,
But I am no mad scientist B-List horror movie figure,
I am bigger, I am bloodless, I am the lightening’s whine,
I am all that befalls the name of Frankenstein,
I’m disturbed, I’m depraved, afflicted with my plan,
But above all I am only a conflicted young man,
And I cannot compete with tainted world’s so dark and neat,
So call me Victor as I retreat,
I am the monster I must complete.
Dec 20, 2014
Dec 20, 2014 at 3:24 PM UTC
He asked me to remember him better than he could have ever been,
He asked me to forgive the things that I had seen,
The people he had broken,
The things he had made,
The blood on his face,
The shaking of his hands with the gun to his head,
He asked me to please remember him dead,
At peace, at rest,
Unable to hurt,
Unable to destroy the things I had worked hard for,
Like the breath in my lungs,
And the beating of my heart,
He told me that we would be better apart,
I didn’t believe him, his hands were as God,
Had wanted them to be,
He saw what God wanted him to see,
He was everything that held and looked after me,
Please, please look up after me,
See the tears in my eyes,
See the fear and the pain and the fact I hate goodbyes,
And I don’t mind the smell of chemicals on your clothes,
Or the fact when you come in you’re too tired to talk,
Too tired to walk,
It grows on me, the electrical shocks,
The bangs, the loud noises, you still hide from the knocks,
Of heavy footfalls on stairs,I can tell that you’re scared,
But I can make things all better if you give me a chance,
This isn’t some textbook, fairy story romance,
He yells and he grimaces, his fingers are tight,
And I wish I could hold him with all of my might,
He bats my hands away and I know that he’s crying,
It would be better for both of us,
He says, I’m just tired,
Of the sunrise, of the sunset, the work I have to do,
Are you tired of me? I ask,
How could I be tired of you?
I would forfeit my safety, you keep your hands clean,
Under the fingernails,
A ****** white and pristine,
Yet so tainted with blood, with a pressure of darkness, of death,
It surrounds you, no escape, there’s already dirt on your breath
Last words, last rites, a madness shaped scar,
Please try to remember, he said, we are better than we are.
Dec 20, 2014
Dec 20, 2014 at 3:03 PM UTC
When she told me she loved me
I didn't believe her.
So i killed myself instead.
A fairy came to me & whispered enticing secrets in my ear.
He outlined a closet upstairs
where I live alone inside my head.
Tidal waves of white roses grow in & out my of spine.
Suffocating the fishes prancing in a field of raving vines.
Lunar Lullaby plays hopscotch in a cloud of flies.
She licks cherry red ice pops & sings bird hymns to oak trees withering in the wuthering skies.
Swarming dragon-lies fly in lakes upon Monet's canvas.
There he paints a beauty of Thumbelina whose grave resides in the darkest corner of my empty heart.
A red cape looms above & flutters without wings.
My cave is growing vaster
And so I sail amongst its seas.
This Psychosis is no more wearing thin than Rigor Mortis can begin.
I'll live sedentarily as a maid serving rotten apples to men chained as apes.
A lotus will float on by down this bloodstream & into the night.
As a crater on the moon your corpse died suddenly as when fruit bloom.
May 3, 2014
May 3, 2014 at 1:42 PM UTC
Paddling through this vastness
I look at the ripples I made.
Floating and whirling,
Clanking and Clinking
Shelley, Wordsworth and Blake.
In the middle of the tranquility
I plunged into the blue
Oh, Arizona sun, you blinds me.
Apr 16, 2014
Apr 16, 2014 at 12:43 PM UTC