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My reflection in the mirror taunts me
Who could ever love this?
My friends tell me I'm beautiful
But they are just kind
I see my body in mirror
I know that these are lies

In the photo
They are
Extraordinary
And there I am
With my awkward thumbs up
Hideous

"Too big"
My reflection screams at me
"Like your father"
It shouts

I hate myself even though
I am a person who loves
Loves so strongly
So easily
It's so easy for me to love others
But the mirror
Oh the mirror makes me hate me
Yup
~
Enter the lair

Of a cloudless grenadine

Misty branches of sun

On the outer marker

And in their place

A strawberry moon

~
Why don't they teach little girls
That your first love will stain your soul


Your husband can scrub and yet the history can never be erased

There will always be moments I think of you

They don't teach little girls how first love feels

And they certainly don't teach what it is to be loved, truly and completely

And I'm so grateful I learned.
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                           Let Us Celebrate No Tyrants Day


                           “We have no king but Caesar!”

               -A long-ago mob as written in St. John 19:15


Even the King of Kings is under the Law
And too, since Magna Carta, our earthly King -
From the people and their voices he can only draw
Such powers as their assemblies vote to bring

But may God protect us from a Common Man
Slithering to supremacy through serpentine speech
Emboldened by the power of cabal, club, and clan
Mobs chanting for their master, a soul-******* leech

God gives us His grace in a King and Queen
Republics give us the guillotine
14 June 20245 - our Stasi handcuffed an 87-year-old man today: https://x.com/CarolinaLumetta/status/1933669206114898254/video/3

The machine (or The Machine) may have replaced a word in Line 8 with a series of censorious asterisks, presuming that I was employing a crudity. The word is "soul-*******," "soul" (presumably "soul" is not a vulgarity?) followed by a common term for negative pressure, "*******," as in a vacuum cleaner.

I strongly disapprove of junior-high ***** language in, well, anything, but certainly in poetry; it suggests that the writer is deficient in vocabulary or is simply trying to be shocking. Yawn. But I also strongly disapprove of prissy persons who find wickedness in commonly used words and in other innocent aspects of life.
Maybe the fall,
Is gravity's call.

At one with the universe,
Floating around amniotic fluid,
Not being coerced.

How
My heart aches,
When the water breaks.

Separation begins,
As does the crying,
The cord has been
Cut.
This is no oedipus complex, but a state of grace.
The greatest
Road trip/odd couple/anti-buddy movie there's been
Each line quotable
Like nothing you've ever seen
Just as Butch and Sundance
Were running out of time
Forced transition
Layers on
Laughs
And
Poignancy
Sublime
Two men chipped
And polished
From very different stone
To meet as friends in the next life
As they walk this one alone.
Midnight run 88.
To make it better,
first it must get worse,
so piles of rubble
beside the road
will one day be transformed
- or not as the case may be -
in the relentless
march of progress.
Perhaps.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
One day .
I cannot keep up with the world sometimes.
The girl who ruins things
thought maybe she’d try fixing.
If she could stop causing destruction–
offer repairs instead–
maybe it wouldn’t hurt.

If she could rebuild broken things,
maybe she'd be met with looks of relief
instead of weary sighs.

So, the girl who ruins things
bought her tools,
watched the how-to’s,
read all the manuals.

But no one sticks around
after something breaks–
not long enough
to see if someone might fix it.

But ruining was easy,
destroy and get lost.
Fixing comes at an emotionally high cost.
What do you do when you can't find all the pieces?
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