"agonizing" poems
Anything can
look like a poem
and sound philosophical
simply by moving
the words on
different lines.
Am I doing it right?
Is this
really
talent?
Art?
Effort?
I think I am trying.
Really, I am
I go back and change the order
and I break lines
where it sounds right
But it does not take me long.
Not at all.
I try to be
intentional
and call it natural rhythm.
Instinct and style taking over
I alternate between
agonizing every detail
like When to Capitalize
and publishing free form poems without looking over them twice.
How is writing supposed to feel?
Should I labor?
or should it flow?
Or do I get to decide?
I think the things I talk of
mean something
at least.
But am I just
pretentious?
fooling myself into thinking that
using common poetry formats
somehow makes my work worthwhile?
May 23, 2018
May 23, 2018 at 5:12 PM UTC
In the place where the moon meets broken shadows, it begins with the swelling of my eyes
Tears roll across the scars, that no one else can see
A phantom’s curse
Only this place can release my from this dystopian enchantment
The sweet smell alone entangles me with feelings of safety and wonder
For a reality flooded with forest flowers and a throbbing wind
It teases my subconsciousness, it trickles down to my soul
Like a an agonizing murmur
The hypnotic web forms
In this quiet place clouds hurry across confusing shadows
Shivering in the delicious sunlight
My immaculate hour of rediscovery begins…
Jan 19, 2013
Jan 19, 2013 at 5:18 PM UTC
***all these pretty people
with ******* flawless skin
unblemished bodies
to contain their confident
loving souls
i look in the mirror
and i cry
i can't take what looks back at me
its agonizing imperfections
and taunting discontentment
tonight i want to die
but i won't tomorrow
so i hold on
despite hating myself entirely***
Nov 16, 2014
Nov 16, 2014 at 1:50 AM UTC
passion
thirst
hurt
ephemeral
physical
cold heat
hunger
water walking
brutally real
physical
skin colors
words spontaneous
devious planned
desire desired,
physical
concrete
parchment thin
muscled strong
catch a caught
physical
making
creating
cresting
cannot live without
physical
electric
shocking
eclectic
varied
realized
why? stop here?
eyed
fingered
tongue tasted,
ear sensual
dreamt
famous
buried
tragic
comedic
gaming played
unsafe
at any
speed
languorous
fire immolating
physical chest pains,
incurable
incumbent
to possess
otherwise, death
fingernails poking
knuckle kissing
lips wetting
blood exchanging
oh yeah physical
foreign native
young old
permanently temporary
infinitely finite
definitely unending
nowhere
no expression
dying dreams
best better
agonizing
agonizing
unrequited
offer everything
receive shoulder
colder than hell
defensive
offensive
cape laid
walk on me
chivalry
until we hold each others fingers knotted
until I stroke your hair unexpectedly,
until we agree to hell with all the rest
until we say the say the same thing simultaneously
until we come together
when we have satisfied each and every one of the above,
freely confess
know nothing of love
but the picayune details that make us greater
greater than greater, greatest, then and only then
we, might have a few clues
Sep 16, 2025
Sep 16, 2025 at 9:47 AM UTC
When I asked you to fix me,
You told me I wasn't broken.
But, let this soak in.
I just wanted to know,
If i was still a pretty enough picture to be worth, agonizing over a puzzle.
Even when it's a struggle.
And you have to nuzzle each piece into place,
Kissing the pieces bent out of shape,
Searching for pieces gone missing,
But you can't make a raisin back into a grape.
Yes, I Remember your middle name
And who says we can't celebrate failure?
Don't be sad, we tried, we tried.
When you write your story in the sand it washes away with the tide.
It isn't our fault.
We may have cut ourselves open, But we didn't ask for the salt in our
wounds
Can I still say "we"?
I guess you're kind of done with me.
I don't blame you, Puzzles are frustrating.
they're a tease.
Please, tell me I haven't lost the most important piece.
Tell me I haven't lost
you.
© copyrighted Nicole Ann Osborn
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 18, 2014 at 5:11 AM UTC
#*My soul would not be stilled
until You reached down
and taught my heart
to sing the song
it had been made for,
until I heard You
singing it over me,
drawing me and claiming me
for Your own.*
*A soul at rest
comes only from a heart
fully awakened
to its strongest desire,
from a heart that knows
it is greatly longed for
by the Object
of its greatest longing.
Surely there is nothing so powerful
against a deep and agonizing grief
as a great and passionate love.*#
Jul 30, 2017
Jul 30, 2017 at 8:28 PM UTC
The power of music
and friendship
heals dead connections;
a well-meaning member
of a jam session
offers me a guitar.
I politely decline,
embarrassed by my disability,
and they shrug. Your choice.
The familiar curves
beneath my arm
like a woman
from my past,
my amnesiac left hand
reaches for the
muscle memory
of fifty years' practice.
After an agonizing minute,
the G chord miraculously plays,
as I played it at five,
the three big fingers alone
strong enough to hold it.
The switch to C impossible;
so I play a variation.
Doesn't sound bad with the group.
My God, I might play a D7
by the next time it comes around
in the song.
The gang is playing old standards,
Ohio State music;
three chords and a cloud of dust,
which suits my present skill(?) well.
I almost cried when a few tunes later,
we sang A Horse With No Name
to my accompaniment.
Beethoven was deaf, yet heard the Ode To Joy.
Hawking is paralyzed, and travels the universe.
I have three good fingers,
and no good excuses.
Sep 5, 2016
Sep 5, 2016 at 11:45 AM UTC
Memories crying, screaming to be heard.
Try as I might to bury these amidst busy days,
still they rise from the backyard of my mind haunting my dreams,
making youth a nightmarish memory.
Empty rooms cry out in agonizing silence.
White ghosts float on lifeless bodies with the same question; why?
Anxious moments still taunt just beyond of safety.
The sickness that gave birth to this still clouds the mind.
So long ago, a lifetime to make peace, still lucid moments of torment
making March an anniversary dirge.
It makes no sense to cry for those gone, for mortals spent in tragedy,
yet every year I try to understand once again, why?
Aug 22, 2012
Aug 22, 2012 at 12:22 PM UTC
I am tired of my rants
like a millions hammers
pounding away in my brain
constant chatter drowns sanity
expectations love and affection
comfort insecurities and misadventures
regrets lost and found
a million lives not lived
what could be and what is
hauntings and remembrances
shadows looming large on today
today that is not perfect
perfection that is just in mind
mind on verge of lunacy
constant screams drowned
in the agonizing void
void that is my life
I am tired, very tired
tears they have a mind of their own
roll down when you least expect
open your soul to strangers
strangers that glare
stay in dark away from glare
tucked in blanket of oblivion
lost and lonely yet sane
lost and lonely yet sane
Jan 30, 2013
Jan 30, 2013 at 1:56 AM UTC
We are so close, but not just by physical touch;
I can feel you the way I feel my cheeks warm up,
after you have said something
that inevitably causes me to blush.
Its as though our souls are connecting
on the same frequency
radiating off the core of this Earth.
This pleasure is unnoticed by most,
but we can feel it
like we feel the blood dripping down our thighs
on a substandard night.
Before we started talking, so many years ago,
I never believed in true love
or really love at all.
I always assumed it was just all in the head,
and two people could only connect to a point,
unless you were related to each other.
After the first year and a half or so of talking to you regularly,
you proved me wrong.
You proved what I grew up believing
for 16 to 17 years was completely false.
For if I had never met you,
to this day, I more than likely would of continued preaching
to myself, that everyone else
who has experienced this feeling called
'love' was insane.
Life without you would of still been bearable,
but only because I would still be lost in ignorance.
I am more than grateful you walked out of your way
to meet up with me that night three summers ago.
I owe you so much, and will cherish every moment
I'm blessed with standing by your side.
I'll make it a point to provide a nurturing life for you,
one worth living for.
You are my world, my inspiration,
the main reason I look forward to waking up,
or falling asleep cuddled in your lovely arms.
I cannot wait to see you later today and hug you,
while my heart races with satisfaction
like the first time you put your arm around me.
This is more than just some fairy-tale,
this is still the beginning steps of our long journey together.
So we mustn't give up when things go south,
for if we do,
it will be the undoing
of what our relationship has always been about.
You truly are my best friend,
the one person who'll never let me fall
if you know you are capable of preventing it,
even if i don't want your help at all. I appreciate that,
even when my words or actions do not acknowledge it.
You truly are the only reason i was able to climb out of that dark lonely tunnel of agonizing depression;
for everyone else either dragged me father down or walked out.
You are my life saver, my sweet guardian angel.
I love you, my dearest, Chris, forever and always.
Jul 24, 2015
Jul 24, 2015 at 7:12 PM UTC
The wind howls
outside my bedroom window
shaking me
my heart; my soul
it screams
*while you sit there
drinking sweet-smelling coffee
a baby boy in Africa
cries of hunger
and aching ribs.
while you are curled up
under warm and soft blankets
an old and lonely man
wanders the darkest streets
looking for warmth;
a home
while you hide there
surrounded by light and family
with an aura of ungratefulness
you are lost in the rays of your technologies
with a frown on your angelic face
when a weeping woman
shakes and prays
for her gone children to reach Heaven happily
but you dare forget God to a screen?*
my house shakes
from Wind's agonizing words
and a streak of cold
trickles into my haven
along with the words
"what am I doing?"
somehow
my stiff legs reach
a window
and the arms in front of me
pull it open
to reveal no sound at all
where is the wind?
did he leave just as
he touched
my heart; my soul
making me waver?
or does a gust not howl ,
speak,
and isn't heard?
no
the wind was here
for how else did the once-twinkling snowflakes
suddenly freeze
and lose all of their beauty?
no one but Wind
would take the innocence
of such young and beautiful white specks
just as they landed
in this cold,
dark world
no one but Wind
would flare you with reality
enough to make you cry with obliviousness
for this wind; my Wind
he is the voice off all those
who have faced
life's stinging brutality;
him
instead of
hiding under covers
and whispering morbid lies
that
everything is okay
Jan 15, 2014
Jan 15, 2014 at 8:47 PM UTC
I have wanted you
for so long
and with such hunger
that now I think
I would rather not have you at all.
For once you’re mine
I will lose that sense of longing
and there will be nothing to
fill the agonizing empty spaces
that time inevitably blows in.
I know it is strange
and slightly moronic
but I just want to want you
for a little while longer.
Apr 6, 2015
Apr 6, 2015 at 2:45 AM UTC
to more than I can be...
a sad isolated man,
throes of an agonizing,
stretched by her for painful
revengeful gain,
kissed with pointless avarice, divorce.
children deeming
him alienating, his faulty
insensitive sensitivities,
to easy blame
little do they know of the
piercing lowliness, the looniness of
nights he listened to sad-eyed singers,
and his late-of-mid of night scribbled scripts,
where he
off loaded the agonies of a midlife
disaster, not entirely of his-own
sown making,
but still his to bear and bare alone...
some accidents happens for unintentional,
unintended intentional new seasons appear,
stumbled, tumbled, fumbled his way onto
this H~oly P~lace, where someone might listen
to his explanations, expiations, excoriations
of his all too common tragedy, and said:
this broken human, he's got his reasons,
read his overly long treatises, his entreaties,
to those that prowl, rowing, in this corner
of the silence of the internet, where only the
trolls, the cold, the easier to-be-meaner oft thrive,
and found none of that, but an oasis of sheltering,
embracing comforting, those who actually admitted
his writings could be loved, and perhaps the writer
himself, was
deserving
of a second chance, a verbal embrace. a rereading forgiveness,
a pat
on his natback, a sympathetic sensory intaking,
and perhaps-this debt, eternal, that put the
for and the fore in a new baby born, named -
new forever
came into existence
the very same
e
that begins those conjoined words
***e~ternally grateful
"and now I sleep in peace when the day is done"
but the night time
is still the
write time
Sep 13, 2025
Sep 13, 2025 at 11:42 AM UTC
My parents warned me about the bullies the responsibilities, drugs and terrible things, but they never warned me about beautiful tan skinned boys with hazel eyes that could make you forget how to breathe, eyes that cut deeper than a knife ever could, whose smile could unwittingly **** and make you forget how to think. And whose hands could steal your suffering soul and shatter your heart into millions of pieces. Whose gentle lips could make you stupidly forget all the bad things he’s done and keep you begging for more. Whose touch sent shivers down your spine and paralyzed you.
Oh god.
They forgot to tell me how he’d make me feel.
And how much agonizing pain I'd be in
When he left.
May 15, 2019
May 15, 2019 at 6:30 PM UTC
Dragonfly o Dragonfly
framed against a lazy summer sky,
you'll hover and ponder out yonder,
like an acrobat you fly.
You'll dance and dart, hover and peer,
Touching, stalking, feathered walking.
On pond shadows dark and near,
onto sunbeams sparkling clear.
Casting imaged reflections,
on a mirrored surface of life's crystal pond.
Where ever-diminishing dainty rippled circles,
disappear onto a distant misty shore beyond.
You'll ponder and peep,
through dark secrets your pond might keep,
captured images of animals & bees,
scented flowers & soft young trees.
About political boundary bursts,
and agonizing desert thirsts.
While strife-torn agony song is being sung,
at the scorching heat of the searing Sun.
Witnessing a climate change,
Industrial, Oil, Air & Waste pollution.
With no workable cleanup program in site,
to warrant a solution.
Our planet's resources stretched,
to its limits by human misery & industry untold.
Life's habitats are disappearing,
the beginning of Earth end is nearing.
It is inevitable that soon, to soon,
after million a year, on life's crystal ponds so clear.
You'll too succumb to man's industrious endevours,
and for eternity disappear.
Andreas Strauss.16 June 2007
Nov 24, 2015
Nov 24, 2015 at 4:16 AM UTC
No one every tells you how hard it is
Watching someone you love die slowly.
It’s worse
Than the quick knife to the heart when their death is sudden.
A moment:grief. Then nothingness.
But the slow deaths,
They ache.
Like a growing cancer eating its way out
and we acknowledge that there is no cure.
Just waiting. Watching. Agonizing.
This time will be it.
I’m ready. I’ve said my goodbyes.
No. Not yet.
One more month.
And while I wish I could rejoice in this extra time together. I can’t.
You’re in pain. I see it.
I feel it.
You’re suffering
And all I can do is watch.
Jun 2, 2023
Jun 2, 2023 at 4:34 AM UTC
Temptation is sweet, subtle,
Like the steady rhythm of beach waves --
Not there unless you're listening and
Watching for the sly and slick riptide.
The wait is agonizing, maddening,
Like walking along shell shattered sand --
Not willing to stop and reason
Knowing the anxiety is pulling people under.
The fall is sudden, quick,
Like the rush of a tidal wave --
Relentless in its destruction and
Scattering the power lusted as the serpent rises.
Feb 11, 2015
Feb 11, 2015 at 10:23 AM UTC
"Kami na ni A"
Or in English
"Me and A are official now"
Exact words you told me
Those were the most
Hurtful, painful, distressful words
I have ever heard from you
And I don't know what to say
I don't know what to feel
I know I'm happy for you
Bc finally she answered you after a year.
The long wait is over for you.
But my tears
They fell, escaped, from my eyes.
I was not able to help myself
I am literally crying my eyes out right now
Maybe you are currently jumping in joy
But what you don't know is that
I am in pure agonizing pain right now
Like someone stabbed a knife in my heart
Jun 5, 2015
Jun 5, 2015 at 12:55 AM UTC
Rugged body hunches,
Impression of a humpback,
Spit blood more than saliva,
Straighten posture to reveal
Ghastly mold of ribcage,
Bones poke at the dermis,
Gasp, prickling oxygen,
Pierces respiratory system,
Flinch to agonizing pain
An hour of spasms at the most,
Wounds deemed trivial,
Famed hers walk around
To stitch the prized emblems
Jun 23, 2015
Jun 23, 2015 at 9:25 PM UTC
Come one, come all,
To the strong mans downfall.
Cut the strings on the marionette,
Believe me, you won't soon forget
The haunting sound of the carousel
Or the staggering heights of the citadel.
A red balloon dancing perfectly in the pale gray sky.
A small child lets out a remorseful cry.
The clowns with their agonizing smiles,
Grab hold of your soul and change its style.
You've waited along time for this.
This frightening bliss of a midnight kiss,
And the familiarity of the moonlights whisper.
You've lost control of your juggling act
Prepare yourself for impact.
Watch out for where the sidewalk cracks,
Because everyone knows how that will end.
Come one, come all,
I've done it all
for you.
May 26, 2013
May 26, 2013 at 5:19 PM UTC
My dearest Little Brother, if there were only words to describe how I feel,
I would tell you that you are amazing, you're truthful, and your real.
You've come from depths and the darkest of despairs, you've lived through things that people only conquer with prayers.
Yeah, we get it, you weren't dealt the best hand of them all.
But look at you now Will, still standing there tall.
You've made it this far, yeah with a lot of love, but what is family for if it isn't to give you a shove.
With your head held high and optimism in your heart
You've realized that everyday is a new beginning, a fresh start.
Yesterday is gone and the past; it doesn't matter.
"I knew who I was this morning but I've changed a few times since then."
Once said the Mad Hatter.
Forever changing, we all aways are. Like Alice in Wonderland, trying to get home from afar. There are so many obstacles blocking the path to our destiny,
but in the end we find out it was all for necessity.
Hardship and obstruction are the root of all things great.
You have to overcome them to set yourself straight.
You have to trudge through the agonizing and the bad
So when you wake up you realize that there is no reason to be sad
Your blessed in more ways than one can fathom
A family that loves you and believes in you, you have them.
We set our standards on what we think people want from us,
But not you, no sir you don't understand the fuss.
You march to your own drum, make friends wherever you go
I've seen you go through a lot and I just want you to know
You've come out on top but there's still room to climb
So don't give up hope and don't say your fine.
Talk to me when you need an ear
Know I love you and I'll always be here.
Jan 22, 2017
Jan 22, 2017 at 6:17 PM UTC
A sound full of unfamilliarity,
Can this world be full of posterity?
Have I lost myself or,
Have I gained you.
Is this pain what I feel?
If I'm alone, is this real?
My agonizing phantom is still the same.
What was I supposed to do back then?
May 9, 2018
May 9, 2018 at 5:22 AM UTC
There is something painfully wrong about
a mother’s cry.
In those seizing moments,
while her nose twitches
and her eyes bleed red
and she lets tears smear
jaggedly about her face-
there is something so unsettling,
so
out of place.
You perceived her once invulnerable,
but now you find
that behind her divinity are familiar fears
that overwhelm her omniscient mind.
When your own Goddess
can’t be free from corruption,
that even the holy
have weak heels and poisoned matrimonies;
that is
agonizing acrimony.
Jul 22, 2018
Jul 22, 2018 at 3:55 PM UTC
It gets... agonizing.
So, very agonizing, and she wonders through the days,
"will it ever end?"
Perhaps, maybe, the divinity of nature
struck down on the undeserving.
A mistake is not a lifetime
but a good portion of it
and deep down she knows she couldn't
but each day regrets her decisions
and rubs lamps on nightstands littered with lotto tickets.
To make matters worse, or better,
all around her are visions of joy,
happiness, love?
And by accepting her fate,
she embraces, and acknowledges,
that the deed was surely done,
and life in death.
Jun 28, 2014
Jun 28, 2014 at 4:40 AM UTC