"baleen" poems
The sea cast a gift ashore
one stormy sullen day
and the barren rocky coast
was suddenly recast
as a natural history museum.
A whale.
A real whale, just lying there
shining on the shale
In another time,
we'd have known how to react.
This astonishing bounty
would have been quickly stripped
Bones for building
baleen for support
blubber and oil for fuel.
But now it lay
surrounded by detritus
made of better stuff.
The truth was,
we didn't really need it,
couldn't really use it,
like being presented with
Casablanca on VHS.
A sign appeared:
"Quad bike rides, £2",
red paint on rainsoaked cardboard.
I wasn't tempted.
Children poked it with sticks
in a desultory way,
stricken, intrigued, ashamed,
and utterly dwarfed.
The weeks passed
as we coughed in embarrassment
not knowing what to do,
until finally
someone brought a digger down
and discretely buried the beast.
By now, it will be a perfect skeleton
a prehistoric wonder
an artefact from unjaded days
when nature could still astonish,
trampled by unknowing tourists
as they dream of sunnier beaches.
Jan 1, 2012
Jan 1, 2012 at 3:06 PM UTC
_The light is dim, but I'm accustomed to working in the dark. Besides, it's safer this way. My eyes are not what they used to be, but it has become second nature to me - the pull of the needle, the tension in the thread.
I stitched my first collar when I was six years' old, sitting on my grandmother's knee in the parlour of the old house at Innsbruck. ‘Isaac,’ she used to say, ‘you have your father's gift. Use it well.’
Ah, Papa, if you could see me now. Such expectations you had for my talent, but I assure you that the occasion for invisible seams and fine beadwork is over. Nowadays I work with a different fabric. A cloth perforated with ****** fire and riddled with shrapnel. The wounds - forgive me - resemble red Venetian silk embedded with black pearls; the bone like the baleen strictures of a dowager's corset. And the red dye runs. God help me, how it runs.
As I work, Papa, I imagine that you are standing in the shadows, your frayed sewing tape draped around your neck. I am praised for my quick hands and my ability to embroider life into abbreviated limbs. And I pray that you are not too disappointed in what I have become._
Jun 2, 2019
Jun 2, 2019 at 8:35 PM UTC
Hello, whale,
yes, you there wallowing
and swallowing crustaceans
with all your calliousity
and my insatiable curiosity.
What a laugh that calf
of yours was
when it frolicked up
to us diverse divers
wanting to be survivors
of its childlike impetuosity
and eighteen foot
preposterous, gargantuan monstrosity.
When you rose up underneath us
I thought you were going to eat us.
You scared me, whale,
when you flicked us with your tail -
the one you splinter yachts with
when you act as Davey Jones' locksmith.
Of course, I retired then
from my dive-in on leviathan,
happy to survive
your forty-five
tonne introduction.
Then you glided into gloom
and sang your eerie song
about your alien, baleen life
in vast, mysterious,
deep areas of oceans.
Good luck along the whale's road,
you mighty minstrel, you diva of the deep.
This diver hopes all humans and harpoons
will spare you and you can share
your song again.
God speed, whale.
Mar 21, 2012
Mar 21, 2012 at 1:04 AM UTC
I'll bottle up the fragrant sea breeze
into tufts of baleen.
Scooping up secluded.
While pressing frequent calls of
loneliness into the fabrics of air
inside of us.
Breaking up the ice sheet
with a warm heart.
Joined by precious
ocean lull.
Ice holding moments
that already passed us.
Poor some whiskey in
let us release the past.
Sep 29, 2014
Sep 29, 2014 at 12:50 PM UTC
mystic line between
blue and blue
stretching yonder -
- i wonder at the wonder -
a whispering sea
confides in me
- an ancient mystery -
the plaintive song
of the baleen.
r - 10/23/14
Oct 23, 2014
Oct 23, 2014 at 11:33 PM UTC
......Finding the words
to describe the feelings.....
Just by moving through the ocean
Inside, I am swimming,
swimming to get away,
swimming to come home
to what I knew.
I know I can never be the same again
Knowing what I know now.
I feel the hollow dust of
of confusion
swirling inside me
I feel my impossibility---
like I am trying
to catch
each dust particle:
every old idea I have ever had,
before it lands and
makes me sneeze --only to blow
all the dust particles back into chaos,
so I hold my breath....
.....pause....
....breathe in.....
...exhale ....s l o w l y .......
.....embody this moment....
and become, one who CAN.
...leave this terrestrial moment....
...and go into the water....
And when I imagine
I am the whale,
I am the vastness within and around
I can just breathe and swim
I catch
all the plankton spinning in chaos
after they have been
cast into the ocean currents
and the plankton come to me,
the plankton feed me
one by one--
I can fill my belly
with all these
d o t s o f
f o o d
Gathering, harvesting,
plankton combing through my baleen,
I am fed, I am nourished,
just by moving through the ocean.
I am free.
Apr 12, 2019
Apr 12, 2019 at 5:42 PM UTC
Should it come to this, without remorse? Like that orange, feeble
and deciduous, while we waited with binoculars through that gray on gray
afternoon for the owl to spread its wings. Perhaps it did, past dusk,
behind the trees, under those vaguely baleen-formed clouds.
The clouds cast shadows on other clouds, as if holding them up against reality, even for our affirmation. Did you think of me this morning, over your Life cereal, and did you miss the fruit? The “organic wholeness?” What is the determinant thing that dissolves?
The dissolution of the self-contradictory comes from the dissolution of the determinant thing. Arguments formed in apartments over a bowl of cherries or a bowl of **** or some such. Loss of a determinate thing (under Article 1262, par. 1.) is the equivalent of impossibility of performance in obligations to do referred to in Article 1266. We are left with the form of a bowl, perhaps a ginger bowl, or some form of lost lacquer.
The distinct lack of skyscrapers from SoHo up through Chelsea was said to be a function of Manhattan bedrock. But modern materials seem to have overcome that problem. Getting on the subway, he heard someone say “…as if each word is born with another word, and spends its life on lines looking for the perfect rhyme". "You know they mate for life," he thought, "the swans. If one is killed, the other often dies of boredom.”
Jan 17, 2016
Jan 17, 2016 at 11:36 PM UTC
He was a rebun pchous a diminutive fellow
a tail wagging nightmare on four legs
and at night he would howl and swoon
to the glow of a full moon
He was a sucker for a sad luck story
especially from that ***** flea ridden
and as she never said, she loved him not
till her own distortion, she was self consumed
Yet as baleen whales notice
she was no pocahontas
she was just another *****
as the dog flew to the moon
By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris
Oct 4, 2014
Oct 4, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
Through a split lip
red foam,
froghopper froth
fizzing, haemoglobin, half-life
sitting thickly-thick,
on a paving stone.
Looking like Clinton’s cards
think human hearts
are shaped like.
But mine’s an artichoke
a watery phloem thistle core
folded in fronds and furs,
bristles of cowlick baleen,
sailing, ship-lapped bark,
darkness and birdcages.
Mine’s a rigour-mortis pill bug
potato fly, oddball, ***** slug
an ammonite, a butterfly tongue,
a bending toe curled in ecstasy.
Exponential shell chambers and septums
ending alongside everything.
And the guts of my heart
incessantly churn mechanically,
maniacally and obliviously rhythmically
Keeping me malleable
soft,
moving,
un-enveloped by beetle wings.
Just like the platelets
of my hardening spit-heart
are, blackening blood,
amber caught bugs,
clay in mud,
elliptical,
eclipsing.
Nothing
like we think it is.
May 31, 2016
May 31, 2016 at 5:21 PM UTC
This ship is sinking.
Your sea, violent.
Lightning flashes through my mind.
There are so many words I have for you.
They try to make their way past my lips, but they are krill trapped in a baleen maw.
Instead they take a pill, fall asleep inside my head.
These watery words rise above me.
They travel down my throat and into my lungs.
I thought I took enough air before I went under.
How wrong I was.
Calm.Quiet.Ocean.
Deafening.
I'm wriggling now.
My eyes frantically searching.
The abyss stares back.
There’s a weight in my chest.
Blue.Green.Silver.
An anchor pins me to your ocean floor.
Waves have swallowed me whole.
Jetsam tumbling through like driftwood on high seas.
I set my eyes on two green jewels glittering bewitchingly.
I'm locked on them.
Two lighthouses guiding me through this storm.
I should swim away from them.
Instead they draw me near, beckoning to me.
I dive down.
I am under their thrall.
I swim hard, I swim fast.
My chest compresses.
I’m out of breath.
My body thrashes and then surrenders.
I never had a chance.
Tiny bubbles make their way upward like small galaxies holding the last of me.
Feb 12, 2025
Feb 12, 2025 at 2:39 PM UTC
now that your lips move and your breath is heavy-wet with burnt orange sighs, your eyes too deep to see me
from so much love away... now that your arms merry-go-round my wasteland, swirling languorous in lust, unarmed... you are the embers of lost ice, gathered on the farside of dead-center, more alive than krill, clinging to baleen and waterfalls, in the toothless maw of leviathans.
You're mine, again -
And out
to Sea.
Oct 17, 2012
Oct 17, 2012 at 11:04 AM UTC
Like sodden fleece
on gathered sheep
clouds trundle, dark and low.
Across the sky,
and sun's white eye,
they flock where seagulls go.
I kneel ashore
where dune meets moor,
the wind beneath my scarf.
With pen in hand,
I sketch the land
and, on its pall, remark:
"This autumn day
of ***** and clay
yawns grey and baleen wide.
It makes me miss
spring's briny kiss
and summer's sequined tides.
But as I mourn
and brace, forlorn,
for winter's coming wight,
my soul is soothed
by nature's truth:
'Day always follows Night.'"
May 9, 2019
May 9, 2019 at 3:22 PM UTC
now that your lips move and your breath is heavy-wet with burnt orange sighs, your eyes too deep to see me
from so much love away... now that your arms merry-go-round my wasteland, swirling languorous in lust, unarmed... you are the embers of lost ice, gathered on the farside of dead-center, more alive than krill, clinging to baleen and waterfalls, in the toothless maw of leviathans.
You're mine, again -
And out
to Sea.
Feb 3, 2018
Feb 3, 2018 at 12:36 PM UTC