"birdlike" poems
There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to **** not easy to tame. It will never breed
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.
Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke
As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.
A new scent troubles the air -- to you, friendly perhaps
But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.
4.8k
A loose handed emblem,
of folded thoughts,
Loss is weaponized in enchanted red,
Wrongs corrected stemming from the
blissful bare signed gawky individuals.
Homage backtracked and renounced
Barely earnest calls for a curious fathom-ability
Heaven bound birdlike shadows,
Bright light gagged and janky,
Found little finger blood tacked to the earth.
Aug 18, 2018
Aug 18, 2018 at 5:11 PM UTC
I never thought of fragile as an insult until I saw the way you spat it through clenched teeth
"God you're so ******* fragile"
hissing barbed wire insults like they'd cut your tongue if you held them in any longer
before, I thought of fragile as the ultimate compliment
a sign that my concave stomach was home to fingerprint bruises
that you were afraid to hold me too tight lest I break
but then I heard it dripping slow dark molasses off your tongue
coating every syllable with thick syrupy tar
it didn't make sense to me that your voice,
petal soft and pitched for laughter
accustomed to slurring my name on dizzy nicotine breaths and over crackling long distance calls
could wrap its fingers around my lifeline and
crush it
until long after I chose to stop being your answering machine sounding board yes man lap dog
you never cared about my hollow birdlike bones or the blooming violet footsteps beneath my eyes
you said I was too ******* fragile
that my eyes were leaky taps and you had no plumbing experience
that my heart was a pincushion voodoo doll and you didn't know how to protect its satin softness from daily wear and tear
I got hurt too easily and playing tag with someone else's insecurities isn't fun
I never thought of fragile as an insult until you choked it out from behind your own iron voice box
and I realised it wasn't so much an insult as a burden
now there is leather binding forming around my cotton stuffed heart
and I'm doing my best to tighten the valves in my tear ducts
I'm still fragile
But it's not your job to hold me together anymore
May 3, 2016
May 3, 2016 at 5:33 PM UTC
Writing poem is like,
Pouring out your heart in rhyme form.
Make rhyming strike,
And not regular free form a social norm.
Birdlike, not childlike,
Respect poetry, it's not cuss but an art form.
Apr 1, 2021
Apr 1, 2021 at 8:34 AM UTC
Beautiful darkness
Lighting strikes the stones
As my mouth unpeels
Liquefy on the edge of hope
Descending toward imagines of my ghost
My weapons are my words
Spiritually sickened
Convulsing with electritcy as it undresses my wounds
Comatose hallucantions howled
Unhinged calamity of the naked shivered sky
As the womb needs its whiskey high
Birdlike flapping my anxieties away
The twine is weak morally I will drown
My bones begin to find me as I go down
Arms and legs that no longer move
As my eye lashes begin to kiss the night
My teeth and lips will never feel a kiss
Looking out the windshield of sobriety
Entwined lovers drunken mourners
I beg of you to slit my tears
Sep 9, 2013
Sep 9, 2013 at 12:12 AM UTC
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
-Elizabeth Bishop
Aug 13, 2013
Aug 13, 2013 at 9:54 AM UTC
The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock
Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,
A quiet offering to a quieter god
You spent several months weeping to the sky
Your small hands curled into your white frock
Work was left unattended in your colorful house
No food on the stove,
No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water
The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home
The home, austere and shrinking into the long street
Your helper comes to do all this
Your children understand in their small ways
You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil
Palm fronds wave in the wind
Salty sea air kisses your wet skin
Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to
Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness
Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise
The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,
Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children
Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom
Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind
Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation
My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings
I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry
I pop one into my mouth and chew
There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,
Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.
Nov 10, 2023
Nov 10, 2023 at 8:27 PM UTC
Do you feel the strength?
In your birdlike chest and your bloated stomach?
The urge to glut yourself on beer and vittles.
Chips and guacamole.
Holy **** This is delicious.
But what should we do - Eat
Or should we abstain in
The middle of the night?
I’ve had a few beers since
The couple margaritas,
But I have no chance stopping
‘Til the shows have ended.
There’s more I need to know.
May 4, 2021
May 4, 2021 at 11:43 PM UTC
tuck my face behind the camera
myself in the shadow of the corner
colors slashed on paper
fingers raw from the strings
my eyes heavy lidded,
I never knew that self-deception was such an art
or that my inner critic
was my greatest enemy
embrace change?
I always have
Now my throat sighs and misses joy
My limbs do not celebrate,
they yell to me
too quietly
my brain runs the show
It has run down the tracks
This is sly flirtation with death
stop talking
I want to listen to the water and the trees,
I am paralyzed here,
fear for the future
pathetic
screams the monster
pick myself apart at the seams
something birdlike and cryptic
but not beautiful
Dec 28, 2012
Dec 28, 2012 at 3:50 AM UTC
we were laying on the floor talking
about your perpetually ***** hands,
stained from rusty machinery, and I got
to thinking that they looked an awful
lot like terra sigillata, or marmalade
or yams or tulip poplar honey--
waxy, with a glazed finish
you brush your left thumb down my pinky
and comment on the thinness of my skin
(unsurprisingly) I mean, look at my hands! you say
and I do and you're right, your hands
are like slabs of green wood--in fact
your whole body seems like some sort
of pliable tree trunk but I don't say this
because we've lapsed into a silence or
an otherwise conveniently synchronized
thought that has billowed up around our
hips until our arms are overlapped and
extended like a petiole of our bodies with
my palm cradled in yours like some aeriform body,
birdlike and gentle. You're tracing those lines like they
mean something.
Like they
mean something to you.
you have to understand that I am too often
inside myself, awash on a shore, grown into
the sand like a clam, experiencing solitude
through a shell, keeping at bay on the bay
sending prayers up like signal flares
pumped up into the sky, silent on
the horizon, loud from in here,
so when I tentatively thread my
fingers through your hair, know
that I do so in supreme intimacy
because words supposedly say
the most (depending on who
you're talking to) but my
hands are a different language
a different place, a different time
a company of dissarranged thoughts
and emotions, rippling and swelling
trying to make sense of being touched
so
softly
Feb 25, 2016
Feb 25, 2016 at 8:27 PM UTC
Darkness falls upon the land
the time is finally here
Chirps now belong to crickets
And blind birdlike beasts appear
A couple bound by cobweb shackles
Bathe in nighttime’s crooked smile
Whilst weaving in the shadows
The captors wait a while
Sounds of leaves from dying limbs
Dance deftly on the midnight breeze
No life within their brittle veins
Forever strangers from their trees
Natures waning lunar grin
Is concealed behind a haloed cloud.
Who knows what sins that it commits
Behind its wispy shroud?
Stars look down intently
With sinister twinkles in their eyes
Spies that stalk the witching hour
Corrupting faultless skies
An owl perches on a twisted giant
Whose Wooden arms stretch out
It searches with its focussed gaze
For creatures scurrying about
Whilst The shielded hedgehog wanders
Foraging the ground
It’s weapons at the ready
For any predators around
minions retreat to their houses
And with a final smirk
Nights guardian begins to fade
And the sun begins it’s work
Apr 7, 2021
Apr 7, 2021 at 12:15 AM UTC
I see myself in her...
Back when I was made of ice,
Every slice and bite precise.
Grandmother's collarbones like
Soft skin cut by knives; birdlike.
I see myself in her...
The treadmill is her best friend.
Against herself, she contends,
Stuck in a world of pretend.
Her own skeleton: her friend.
I see myself in her...
Grandmother chilled to the bone.
Present summertime unknown.
She's carving her own tombstone,
Out of her sharp hipbones.
I see myself in her...
Was that how they looked at me?
With confusion and worry?
Was I the storm on the sea?
Or the dark depths underneath?
Nov 28, 2015
Nov 28, 2015 at 5:02 PM UTC
know what is gone
and what is beyond the dandelion veil
know what is just out of
reach, something you can just barely taste on the
tip of your aching
tongue
you're a whole-headed nightmare
some rare birdlike enigma
flapping through the warm night
like godspeed, glory, send us away to some place we've never known
once, you told me my poetry was too sad
and if you were just there for me
maybe we wouldn't be a fire
of burning feathers
your bones
are my bones
and isn't that enough?
Jun 24, 2017
Jun 24, 2017 at 8:31 PM UTC
breakfast with my mother
is now a song of
tapping,clinking noise
as the tremor in her hands
grow beyond the medications
control
she will be 85 within month
and has become small and birdlike in appetite
conversations have become
vocal exercises in loud short
projections
but she is not deaf
the world has just stopped
speaking clearly
her eyes
have seen so much,
her heart
has encompassed both
great joys
and deep sorrows
the sharp cutting edges of
her mind
are now becoming
butter knifes
it saddens me to know
her mental acuity
is dwindling like yarn
unraveling
to pool in a
muddled mess
of colour on
the dusty floor
i watch her
over my coffee cup
we are so
different and disparate
i once truly believed
my self
to be anothers child
our personalities
were so divided by lifes spectrum
but as i muse now
as a mother myself
watching her
it comes to me
if i am just an inkling
of her strength and grace
then i am an amazon
incarnate
incarnate
Mar 19, 2014
Mar 19, 2014 at 5:59 PM UTC
father
son
I saw them ****
out of hunger
the angel
could prepare
angel
-
it is wholly birdlike
the thought
that brings oil
to god
-
the sleeping alien
is not without
its headless
astronaut (the first thing
-
one sees
hallucinates
Jan 22, 2016
Jan 22, 2016 at 11:25 AM UTC
In the weeks leading up to your death there was no fire in your lips and no water in your eyes and you seemed happy for a turn so I let it be; when you licked into my mouth and it felt like feather candy, like I’d ticked off all the right choices, no red lines and I thought that we were safe. As you curved under the inside of my birdlike wrists and fed me praise, kisses where you projected cuts I had no heart for sight and but knots to stomach, that you loved me a little bit. I loved you less than a bit, then, but maybe it was always like that. I wake up to your shoes strung on a wire and that is fine but; i see you strung on a wire and things are not fine.
Apr 26, 2018
Apr 26, 2018 at 1:18 AM UTC
deep, quiet and soft
he puts my soul to sleep
like the sun, as it dips over the hill
and my heart, like the moon, it rises
contained, timid, calm
this brittle branch
a twig beneath my foot
his fragile, pressured posture
he seems a birdlike thing until he
sparks- snaps
across the room
lightning on a hot summer day
unexpected, and
explosive, and
beautiful,
that bright, electric beam
Apr 30, 2024
Apr 30, 2024 at 9:18 PM UTC
You offered me your hand,
In fear I stepped away...
Who could ever truly want
An empty piece of clay?
And that's all I was...
Till your love shaped me.
Into a birdlike form,
Finally I was set free.
Except I wasn't.
So much held me down.
Not happy with so little
My smile turned to frown.
Everyday you reminded me
What made me who I am
And eventually I smiled again
As I started to understand:
Even if I shattered into a thousand pieces
Having you around will always be enough.
If love were to be considered a crime,
Is it one we are both guilty of.
Jan 29, 2018
Jan 29, 2018 at 5:54 PM UTC
Female Conversations
She talks in stacatto, stenographical bent
Flowing along without pause
Her mind flits from one thought to another
Avian style in a birdlike frame of ideas
Rapier fast in her intent
Before I can tune into her words
The subject’s changed again
Lost in the progress of the process
I frown in puzzlement
But she’s moved on
And when I finally comprehend
She speaks of something different
And now I’m totally lost
But laugh at her commitment
A lateral thinker to the last
I feel as if I’m drowning in
The ocean of her mind
But she is swimming fast to shore
She’s left me far behind
May 19, 2016
May 19, 2016 at 4:43 PM UTC