"brutalist" poems
Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
your grass masturbates my feet
and the clouds cushion my bedhead –
I am alive
as the plants breathe, I
can watch myself as they watch me.
I am mundane, plain, a concrete building
brutalist and manmade
but their real existence, live vines climb
and make me seem attractive…
Even as I want to be dead,
they kiss me as a husband would his
sleeping wife –
even loving when unaware, forgetting
acknowledgement
being beautiful all alone.
Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
I am alive
no longer manmade in your home.
May 4, 2013
May 4, 2013 at 3:31 PM UTC
I grew into you like vines, delicately covering a brutalist form with a love I only know. My heart is submerged in a little ocean, its depth grew in me as I carried the weight upon my soul. The waves painted me blue, reminding me of all my sad lullabies.
Your name is a possession and embodies all that you are (it's the only way to keep you.) If I got the chance to love you, maybe I'd be much more than a supernova, devouring its life until the very end, traversing the boundless space, and it would leave traces in a thousand years; my love for you would still resonate, like the haunting interludes played by a piano in the epilogue of a song.
Feb 11, 2024
Feb 11, 2024 at 2:55 AM UTC
we are all digging graves
under some distant hazy
sunset,
somewhere,
anywhere.
the sun never really truly sets.
so what is left to
interject with when
anyone says something
about suffering
having no
end?
Jul 26, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 at 12:10 AM UTC
Through the street lights and brutalist cliffs,
blinking beams echo my breath.
Laughter still bleeds in my throat, conversations still pierce my ears, alas
A Kodak haze, a synchronized buzz
and agony is gone. For most are
nothing but pines,
A sleeping balm, a charming whiff, all the
same submissive to a whirr.
As a child, they left me in awe
Now I know they're nothing more
than a palisade for the sea. Those
that bid time in the isometric
backwoods, simply haven't the clue,
that no concrete can still her.
Oct 14, 2018
Oct 14, 2018 at 12:06 PM UTC
A composition, bordered by brown track, white shelter and
yellow line;
off-white, smear-windowed building (background)
hexagonal floors, brutalist mandala;
triangle across the frame, a ***** polluted structure
one half of a red cross logo, boarded windows
- chipboard, corrugation, MDF;
and Southern Rail green is grass in the lower foreground
arrows, words, people.
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 10:34 AM UTC
4/23/2016
"Speaking of batteries,
what's the positive in this? Negative?"
she threw out there, lithe little
extensions of her hand palely wrapped about a martini glass stem. It held seltzer and ginger.
Long Island City, Queens
twinkled cobaltly, covertly, in the
harbour
incognito, morphing into the sky
in the gloaming.
"All those people," I said, ignoring
the question. I always ignore the question. "So many. But this city
so cruel and brutalist and impersonal."
She shook her head,
stirred her cocktail stirrer
the mint sprig moved to the bottom
of the glass.
"As opposed
to what?"
Apr 26, 2016
Apr 26, 2016 at 8:32 PM UTC
I am a broken toilet
Spouting crazy ideas in the basement of some brutalist mansion
My thoughts gone lurid, growing on the whitewashed cement into flowery moulds.
I am a scarlet stain on the ceiling and I am loud and furious and I reek of guilt and decay.
editting editting editting becoming becoming becoming
I am an alpha particle.
Writing writing writing down everything.
I am a ray of light.
I cannot tell if I am real so I feel my face.
I am superfluous, overdone, like a Christmas sweater, Rococo, overtilled to the point of erosion.
I am last night's espresso into this morning.
I am twenty strange projects
and I scrap them as if they were funhouse mirrors.
I am shaking like a leaf.
I am manic and I am happening all at once and I can't ******* stop.
Apr 12, 2016
Apr 12, 2016 at 3:03 AM UTC
Our temperate country roasts and burns flesh
with Apple devices cheerfully
advising that the temperature is
currently a three dicey digit affair
walk in the 100 degree overheating
atmosphere, where sluggish slugs,
once mobile New Yorkers, search and save shady places that proffer
a handful of degrees relief from the
brutalist sun, who was heard smirking after a wet Juno,
"oh yeah,
I'm back baby with the vengeance
of a squalling and squabbling infant!"
and to harmonize on our lack of immunity from the terrors of weather, and yes, it's still June, the quiet nighttime skies awake us a thunderous slapping of sheeted rain, squalling and squabbling,
rat-a-tat large caliber bullet/droplets drilling holes in our
template temples expecting early
morning serenity;
the Newspaper rags in search of pithy witty declaim:
Rainstorms To Crack The Heat Dome In NYC
neglecting the cracking of tempest tossed tempers,
furthy discombobulated composure
of forced sheltering in place
more, again, uhh,
as if parched thirst or drowning are a choice
ok rant over!
the displeasure was all mine
Jul 15, 2025
Jul 15, 2025 at 4:30 PM UTC
O, cry morning, sun breaks again
In that history of banalities
Are written, I finished the cigarette
Before the coffee, twirling wind
O, sigh morning as inverted
Could carry me to the rock wall, thinning grey,
Of the house where egos, bruised, seek guidance
The black bird builds a decoy nest
O, shy morning. churlishly answering questions never
Asked before, “nah-uh, nah-uh, nah-uh,”
(A ****** is heard, of most[ly] fowl)
Spoken mostly to the fact:
It is what it is. Acceptance
O, belie morning. builds a brutalist window, round by row
The they that walks whistles low with nebulous intent
To remind itself to forget
Abysm is a stranger in your city streets.
O, blithe morning. Such cringing in place
Of those sleeping hours, parsing the drop-ceiling’s
Calligraphy: kings be draped in robes of flesh
To depose the anarchists in cerebral lands,
O, yes, my morning. a lechery for the heart,
That religion of my given path
Or its surrogate, the lawful rebels
Writing on every city row, so willing but rough,
My guest, O, my morning, such a pity!
Restless and genuflect, the they does not find itself
Swayed by the largess of absence
Craning neck eastward toward the perfect morning,
Ever on the cusp of the perfect twilight.
Aug 1, 2017
Aug 1, 2017 at 12:54 PM UTC
Profanities,
declarations
bombastic, love/ hate sprayed, whatevers,
beer-stained brutalist underpass
the lake, a paper-mill, stink of pulp-steam,
dog-shit minefield ,fast-food cartons
park-and-riding, egg-fried verges
turgid outflow,
Down this squeezed tube,
of dead algorithm n' *****
blue-green algea ,wetland gangrene,
come Nightingales..
Meliflous revelry,
distinctive dichotomy,
obvious opposite
oddity
Beneficent Mediterranean
medicine chugged via
secretive syrinx
sweet,
sweet
sweet unplugged jugular
thick cut clarity, every
note a pearl-dropped hope for muddled
ditches, creeks and jetties, broken
wings of football pitches
blood of oak and bluebell
soaking smoke above the muddied tracks
and clearing,
clearing all
before their song
May 21, 2023
May 21, 2023 at 3:05 AM UTC
it ain't the same
remember your street
how colorful it was
almost like a yellow brick road
or a gingerbread house
your friends congregating for a game of 21
americana incarnate with illegal fireworks
and soggy doritos after swimming for hours
what's really so different
everyone becomes an adult eventually
I just hate different the birds sound
They don't even sing much anymore
Colors muted and sights replaced
brutalist and architecture meant to appease shareholders
Nostalgia and cynicism are best buddies
and I here I am...
misery comes in threes
Sep 20, 2025
Sep 20, 2025 at 6:48 PM UTC
I take the night bus
From the inner city,
Where nightlife spills
On icy sidewalks
And aliveness soaks brutalist concrete.
I do it all,
I do it all for you.
I ride the lonely mastodon
Out of the new self.
A teal finback slicing
The sea of blinding halos
Who only come in pairs.
I do it all,
I do it all for you.
I cross the Rubicon
To the frostbitten lands,
Where the sun set at four.
The bungalows leer at me;
I am a stranger to your world.
I do it all,
I do it all for you.
Jan 25, 2021
Jan 25, 2021 at 10:16 PM UTC
Time as a concept
becomes especially troubling
once it makes itself known.
Now you’re against the clock.
All progress a single
stuttered step
from falling apart.
Brutalist landscapes
masquerading as a bioluminescent,
science-fiction sentient beings.
Unfortunately the clock,
is ticking.
Hours go by the past
increases the future
recedes. Possibilities
decreasing regrets
mounting.
Do you understand?
When it all burns,
as I assure you it will,
every empty office lobby
and husk of window looking down
from tender jagged tenement towers
will pour rivulets of ash across
broken bricked sidewalks
like crawling fingers of lace.
Only the mosquitos will remain unchanged.
Spilling deftly from the same canals as each
and every brood
to have ever come before.
Nipping the skin of those left behind,
to sing the names of the dead
into the corn seeds scattered hopefully
in cold air.
Sep 6, 2021
Sep 6, 2021 at 4:10 AM UTC
and he will bear it
like a curse,
like an orchard on fire
in the face of a harsh winter,
like dinner with her parents;
I'm withering on the vine.
I'm withering away,
it's fine.
it's apparent to nobody
but me.
the wine was nice though.
Aug 1, 2021
Aug 1, 2021 at 6:25 AM UTC
**** of the earth,
but its still turning
so I don't
see your
point.
I'm long past annoyed
at the shape of the void
I fit into in your
mental map
of all this
********
gestures at everything
[everything keeps growing]
Jul 26, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 at 12:20 AM UTC
well, I guess coffee
is in ruins.
future excavations
will suggest
some previously unknown
ancient civilization,
but not how it met
it's end.
and yet, here we are.
whose to blame for that ****
deflect all you want.
I guarantee I can even do that
better than
you.
Jul 26, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 at 12:55 AM UTC