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Words set to music
give the body tonic--
poetic melody:

rhymes, rhythms, caesuras,
meters, beats, stanzas
and envoys
in use.

Making millions of dollars
off an album,
platinum
pop stars:

hounded by paparazzi,
landed in a Jaccuzi;
deified are poets--

pursued by Muse's mustang
midst the prairies
of inspiration
trotting.

Poetry draws no pretty penny,
prizes like the Nobel
praise.

Mummy poetry is exhaling
in the lyrical pantheon
of music.
Kotodama Sep 2014
I love it when you type letters
with your fingertips
on my skin
backspacing my faults
and joining my freckles
letter by letter
until you’ve created a new word.
Sometimes,
you discover a new universe in the obscure abyss
and mark that with an asterisk.
In the morning,
you would press kisses
between the parenthesis of my smile
and bite ellipsis
on the crook of my neck
so that I would wake with your watermark.
I still remember that day
when you assured me
you are just a space bar away and
I am a story you will never finish writing.

"I promise,darling
that you will be filled with caesuras but no period.”
JP Goss Mar 2015
The sun rose pink over Lancaster;
Its frozen rains came quick in tow—
Here, we sense the passive and the active:
To take the drag or pull:
He is dragged by the way of the automatic hand-to-mouth;
The Other, is my command—
But that, even, impelled snowfully toward
A closed fist, a locked grasp, an unwilling departure.

I suggest a dislocation somewhere in parallax:
Take paper dimensions and fold them 104 times
And everything flattens out—
The ocular inversion becomes like-real; I’ll swim in that!
Puddles are dragged by the wind, whilst the pull thinks in spite
Of I, its strange corpus of author, and opus
Drags to the creature of appetite deign to call to order.

But a power powerless to its name given it:
Destined desiring of sunnier metaphors—
The alcoves of the thread, brought to just us
Caesuras of what satisfies, in food, in just us
The depth of image holds true: one cannot live on bread alone.
Thus, I muse and mull back to locks of hair and bellybuttons
Waiting, in time—the deepening of time’s cloth
Where my hand caresses her thigh—
One can feel the gravity pressing on the heart,
All the love that self-reflects, combs out the wrinkles,
And has faith in the good inertia.

By this secular host consubstantiate
And Other (surely a pleasing affair) is but moments away.
And she and I look so pretty together,
Our is of whom and what and the third conditional.

That which presses upon itself, the one dimension,
Cannot disentangle from name or alliance, nor faith,
Greedily picking at the oily ruptures, effulging in transparence,
Contradictions care not for astrology,
And whether you are poetry
Is not important here.
this is the mind’s subtle configuration:
    light, dark, vacuity. a metastasis of
    sound from dispersions. except
a few stray birds alight umbilical tightwire.
    i start to dream the clarity of something
comparable to                            

                                 ­                        vertigo.
                                           in that high place,
pouncing, daringly immense, this experiment
is in the mind’s operative. but you have no idea
what I am pertaining to, or what I am describing
to you, as I do not have maps to begin with, nor
do I have the blueprints to succinctly depict where
to go in case my lostness intersperses with yours:
that there is only precision in where we want to go,
but never where we are at present, and that in the long haul,
         long-winded ruminations are waste of time
and that to have wallowed deep in the grovel of mirth,
to sully in superfluity, and to give no care as though
    120 kilometers per hour in the expressway, shotgun,
hands spread in the sky towering like lampposts yearning
for a steady acquisition of light, the sounds that take the
  form of apparitions and we scream, yes we scream,
with tenderness and rhetoric,

                                          are, of course sensuous narratives
the heart measures in quatrain, in caesuras, in verse
    and breadth ( and or so, the simplified electric delight
      of a word’s sweet measure hurled to the rotund of ear as
     to move close in speaking / whispering )
to permit ourselves to boldly gasp for breath
     after the thrill of realizing the terseness of things,
               that allow us to speak beautifully for ourselves.
Sara Brummer Feb 2021
Nature has her own poets:
They do not wander among dactyls
and anapests or widen caesuras.

They dazzle with the quiet frangrance
of blossoms. They create diaphanous
webs, taut and quivering wordlessly.
They paint the backwash of evening
in shades of repose. They translate
the secret langage of butterflies.
The echo the silence of stones, mumble
the soft nothingness of currents of air, shine
rare, silky light through evergreens,
dance, noiseless, among mobile clouds.

How can we compete, with no adequate
expression for love or beauty ? Nature’s
bards bring us, with each dawn and dusk,
the gentle touch of the otherwordly.
alexa Jun 2018
he fell for my words
before he fell for me,
drinking in all my commas
and caesuras
and “random” capitalizations
before he got to know
my mahogany eyes or
love for elephants and
all things pink.
he fell for my words before he saw
just how not okay i am,
but i guess,
by reading my words,
he already knew that.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS Dec 2020
It is a love poem when I am making love to you, a soliloquy of silence but for your murmurs and your moans. The stanza of your shilouette, the verses of your curves. An iamb means I love you dearly, a dactyl that you are delicious, spondees and trochess of tenderness and passion. There are rhymes and rhythms when we lie upon each other, an alliteraration of kisses and hugs, caesuras to catch out breath. Our love-making is a chiasmus, making and taking tortuous turns until white sheets and yellow pillows fall on hardwood floors. Caresses precede onomatopoetic sighs that become love songs. Anaphoric thrusts need no explication, only the silence and solitude of joy.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

— The End —