"canvasses" poems
We are the kids – beautiful blank canvasses ready to receive the joy of life.
We are the kids – hope & love consuming our souls, grasping at the shiny & new.
We are the kids who played in the fields and danced in the sun.
We are the kids with innocence in our hearts and a cheekiness in our soul.
We are the kids who believed in a benevolent God and the generous teachings of Jesus.
We are the kids whose imagination was an infinite resource - bounteous, diverse and effervescent.
We are the kids who reveled in the fancy, the nonsensical, the romantic and the wild.
We are the kids that couldn’t wait to grow up,
We are the kids who believed in our future.
We are the kids who never saw it coming.
We are the kids who lost our innocence as soon we walked through the big school gates for the 1st time.
We are the kids who were told to “think of your future” and to suppress creativity.
We are the kids who were forced to grow up very quickly.
We are the kids who didn’t know we were “different” but there were plenty out there who did.
We are the kids who had to pretend to be what “they” wanted us to be just to survive.
We are the kids who came home with scars every day – both physical and emotional
We are the kids who endured the obscene words of Neanderthal hate every single day.
We are the kids who were screamed at by our parents to fight back even when we really didn’t have the capability to do so.
We are the kids who were told crying was a sign of weakness.
We are the kids whose so-called classmates stayed silent when they did their worst.
We are the kids where the school gates were no barrier to their lynching.
We are the kids who turned quickly from being wide-eyed & hopeful to being terrified & desolate.
We are the kids who dreaded every single weekday from first term to last.
We are the kids who fruitlessly prayed to a God who had deserted them.
We are the kids taught by teachers who were found wanting.
We are the kids who suffocated in sheer hate.
We are the kids who took our own lives or at least tried to.
We are the kids who self-harmed.
We are the kids who sometimes never came home.
We are the kids who survived but never really left the school yard behind
We are the kids.
Your kids.
June 11, 2018.
Sep 12, 2018
Sep 12, 2018 at 6:10 PM UTC
i loved to paint using your colour.
i’d go day and night, from one canvas to another, using different shades of you to paint all kinds of pictures.
i never lost any ideas.
i never had to find inspiration.
it all just comes to me whenever i look at you.
one day, i woke up colour blind. and unfortunately, it’s in your colour.
all the paintings, all the sketches, all the canvasses that were of your colour, plastered, hanged, and taped all over my walls doesn’t make sense anymore.
it was all grey. all dull. a colour i know existed but never really tried using before.
i tried searching for your colours in the things you’ve touched. the words you’ve said. i searched everywhere but whenever i do think your colour will come back, my eyes revert to reality.
now you’re just a memory.
your colour will only exist inside my mind.
those shades i loved. the pigments i crave to achieve every time i stroke my brush. it’s all in my head now.
it’s been years now. your colour isn’t as bright as i thought my memory would remind me of.
i paint with a different colour now.
actually, i paint with all the colours now except yours.
all those nights i spent painting, it’s with every colour i come across but yours.
now my wall’s full of colour again. all from different parts of me. colours i never knew existed.
now,
i’m happy. i’m content.
i’m colourful.
Sep 1, 2018
Sep 1, 2018 at 5:21 AM UTC
Please let me preface
I dont like people
crouds make me cringe
and while i value my friends
i highly value my solitude
------------------------------------------
I cant picture a face
when i close my eyes
when my mind trys to grant
that one final human wish
before slumber encompases my body
and reality and dreams interlace
For i have no soul to match with mine
nor a soul to follow
in deepest secret with the fleeting hope
that maybe our souls shall intertwine
But i wish not for two to meld
for hearts to pledge an undying vow
for lust and ****** greed
for billowing convorsations
But silence
An individual respect for ourselves
two beings gracious for company
bodies laid side by side
your fingers tracing circles
on blank canvasses of skin
Where there is but an understanding
that breath so silent can be pleasently shared
and electic touch soulfull
igniting warmth surrounding my heart
of which embers burn soft and hot
Where aching muscles
tense from harsh realities
are smoothed away with solid hands
a mutual relationship where the
solidarity in thought is aknowlegded
yet the pleaure derived from presense
a caring being holding steadfast
unwilling to let me go
gentle and kind
Where the silence of
spiritual understanding guides
the instictual need for
companionship
Mar 17, 2013
Mar 17, 2013 at 10:59 PM UTC
Let us paint our canvasses on WOMEN!!
Curious I stand to unravel your perception of a woman
Would you weigh her as a piece of wonder or a gruffly aggressive thunder?
She is extraordinary, gorgeously efficient, solely independent!
The love she embraces is wider than the infinite heaven and deeper than the fathomless sea.
The shallow world with its profound hypocrisy,
Banters with a judgemental frown.
The world has changed, and so has she.
It has known the beautiful rose, tarnished by its prickly thorns,
Only the delicate rose, the world, with its abysmal critics, abides by to adorn.
She knows her paths, truly determined to achieve her goals,
Her patience deserves a salute, her tremendous sacrifice only to satisfy our souls.
Dare never to shred the lovely red petals, not knowing her darings!
For also the thorns in her are perilous, to blemish a wound till your last.
With her chin up and a gaze so ferocious, ocean of wisdom she is vast.
She rises, she grows, taking a free flight, venturing to claim new heights,
She is benevolent, a ray of sanguine sunshine to your forlorn nights.
Walking proud, believing in who she is, glimmering like a star!
Born strong she is, refuses to be judged by her scars.
She is the teller of her tale, over fears and worries she will prevail.
A miracle of God, with a sweet lingering fragrance she leaves a trail,
Of patience, commitment, empathy, and unfaltering fortitude !!
by ~Mihika Rohatgi
Mar 7, 2021
Mar 7, 2021 at 10:50 PM UTC
Panasonic and Sony beeping
in custom made Reid & Taylor pockets.
A trade for a Rolex throned on his wrist in lieu of
once existent dreams, in now hollow sockets.
Adrenaline pumping before
high stakes meetings and brunches.
Calculating the dose of his choice of drug,
penthouse suites and timeline crunches.
Dizzy with ambition, painting
******* bleached canvasses.
Narcissistic laughter aimed to beguile others,
he, for whom his relaxants are stresses.
Dealing with the Devil himself,
power tainted and ill-gotten,
the realization that humans are not beyond sale;
in markets, mergers and acquisitions.
Recessions, Inflations, cruel overdoses
of risk, of danger unspoken.
And when he surfaces again to consciousness,
profits, losses both taken and broken.
Lost in the sewers filled with;
stock brokers and agents alike: the pawnors,
a haughty expression with green bills,
to score his ecstasy, capital owners.
Another dollar, another hit
never enough to sleep remembering the day.
A Corporate ****** scouring for riches,
a high, a trance not soon before long will sway.
Jan 1, 2014
Jan 1, 2014 at 9:04 AM UTC
She paints pictures with her eyes;
a million smiles over one of time’s canvasses,
lips bleeding the taste of dark chocolate coated cherries
over tender tongues.
Feb 16, 2011
Feb 16, 2011 at 4:00 PM UTC
there would be blank canvasses
empty words
silently echoing the pages of poems not written
of narrative never revealed
from muses overwhelming
spirits overflowing
onto sugar coated melodies
woven into lyrics that
pester and harass and permeate the sacred space of minds
there would be blank canvasses
empty words
of delicate curves or hips, wide like sandy beaches
immortalized by brush strokes or camera shutters
empty panels of superhero legends forgotten
there would be blank canvasses, empty words
of no church praises hollered over holy rollin piano riffs
but most definitely, most importantly,
there would be blank canvasses, empty words
and
hands that never itched
to craft golden scrolls onto the haggard loose leaves
residing in sharpie stained notebooks
and great wisdoms never told which ****** great minds
moves great minds
with melodious lyricism
which haunts souls
taunts souls
with the burning questions of shoes and ships and ceiling wax
there would be pens never emptied dry
cultivating piles of paper ***** with half *** rhymes, rhythms, and washed up metaphors
muses would never possess individuals
sleeplessly seeking to fill up forests worth of leaves
after suffering from the doldrums of writers block
blank canvasses, empty words
in a world without art
Apr 22, 2013
Apr 22, 2013 at 2:18 PM UTC
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queenin opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel;--every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light;
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
1.8k
supine, deeply do I ponder
of those times as if, I've
treaded upon coal ablazed
beds, of womb fetally
withdrawn; darkness embeds
itself, attempting to see
with clarity through murky
watered canvasses
I, analyze self, coping
with turmoil; glimpsing
the light at the end of
elongated tunnels, leaving
burdensome baggage
that isn't a *** of gold
at the end of a rainbow
giving way to self-awareness
as a glorified sunrise opens
to new horizons; long awaited
as if, eons have passed without
notice, finally, arriving at my
threshold of salvation by the
grace of God; sanity redeemed
Jan 11, 2013
Jan 11, 2013 at 2:15 PM UTC
This is the time I cannot bear: this silent evening hour
As I shut windows and the balcony to prying nightsong:
In the trance of dim lights, I ride the incense plume
Across whispers and half-thoughts, slicing through
The canvasses of time: that unforgettable house of love
Perched by the lakes, circled by the stream and canal
Where worlds and time stopped to catch a glimpse
Many shades of grey silhouetted against stormy skies
Of swans gliding past fresh ripples across reeds
Drenched in a hundred hues of ethereal moonlight,
Hum of the wind surfing on the waters, drunken voices
Of assorted lovelorn: thrushes, finches, hidden warblers
Majestic storks and herons guarded the secret doors
To eternity, pitched right in the middle of the great city
By the home that housed love in precious embrace
O the cold of the winter that screened for damp corners
In our souls, through meditative shades lining the view,
The home that I squandered, I who love ruins and rubble
Aug 15, 2012
Aug 15, 2012 at 12:02 PM UTC
No paints and not one canvas
Nothing sellable at all
But, an artist is an artist
With art to share with all
No profit in creations
No way to sell his works
But he creates pieces of magic
With lots of different quirks
His tools are nothing special
Pastels and pieces of old chalk
His canvasses are static
They're the place that people walk
He's a sidewalk chalk pastel artist
With only digital designs
His work goes with the weather
Cracked pavement creates lines
No matter where he travels
He can work when the muse strikes
But, he has to watch out for street walkers
And folks riding through on bikes
His pictures are amazing
Where real life ends you can not tell
But, because there is no canvas
He has nothing to sell
He creates from chalk and pastels
He is an artist just the same
As those with paint and easels
He just plays a different game
Donations are his lifesblood
An empty cup beside him lies
Stand back and be awed by
His artwork before it dies.
Feb 23, 2013
Feb 23, 2013 at 8:50 PM UTC
2nd to rise, she enquires
you ready for coffee?
it's only 6:22am
if you're having, I'm having...
she quiet disappears
thinking coffee's coming,
when to this layabout,
it occurs,
she's making
coffee in the ****
get up, make myself presentable,
track her,
the coffee aroma pulsating,
radar signal emitting
sure enough,
coffee in the ****
grinding, dripping...percolating
but what I see is
contrast and
definition
appliance white
stainless
steel chrome gleaming,
walnut wood cabinetry warming in
Vermeer sunlight window in-streaming,
a Chagall and Botticelli duet,
freshly filtered
thru a Manhattan sky
and flesh,
freshly filtered
flesh
is not a Crayola color,
or
if it is,
it's more a spectrum,
than a single shade
but this moment morning
flesh is more realized,
as if recognized for the first time,
by a newborn old timer,
who senses the
comprehension tension of circumspection
circumcised differentiation,
flesh knowledge gradation gained
this poem,
a first attempt at
painting a ****
in words
appreciating task enormity,
for there are currently
insufficient words,
too many striations,
all cannot be straitjacketed to the
vocabulary palette
this then,
but my first definition of many,
of
flesh
so many canvasses,
so many undiscovered shadings
awaiting
****** recognition definition,
composition
Jul 24, 2015
Jul 24, 2015 at 6:27 PM UTC
*We grow up believing that the magic stays. But it never really does. Experience skins us, bares us open. To a reality that is far from what we want ourselves. As children we were blank canvasses. Time went on and so did life bring so many colors to that canvass. Sometimes bright, sometimes dark. Filling the white, pure spaces as each day we learn to fear, to hope , to love and to desire. But we also lose our ability to just go back to that blank slate. Where everything is clearer, unclouded. And we just think that the world is full of it, when all along we are just full of it.
I'd like to know the art of just being that empty canvass again. To learn and to unlearn every color that the world has given me. To be thrown into an absolute mess but still go back to where I came from.*
Jun 6, 2015
Jun 6, 2015 at 1:59 PM UTC
LAUREL AND THE MARE
It was spring and Southern Ontario air tasted of trees.
A pregnant mare escaped to the woods from her prison on the estrogen farm.
She had long, curled hooves and cracked skin.
She came to Laurel and her two children at the edge of Beamsville.
Laurel had no work, a jumble of painted canvasses in the porch, her father's
Hired man's stucco cottage. Laurel, Hadley, Malcolm wore ski jackets and jeans.
The horse loved to exercise at night in the yard.
They combed her and gave her oats. They couldn't afford a vet so they
Called a farrier horse dentist and she fixed the skin and hooves and filed the teeth.
They hung a trouble light on a nail and talked to the horse at night.
The farm smelled of animal again: you know the power of grass breath.
They read library horse books and what's left of the family
Sang with the radio in the barn. Those might have been holy days,
They were feast days, and the children were pulled away from
American television by the strong and willing horse.
Torn French bread and good cheap Beamsville Magnotta wine on the picnic table,
Wine for the children, too, and they all read in their beds after dark.
Laurel went to bed thinking: "It's La Vie Boheme for us."
She gloated at the return of ******
Feeling and the possibility of love and laughed her
Coarse, sweet, hee-haw laugh.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
This poem was published in Canadian Poetry
Apr 23, 2014
Apr 23, 2014 at 11:19 PM UTC
It all suddenly seems to make sense
As you lie in your own filth
Naked, cold, intoxicated
Yet, happy
As you stare at a blank canvas
With quivering hands
Hoping to leave behind
A few stupid memories
Feb 3, 2013
Feb 3, 2013 at 1:54 AM UTC
America, you don’t need us anymore
so we’re going on vacation.
You’ve got religion to whisper in your ear
and sing you to sleep at night,
and culture of homogeneity to get you up
and going on cold Monday mornings, coffee in hand.
You’ve got plastic prophesies to keep you alive
and sick on medicines from unrhyming
peddlers of purpose.
You’ve got assumptions and science to teach the kids now
so long as the chemists abandon their really significant digits!
You’ve got calculus problems and practical things to scribble
on the back of the wornout canvasses of Monet and the recycled
papyrus of Parmenides—nothing’s changed.
You don’t need metaphorical ice cream.
You don’t need symbolism of green ideas.
You don’t need moonlight anymore.
You don’t need breezes on summer afternoons
unless they’re part of a lemonade ad.
You don’t need stars.
You don’t need hope or purpose or prosperity
that can come from the meaningless lines
of poems.
You don’t need us anymore, so we’re leaving.
That’s it.
We’re done.
Goodbye, America. It’s been
fun.
Jan 16, 2014
Jan 16, 2014 at 8:58 PM UTC
There are faces that go on the pretty, high-end magazines,
In demand, highly sought
Read once
Then kept away
Then there are faces that go on the canvasses of painters who were once unknown
Coveted, evoking
Imprinted on the mind
Hanged in the Louvre
(for all the world to see)
Now worth a million
Sep 3, 2017
Sep 3, 2017 at 10:57 AM UTC
I humbly ask You to unlock
the hidden silences and secrets
of my fugitive and forlorn heart,
that there may be in this exile
a fruitful renewal,
a new birth,
a total pouring forth
of without cessation worded petals
on the canvasses
of a continually blooming mind
with living acts of creation
in Your most holy of holiest names.
Jul 21, 2010
Jul 21, 2010 at 6:05 PM UTC
His hand seizes no brush,
What he has is dish alone.
There came a deluge –
A surge of days
With lovely clatter of voices.
Eggs tousled,
There’s a perplexed question within.
Amused by her doll,
That little one.
His weeks-old pant
Now rowing incessant,
Famished for something.
A trance of canvasses stretching,
Where there’re outlines
On ocher-soaked linens,
Earth-dug umber, sienna, yolk yellows,
Wet, oily and waiting to bleed
Thick and gummy from the brush.
In his veins,
The scent in ether enthralls him –
He was lightheaded
leaves me lightheaded,
Daubed and anointed
By the deity he has filched from.
Now the baby cries,
Sodden, smells like a milky cotton
Sopping every minute up,
Those implicated hours.
He’ll spill years
As the earth alters his faces.
Greens of summer,
Tarnishing into autumn..
And in winter, the north light;
Grasping firestorm
In the braids of the medium’s hair.
(9/10/13 @xirlleelang)
May 27, 2014
May 27, 2014 at 10:07 PM UTC
Time broke the heart of Van Gogh
Wrenched the soul of Edgar Allen Poe
As the ages spoke with words and paints
The romantics yielded up all of their pain
And put it on display in canvasses and pages
Mar 14, 2016
Mar 14, 2016 at 8:14 PM UTC
Where is that lover in the black dress? One not of worldly dispair, one of makeup made from queen like caress.
Where is the string player? The dream slayer amongst devils of men, beyond cremation of friend's. For words art just meaning's of all seeming realities of cape fear! No desires ever met, for this one truest of death surely draweth near.
Like liquid to the needle, like wings on the Beatle, air conditioned rooms made from doom, I bleed out prophetic tears!!!
Images of ashy mascara currupts human time, queen of black, sits on back cracking fingers in glue like slime!!!
An actualiser, say adieu to morning glory faces. Painted on places to canvasses of darkened boutique....
The administrator,a navigator gather all on cloudish cobblestoned paths, much more than an assembly....
Babiche laces rambling to the dark souled queens Victorian skin!!!!
Axer thy taste towards her, the one owned by no one!!!! The one adored...
She whistles to heartbrakes destruction...... ( la,LA,LA,LA....she's the only one awake amongst those who snore....
©Brandon Nagley
©Prison poetry
©Lonesome poet's poetry
May 9, 2015
May 9, 2015 at 3:54 PM UTC
I humbly ask You to unlock
the hidden silences and secrets
of my fugitive and forlorn heart,
that there may be in this exile
a fruitful renewal,
a new birth,
a total pouring forth
of without cessation worded petals
on the canvasses
of a continually blooming mind
with living acts of creation
in Your most holy of holiest names.
Jul 21, 2010
Jul 21, 2010 at 6:05 PM UTC
*I can imagine staircases already
From her legs up,
The sassy strut divine
Of deities descending,
Her curvatures, delight,
Carefully cascading, lather me
As hands on her hands, as fingers,
Or ***** my spirit.
I am nowhere near my mind
Within her mind,
The clauses of her mind, this flower.
O her oblivious flower, opened, bare and all.
I can hear it all already, all,
Her steps deceptive,
The pleasant cries and onomatopoeias,
A princess or a pheasant somewhere,
Surrendering, the grin
Of suffering.
I can sense it, feel it, peal it from our canvasses,
Which were carcasses for so long, taste it,
O sweet molasses,
Which intimacies were hers,
Were mine.
We're mine alone.*
© 2015 J.S.P.
Jul 4, 2015
Jul 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM UTC
1.
Because I do not believe
There is any love for me
And that gender is a construct
Of this confused society
I state plainly or plainly post
For all who wish to see
My gender is not binary
2.
From one voice history flows
All hippie dippy flower child
All love and no fire power
Just truth and the hope
For a world where words
Can change dark hearts
To canvasses of light
3.
I choose my verses carefully
Line those syllables up in front of me
So I can see if I am a decent poet
Aug 24, 2015
Aug 24, 2015 at 4:48 PM UTC