"capacious" poems
There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.
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Would but indulgent Fortune send
To me a kind, and faithful Friend,
One who to Virtue's Laws is true,
And does her nicest Rules pursue;
One Pious, Lib'ral, Just and Brave,
And to his Passions not a Slave;
Who full of Honour, void of Pride,
Will freely praise, and freely chide;
But not indulge the smallest Fault,
Nor entertain one slighting Thought:
Who still the same will ever prove,
Will still instruct ans still will love:
In whom I safely may confide,
And with him all my Cares divide:
Who has a large capacious Mind,
Join'd with a Knowledge unconfin'd:
A Reason bright, a Judgement true,
A Wit both quick, and solid too:
Who can of all things talk with Ease,
And whose Converse will ever please:
Who charm'd with Wit, and inward Graces,
Despises Fools with tempting Faces;
And still a beauteous Mind does prize
Above the most enchanting Eyes:
I would not envy Queens their State,
Nor once desire a happier Fate.
3.6k
whenever I feel the tremble start to ooze its way
from my compact mind to the tips of my fingers,
I immediately anticipate the fate
that I have always been able to foresee
whenever that familiar first jolt of an anxiety attack sails its way,
like a vessel in a storm
throughout my entire body
heart pounds an intolerable caution
lungs wheeze frigid determination with a rough friction
that lightly scrapes my core with a ticklish flutter
shoulders lift up into a hunch; absolutely automatic
the top tray of teeth lock clenched into the bottom tray’s hold
a fleet of air hisses in and out of two nostrils like a monk’s meditation
capacious eyes flicker from
the lid to the lash to the iris to the pupil to see everything
everyone is staring
everything is too intimidating to look at for longer than two seconds
then, the tunnel
the clearest, acute vision waters into a soft edged frame,
into a pixel mud of a picture, into a black peripheral,
black corners rounding in – a narrow and petty circle
I use it and follow it to wherever my
deepened impulse decides to take me
silently contemplating,
silently speculating,
silently examining
the fears I let my feeble self
get swallowed up in.
Sep 3, 2012
Sep 3, 2012 at 1:42 AM UTC
There is a feeling that is capacious and transporting
I have no sense of loss I miss no-one, not even myself
For some unknown reason I cannot remember who I am
Everything is becoming most peculiar.
A strange carnavalesque atmosphere is gently blowing around me
Time has moved, passed, drifted, gone back,
Gone forward, gone down, gone up.
There is a tepid touch on me, I shake
Feel infinity of tears without inventory or cause
While the sun gives two shadows to one shape
I see the seven minute blackness of 2186
Apr 14, 2012
Apr 14, 2012 at 1:46 PM UTC
1.Emotional obesity
Her enlarged ego, she proudly wore
as if it was an impregnable armor
what an observer could see was
an emotionally obese siren on the prowl.
her mate too was thoroughly
compatible to her,
when they danced, two enlarged
egos rubbed in a way really wrong.
2.Ego trouble
Every ego is different in shape, size and measure
but in essence all egos are capable of making troubles.
3.Killing ego
Killing ego isn't about blood and gore, it's good riddance,
that's the way to make light go euphoric, proliferate.
4.Ego goes in to a bag
Every individual ego soon finds on its own,
an equally capacious ego bag to carry it around.
5.System breaker
When an ego problem seeps in to a system,
it'd establish it's nuisance value; helps to easily sell it.
Mar 20, 2016
Mar 20, 2016 at 9:14 AM UTC
I woke up with gloomy dreams,
A pretty face I remember,
She had the vive of a queen,
While I was the slave of cold December.
Dream again, I ask my heart and mind,
Fading images meant this story's end,
So my eyes wore a sailor's dress,
Searching for a lost pile of sand.
The minutes of that dream shaped my hours dull,
With no awe in this life , I waited for her call,
I became what they call incorrigible,
As this desert heart now needed a last rainfall,
I never asked for her lover's heart,
Just to watch her skip my heartbeat,
Nor craved for those moonlight lips,
As I spend a lifetime watching our eyes meet.
The dream may never come,
Her sunset eyes may never rise,
For the sake of my capacious heart, I still close my eyes,
To live a thousand deaths to once see her blue sunset eyes.
Dec 16, 2015
Dec 16, 2015 at 8:09 AM UTC
644
You left me—Sire—two Legacies—
A Legacy of Love
A Heavenly Father would suffice
Had He the offer of—
You left me Boundaries of Pain—
Capacious as the Sea—
Between Eternity and Time—
Your Consciousness—and Me—
1.7k
I planted a cherry tree
Four seasons back
In a morose rain
Pelting sharp upon nimble naked boughs
And rows, of wild berries
Running amuck in an unruly strain.
The tree is a full bloom now
Of white satin flowers
Swirling against a beaming blue
Tonight, as night keeps a vigil over my eyes
I get under my squally Cherry Tree
And suddenly I see it ailing
Sick old moon peeps through its branches
And I hear them crackle, not clear though
Moaning unobtrusive, through a wicked grin.
The moon lingers on long
Shining painfully in the womb of night.
I feel the stiffening wood coagulate in my veins
As blackness suffuses unbridled
In the cold wilderness of mind.
April never was summer in Kashmir
Look unto these dark skies
Those pierce the ether yet once more
Pelting mercilessly upon
The ailing, armourless beings
Whereby the cruel moon grins
And my heart wilts with each withering flower
Knocked down in the mud by
The unsparing shower.
Tears trickle down the smeared petals
And I collect them into my eyes
Till the plethora can no longer be contained
I let them fall
Into the capacious ***** of earth
And in this cruel April rain
My Cherry Tree shivers.
Moans. Weeps. Over me.
Apr 14, 2013
Apr 14, 2013 at 9:46 AM UTC
I
duck into tree light
while this red earth field,
seven years ripe,
germinates small answers
to questions hard planted.
You,
Shroud in silence,
drink the silver night air
while the elusive slips
silently by.
We
stand sky-high
weaving through
grain threshed
wind swept fields.
Suddenly,
awakened by the capacious star's
rising yellow ardor,
verdant implants of dewy life
lift skyward and scatter untrodden roots.
Jan 11, 2010
Jan 11, 2010 at 2:43 PM UTC
Here it comes.
Its capacious claws of dejection,
seeping through the cracks,
to diminish my perfection.
I simply try to breathe,
But by the melancholic waves I am defeated,
Optimism is drained and slowly depleted.
I try to run, run,
I rummage through the rooted pit in search of the light,
My conscience longs for joy and struggles to fight.
But no,
Its on its route, around the bend,
Hello sadness, my old friend.
Aug 15, 2013
Aug 15, 2013 at 8:38 PM UTC
“I won't drink the tap water, its poison here”
and when she declared that,
I couldn't decipher if she meant here
as in Northside, or here as in America.
We ate sushi at 2am in the city
I was trying not to show my drunkenness
but I was stumbling into an accent
my grandparents carried with them
tucked in the backs of their mouths,
now peering out of mine.
testing the hydrogen
in the beer
in the back of my throat.
I need sleep,
I'm hungover
This poem can wait.
My mind seems to move itself,
spinning somewhat
while I remain stationed
to soft and tattered cushions
At times, not sure who's moving
Mind or body
like parking next to someone
who's leaving the lot
for a moment
you're caught in the standstill
Where nothing really stands,
Still.
I need sleep
My head feels fuzzy
This poems not great.
Its much later now,
the world seems
more capacious somehow
When my eyes are fully open.
The last of my confounding
half light musings
dissipate like tendrils,
mist in the rising sun
and I, I am left behind
in the residue,
The hardened truth
that cannot move.
“This water is poison”
Her words echo through my day
and I wonder if this poison
will ever evaporate from our veins.
C.e.M. 12.15.2016
Feb 27, 2017
Feb 27, 2017 at 7:30 PM UTC
A cake of nurture and dreams
Made with the love of a maternal hand
Held to its core by an annointed candle
One of many belaying darkness
Until the wish emerges from your dream
A pouted blow, subtle to caress the wish
If the blowing soul has not the conviction
A full blooded blow will transpire
The smoke enthused wish rises
carrying with grace to ones deity on high
The rayless candle lifted inspires a cakely breath
A magnetic capacious attraction to all
Benediction now stored within its sweetly core
A knifely treaty made with sacrificial cake
Good, vented to the riven soul
A bonding gift, a cakely slice
for each companion
Consumed with temporal appetite
Binding memory to this day
Heralding ones peace with this earthly year
Jan 6, 2023
Jan 6, 2023 at 9:43 AM UTC
With ever-bounding enthusiasm, an enthralled, elated group of people embarked,
Not to visit a vast, vibrant land, but to colonize a capacious continent,
Imperial insatiability was inferred upon imagining an inventive future,
Latent with lustful leering upon the land, we, yes we, left for liberty.
With eyes of fire, souls of greed, arms of thunder,
We filched their land, stole their food, killed their eagle,
We shattered their culture, scorned their ways, and dared to call them savages,
We drenched our freedom-land, with the blood of natives.
We are the land of the brave in a prose penned by a poet,
Being brave we brutally butchered, under the guise of our liberty,
Barbarous is our embellished bravery; reckless is the loss of life,
A lost liberty echoes with the laughter of the ghosts of irony.
In a ****** battlefield lies dead our liberty, once free, once brave,
Imprisoned in a stunning story of sorrow, liberty shall we never know?
Freedom foregone is never forgotten, simply a freed freedom,
The bravery lost was passed to the savage souls we seized in the name of liberty.
May 30, 2013
May 30, 2013 at 3:11 AM UTC
Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.
Part Three: Love
II
YOU left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 1:54 PM UTC
He materializes in white, as though from cloud
out of petals and vines--bright ferns whose arms
flower and wrap as though silken angel's yarn
breathing a sheer and layered freckle-shroud
about the capacious canvas of his back
in an uncharacteristic ceremony of purity or bliss.
So capricious a beloved yet elicits a dual image
in the mind of her who's also seen him black.
Apr 16, 2012
Apr 16, 2012 at 9:17 PM UTC
When I was young and needed wheels
my father helped me buy my first.
He worked then in a funeral home
and got a great deal on a hearse.
When first he handed me the keys
I thought there must be some mistake;
A Station Wagon for the dead-
Most dates would do a double take.
True, it had low mileage,
but a ghastly MPG.
It was very roomy in the back
where the coffins used to be.
I thought it would be hard to park,
and in that, I wasn't wrong.
Dad said the horn was customized-
when pressed it played "the Munsters" song.
Its capacious bay proved useful
when transporting beer and wine.
It even helped me to get "lucky".
a "Goth" girl thought it fine.
Pale white skin with tats and piercings'
those memories still can thrill.
Though I found it disconcerting
that she liked to lie so still.
These days I drive a Prius
in an effort to be "Green"
I work out and eat "healthy"
as I'm no longer quite so keen
to be caught lying in the back
of a flatbed limousine .
Feb 22, 2013
Feb 22, 2013 at 7:31 AM UTC
I write poetry
to have
a conversation with myself
and with God
and you
to log
everything I see
and think
and feel
to expose
the lessons I was forced to teach myself
the prayers I learned for you
the wisdom you learned for me
to give
and less so to take
and therefore not to make
something of or for myself
only inevitability can be birthed--
with all the cries and wails
that arrive in sync with newness and life--
as I traverse the capacious cavern
inside and realize
to have it is
to log it is
to expose it is
To give.
Dec 2, 2024
Dec 2, 2024 at 10:29 PM UTC
A reflection of spirit
warm benevolent embraces
flood my being
until at once
I am sprung full of holes
sprouting translucent
pools of love.
Never ashamed
timid or bothered
by this outpouring.
It is the purest and finest who care
in all these pursuits and endeavors
reaping the cascading benefits
of putting someone else
graciously above yourself.
Coming out of the circle
reaching the clouds
feeling full amidst the crowds
peaceful, gaiety, light
insightfully humble and happy.
I have been in flight
and heard the capacious call
of the mourning dove.
Apr 12, 2014
Apr 12, 2014 at 3:21 PM UTC
Stranded and standing stark naked
Looking longingly for lost love;
Pulling pounds of putrefied protoplasm
From your feeble foundation;
You exist in an enigmatic environment of errors.
Your words ache and your blood seethes and your mind tremors
At the offenses of time since passed.
Give up the fight; you're careening towards a cataclysmic crash of capacious proportions.
Nov 2, 2012
Nov 2, 2012 at 9:34 PM UTC
Impressive in his houndstooth coat,
he is noticeably provoked
by crimes against Wallace Stevens.
Beneath his office window
a student meandering to class
takes a twig
of boxwood in his grasp and,
without a moment's thought,
casually plucks it off.
Seizing upon an epiphany,
(or moment of regret)
the Professor turned and said to me:
“We shall all be plucked in time,
or driven down beneath the tread
of farmer feet, in mud as red
and thick as congealing blood!
Driven down like grain
by men with callused hands.”
The world's weight now suspired,
he turned his gaze
to the walkways below,
signalling, I surmised, that I should go.
Death,
I had to concede
is an undignified affair:
random and incoherent in its sweep.
We are naked, riven,
utterly alone, and strewn,
once reaped,
into the soil that was our home.
But not the tall, brown men
of the whispering halls,
where fates are drawn and snipped,
(where capacious noses lightly drip)—
they are plucked with the tenderness of frost,
tucked into filing drawers,
and lost.
Oct 5, 2016
Oct 5, 2016 at 12:53 PM UTC
Give me something lost
Something out of chaos
Not distinguished solemnities
With delicious incompetence
Of well meaning features
Both charming and possible
No, bring me an uncertinty
At once plausible and disturbing
Such as would I discern in a puzzle
Whilst trying to find the coordinates of an allusion
A distance that evaporates in poignant lament
In a comical taste for the grotesque
That resides beyond the horizon of conceivable vision
With a more capacious understanding
Of implausible supposition
That would fragment a fake authenticity
Despite such choice by another eye
Yes, give me something out of chaos, please
Aug 2, 2012
Aug 2, 2012 at 3:42 PM UTC
Slumbering in my capacious tomb,
I dread the surrounding recesses.
I've carefully examined every room,
silence building into deafening excess.
A horrid intuition commands me now,
Something watches at the threshold.
Hours have passed without a sound,
But I'm no fool, silence, I withhold.
Feigning sleep, I bow my head,
allowing the stranger to approach my bed.
No longer a bugaboo, it draws its knife
springing forth like a cobra to take my life.
Snarling like a beast, I counter its jab
Horror marks its face as I ferociously grab,
Wrapping its head with my blanket,
I twist, and lay the beast to casket.
Every night I battle my beast
And never have I ceased
To terrify that familiar freak,
Haunting my subliminal sleep.
Mar 9, 2021
Mar 9, 2021 at 3:32 PM UTC
Oh sickly stupid me,
I have never been so weak.
I always wanted a smart girl
Who could grasp my capacious vocabulary
She would learn and become better.
Oh sickly stupid truth,
Why do you have to come and…
And take from me what I think need.
Truth:
Too young-
Too smart-
Too beautiful
To be contained
Within the boundaries of a... anything.
And so away
You distant speck on the Horizon
Let my tears drown the last remnants of you from my sight.
While lubricating our transition
To another life.
Aug 5, 2010
Aug 5, 2010 at 5:55 PM UTC
Yes just being honest
I cant write poems in the way that most of you can
I'm pretty much self educated
so forgive the errors in punctuation and prose
I write as I see and feel,
nothing fancy.
My very first poem on this site (Tranquillity)
was written while sat on rocks overlooking the sea
That is how I write. No sitting down with capacious notes
and a week to make it sound right
No thats not my way, not what I do
I just write as the words fill my mind
Give me a subject, I'll give you the words
But please never mock what I write
I do my best in this wonderful place
Please understand what you've read
Feb 26, 2014
Feb 26, 2014 at 6:50 PM UTC
A capacious fallout shelter in the Arctic
We have survived the blast
But our rations are depleted
The sublimation of the crazed hunger that is obvious to everyone
I have lost
Tempting as a cool crystal fountain
Enticing as willing women with legs spread
As luring as a treasure of golden bars
I’m sorry my friends
I will never be forgiven for this
Dec 19, 2013
Dec 19, 2013 at 1:07 PM UTC