"cataloguing" poems
Dear Emma Watson -
Shall we make love
The object of
Our spiritual quest
Together?
Surely an altogether
Better option
Than pairing you off
In a commentary box
With one John Motson
Discussing twenty two
Pairs of socks
Chasing a piece of leather?
If spiritual questing
Is not for you
I will make do
With tightly tied pairs of shoes
Existential emus,
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Whilst hoping you find
Your Sherlock Holmes,
Miss Watson
I will content myself with
Cataloguing my collection of
Black and white combs.
I also have plots on
Which I need to work -
Wednesday Addams's love of
Moon dried tomatoes
Or Erica Roe
Somewhere in Portugal
Growing sweet potatoes
For sale.
Don't let anyone tell you
There ain't no perks
To being an Omega Male.
Jun 6, 2014
Jun 6, 2014 at 8:01 AM UTC
The clouds whirl around horns of the gate.
The blush of the morning is tangerine
and gold. The blossoming chorus from the bay
for now is just silence, fog and a silver lining.
The cinema bulbs are flickering out.
There is Coca-Cola in my soul.
There is anguish in my bones.
Luxury paid for the tightness of my skin
and an artifice of love.
It blew away like dry grass.
I think God is a librarian,
crumbs in his beard, fingerprinted specs.
Cataloguing the hours I spent on my knees
his matinée idol, his evening sandcastle,
stones applauding his work in the Cali tide.
What can he do to me?
Witchdoctors can forecast rain from my guts.
A poor wading bird can fish me up
and photograph my corpse iconic like Evelyn Hale,
but that 'man' can do nothing…
I see the Island rising from the mist
like it’s throwing off its coat.
I’m like the birdman, in my way.
I’ll be remembered
flying.
Perhaps I can even make it magnificent?
The boys on the boat will talk over their beers
of that triple tuck swan dive,
the acrobat, a harlequin that tumbled
like a shadow on the rising sun
Kamikaze, I Samauri!
The war drum beats, on, on but I’m done.
l am in the eye of the storm.
I am the harbinger, the horseman -
And the universe is a ball in my hands.
I made you up, I’ll rub you out.
The sky is holding the Sun and the Moon.
5am. Circling gulls. Harikiri.
Machinery rings upwards through the girders.
Equinox. Tomorrow is untouchable.
Nov 13, 2015
Nov 13, 2015 at 10:21 AM UTC
I..am a collector of words;
Words that weave together
To form the clauses
that blossom into stories; people’s stories.
Words that keep secrets, spin lies,
Howl profound confessions from the rooftops of minds
Rushing out and over the ledges of lips to fall
On ears that do not listen—floating
Story after story, finally reaching the ground—forgotten.
On the sidewalk lay the slain and mangled things;
Victims of gravity—of silence that refused to break—
Of ears that refused to listen.
i… am the undertaker of the alphabet city.
I pick up the fallen, garbled, and lifeless;
Carting them away to the depths of my mind
Cataloguing, keeping, revering the reverberating vibrations.
my ears hear what is yearning to be heard
they acknowledge the wants of language.
I practice the Resuscitation of monologues
and the Defibrillation of forgotten phrases
an EMT of etymology,
I coagulate the bloodied and heartfelt confessions of lovers
suturing the spaces between breathless sentences.
prophetic Disambiguations clutch at gray matter and claw through flesh
tearing the tethered syllables from which meanings are formed.
I twist plot like a lemon twists martinis
Weaving tales that intertwine like the digits in math
or my hands when you held them in your own.
clasped shut.
tongue-tied is just another term for french kiss
and it is hard for you to find the right words to say
because I, a collector, have caught every last one from your lips.
Apr 3, 2014
Apr 3, 2014 at 8:58 PM UTC
Can you feel it?
*That something juicier and wetter
That something wilder and fiercer
That something wiser and stronger*
Divine and lovely fragment of God
Searching and sifting
Through the soil caking your feet
Your archaeological dig site
Resurrecting from your deep red earthiness
Sorting your finds
Cataloguing your treasures
Can you smell it?
*That something juicier and wetter
That something wilder and fiercer
That something wiser and stronger*
Turning over and over each exhumed shard
I watch you squatted, frog like
Remembering ~ Releasing ~ Restoring
Becoming one with Ivory bone and awakening to the harmony of blood's song
Navigating with courage your shadow
I watch you bearing down
Giving birth to truth and beauty
Can you taste it on the wind?
*That something juicier and wetter
That something wilder and fiercer
That something wiser and stronger*
Feb 7, 2013
Feb 7, 2013 at 1:44 PM UTC
Yet another year has passed in a blur of waste and want, resplendent in good intentions, and captive to the grievous mistakes and wonderous successes achieved in its wake, and I marvel that i am still present to witness times gentle touch get inexorably firmer as its slow breaths draw closer to my cheeks. Birthdays seem a childs delight, yet it was with barely veiled excitement that i awoke this morning, cataloguing the days tasks mentally as I devised preemptive counter measures for the growing list of demands that seemed intent on marauding the simple joy of celebrating my own existence with the people that found themselves, some to their discomfiture, in my life.
It was early this morning when the first notes of the birthday song, the song that every child knows, and every adult can sing effortlessly, erupted in my direction, and i wanted to hold time in my hand, and forbid its passing as my daughter Taylor sang to me, her soft, lilting voice taking care with each word, as if she bled her heart onto each syllable before it passed her lips, and they fell before me in a shower of soft sighs and silky, red regard. I listened, silent, as I heard her say the words, and they weresuddenly a foreign language to me, a magical language lost to common ears, that echoed with beauty unimaginable, and i stood, transfixed and defenseless against the innocent sincerity she placed on each word, as if she bent over them as they lay down to sleep, kissing each on the forehead, smiling as she went to the next.
“Happy Birthday to Daddy…….”
Since she had arrived in my life, i had taken this name, and with it, the promise to try, in the most assuredly imperfect way, to cultivate her brilliant, questing mind, and to attempt to be the example by which she would measure a man. It was an honor, that name, coming from the lips of an angel, whispering the love of God in a childs song, and i could barely hold the tears as they threatened to seek refuge at her feet, and revere her name in dripping splashes along the ground. Twice today, she sang that hymn to me, and twice i fell in love with her as her sweet little voice lifted in the refrain. “Happy Birthday to Daddy….”. She was, I thought, my sweet, beautiful little girl. As she sang, the sun peered down upon the earth, its baleful eye softening with the rising beauty of her song, and the trees swayed with the words of her adoring communion.
May 17, 2015
May 17, 2015 at 9:52 AM UTC
Dust.
Keep it in my back pocket, keep it low 'n ready.
Grab a handful, a grubby fistful, when you need it.
A desperate need.
Need it like a gasping breath after swimming in the dark deep
of your own thoughts.
Need it like a lover's glance, or calm words after a storm.
When the need takes you in,
you'll tremble and shudder
like leaves or sunlight.
When the need swallows you, you'll know.
A deep down know, a bone stilling know.
Your soul will rise and fall, lifted and crushed
like shells and hopes.
And then you'll rebuild, picking up
little pieces and big pieces and heart-shaped pieces.
Discarding.
Cataloguing.
And you'll know.
You'll know that you took a handful and made a world.
You'll know that you did your very shining best, that you
fell off of every cliff and tripped down every flight of stairs.
That you broke and shattered perfection
into what it was meant to be.
For today, you destroyed beautifully.
You gave need a want and want a need.
What is needed...
What is wanted...
Hope? Courage? A bit of faith?
Or maybe love?
These are things that sink or swim.
Will I sink or swim...
Today?
Tomorrow?
In this world where you don't know
what you need or what you want?
There's only one thing you can know
and cling to in this life of waves and currents and storms.
You know there's a glimmer. A bit of dust.
And you know that you're not ready to stop swimming yet.
Copyright Morgan Graham October 8, 2012.
Oct 8, 2012
Oct 8, 2012 at 9:38 PM UTC
Where do all dead poets go?
If you find out then let me know.
Does all language die with them?
Words float in air, then end. Amen.
Or are their words preserved in time?
Scorched on paper, then held in shrine.
There to be seen, read, devoured,
Ancient wisdom from those empowered.
There to make a serious point
Using words to soothe, anoint.
Recording times, events and places.
Cataloguing history, people, faces.
Sometimes harsh in what they say,
Determined to speak come what may.
Not all poets speak in rhyme;
Using rhythm to keep in time.
But all good poems should touch the heart,
Evoke emotions from the start,
Make the reader see and feel,
Hear what's said, know it's real.
Remind us where we all connect,
Be you non- religious or from a sect.
Touch our senses, hearts and memories.
What one man does another sees.
Not all men use knowledge for good;
Follow morals and do what we should.
Think before we act and speak.
Find courage, be strong, protect the meek.
If you find time to help out others,
Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
Take your life and start anew.
That's when you'll find the poet in you.
Aug 1, 2015
Aug 1, 2015 at 6:38 AM UTC
1.
I am optimistic enough this day clings to the highest mast,
is now born out of prophecy.
I pass by the old mirror: see myself: blear myself:
is blot to canvas, slit from the wrist of this home:
I witness how it is to sustain beatings.
2.
In the empty lot, age 9, we wrung frangipanis and ruined
the pedicle somehow a map of a history where this ground
shook that was once an old cathedral. We blew
bubbles out in the haziest of days, pallid and droopy
the clouds identify in their short collisions – the stream that was
the sky
the face of my mother when found news of my would-be death
1996, Kawasaki my mother's clutch on the soiled linen
beginning an autopsy
3.
I conjure a frayed upon image of death in its colloquial.
a fractal of mistakes taken as righting out. I sense prognostication
when potential for a satisfied framed encounter or out of luck that was
a night making all of this less than total.
I remember the discoloration of the many lights – the sky beginning an
erratum: this could have been your last – what is exacted here
like a tarot, the culprit a newfangled man in the rearview mirror.
4.
How can I forget you – all of you? You wear light like karsunsilyo.
You are all flowers I arrive at a contusion of gardens.
Rinse me with light – abandon me after.
5.
Made air staler. Dew my maiden when lit
from the matutinal – in tow, a bedraggled kite soaring in the heat
one distinct summer,
wish it pure that was I, almost touching the vermillion,
my faintest image of freedom was a bird trapped in between
the venetian.
6.
In a dream, I am pursued by a train in an alley – in the next scene,
I am being forced to take a plunge
into a chasm: the fall did not scare me – but my acquiescence
made me flinch: standing before space, anesthetizing
the skin so it made me more than metal, the clangor
suggests a tragedy. Awakened by violent nudges
from my mother: it was the New Year. Pyrotechnics paint the sky
over and over an ephemera in the bleak behemoth of this:
a makeshift home ruined by untranslatable music
the sound of rain at 11 in the afternoon and a nearby funeral.
Jun 2, 2016
Jun 2, 2016 at 1:14 AM UTC
instead of sinning there would be a recess
where people all over the world every three hours or so just stopped
and played kickball or slid down the icy slide cataloguing how far
down the playground they slid
tied rubber bands together , thousands of them , attached a small
plastic airplane to it , stretched it far as it could go,
and flew it imaginatively, then went back to being grown up?
Mar 6, 2016
Mar 6, 2016 at 5:57 AM UTC
for her.
<>
“you will laugh with surprise, as the anointing oil of relief
crowns your head, slicking down to caving cavities,
river running in crevices, that feed the buried places, replenishing the almost forgotten secret of letting go”^
~
the mind caches certain skills, once learned, never to return,
but tucked away, just in case, maybe, in the nightstand junk drawer of: “don’t need it now but, **** you never know”
kept around in the lost and hopefully, not to be searched for & found,
a skill set painfully gained, a muscle memory, flabby from no use
but quick taut tightly, snapping back when **** here we go again
I loved you in ways theoretical impossible till you enabled the possible
lost you for no good reason, in an act history labels beyond belief,
refuses to record, lest by memorializing it became/becomes re-realized,
this intolerable, would be past the ****** eroding barrier reef
the difference between junk and treasures is in which drawer placed,
the steps to letting go once learned, cannot be forgot, the cost,
way way too high, kept around, in a damnable place beyond grief
not to close, handy, findable but easily, avoided, but strange, when
living in the epicenter of the virus, you do some cataloguing, ridiculous,
this touchy-feely escapade, nothing ****** to be gained, all-too-brief
head shake, took a pandemic to make you go back, rustling among
the ancient, old hand-writ poems, another keepsake kept for reasons
known and unknown, to be **** sure you once owned it, survival skills
*In the Pandemic Days of Almost,
somethings will die, some go forgotten,
but the almost-forgetting-skill will survive,
a necessity of the how-to’s:*
***how to grieve,
how to believe,
how to leave
but live on,
hoarding
all the **** necessaries
ready to be retrieved***
<>
Tuesday Mars 24 Twenty Twenty noon
In the Epicenter, New York City
Mar 24, 2020
Mar 24, 2020 at 12:13 PM UTC
I've been collecting words
for years- cataloguing
feral and oblivion, catharsis and
iridescence. I keep gusto
in the drawer beside my bed.
I put visceral next to the broken
mirror you left. I've hidden marrow
next to vastness as if they are mine
alone. See how they slip out of me
like a ****** nose at just the wrong time.
Feb 23, 2021
Feb 23, 2021 at 4:11 PM UTC
Apple blossom
Gutter rhyme
Misplaced memory
Loving pine
Another time
A quick dime
Recipes for two
Mistook me for you
I'm alone here
There it is
Pressed' sun
Hanging moon
An outcasts eye
Fresh shepherds pie
Gain share logic
No money in my pocket
Locket lost
Sea farers woes
A little in lace
Distracted pace
Hunter blitz
Lover's kiss
Spellbound in time
A witches cry
Un-absolute love
Cold bed sheets
Milky white sky
Scarlet tied lie
Beer in the morning
Beer in the afternoon
A lover's quarrel
A single man croons
Six pillows in the month of July
Fraternity politics
A shaping of a coup
Take the tooth
Breast feeding young
Red swollen tongue
Naked rings on frail fingers
Death doth linger
Marshmallow hiccups
Grass fed nightmares
Grandma was forgotten
The lights must be turned off
Ice on the walls
Earth on the move
People here
People everywhere
Sin in sentences
Breathtaking passages
History hovers over us
Grave are always
Too large
Itemizing life
Cataloguing it all
One more prize
Before the great fall
Sequence of smiles
Remedy my memory
Pluck my eyelids
Take away my pride
Quieted down
Sleeping through the day
Seeing the future
She can't stay
In tune
Harmony
Of
Three
What else is
There
To do but
Be?
Jul 24, 2014
Jul 24, 2014 at 9:02 PM UTC
At 28 years I have become more self-interested
than I have been for two decades.
I am exploring all the granite holds my mind can grip,
all the ways my heart can cleave,
what fits into my body, the feeling of entry and exit,
how invasion stings and where I build my walls,
what quiets my horses and what scatters them galloping.
I used to look outside all the time like a periscope,
but now my navel fascinates me.
For so long it didn’t really matter who I was.
I simply was. I did. I perceived. I acted. I reacted.
The world needed my discovery. I yearned to stomp
all over its trails recording my findings.
Now I am ecologist frantically cataloguing the behaviors,
daily rituals, feeding and mating practices
of the only one of my species. Now it feels paramount
to carve out the hollow where I shall nest,
to place a sign for others, and a pair of binoculars
and a guidebook: “The Wild Me.”
Aug 2, 2019
Aug 2, 2019 at 7:49 PM UTC
We humans used to live in colonies like Purple Martins
But now, if you come within six feet of us
We are skittish like the rarest Warbler.
In the future; tomorrow and the foreseeable days thereafter,
Our children will become people watchers
Cataloguing all the neighborhood types,
Like the Blue-bellied Mail Carrier
Or the UPS Driver with their brown plumage
Who drops packages like the old Cowbird, their eggs
In your nest.
More adventurous children will venture out with their “People Magazines”
Trying to seek out rare life sightings of the Sexiest Man alive
Or a common Kardashian, often without plumage.
The most cherished sightings occur when grandma and grandpa appear
On their nest cams, cozy and safe, reaching out to hug or kiss empty space
While decorating their nest with a holiday table that won’t be filled with their
little hungry birds,
As in other days, and different nights.
Selah.
Apr 2, 2020
Apr 2, 2020 at 9:27 PM UTC
Addiction,
Oh how she longed for addiction,
that she could understand,
Like a gentle tap on the door,
A little ring in her head,
A buzzing in the back of her throat,
Reminding her it was time to sink lower,
Down into the pits of her own damnation.
Addiction,
She would prosper compared to this,
She would fly,
Wings out like telescopes cataloguing the night skies,
Pain was only a replacement,
A repression of her bottled sins,
A soul deep binding that kept her Outer Her from going nuclear.
Addiction,
If only she could let herself go back,
Take steps back down the staircase and away from heaven,
Climb down into the well and huddle in the bone deep chill of that water,
Iced veins, burning under her skin,
That peculiar smile on her face..
The distraction,
Like triple rainbows from a school bus seat,
All the children turn their heads in wonder,
Eyes wide in innocence and joy,
Sweeping away from their little lives to witness that majesty,
And her,
Lying,
Crying,
Dying,
Drowning,
In that bed of hers,
Sheets seeping into her skin and biting cramps at her limbs,
And her fingernails,
Sharp enough to hurt and pull her mind away from dark alleys and harsh truths.
It was not a world of infinity,
Not a world she could escape by regular means,
And it pained her everyday to be reminded,
It ached in the pit of that tomb of snakes, writhing around in her stomach,
Smelt of ash and soon-to-be-lit matchsticks,
Phosphate, red, burning, like the sun,
And her, with skin, as soft and white as the curtains going up in flames,
Eyes wide and begging for something else to look at,
A summer snowstorm out the window perhaps,
Anything but the digging thorns of truth that tightened around her throat like a noose.
Anything but those thoughts,
Of how sharp her fingernails are,
And how locked her door is,
And how small she is compared to the majesty of the world,
Glorious and frightening.
Anything but how easy it could be.
Jul 10, 2018
Jul 10, 2018 at 5:23 PM UTC