"constancy" poems
.
1
death dirges
Frogs in distance sing . . .
Foxes, herons, join in too,
. . . A round of croaking.
2
love gifts
Her gift of flowers . . .
Came at night without garden,
. . . Were picked in bedroom.
3
twins demure
Full moon and she . . .
Beauties without crescent smile,
. . . Naked in starlight.
4
light music
Before even sun . . .
Gleam opens to paint each day,
. . . Beauty in birdsong.
5
iridescent
After sun showers . . .
Sparkle of rainbow colours,
. . . Busy hummingbirds
6
chilling
Hollow sound through trees,
Naked and bare branches sway,
. . . Old winter creeping.
7
flirting
She wanted a child . . .
Rushed from one suitor to next,
. . . Clock set to maybe.
8
super villain
Truth once singular . . .
Mucked all up with politics,
. . . In cowl of falsehoods.
9
casualties
Blood spills in gardens . . .
Naïve worms torn from loose grounds,
. . . Red robins, green lawns.
10
stigmata
Each spring miracle . . .
Trees blessed by caterpillars gifts,
. . . Holey hands of leaves.
11
consecrations
Ripples lead to bows . . .
After fish breaks the water,
. . . A kingfisher dives.
12
constancy
Steadfast as always . . .
Wildflower in sun and rain,
. . . Showing true colours.
13
roommates
Chaste lovers wonder . . .
How bodies weather the cold,
. . . Never knowing touch.
14
swept away
Suddenly we kissed . . .
At beach as tides rolling in,
. . . Drowning by ocean.
15
seductress
Her red hair so long . . .
Brushing my face, hiding eyes,
. . . A kind entrapment.
.
Feb 13, 2015
Feb 13, 2015 at 10:20 PM UTC
1255
Longing is like the Seed
That wrestles in the Ground,
Believing if it intercede
It shall at length be found.
The Hour, and the Clime—
Each Circumstance unknown,
What Constancy must be achieved
Before it see the Sun!
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She strides down the street,
Holds that cancer stick up to her mouth,
Takes a deep breath in,
Filling her lungs with lethal smoke,
Gradually rotting away her
Interior.
Her heart beats out of her chest.
[A heart divided between two hearts.]
He’s waiting at the street corner
Between the alley of lust and the
Path of ignorance.
She sees his silhouette in the
Distance, a dark apparition.
Her heart leaps out of her chest,
Towards him,
Reaching for him,
Propelling her to him.
She had absolutely no control over the matter.
The other man she loves is home
Alone, waiting for her too.
Moments ago, he
Held her in his arms,
Kissed her goodbye,
Told her to hurry back soon.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too” - the words
Suddenly conveyed
No meaning to her.
She told him she was
Running an errand, when,
In reality,
She was running away
From him.
[*A heart divided between two hearts
Can never really be a heart.*]
His love suffocates her.
His love drowns her
In its constancy,
In its predictability.
With him, she feels like a
Bird with its wings ripped off.
Held captive, in a wire cage.
[*A heart divided between two hearts
Can never beat the way it should.*]
How can a woman with two men
Who love her
Feel so
Staggeringly
Alone?
Who will love her until their
Disintegrating hearts turn into
Simply dust.
[*A heart divided between two hearts
Can never really keep from rupturing,
Infecting the body with its own poisons.*]
So she lets her underground lover
Envelop her in his arms
And kiss her until both of their lips
Are numb,
Until they both want more.
Until they cannot restrain themselves.
His love releases her out of her
Cage, allows her to fly once again.
The passion of these moments
Will never be forgotten.
His love brings the roses back to
Her lifeless cheeks, brings life
Back to the void inside her.
And, his love allows her
To fly back home, once again,
Straight into the arms of the
Man who is her keeper.
Nov 14, 2012
Nov 14, 2012 at 3:05 AM UTC
~weary weighted~
flummoxed are the sea watchers;
the long rhythms of sea change reveal only minor modesties,
difficult discerned are the tidal subtleties
though repetitive thrashing extracts it toll,
only the weary-weighted see the true meaning of the beating,
knowing full well,
it beats for them
recalling their early day’d fascination with its endless chaining,
now knowing all are similar
detained-chained,
and the ******* churning but a cover up masque,
they need not longer conceal,
an unrevealed confess:
water is heavy-weighted, you cannot forever float,
constancy is of a thing to be wary,
its sadder longevity,
a chipping away erosion of wearing,
*‘tis is the knelling noise of sad respite,
an unlight lighthouse*
~for Victoria, a year later~
Jul 29, 2018
Jul 29, 2018 at 3:21 PM UTC
1737
Rearrange a “Wife’s” affection!
When they dislocate my Brain!
Amputate my freckled *****
Make me bearded like a man!
Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness—
Blush, my unacknowledged clay—
Seven years of troth have taught thee
More than Wifehood every may!
Love that never leaped its socket—
Trust entrenched in narrow pain—
Constancy thro’ fire—awarded—
Anguish—bare of anodyne!
Burden—borne so far triumphant—
None suspect me of the crown,
For I wear the “Thorns” till Sunset—
Then—my Diadem put on.
Big my Secret but it’s bandaged—
It will never get away
Till the Day its Weary Keeper
Leads it through the Grave to thee.
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Then a lawyer said, "But what of our Laws, master?"
And he answered:
You delight in laying down laws,
Yet you delight more in breaking them.
Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with
constancy and then destroy them with laughter.
But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore,
And when you destroy them, the ocean laughs with you.
Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent.
But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are
not sand-towers,
But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they
would carve it in their own likeness?
What of the ******* who hates dancers?
What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the
forest stray and vagrant things?
What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all
others naked and shameless?
And of him who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed
and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all
feasters law-breakers?
What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight,
but with their backs to the sun?
They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws.
And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows?
And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stoop down and trace
their shadows upon the earth?
But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you?
You who travel with the wind, what weathervane shall direct your course?
What man's law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no
man's prison door?
What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's
iron chains?
And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your
garment yet leave it in no man's path?
People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the
strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?
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Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing
Save the eagle, feather’d king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak’st
With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st,
‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:—
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight;
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither;
Simple were so well compounded,
That it cried, ‘How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.’
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed in cinders lie.
Death is now the phoenix’ nest;
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
’Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
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I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her-I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
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Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my belovèd as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
“Fair, kind, and true” is all my argument,
“Fair, kind, and true” varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone.
Which three till now never kept seat in one.
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1683
That she forgot me was the least
I felt it second pain
That I was worthy to forget
Was most I thought upon.
Faithful was all that I could boast
But Constancy became
To her, by her innominate,
A something like a shame.
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every poem gets the exact number
of reads it deserves
<>
nah, I don't think that for
a millisecond,
shoot,
not a ****** nanosecond (1)
truthfully
I'm torn up inside
and my thinking
absolutely
could be wrong
or could be right
absolutely
just like the optionality
of believing in god;
has to be some force
of intelligence that
could create such
microscopic complexity randomly
or just thinking the world
is just a series of accidentally
interactions
so
who's to say what's good,
what's not so good,
and by what standard
one should judge
Is this a poem?
Heck if I know
and what sbout the poems that
get not a one,
a single one, absence of curiosity,
an unheralded execution.
death by silent ignorance,
a master's mastery of exactitude
all because
just because
Is that a collective decision
by an unconscious collective,
the best moderne equivalent of
the unmarked death
of just a single one of
your billions of brain cells (2)(3)
all I know is
that my confusion is confirmed
my constancy is inconsistent
my equatorial balance is
gonzo, dragging me down,
each division wants to piece me up,
and today,
right now
got no answers
at all
how do I define myself?
what categories do I fit
within?
and yet
that answers one question!
**do not write interrogatory inquisitions
at 1:15 am
(unless you're a DUMB lucky *******
who believes they got
answers**)
Jul 12, 2025
Jul 12, 2025 at 3:19 PM UTC
1417
How Human Nature dotes
On what it can’t detect.
The moment that a Plot is plumbed
Prospective is extinct—
Prospective is the friend
Reserved for us to know
When Constancy is clarified
Of Curiosity—
Of subjects that resist
Redoubtablest is this
Where go we—
Go we anywhere
Creation after this?
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Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
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Silent stars reside
In the blue milieu
Continuing their stellar constancy by day.
They are there like my love,
silent, unpretentious, patient and kind.
Trace your finger along the sky, connecting the dots of your name to a safe, congenial and forgiving place to call home. Maybe your name will meet with mine in the night when the stars return, walking across the expanse of loving kindness that is within your reach.
See you tonight dearest one. Just look up.
Oct 5, 2021
Oct 5, 2021 at 10:15 AM UTC
His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.
There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.
It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,
Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.
Even in remote provinces no war was waged.
Generations grew up friendly to fellow men.
The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.
It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.
He was envious and ashamed of his doubt,
Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.
Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.
Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.
Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.
And war began with a battle on the islands.
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Damaged trust and marriage schemes
Held hostage in each others' dreams
Pinned to walls but flailing still
Forgotten values, failing wills
True love waits, we tell ourselves
True love gladly stacks the shelves
True love sets conditions and
True love does the dishes and
Slowly, slowly, we forget
Just why we're here and who we met
Another notch in wrinkled frowns
Where I keep getting lost and found
In roller-coaster ups and downs
I'm lost and lost and lost and found
Missing flights and toxic tongues
Catharsis found in tar-filled lungs
I lost myself in who I wasn't
And in what true love does and doesn't
Not quite gaslit, not quite safe
Playing back the ancient tape
We envy death for constancy-
Besmirching our own consciences
We forgo our emoluments
Too traumatized by precedents
But hush you tell me, no one knows
The pretzel-bending ways we grow
Forever twisting round and round
Lost and lost and lost and found
Now freaking out, now breaking down
Now glaciers found in evening gowns
Now agonizing 'Who am I?'s
Now dying fire in your eyes
At last the sunset settles debts
We tally up our last regrets
Relenting to incessant ghosts
Abandoning essential posts
'Til all that's left is loss and hurt
It burns and burns and burns and burns
And now I choke on orders filled
And mourn alone the youth we killed
I scrape the comb across my nettles
Pricking feelings, bleeding mettle
Finally free from ups and downs,
I find myself on solid ground
Oct 2, 2018
Oct 2, 2018 at 10:52 PM UTC
1357
“Faithful to the end” Amended
From the Heavenly Clause—
Constancy with a Proviso
Constancy abhors—
“Crowns of Life” are servile Prizes
To the stately Heart,
Given for the Giving, solely,
No Emolument.
—
“Faithful to the end” Amended
From the Heavenly clause—
Lucrative indeed the offer
But the Heart withdraws—
“I will give” the base Proviso—
Spare Your “Crown of Life”—
Those it fits, too fair to wear it—
Try it on Yourself—
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When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,—
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
You think a sudden damp of love
Will through all their senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your ****** to the name of massacre.
Poor victories! But if you dare be brave,
And pleasure in your conquest have,
First **** th’ enormous giant, your Disdain,
And let th’ enchantress Honour next be slain,
And like a Goth and Vandal rise,
Deface records and histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And, without such advantage, **** me then.
For I could muster up as well as you
My giants, and my witches too,
Which are vast Constancy and Secretness;
But these I neither look for nor profess.
**** me as woman, let me die
As a mere man; do you but try
Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
Naked you have odds enough of any man.
2.7k
***A Woman's Reflection on Her Reflection (Valence and Value)
one poem, written by two authors***
~~~
**Ever the analyst,
A mirror functions as surface to
Parse the fleeting constant
Of youth's beauty.
From genetic gift
Of symmetry and bone,
To technological tampering,
Until the equation is solved,
As experience and character
Models and maps the result.
The answer, a reflection,
Of individual valence and value**
(written by S.D., a woman)
~~~
(written by N.L., a man)
unbidden and unannounced, a
"not fully formed poem,
but a simple reflection"
inbound missile arrives inbox,
armed with silent power,
the lethality of the
Holy Unexpected
the man reflects
on her mirror-on-the-wall's
fulsome reply,
parsing the words of a
woman's reflection,
while gazing on her own
every human's momentary glass notation,
but an instance of summation,
a human poem, whose editing,
unceasing
a comma here,
a period inserted,
an eye shadowed, an eyebrow tweezed,
a eye dark circle line added,
to tree-mark time's authorship
all these
but a person's
excerpted extraction,
notarized,
then auto-erased and revised,
as out of date,
instantaneously compromised
but,
***it is upon the conceptual,
valence and value,
more that the man reflects perpetual,
less on transitory morphing changes of
exterior mortality
while overlooking her
glassine realization from behind,
he concludes:
every reflection,
no matter how oft the snapshot,
the unfleeting constancy
of the combining of the
princes of principles,
valence and value
that he witnesses,
in the calming pool
of her eyes,
(those borrowed windows into her soul's well,)
so well reflect
her unchanging greater finery,
her character
this reflection,
metamorphosis transformed.
into a planetary permanency poem,
high placed in his the firmament
of their conjoined sky***
Feb 25, 2016
Feb 25, 2016 at 8:54 PM UTC
for Ashley and Trent
Joyous tears lie just ahead,
for Trent and Ashley
will seal their love today.
Pipes, strings, brass and voices
will soar beneath
Saint Peters towering nave
and we'll rise as one to affirm
their pledge of love and faith.
They met in band at Belleville East
and always seemed to know
that on some spring morn in June
they would stand at the altar
to vow their lives to constancy.
We all knew it too and today
we would be no other place
for hope unbounded rules the day
and echoes in our grateful hearts.
May 21, 2016
May 21, 2016 at 11:30 PM UTC
In anticipation of the too-few precious hours in tandem, we divulged our carnal cravings at each others’ hands, but omitted fragments, saving them for some other day, finding them too truthful.
When you hold your body to mine, as you have told me you will, I want a flurry of colored breath, peach and magentas and crimsons slipping translucently from every part of me and wafting in and out and between us like a graceful fog, and not just the force of fingers that have waited too long to touch, but the electrostatic brushes of life’s restlessness falling slowly into their own gravity as we learn to trust the moment.
Our lips are full of nerves and that is why a kiss is so much more than symbolic. I placed my lips to the skin of an orange and I was met with the sensuality of the whole terrain of this world. Intimacy then, is the slow press that reassures humanity – the invitation into a world with no walls – the rush of blood that comes from being completely receptive – that is the kiss I want with your soul.
After all the epochs of lovers, these are all the same words, but they are lanterns bouncing across the plains and sparking anew in the way that the naive are always entranced by the lighter in their hand when they first learn how to light a cigarette, elated and dizzy from the ***** Twinkling.
Sometimes all it takes is a breath and I am light and wind and red paper confetti and the moon and a golden orb that turns all it touches into a shining constancy of what’s called love – and I visit your heart knowing that you can’t tell it’s me, and then I must leave– and I know that I was not in my body, but that it must have kept existing while I was gone because I always wake up in tears, and someone had to cry them.
Conventionality dies between us and there are no titles or promises to speak of. I once found security in labels, only to find that they leave no room for the inevitable growth and weathering of time. So I ask little of you – only that you are always true with me, and that you occasionally put your hand in mine.
May 13, 2013
May 13, 2013 at 12:22 AM UTC
Difficult to say it is a crisis of faith
Deadlock stubbornly cracked
Divide intensified with fact so backed
****** is truth, lost memory's wraith
"Who's to blame?" as so often "they" saith
Forget this daft idyllic hope, loyalty
To nothing has my life compared
And as most humans, no heartache spared
No limits to its reverence and constancy
As God shapeshifted, any form but royalty
Kings of Kings, my Makers, Lords on High
Omnipotent theories to query
Over verses I've traveled, all but Kashmiri
Reasonably these to view before bye-bye
Off I am to Pir Panjal, where I shall quake and die
Nov 23, 2015
Nov 23, 2015 at 2:14 PM UTC
Conjunction:
a small class of words distinguished in many languages by their function as connectors between words, phrases, clauses, sentences
- the act of conjoining; combination; the state of being conjoined; union; association:
- a compound proposition that is true if and only if all of its component propositions are true.
- the coincidence of two or more heavenly bodies at the same celestial longitude.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am in a relationship.
a colorless word
a word of no clarity
a good one? a bad one?
a professional deal,
or one that makes you squeal
with pleasure or despair
without context or content,
a description of a status,
not a state,
but a quid pro quo
I prefer
I am in a conjunction
*well recall the day
our orbits
more than crossed,
but synchronized,
when two bodies
began to travel
upon the same longitude
one direction
in conjunction
t'was the day we coordinated
on our mobile phone,
co-configured our future,
our calendars*
*nowadays,
I answer her questions
while she is commencing to think,
when her foolishness prevails,
she questions, "did you remember to..."
my answer, a question returned,
connected, constant and conjunctive,*
"and what's my name?"
an answer conveying constancy
*relationship
oft the farthest place from logical,
but you know that,
say I am in a conjunction
and the logicians will celebrate
the end of your lonely celibacy,
well they understand the truth
inherent in and of and about
your compounded proposition*
*what unimaginative creatures we be,
dispensing with beauty for factuality,
but facts are easily misread,
your fact and my fact, relationship,
the exact same fact, conveys neither
an agreement as to what that means
are we unionized, associated, or conjoined
what is the quality of
our related ships?*
so
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
amend my status please,
post me
as being in a state of:
a) conductivity b) connectivity c) concoctive
no, none of those
capture
what we have
captured,
so let create a new state,
a new world,
using a very old world word
post us as follows,
"Nat is in a conjunction"
Apr 25, 2014
Apr 25, 2014 at 6:32 AM UTC
I
And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The mood arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.
II
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
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