"crabbed" poems
My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.
Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.
While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and ****
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.
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Who was there had seen us
Wouldn't bid him run?
Heavy lay between us
All our sires had done.
There he was, a-springing
Of a pious race,
Setting hags a-swinging
In a market-place;
Sowing turnips over
Where the poppies lay;
Looking past the clover,
Adding up the hay;
Shouting through the Spring song,
Clumping down the sod;
Toadying, in sing-song,
To a crabbed god.
There I was, that came of
Folk of mud and name--
I that had my name of
Them without a name.
Up and down a mountain
Streeled my silly stock;
Passing by a fountain,
Wringing at a rock;
Devil-gotten sinners,
Throwing back their heads,
Fiddling for their dinners,
Kissing for their beds.
Not a one had seen us
Wouldn't help him flee.
Angry ran between us
Blood of him and me.
How shall I be mating
Who have looked above--
Living for a hating,
Dying of a love?
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How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall,
The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
Who should be furious,
Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
Roaring, crawling, quarrel
With the outside weathers,
The natural circle of the discovered skies
Draw down to its weird eyes?
How shall it magnetize,
Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze
That melts the lionhead's heel and horseshoe of the heart
A brute land in the cool top of the country days
To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,
Love and labour and ****
In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout
The black, burst sea rejoice,
The bowels turn turtle,
Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle
The parched and raging voice?
Fishermen of mermen
Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin
With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,
Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound
Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,
Trace out a tentacle,
Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and ****
To clasp my fury on ground
And clap its great blood down;
Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas
Or poise the day on a horn.
Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,
Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost
Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops
With carved bird, saint, and suns the wrackspiked maiden mouth
Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,
Clips short the gesture of breath.
Die in red feathers when the flying heaven's cut,
And roll with the knocked earth:
Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.
You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,
And dug your grave in my breast.
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by Damon G
. glum, morose, surly, sulky, crabbed, saturnine, gloomy mean showing a forbidding or disagreeable mood. sullen implies a silent ill humor and a refusal to be sociable
I'M BECOMING UNWOUND
. glum suggests a silent dispiritedness . morose adds to glum an element of bitterness or misanthropy
I NEED SOMETHING TO HAPPEN
. surly implies gruffness and sullenness of speech or manner
A VIOLENT THING, EVEN
. sulky suggests childish resentment expressed in peevish sullenness . crabbed applies to a forbidding morose harshness of manner
THE CRUSH OF A BREAKDOWN
. saturnine describes a heavy forbidding aspect or suggests a bitter disposition
A REASON TO WANT TO
. gloomy implies a depression in mood making for seeming sullenness or glumness .
GET UP AGAIN
Jun 13, 2010
Jun 13, 2010 at 9:51 PM UTC
Old women are forgotten wombs
whose graceless bodies have fed the world,
then been sent to sit in its shadows...
not quite seen, unacknowledged
and without nurture.
Old women are crucified with the nails
of oppression and poverty.
Invisibility swallows them when
age freckles out-number the fresh
patches of youth.
Old women have scarred and calloused
knees from kneeling in submission to
lesser minds that felt bigger for the
looking down.
A rosary of sorrows is strung through
the weary fingers of old women.
They are hung on the crucifix of youth
and beauty to wither into dust.
Old women have crabbed and ruined toes
from shoes worn too long - that a child
might have new ones.
Alone in cubicles or corners, frayed photos
beneath their coats, old women remember
children that have long forgotten them.
Old women do not seek a man’s arms...
for that is not a refuge, but a honeyed trap
where souls are flayed and burned.
Old women talk to themselves because
no one else has ears to hear, or words to share.
Even their echoes are faint and whispered.
Such wondrous minds...libraries of living life,
vision and experience...left untouched because
they are not behind a pretty face.
Behold the woman....she is a wealth of wisdom
and power, beauty and courage - to those
wise enough to touch her power.
Her reckoning will come...
Until then - she endures.
Jul 20, 2015
Jul 20, 2015 at 12:28 PM UTC
The boy with no words
Sitting in a doctors office
The words Autism was cast on him
Like the wizards in the books his mother reads him
This boy sees his mother
leaning on a wall for comfort as she screams
“Oh god why!”
The screams paint the walls
Doctors try to act like they feel her pain
Throwing around comforting words
Just so she could shut up
The doctors are embarrassed
Because other patients are looking
Shaken up like the soda cans
They crabbed from the lounge
The Boy just sits there
On the glossy floor, thinking
“Get up, we are missing Saturday cartoons”
Dec 7, 2014
Dec 7, 2014 at 2:21 PM UTC
Clouds of white March mornings
Surf inside this smokechamber I call a brain.
I was twelve and you were thirteen
Both separate rigid crystals growing
In the back of Mom’s awful red minivan.
We stained our fingers with Oxnard cherries
And got high on orange and eucalyptus.
Sand behaved like molasses.
My Walkman was full of ants
Who hated Third Eye Blind with a vengeance.
I had a pimple on my chin
Which I tried to hide with makeup
And I really hoped you’d notice
My cotton candy body splash
I got it because you like
Juicy Fruit gum and
That smells like cotton candy to me.
I chunked down short white shanks
On the red crabbed beach towel
Hoping you wouldn’t notice the ricotta billows
Developing on the upper thighs
Between slushy rivers of purple lightning stretch marks.
I couldn’t deal after ten minutes so I got in the water.
I laid myself across submerged tidal-pool boulders
Near-floating on the frigid little water-pyre
Congealing my skin like vanilla pudding
Bogging me down like a sea sloth.
It took me a halflife to figure out
That while I miss those mornings,
I do not miss you.
Dec 24, 2014
Dec 24, 2014 at 2:11 PM UTC
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant.
I hate the pompous and the phony.
I hate the jealous, the resentful.
The crabbed and mean and petty.
I hate all ordinary and dull little people
who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
I hate the New People
with their cars
and their money
and their T.V.s
and their stupid vulgarities
and their stupid crawling imitations.
I love honesty and freedom and giving.
I love making, I love doing.
I love being to the full.
I love everything that is not sitting
and watching
and copying
and dead at heart.
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017 at 11:41 PM UTC
When I can no longer dredge, move water
dragging silt through sand, disappearing
my hands tied by seaweed, clawed and crabbed
strange ocean of paraphernalia, I trudge the land
my lips, red crusts and salty bled
fingers stiff, rusty locks, rubber gloved
swallowed up, fastening round a net, a trap
to pull the ocean in
Jan 4, 2015
Jan 4, 2015 at 10:24 AM UTC
Crabbed old feet - imprisoned
in shoes too small, too *****
and too red.
A bit of music escapes
from some trendy café,
she dances in the wailing cold.
She remembers when
she was pretty.
She remembers being young.
Now a ***** wall
of fears drifts as she finds
her old age has begun.
She is worn down, worn out
by the pain every old woman knows.
The laughing mouth of the grave
waits to welcome her home.
Jul 17, 2015
Jul 17, 2015 at 5:46 PM UTC
There are poems about you , which do not live,
its a sad kind of disguise
but they grew ,
developed body parts ,
bloomed like buds ,
and found their way straight through my summer plumed heart
to write about how it felt when your hands touched me ,
and your arms felt more soothing than the star blue bed I miss home back.
your thoughts are crabbed , creating the sallowness of fear .
the bitter sweet time we spent projects into my little dumb mind ,
then makes my tears like vinegar , or bitter blinking yellow missings .
with forever my lips curving in an arc .
coming of you was not so easy but you made me alive now.
Apr 28, 2018
Apr 28, 2018 at 3:47 PM UTC
Crabbed old feet,
imprisoned
in shoes too small,
too ***** and too red.
A bit of music escapes
from some trendy cafe
and she dances
in the wailing cold.
She remembers
when she was pretty.
She remembers
being young.
Now a ***** veil
of fears drifts
as she finds her
old age has begun.
She is worn down,
worn out, ****** dry
by the pain every
woman knows.
The laughing mouth
of the grave waits
to welcome her home
Aug 4, 2015
Aug 4, 2015 at 11:42 AM UTC
It appears as though I'm prisoner
of my desire to express
The words keep coming better
and I mean so out of jest
For I am not a writer
no,
A writer is but me
but I'm right crabbed and mad
It's taken til now to see
Jan 10, 2013
Jan 10, 2013 at 1:00 AM UTC
AGUILAR
But a happy few
Broke from our cages and were spared for slaves,
Within the warlike clutch of Na Chan Can.
My freedom have your wax and honey bought.
One stubborn soul, Guerrero, stays behind.
CORTÉS
And with slave’s ransoms, we must rescue him.
AGUILAR
He will not come.
ALVARADO You must mean “could not,” man.
What exile, broiling in the pits of hell
Is tossed a rope from heaven and will not come?
Your Spanish rusted in these humid airs.
AGUILAR
These Mayas have seduced him to their cause.
When I confronted him, he spoke to me:
“I am a wartime chieftain, and their judge,
And see how lovely are my wife and sons!”
Three handsome half-castes nestled at his hip.
“You go,” he said, “and may God go with you.
But black tattoos have spiraled round my eyes,
And broad, thick discs now pierce my ears and lips.
Would Christians welcome one so scarified?”
CORTÉS
God only scorns the scars of souls.
OLMEDO Well said.
AGUILAR
His crabbed wife waved in my face and spat:
“What grimy scarecrow dares provoke my lord?
Shove off!” But our Guerrero caught my arm.
“I’ve warned our Mayas of Castile,” he hissed.
“If Spanish visitations will be suffered,
The scabies of their ‘culture’ will erupt,
And Europe’s slow, inexorable flow
Must soon encrust and case these florid lands
As running wax will coat a candlestick.
Then must I trim Death’s wicks.”
CORTÉS What can that mean?
Nov 3, 2016
Nov 3, 2016 at 3:21 PM UTC