Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Lawrence Hall Jun 2019
Oh, yes, you should dabble amateurishly
With sketchbook, pen, guitar, and crescent wrench
With telescope and hiking boots and love
With verse that scans and prose that strongly speaks

For a dabbler, all the world is his adventure:
A coffee cup is as Old Santa Fe
A stroll in the garden a pilgrimage
To Canterbury or Santiago

And you should draw and write and sing these things
Oh, yes, you should dabble amateurishly
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:

Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com

It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.

Lawrence Hall’s vanity publications are available on amazon.com as Kindle and on bits of dead tree:  The Road to Magdalena, Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, Lady with a Dead Turtle, Don’t Forget Your Shoes and Grapes, Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, and Dispatches from the Colonial Office.
mEb Nov 2010
To rivit and gaze abrrantly
Your visually sick behind retina
Processing on whimsical stammor
Docket’s of false telltale pouring from hundreds of mouths
All while one gamming sheray from your eyes says enough
Those worn graying-blued bags underneath;
They show a hard working bluff
Devised; let’s embellish our stares of evil on outward crowds
Let us pick out other bagged eye crevices, and not moving blabbers’
Nothing but the time they’ve gave; those wise ******* dabblers’
We glance the demon out for thrill
We are the visually ill.
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2016
I well recall encouraging
in the early days,
sending messages to and from,
what was beyond and in between,
what lay between a woman's
wind tossed
heart
and her
breathless, winded,
words

these spaces,
so wonderfully human
and fine,
that we better
recognize
their existence
in ourselves,
through her words

motives purely
selfish, then, I guess,
words pearly,
gifted and given,
how we find the same language,
forges all
our contexts,
with a binding grace,
that elevates us all
beyond and un-between,
above
life's grays

I well recall the
rare, early days here,
when communitas was the
only guiding principle,
seldom was heard
a discouraging word,
how sharing each other's
innermost,
was
the most,
the finest,
expression of the ultimate humanity
inner,
that we choose to accept,
when wearing the
poetry cloak,
a notional emotional
grace
supra-national
in a shared world heritage site,
that no one poet could ever hope to obtain alone

I thank you
once more,
one more,
time and time again,
for the bloom
of your rose,
gifted to all we
itinerant dabblers,
in a world where
words and will,
literary and love,
transforms and re-forms
each other
with the constancy-frequency
glowing alliteration of
an early morn Florida sunrise

you are among the best of us,
we will brook
no,
this denying,
keep us together,
be the poetic glue,
the ganglia connecting us,
this ragtag band
of brothers
and
sisters,

after all this
are we,
not the lucky ones
who read, observe, feel,
and love the special aura of
the poetess

Ketoma Rose*
~~
with affection
nat
8:43am
Jan. 9, 2016
nyc
Zubair Hussaini Apr 2012
I want it all.
I have a craving for what this world has to offer
and I'm daring to see if it'll be fulfilled.
Yes, shiny baubles and warm sensations
bring them all.
But I also want the depths of human experience
I want love
I want meaning and purpose
To answer to higher call while knowing none exists

Do my words sound cryptic?
As well they should.
Language, poetry, fiction
All are imperfect means of communicating the breadth of consciousness.
They are tools our ancestors created haphazardly,
Quite by accident
In search of reassurance and comfort
In the coldness of existence.

This modicum of life cannot be grasped entirely by any
Save sages and scholars some say.
Mystics and dabblers they are.
Life is not viewed from a single lens.
Would you stare at your lover only through photograph from afar?
Life requires mixing and intersplicing to bear any examination at all

So once again I ask, do my words sound cryptic to you?
I sure hope they do because I hold no answers.
Those I learned long ago are quickly dispersing
with who knows what else
and all to no avail
Like Winston Smith,
I think it’s time to start a diary.
Follow me now:  it’s April in Oceania,
The cruelest month,
The silly season, printemps,
A regular I see London, I see France.
I see Winston’s Underpants.
If you catch my drift?
La Primavera: Vivaldi’s rocking the
Juke box and the vote, Botticelli’s painting,
A mural on Jerusalem's wailing wall.
My diary will be hard evidence of thought crime.
Thought crime: one of the more severe varieties of
Religious experience & the most psychotic form of mental illness,
In a category known as antisocial personality disorders.
Thought crime means never getting into any serious trouble,
Until you’re caught, can we at least agree on that?
So, we'd better add the DSM to our stack of essential literary classics.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Published by the American Psychiatric Association,
Providing a common language,
A shrink’s Esperanto.
DSM-IV codes classify mental disorders.
The DSM: a Frommer’s travel guide &
User’s manual for life on planet Earth.
So, like Orwell's Winston, I start a diary of my own; but
Unlike Mr. Smith, I address my message to the here &
What’s happening now, not the future, not the past but
N-a-zayer, N-a-zither NOW.
That's right, I write for the present:
“If thought was ever free, it is not free now."
If truth exists it is a closely guarded secret,
Although McLuhan’s observations hide in plain sight:
“The new electronic interdependence, recreates
The world in the image of a global village.”

Which makes us all global village idiots.
We are no longer different from one another;
The age of groupthink is here.
I write to you from an age of security & surveillance,
Warrantless search and predator drones,
An age where no man is ever truly alone.
From an age of standardization, replaceable parts,
Whirling dervishes, dabblers in spin control,
Newspeak and doublespeak,
Atlas shrugged, drugged and fugged,
The new world order:
All but the faint of heart need apply, …
*"I send greetings.”
Seán Mac Falls May 2015
Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Rube lords with simple vainness,                                                        ­­              
Watch him crown himself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Rube is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.
Hello Poetasters,
vanity Reeks
mediocrity shines on HP
Noah Feb 2013
Needles and spoons and white powders,
Among other things I've never seen or touched or smelled -
Such things seem not meant for dabblers, or at least
Not for me.

Those things are meant for stars, who see stars,
Whose fame reaches the stars,
Whose face is broadcast through the stars and back again,
Echoing their brains and bodies and all that white powder.
They're not meant for schoolchildren,
Who climb up ladders and jump off cliffs,
Who grow tall only with scissor lifts securely under their feet,
Who stand at the top of water slides and sit at the top of roller coasters,
Who're only as close to the stars as the school roof will let them be.

Those things are not for them,
Not for me.

But there is something,
Something softer, lighter, easier, greener,
Something familiar to most.
Called a gateway for some, certainly for the famed,
A gateway to the stars even before the needles and spoons and white powders.
There are books about famed faces and the way they wrinkle over the years,
About their cultivations, their migrations, their explorations.
Books of things they've done, that I've done, that we've done,
Smoke billowing from our lips, our nostrils, from every pore,
And books about how, with the same ritual I've taken a part in,
They somehow manage to climb so high - mimicking their fame,
they soar up and up, to the stars and past,
Through religious experiences, baffling adventures, new and brilliant insight.

Not me.

I reach that roof or lift or water slide,
Stretch my hands as far as they can reach,
Point my toes for that extra barely inch,
And, after such heavy straining,
Fingertips atoms away from the clouds,
at least the clouds,
give me the clouds,
I collapse,
Breath short,
Heart racing,
In exhaustion.
Seán Mac Falls Nov 2014
Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Rube lords with simple vainness,                                                        ­              
Watch him crown himself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Rube is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.
Seán Mac Falls Feb 2014
Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Dawn lords with simple vainness,
Watch her crown herself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Dawn is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.
Seán Mac Falls May 2014
Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Dawn lords with simple vainness,
Watch her crown herself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Dawn is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.

— The End —