"drowsed" poems
Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, "Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..."
That one word was all he said,
That one word through all my sleep,
In monotonous mock despair.
Nonsense may be light as air,
But there's Nonsense that can keep
Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, "Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..."
He had faded, he was gone
Years ago with Nursery Land,
When he leapt on me again
From the clank of a night train,
Overpowered me foot and head,
Lapped my blood, while on and on
The old voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, "Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..."
Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
"Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..." he said, "Cat! ... Cat!..."
When I'm shot through heart and head,
And there's no choice but to die,
The last word I'll hear, no doubt,
Won't be "Charge!" or "Bomb them out!"
Nor the stretcher-bearer's cry,
"Let that body be, he's dead!"
But a voice cruel and flat
Saying for ever, "Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!"
4k
In the deep of time indigenous tribes
surfaced a red earth with protruding plateaus
and burnt canyons along the Cimarron River.
The ancient Anasazi settled
at the core of this mesa.
Scattered ponderosa pine.
Yet, their sudden demise echoed curiosity.
Navajo sensed a struggle of two infinite worlds,
a quivering inundation.
Circling its haunted ominous shape,
a skull with one eye, the apparition of light
rose into a blue desert sky.
Violent storms crackle hot lightning
strikes in a sulfurous summer-
an oracular hothouse.
Navajo talk of spirits or the gateway
to fire. Heaps of iron and lodestone
lodged in the cap. Only two
brazen, cat totem poles guarding its passage.
Standing among the mesa
to feel the verve of the earth.
A New Mexico sun beats down
burning the drowsed terrain.
To see the legendary shaman glow
in his ephemeral blue nimbus.
Bathed in gaudy turquoise.
Sensing the dark encroachment
of a ghost. Near the bony hills, soared
a turbulent black bird in full flight,
upward.
Apr 11, 2013
Apr 11, 2013 at 7:43 PM UTC
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,---
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
2.4k
I dreamed I was a butterfly.
(Or butterfly was me.)
I fluttered by the golden sky,
The mountaintops, the sea.
I felt the warmth, the sweet caress,
The gentle breeze of love.
I knew there was no hell below,
No heaven up above.
I spread my wings and let it go,
Forgetful of the past.
I dreamed I was a butterfly.
I fluttered – free at last.
I drifted on the salty waves,
Beset by melting ice…
Amid long years and short days
I freely cast my dice.
My dreams came true, and all at once
The evil was no more…
I let it wash all over me,
And then – I crashed ashore.
Anon, reborn, I dreamed again.
(Or butterfly dreamed on.)
My whole existence – pure as Zen,
Unique as a black swan.
The shards, dispersed along the way,
I gathered – one by one.
The kintsugi of life I made
Was brighter than the sun.
The silent flapping of my wings,
Akin to sands of time,
Sustained a galaxy of springs –
Both mortal and divine.
I ambled on, both dry and drowsed…
The point of no return –
I felt at home… When I aroused,
A better world was born.
My dream, however short it was,
Is now a part of me.
Now, conscious of a grander cause,
I flutter by so free.
Mar 23, 2017
Mar 23, 2017 at 7:07 AM UTC
In a losing
there is not much architectural
panaché.
It’s a
dislinear philanthropy.
The sort of desolate impala predator in recycled NatGeo covers;
The last time I saw my grandma, she was in a lucid litter; her bed a dwarven vault umbrella.
I was yet to understand blood.
When she passed, she left without much weeping. My father-
A people’s baboon- sailed in still ebbing.
In those feralities, there's a lack of certain
strategy, blasphemous is the antelope's unpinnable traversing,
all but for
the mountain beast
who still lurks in the weeds. Crimson then often filled those pages.
There were a lot of funerals in mere naming; curtsies of fathers
of fathers of classmates.
I didn't know them much more than in movies, as described
then to me,
they missed a certain mark(frequently in the appetizers.)
In splatter and sploosh, in spilling and splash maroon- the droplets - danced in
my drowsed peripheral; imagine the photographer, it feels, that in every such photo, it is the same one.
So when you were lowered, I did as those films, and wore black-tie cotton and hugged,
and hugged,
and I wrote a poem, that I should think, you would hate, and implored that you heard the rummage
in the sighs of the snow and the cracklings, and that you read the other poem and scoffed less. Only now have you begun
to leave and it's most hideous, my friend, that you do so,
so spectacularly underwhelmingly.
And it is the grey that is left, which I find most tasteless; ghasting in recurrence that ends in a
lump, upon which the camera lingers on, for it is
feebly
glass.
Oct 26, 2019
Oct 26, 2019 at 7:34 PM UTC
One night I drowsed, I dreamt about
A halcyon azure world without
A sign of mortal coil or wars,
Of idleness of eldritch sores;
Yon heavy clouds quietly crawled
Savouring the zephyr's shiny-gold;
And there, midst vast and endless wides,
We could have found a place to hide
Whereupon I could pree your mouth
Touching you gently, never tough;
Those fervid, tempting, blushful lips
Could the sublunar realm eclipse...
Aug 25, 2025
Aug 25, 2025 at 7:39 AM UTC
"We enjoyed our time together, all the good and bad weather and I cannot forget the cries of my friends before they died."
I am explaining it’s a duck that for some reason sings you to sleep. I say I don’t know what else they will come up with. a man in the alley has brought his daughter there and is punching her in the arm and I don’t think it’s playful. I say this, too, but the duck is singing and you are drowsed. the man is hugging now his daughter her arm a carnival prize. I turn the car radio on and have to lower it but lower it too much and leave it. I watch as a woman who seems to be hiding some fetal creature in her back walks to the door of the clinic and leans at it with a key. she then pulls the door but it doesn’t come. she is surprised and drops the key and bends for it and its then I swear the creature yawns.
Aug 8, 2012
Aug 8, 2012 at 1:35 PM UTC
They are so fragile
They're making me drowsed
Like I’m looking at the letters
Very, very up close
When everything is still
Yet nature is raging with sounds
It feels like Heaven should feel like
I am drowning in this piece of time
Part of me wanting to die
The other part struggling for
So familiar state of life
Jun 23, 2011
Jun 23, 2011 at 8:20 AM UTC
for Sia and Gia
~
actionable,
seeking perfection,
yet this morning,
an unnecessary.
lying in bed, window gazing,
Barber's Adagio for Strings
fills the inner ear's atmosphere
in tandem, in cahoots
with
a new day's pastel palette,
whose new hues
hew away
half-remembered distasteful recollections
of rapid eye'd drowsed darker dreams.
bereft of cares,
'to do' lists
do not exist,
t'is only merest minorest inconvenience called
gravity,
preventing,
my physic shell from
being jet seat ejected
to ascend heavenly sky'd
even love's labor lost,
a pained yet pleasurable strife,
the best of the best
of a worn and torn cycled life,
all shed, all put to one side
like incidental music.
seeing light earthed birthed,
perfection granted to the early risers,
Massenet's Meditation turn violins
from soothing turns to sudden orchestral tumult,
causing a misstep of doubtful questioning,
a momentarily soul stumbling
crashing cymbalic disintermediation
Copland's Appalachian Spring replaces,
retracting, sealng wax away
all concerning distractions
of my concerting pastoral.
and tho a season too late,
for this is my time,
summer time,
the time of my music,
my seasoned, annualized
concerto with the Earth,
his music is most
well come
these,
the Summer Man's
days of awe,
days of tranquility,
days of simplest tones,
no atonal atonement requests necessary,
for mellifluous harmonious in everything,
perfection is given, not taken,
well received
in calming serenity,
Bernstein's West Side Story then presents,
so out of place
to where I current am,
a natural sensational day beginning
on the very near-to-the-end
of a long isand
(tho the West Side, en veritas, was
my teeming small town community, my noisy, honking
rooting birthplace story)
Lenny composes a dance of reminder that
*somewhere,
there is a remainder,
somewhere,
there is a place for us,
even me.*
and it is
here, now,
in the uncontested sky
over my blue-green grass,
that leads to my Peconic shoreline,
where I hear a new world symphony
of cawing birds and silent bunnies,
dancing deer and zzzzing insects,
completing my
natural composition,
the playlist perfection of
me
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 6:29 PM UTC
Life was once , happy
Then it took a turn.
Life stopped moving
It became ******
Life became quiet,
Life became like a riot
Then it became my diet
Because of the virus
My heart was beating,
while I was bleeding
Yet, my heart kept on screaming
Words, never came out,
I came into doubt,
I don't know how,
I just said my vows
As i slowly drowsed
Mar 23, 2015
Mar 23, 2015 at 2:48 PM UTC
The squall of soaring seagulls up above,
The creaking of an icy frozen grove,
The numbness all over his limbs,
Surrounded by a desert of the nips
As if a wounded whale upon a shore
Mottled with a spots of ****** gore
A sailor lay, amidst the shipwreck caused
By a helmsman un-afortunately drowsed
And skyward gazing, looking at the sun
To inner self this lament he begun:
“My name is Thomas, Lord, I’m very young,
I’d speak to you aloud, but I can’t feel my tongue,
But, still, I hope that you will hark;
O God be **** the day when to embark
On this here very ****** ship I decided;
I guess I was too much an absent-minded
But I am young, o Lord, and know not world,
Therefore a chance to th’ opportunity like this to hold
To I had no moral right to disregard,
So in a blink I am aboard a ship dubbed « Scarred »;
We travelled fast, we anchored now and then,
I guess once time we even Devil’s Den
Were very lucky to escape ungrazed,
But otherwise was very last this case;
The moon was up, the sky was clear,
The stars a-strewn dissolving every fear
So very much affected by this sight,
The worthy helmsman gave in to the night;
In every other instance (and they were)
Did nothing never happen, but now lo,
The splinter showed itself to lonely night
And did emerge to that most pallid light;
And just like this he pierced into our hull
Like in a wretched man his horns does sheath a bull;
Commotion set us all awake,
Some people overboard in our wake,
I’m to the deck, the moment next
I lose my conscious, fall from the apex;
When I again do can perceive the life
Every other mate did lose his strife;
And only things around me thereof:
The squall of soaring seagulls up above,
The creaking of an icy frozen grove,
The numbness all over my limbs,
Surrounded by a desert of the nips
As if a wounded whale upon a shore
Mottled with a spots of ****** gore”
With these thoughts swerving in his mind
Of the outer world became he blind;
And thus he perished, left there all alone:
Blind and bruised and Frozen to the bone
Apr 12, 2020
Apr 12, 2020 at 10:36 AM UTC
He perched on the edge of the bed,
a study in confusion and misery.
He landed badly, and crawled away.
Then rose and got dressed.
He had slept the sleep of the innocent
and he drowsed away the morning -
He strolled to the window to drink in the view.
Swallowing his first coffee cup's worth
and smoking his last cigarette fondly,
he had a gone feeling when in wonder,
How long has it been since
she left the house, the room, the bed?
He had ought to turned her away
but was always too soft-hearted.
He still told himself that
this would be the last time.
-Jamie F. Nugent
May 12, 2016
May 12, 2016 at 10:01 AM UTC
I drowsed on the black floors
Of my mind's whine despair
Muddled in my dreams
Persisting in fondled baggage
Baggage of this cruel world
Fragment of its insane voice
Yet penetrated in my beaming world
In those shades of deplored nights
Hands sticked to each other
Dark yet vivid it was
The summer we met
Dec 12, 2019
Dec 12, 2019 at 7:49 AM UTC