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Serpent King Oct 2012
There comes a time,
When darkness will sadly shroud,
When one must be strong,
Strong enough to see that darkening cloud.

There comes a time,
When a rose will not be found,
When one must be strong,
Strong enough to hear that heartbreaking sound.

There comes a time,
When sadness will overcome cheer,
When one must be strong,
Strong enough to taste that painstaking tear.

There comes a time,
When cities will crumble, spent,
When one must be strong,
Strong enough to smell that enflaming scent.

There comes a time,
When evil will start your death,
When one must be strong,
Strong enough to feel that life-ending breath.
Chaotic Melodic Aug 2010
This is for those of you that are hopelessly addicted to deeper meanings...
Where you examine the steps you take in the day under a microscope to see
the cracks scrambling restlessly up your legs to find your weak spot.
Your **** of aroused curiosity can only be stimulated via
lightning struck snowy powders dripping gently down your throat and tickling your brain-stem
until you laugh at the crows poking their heads in your back pockets.
They burn holes in your suicidal tendencies like kids playing with matches
for the first time behind the shed.
When your **** gets hard from the fire burning too close to your retinas and
enflaming the world as you knew it, charred and raining ash on the dead roses
that you planted and forgot to water.
**** them, these pilgrims of anxiety crawling across your arms like
stranded orphans in the desert, where the nearest well is spiked with adrenaline aged in
a dying cactus.
Wow you are dark tonight..
As if the dandelion seeds you set free flew back and tried to choke you.
Where are the heart tickling epiphanies now?
Sitting out on break and blowing cigarette smoke into nearby passing baby strollers?
I am not expecting you to like this.
I am just a deluded witch doctor dissecting your brains and attempting to pry out the tumors.
Like an excommunicated jedi knight using his mind to strike flint together.
The sparks smile and dance like college kids on ecstasy, not quite realizing that they are drowning in the undertoe.
They revel in the nostalgic numbness.
Only an IV of sweet lime juice can sustain such wilted leeches.
When lacking in vitamins, your skin is a papyrus to bury under the nile, and
watch from the hills as kids of 2100 and later search for WiFi to connect their burnt out forebrains to.
Coughing up several old moth eaten sweaters that you stuffed away
when your new girlfriend came over.
We hide our pasts like kilos under the coca cola shipments, and no matter
how far you ride the rails, the rats still nest and chew apart the cables that
keep the whole train locked together.
And why is it that we secrete our secrets in our sweat, and cover it up with
cheap deodorants?
Our catch-phrases mask the stagnant breath of our restless nature.
Humans, the bugs in our systems trying so hard to shout out to us that we don't really exist.
Thoughts as fragile as smoke could never support our weight if we chose to
colonize the moon and dig for diamonds in her eyes.
We may find that our stain-glassed windows keep out most of the light, while
preaching to keep our eyes closed and heads held close to the ground.
The civilized dances we partake are only nervous ticks of robotic
drones drilled on overtime.
And we think that these words useless, like grains of sand to let trickle out of your hands.
Our words mean nothing!
Even though you might have felt something in the last five minutes as these
black scarabs have peeled away at your comprehension.
You paint pictures with only black and blue and expect
fresh tongues to offer you green and purple instead.
But how can you expect anything other than the bruises you beat into the walls.
Like magnets on strike, you expect the world to just "let it go."
But I'm not about to rely on that weaker force to guide us.
The paths of unprecedented unraveling is where we are heading.
Where gravity is so pre-"concious-cocreation" and the last street light alive
will keep on whispering its salty sentiment.
You and I are not so different, although we profess to keep our distance
and fear too long of eye contact, as if a moment of silent connection
triggers the virus warnings and ***** up your downloads.
****..
All I wanted was a light-hearted comedy and all you had stocked up in your
dvd cabinet was a bunch of black and white ***** films.
You said the dark side makes you appreciate the light, but every night i hear
those last beaten breaths, limping across the dark hallway with their fingertips sliding
quietly along the walls.
© 2010 Cory McQueen
Maryanne M Jan 2013
A flame wihout its
   heat is as useless as a poetry without a thought.
              What is man without a soul? Can he be called human at all? How
             useful is an empty house that stands on a barren hill? A man
                         not capable of thinking? A blank book? Or a sun without the grace of a fire? How good is
           the wind without the trees?  Or the birds that worship its strength? How good is the ocean without
                              the fishes? Or the human that embraces its wealth? All things are interconnected and   interdependent.
    Like air to mankind and to the trees. And trees to mankind and to the soil. Like air to the waters.
                    Waters to mankind. Waters to the soil. As fire to man as to the trees. Mankind to the trees and
               to the soil. And trees to the soil, fire to the soil, man, fire. Fire and man. The fire within a man. Enflaming
                      the soul of another man. We are all relatives in the dance of life. We are integral part of the earth.
          The air, the waters, the sun and the moon. Everything is hitched to everything else. The air,
                                   the waters, the sun and the moon. The salt of the ocean is in our blood. The calcium of the rocks
is in our bones. The genes of ten thousand generations is in our cells. The fire of the sun king is in our spirits. The might of the winds is in our lungs. The most powerful element of the universe is in our hearts. The mighty winds
                     rage and we bend for them. The fields yield and we kneel for them.  The blossoms open and we  rejoice.
                               One could not pluck a flower without hurting a star. The wolves could not haunt for a
                        meal without troubling a heart. An atom could not deteriorate without worrying
                             the universe.  But along
                                  the way man seems
                                   to forget. And most
                                   of the time, man does
                                    not pay attention to
                                     its depth. Man be-
                                    comes too ignorant
                                    to understand. That
                                    man is the heart of it
                                   all. The pulse that keeps
                              the system alive. Man ne-
                                eds not observe but feel. M
                               an needs to penetrate quite-
                            ly as earthworms. Underst-
                            ands as soils absorb water. Pon-
                   der as the winds gather strength. Spread
               as the vines that overrun the yard. Let your flame be the
                                          guiding light.Do not let it be the fire that burns.
stéphane noir Nov 2018
when i think of you
it's always christmas in my heart.
it's always icy cold and brisk -
not the kind of cold that you bristle at,
but the cold that makes you gasp for a breath,
like you've just realized you're alive.

the feeling swells from my heart,
up the sides of my neck,
warming everything it touches,
enflaming muscles it has no business brushing,
until i can barely get any air down my windpipe.
my lungs seize up, just as they are,
and i can't remember ever taking a deep breath in my life.
are you buried down there in my solar plexus still?

i know i've gotta be out of my mind -
that's one thing i'm sure of these days.
but i can't shake that excitement from my heart,
like i might see you this time,
you might be around just for a few days
and we might sneak off together to talk,
dreaming dreams bigger than each of us,
bigger than both of us,
or just sit somewhere and be silent.
i'll make up and excuse about seeing an old friend,
not a lie, really. no, not a lie at all. simply understated.

god i'm thankful for these memories.
i'm so grateful, through and through,
for the blaze that flames on in my heart,
a feeling i could never forget, never replace.
God bless the freezing air, the frost on the windows,
the leafless trees, stiff and cold on the side streets,
the brick buildings and all their contained heat,
a hot tea, and you forgetting all the words to all the songs,
the fireplace in the downstairs den that I'll never see again.

God bless the early mornings and late nights,
the trading of songs back and forth,
the wrapping of emotional gifts and
the excitement of opening them in front of each other,
the beanies and layers of coats and sweaters,
the dressing up, doing of hair, & sweet smelling perfume.
God bless the light beers and sweet wines,
antique shopping and long cash-wrap lines,
lattes and americanos, hot in your little hand,
the smell of coffee beans wafting through my nostrils
early in the morning when mom is the only one awake.

but most of all god bless the music.
the sound of church bells drawing out
a year's worth of love and hope from my heart,
eternal, transcendent and completely dissociated from personality,
the electric guitars playing "o holy night",
my mom on the piano, a text from you on the screen.

i'd be nothing without that music, different without you.
i don't miss the arguments and the fights, the awkwardness,
but i miss the rosy edges of everything,
all of my experiences at Christmas are tainted by you -
i miss focusing on what i'm doing,
while always half-focusing on you.
"sure, i'm helping cook dinner - but did my phone just buzz?!"
it did. it always did. whenever i checked, it was buzzing.

my brain can't understand this
or plan what needs to be done,
so i will leave the matter to my heart,
the ***** of deepening, infiltrating
penetrating and incorporating all of the love it feels
into every moment of every day of my life.

out here, a glass is raised,  always waiting for your cheers.
Why is “god” censored?
onlylovepoetry Aug 2016
"Love...
It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one."* Wadsworth Longfellow

<>

forgive me, Henry,
for tampering with thy perfect,
these words provoke
a restless, hard earned, smouldering and enflaming,
imperfected, unasked, unsought,
yearning

to explain, share, complete, abbreviate, lengthen and explicate,
my version, my coloration,
my coronation,*
from the end of ceaseless, repetitive waves of wanting
completion

forty years in the desert,
four hundred year in ******* in Egyptian exile,
boul
der chained, uphill climber,
amazes me even now, how
did I desire to breathe,
arose to contemplate, perplexed,
why was I placed on this star,
skin branded dissatisfied, a human being,
unratified, unconstituted

just another love song, just another poem,
certainly no better, and surely worse,
than the  thousands of thousands that preceded,
and the thousand more that will come by
nightfall

surrender - I cannot surpass
what lies below

acknowledge respectfully,
the luckless, the loveless

despair can dissipate, as hard to believe,
as hard as the unendurable, I counsel not
hard patience,
instead,

awake forever impatient, irresolutely
hardy and ravenous,
for what will come your way,
when I cannot say,
but this I know,
you are an elected, selected one, and

It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one


8:21am Aug. 27, 2016

<>
Endymion (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
       Lie on the landscape green,
       With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
       Had dropt her silver bow
       Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke Endymion with a kiss,
       When, sleeping in the grove,
       He dreamed not of her love.

Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought;
       Her voice, nor sound betrays
       Its deep, impassioned gaze.

It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one.

It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep,
Are Life’s oblivion, the soul’s sleep,
       And kisses the closed eyes
       Of him, who slumbering lies.

O, weary hearts! O, slumbering eyes!
O, drooping souls, whose destinies
       Are fraught with fear and pain,
       Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
       But some heart, though unknown,
       Responds unto his own.

Responds,—as if with unseen wings,
A breath from heaven had touched its strings
       And whispers, in its song,
      “Where hast though stayed so long!”
Frenchie Jan 2017
I arrive, weary, weak, wonderous
Daily work of a woman, it seems
It's not over, never over...

She sits in her spot,
beneath the shine of the evening sun.
A deep inhale, soft expulsion of my sanity.

I smile into her glare, a calm resolute
To the coming war.
Her eyes like daggers enflaming every flaw.
Of those things entombed within,
That bite, scratch, and gnaw.

And oh how my skin does crawl!
Oh how I yearn for the day to dance upon her in celebration of a life well lived...
Well over.

I love her, in all her 90 ways
I love her much more on her better days

Yet my heart can be fooled
When her monsterous drool
Exudes from her voice
As nails on a chalkboard
Giving me no choice

Her songs of songbirds
Vultures to my fate

You see, sweet little flower lady
Seems tame, makes me to blame
A crazed woman, who only has me
to suffer the sins that she has carried.
Victoria Reese Feb 2012
Sunshine to my dull day,
Glistening in a yellow hay,
Blue seas ride above,
Eternal like the holy dove.

Away from the dark of night,
You hold me so ever tight,
Kissing eternal on my head,
Whilst we share our earthly bed.

Fire enflaming betwixt our skins,
Like sparkling hot fiery strings,
Connecting us together in a hot heat,
While our hearts drum to its sacred beat.

Lay alone in flowing stream of peace,
Yet our hearts are not to cease,
This love stays stationary in this fire,
Nothing can ever make it expire.

Creating joy, pleasure and calm,
It is its own soothing balm,
To the heart, mind and soul.
As we drink from the nectar at cupids bow.

How can I leave this,
For it is heavenly bliss,
To lay in this field of dreams,
Floating alone in our lover’s stream.

Death cannot divide,
For Love does not make us blind.
It opens our mind to our heart
So that we must never be apart.
Sarina Apr 2013
Let us go to that market on Broad Street, the one by Little Theater
where I got mad at you and refused to scale your wrist like it were a skyline –
I did not even knot your knuckle-hair with my sweat.
I was so angry, but I want to go by there again. We can search for some
nectarines and decide which share of our bodies they appear, feel most like.
One will have to be rotting, because your cheeks are an old peach,
black fuzz on the ends of something round, enflaming –
another can be as young-looking as I was when you first touched me.
Then, you will hold the door open while we prance into the House of Pizza,
find that corner bench where painted lighthouses dawn the walls:
I have kissed you here before, once when I was sad and another with a grin.
Sometimes, I wonder how many places I have loved you
but that would be as impossible as counting every way I have known you –
sometimes you are a moon off the axis, sometimes you are a plum
sometimes you are bobby pins in my curl, sometimes not
sometimes I rest on the bench where you licked frosting from my cheek
and sometimes just going to the grocery makes me miss you enough.
Annie Mar 2020
I had a dream
Leaping stone to stone
Above a stream
Beneath me faces
Of the dead and old
Around the mist
Of the silent cold

I ran from place to place
Enflaming candlelight
Step by step along
A never ending staircase
Arriving on the top of
A tower, left alone

Haunted by a wooden rockinghorse
I threw down marble stone

By which I made a sacrifice
To fires burning bright
That saved me with its blazing flame
Within this bitter night

(And when I woke I saw it clear
As morning sun after a storm
My memories I couldn't bear
Still stuck in me like roses thorns)
A dream I experienced after assisting my first ***** donation.
CharlesC Sep 2014
his glassworks
of enflaming color
do not display as
central balance..
vertical symmetry
reserved for more
sturdy times..
we might ask
is truth best told
as slant
Emily so in-formed..
the creation we muse
is always slant
slant color shading light..
for without color
beauty fades...
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Emily Dickinson
Darrel Weeks Sep 2016
I look deeper into the mirror
Hatred is all I see
Perhaps despair also in reflection
So I  resolve to change
Scratching
Clawing
Pulling
Pushing
Biting
Clutching
Tearing
Enflaming
Ripping

To shed this skin
And stand beyond my nakedness in front of you
When we hurt the ones we love. We dig a deeper hole
Timothy H Apr 2016
Recalling a botched conversation
Is the worst
It's calling up witnesses
Directly to your brain
Enabling the 3D film to begin looping
In every failing, torturous detail

But the larger loss
Which is somehow known
    to only your stomach
Is where the conversation
    could have ended -
With two souls
Momentarily hitting the same beats
Increasingly less alone
Echoing unifying cadences
Together
Understanding
Reinforcing -
And enflaming the heart
Inside both rib cages

And instead
It's two beings
Who can't even hear each other
From the other shoreline
Andrew Rueter Dec 2021
I can still remember going to school
when it was raining
morphing into a mule
for things draining
from the life I thought I would rule
it's enflaming
all of this taming
with no one to save me
when the student meets master
whose whip is faster
than the policeman's blaster
protecting their interests
on the command of corrupt arbiters
so I can't make up the difference
when their money muscles are bigger.

They turn my peers into overlords
I can smell the overtone
of the rear odor grown
living in my motor home
parked at my job
the ark of the lost
heartless and tossed
friends of the frost
counting the cost
of commodity crops
guarded by cops
so I must pay the right price
or get filleted in a knife fight
by members of a different ark
their difference is stark
like they're the FARC
from Jurassic Park.

We once went to school together
until we were unspooled forever
diverging cultures sever
our tumultuous tethers
until we're rats racing
to the flats facing
the cliff casing
of a bullet blazing
through rodents raging
while automatically aging
in a game not worth saving
until our grave is paving
so the rats contract rabies
and try to enslave me
through shameless shaming
their nameless maiming
is grating gravely.

Their laugh of wit
a crack of whip
they slap I slip
in their pool of spit
which is fuel for grit
to not take their ****
until they break my hip
with the quake of work
I'm too raked and hurt
to spank their skirts
so I bank my irks
for another day
when I want to play.

The days continue to pass
as they misuse my ***
their issues last
through the time elapse
I can't seem to grasp
my life from their clutches
I tightrope with crutches
until I break for my lunches
or break from the punches
of a million miniscule crunches.

They break me in
they break me down
I can't hear any hymns
over factory sounds
I haven't been to the gym
since I developed this limp
being their gimp
getting ****** on the regular
my only communication is cellular
feeling so molecular
kicking for a living like Shane Lechler.

I look at the analogue clock
sitting next to my Econolodge cot
to see this is all the time I got
getting high smoking ***
pretending I'm something I'm not
which is happy
childhood friends outlap me
all the while laughing
about old jokes from school
like forgotten jewels
carried by a beaten mule
working for wool
so it can dress like a sheep
so it can get some sleep
to forget the regrets it's reaped.
Michael Marchese Nov 2019
Unheeded the warning
To not take to leading
An empire fleeting
Succeeded in meeting
A global trade quota
In breeding consumers
Like coca and cola
Place orders for new world
Disorderlies
Bordering
Neighbors in anger
Like free-raiding slavers
The ones who engrave
Condemnations
On strangers
Enflaming the tensions
Like Union secessions
Reclaiming your pensions
Like dispossessed peasants
Then pleasantly selling you
Greater Depressions
Inflating the price
Of each stock
Market crashed
As they’re harkening back
To the Gilded Age past
Mistakes made
By the master class
Fascist gas mask
Clasping racist ace cards
In their draft-dodging grasp
And enrapturing masses
Like pastors on acid
As faster the natural disasters
Leave gasping
The aftermath zeros
To sift through the trash heap
As scraps keep providing them
Something to eat
And that “just so it” psyche
No shoes on their feet
To compete in a race
To the top
Of the bottom
To watch it all topple
Like Hillary Rodham
Back down to this limitless growth
Swinging rope
And a hope and change slogan
In some brighter future
Where data-brain-drainers
Collude with polluters
And looters
To root out the suitable
Next active shooter
As losers keep playing
To win
Movin’ in
To the city
Of opportune sin
Get some skin in the game
Make a name
For your lack of fame
Minimum wage
And escape from the cage
That was sub-standard living
Conditions before
The New World Bank
Salvation
Uplifted the poor
With more freedom to choose
Than a grocery store
How to rot the core
Of this for-prophet war
Against forces that still
“Have-not”
Settled the score
Travis Green Jun 2018
I was born hipped and a whirling wheel of dangerous beauty.
I hovered in the horizon and sipped on my ****** wine,
my eyes growing an enflaming fire of blazing thunder.
I became a rumbling rollercoaster humming slow sounds,
bringing whooshing winds to fulfill my inner desires.
I shall be heard; every distant land will bow down and praise
my name.
I was a prized majestic jewel rising in the crimson shadows,
unleashing chaos.
Michael Marchese Mar 2020
Don’t want to be reading
The dreadlines again
Or seeing
The pleading,
Bereaving
Condemned
To eternal,
Infernal,
Infirmities
Sick
Of the different day,
Different plague,
Be afraid
Shtick
So we pick and choose
Truth
More appealing
And safe
And we make it replace
What no scapegoat escapes
From the burden of knowing
“So much on your plate”
To the taste
Is addicting,
Afflicting the state
Of the outdated status
Updating-site
Fake
News in its earth-******,
System
Victim-blaming,
Disastrous forsaking
Of tensions enflaming
Then breaks with reality
Leaving you waking
Up to
Shaken up,
So it’s back to the stirring
Of hurrying cups
Of productive
Consumption
Of never enough
Pics of food
On the feed
In its virulent greed
As it propagates,
Promulgates
Seeds of deceit  
And like vermin
It breeds
A posterity ceding
More user agrees
For the free-raider
Data invader’s 5G’s
So to spy with our eyes
What they hide
As we stream
Along indolently
In naive
Fever dreams
Interweaving
All that we perceive
To confines of a screen
Never blind to the scene
Yet immune to the screams
As we still hope and pray
To evade
The disease

— The End —