"erasures" poems
No option, but to be perceived
Violent, Aggressive, Irrational
Identity becoming an other
Words of malice, they mystify
Words of ignorance, they vilify
Subverting consciousness and articulation
Our identities, fighting to be
Autonomous landscapes
Hoping in anticipation for liberation
No real notion of we or me
Implicating it's inhuman to be foreign
When they represent as much of we and me
Scandalizing alternative identities as subversive
Advancing erasures in favor of hegemony
Propaganda favoring what is most white
Amelioration for the obliteration of cunning identity?
No more cooperation, ****** the euphemisms
That cover up, and help justify marginalization
Our identities, fighting to be
Autonomous landscapes
Hoping in anticipation for liberation
Time to **** ****** massacre eurocentric ideology
We preach no violence, being not them, just we
But cannot request to be free, must tear it out by force
Eurocentric ideological pandemic inhabiting, inhibiting the soul of mankind
Unthinkable abomination concealed in the veil of appropriated minds
Necessitating exorcism for the incarcerated conscious mind
When we completely violate mandates of eurocentric ideology
When only we appropriate our own identity
When we all nullify the color of our skin
As profanity or inadequacy
Our identities, fighting to be
Autonomous landscapes
Hoping in anticipation for liberation
Will be awaiting purgation from alienation
Feb 1, 2013
Feb 1, 2013 at 6:25 PM UTC
“The executioner’s face is always well hidden”
a Bob Dylan lyric
<>
mine own “ex,” in chest encased, silent, with grimacing smile,
happy to be of sir-vice, sent home unhappy, cause his cut,
not quite deep enough
this time,
though nearly succeeded,
but his biz is an-all-or-none inclusive Swifty tour, disillusioned,
he don’t get paid unless he brings my punched ticket to a glorious
sadness conclusion
someone asked (axed in local accent) if I’m nearer my god
having survived despite my best efforts at self destruction,
to which I’m smiling when uttering a “heartfelt prayer” of
Hell No!
cause the channel always been open and either side can initiate when so desired, the gates of love always open,
so wasn’t surprised when playing with my matches,
he went silent, but knew fully well, Mr. G a risk taker,
put his roulette chips on a “basket bet,” (1)
needing a double 00, to collect,
because, shoot, the timing was good…
Me?
ain’t naive enough to hope that a prayerful request
would not be met with a “now you want some intercession?”
and a heavenly sneer, cause we always been perfectly clear,
with each other, ask and you won’t receive, and none of that
what have you done for me lately razzamatazz,
nah, the record impurities gray
and no pencil erasures allowed…
knowing that the executioner will be back’ round someday,
my wounded heart too tempting to pass up twice, and
that’s ok, this old man learned to live with
a not entirely pleasant uncertainty,
*”This old man, he played one,
He played knick-knack on my thumb;
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.”*
but he didn’t play two, having no kazoo!
Sep 5, 2023
Sep 5, 2023 at 12:24 PM UTC
The tyranny of this empty room
will always be the underlying comfort of no one.
These books left unread, has been the taste of my inglorious pursuit of happiness.
A guitar hanging on the wall collecting dust and rust, is a product of my unremarkable trust with myself.
A single bed that will be slept on later, will be filled with imaginative thoughts of grandeur,
Combined with the thoughts that betrayed me compiled with,
"I should've and could've".
Only this pen latched on to my hand to carve the honest words,
This paper to produce erasures of beautiful sentences.
The writer that will bear the coming of tomorrow.
Dec 17, 2021
Dec 17, 2021 at 11:08 AM UTC
*A faultless poem
inkless, without erasures
written in fixed glances
in agreement
a matchless pact
Each verse, a touch
a breath, a gaze
suddenly, their storm
unleashed
ink runs intense
crimson hearts bleed
bodies collapse
their surrender writes an end
a kiss
their thirst, a perpetual desire
to rewrite with fault
they call it a draft
and find a blank page*
Jan 30, 2016
Jan 30, 2016 at 10:48 PM UTC
reverse engineering:
tomorrow
i will know still your voice,
how your silence splits words
into pieces, as you break me
with your collared sweaters and polka dot
socks: tell me i am floating,
question my Gods, forbid me
from touching your church elders; your parents’
Lord.
today
i will know your laughter, a tad frail:
the voice of an unsteady
deity - your fingers - never stilling a pen,
nor sketching a hand - whittling
my own: your chin trembling as you chide me
for their largeness; i show you their erasures:
your lack of wayward lines; your work
of an artist.
yesterday
i tell you to sing, you tell me not to -
you arm yourself and lock away in your room,
say your poetry terrible,
wrong, un-joyful, cross-averted; they cracks
in all the wrong places like your flimsy
hands, like your hopes massive-disintegrating
like the feebleness in your dust-allergic bodies; your lack
of lungs: brittled long by heavy-handed
words and thin brushes: you with death -
the un-wayward stroke: You
who are sickly, whose quiet breaths reach
where we cannot find
and find the places where
our gods long to be touchable.
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 11:55 AM UTC
Not sure when all of this started
Maybe the day sanity departed
But now I find that I like to chew
On anything the color of blue
The transition was rather simple
Erasures from colored pencils
Of course you know the color I choose
Do I need to keep reminding you
And who in their right mind would not pack lunch
Without the world of Crayola in a colorful box
They even give the crayons fancy names
Although all the shades of blue taste the same
And for a chew with a bite without the bark
I always do blue from the Play-Doh jar
To be fair other colors I've tried
But haven't I told you it's the blue that I like
Don't dare get me wrong there is normal I find
Why I'm a softy for good a blueberry pie
Then there's blue Pixie sticks
And blue Kool-Aid mix
Blue frozen pops
Blue chewy gum drops
Blue Gatorade
Blue frosted cupcakes
Who ever knew
There was so much color blue
And I know what you think
Call it a hunch
But the Permanent Marker
I needed only try once
Like I said
I'm not sure when all of this started
Maybe the day sanity departed...
Sep 23, 2016
Sep 23, 2016 at 8:51 AM UTC
My behaviour erratic
My speech far from smooth
These days I can't wait to cut down anyone
Who thinks life is a bed of roses on a cloud
Life is not effortless like the rainbow you so seek
These days people are afraid
The spark dying
The fire extinguishable
Do not be depressed from what I say
There is family to hold you up
And words to console
These things are meant to be
There is a correctness in some rare person
But Me? I am far from right
I am twisted
Like a crooked spine, I hurt
If someone out there feels as I do
That no consolation may come due to uncorrectable mistakes
Please let me not feel so alone
Hopeless cases that we are
Erasures all over our life's draft
I can see my follies plain as day
I can see you clearly
There is a correctness in some rare person
Judgement, I pray you be far from swift and close to gentle
I plan to live out my days trying
Best efforts are like flower buds blooming
I plan to be celebrated for my triumphs over my trials
When I have died trying
Jul 30, 2016
Jul 30, 2016 at 9:40 PM UTC
a love letter in the sand
*she implores me at my weakest,
early morn, when sleep and sorrow
yet linger on my eyelids and dreamt stories
still have not been replaced by the careworn,
life’s erasures that ***** sparks of creativity
write me a love letter, a forever composition,
resistant to aging, time and weathering, a poetics
stamped with a maker’s mark, a signet, a hallmark
to our love that will be read unceasingly, a party to eternal
preserve our sharing, under glass, in paint, in this ink,
in this atmosphere
deny not my request, for it is holy tinged, reddish singed,
the best of us to become immortalized,
for all other lovers to follow, in garden planted,
a peony’s blooming upon request, whenever needed,
be ready seeded, to salve and save, to be given and gotten,
in a single act jointed
no matter if our names brown edge to faded,
our love revived when it is voiced, witnessed, taken,
our love refreshed upon renewal by others eyes, lips, sensations,
make it an oath, a promising, combining our combination,
bless it for everyone, to be a blessing, a dressing of loving*
poet rose from prone, our templar bed, bathed his face,
bid his woman, follow, her bidding to be won, for this now
is the moment precise that such a need be immediacy met,
a task such, cannot be denied, temporized, delayed by delicacy,
a challenge so eloquently stated, must be instantly sated
to the sandy beach I took her, for she would be the first witness
to her creation, her inspirational must become perpetual,
with forefinger in the sand drew the words she had chosen,
for in every respect, he gave grandeur, preservation worthy, now encapsulated as “I will be yours forevermore”**
“how can this be eternal, in minutes, the tides arrival,
it’s erasure a certainty” she laments...
not true, I soothed, the tide will take each grain of our anthem,
with our bodies ash, to every seventh corner, where lovers gather,
to be rewritten, melded together, soft spoken unison,
spreading our tale, forevermore...
it will take 100 years for a single grain to cross the ocean,
and then, when all are as one, as we begun, this day,
our love letter in the sand perpetual
Oct 18, 2019
Oct 18, 2019 at 11:07 AM UTC
If I had a map of your body,
I would erase all of the places I love.
So that I could never get hurt,
and I could never hurt you.
You would float off the page,
and I would fly too.
Souls intertwining above, scattered from erasures
below.
Collect your favorite body parts and
Etch-a-sketch them together.
Before you get too attached,
shake the pieces and restart.
Hardest among parts to find is the brain.
Easiest, the heart.
You didn’t break my heart,
you broke my brain.
And now all I can do is process you,
think about what we did,
and what we won’t do.
If I had a map of your body,
I would erase all of the places I love.
Oct 25, 2010
Oct 25, 2010 at 1:56 PM UTC
Backspace means nobody will see
Paper tears bit by bit with erasures
but on MS Word there are no consequences
My poems are full of backspaces
There was one right when I types backsapce
When you don[t backspqace notjng makes sense
Bu t what is life withoiut mistakes?
Silence is a life without any sound
Did I stutter? Then sing with me
Beautiful babies are something mistaken
Mother's are sometimes mistaken
Blasphemies are sometimes mistaken
The flat earth is something mistaken
I can be mistaken
Sep 4, 2017
Sep 4, 2017 at 10:46 AM UTC
It may be my weakness
That I write and live
Without revisions
Or blend endlessly
My painted blue
white horizons.
It may mean I am
True or careless yet
I don't care
A bit. Just trying
To live
Honorably
Speak truth
May I someday
Make all the words
Arrange in a flow
That portrays
How a man with
Heart needs no erasures
No fan brush
Or cleaners
Just a bit of spit
To wet his finger
As he composes.
Jan 27, 2018
Jan 27, 2018 at 5:30 PM UTC
Ink blots,
Words blur...
I can still
see the
pieces
of your own
person-
written between
the lines I've
penned when
I still have
the heart to love.
Torn pages,
erasures here and there-
I have tried to
write you off,
but it seems
I cannot ****
what's immortal.
More so, I cannot
erase what I
have written.
Tear stained,
scratched papers-
I have bled
enough blood
to tamper
the words I've
written...
But you...
You, I cannot
replace.
and I, I was
the only one
at fault...
It was my own
words
that made
you immortal.
When a writer falls in love with you, YOU CAN NEVER DIE.
Jan 12, 2016
Jan 12, 2016 at 9:51 AM UTC
crude
but the shape
of things to come
the Seine
Notre Dame
in pencil rubbings and erasures
the mind
a potter's wheel
with clay raw and ready to be tossed
Whit Howland © 2019
Nov 23, 2019
Nov 23, 2019 at 6:49 PM UTC
Dramaturgy
1
I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.
It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.
2
Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.
3
Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.
4
Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.
5
He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.
6
They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake. A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.
7
Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for
Apr 8, 2016
Apr 8, 2016 at 10:37 AM UTC
1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.
2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?
3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.
4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.
5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.
6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.
7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.
8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.
9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.
10 Disappearance.
Apr 25, 2016
Apr 25, 2016 at 10:13 AM UTC
defined by daily chores responsibilities
next months rent payment
fear of utilities cut off
how to eat on $10 a month,
I rather would buy milk for the stray cat
I adopted
a cuddly friend
that had four cute kittens who
so far with me have
a roof and water and a place to meow
explore
and a slice of my baloney
my bare feet to play with
so, am I wrong to play make believe?
To spend my off time from
the daily grind, the labors of surviving,
enraptured by the beautiful sunsets,
is it wrong for me to dream?
I clipped a rose from a bush today,
brought it home, in water in a plastic cup on
this cluttered desk full of pen and papers, erasures
cigarette ashes aspirin and allergy capsules,
It the one bud glows in true beauty,
hope and nature and memories,
her petals a new play toy for my imagination,
and the kitties paws.
Jun 15, 2015
Jun 15, 2015 at 7:06 PM UTC
the rest of the lights before you
slid into erasures. we have become
everything the city is in its precocity;
from the wind that gallops, the dog
howling into a crossfade, even underneath
the already dead lampposts that give
in to the velocity of such departure,
a divisible line. a border I cannot cross.
I dip my body into the thick dark
and become bendable light through
the crevice of doors. the gnawing silence,
your leitmotif. something the wind is still
all beautiful things passing and I become
nothing more but a dank memory in the muck
of forgetting – whatever it was, that I conversed with,
stars their dereliction, all across the flagrant void,
I am beating with more life than ever,
dancing around your leftover moon.
Mar 9, 2016
Mar 9, 2016 at 11:15 PM UTC
Drafts
and
erasures
outlines
and
pencil stains
bits
of
lead
scattered
across
the floor
so
does
my
thoughts
whenever
I'm with you
Aug 3, 2016
Aug 3, 2016 at 6:32 AM UTC
trespassers
shoot themselves.
your son gets hired
by city
to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.
my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive
turns on.
a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.
my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures
using only
redactions.
god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.
I am far too animated.
your body is the notice
eyes
give.
Dec 18, 2014
Dec 18, 2014 at 2:42 PM UTC