"esplanade" poems
I thought I heard
Canadian slang
from the opposite bed-side
Like it's 2009, rub some lines off my face.
Inner space bleeding outward,
deep red, a nosebleed,
angled points on white of The Maple Jack.
A Nip at the Sal's on Esplanade-Riel.
Grab your runners and toque,
it's warm, but not forever
and these legs are sore. Polar bears
on the sweater you wore in the Fall--
Churchill, Manitoba, the streets are full of teeth and claws.
Awoke and wanted warmth lacking.
I thought I heard Canadian slang.
I thought I heard "it'll be okay"
from the voices of feathers fletching arrows falling.
they whisper and screams sink deep behind
eyelids
closing.
A sentence unfinished,
sinking in flesh
in time
sinking
in snow and ice
sinking
in water in Summer
sinking
in memory.
I thought I heard
plans being made
and shy laughter.
I heard it 5 times. Didn't I?
Days fade, ears dull*
Walking on streets, in the cold
towards her home
I thought I heard laughter--
heard something
like laughter--
I thought I heard rain, as the Lodgepoles drank water.
I thought I heard laughter.
I thought I heard wax melt.
I thought I smelled fairness.
I thought you wanting more time
to bleed and blur tenses.
I thought I heard rivers rushing and roaring
their battle cries--
--asserting their presence.
I thought I heard cars pass and sounds of the daytime
and late March walk along bridges.
I could swear I heard something
Like Canadian slang,
sweet
water
light
laughter.
Something.
Jun 28, 2018
Jun 28, 2018 at 1:28 PM UTC
Trezūnger, last house along the esplanade
Stares out towards Polruan Point. In the growing storm
I feel Atlantic.
St Catherine stands
Over the harbour, laying her claim to the sea
Under the watchful gaze of the eye of Neptune. All the while
The trees whisper to the waves in the wind and release
Leaves and autumnal fragrance. Clustered cottages shoal
Whitewashed in the lee by the ford-over-the-stones-by-the-beach.
The tide and the air pressure low as nature ***** a deep breath ready for the storm
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 1:10 PM UTC
some of us walk insistently,
instinctively, and instantly to
and upon the edged path,
this physical nexus & abstract mental locus,
a cliffside enticing rock strewn trail,
drawn of men, by men, for men
(yes, men are people too, still)
enthralling views,
down to the riverside,
where eyes intuit the
beauteous aroma of
precious precocious
precarious precipices
and the near-stench of
mortality
amidst
wafting scents of inane undesirable need,
hints of destruction, or,
alternating eager relief,
like a ****** infused, instant attractiveness,
making weakness in the knees, all too real,
trembling with a delicious accented edge of
a fresh, familiar scent, fresh baked bread,
an all enveloping consumption need now!
to
crave what we fear,
to fear what we crave
our cravings are craven,
this twisted sense, annuls
our common sensibility, yet,
titillates our pleasured imagined relief,
releases, our unsated, even better,
our insatiable curiosity to tremble,
an entire body enjoined by vibrato~
enticing tremulations, shaken and stirred,
this danger choice releases something primordial,
escape? a reckless wrecking so deeply designed,
it has its very own designation…death wish
multitudes of easy choices afforded my senses,
and by accident, all mine chosen, all nearby,
I travel the esplanade près de the East River,
where even if calm is the sole visiblilty,
undercurrents and the unpredictable passage
of container wakes and the larger freighters
will hand you down, so easy, to become parcel
to a littered river bottom of centuries’ artifacts
but even more tempting, the balcony,
a hop, skip and a jump unlocked,
mere ten steps, no need for a running start
why it’s the “height of convenience,”
he ruefully winces, and not even any
TSA lines or inconveniencing “conveniences”
Why this calamity seems so desperately desirable,
Why this unabrogated feat so featured, nay, even
feted in our hot? cold? bloodstream
“Why just men?
*I don't know,
Perhaps,
it is all I know.*”
Dec 5, 2023
Dec 5, 2023 at 5:42 PM UTC
Another poem from the pen of my alter ego Barry Hodges
Half asleep, I sense you rise from the bed
Where we have shared love's passion,
Your sweaty body glistening as the dawn's early light
Peeks through the curtains of our ensuite bedroom.
O! To think that our great love affair must end
Now that your husband has threatened
To asphyxiate your six dear children
If you do not cast me aside like a worn out shoe.
And when I awake fully I find you gone forever,
The only souvenir of our last night together
Being a small squashed **** lying on the stained bedlinen.
O! How can I ever forget such a tragic awakening?
*FOOTNOTE
[I knew from bitter experience of similar occurrences that dear old Mrs Bloggs (Seaview Bijou B&B;, The Esplanade, Ramsgate, Kent) was bound to make a hefty surcharge to disinfect the bedding thoroughly. What an unromantic old ***** she was, may she rot in Hell forever.]*
Apr 26, 2015
Apr 26, 2015 at 6:16 PM UTC
so effulgent
the daffodils of brightest shade
so effulgent
bold trumpets e'er magnificent
they grew along the esplanade
showing a splendid tonal grade
so effulgent
Mar 2, 2017
Mar 2, 2017 at 6:39 AM UTC
How tectonics shift
As continents drift apart,
Oceans open up.
Now you, undeterred
Ascend the promontory,
Cross the esplanade.
Poised with honours,
You sidle the cliff edge path
Predator to prey.
Await your moment.
Swoop, gliding on the uplift,
Behind you a trail.
My mirth, invested in you
This day escapes me.
Jun 6, 2014
Jun 6, 2014 at 12:20 PM UTC
Of a nefarious shadow that followed
Her eyes of blue serene were nonchalant
As she wended the verdant lanes.
.
The lanes she trod like an esplanade
Her ears could perceive no rant
Of a nefarious shadow that followed.
.
The phantom to her was an Adonis
And yet, oblivion to herself she did grant
As she wended the verdant lanes.
.
The undefined was lurking closer
Unacquainted while on her errant
Of a nefarious shadow that followed.
.
That aisle could pave way to her hearse
Unaware she; of the dangers nearing every instant
As she wended the verdant lanes.
.
That peaceful sienna her eyes were at
Oblivious of the slow augury chant
Of a nefarious shadow that followed
As she wended the verdant lanes.
Aug 4, 2014
Aug 4, 2014 at 10:30 AM UTC
This is one of Barry Hodges "Memories" poems.
**O how I recall with sadness in my poor forsaken heart
How I lost my fat-arsed sister (though she was a silly ****
We had just enjoyed a meal on the esplanade at Taormina
(soup, spaghetti alla vongole followed by some tasty semolina)
So we went for a digestive walk through the Sicilian hills
Not realising we were in for some awful shocks and spills.
There came a mighty roar and a dreadful smell of sulphur
(even worse than flatulence or a burp caused by little Maria's peptic ulcer)
Oh dear, oh dear, Mount Etna had just violently erupted
With lava bursting out, from the bowels of earth rudely eructed,
And with a sickening splodge a fiery lump landed on the hapless bird
Causing her to die forthwith, screaming louder than I'd ever heard.
God in his mysterious ways is supposed to show us his mighty wonders
But occasionally I do believe he quite clearly makes some ******* blunders;
And I really think it's quite unfair to cause a volcano to blow up
Especially since it looked a nice mountain for bold climbers to go up;
But it's an ill wind that blows no one any good has always been my motto
So I emptied Maria's scorched purse, went to a bar and got quite blotto.**
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 10:36 AM UTC
Thanatos broke the paradise and gave it yellow skin
but when slit, his peel hummed like an opera
just beautiful enough to make me fall in love with him:
moon set and guts gouged from death songs sung.
How his eyes are melancholy orbs, storm clouds
and his chest has not hair but scales that shed to stories,
the final sunset he found as a father in doubt
before noticing me in a scope and his son in glory.
Now he walks less ugly through esplanade and field,
singing through battles that eat him to wounds.
When he reaches me, on one knee he has kneeled:
a proposal has no purpose for us, so he passes his tune.
Is death a mission to bristle our love?
Thanatos, my one and only, is an angel above.
Feb 26, 2013
Feb 26, 2013 at 8:36 PM UTC
Drowned out by divas
It was comfort that left us unprepared for this
This being the circuital embibement of chores and books
A choice to unentangle the moth from the web
Leaves one with typical but still misunderstood disturbances
Dad is a peadophile
We had ***
And now they're naming me a newt
A wet creature, suited especially to specific environments
A sham executed from the musical tenemants is one thing
But a crammed into trailer park is just a shame.
what makes a butterfly float, when everyone else is drowning?
The eyeish eckelecktic rom capacity can be blown away
And the attitudes of specs can thwart their own terrain
But if a pen draws blood, there's not room left for anything
So tell me the joke, esplanade yourself beyond my reach
Coke yourself up, give a scream, patent this work as your own, cherish the tub thumping
Be a cherub though rather than an angel, excrete malignantly and door slam the foreign light.
But someone must decide if the light is foreign.
Feb 4, 2025
Feb 4, 2025 at 9:51 AM UTC
Two blue piercing eyes
A luminous sky
And your hand in mine.
Our breaths becoming one
A bright green esplanade
Two pigeons flying above the clouds
To reach the unreachable
To dream of being free
To leave what was once their land.
I’m biting my nails and you’re looking at me.
I’m wondering for how long you will stay this time.
Will you leave without a word
Or will you disappear ?
I know you will leave anyway…
Not that I don’t trust you,
It’s me, that I don’t trust.
I know you’re in my head
But doesn’t that make you more real?
I want to make a promise
To myself, to you, to your eyes, to the sky.
I want to promise you that I will fight
And maybe I’ll get closer to the unreachable.
Sep 28, 2018
Sep 28, 2018 at 2:39 PM UTC
Is all concrete below ephemeral skies,
To think what is now as already made,
Riding lone, the plateaus of a minds eye,
Or is whole of nature purest esplanade?
Jan 27, 2014
Jan 27, 2014 at 3:36 PM UTC
Is all concrete below ephemeral skies,
To think what is now as already made,
Riding lone, the plateaus of a minds eye,
Or is whole of nature purest esplanade?
Oct 6, 2013
Oct 6, 2013 at 2:37 PM UTC
Rich rigid bricks,
your sheen green cat eyes.
Your mom’s huevos rancheros -
spilling into noons.
Fireplaces off the window panes,
crisping open a warm chest
for a bed of new delights.
Dozing in my ice sheet hands -
I was meant to be bitten,
then bitter.
Lips pushed their forgetful illusions,
His rememberable forehead lines -
tasking away at lost minutes
of too many 14 hour days.
Here between long firm legs
lying in your large white cottons,
over collections of moles,
and forests of scars.
Wondering if she hurt you
in the same ways
that he hurt me.
Apr 17, 2018
Apr 17, 2018 at 1:02 AM UTC
We hide and nurse our dilapidated
Bodies from the blistering day.
Come night we tear into our
Tender flesh in mad dismay.
"Peel away thy carnal mask.
Punish thyself in blissful blows
That sinks deep below thy bones."
We are lost in this atramentous esplanade,
In perpetual suffering for our evil, white god.
Jul 6, 2014
Jul 6, 2014 at 4:14 AM UTC
I buzz down Bourbon St.,
bar-hopping to and fro in pursuit of some
sought-after nerve.
I’ll pass street entertainers performing
various tricks and trades
and I’ll envy not their boater hats
filled with cash, but rather the
attention they command from mothers
and fathers alike, on-looking and inebriated.
Maybe father would’ve looked at me
with the same awe, had I donned
a pair of stilts or covered my body in
tinman silver, for his
failure to pay me mind
certainly wasn’t a result of
under-intoxication.
I digress. The thirteen blocks that stretch between
Canal & Esplanade Avenue host
a distinct pattern of storefronts:
Bar, strip club, bar, gift shop,
bar, strip club, bar, gift shop,
and so on.
I’ll stop in nearly every other one,
and the taste in my mouth
will start to remind me of the street’s namesake.
With a scant blouse on and
a batting of my bedroom eyes,
a man will inevitably strike up a
“conversation” with me.
While I unconsciously engage
in repartee, I’ll wonder to myself
what must be wrong with him
that he would hone in on some
despondent fool like me.
He’ll continue to ply me with drinks
until a taxi cab takes me away,
and through a backseat window
cracked open, I’ll hear
New Orleans sing
while I sigh.
W.M.S.
2017
Mar 17, 2017
Mar 17, 2017 at 9:36 PM UTC
Morning gorgeous,
Is what he writes every morning before dawn!
Cause he knows she is not beautiful but she's beyond ravishing!
You wanted me to write about you
But words cant be quite enough to describe you
cause it will just be a glimpse of the real you!
Sometimes he calls her Juliet like the movie stars, he the Romeo!
Just to set a beautiful masterpiece of art of what they are!..
living life like an opera,
The cupid must have known to shine your way on my path!
I serenade you as we esplanade
Through the journey of our fairytale!
Your curved lips are so kisspiring,
I cant help but kiss for a while,
Your eyes makes the dog star just dull
As they lighten up the sky in the night
Your beauty makes me
understand why am blinded by the spell you cast down on me!
You the priceless gem that i fall for!
I fall for you everyday!
Mar 30, 2019
Mar 30, 2019 at 7:54 AM UTC
Death is not the end, it's just a change of state
When your soul departs this earth, you will meet your fate
-
Of the places that you'll go, there are only two
One of happiness and bliss, one of pain and woe
-
The choice is NOT your own [1]...it's called the Sovereignty of God
Will you walk upon the Sea [2], on its esplanade?
-
You will if you're Elect, and if not you'll burn in Hell
To be Elect is NOT your choice, against this doctrine men rebel
-
Your religion doesn't matter, "Salvation's of the Lord" [3]
Read the Holy Bible, His Word His Twoedged Sword [4]
[1] Calvinism
[2] Rev 4:6 (Crystal Sea)
[3] Jonah 2:9
[4] Heb 4:12
Jan 28, 2015
Jan 28, 2015 at 3:10 AM UTC
Is all concrete below ephemeral skies,
To think what is now as already made,
Riding lone, the plateaus of a minds eye,
Or is whole of nature purest esplanade?
Jun 3, 2015
Jun 3, 2015 at 1:56 PM UTC
A teary eye grudged into face,
That lingered with sadness and began to race,
As solid droplets skewered down his skin,
To shame his faith and brew with sin.
For it not of fitting character to him,
When his status fell short with such aching limb,
Forced upon midnight's distant lullaby,
That shook with fear and thought to mollify,
An apology that voiced its trial,
Swept with the gloom of alleged denial -
So that he turn't to the face of a well known God
In memoric outcry of the vast esplanade,
To which he'd revisited the softest of memory,
That faded with time, and to her, now shimmery.
So, he'd faced upon a distant life,
That pitted his stomach and sickened with strife,
Before the glisten of his dawning tear,
Stapled forth with its reigning leer,
Admittance of vows that traced with guilt,
The foundation of which his mind was built,
A mock of betrayal to that of dignity,
Of a loss so steep that it shed malignity,
And forced a plea of archaic misdeed,
That bred a demand of desperate accede,
For one more moment, the last of chance,
To partake upon a memory of beloved dance,
So that maybe he steal upon her heart once more,
Or toil to delirium as static of love fleet out his door.
Dec 21, 2017
Dec 21, 2017 at 12:06 AM UTC
~an artwork beneath our feet, yet invisible to
our eyes, constantly changing ,interlocking
interlinking~
this poem has asked for composition
everytime, I walk upon and past the sculputure
beneath my feet on the Esplanade by The River
(Diatom Lace on the East River - Stacy Levy
www.stacylevy.com › projects › diatom-lace-on-the-east-river) (1)
but as I daily hurry past (for years) and over this pattern form lifted from the
river's flowing,
a daily delaying,
for the words good enough to honor it, the invisible floating floral tentacles,
attaching each water molecule to the next,
do not arise of sufficient quality of wordsmithy,
the Whitman words do not float up from the waters rushing past,
and come to rest in my multi-tasking poetry conceptuals
many months, even years,
have gone by and after every water walk,
the sculpture stabs me guilty,
of procastination,
and an unwillingness to tackle it,
like the other tough stuff that haunts me
so this morning, when I drown in the file laughingly called
100 & One Drafts
a J'accuse (1) finger stabs my eyes and repeats the caveat of the sage
Hillel the Elder: (1)
If not now, when?
and even as I sit and compose,
the words refuse to surrender unto me
for easy transcription
and the chest tight with guilt, from all the
promises I've made and remain
unkempt & unkept,
that stunt and stun my spirit,
with inconsolable sadness
So
I distract myself,
check the sleeping woman<
take my morning meds,<
reheat my "The Gamblers Mug" (Cezanne)(1) of morning coffee,<
and alas, at last, once more surrender to my worst,
and issue an invitation to >you<
come visit me, come walk with me,
perhaps together, a greater good will emerge,
and we will feed each others tongues
with syllables and sounds,
that will trigger,
go figure!
a suitable poem
worthy of a great art work,
the lace of diatoms
in the water,
that our eyes cannot see,
but our hearts
can feel
and with better words,
be so honored,
*by a poem
truly worthy
of this*
miraculous
conception
Mar 29, 2025
Mar 29, 2025 at 8:31 AM UTC
design your body next to me,
close the blinds let’s sleep till three.
choreograph heartbeats
and rendezvous in our dreams.
rewinding roads above box springs,
your toes curl tight around my feet.
when we esplanade under sheets,
high thread counts don't mean a thing.
Nov 11, 2021
Nov 11, 2021 at 11:45 PM UTC
There are some who consider suicide,
You can see it in their eyes,
They forget the hurt of their loved ones
When they fail to say goodbyes,
They see no point in the gift of life,
Say it doesn’t work for them,
But we walk on by, and we let them die
By some careless theorem.
I noticed the girl in the local church
She was down upon her knees,
Her shoulders shaking with silent sobs
As she stared at the altarpiece,
Her eyes were glazed as she walked on by
It was then that I knew, for sure,
She’d be walking off to an awful fate
If she walked alone through the door.
I caught her up and I walked with her
And I said, ‘I know what you think,
But this will pass, it’s a half full glass,
What you have to do is drink.’
She turned a tear-stained eye to me
And she said, ‘But what would you know?
Your life is a bed of roses now,
But mine is a horror show!’
I tried to draw her out from herself
And she seemed to want to talk,
We wandered down to the Esplanade
And went for a long, slow walk,
Her parents, they were divorced, she said,
Her father had disappeared,
Her mother was mired in drugs and drink,
It was DNA she feared.
‘I don’t want to end like her,’ she said,
‘I don’t want to go like him,
My older brother just hanged himself,
I don’t want to go like Tim.
There’s pain and heartache each way I turn,
I shouldn’t be here at all,’
I put my arm round her shoulders then,
And leant on the old seawall.
‘The life you have is a gift from God,
You can’t just throw it away,
We all have the choice to soldier on
To a brighter, better day.’
I thought that my words had helped her then
When I left her, shaking her head,
That was at three in the afternoon,
By six o’clock, she was dead!
David Lewis Paget
Mar 24, 2014
Mar 24, 2014 at 6:49 AM UTC
Is all concrete below ephemeral skies,
To think what is now as already made,
Riding lone, the plateaus of a minds eye,
Or is whole of nature purest esplanade?
May 20, 2013
May 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM UTC
we are devilish sparrows flitting
anon, currant fruits upon a limb-
talons curl grasp the worlds
ovaries and testicles
in delightful spurts
of esplanade;
an umbilical cord remains
after mama chews in two
the veins,
in vesical exuberance
we splay
and **** and hew
the sweet fruits flesh the
mane
the same as our
tree trunks do.
Cantilever on a shelf
ripen
weave a poem ourself
make cream and wetness
come into the silver eyes of lust,
it is all so normal now
the cow(brown cow)
forever
masticates
white forever now
Nov 9, 2017
Nov 9, 2017 at 11:41 PM UTC