"evaporating" poems
My parents gave me a pink childhood framed with lace and luxury--
but a black stain has spread there, deep as the amount of time
I’ve spent thinking about what people are capable of, and how they can stand
hanging a mirror in every bathroom, because water cannot clean people
of the lie they told their brother or the betrayal inflicted against their friend,
some wrongs of which may never be realized, but will always remain
in the form of a new freckle on my left cheek or shadow beneath my eye.
And I am sorry, because I should have sooner heeded my mother’s words
when she told me I was the moral compass grounding you stonedust streets.
Your childhood resembled a light bulb broken before it tasted electricity,
no one taught you North from South and how different the terrain may become
when you find yourself in the mountains with only sandals on your feet.
I had been that for you, and you told me as much every weekend we spent
riding in the bed of my father’s pickup truck and shouting against wind-gusts
that threatened to carry our voices away from one another--
I have sinced learned there are many ways to **** a person.
I killed you when I stole your sense of direction like floorboards from beneath
your cracked and bleeding feet, and allowed you to fall--who knows how far--
landing in a pile of skin-biting needles and leftover sediment,
the very bottom of brown-glass bottles strewn across the floor.
Staying would have saved you, I’m sure, and I’ll never forget that I turned away
out of fear, cowardice, because I hated the sight of your skin-and-bone crowd,
friends in name but not in heart, and left you lost among them,
And you who knew no better remained, your humanity
expelled with each smoke-laden breath and then evaporating, nonextant.
Jan 21, 2015
Jan 21, 2015 at 7:45 PM UTC
You're my sunshine,
My only sunshine,
You radiate your love into my veins,
It hurts so good, I can't complain,
Your beauty, every so blinding.
But you yourself, you are binding,
Binding yourself, just rotating,
One day we'll get close, hallucinating,
But when we do, i'll be the one evaporating.
Jul 14, 2015
Jul 14, 2015 at 10:16 AM UTC
an all purpose cleaner response to the
how-ya-doing-question,
as my vibe unmistakable;
the hatred in the world directed at
MY PEOPLE,
is inexplicable, beyond reason,
a hatred raw and pure in the
tiny places we humans hide it, lest
our ancient linkage to an unreasoned,
embarrassing emotion, be revealed
but now revealed it is reveled,
as the freedom to despise is a
valued thing
is an ancient scar, now freshly wounded
and the two thousand year old accumulated, callused,
surrounding wafer thin, layered upon layer of
tissue,
wiped away
in utter disbelief
cleansed,
a different kind of impure clean,
“like” an ethnic cleansing,
traceless, whisked away in a wink of moment,
a goner.
like hope, prior sentient optimism
sentenced to life imprisonment and
this sentence, and this very sentence!
written finally understanding that it is
a punishment
far worse than the quick relief of death.
c’mon, how about a few “fukk you jew”
cri de coeur, heartfelt, genuine, pointless
hate
no, not I, no, not me,
spare me the pithy comments,
the pointless sympathy, glistening
like evaporating water droplets
before disappearing, I ask myself,
not
why they hate, why it persists,
for this I understand and accept
the foulness of what we are capable of is,
beloved,
as a secret pleasure, now secreted in torrents.
no, I ask myself,
why do I write poetry,
for it is as pointless as
the hatred directed at me,
from birth, till death,
and ever after,
the humanity of poetry
just another fraud
another reason
why this man cries in the bathroom,^
not from any shape of shame,
because poetry is pointless
in times of hatred, and now we
know, recognize, it is always
somewhere, nearby, always
present and prescient,
pointless hatred,
itching to be pointed at me,
makes for
pointless poetry.
To whom shall I point my poetry?
Nov 12, 2023
Nov 12, 2023 at 2:08 AM UTC
Cerulean blue, the mad rippling
how I crave water, sometimes even green
in spring the melting of me
smooth ****** skipping
blue pools swimming
to feel an ocean inside
the storm clouds collide
unhinged from fire's dream
a torrent, a waterfall
of holy water
evaporating into
steam.
Oct 10, 2015
Oct 10, 2015 at 11:16 AM UTC
A Few lines etched where no words give weight.
Good riddance say the veterans
Of a nation gone sour with grief
Like a lemon slice evaporating onto the tongue of the sick.
But when the young yearn for White Nights,
The old claim they are blinding lights to the cold sugary substance
That supplants an easy path.
The bullithole rush of renewal and loneliness and progress thwarted and abandoned,
Inertia seeping through
Into a cold summer's day.
Between the cursing slant of sleek paved roadstrips,
And the burning briars that thresh the border's haunt,
What is picture postcard emerald
Is in that same instance soviet architect gray.
These are the sleepers bereft of the dream
whose twenty-five stories high
or ghost estates
are domes to cast out the howling banshees, those suffrage of the real
to be re-thought as mere props which surround the haloed glowing screen.
So sheen the Motherland glows in untarnished eyes
Familiar solely with glass behemoths parading with their reflections
In grey water-drizzled streets,
Only to be replaced by iridescent rainbows that foster a hope.
A hope that was packaged and sold two decades back
Since it was not worth carrying into the New World.
The water-trough falls to where the electric line banishes, connects a spike,
"rejuvenate the breakfast table"-some far-off God reports, Hades still waiting,
Intel-chip Blue, epiphany at the gates.
Jun 11, 2012
Jun 11, 2012 at 9:02 AM UTC
Against the saturated
Horizon of dawn,
Loitering in the dark timbre
Of emerging consciousness -
Dissipating somnolence
And preemptive despair,
Tacitly adumbrate the
Yawning abyss.
Chastened by the cunning and
Lubricious nihilism,
Igniting fermented provocations,
Silent subterfuge; death,
By mirth - the inane;
Lament of the mundane.
Fallow paradigms, accretions of
The last gasp -
Evaporating empty liturgies
Of suspicion;
Charity and equanimity -
Lost in confinement,
Triumphant avarice bearing
Descendants
Of intransigence;
Wielding imperious
Schemes of orthodoxy.
Pollard fragments of
Silken tapestry,
Miasma draped depression
Abridging;
Conversely,
Permuted flurries of anxiety
Dislodge
The vestiges of meaning
That abide
In brazen equivocation.
Tributaries of dogma reach
Their confluence,
Watershed moment,
Numinous effusion
Streams naked epiphany,
The precarious vision -
A gesture of providence,
Certainty and contingency;
Gratuitously derivative, life
Equals choice.
Verdant branches of intention;
And opportunity the vine,
Live forward -
The pen, my voice,
Piquant conduit pouring,
Exuberant wine.
Footprints found in givenness
Underline,
Penumbrae of my soul;
Mirrored silhouettes,
Thoughts and words engender;
And in verse adorn
Fecund soil, Line after line,
The cosmos altered,
Continuum of permanence -
Artist’s art articulating
Essence of my imagination,
I proliferate, I design
Phrases unique,
Participation mystique.
Words creating world,
The apparatus of infinity
Heidegger, ontologically precise,
Language -
The house of Being,
Ineffable, Promethean
Literary devise -
Envisioning possibility,
And abundance to allow,
I occur
Inhabit
Manifest
Future phenomena
Experienced as now.
©2008 & ©2011 W.S. Warner
Sep 16, 2011
Sep 16, 2011 at 2:02 PM UTC
My neck noosed
My legs loosed
I witness the tragic
It seems so emphatic
I feel entropy
Enter me
Centering
Around love and pain
I wear gloves of shame
Toxicity taints touch
My reaction is to cautiously recoil
For I feel a great punch
When I expect them to be loyal
A tear rolls down my cheek
Navigating scars
Like a man who is meek
Navigating bars
It starts and stops
Then keeps going
The tears drop
From what I'm knowing
That my time is evaporating
Dealing with the exasperating
I feel I can be caring
I just need the chance
We'll see how I'm fairing
On the end of your lance
Penetrating deeply
The pain is unceasing
Like a thousand bee stings
While you stand there feasting
Making me feel alive
From the pain inside
I guess things could always be worse
Sometimes that feels like a curse
Because I have problems all the same
But it's true
The sum of our troubles equal this game
That we lose
Even though I'd rather deal with *** and silence
Than to be vexed by violence
They're all just ways of imposing our will
Whether it's through who we birth or ****
Conflict is how we get our fill
Every day a different fire drill
We hate each other
We date each other
We underrate each other
To deflate each other
Pain is used as a tool
Until blood lays in a pool
These things that annoy us
Are met by avoidance
These things compound
Until I can't be unwound
I live in a world of contending intentions
It's a world of our own selfish invention
A world that burns bright
So I can't sleep
When day turns to night
I hear death creep
Seeking to take me from a life I never asked for
But I'm grateful to have
Life is about experimenting with opening doors
And I'm stuck in the lab
Feb 18, 2018
Feb 18, 2018 at 9:22 PM UTC
A Few lines etched where no words give weight.
Good riddance say the veterans
Of a nation gone sour with grief
Like a lemon slice evaporating onto the tongue of the sick.
But when the young yearn for White Nights,
The old claim they are blinding lights to the cold sugary substance
That supplants an easy path.
The bullithole rush of renewal and lonliness and progress thwarted and abandoned,
Inertia seeping through
Into a cold summer's day.
Between the cursing slant of sleek paved roadstrips,
And the burning briars that thresh the border's haunt,
What is picture postcard emerald
Is in that same instance soviet architect gray.
These are the sleepers bereft of the dream
whose twenty-five stories high
or ghost estates
are domes to cast out the howling banshees,those suffrage of the real
to be re-thought as mere props which surround the haloed glowing screen.
So sheen the Motherland glows in untarnished eyes
Familiar solely with glass behemoths parading with their reflections
In grey water-drizzled streets,
Only to be replaced by iridescent rainbows that foster a hope.
A hope that was packaged and sold two decades back
Since it was not worth carrying into the New World.
The water-trough delving where the electric line banishes,connects a spike,
"rejuvenate the breakfast table"-some far-off God reports, Hades still waiting,
Intel-chip Blue, epiphany at the gates.
Jun 12, 2012
Jun 12, 2012 at 5:24 AM UTC
Fat was the first word people used
to describe me when I was a kid
And that didn't bother me much
until I found out it was supposed to
By the time I was fifteen
I knew what it was like to be clinically
overweight, underweight and obese
It was the year of menthol cigarettes
and baggy clothes
Hunching naked over a scale shrine
Mixing ***** with vitamin water,
complimenting each others thigh gaps
*The year breakfast tastes like giving up
and the only time you feel pretty
is when you're hungry*
Not obsessed with being empty
but afraid of being full
Replacing meals with more practical hobbies
like planting flowers or fainting
And ever since I started evaporating,
girls that never spoke to me,
stopped in the hallway
and had the audacity to ask how
And when I told them I was sick,
they told me I was an inspiration
How could I not be in love with my illness?
My eating disorder was the most
interesting thing about me
But how lucky I am now to be boring
To look at a sandwich
and see just a sandwich
Not half an hour of sit ups
or two spent hugging the toilet
This is the year I find more productive
things to do than googling the amount
of sugar on the back of a
lick and stick postage stamp
The year the calculator in my head finally stops
The year that I eat when I'm hungry
without punishing myself
And I know that sounds stupid
**but that **** is hard**
If you're not recovering, you're dying
When people asked me what I wanted to be
when I grew up,
I said skinny
Jan 24, 2016
Jan 24, 2016 at 12:30 PM UTC
*Two performers debating on a quirky time capsule stage
Evaporating the barriers of time with their improv
As the spectators breathe life into their routine with no turmoil*
May 11, 2014
May 11, 2014 at 6:27 PM UTC
*to say I am my own
is a misunderstanding.
I am not my own.
I have no business living in my body.*
every so often
a soul enters and departs
slipping and evaporating like clouds
and hazy veils of smoke.
the souls tell me who they were
and what they weren't.
I can no longer help them
since their time is up.
no wonder people ask
"what are you thinking about?"
for souls pass through me like doors
and gates left cracked ajar.
*to say I am not myself
is an understatement.
I am emptied.
I hold weary travelers as if they were my own.*
Apr 19, 2017
Apr 19, 2017 at 2:32 AM UTC
that’s how you like your poetry,
That’s how you would like everything,
No stress, no test, easy on the breast,
but short and sweet has no protein,
won’t build your bones, quite contrary,
the poem that doesn’t make you think,
it’s just a cavity, a precurse *to self~decay
a drip dripping in just another day of you* evaporating
Mar 29, 2025
Mar 29, 2025 at 2:54 PM UTC
Too attached to
The memory of you
And your sunken dimples
That held up the happy curve of your lips
(And held up my world too),
The want in your voice
Coarse with loneliness and anguish,
Though evaporating when ******
Between us two
(My sweet words the answer to your sole prayer),
Your distant stare shielding
A wall of deep thoughts
Scared and shamed and lovingly true
**** as the ocean blue)—
I love you.
Jul 18, 2014
Jul 18, 2014 at 10:26 PM UTC
I can feel the loneliness deep inside
the half-shaped moon, stripped, scorched, destroyed,
shifting, scrambled diction, hazy nonfiction, drifting
consonants and vowels lingering in meaningless
frames, confined in a sleepless state, searching for
its missing outer being to make it complete,
quivering in solemnness, struggling for freedom
and perfection, conflicting science crumbling without
reason, evaporating equations swallowed into unfamiliar
places, sunken history tumbling into the depths of the abyss,
disconnected from the great milky clouds and glorious
sun, its wandering metaphors hovering in some unknown
distant kingdom, in the depths of a solitary dungeon, dying
of its creative invention, broken sounds sluggishly surfacing
for air, fading shadows seeping further out into the inner wave
of Saturn, its decaying reflection changing between time
and space, rising and falling in forgotten eternities,
declining in rhyme and harmonizing patterns,
as shattered lovers diminish apart from one another,
locked away in frigid and featureless mazes, drowned galaxies
floating in sinking outer spaces, vivid blackness surrounding
its sunken design, lost languages falling apart into split and hidden
dimensions, swimming in stuttering syllables across the crimson seas.
Jul 21, 2018
Jul 21, 2018 at 8:23 PM UTC
i feel like boiling water
slowly evaporating into thin air
and thus,
becoming invisible to others.
q.d.
Feb 17, 2019
Feb 17, 2019 at 8:02 AM UTC
I saw him today
He looked just as he did months ago
He hair was all in his face instead of slicked back
His shirt was tucked in and he was wearing a belt
He looked like his old self again
The one who I knew, really knew
I understood his brief sigh, could wrap my mind around his gentle smile
Could wake up to his breathing
I had never loved someone in such a way where it consumed me
He was delicate, fragile, but could stand in his two feet with no effort
And I loved when he was drunk, stumbling into my arms
It was the only time I ever really held him if only for a fleeting moment
I wish I had never known him before the change
It would be easier for my lungs to collect air
If I hadn't tasted his secrets, hadn't washed my hands in his laughter
If I hadn't met the boy who cared so much for the world
He never faltered in his genuine approach, never had to even try to be a light
He just was
I know that in this drought I will have to move on from him
But it is hard to walk away from something you once found such solace in
He was a thunderstorm
Could put me to sleep in troubled times, the sound of his rain
But the echo of his thunder was enough to wake the dead
The destruction he left behind him was merely a walk through an empty hallway
He had no idea what he had done to me and still I think he is oblivious
I do not want to tell him
Do not want him to feel pain or remorse for a girl he swore he'd love forever
I've learned it is easy to believe the things you want to hear
I was deaf to every motive that was not to my liking
I should have seen it coming from the moment he said he was just too busy
Hectic schedules are likely dry seasons and the sand of our hourglass had run out
Time had slipped off of my fingers like rain drops off the window of a car speeding down the highway
Flying by but moving ever so slowly
Evaporating had never seemed so malicious and
I saw him today
He looked just as he did months ago
He hair was all in his face instead of slicked back
His shirt was tucked in and he was wearing a belt
He looked like his old self again
The one who I knew, really knew
But I don't know him anymore
And he
Does not know me either
Nov 11, 2015
Nov 11, 2015 at 10:58 AM UTC
Dreaming in ivory she heeded nothing.
The solace rushed through each cell like unalloyed ecstasy.
Evaporating her last sigh, she let go of the agony left viable within.
Life wasn’t absolute anymore, self identity was consumed.
A lifeless corpse with no earthly ties, no human needs.
Decay began having his way with her devoid flesh case.
Life flourishes from blight so gracefully.
What once contained memories and dreams, was now reduced to naught.
Nov 15, 2022
Nov 15, 2022 at 8:11 PM UTC
I am a rain drop flopped down from the clouds
I could have landed in a river or the sea
Then merging with the rising and receding waves
I would have been washed down into oblivion
Or could have fallen from the heights
Into a desolate dreary desert
Amid the blistering granules of sand
To be absorbed into nothingness
Chances are there to have fallen on a rock
Lying scorched in the heat of the mid day sun
Then I would have vanished into thin air
Evaporating into non existence
I could have fallen into a muddy puddle
Or perhaps into a filthy drainage
To be contaminated with the sewage
Or be the breeding ground of worms and bugs
But fortunately for me
I happened to fall into fecund soil
Where there lay in wait a few seeds
Hankering for the cool touch of moisture
Arid souls desperately thirsting for water,
They ****** the molecules within me.
As their dry kernel got soaked and puffed,
Slowly they sprouted and grew into life.
Absorbing again the drops that came after me
They, into towering trees eventually grew
Some touching heaven’s azure heights
And giving shade and shelter to many
Now as I see them crested with flowers
And bearing clusters of luscious fruits
I feel I am there in each leaf and bud
And my essence flows through every vein!
As a teacher, what more is needed for me
To feel contented in life?
Feb 22, 2017
Feb 22, 2017 at 6:36 AM UTC
Like a plane in the
fog
looking for a place to
land
Like a man in a
homeless shelter listening for the rapture
A pelican on a pier
eyeing his next meal
the last apple on a
tree all ready
to fall
Remember I started with blue
skies in front of me
I studied my flight plan well
I knew I'd be landing
I knew for sure
it wasn't going to be hell
I always tried to do so well,
focusing in on innocence
when ever I was able to
But there are failures of compass
The phantom captain takes
a nap
The instruments may keep on
saying you're right on track
But
the only trust I have is
in the Northern Star
and in Mars high
in the sky.
It seems impossible
to be so lost
Like a plane in the
fog
looking for somewhere
to land.
Like a woman working tables
until two a.m.
Her fitness app keeps saying
a hundred years this shift
The fuel is evaporating
The miles to go before zero
keeps hopping
Like a whale without a culture
no one to talk to
The sky is a 300 mile high
air ocean
I thought I was free
to get from here to there
Like a window with a view
of a brick wall
Phoenix in the summer
A tsunami on dry land
A river without a name
A cougar and no game
Like a lover whose left
and no way to find their name
So many aspects of this life
Departures and arrivals
a one way ticket
There is a great darkness
out in the distance
I know it's getting closer
but
I keep on drifting
Like a plane in the fog
looking for a place to land.
Oct 21, 2016
Oct 21, 2016 at 1:48 PM UTC
~ ~ ~
*Affectionate was
your way
of letting my
worries disappear. . .
How you put your arms
tight around my shoulders. . .
How tender your voice is. . .
whispering words of comfort
into my right ticklish ear abalone.
Believing in me. Lovingly. . .
Your ocean of whispering
sounds. . .Wavered Deep,
deep love conection. Our
Free symbiosis
enhanced by French
parfume, evaporating
from my occiput fragility.*
~ ~ ~
Sep 21, 2015
Sep 21, 2015 at 1:35 PM UTC
~for better days for the poet betterdays~
mournful tunes play silently, but still too often,
eyes wet but in corners kept, recurring then the
memories, keepsakes, letters, books, small trinkets,
not dusty, but dusky, resting on in-between ledge of a
mountain-sized twilight of well lit shadowy haziness,
edgy dark brilliance, a comprehensible contrast non-comprehendible
tunes that bless with equal measures of grief,
comforting, by memorable card flashes of good relief,
a dividing line, hazy and frequented crossed, a sort of path,
with no destination signaled, as if the path itself was an end,
to a meaning, a solution, with no clarity divined, a division
of sight and insight, providing an ill fitting reconciliation
mourning is electric, morning is electric,
letters, words bottled up in evaporating perfume bottles,
seeking the comfort of dissipation unto a larger atmosphere,
the scent in everything tangible, stronger still yet, in intangibles
that can erode but never ever fail to return instantly when voked,
by vision, odor, a particular child’s smile, line in a poem volunteered
recovered, uncovered, a post first writ to be written, discovered,
when time and place coincidentally breathe together, at last,
beckoning you to places where memory serves only as a pleasuring,
upright mind marker, decorated in chains perpetual reforging,
absent pain, gleaming dreamings full-replacing longings for pasts,
new verses composed, passing, a grand addition to a child’s legacy
May 18, 2019
May 18, 2019 at 8:50 AM UTC
I feel myself
evaporating like morning mist
As I drift higher and
higher from the ground
And I reach the sky and
finally,
them
Clouds made up of those
who have faded away-
millions
Sep 15, 2013
Sep 15, 2013 at 9:31 AM UTC
He called me Hiraeth
and I never knew why
he carried me in cupped hands
like water,
like evaporating rain.
He called me Hiraeth
and i never knew why
he held me in clenched arms
like ghosts,
like people he has already lost
He called me Hiraeth
and I never knew why
he dropped me through stratospheres
like atom bombs
like war, famine, hate
He called me Hiraeth
and I never knew why
he watched me through refugee eyes
like a burned home
like a train barreling into the night
Aug 19, 2020
Aug 19, 2020 at 1:17 PM UTC