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Em MacKenzie Aug 2021
I had a conversation with the devil
off the books; it wasn’t recorded,
the correspondence was something to revel
but it can never be reported.
We sat across from eachother at perfect level
but I still felt small and distorted.
In his presence I was disheveled
but I wasn’t the one who was sordid,
it appears he intended me as a vessel,
viewing it as I had been rewarded.

I had demons on each side
striking a bargain over my shoulder,
the heat in the room magnified;
I started to smoke and smolder.
Then they began to attack my pride
while reminding that I’m getting older.
I couldn’t run nor hide
as their weight began to feel like a boulder.
Their evil grins stretched wide
freezing me in place; my soul grew colder.

The third course had arrived
a pound of flesh disguised as an entree,
and I was very quickly advised 

to be mindful of what I say.
As though I found it deprived
it would be wise not to give that away.
I knew the victim hadn’t survived,
and my stomach turned at the hue of grey.
They asked if I had been baptized
and if I did, how frequently did I pray.

The devil licked his lips
and he whisked his wine,
more aggressive became his sips
as he frequently eyed mine.
Providing helpful quips
like the year, saying it was divine,
and dolling out some tips
one being that it was rude to decline.
He told me that he held all the chips
and that I only had a vine,
and he was determined to have me in his grips
regardless of the strength of my spine.

I finally came to the conclusion
that it was my turn to speak,
but amongst great confusion
I made no sound, not even a squeak.
It had to be part of his illusion,
I refused to feel so weak.
He implanted the delusion
but each word began to leak,
and with each pull and each extrusion
I voiced of the havocs he would wreak.

He asked if he could reply
as he was just misunderstood,
and though I knew it a lie
I told him that he could.
So he began to fake cry;
swore his potential to be good,
while pointing up to the sky
blaming his flaws on childhood.
A story I knew better than to buy
paired with an excuse that I never would.

Now dessert, finally at the brink,
anxiously waiting to get up, away I’ll slink.
He told me not every soul is equal no matter what I think,
and the apple is poison but I should try the drink.
Held up the worlds suffering and made sure I didn’t blink
and said “you can fall deeper even while you sink.”
But the conversation was done, I realized I’d been hoodwinked.
He just grew in size, I was never the one to shrink.

I got up and I rung the bell,
announcing we were done, no need to dwell.
Extending my hand out to meet his cold shell,
I was no longer under anyone’s spell.
He bought my false thanks, as far as I can tell,
and I informed him he should return to his cell.
Meeting his eyes I pushed to wish him well,
I may not believe in Heaven but I have seen Hell.
Freestyled this one unintentionally, no offense to religion or belief
When life words strayed,
Everything for my life was betrayed,
Nothing good for the monkeys,
Neither any door for the keys,

See how swiftly my life has grown
Causing my skin to brown,
To the Gods, it is the blessing of rain,
To me, it is the blessing of pain,

When life was questionable,
Everything for life was edible,
Nothing good to ****,
Neither any way to the hill,

Yes, the hill the covers my pillows,
Sending my soul to the gallows,
Hmm, life has gone completely gaga,
Indeed, my life is a complete saga.


© PRINCE NANA ANIN-AGYEI
Email: nanaspeaks@gmail.com
onlylovepoetry Jul 2023
(be-tween and be-twixt)

———-


the most precious but precarious item
in our possess, value far above rubies,
this love overflows, but it drowns me
from within, for it has no home for
pleasured sharing and goes wasted, excreted
in tears and exhalations without destination

condition incurable, and the doctor advises,
projects, a life span rangebound from
be-tween
and
be-twixt,

imperative that this love be
disbursed, pressure relieved,
fluid and gases shared,
send it forth,  
Doc behests,
nay,
begs,
you’re a decent human,
tell your tales,
follow your motto,
write those love poems,
always leave them laughing,
and give them love in smiles
all-the-whiles
bringing joyous relief to your clogged arteries,
all this the bare minimum,
for you must moreover grasp and clasp
your body to another, for this
the best transfer transfusion
of all your needed love needs

go be needed, be great, be lessened,
be all three
and never walk alone,
with just hope in your heart,
for the heart, automatically refills,
and this the best, medical opinion…
for all those with too many love poems
requiring expulsion and extrusion
Those of like mind
Stepping down corridors
Toward blurring red signs
Each extrusion an exit
Hapless movement
Containers transported
Memories and anguish
Containers transported
Into meadows of ease
Between trees minus leaves
Nothing but a reflection
Degenerated façade
Ashes vaporized with
Consciousness, my boiling
Water
MMX
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2016
Flight #177 / Seat #7C - where I'm bound/I have been released

the final part of the trilogy,
re broken lives,
some finalized,
some revitalized,
some, their score,
incomplete

~~~


on the road again,
crossing the continent,
from sea to shining sea,
from one set of Eastern grandkids,
off to see the wizardry
of the West Coast variety

six hours six minutes,
flying high time, weather's fine,
a voices inform us, that will be
our mutual time of peaceful co-existence,
on this particular traversée journey

I've done harder time,
30 years ++ with no parole,
except for poetic verse,
them words,
I learned to parlez-vous parlay

never been afeared of flying high,
even amidst the wickedest black pitch,
tar and feathered thick, which is all the
ovaltine shaped window of the
exterior world, cares to reveal
at thirty thousand feet

the oxygen level in the cabin,
as it usually does,
says hey!
feeling heady boy,
so get good, so get ready,
write us a poem, a new shiny toy,
another of your airborne verbal medley

I've got little upon
to expound,
currently limbo'd
tween fresh, death-revived,
past memories of imprisonment and release,
by the jailers of L'Ancien Régime
and
the soon to feel,
happy anticipation of
Frisco fresh young lives re-greeting us,
long distance visitors with joyous screams,
loud, clear and that may cut
the muddied gloom internal,
like a pair of welcoming,
gleeful, liberating scissors

my windowed widowed refraction,
directs my carpaccio-thin guise
to pierce onwards a well trod state of
deeper reflection

noting that we will soon be flying over
water poisoned Flint,
in the state of Michigan,
just missing by an inching,
Paul Simon's sung request,
his "all come to Saginaw" dare

yet, I don't know where I am,
though the course trajectory
pilot-officially programmed and set,
ticketed firect  through to
San Francisco

nonetheless, my internal organs all feel lost,
misplaced and turned down around,
passing directly over cities heard of
and yet never seen or footed,
can I still claim to have been there?

same question differently couched,
providing this passenger's headache,
I was there, of this world,
for the almost forty years plus,
though I wasn't really present,
merely accounted for,
finally learning that "freedom"
is just another word

and though the Angel of Death,
scheduled, made a pre-flight pick up,
he left part of me behind
and on board,
to pick up after,
steward some of his and my
messes

the eyes, the brain, the whole noggin,
search for secret signs,
potent portents, turn indicators,
that this gloomy doom,  cloud thicket,
this too shall pass,
this last shared repast of shards,
this,
my so long now song
an au revoir to
"sad eyed lady of the lowlands"

noting that I am outbound and seated,
on a bunch of lucky sevens, flight and seat,
could be my luck is youthful changing?

where I'm bound
I can't tell,
I'll let you know when I get there
when I know, how I'll know,
I don't know, maybe some
extrusion of new words will speak,
at landing time, a different voice,
where and when I'm bound,
that will cry out


"now unbound,
at last,
at last,
I have been released"
**

~~~
2/11~12/2016
started while over the Great Lakes, Michigan, and Wisconsin;
completed over Tahoe, Carson City, & Sacramento
"With your childhood flames on your midnight rug,
And your Spanish manners and your mother's drugs,
And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs,
Who among them do you think could resist you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,

Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?


Oh, how could they ever mistake you?

They wished you'd accepted the blame for the farm,
But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm,
And with the child of a hoodlum wrapped up in your arms,

How could they ever, ever persuade you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,

My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row,
And your magazine-husband who one day
just had to go,
And your gentleness now, which you just can't help but show,
Who among them do you think would employ you?

Now you stand with your thief, you're on his parole
With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold,
And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul,

Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?

Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,

My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?


Read more: Bob Dylan - Sad - Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands Lyrics | MetroLyrics
I wandered back to the scene of the crime.

I remember all that transpired from that night.

As I was making my way across, the bridge went up in flames.

And the smoke still lingered even after all the tomorrows came.

I saw the match from your hand.

I smelled the gas before I could land.

I blame myself for not expecting it sooner,

when all of your crimes leave the same signature.



All the houses that burned down carried your name.

History said you were going around claiming you were framed.

Yet the clothes you wore still reeked of the fuel.

The last thing they found were skeletons inside a cubicle.

Did you think I’ll always play your game,
never thought I’d grow tired of the same joke every day?
When I came to bid you an honest farewell, 

you thought it was an invitation to send me straight to hell. 


Perhaps I truly am the one to blame.

You did tell me about the things that drove you insane.

And I recklessly chose the path of extrusion.
Perhaps I deserved this execution. 


I wandered back to the scene of the crime.

Where the ghost of the bridge we burned still haunts its culprits.
I saw fear when we locked eyes.
Did you think I’d be reduced to ashes?
Did you think you were burning a witch?
Darling, you forget I’m a phoenix. 

Fire is what keeps me alive.
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2019
“So good to be checked in on :)”


<>

so informed, I’m thinking,
yes, I know,
it is a spécialité de ma maison,
checking in on far and dear, not so near, ones,
periodically.

ask myself why,
and the answer comes easy,
intrusion and extrusion.

the pleasant shock of stumbling into an old friend,
both stuck in the revolving door at Macys Herald Square,
which is odd because it’s DECADES since I was there.

there are many outposts on the poetry cables
who have received this SOS, and the inevitable outcome is
a new poem commissioned and perhaps, no admission,
that’s the why and the wherefore surely so purely selfish.

need a guide to help me pick apples and pumpkins,
which is not in my wheelhouse of expertise,
thinking you could give me a boost,
so selfish, you see, picking up the pieces of fall(ing)
and poem titles from, then for, friends.

for you never know
when and how well,
cinnamon apple and pumpkin cream pie
soothes the souls from home grown tumult,
with hot tea.

SOs, how ya doing?

just checking in...

<>
9/12/19
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2022
How many poems does one individual contain?

Ahh you say!

Why unlimited are our of-coursing emotional exhalations,
our sighted and insighted sparks
like forest fires they come ad infinitum!

THEN the mind’s eye blinks, then word blindness follows
in phased arrays of
gaps that cannot always be easy pencil filled, permanent inked,
as locked and closeted,
and put away in a glass jar of formaldehyde.

I see, I feel, I hear, I read and react;
a notion,
a title born,
perhaps even a line or two follow-on scratched and etched,
even refetched
but followed then
by the deafening quietude of a stillbirth breeched
 fetus,
the emptiness of a blanketing blank,
a glance too short,
a foam extrusion whitening the spark into nothingness,
the death of a poem in a forest…

and you can’t care!

more such wordless poems have I buried than the
talkative children I’ve birthed,
old age delimits me now, my eyes failing, my hearing lessening,
the senses eroding, and worse, the frustration morphs
NOT INTO caring,
for the days of wine and roses, the mid-of-night urgency of
try, try poetic ****** is now a sinful spilled residue
on the wooden floor,
crumpled sheets of spermatozoa failure to perform…

the wastebasket
is a into a silo of mockery, a self-administered glass shot
of saltwater, bitter herbs, lamentations, an impassable gateway nominally know as 502, a wide, emptied moat of “haha on you!”

thus an answer forms,
there is no endless, growing,
inhumanly impossible trumpeting crescendo voice that doesn’t falter, eventually!
a petering out, a tangled, gordon knot of a shoe-laced Nat voice that cannot be untied by creaking fingers that scream ¡no más!

Even though
you believe, you yet possess the tools, though well worn smooth,
the belt lies heavy on the hips and its removal a welcoming
enlightening!

let me abide in peace, trigger me not, and the
answer is and always had been, this one, or the next one,
or the one prior is perhaps the finale, you will never know,
and if you do,
you will never permit yourself to utter aloud,

terminé et terminé!

in sæcula sæculorum imperf!

forever and forever unfinished finish!

!last one out, turn off the light!
10-30-2022
wichitarick May 2016
Treasonable paths paved with plight facing future fences- narrowness of paths opening to broader horizons
Friction with fiction, truth rhyming with smooth  combating compassion's, commencing after coercion
Past pressures progressing ,pleading often prying being blocked from extrusion for fears of final conclusions
Patterns and plans working in structure as opposed to random ramblings ,unfocused fantasy's to easily grateful

Sellout for solitude for repentance of past crimes ,sailing into a future but with a black memory
Self preservation comes easily for many with no reservation ,compelled to escape at any cost
Playing the cards ,forced to draw, causing tension individually then re-dealing while being  wary
While shadowy is not part of morality sedition is not  bound as tight as religion when salvation is to be wrought .

If to be believed  bellowing or begrudging blasphemies light the fires in mortals minds
Crossing oceans  carrying burdens to present a truth, presenting caution while it is explained
Taking time for knowledge to reside ,building strengths without weakness,watching as it unwinds
Rumbling grievances resemble rebellion ,rivals embattled, entrenched as it becomes ingrained
Towing with resistance brings strength easing the path to subversion into withered minds

Virtuous vibes reaching out like a grail to be seen as a jewel of an unseen crown
Protection at all cost ,gangs of guards looking away becomes perfect timing for those seceding
Standing final ground becoming like a personal ALAMO  ,just a need for their voice to resound
Inner principles form bastions offering new life for a soul in strife changing directions from receding . R.C.
Keith W Fletcher Jul 2017
Far beyond all the empty promises  
I closed the door with the quietest snick
As latch slips into the awaiting catch plate
Far better than we had been able to clique or click

Sunrise waited in patient observance
For my fingers to gently check the connection
As I quietly eased the screen door home
Turning in time to see the sun light my new direction

NO! I was not slipping away on silent footsteps
In cowardly extrusion from responsibility or obligation
I had made it clear that I was going to be leaving
Owing nothing - unrendered in this short lived creation

Where we somehow thought we would find happiness
Were we to live together.. rather than unhappily apart
Distance may make the heart grow fonder ....unless
The sweet nectar of passion - shrivels away as its  juices go ****

Two weeks was a lifetime - silent screams and averted glances
Then yesterday as I walked out to burn away my frustration
Finding my smile again, right  in the middle of a million paces
So proudly I carried it all the way back with devine inspiration

Only to have it shatter into pieces - like a thin layer of frozen fog
Falling away in an almost audible .. crackeling  intrusion
The very second that I stepped into their presence ..and then ..
I knew that this creation was not real enough ....
             ...to be magic ..... and not faint enough to be an illusion!


I walked away that day
Heavy of heart and weary of spirit
I may not know what love really is .....
But I will know it ....for what it's not - next I come near it !

So I left the keys on the kitchen table and I checked the latch ...
          ....at least 3 times !
Chris Slade Mar 2020
Elsan! I know… it sounds like a sun-kissed Spanish Beach doesn’t it?. El San!
What it is, is a make of chemical toilet. In the old days, we called it The Can!
In the yard behind a Yorkshire farmhouse… your fate & your poo - was sealed!
Grandma Ellen’s WC was the best advert for crapping alfresco out in the nearest field.

But, in a corrugated shed… a plank seat on a galvanised bin with a cranking handle.
Always best visited in daytime ‘cos after dark you’d need to take a candle.
And, when you’d achieved your goal in there… and it was past your time,
you cranked it and your extrusion disappeared in the primordial slime.

It was not a reader’s loo… No time for catching up wit’ Daily Mail.
although the paper was held neatly to the shed’s timber frame with a trusty, rusty 6inch nail.
It was cut into handy squares.  And almost without fail, you’d start to read still sitting there
and, when you got into the words, readable in the gloom, they were cut off just above the tear!

No, you’d just want to get out quick… The Jeyes Fluid scent would tend to make you gag,
It didn’t even allow my cousin Alan time for a crafty ***.  And monthly, according to occupancy,
Uncle Charlie did the job he’d said he’d never fancy, that of struggling toward the field
to empty the contents. Ironic really that after Uncle Charlie and Auntie Nellie died
the next owners plumbed their new one - up to the new fangled mains inside!
Chandy Jun 22
Living through illusions
Becoming disillusioned
Leading to exclusion
Delusions and confusion
Packaging hope into an infusion
Marketed as inclusion
Executed as intrusion
Running into seclusion
Transfusion, hypoxia to asphyxia
Left with no ideas except extrusion

— The End —