Fishtails poems on Hello Poetry

Farihah F Dec 2013

She laughs, he smiles.
The black forest taste he could only taste at the peak of light beams
Her laugh seems similar, quite similar.
Her haha's outcasted the glooms and dooms
Just as the black forest melted on his taste buds when sun rays streaked upon his shoulder blades.

She cracked a joke, he laughs and nods
Intellectual is what they might say
A brainy maniac she is, who could co-host a sitcom
His Friday nights would now only be filled with her wits
Replacing all the beers and stouts for a while
His once bumpy and rocky throat is nil compared to the highly raised cheekbones visible during a good laugh

But one day she cried.
The guilt he carries overshadowed his sympathy.
Her big swollen eyes
Her pinkish and warm face which was covered in dribble
Hadn't he known?
All those time he made somersaults, he was drown deep below
He could breakthrough,
but was too mesmerized by the mermaid's blinking fishtail and scaly skin.

And she saved him
From being turned into a merman
Only then he was back to square one
Where her laughters, her jokes and her sobs are actually his sugar crush, his Gatsby gold
As always, she was after all, his soul saver.

Emily Clarke Mar 2012

Fish Market

Walking through the market,
fishtails hanging sluttishly over the edge,
scales glinting
the smell is vaguely familiar,
I try to place it.

You wink across the crowd of people
as you weigh a bag of squid, your hands dripping dank water
and my cheeks redden--
I’m shy as the memories of my striped underwear on your stained carpet
and your mouth on my ******* rise unbidden.

You are nameless, but now at least,
I recognize the smell.

Shashank Virkud Aug 2013

Verdigris (I'll Try If You Try)

It's been one boring, restless, ***** of a drive through this sunken state. I click the windshield wipers off as they smear verdigris across my polarized vision, the FM stereo crackles and hisses in dissonance
with moaning, squealing brakes. My four cylinder fishtails ever so slightly as tattered tires nick and skid through puddles of *** the cumulus left behind after ******* the sun, which is crying now as it falls to sleep. Driving mechanically, I let my thoughts wander as I meander along I-4.

*You and I, we've never known what it means to perfect our chapters, to get into each little cavity, or between two immaculate ribs. We'd like to simplify all of that to one line, to reduce the dimensions rather than revel in their story. To see with six eyes or live as a termite within the wood grain is really all the same. But you know, we haven't finished yet simply because we are not finished yet. Some of us yet insist they hold on to the rotting shreds of a dying breed, a generation gone gangrene, their fingers in their feces.

But we know how we want it to be. Humanity will be different for you kids, we promise.

Andrew Rymill Jun 2014

Mysterious Labors

Empty cars drive down
the roads of my soul.
While rain falls and collects into pools
of lost memories.

That sing in a half remembered language,
images that flow into forms,
as strange lizards crawl out from under
their polished runes at the curbs.
To swim down the lanes of the road
cuneiform between phantasmal tires and chimerical highways.

As the fishtails of the jalopies,
wiggle as they echo down the byways.
Past luminous sunflowers the size of small cities.
While beautiful women with long damp hair,
weave wild flowers from the empty fields,
and place them on their brows and between the shells of their ears,
and ignore my phantom passing with their mysterious labors.

My teeth morph into typewriter keys
i slowly pull a sheet of simple paper
across my cold metal spindle
and with my dreaming eyes:
watch the chrome unicorn on the front of my automobile,
strain the sky tears as the raindrops loft down,
like liquid diamonds,
and splash against the glass panes of the wind shield.
This silent single horned hood ornament
is like a weather vane pointing
to otherworldly horizons
hope shimmers in the liquid deluge.

Hurt LockerFeed Birds Feb 2016

Existential Blues

the wishing wells eating up their spells, the mystery tour catching an early flight to greeece and ending up broke with no fishing tail to catch onto, mystery wheels of which way and rhyme a quick way to pass the time working on fishnet and fishtails to bring into a *** of good luck that can either be lousy or unimpressive and stupid the lovers cast their first spell and fear is driving them but its heading up to good luck, and the clouds are permissive, and they understand what they need to understand, and I’m not doing this for anyone but myself from now on, I guess thats just a decision that you have to make, and the precious fools who make an irony out of their vanity will be great too, and we will do a dance together, yes we do a dance together
I am a man that wants to do his best to preserve what is coming, to grant solitude and goodness to those that were good to me, I believe in a God moving through things, controlling things that I cannot understand, because things are just too **** complex, working way soldiers on a ride to vacancy, vacancy, vacancy, oh just scribbles and random dots showing on either side of reading lot and loving the poetry and the history of it, and sometimes there is a movie, oh sometimes a classroom is a place to dream, to dream rather than to actually focus on the lesson, a random destruction of beauty, a random destruction of beauty, lovely forces making on a take out transition into fuller notions of equality, and loving their morality, and just making their decisions good enough to foster an excelllece, of equal stature of equal pride, moving through the ride, moving through the ride, and they all excel at what they can and cannot do, and he kept them still cool, and he could have taken the ride, but he chose not to, what of a hero? what of a savior? what of a pastor attempting to take down everything that he has already established and coming up with nuclear error, pasting out the tangible worst of makeshift cranny acid truculent succulent brandy candy plans to see me jammy

marianne Feb 2020

Love the questions (after Rilke)

I don’t know how to love the questions

that blast in brawling on wild winds lashing

the sirens of warning that road rivers are rising

and goodness is vanquished—

the single certainty of more

and too much as the earth spins

off its axis.

I do know how to be still

and listen in warm morning sunlight

to the wisdom of women who tell me

that hope looks like armies of beings wielding

sunflowers and parsnip, fishtails

and dust mops singing songs of our mothers

claiming our birthright, until hearts

find earth’s drum beat, songs

turn to thunder, until groundswell—

and the many are one.

I know how to hold a long gaze

squint far into the distance

until I can

see

it

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

#climate #hope #stillness #mothers #groundswell #oneness #love

matthew scott harris Mar 2020

Morbid fascination (mine) as covid-19 pandemic...

foments rampant monopoly on bedlam

Wreaking ball (his stick) havoc (think ostensible
civil war scale not seen since Vietnam),
whereby microorganisms jamb
**** sapiens immunity system
complements of ****
resembling green eggs and ham
necessitating Doctor Seuss

to stoke bram
bullying cat in the hat
on a hot tin roof ****
senseless cant be understood
Matthew Scott Harris argot sham
bulls (red dilly), and sallies forth
with neither reason only rhyming flimflam.

All Joe King aside - at any rate,
yours truly, (a generic garden variety reprobate),
not hell bent to receive nasty hate
male courtesy vexatious reader to berate,
cuz unwelcome chide and chime
prompts gnome mad tick versifier
to test (ease silly) to provoke ye to fulminate.

Humanity now fishtails helter skelter
across oblate spheroid courtesy coronavirus
global pandemonium unleashed
expletive maniacal tsunami
(think) metaphorical groundswell
primates hurry scurry to and fro,

hither and yon frenziedly
pell-mell housing random erratic
discombobulated, bobble headed
(simulating) quasi Brownian movements
at warp speed embarked
upon impossible mission.

Here I paraphrase (er... rather plagiarize)
President John F. Kennedy,
whereby he delivered on January 20, 1961
his inaugural address in which he announced
"we shall pay any price, bear any burden,
meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe to assure the survival
and success of liberty."

Though the then USSR
(Union of Soviet Socialist Republics),
now identified as
union of Soviet socialist republics
helped nurse (and ratchet)
state of political hostility
existed between Soviet bloc countries
and US-led Western powers
from 1945 to 1990.

Our present crisis I aim(ed) to show touché
(pardon mum oddest tee) culinary poetic entree,
how bajillions of people mercilessly
unfairly subjected to influenza like agony
exhibiting following symptoms:
cough, fever, tiredness, difficulty breathing
(severe cases), yet

many met their untimely demise
with prompt care, nonetheless minimal delay
ferried them to awaiting quay
where Charon doth ferry
dead souls across Rivers Styx and Acheron
resignedly where forced to abandon treasures they
must relinquish all trapping he/she did parlay.

— The End —