"flint" poems
How neatly a cat sleeps,
Sleeps with its paws and its posture,
Sleeps with its wicked claws,
And with its unfeeling blood,
Sleeps with ALL the rings a series
Of burnt circles which have formed
The odd geology of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
With all the fur of time,
With a tongue rough as flint,
With the dry *** of fire and
After speaking to no one,
Stretch myself over the world,
Over roofs and landscapes,
With a passionate desire
To hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
Would undulate, how the night flowed
Through it like dark water and at times,
It was going to fall or possibly
Plunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
Like a tiger's great-grandfather,
And would leap in the darkness over
Rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep cat of the night with
Episcopal ceremony and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams
Control the obscurity
Of our slumbering prowess
With your relentless HEART
And the great ruff of your tail.
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An emerald is as green as grass;
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire.
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In times gone by, now recondite,
Neanderthal, ***** upright,
spoke softly, tones so lily-white,
and tried to put the world aright.
He taught us how the flame ignites
that wearing furs will warm the nights,
just why the rolling wheel excites,
and how the beveled flint stone bites.
Before the days of dynamite
he fought his foes with spit and spite,
and swung big sticks with all his might,
and rendered death with stones in flight.
Engaged in never-ending fight
(arenas were a global sight)
he forced his forces to unite
to sate his oily appetite.
To quell rude thoughts that may incite
he ruled the realm with fly-by-nights
and culled the winds of words in flight,
and darkened minds to anthracite.
With fairy tales of evil sprites
and how the fist of freedom smites,
he washed the world with flames alight
to vanquish hoards of parasites.
Each dawn the damage brought delight,
the foe was bent, a bit contrite…
yet battled on with no respite
until the dusk and evening light.
Encamped beside the firelight
Neanderthal, that shiny Knight,
awaited morn while sitting tight
assured the end would be alright.
Yes, conquest seemed his sacred right…
Forevermore?… well, no, not quite…
Neanderthal's extinct tonight
and lies beside the Trilobite…
MORAL
The Oreo is round, not bright:
while rolling near the candlelight
at first the searing seemed so slight,
the molten cream an oversight…
Apr 4, 2014
Apr 4, 2014 at 3:03 PM UTC
It was hard in the Moonta Mines that year
For the miners, down in the pit,
It wasn’t a place for a weak man, but
The Cornish Miners had grit,
They burrowed deeper with every day
Extracting the copper ore,
And the skimps grew high in the heaps that piled
Not far from the Moonta shore.
They wore their helmets deep in the mine
With a candle fixed to the brim,
And worked in the glow of the candlelight
While the pumps pumped out and in,
They pumped for water, they pumped for air
For the air in the mine was rank,
And water seeped at the lowest lode
Where the atmosphere was dank.
They built their cottages out of lime
And mud, with a building board,
On Sundays, that was the only time
Once they had prayed to the Lord,
The Cornish Miners were Methodists
Built numerous churches there,
And Cap’n Hancock had said, ‘Attend!
Or your job is gone – Beware!’
Those men of flint had hearts of gold
And they raised their children fine,
Sons would follow their fathers then
And go to work in the mine,
One Christmas Eve they were gathered there
By their hundreds, on the green,
A candle lit on their helmets each
Like a glittering starlit scene.
The wives and children were there as well
With their voices raised in praise,
The swelling sound of an angel choir
With their humble miners ways,
They called it Carols by Candlelight
And the movement grew apace,
It spread all over the world from this
The Moonta Miners grace.
David Lewis Paget
Jan 1, 2014
Jan 1, 2014 at 3:33 AM UTC
Lonely and cold,
I wait for love
beside the frosted window
while dreams of fireflies
sparkle in the snow.
I sip black coffee
from my mug, quietly,
so I don't wake them...
Because I know when summer comes
I’ll have found someone
and I want to make sure they're all well rested
so they can swirl around my lover and me
when our soft lips spark
for the first time
like flint,
so I can watch them drown out
in that new lovelight
that'll glow furiously when dusk
cinders into darkness.
But for now
I'll have to deal with the darkest months
alone
while they lay on the lawn
asleep under the moon
with beautiful dreams.
Jan 14, 2015
Jan 14, 2015 at 2:50 PM UTC
The Milk-and-Water School
Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
Disfigured, I should be less fair.
She was unwise, I may say blind;
Once she was lovingly inclined;
Some circumstance has changed her mind.
The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School
Well! so my offer was no go!
She might do worse, I told her so;
She was a fool to answer "No".
However, things are as they stood;
Nor would I have her if I could,
For there are plenty more as good.
The Spasmodic or German School
Firebrands and Daggers! hope hath fled!
To atoms dash the doubly dead!
My brain is fire--my heart is lead!
Her soul is flint, and what am I?
Scorch'd by her fierce, relentless eye,
Nothingness is my destiny!
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"I'm just not into you"
Pour water on their hearts
Stamp the embers with my shoe
I don't carry matches, a flint, or gasoline
But the sparks fly, anyway
Sep 3, 2014
Sep 3, 2014 at 11:43 AM UTC
They told me the only thing that could cure heartache was war, and since the war wouldn't take me I figure the only thing to do now is take up a life of crime. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera that the only cure for heartache is to find other hearts to break. Five years have passed and I still remember without fail the flint of a lighter, the squint of an eye, and the bell of your dress. I dream a dream each night, sweet variation of the story of you. It comes down to a letter sometimes, I go to the window well with a notebook and a pencil and I draft a sonnet, sometimes a verse, any form of an expression to idle the time it takes for me to find you. I know stars that haven't lived as long. The way I cupped my hands over your ears, the way rapture lived and loved, you kissing me in the shade of the palm trees up their on Notre Damen Ave. I know the curve of the Earth wrapped in the shades of the skin on your body. I live every day for the chance that I will meet you again.
May 2, 2014
May 2, 2014 at 3:24 PM UTC
We can only afford to contain our fires
Turning to... Soothsaying waters
Soothsaying rain, empty out your bottles
Irrigate from our heart puddles
Let flow into a singular well
An oasis where our hearts would kiss and silently tell
Submerge us as one being
The water milling and licking
Kissing our warm skins
Wash away as it purges and cleans
Cleansing waters, wash and give birth
Rid of the sadness to reveal the earth
Of this earth, you and I are one
Looking up to idolise the same sun
Wedged between... This expanse of redundant land
Pining for the mixing of our sands
We... We are made of the same
Earth, dirt and gravel placed in different games
Bearing similar stones that beat
Beating away the seconds that flit
Earth biding time... Stay on ground
Let wind take your souls to realms unbound
Casting our souls into the wind
Carved hearts on flags we pinned
Kites of love set to catch the air
Wind be kind... Carry us easy with care
Gift us your gentle airy fingers
As you would the sails of hopeful seafarers
Together we would dance and billow
Frolic upon your light feathered pillow
Ride the wind, on wings that never tire
Tiny bites that keep us afire
Never needing a flint to set alive the flame
Stoking the fire that burns on the same
Rhymes and reasons be our fuel
Combat logic and sense in a cerebral duel
Fight in our eyes, subdued are the blazes
Embers dormant behind glassy tearful gazes
Spark them to life with passionate heat
Fan them to rage till the time our hearts meet
But still... We must contain our fires
With nothing but soothsaying waters
Aug 22, 2014
Aug 22, 2014 at 12:49 AM UTC
This candlelight has been witness to both hatred and love
To shouts of anger born from throats reddened raw
Smashed mugs and smashed china and half-mended smashed hearts
But to passion, forgiveness, old flames both rekindled and small.
Candlelight lit from matches or flint
Such lovely low light supplied to romantic nothings
(“Does it really matter which?” you’d asked me then, eyes to the sky.
And I’d nodded, because it did.)
And I remember the first time I saw you by candlelight.
Shattered bulbs had left us with nothing but flames under stars
And I’m glad I first found you by such unforgettable light
Not lackluster memory that passed me by
Because now, alone beneath imaginary hatches
You light up the room by candle wax and boxed matches.
Oct 29, 2014
Oct 29, 2014 at 7:26 PM UTC
I found a lighter in an old winter coat
and remembered that it belonged to you
I spun the flint and saw the spark we shared
the flame died like our love.
We sparked blunts together
We spent months together
Our love was to be forever
Or so we thought
We smoked some reef
But then we had beef
And we just had to be apart
Oh reggae love, I miss you so
But our ending was all she wrote
Maybe I'll find some other ***
And find her lighter in my coat
Dec 4, 2014
Dec 4, 2014 at 10:56 PM UTC
i watch that ember burn,
in a slow-roasting fire.
i hear each individual crackle,
exciting my inner-most desire;
to feel that blaze a'burning,
deep inside of my heart.
that's ceased, post-recently,
to strike the steel to start.
blood type: irrelevant,
for it's flint flowing through my veins.
the tinder within must surely be damp,
else you, my dear, fight flames like rain.
Aug 2, 2011
Aug 2, 2011 at 9:47 PM UTC
me? these days?
i have to bribe bonsai tigers
to fall asleep by giving them
excess treats,
drink myself to a limit
and then take insomnia tablets,
glance at the stars
and gag up a bolshevik black hole,
think about russian
newly-wed millionaires
spending so mcuh the taxes go up,
testifying: well when the full circus
with elephants and missing acrobats
comes... and there's no french revolution
versace... we're in bigger crap
we thought we were...
so i took to peddling, keeping heart
rate with feeling rather than
a heart-rate keeper on the wrist known
as apple / iWank...
you'll never believe the amount
of creativity that comes from Onan...
it's like that story of onan and samson
like it's that story of cain and abel...
you'd have to be a mozart to find a creative
continuum in women rather than
beethoven in the hive of being deaf...
say rich and thus say spend...
say poor and thus say like a primate
with two flint stones... what the hell is this?!
japanese crow reduced their beak for
nut crushing purposes into a car tire.
FIRE! FIRE! PROMETHEUS!
so came the world favouring thought
from prometheus' liver
when in diaper-shelter postman pat delivery
by a stork... but each of us that got the slit
of liver never claimed origins in the apple
adam ******* out when eve forgot
that satan's singularity was expressed in
a pluralism: eat this apple, depilate,
and you and adam will be like the gods...
but then the metrosexual emerged
with shaved legs and a shaved chest...
down the drain that dream went:
as long as you eat the apple and know
you have hairy legs... i'm sure whatever you
say he will be ordained with pleasure to perform...
eve - i need a hammer
adam - here babe
eve - i need a nail
adam - here babe
eve - i need five planks of wood, four legs one like an abdomen
adam - here babe
eve - mash it up
adam - hey babe, what's that?
eve - a ****** table, tapestry for porcelain!
adam - woah! that's great!
eve to god - this adam is a ****** robot!
satan to eve - well... get ready for ******
Dec 17, 2015
Dec 17, 2015 at 8:48 PM UTC
I
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb's weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark derniers let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp
And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds' iron
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world's ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ** the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love's damp muscle dries and dies
Here break a kiss in no love's quarry,
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggots barren.
And boys are full and foreign to the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
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.
And I stumble on across the barren land,
the mist, like a shroud, about me swirls,
chipped flint rocks assault my bare feet,
an endless quarry of slate grey, my world.
So the curtain of sadness and submission falls,
covering my mind with an opaque funeral drape,
the hazy images of the isolated and desolate,
forming the features of depressions landscape.
Vaguely felt, the invasion of another waits,
blind and innocent in a palace of real fear,
set free to roam in a strange arid topography,
desperate times pause for vision to be clear.
A stark scene viewed through teardrops frozen,
by ice winds of piercing calamity and despair,
of a place exclusive to the disaffected and lonely,
the last retreat for an exhausted mind to repair.
And this is my world where the haunted party,
leave me be with my cold mists and grey stone,
the frozen tear for a souvenir means everything,
my special gift, the feeling of being utterly alone.
© Pagan Paul (24/01/18)
Jan 24, 2018
Jan 24, 2018 at 7:09 AM UTC
May the flames of my heart
become the fire we start
between us and the storm
May the furnace in my soul
be the heat for the coal
that keeps our children warm
May the spark of my mind
become the flint that you find
lighting the darkest dawn
May the air in my lung
breathe the breath of the sun
and birth life into a love reborn
May the jewel in my eye
Have you searching the sky
and all the riches heaven has sworn
Aug 30, 2022
Aug 30, 2022 at 7:03 AM UTC
Chalk and flint
Beech Woods
Furniture makers
Hills rolling
Rivers and stream
All being swallowed.
London expanding
the city rules
more and more.
Nov 19, 2014
Nov 19, 2014 at 8:46 PM UTC
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through the Concord Plain.
Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the steam
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.
Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.
So forth and brighter fares my stream,--
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness taints its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain.
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what city this is, it's clear to me,
where silver steel is all i see,
winding, turning, to the left and right,
where no man is content to simply be.
it glitters and gleams even in the darkest night,
flickers with flashes of flint-edged light,
o, the people, with their long-dead eyes,
they know not the secrets this city hides.
o, the people, and their anguished cries,
i hear them all, the lies, the sighs,
alas! these very things i dread,
the city moves on, the clock ticks by.
a penny for drink, sir! a penny for bread,
a pound so i might find a city-bed,
no place to lay my city-head,
no place to lay my city-head.
Mar 13, 2015
Mar 13, 2015 at 8:59 PM UTC
And sing
My bitter praises
To nails
And flint
And flesh...
Dec 6, 2012
Dec 6, 2012 at 8:21 PM UTC
681
Soil of Flint, if steady tilled—
Will refund by Hand—
Seed of Palm, by Libyan Sun
Fructified in Sand—
2.9k
Click click click goes the lighter
I stare at my beautiful back bone as she breaks a part
She takes her poison just the way I taught her
But is time with her new lighter
Click click click
Tears run down her soft face
Click
Her nervous tick gets slower
No please keep going
When she clicks the lighter at least her mind is on something else
Just for that split second
Look forward, only a little longer
Why can't I help you like you helped me
I want to hear you trucking on strong
Click click click
That's better
Mar 14, 2014
Mar 14, 2014 at 2:44 AM UTC
“When hot meets cold and does not melt it,
When flint meets flesh and does not cut it,
When heart meets heart and does not change,
Then you shall know.”
Apr 15, 2015
Apr 15, 2015 at 4:50 PM UTC
958
We met as Sparks—Diverging Flints
Sent various—scattered ways—
We parted as the Central Flint
Were cloven with an Adze—
Subsisting on the Light We bore
Before We felt the Dark—
A Flint unto this Day—perhaps—
But for that single Spark.
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I
All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.
How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.
II
Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.
III
All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.
Flower, flower the people's fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh's vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.
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