"floaters" poems
There were dividing lines
between Springfield
and Mariners Gate
soft, subtle lines
that spoke of origin
and code
and biting union
it was all
the reason
for being;
alive and living
dead or dying
deep in a pack
of pint size resistors
hell bent on the
marsh crow
and cannabis tower
jumping the rush
with *** shots
and anchors
and tribunals
camouflage creepers
and transient floaters
marked rebellion at the gates
(skullduggery and taunt
high on their favor list)
jack straws and flat paddles
for the evening charade
beakers and flailing hands
from the foot washing baptist
(the Pleasant Street conservatives with their
own something to say…“there’s gonna be hell to pay!”)
there's a
lingering effect
to this sentiment
(evident in the pump house stride)
the river winds
blow gently
into the night
as the huddling packers
and **** backs
chase the evening hours
it’s a bitter sweet
end of an era;
those traction bars
hood scoops
and nickel bags
will always
be the rage
Feb 21, 2017
Feb 21, 2017 at 11:13 PM UTC
Nothings how it looks in fact, maybe the opposite
People say I'm energetic
When I'm fighting for consciousness
Downed NyQuil to solve my imperfections
Took Benadryl to sleep
Drugs make chatter over the back and forth banter of boredom
And action
A trip to the hospital
Affects the people to care for a minute
Hallucinogens fade, but this music it stays
No 3G left **** it lets sing
Words slurred
eyes red
I don't give a **** spread love
Acceptance
And tears of joy
The ones that run over the face of a baby boy
Mama's proud
Baby you're so smart!
You're gonna be so successful!
Yeah I remember those days
Now its nicotine sticks on my lips and E's for my mom to brag about
They think I'm lost
Am I?
Testing to be done
Society approved pills to pop
And a letter from my aunt
Words spread like dye in water
I've dropped
Down from the heaven of the early years
Lucifer can maneuver his way around the city unnoticed
A spy who tells lies to himself and greets the people as equal
Human again
I'd like to be
All I want to do is live!
But a life's money, family, and a plan
Floaters get flushed
Couch potatoes get crushed
Lazy *****
Ha
They just get fat
Like these joints everybody wants to roll
**** is for beginners but what happens to the pros?
No trophy for the taking
No stack of gold
Just a massive headache
And dependence
Diet coke doesn't count
My sis puts her heart on her sleeve
Me
I don't even think I have one
No wait it's up my ***
**** me good **** me long
That only love is what turns me on
If not
Keep out
Of my head
Or
Switch, light
Too god **** bright to illuminate
these white walls I'm hired to paint
24hrs, 365 days a year, until the day it’s complete
Avoidance
Births time from time
Cuts wrists to elbow
Show how mellow
I can be
Let me cope
Every days a new day
Born today die tomorrow
Next day
Wake up
Look in the mirror and decide
what you'd like to see
Jan 17, 2014
Jan 17, 2014 at 4:22 AM UTC
“What can a poem do?”
—————————-
***”A poem
is a not a tourniquet
when you’re bleeding.
It’s not water when you’re thirsty
or food when you’re hungry.
A poem can’t protect you from an airstrike,
or from abduction, or from hate.
It’s hard to write when our words feel
like they’re not enough—they can’t do
the real, tangible work of saving lives,
or making people safer.”***
(see (1) Maggie Smith)
<~>
as is my wont,
I write,
as is my Natted~inhabited,
retiring to the local watering holes of
Cerebrum & Cerebellum,
them regular haunts,
where all requests are mailed, processed, satisfied & marked;
‘return & render to the sender, who’s on a cerebral ******
and that request?
‘give me the words’ (2)
those ‘to do’ words, floaters, direct to top of list,
those ‘can do’ words, that can effect the affect,
spare the despair, realize the fungible, concretize cures,
soften hard waters, giving a worsening worn life fabric a
curated baby blanket feel, a 4-ply human tissue of
‘words that tell me everything’ (2)
salve solution verbs that bounty-wipe spills in entirety,
vacuum up spillage spoiling of 17 days of terrible nouns,
uncovered-unknown rages caused by inflicting prepositions
released a hatred rising,
safety rebury it deeper, drug & destruct the sleeper agents,
and let me start over again with
‘telling me everything by saying nothing’ (2)
the pausal silence, the quieted spaces tween the heartbeats,
where ‘reflection,’
the noun,
and its world of alternations,
reflection,
the noun,
look inwards, but shining outward,
this, this!
is where the poem goes to do!
enervating & arresting
its contradictory powers
rock you into wild docility,
possessive and submissive,
contradictory interferences,
smoothing the roughness,
closing the gaps it opens,
healing the caused truthful cuts,
with words that tell you
everything and nothing,
open the holes, filling the gaps,
that is what a
poem do,
in and by
the manner it is spoken…
<~>
“Sometimes a poem is the stone you carry in your pocket—the one you rub when you’re worried. Let’s fill our pockets with poems.”
(see (1) Maggie Smith)
Oct 24, 2023
Oct 24, 2023 at 10:10 PM UTC
Butterfly
Fly close
Close to me
Flutter By
Reminders
Coming up
Sinking back
Remind us
Running
Away from
Who you were
Who you are
Floaters
Not for you
Suicidal
the hearts bled
So Butterfly
Keep close
To this heart
Flutter by
Feb 3, 2014
Feb 3, 2014 at 1:12 PM UTC
Appa’s demise has put a load of care on me,
The family is dependent on me,
There’s a boat leaving tomorrow night,
They say it’s the last one for this quarter,
We need to leave.
The conditions here are getting worse by the day,
The playgrounds are unrecognizable,
The schools are no longer functioning,
My friends are nowhere in sight.
They say the boat is the only option out of our land,
Tiko’s family left with the boat two months ago,
This is the time when one prefers somewhere else to home,
We really cannot miss the boat.
The sunrise makes its way through my cracked window curtain made from mother’s clothes,
But it’s only a reminder of yet another day,
I must say it looks beautiful but sad,
Every new day seems never to be different,
I hope to take steps that will not lead to my death, a loved one or a neighbour.
I heard the camp is not so great but it’s safer than here
The boat is small and there are many of us.
I am lucky because unlike Rasheed’s family;
We are just three and they are ready to fit us in the boat,
No one wants to leave their loved ones behind.
The driver starts the engine,
The journey has begun,
The journey to nowhere,
Everyone has the look of fear and uncertainty,
What lies ahead, no one can surely tell.
The boat is moving,
The sea breeze feels amazing,
Am not sure how long it will last,
Appa is dead, leaving mother and Hassan with me,
The driver says it will take all night.
We have life vests and floaters,
Mine is largely oversize,
I have not been eating properly,
I hear there is food at the destination.
The sea is calm,
The driver is whistling,
The woman sitting beside mother have been crying,
She had to leave her children behind
Again, I am very lucky.
We are getting closer and it is getting cold,
The engine does not sound right,
The driver looks panicked,
He assures everyone it’s nothing to worry about,
The tide is rising and it’s still dark,
We can see the lights at our destination
Water is getting into the boat,
Everyone is panicking,
The man beside me throws his bag into the sea and gets ready to dive,
The next person does the same,
Maybe I should do the same?
Mother and I can swim but how about Hassan who cannot?
There is a bigger boat coming,
It seems like we won’t be drowning,
I have seen my death so many times,
I am no longer scared when in danger,
The boat rescued us; we are ashore in this land where our fate will be decided
Now what?
Apr 28, 2020
Apr 28, 2020 at 6:20 PM UTC
Not the drip of freeway from Pittsburgh but a rough trundle
on chalk roads as flaxen skies shade to molten celluloid
and I can still see them
flash in August fields like a crop of traffic lights
they flare as hay-bale paparazzi or
floaters in the humour and hang
careless in seasonable decadence
so I’ll pass from the frigid, processed air
and join them in their closeness.
No buzz but a minor hum coming from the
moment’s luminosity and then they’re gone
making good on thunder’s empty promise.
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 7:11 PM UTC
Sycamore floaters fill the park
and shadows grow long on the hill
as the sun sets on my peaceful oasis.
Dogs are being walked and chickens
are being watered.
The tweekers are on their
rigged up, gas powered bicycles, zipping through
the streets like squirrels in the ancient oak
tree guarding my corner of the block.
Everywhere I look I see fifteen million
emerald leaves shining back the truth to me.
Jun 2, 2013
Jun 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM UTC
Flashing numbers; this isn't a binary
sequence but the universe has got me
wondering. 01001011010101011
combinations of 2 create infinitesimally
complicated creatures, craters, croutons,
castrations, cancers, colons, concretes,
convulsions, corn-cobs. 'Where is my
mind' by the Pixies; wish I'd never heard
it before. No simile metaphor for what's
next, swooping ultraviolent. Almost like
skin being ripped off so I'm nothing but
bone and muscle. 'With your feet in the
air and your head on the ground,' the
dam snaps and floods my Amsterdam
cheeks like New Orleans; scrambling for
roof I drown. Scrambling for roof I drown.
'Try to trick and spin it, yeah,' polka-dots
and floaters; bacteria in my eye dives into
the ocean and makes me wonder which
flew bottom and rounded-dust to eat *****
on sea-floor. 'Your head will collapse, but
there's nothing in it, and you'll ask yourself,'
mashing cellphone numbers now; mashing
cellphone needed now dad pick up please pick
up worlds end pick up mom pick up I need
to know I'm real I need to know there's truth,
'where is my mind? Where is my mind? Whee
erre is my mind?' the world fades into itself and
what crosses mind is death but no, why? No,
need. Dad picks up to my heaving sobs. Rational,
collected. Collect call. World freezes.
Jan 16, 2013
Jan 16, 2013 at 9:13 PM UTC
Ornamental graves set like feasts
for unfaithful lovers,
the broke marrow of virtuous phantasms,
now swaddled rapture
chanted as basilisk verses.
Scarred Alice wraps it around
torn limbs--
festering gauze--the cynical made anew.
"Creation moves," the gluttonous moper speaks again,
"to erase itself."
Alice's children blasts
the afterlife caboose
to the front of the freight
--saeculum saeculorum--
"Wake again and again
without ghosts and wrath,
dear children." The wind whispers their souls
back to her--"the molding of men
and women attend to sponge the graves dry."
They will raise themselves
--chanting the basilisk verses,
mother Alice
departs her children twice
to the corridors of rose fields
in her naked cloud.
"Come back, dear mother...."
"Come back, dear mother..."
they chant,
"Your salted epitaph
still lingers in our throats."
Not fit there
or here.
Nowhere, Miss, nowhere--
Sin is the party
that doesn't die
and neither does the health
of lyrical sand.
--Floaters like discontent
Alice,
recreate the world,
--our world with
pastels and finger-paints
doodles on Arlington headstones
--messages for our ear bones
--disasters on eleven
turning stones roll over--tortoises play dead
but whisper,
"Clergy cerebral
won't wisp away
beds of jewels.
I pity people who think
themselves powerful.
"Frost-bit devices dilate
like the hands of a watch
tearing time apart with
rusty blades.
"Counting fingers--useless freedom
--bothersome slavery."
Alice knows what the basilisk knows,
we would sacrifice
the only righteous heart in *****
& Gomorrah
to save
&n
Feb 27, 2013
Feb 27, 2013 at 9:22 PM UTC
When again in Joyous MAE
where Weeping willows bow and sway
and Martin swoops from hollowed eave
to where Victoria bids us leave
down railway track by home bound Duck
and motion sickness makes us Chuck
smelling salts from moonlight blossoms
as Marian asks what's a possum
Hilda and Tim try to explain
as Bala steps onto this train
he greets with smiles sweet Linda there
as Edward offers him a chair
Thoughts Forgotten as we chill
my Dry Sapphire Gin I knock and spill
cussing Profanity too loud
I shock so many of this crowd
Sammi Sweetie red of face
covers the ears of Madison Grace
Jerelii turns to poor Prabhu
and asks him soft what can we do
Frederick hands to her a tissue
and Vijay says good luck I wish you
Rena Em and poor old Quentin
have not returned when they were sent in
offering advice and gentle aide
and Lee and Jimmy knelt and prayed
Harlow ran and Blackmire followed
both too afraid their courage swallowed
Floaters pointed to Anon C
and said aloud you come with me
Something we knew was ours has gone
but look his Sisters just got on
So Daytonight spoke I'll cuff his ears
to stop him swearing now my dears
Embers knew shed blow her top
so quickly Rose and said ... My stop
Jan 28, 2013
Jan 28, 2013 at 11:04 PM UTC
Some of the ***** sink
And some of the **** floats
But when one plunges sinkers
They squish, smear, and combine
And the plunger comes out
Pretty gross
Feb 9, 2016
Feb 9, 2016 at 5:46 AM UTC
I see vivid, my vision flowered
All the colours, i call them ours
Afterimages and my poems
Branded on my eyeball's moments
Blue does spread like food colouring
Dropped in my vision spluttering
I close my eyes to escape the noise
But all it changes, is the background choice
I see the bright blue sky
With floaters, sparkles and vivid lies
And sometimes my hands are dissapear
Beneath shadows leftover from lights bright near
But all in all it is alright
After all i could lose my sight?
And that is without mentioning my ears
that have been ringing for years.
Aug 1, 2023
Aug 1, 2023 at 7:11 AM UTC
emoticon smiles, crunch! leaves under boots are a shattered glass,
believe in the underline, yorkshire smiles at new york, you grew up and I accept that, son.
never over the beginning of the orange bullet casing. in Sandy Hook the deepest opposition faced mankind
that of the speed in which the modern world finds itself chasing chinese dragons in the bacteria floaters
of the eye, watching as they dip into ocean as if that were insane, but what's insane is to consider the
lost mind to be a mind that was lost in the beginning, you can't lose the mind, you can only find it within
its memory foam.
Feb 17, 2013
Feb 17, 2013 at 2:02 PM UTC
All land begins
underneath these feet:
a merry makebelieve.
Jump
and catch a glimpse of Arabia
in red,
Birkenhead
in yellowish-grey,
Berlin's fading rainbow..
all lacking in depth like
floaters,
like foreign pain,
like your very first birthday.
Don't they?
Spend days in suspension,
don't you?
Well, look around!
You see ahead
and back
are much the same
when all is round.
And all IS round!
Unless of course,
you're
on the ground
where a single wave can
****
Doubtless fun,
boundless thrill, all
but for a price!
Here
even cloudy sunsets imply
sacrifice.
And at nights
perfect darkness never dwells,
Some devilry always tells the time
in mocking ways:
Jump
and you're on holidays,
divorced from all necessity,
sleeping in the sun
for days an altogether different
beast,
electrified,
with sandbagged veins.
At least not dead,
I hear you say.
How cute..
Alas! the price you pay for
being oh so futile is per se
a snide;
So pick your cherries and throw them
in that tide!
You know the lights in this harbour never return
in a straight line
May craft and the shimmering power
not let you be
the fog in the rye,
or the rock's inside.
You are round and everything
is your equal.
So consider your battles well.
Jul 11, 2018
Jul 11, 2018 at 5:14 AM UTC
The cloud drops on my lip
On the tip of my nose
I get hugged by the drip
Ah, rain is so close!
The heat is now a story
The balm seems so near
Regaining its lost glory
Surely the monsoon is here!
Tip-tap on my windowpane
Dark floaters are busy
Pouring on men and women
Life is once more easy!
I'm glad the rain is back
To awaken the soil's green
Wipe out the summer's crack
Dance on my parched roof tin!
Aug 22, 2013
Aug 22, 2013 at 4:00 AM UTC
In many short years
we’ll know we were sweet and naive.
We’ll think about the things we thought,
our understated predictions
our dinner table conversations.
There were floaters
in our oracle’s eyes.
It will not be the now
that we know.
As what happens to us
disappears
like the sound of an engine
in the fog,
moving away.
In many short years
Auschwitz has a café.
After the tour
all the waitresses
come from the kitchen
uniformed
to sing to you
on your birthday.
In many short years
they’ll build on Chernobyl
and Fukushima will be an oasis.
There’ll be fields of bodies
fertilising strawberries
for other countries.
-
We’ve got no memory.
Horrors aren’t like happiness
they lose their impact
with every sharing
and every listen.
Will you be there?
In the next big thing.
Think of that.
How much faster everything’s destroyed
than it’s made.
Think of what work your life took
Wrong gods appear again.
As always a side will be picked for you.
As always the goals are your own.
And the answers are more questions,
homophones,
the same lessons
and still they’ll bomb playgrounds
built on bomb sites.
-
Then the next big thing.
Your entropy,
that starts and ends in fire.
The wolf
from another wood and paper town.
The flames on your monuments
and shopfronts
caught on divine wind
and a scent for sin.
Most now know
they’ve never been scared before.
Things you never thought could alight
prove you wrong.
The air stings and follows
and the clouds finally become too much for the sun.
Your heartbeat’s afterlife
is someone else’s tutting.
Unread letters,
guitars and bars with history,
family traditions
and the weight of her hand,
thumb hooked to the belt loop
of your jeans
are now one weather formation.
And under all
is flat and yellow
like an African morning.
Is it angels or great bats
which have given you
your turn?
Aug 3, 2016
Aug 3, 2016 at 10:03 PM UTC
from the cold road: houses visible (without wires)
entrenched in white snow: sherd forest archaeology.
car parked, bananas and bars packed, we hike.
a magnesium flame painting, freezing. a collage. a frenzy.
now, various floaters organized in armies playing war
or grazing, flamingo legs embalmed and crooked
and cooked, charred and glazed in a kiln, kin amid
the cold air, the ground is a movie screen.
the sun, sidelong, bruises our pilgrimage
and lays shadows in place to dissect and incise.
light like a plague, a pear flesh, a frozen swarm of locusts.
the forest opens, we reach aforementioned rural shantytown.
those houses when we parked and hiked to them
were not houses, they were barns, the windows, doors
all were painted in detail on pieces of plywood,
some big movie set gone missing (headline: *found!
deceptive, chipping curtains hung out in the cold*).
Dec 26, 2016
Dec 26, 2016 at 5:47 PM UTC
Ink
blots
impossible
knots
testing the limits of
a circular drive
one hand on the wheel
the other copping a feel
of his passenger mate
dutifully nursing her neonate
foot goes down
to apply the break
fracturing fingers
is what it will take
to lessen
the voice
avoid
the slade
move
the mountain
tell me, don't floaters
eventually get flushed?
Aug 30, 2020
Aug 30, 2020 at 7:40 AM UTC
I could stumble from one end of town
to the other,
a mile of tripping over my own feet
somewhere between the water and the hills
between the fishes and the coyotes.
Twelve years as a tide,
scraping the same sand with raw fingers
waiting for the current to tug me out to sea.
tossing and turning,
the city set on spin-cycle.
We built a house atop a mound of dirt,
overlooking the valley of sticks and tanned grass
inhabited by the breakers.
The leather skinned reptiles who found dust
beyond their childhoods.
Where the tide has crashed for a hundred years
and the floaters and drinkers,
the crumbling ambitions have washed ashore
along the Payette River.
I see the same horizon from every street corner.
The only variable
is the number of cars that pass through everyday
and have the unfair luck
of escaping the city limits.
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 3:12 AM UTC
I am spooked
you are everywhere,
you are everywhere like
the floaters, as soon as I
try to track you, focus
on your image
you race ghostly into my periphery
dancing just out of reach
you are everywhere,
you are everywhere-
I am spooked.
Jan 4, 2015
Jan 4, 2015 at 10:39 PM UTC
an intersecting pattern
has shown up
on the radar screen
there are many familiar characters
to be seen
entities from a far
constellations
has appeared in this location
it has be most astounding
to find those floaters
in this surrounding
I bet if I check the radar screen
in the next while
there will be more familiar entities
landing on its dial
they are ever popping
into this sphere
and one finds this
all to be exceptionally queer
at any minute Alvin Asteroid and Melba Meteorite
may make an appearance
on the site
they'll be traveling
incognito
but the intersecting pattern
shall bear their info
Jul 27, 2013
Jul 27, 2013 at 2:33 AM UTC
White feathers falling,
When an angel flew close by;
There's nothing up above us,
But I saw him, on the sly.
White downy floaters,
Floating on the sea of air;
In a single eye blink,
I saw him hovering there.
Souvenirs of miracles,
Signs and wonders too:
He knew he lost that feather-
And he said- give it to you.
Jul 3, 2010
Jul 3, 2010 at 8:49 AM UTC
the hall walker slides along the wall
one hand brushing the cheap paint
his thin vacant face
etched in a shallow gasping for breath caricature
the hall walkers drifting steps
are across the carpets patterns
but no one objects
his neat and clean golf pro outfit
still clings to its filthy rich beginnings
suede leather faces
and the disdain they project
the hall walker has paused
to announce his desire to be on his way
to the blank wall
a poster nearby grins down at his madness
with a fateful message about condoms
lest the madness spread no doubt
he raises his voice
but to no avail
the wall remains ignorant
but we are far from alone
me and the hall walker
a stream of faces
the tight lipped impaired people
come in waves through the hall
like a strange tidal basin of the medical world
the floaters and driftwood
the gathers of shells
and thouse who seek to hide inside them still
this odd place of the infirm
a dozen bent forms
pushing canes
and mounted on wheelchairs
slowly fold the hallway
with the repeated ebb and flow
of their travels
the low electric sound of their hover-rounds
like meat grinders digesting a daily dose
putter past in steady stream
a nightmare vision of what awaits
the hall walker stops to ponder
the fate of his domain
his hall is no longer his kingdom
and they now shoo him into rooms
or out the door
rather than let him walk the line
between dark and light
that is the way the world decides
the hall walker
pressed his golf shoe
into the soft dirt of wet night
and smiled clean and real
recalling the scent
and releasing his grip
he follows the young nurse to bigger and better halls
to walk the wall
Oct 22, 2013
Oct 22, 2013 at 1:09 PM UTC
I looked up
This morning
Before
the globe
Of life lifted from
The dark horizon
The passengers
In the sky
Began to announce
Their arrival
With frosting
Dressing the gray floaters
Tipping a hat to the mistress sun
As do the yellow roses
That glow in the darkest
Of green along the
Fence. Next to me.
Waking up.
One only knows
The presence of the days beginning
By these clouds
These flowers
And the black capped chickadee
Announcing all clear
See-see dearee
All threats are gone.
Jun 2, 2025
Jun 2, 2025 at 8:20 AM UTC