"flotsam" poems
These days have ebbed
as Love's swell was checked:
the waters in some places
- all but dammed!
But now at last
I sense the rising tide
and thank Temese
for the current's turn;
now following that great writhing snake
to where its pulsing head will rake;
over the mucky soiled watery beds
of Woolwich
Greenwich
Limehouse
- and under -
Tower Bridge
To that great gloating sight
A crown of a billion lights
Blazing day and night:
And somewhere within
In the slick oily warmth
Our flood tides mesh,
As over each other we wash.
Hard thrusts
wicked deep cuts
given and received
are recorded in that great mirror smoked!
where with a tug and a shove
on the banks
in the streets
through the loopy twists
everything prospers in the glow
as the decades decaying flow;
each ***** bud
red with new blood
one after t'other
flowers
before their purple petals scatter.
Let's on the luck o' the dice
(you 'n' me!)
ride out
on the flotsam and jetsom
that has carried us this far
and as pleases
merge.
Aug 7, 2018
Aug 7, 2018 at 2:32 AM UTC
implosions are for starfish and our mission is clear. we have nowhere to be from
and that's half the battle. we are seldom unbridled in the chastity of our carnal bluff...
and our cages are breathing. we are finally designing our most daring Inertia.
both mum on the details in the devil's flotsam. we jot some of the names of the nameless...
on the outside of Dixie cups. like mint julep promise to a tangerine honest.
again and again, we ache through the breeze of our soothing traumas. we court the verity of a sham.
we blast through the congregation of our adversary, snipping varmints from a stale camp
in the southernmost of our due south,; where they fear the bonfire until a vagrant maps
the flaming tongues to a long kiss.... and we crash upon the shore
of Never Asked.
but regret This.
May 9, 2013
May 9, 2013 at 5:21 AM UTC
We are sands astride and in the tides
Waters which tare us from both sides
Passion and fury
Duty and honor
Pushes us in
And pull us out
Love to hate
Pushes us in
And pulls us out
The desire for domesticity
And the desire to be free
Pushes us in
And pulls out
Till we are bludgeoned
By the flotsam
Tangled in the terrible debris
Battered by the violent sea
No more you than I am me
And I wish I had the gills to breath
Before those tides overwhelm me
Nov 29, 2014
Nov 29, 2014 at 12:46 PM UTC
Droplets speckled across thick green leaves,
The moon riding high almost at her peak,
The ground was soft and dewy,
While the grass entwined my feet.
There was a time when I'd feel the beat below, the steady heart of the Earth.
Breeze wing beaten to my face by the wide wings of the Sky.
My aura was alight with Fire and my Spirit was adrift like flotsam In the Ocean of my Soul.
Felt like I was stranded, salty, searing in the Sun.
Like a tree that has been petrified by lightning.
My mind a forest bowed by gale force wind.
I was raw, undone, unraveled while unravelling more with reckless abandon.
But think of the forest, think of the woods, think of creation and the nature of all things growing.
I need to remember the Moonlit Grove.
Nature so suple, divine and in spaces evergreen,
Life was a simple fragment made wholly meaningful In this moment,
I'm In awe of this complex marriage between living, growing and giving life after your own.
Where the doplets were speckled across thick green leaves,
The moon riding high - climaxingly luminous at her peak.
The ground was soft and dewy in it's rejuvenating embrace
While the grass entwined my feet and the moonlight kissed my face.
Nov 12, 2022
Nov 12, 2022 at 4:42 PM UTC
His nights are restless, endless dreams
of young men climbing ladders.
The ones who stop to fix their vests
are left below, row after row
there seems no end, distorted faces,
silent screams through bottle bottom glass.
Twenty winters wishing that
the dream might finally end,
he tilts his head and looks at God
above his bed, a crucifix upon the wall,
his Jesus hangs and bleeds for sins
of lesser men but for him there is no comfort,
he can't escape the scene of drifting death
and flotsam, sailors drinking blood
from swollen corpses, greedy
in the eyes like the sharks
that encircle them.
When daylight comes
still no relief, he sits among
his salty sheets and chokes
on waves of guilt. Deceit
will always be his master,
every day no different
than the rest
except,
today he’s had enough,
the dead,
they will not cease their torment.
Twenty winters waiting
but the dead won’t go away.
The boys who stopped to fix their vests
The man with gaping wound in chest
The burning wreckage going down
The screams of those who soon would drown
The oily water thick as mud
The utter chaos, flesh and blood
The rabid thirst he could not quench
afloat in pools of human stench
He goes outside and lies upon
the grass, a Navy Colt revolver
in one hand, a toy soldier in the other,
he puts the gun against his head
and pulls the trigger.
Twenty winters
Twenty winters
Rest
Mar 20, 2011
Mar 20, 2011 at 8:00 AM UTC
I was a flailing phoenix
Trapped underneath a waterfall
Unable to rise from the ashes
While being continuously extinguished
Until you constructed a dam
With the flotsam from my heart
I opened my wings and emitted light
Fearing waterfalls I took my fire flight
I was elated to have migrated
Where the weather was tropical
And the conditions seemed optimal
But your aggravating absence
Endeared an enigmatic essence
A vengeful apparition
That conjured rain
I desperately craved your protection from the elements
Until I noticed the precipitation was my infatuation
For you and the things you do
The things you build
Make rivers stay still
And the things you say
Make me regret being gay
Because you're a ******
You live in your exclusive dam
Your teeth are like cleavers
Gnawing on sacrificial lamb
Sep 28, 2017
Sep 28, 2017 at 7:12 AM UTC
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed,
He with a book, keeping the light on late,
She like a girl dreaming of childhood,
All men elsewhere - it is as if they wait
Some new event: the book he holds unread,
Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead.
Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion,
How cool they lie. They hardly ever touch,
Or if they do, it is like a confession
Of having little feeling - or too much.
Chastity faces them, a destination
For which their whole lives were a preparation.
Strangely apart, yet strangely close together,
Silence between them like a thread to hold
And not wind in. And time itself's a feather
Touching them gently. Do they know they're old,
These two who are my father and my mother
Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?
5.2k
In a midwinter night’s dream
i found myself lost again,
or was it even this year ?
It may even go back farther
than yesterdays out of reach,
older than an ancient pyramid stone
Before the rebirth of past life deposits,
unborn orphaned motherless sediment,
flotsam of the ages adrift,
unknown for more than a thousand years
... waiting for so long to see beyond the bounds
High atop a slippery edge-cliff
i clung ―
Searching for a deeper understanding
of who i am;
Roosting like a starving bird of prey
with a broken wing
born alone ... holding on
With a fear in his eyes
that only i could comprehend
Staring way down deep in the pith,
into an internal pitch black abyss,
just begging to see beyond ―
Mindful it's so hard looking
into the eye of a storm
Intimately parsing the recurrent source
of reigning pain
Where the perpetual fog of isolation dwells;
an inversion, preventing dispersion
of the nimbus cold and dark
In the darkness, there bides a suffocating
emptiness,
A swelling silence what loudly knells,
leeching through a perennial ache
An abating voice within hollers unheard,
invisible as a bitter cold wind howling
relentlessly through the hollow pang;
Echoing the subsiding say
(squeezed out) ... of an orphaned soul
deep beneath the light
Awakening to realize ― once i was alive
and
i could feel me holding on to you
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Dec 30, 2017
Dec 30, 2017 at 7:11 PM UTC
superimposition of celestial ampersand:
a continuity of all things
stars hanging loose in the pupil
of this deadbeat word.
typhoons in a swirl of tempestuous ballet,
dogs shivering in the blue cold,
biting their canine integument the way
scarabs would, sinking in a temporal flotsam-way within tectonic display
of text
hectares of blank stares bringing
to life lysergic field of black birds.
and then some
equal number of evocativeness:
continuing on into the ground
are the bones warm in their compost.
the sudden fragrance of rat ****
appeals to the masses.
too much laughter in flooded thoroughfares pockmarked by
the vehement jam of staccato jackhammer.
choking us is today's headline
in supreme obbligato - its stench
reeks of libidinal perfume etched
in the flesh of the rigmarole.
one filthy day in Manila.
Oct 2, 2015
Oct 2, 2015 at 12:53 AM UTC
Flaming bridges up in smoke—
ashes scattered in the wind
Requiem to passing yesterdays;
vestige of all that’s lost —
bestrewn in prevailing currents
amongst the drifting autumn leaves
No smoke on rising waters
— lingers between
growing distant shores
Untamed rivers rising
rinse away
the taste of sparks
spake from silent tongues
Portaging all that once was
with all that could never remain,
back to the briny deep
An uncontainable
rivers pilgrimage —
entombing reverently
ancient fractals of being
Sowing feral rivers' ashes —
sacrificial scatterings of destiny
washed afar unto the flotsam
on shoreless stormy seas
Jesse Stillwater
Nov 10, 2018
Nov 10, 2018 at 12:54 PM UTC
I
__
i am so much smaller than you
and i can ever
believe...
and you are so much smaller
than you and
i know.
i sit within the winds,
those summer breezes,
some gusty gales, perhaps,
feeling
'the tug
and toss
of its fabulous force
rippling
churning
combing the thinning grey hair on my tired head,
my clothing,
so indistinct,
flapping,
furling,
floating, --filled with this seen-un-seen presence,
and i know
a am so small,
and my life so
ludicrous,
like the air
that comes
and goes
out of its own control,
but,
i am too small,
and unable
to stop this, its invisible assault.
II
__
when i am a-float upon
the great lakes, the oceans
the
rolling
rivers
i live
like a tiny slab of flotsam or
driftwood
sailing
slowly,
circularly,
(oh-so!) quietly
running,
reeling the peeling painted oars of my boat
against
the grainy flashing surface of the waters
rumbling,
rolling
away
this insatiable yearning
to go wherever it takes me to go, but
i know
i am very small,
and cannot control the eddy's creeping currents-
constant-currents
thus
submitting
my wayfaring self
to the
unfathomable.
III
__
these trees towering
above me
around me,
the sapling,
the blanketing
(in my lifetime)
blooming branches
creating
an emotional, outer, physical, inner, spiritual
dwindling
like the leaves left shivering beneath the cold winter's frost,
once casually
falling,
dropping,
drying up around my soul
slipping
into silent winter slumber,
to awaken
again...
--and then!
(to the dismay of my self-enlightened discovery)
i see
how small
i am
only to return again
from that brownish-moist
soil-bed
like a seed
beneath
the ground
never sprouting,
only fogetting,
the once and always forvever
and ever
the natural
insignificance
of being.
Jul 10, 2010
Jul 10, 2010 at 3:46 PM UTC
You walk to the woods from the mountains too fast;
trip over your feet when blades of grass nip at your heels
and take up life amongst the low.
Flotsam swirls in your wake;
silt rises to meet you.
The sun sets in deference to your arrival.
You walk among a sea of azaleas and fire:
bloody-thorned crown:
smoke laying low over the ground protecting your footfalls,
come to convince me of my damnation,
spill mulch in my bed,
and track lake water through my rooms.
You walk with broken glass in your heels
and blood on your cheeks,
spilt milk smile and sickly sweet lips,
cradling a dead bird and a lead heart in your hands
with a gallows leash hanging off your neck, onto the ground.
You walk into the house of my elders,
the sacred burial ground,
the meeting place,
the palace,
and the bar.
You order a scotch on the rocks, a lapis circlet, a book full of secrets, dead man’s blood, and my heart.
You walk backwards
around the cherry blossom orchard and its overwrought signatures,
harrumphing at arrogant petals and snickering birds:
politic in reverse and rough lines in slow motion.
There is something you forgot: it wears white linen and
sits on a rose throne.
You loved it, once.
You walk to the mountains from the woods,
barefoot and starving,
caked in mud and licking the shine off your teeth.
Your knees are bleeding.
Your heart is bleeding
Jul 9, 2018
Jul 9, 2018 at 11:29 PM UTC
My heart like the ocean
Ebbs & flows with the presence of the moon
Aye, the inconstant moon
In all it's silvered graces
Shimmers only of it's own accord;
Like yourself
While you light the sky
Life's burdens are but jetsam
cast away
The ship of my soul is lightened
to freely follow loves wind
where ever it does catch my sails
But in your absence
I am lost on a tumultuous sea
Likely to sink
In the wake of this tempest
I seek solace in the stars
But flotsam am I,
As I know you shine not for me
Apr 21, 2014
Apr 21, 2014 at 1:20 AM UTC
The once timid
Shores of my resistance.
Fearing an inundation of the sorts
of Flotsam and Jetsam that can cure a man of loneliness,
Were trampled like soccer fans in Venezuela, when you appeared on my shore.
Certain that the fraughting souls within, were to cover me in stinking pitch.
I retreated to the hills and played the wait and see.
Waiting and watching and hoping to pray.
And when you legged your way
onto my beach,
I cried like a gangster on new years eve
Sep 14, 2012
Sep 14, 2012 at 12:48 AM UTC
an assembly or
better named
a clump
of multifarious flotsam
presenting its untidy self
on a recent passing
streetcorner..
a hesitating photo records
a drifting pinecone
centering a stained
and shredding newspaper
a broken sharp stick
red rocks of scales and shadings
flecking dried green leaves..
order imposed by
framing and shaping of
the sidewalk corner..
might other forms emerge
with a focused patience?
a partial headline reads
...sound without the wires..
news of expanding connections
outside a material realm?
headline seemed embedded
in thick advertising bulk
announcing a continuing
culture of material weight..
much else of red and green..
the centering pinecone
occasional pineal symbol of
higher dimension entry..
somehow rightly here
in the dark center
of this mess
this a brief experiment
not yet for most an answer
a question now of mining
finding patterned varieties
in large nature's trove..
patient visions residing in
gathered fragments
if gathered they be..
expectations of more
in what persists
of this and that in
time... :)
Jun 13, 2012
Jun 13, 2012 at 11:03 PM UTC
When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.
Jun 26, 2013
Jun 26, 2013 at 2:11 PM UTC
That day we came
and having come
lapped at by perfumed light
at once separated.
We bathed in the pool
the water like crystal
in the sunset
our limbs like glass.
On the bank
in the hot conjoined air
we made love again
our sweat
like silver in the moonlight.
the water's suppurating flow
drew our limbs
like flotsam in the reeds
grappling glistering lilies
as we floated in slow, ********
currents.
along the bank, the Camphor
shades the forest flowers
through the long-leaved grass
the python slinks
We leave for home
darkened by the sun..........
tongues digging into melons,
pomegranates laid out
neatly for dessert
******* out the Rambutan-
once the hairy skin is peeled-
fiery, red
the soft core sweeter than coitus-
and stays longer in our thoughts.
is this where the dreams are,
or where the dreaming begins,
between the first caress
and the final gasp of satisfaction?
Where the threshing limbs
devour the sun-shredded wheat
and the panting ribbons of air
swallow the final sigh-
the sleek river flowing
seaward, ocean marshalling
the land,
coral languishing in green pools
of broken light.
Here, within this infused beauty,
********** has power
beyond the weather-bound senses
of our northern homes,
encased in dull precipitation
sunshine a blunted knife
beyond the pot-shaped mountains
high above the trees
like a tear emerging from the sky
drops the waterfall
its descent
languid, its fall sharp and effortless;
tinged with azure, carefully sprinkled flakes
it spreads out like a clear, chiming puddle.
There we spread ourselves
naked in the sunlight
the sea's rumbling noise
distant and fumbling-
spreading its curling claws
into the slyly forming sunset
in reiterated rhythms
like beating hearts
like lungs-
the carefully manufactured beats
blending.
Mar 20, 2016
Mar 20, 2016 at 10:28 PM UTC
When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.
Oct 26, 2013
Oct 26, 2013 at 3:25 PM UTC
When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.
Jul 26, 2012
Jul 26, 2012 at 12:34 PM UTC
How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
never forgetsam,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,
it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.
2.9k
Friggin' the best of
All maritime words
Like
Lash the friggin' tops'l
Friggin' foresail
Fifteen friggin' frigates
Five friggin' fathoms deep
Flotsam friggin' jetsam
Friggin' me timbers
Friggin' boson's mate
Scrub the friggin' deck
Aye aye, friggin' Captain
It just feels so right
As spicy as Jamaican ***
It rolls right off the tongue
Like a wench's pearl
Just like a friggin'wench's pearl,
Mate
r~ 28Feb14
Feb 28, 2014
Feb 28, 2014 at 8:00 PM UTC
To write a poem is a treasure hunt.
Diving deep into the depths of your soul,
searching through your minds twisted alleyways.
Rummaging among flotsam and jetsam,
for that one pure gem that outshines the rest,
that starts out as a diamond in the rough.
Poetry is akin to opening a chest.
Spilling the jewels to flow over the page.
Each reveal, the precious stones take on life.
Mingling and coalescing into a crown
to be worn with pride and majestic joy.
Kaleidoscopic endeavor,
offers up a piece of yourself, you share.
Sep 19, 2010
Sep 19, 2010 at 6:02 PM UTC
I pulled back the thicket
Brambles and thorns
Bordering my mind
Inch by inch
To let you slip inside
Hi
I hope you don't mind
The pestilent storm of neuroses
The angry winds whipping around
Eroding my cognition
(They all say
I ought to stop overthinking
They don't know the half of it)
Pardon the mess
The litter of apprehensions
Flotsam and jetsam of rumination
Tangles of tangents
Smog of chimeric thoughts
Sticky rambles festering in the corner
Acidic drizzle
Of obstinate wayward tunes
Insecurity and fear
Eating into the pillars and foundations
If you don't mind terribly
The clatter of sleet
The noisome fumes
The skittering vermin
The sheer clutter
That would make packrats shake their heads
If you don't mind
At all
Would you stay?
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 7:24 AM UTC
.
When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.
.
Sep 29, 2018
Sep 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM UTC
Useless Money
I often get petitioning letters so many people trying
to find a place to live and only receive a bitter refusal
and see their children die of thirst and hunger.
I wish to help them, but no money in the world is
enough to stop this flood of humanity seeking a haven
flotsam, the wreck of the unfortunate and we can do
nothing but look another way.
Overwhelmed by the misery I can do little about, but
the woman from Myanmar who won a medal for her
tenacity, choose not to speak. The friendly Buddhists
are killing Muslims in their midst, they have become
refugees; the woman from Myanmar is voiceless.
She, the upper-class daughter of a Burmese general
Who aristocratic behaviour impressed us deeply,
But I ask why she is staying silent now.
May 21, 2015
May 21, 2015 at 5:15 AM UTC