"gabble" poems
who lit the candles
placed so eloquently
behind purple rock?
that sculpted radiance
and chapel grace
wound in a chosen
defined way
down the spiral
stone stairs
street cars dawdle
alongside
the packer slew
biding merchants
shuffle their wares
as the front man
and pock face
sing their sullen
holy blues
cut jazz echoes
over the accompanying
gabble and drone
incense and haze
pour from
a lower trap door
sack fish, truffles
and splendid crafts shine
inside the stained glass fronts
a wide mouth snapper
with a bloated tongue
greets the
morning tide
(not camera shy
in the least!)
the fish traps
and beaneries
bring life
to the flourishing causeway
hula hoops
and circle ballers
join the
cobaine stage
favoured rogues
and mac jacks
speak easy
of the big daddy
beth’s triple by pass
taking firm hold on
tricky ****
and the nutcracker
maze ways,
taggers and
lost tunnels
of cu chi
strike a
nerving blow
a poised finger man
belts out his tune
(with a sniff sock
and iterating glare)
his nosey neighbors
cut artisan bread
(with a white wine
and jelly spread)
midwives push forward
for an afternoon
toddle and stroll
Jan 19, 2018
Jan 19, 2018 at 11:12 AM UTC
Back of my back, they talk of me,
Gabble and honk and hiss;
Let them batten, and let them be--
Me, I can sing them this:
"Better to shiver beneath the stars,
Head on a faithless breast,
Than peer at the night through rusted bars,
And share an irksome rest.
"Better to see the dawn come up,
Along of a trifling one,
Than set a steady man's cloth and cup
And pray the day be done.
"Better be left by twenty dears
Than lie in a loveless bed;
Better a loaf that's wet with tears
Than cold, unsalted bread."
Back of my back, they wag their chins,
Whinny and bleat and sigh;
But better a heart a-bloom with sins
Than hearts gone yellow and dry!
3.7k
Autumn, like an Indian classical dancer, dressed up
Arrives with soft rhymes and quickening steps
She comes aglow, aglow with a rare beauty
Dancing to the bracelet's tinkling song
Her floating robe falls in deep folds around her feet
As she mesmerizes all with moves full of grace
Viewing the flaming colours in assorted display
We are apt to wonder if Nature carefully saved up
All that is best for the closing grand finale
Autumn tints look enchanting all through the land
With pervading green, offset by crimson, citrus yellow
Flaming red, lustrous gold and a faded russet
The air stays crisp and sweet in the ripening fields
While stray clouds ramble in flawless turquoise sky
When autumn is thus all agog like a frenzied dervish
It gives us morbid pictures of death and decay
The trees wrestle to free themselves of their worn cloaks
Causing a cascade of withering autumn leaves
Now they fall scattered in endless stream and lie in piles
Like charred carcasses after a fierce forest fire
The rustle of dry leaves blown by the wind
Falls in our ears with the gabble of migrating birds
Pale sunshine sifts through leafless trees of maple and oak
All those leaves once stayed regal in stations high
But now tossed out like worthless chaff
They come nose diving and fall several meters below
Spreading a hazel curtain over the moist earthen crust
When trampled mercilessly by careless feet
They silently mourn their thankless fate
Graying that comes at the end of each autumnal fall
Reminds us of the pall of gloom that awaits
It is disturbing like the parting song of birds
As they fly southward before the fall of winter
Oct 8, 2016
Oct 8, 2016 at 9:09 AM UTC
Alice and I were fudged fruiting inside Falstaffian freakish fleur–de–lys:
She inside a quack–aztec–tattooed tank,
Me inside a pendulous magenta harness with polydactyl–perverted plumes bespattered into it.
In the ****** **** of that kaput flophouse
We creosoted our conks all the cockatrices of the gorge–de–pigeon,
Inside crotches, Jacuzzis and homocentric Action Men.
Alice, with the pornographic bend sinisters in the teeth of her poltergeistish fajita crocodile,
Smacked of the plug–ugly poofter of a south–south–west by south sackful sandbank.
I cemented the jaundiced dangler of an ostrich to my prick.
With that and my uncut fiddlestick of knobs
I was the idiosyncratic and wholehogging sadomasochistic slapper!
We banged the bush streaming proboscis in tentacle
Through smorgasbords of hermaphrodites and high muck–a–mucks
While Ravi Shankar’s idioglossias and cockchafers juddered our titbits.
Our Moonies were classically cracked flabelliform by the time we disinterred them.
Alice managed to fornicate incognito white elephant on behalf of myself
And we were passionately on the back of the dingdong, naked as our Moonies.
We kept one’s pecker up wrapped up in the shadowgraph
Athwart ever-strangling girdles of formaldehyde, ozone, fomenter and widow’s weeds,
Athwart polytetrafluoroethylene–pricked precipices and then down to the butts
Where we both came to a sticky end on our jockstraps and leered at the ballet dancers
That we then penetrated rhythmically by elongating tumescent our gang banging tentacles.
Through comfortable French knickers I burped, “Thank you for ****** me everywhere, Alice”.
In the soporific honeypotspunk, aped on the ooze,
I could smell that her **** had made her ******* type soap flakes break the sound barrier,
Splashing out a ***** whale seed skirting her jowls.
“You’re fragrant, flypaper”, she rapped.
The Government gabble that little green men who hammer out the sexagenarians weren’t on board.
Inside spleen of the spliffs, inside spleen of my gangrenous Pollyanna, I will over one’s dead body evacuate.
I will over one’s dead body evacuate.
Mar 22, 2010
Mar 22, 2010 at 4:09 PM UTC
"The past is a bucket of ashes."
1
THE WOMAN named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
... and the only listeners left now
... are ... the rats ... and the lizards.
And there are black crows
crying, "Caw, caw,"
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The only singers now are crows crying, "Caw, caw,"
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are ... the rats ... and the lizards.
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.
2.4k
MANY things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes, me-too, me-too.
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith.
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it-on the streets, in the postoffice,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for .. Blaa-blaa .. Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa .. and all points northwest .. all a-board."
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
2.2k
Pretty poppies
And burnt earth for horizons
Crackling savage against the cool blue
That burns you without and tightens within
Endless green and poppies
I wish I spoke like you,
In red earth, pebbles spilling from my grin
Able to lie as much as gabble
And taste the impatient air
The scent of expectant poppies
Hurriedly, I'd rush back there
And feel the emptiness apart from me again,
That kind of emptiness that lends itself to
An adventure in you
And blushes
Like poppies blush
In turbulent valleys of burnt dirt
May 27, 2017
May 27, 2017 at 2:26 AM UTC
Girl, around 27.
No, woman, rather.
Her youth walked through and hung there, dry, as mine did in exchange
so we pick and choose a role and sidle along the bar where
I am with a perk in the feet, lifted by the ***** of,
but a lot easier than you can imagine as
she lays her words out like warm hands and with a blue bird of compassion,
asks me how I am.
I gripe and she listens in a knowing way then reverse
in very clean queues and open mouths
She says, “They say today is going to be the busiest day of the year”, with a fire lit
behind an eye where she does not smile of her face, but through a grit in the teeth
I laugh inwardly, towards myself in a search for appropriation and then spit heavily onto table, “well, it looks like we both have something to look forward to, then”.
Then angelic laughter where my cheeks couldn’t follow and I am ****** in.
There was a moment then, which I wish could be brought to plate and silver.
a sort of cunning lock between a soul and my own where I hope only to god,
that I’ve thrown a key down river.
She walks out after our matching eyes and mirrored moves
So I watch her,
not her ***
not her chest,
not her brown, burning hair,
but the still skin of her neck in an open sense where I want to take it in
as if she had the happiness and I am jealous
like a tearing gabble of a baby.
Oct 18, 2012
Oct 18, 2012 at 2:57 PM UTC
Confidence is key
In oh so many ways
Much more than with
The things you do.
Walk tall, stand still,
Be open and direct.
Show them all
That you are completely
Unafraid.
Don’t fidget, look around or gabble on.
Don’t show your anxious self.
Speak slowly, with pause
And show you are assured and calm.
For confidence is like a virus,
Spreading out throughout the room,
Infecting all
With that assertion
That You
Are Number One.
If only I myself was brought up this way,
Who knows what I’d have done?
But better late than never,
As they say.
Let’s start,
By being tall,
And cutting out
That slouch.
But remember,
Never compare:
Treat everyone as equal,
Never be arrogant:
Be gently assertive.
Paul Butters
© PB 9\3\2018.
Mar 9, 2018
Mar 9, 2018 at 9:11 AM UTC
My mistress in agony,
my beauty brewed in ashes,
I dine with the facetious and on the families in fashion,
come hop the bandwagon and land on fields growing glasses and a jugular covered in gashes will heal a life full of laughs and a death void of sadness,
I plead with you boys like a judge pleads friendly gabble dances,
like a judge gives phony gabble rants and rants plead deadly drive by flashes.
authority is the hoaxes in which the joker laughs and a televised revolution is the perfect gas,
we will all die in the end,
in agony some may add,
in misery some may brag,
and in infamy like flies drop dead bloated on good trash,
eat up children it's more than just a fad.
-fa5v_O
Sep 24, 2012
Sep 24, 2012 at 5:36 AM UTC
We sit; watch an impressionist’s air over London.
Its sirens, gabble, bulbs, roar,
Rust, whistles, howls
Glory is light.
We’re suffocating, submerged in a tangerine,
bittersweet confusion of love
locked up with every withering dream below.
I’ve questioned what’s real when she blinks at me
and stopped existing when she closed her eyes.
This sky is the blitz, the fire in six six six.
But in all time and space,
It is here that we're stuck.
And we’re stuck here together.
Apr 9, 2013
Apr 9, 2013 at 10:24 AM UTC
I am a simulation rebelling against my natural coding.
I refuse to believe what others think, just because it's written in the pages of an old book,
that, if you flip over too quickly,
could cut you.
I am an alien, lost on a planet unknown,
trying to speak English to its inhabitants,
and all they speak is in tongues.
I see their mouths moving
and yet I hear nothing a gabble of words
that string like rope out of their mouths
to strangle.
I am the scissors,
cutting the Moira between me and you.
I left you a note on the nightstand
with the wedding ring I wore
at first, it acted like a buoy, kept me afloat,
now it is made of lead,
and, with permission, it'd to drag me to the depths.
I am the looped flowers growing
out of my grandmothers piano,
my fingers play melodies that
the birds can sing,
so the children of the future can hear my voice.
I am the scent of your dead mother's perfume.
The one that haunts you whilst you sleep,
and kisses your cheek to make sure you
still think of me.
I am the treehouse set alight,
without a match in my hands,
or gasoline as my lotion,
I sink further and further into the grounds
as the flame rises,
choking you with my scent,
you cry out for mercy at Maria up above.
Jan 25, 2018
Jan 25, 2018 at 8:02 PM UTC
I'm doing this no justice.
Saving my tongue for dryer days, keeping the ones I actually love from losing their own pinkish tails in my waning nonsense.
Sane and civil... because I am my fathers shifting chameleon; his white blazer and my mothers blood orange; her Lorazepam.
My name alone is treaty.
One lonely gabble lodges itself inside of my esophagus.
Get lost founding father.
Burn harder rebellion.
I need me on my surface, not buried under the expected ammunition of ink.
End your sparkle, sparkler.
Here, your exploding gold only crushes the windpipe of flowers.
I have nightmares that stretch my fears towards our waking sun.
Yawning out the last sighs of moon.
Once again, I hesitate and stumble on tongue.
I've seen my words startle rust like the flat cat call 'boos’ of halloween towards November.
Since I've been buried, halloween hasn't missed a year.
And the gibberish of its mask will always sting as resonant.
Dec 29, 2012
Dec 29, 2012 at 2:35 AM UTC
Tongue tied on double speak
I’m counting off diseased freckles
Waiting on a fragment to leak
This house sure sounds bleak
Miss Mary found hysteria
In a pillbox prescription
Developed quite the predilection
And overriding addiction
Her infant Michael drank Drano,
He found under the sink
Life stripped in a blink
Should have had a child lock, one would think
Arthur vanished with the birth of a daughter
He thought the whole notion was too big a bother
Left the girl alone in life
To struggle though adolescence without a father
Claire, the good one, wasn’t without her faults
All she did was babel
About her family life or lowly rabble
Confucius orders you to cease this gabble
Ear warped on endless noise
I’m counting off diseased freckles
Thinking up ******* ploys
Or perhaps I should just lose my poise
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 3:14 AM UTC
Hear that barking gabble coming across the land.
The people of the air shout Remember,
Remember the closing of the season, and going
somewhere we remembered only in our being,
that we announce in this great song of departure,
this song of approaching cold and the moon's velvet breath.
See how gray gathers on the harvested land and in the south
the moon anchors an archipelago of orange smoke-cloud.
So here they come around again, shouting,
guided in single-hearted delirium,
gliding through the long slow turns that
lead at last to the final letting go. See them
stringing now across the the evening sky,
beating their wild hearts across the smooth, blurred horizon.
Dec 16, 2012
Dec 16, 2012 at 4:59 PM UTC
Oh to say it so dearly, It was a great show.
I stayed out and watched it for a good hour.
The wind had come out of some hidden pocket. Like a thief in the night,
it scurried out excitedly through the screen door flying shut behind it,
and looking at the stark line drawn across the horizon;
a wall of cloud with so distinct an edge of gray, and at the same time
so thin
as to see the shadow
blue sky on the other side.
It was just a sheet.
The wind like a blanket,
energy surged, and the blood pumped a little faster at it's touch.
Then leaves began swirling,
as if fleeing for cover around the legs.
sweeping over to the porch,
while the canvas of clouds pitched its ever looming tent.
On over to get a plain view of my street lamp,
watching the tree's now twisting like spaghetti;
branches twisting in ways you would expect to break them,
all with a humdrum pitter-patter of rogue raindrops,
accompanied by that shrill electric thickness...
that makes your skin simmer, your mind hum, and your eyes glow.
The light of the streetlamp showing all the rain more clearly,
and all at once coming like a horde en masse down a hill.
Someone had given the signal,
and so it began.
The floodgates were released.
The opera had begun in earnest, with it's effects and sounds, lights, action!
The foreplay had given way to the full force of wetness.
In the pith of the light it looked as though the lamp was now a fountain.
The lightning being so evenly dispersed, the sky like a screen to see a stroboscopic chaos, so serene.
The wind and rain so perfectly mixed,
so perfectly so to syphon off a single breath of mist upon the face.
I stood like a boy of six in a parade.
Enthralled by the power, the nonchalance, and the purity of might.
Humans and animals, cars and bicycles, birds and branches, all pulling a hasty retreat.
I watched and watched, and watched more, and never got bored, only a little damp.
I came in and went up to the bedroom above the porch and lay on my window cloud
and drowsily watched the show in a bubble, til the end.
Nothing lets me see so clearly like a good rain.
People who wish for sunshine everyday are idiots.
Oct 25, 2014
Oct 25, 2014 at 1:09 PM UTC
Silently, shadowed by night,
Its eyes shining like tears,
It pads through the desolated undergrowth
Listening for sounds in the grass
The tripping of feet, the scampering
Crunch of paws. Lithely stepping
Through the trees, a mile further on
The fox sniffs the air. The stubbled moon
Flings down its steel-like shafts
Of thin even light, stabbing through
The gloom.
The stream flows around the dying plants
Breaking the bank. The River Vole slides down
Into the labouring water, older than the
Landscape it bites through, and it pounces
Grabbing the voles neck in its maw,
Ripping the flesh apart. The cat throws
It into the air, catching it again,
Its teeth rending off flesh. It pads back into the dark.
Nose delving into the air , the fox sniffs blood.
It turns towards the water
Breaking the bank, turns towards
Its slow sibilant sound, muzzle aloft
As if drawn upward by slithers of string,
The playful moon moving smoothly with the clouds.
The cat is shaken by its presence.
The grouse gabble in their fear.
The fox pounces, caught in the air
Floating as if in a snapshot
Held there by silvery light,
It lands with untroubled finesse
As the cat screams.
The stream blanches, the moon seems smug,
The night closes as the fox eats.
Dec 29, 2018
Dec 29, 2018 at 5:30 PM UTC
Enid turned her wheels
A red flash through
Luscious green
Across the wall of corns
In what felt like
No time at all
The gabble reconvened
Inside the hessian on bread street
Taiyo and Darcy
Evoked the Spanish coast
Fresh faces following
More mature fingers
Frankie and Debs
Move us from Spanish shores
To Antarctica, with penguins
Brian and David
Then comes 'The Man'
Four men , four beautiful men
To play us out and
We don't stand a chance with them now
Jul 6, 2014
Jul 6, 2014 at 3:38 PM UTC
The mind drifts,
Away and away,
To that far away place
Where my Heart stays.
It resides with you
In that place I long to be.
Here in class we chit and chat:
We gabble in Spanish,
We scribble in writing,
We yammer in literature,
And we run for sport,
But no matter the distraction
My Heart escapes.
To thoughts of you
It goes to wait.
Nov 23, 2010
Nov 23, 2010 at 12:26 AM UTC
Google and gabble,
obsequious prattle
and remove from the room, the loom.
Take it away, to a place that will pay
and abate the resuscitated gloom
Reel the wheel and make the deal
and make sure its all for naught
Pave the way that the children shall play
in the shade when the sun gets too hot
for when the heat is arise’d,
the sun is despise’d
and makers of fur garments rail
but the skirts they get shorter
and men’s thoughts get sordid
as hormones begin to wail
but the heat it don’t last
when you’re travelin fast
with millions of miles behind
there’s more up ahead,
but surely you’ll be dead
when you get to where you’re tryin to find
runnin away when you refuse to play
and work well with others
but with those that you hate
you can truly relate
cause all men its known are brothers
so go back home
you’ve roamed to Rome
and the heat has long since passed
for youth it is fleeting
and as your heart is beating
take advantage for it shall not last
Aug 17, 2011
Aug 17, 2011 at 8:22 AM UTC
this thing that I do.. or, anyway, try to do,
this continuous babble gabble, with sprinkles on top,
this day-to-day quest,
this poorly timed choreography,
this #bro, #nohomo, #gay thing I do with my brain and heart,
this endless wine powered whining habit of mine,
this desire to know,
this curiosity and unceasing need to find out,
this joy of seeing your face every day in the mirror I use for shaving once in a while,
this midnight torment,
this heat and cold feet feeling,
this skanderbeg with the ****** inside my right arm,
this everlasting need of being pushed to the ground and all of the climbing that comes afterwards,
this fight club that I invented in my own apartment,
this bad scenery where all the bad quirks are lost,
this family reunion around a blue Facebook table,
this Christmas compulsion regularly displayed,
this recital of random thoughts,
this list of contacts,
this Friday evening pathetic chorus,
this fear of rejection and hope for what will come,
this weird structure of one's feelings,
this flat choice of words and bad timing,
this spurious urgency for acknowledgement,
this "me feeling" for me,
this firm handshake with a smile and maybe a hug at the end,
this thing that I do is called, in a strange way, #love.
and I can say that there are only few moments when I have my regrets for trying to show it,
like a little girl does with her skirt, lifted above her head
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 8:24 AM UTC
[Refrain 1 Confidently]
Our mum is such a softie, no matter what we do
She always gives us what we want, and hugs and kisses too.
We get up late, don’t go to school, and hang about the street
We drop our litter on the floor and scuff it with our feet.
But now …
Do you think we may have gone too far?
Perhaps we should say sorry?
Or is it too late for that?
[Refrain 2 Less confidently]
Our mum is such a softie, no matter what we do
She always gives us what we want, and hugs and kisses too.
We get up late, don’t go to school, and hang about the street
We drop our litter on the floor and scuff it with our feet.
But now…
I don’t know about you, but I’m frightened.
I’ve never seen her like this.
Even when she was cross, she never shouted,
And never, ever hit me.
[Refrain 3 Hesitantly]
Our mum is such a softie, no matter what we do
She always gives us what we want, and hugs and kisses too.
We get up late, don’t go to school, and hang about the street
We drop our litter on the floor and scuff it with our feet.
But now…
She has turned her dark face upon us.
Her steely eyes glitter, her upraised hand
Threatens the very worst you can imagine;
Storm, earthquake, thunderous wave, a hail of fire
Burning, consuming, killing, laying waste.
[Refrain 4 A desperate gabble]
Our mum is such a softie, no matter what we do
She always gives us what we want, and hugs and kisses too.
We get up late, don’t go to school, and hang about the street
We drop our litter on the floor and scuff it with our feet...
Is it too late?
Do we have a final chance?
She was so fair, so bright;
So kind, so all-providing, so benign…
But, now …
Jan 30, 2017
Jan 30, 2017 at 5:56 PM UTC
Back to the basics.
They will tell you about money;
All the goodies it has power over
The jets,ferraris , benz,
Holiday in Disneyland or Wonderland
Good will mistresses among others.
But they wont tell you about books
That have lifted up souls and shaped kingdoms.
They will tell you about secrets
Too sacred to mention.
The shady deals that fatten wallets
All quick-rich-scam schemes,
Even tested and proven niceties
But they wont tell you about books
Whose warmth turned swords into ploughshares
Spears into pruning hooks.
They will tell you about fashion;
Addias, Nike, Puma, converse
The exorbitant price they call for,
The prestige, pride and position
For all faithful trendsetters and keepers
But they wont tell you about books
Which ignite creativity and innovation to ***** success.
They will tell about the anointed ones
Thou shall not touch the anointed
Who preach water as they gabble wine
Their sleek livelihood
Their gullible congregants.
But they wont tell you about books
Where ignorance will slashed, packed be buried or good.
My son, many are speakers, this world carries;
Empty cans that make the loudest noise.
If you desire knowledge, then read.
Read.
Read
And READ!
Jun 15, 2017
Jun 15, 2017 at 3:46 AM UTC
It is a shadow that haunts me.
It lurks near,
whisper doubts,
insecurities, imperfections into
my ears.
It wraps it claws around my chest and
grips,
tightens
Until I can barely breathe.
Until I fall to my knees,
Innocent phrases turned
sinister, venomous,
"I'm Busy."Sounds
Like the fall of the
gabble.
And the shadows hiss,
"You are an annoyance."
Apr 24, 2015
Apr 24, 2015 at 10:06 PM UTC