"haggles" poems
I’m lost in Rome,
all the roads have brought me here.
I’m searching for home,
Holding a picture of it near.
I step into the metronome,
I enter with an identity in my pockets.
I speak to the garden gnome,
He’s asking if I’d like to buy a silver locket.
At a legato tempo,
10. The metronome keeps ticking.
My lips only stay chapped,
Simply because I won’t stop licking them.
“I’m looking for the Lucky Fix.
The Shaved Jaguar told me this is the place.”
The Gnome haggles me up in my face,
“Oh please, I know all the old tricks!
I now control your brain stem.
You have a long way to go! You’ve been trapped!”
At an Allegro tempo;
20. The Metronome keeps tocking.
On the stage,
The Kangaroos are still kick-boxing.
Breaking free of their cage,
The only price is to make you dance.
“I seek to barter for some potions",
They want to know, "So Why have I been cursed?”
The Hooting Owl, offers them a grand notion.
“Keeping thinking that and you might just burst.”
30.The metronome stops on the off-beat, .
“Where is the Lucky Fix?”
I began to grow impatient!
“Don’t you first need your feet?
Your priorities need to be layered bricks.
Your addiction to gratification will lead you to defeat!
You can find the matches in the Fire Station.
I know some of the tricks. That’s a good place to start.”
The Goblins are looking for the heart.
40. With a Presto Tempo
You must reset the Metronome.
TJW 2013
.
Oct 23, 2013
Oct 23, 2013 at 12:37 PM UTC
I told you the ticking madness was enough to turn it into a panic race, so detached from all that we are made of, we become nothing we are made from. Now ingesting genetically assembled seeds - that don’t deserve the name seed at all. For seed is life, she belongs to mother earth, not a synthetic corporate beast.
A patented man made pill that sprouts an idea of life, a deception, that when ingested in it’s varied shelved forms and assimilated, draws us further and further away from nature, and our nature, and man, now part robotic manifestation through assimilation alone.
And they come with their chains and capitalist whips to break the backs of the earth reapers and sowers who fed yesterday, who fed their fathers, chaining them into a prison unbreakable, suffocating beneath a system controlled by paper. But surely man, his free thought, seed and crop, is more valuable than paper slavery?
And our brother labours in pain, all but to produce a good, or a bad that the unsuspecting haggles for, all because their growing inner robot has a dogmatic pining to be more than nature itself. He seeks supernatural, he seeks fame and status, and to be a god, but that “god” has no concept of the cosmos he was set forth to know, to praise and to be praised by, so instead he worships artificial idols.
And the fight continues. And the madness ticks on, debilitating the organic ones; seed robbery after seed robbery, crop seize and acquisition after policy, after policy, after tariff after bill and there is no bailout. It’s all woven into a web of intricacies, leaving no room for natural, no room for humble.
Then they say the meek shall inherit the earth, and I wonder when, and by question alone I am reminded of the ticking madness. I am reminded that natural, never questions time.
Apr 24, 2016
Apr 24, 2016 at 5:19 AM UTC
two feet shuffle
onto the matted down, stained-brown, maroon-ish
welcome mat while
a head shakes off the dusting of snow
its shaggy hair has collected.
breath billows out of a mouth
like smoke from a burning cigar as
a body, with glasses fogged, fingers frosted,
bundled up in scarfs, and mittens, and layers galore
inches into the grocery store
where a bagboy slouches in a
half-dazed stupor, eyes glued to the clock,
a self-righteous old lady with her
back bent, voice shrill,
haggles the price of soup
and a baggy-eyed mom snaps hushed
chastisements to a dirty-faced boy,
with ratty hair falling onto his blushed face.
in this store, customers move slow,
with nowhere to be and nowhere to go
and the holiday jingle heard playing
above them, betrays their heavy hearts
and sunken spirits.
outside, it is cold,
but inside this store,
it is no different.
Jul 28, 2014
Jul 28, 2014 at 2:24 AM UTC
The charity shop smells of yesterday's arguments
and the mannequins legs' are slimmer than mine.
She poses ethereal in the window,
wears a skirt I outgrew 2 years ago,
he would be on her if she could part her peachy lips.
I look beyond, hidden, watch
while he haggles over the price of his own shirts.
I laugh, I skip and potter home,
my thighs chafe,
I don’t care.
Dec 15, 2010
Dec 15, 2010 at 2:24 AM UTC
I.
On the surface easily gliding,
are my hands. I keep on the table
an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
whose face I can almost touch.
When let go of closure, air thins and I move
secretly with fluency. This is how objects
escape my grip.
II.
In front of the eatery, a transit.
I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
The face next to me, disquieting the music
of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
another throng of absence. As a substitute
for beings shackled to duty,
the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
the wind through opened windows.
III.
Define space as a venue for collision.
Say when a red-haired woman straddling
a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
She ascribes her presence to my footing
and from where she left off, I take form
of her expired movement.
Found strangeness is that space
is what happens when remembered. But hold no
bearing and rear contrivance,
trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
the in-betweenness and then transmutes
an occurence,
say the volatile shape of a hand when
clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
reticence of a troubling question.
IV.
A man carries a take away and is now
amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
housing a familiar language. Home.
But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
trying to transact a being angled towards home.
They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
Air once stale, is now succulent with the
resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
of times the vehicle trundles within
the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
with rest. He is home,
unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
freed from a vitrine.
May 13, 2016
May 13, 2016 at 6:05 AM UTC
They woke up to the peek of the mellow sun
Its rays not permitted by the dark ominous skies of the morning drizzle
As if the day have still the quality of night
Where the shy were shameless, their mirth boisterous
Where the bold haggles on the fringes of revolution
Until slowly the scalding heat of passions from the night passed
And evaporated forming mist and fog and dew.
The time held back
As they strip the night's cloak
Traces of stardust freckled their skin
A reminder of the raucous night
It was mixed feelings of hatred and love
Of loathing and yearning;
Of surrender, or of revolution!
The foundations of the day slowly cackles
As the sun breaks through that thick cloud that hangs above their heads.
All the venery and vanity comes alive
As the sun takes the cover that hides the depravation
The loudness of the roosters' crow in the countryside
Were overpowered by the boisterous hum of engines
And a people once again facing the grim task of living
Silenced are the laughters and grins and joyous singing
Repressed are the dancing and carousing
Dissolved again are the reveries for the death of the sun!
Aug 8, 2017
Aug 8, 2017 at 3:18 AM UTC