"incarcerating" poems
Graffiti, Graffiti, Graffiti
Being bled onto
The landscapes between thighs
Incarcerating women's wombs
Justifying men's genes
Foreigners appropriating
Women's and men's sexualities
Losing the power to be
When changing our roles' long overdue
Gendering our words and attitudes
Man, who taught you to be a chauvinist!
Woman, who taught you to be a *********
Don't put your god in gendered bigotry
Do man's emotions feminize him?
When will women freely carry torches!
What gender do you assign this voice?
What gender do you assign this words?
Will the masses even understand these choices?
Don't worry, my sexuality won't infect you
Criminalizing sexuality
Placing it front and center, implying that's all I am
Graffiti, Graffiti, Graffiti
Being bled onto
The landscapes between thighs
Graffiti, defiling the masses not high classes
Because men and women of society
Full of stride, take pride, in their gendered hyde
Graffiti, defiling the masses not high classes
Ignored hoods, barrios, countrysides, ghettos, projects
Devouring women's and men's bodies
Younger and younger people falling to HIV/AIDS and STDS
Vaginas receiving the violence, wombs bringing misery
LGBT youth ****** into fire
Lost males (in mental chains) ****** to assert their manhoods
Graffiti, Graffiti, Graffiti
Full of dangerous chemicals, being sprayed onto
The landscapes between thighs
Attempting to legislate our stories, without warrant
Jan 29, 2013
Jan 29, 2013 at 10:06 PM UTC
Dragons spewing fire
Incarcerating the burning soul
Hatred seeded within
Raging across the premises
Engulfing everything
Turning to ashes
Blown away by the winds
Remnants of soot
Scathed with dark stains
Fire burns one and all
May 20, 2015
May 20, 2015 at 12:39 AM UTC
We have our dreams,
My perfect stranger,
Though we never really met,
Perhaps; never shall meet.
Still, we amble along together,
Navigating the lamentable brook,
Unfulfilled promises, foaming,
Swirling around our bare feet,
The cold of reality numbing our toes,
Skipping over rocks of broken ideals,
Once cherished, but not here, no,
They are fractious and discarded.
Trickles of tormented sighs, tease,
While avoiding guiding ropes of life,
Which would snag our thoughts,
Straining against friction burns,
As they attempt to bind us tightly,
Holding us prisoner, when in truth,
We are capable of incarcerating ourselves.
Although, our minds are free, yes,
Living beneath the same impassive moon,
Bathing within its stolen light,
Stealing our own, moments of peace,
As in sleep, we slip away unnoticed,
To hold each other, so loving,
Above the clouds, sharing caresses,
Smooching around, and round,
Oblivious of telltale tears on our cheeks.
A shooting star arcs across the sky,
‘Shall we wish?’ You ask,
‘Nah,’ I reply; wishing is for fools,
Be content; acceptance is the key,
My perfect stranger,
We have our dreams.
© Paul M Chafer 2014
Jul 16, 2014
Jul 16, 2014 at 7:43 AM UTC
A feeling of claustrophobia has begun to confine me.
This swamp of ideas thickens inside me, the murky clay mud making each step twice as demanding as the last. The once clear flowing waters of my dreams seem to be crystallizing, clouding and freezing over, ceasing the stream of my escape. My brain is callusing over incarcerating me, forcing me to experience the hardening of my own being. A reaction inside halting my imagination and depriving me of the ability to call out for help. These thoughts and words I evacuate onto this page only act as a catalyst speeding the process of my inevitable silence. There will come a time when the swamps have solidified, and the waters of my dreams become frozen clouded crystals trapped in place. My brain will develop into a callous, rendering my mind mute, I can feel this metamorphosis materializing yet there is nothing I can do to stop it, the development has already begun, all I can do is wait until a feeling of...
A feeling of claustrophobia has begun to confine me.
Dec 27, 2014
Dec 27, 2014 at 2:54 AM UTC
Your heart gets heavy and you say lets do it again
Unable to raise a white flag to your good friend
your mind continues its destruction from within
Excessive thoughts and troublesome plights the enemy continues its rampage through the night
Strength unbearable impossible to fight
Incarcerating you to the prison that is your mind
Aug 23, 2015
Aug 23, 2015 at 3:41 PM UTC
Holding me firm, I can feel it incarcerating me.
With my ankles bruised from carrying the same heavy chains, day by day.
Chains, that will keep hurting my ankles with every step I take.
I can hear them squeak, tearing my tympanum with every drag.
Reminding me remorselessness that I am one more slave.
Working under its rules, shaping my life with my every breath.
Punishing me with all my memories and rewarding me with an unknown future.
At night it laughs spitefully seeing that it has caught me in its timeless web of an insomniac hex.
And in the morning it plays the same joke seeing that it has caught me in an eternal doze.
I wake up , following the ritual it has for me, slapping me in the back with its whip declaring its power over me, as my owner.
At 7:00 am I wake up indoctrinated by a false faith" Thank You 'God' for this new day ( I thank a 'God' I do not know a 'God' I do not follow)" I suddenly feel confuse.
7:30 am; I shower.
7:40am; I choose my outfit, one in particular that will disguise my insecurities.
7:50am; I have breakfast. My palate already knows the taste, and it protests intensely for a new tang.
8:00am; I walk out of my house, feeling the wind through my body silencing the cacophony of the chains and the beeping of the time clock they hold.
With every beep, I realize I can be late. I rush.
9:00am; I start my ritual, managing papers in an office full of sick people, just like me. Moored by their own chains to their own sorrows, with different time clocks and slaved by the same owner.
4:00pm; I plead it to go faster, to show me mercy. It laughs.
7:00pm; It frees me from my work routine, I thank it before it slaps me in the back again.
8:00 pm; I'm home the chains feel looser now, and I have a break.
9:00pm; I eat dinner same flavor, my palate prepares to taste the same.
10;00pm; It orders me to go to bed, to laugh again about by insomnia and wake me up with no pity.
It doesn't care about what I need, I go under its rules.
It threatens me everyday with my memories and it frightens me with an unknown tomorrow.
And, I only have 24 hours each day,60 minutes in each hour and 60 seconds in each minute to do what the calendar of life has for me .
I was convicted with a human felony, and I am currently serving a life sentence in this time machine.
I am cursed by time and my challenge is to defeat procrastination and monotony.
Dec 8, 2013
Dec 8, 2013 at 12:15 AM UTC
I'll give you my thoughts for a penny.
Only a penny, because they're certainly not worth a nickel, five cents for the five fingers I'll frequently run along my collarbones, imagining myself imagining the moment when you did the same, all that's left now is the ghost of your fingers, negative space.
Not worth a dime. A dime I'll use to buy a caramel that'll glue my teeth together and trap the words I know I'll regret later on.
The sweetness of my unsaid words will linger for hours.
Not worth a quarter, 25, enough for all my fingers and toes, and one more for the hand that seems to linger around my throat, incarcerating monologues I can't seem to make anyone understand.
Certainly not worth a dollar, a dollar I'd use to buy sour patch kids, partly because I know they're your favorite, (you can appreciate the way they'll sting your tongue after a while, and the oxymoron living in the sour sugar that coats them), and partly because I sure am sour, and after all, I'm only a kid.
Dec 10, 2012
Dec 10, 2012 at 8:21 PM UTC
“I’m still in awe of words” (in life, as in poetry, timing is everything)
objects, humans, surprise and interrupt our
daily modalities, knocking us, yo! to the ground,
we, pounding it, for the word void appears,
the frustration of incapacity incarcerating,
accompanied by the loudest silenced scream,
of no poetry available, try again later!
in life, as in poetry, timing is everything
we walkabout, thinking of the scheduled eventualities, or
the dates calendar-circled, though some questioned marked,
in pencil inserted, will I be a mother, find me a husband,
a human grander grandee, fit to be with me a noble progenitor
of more than our generation, watching the sidewalk cracks for an
inkling of when, on or about such and such an alteration,
a seam undone,
a stumbling, seeing a realization as we fall, hands extending,
a notice of arrival,
all needing reconnoitering, commemorating, a poem prepared,
but none to no avail
in life, as in poetry, timing is everything
so we are in awe of words, so necessary, everybody knows,
the awe in awesome, a description for the pixels encapsulates
in I-phone photos,
the where and the why of when, I was grinning like a stupid fool,
the inability to deliver precisely when required the covering of
an appropriate description, your words, use your words, will
fail you spectacularly and so we remain awed, realizing
in life, as in poetry, timing is everything
but awesomely awesome word worlds, near and dear, held forever
in scrapbooks, the literary overlay of the treasures of everyday life,
are the still life of our longevity contextual, the celebratory,
the unexpected losses, largest to smallest, in size order,
kept fresh when you flip through those poems in dusty binders,
in oversized sewing boxes, yellowing in concert with our eyes,
graying with follicles of past pluperfect,
recalling not just the when’s, but the more important, now, the
wherefore and whereupon, the words marking the conjunctions,
recoding the recorded synapses firing sequentially, brain to fingers, the ah so of the poetry of lifetimes
“I’m still in awe of words” (in life, as in poetry, timing is everything)
<>
Saturday
September
21st
2019
Sep 21, 2019
Sep 21, 2019 at 1:31 PM UTC
She was a sad, sad girl, with eyes of glittering diamonds,
You know, electrifying and incarcerating,
Piercing the light,
She had hope despite the fire that burn, burn, burn so deep inside her,
That burning pain she felt when friends abandoned her and boys kept replacing her every week,
But despite the heartache and the long days she kept on going,
breathing in and out,
slowly,
Take the awful and miserable thoughts elsewhere,
deviate the pain, with love,
Find those who care and spend time with them,
Drink a cup of hot cocoa and forget,
Thats what she did,
And those ever permeating eyes kept on searching heartily for another,
Despite the agony and rips and tears she kept on getting,
She wasn't giving up,
Not yet,
Not just yet,
Despite the sensitivity she had and the naivety of how the horrible world worked, not yet,
Not yet,
So she kept on smiling in the rain,
Maybe she find someone to kiss her in it to one day
So boys continued on with their games and she continually would lose them,
And girls…let's just say they weren't dependable people…
So off on her own,
Walking along the road alone,
And sometimes she actually preferred it to be this way
Oct 20, 2012
Oct 20, 2012 at 4:21 PM UTC
Without you my heart is calm
My head is quiet
Every worry is neatly tucked away where it belongs
Then one day out of the blue you called
You called and you compared me to objects hidden in the fog
You said
You couldn’t quite see me
But I thought, you wandered these streets every day
Then you said
You knew I was somewhere
You just couldn’t remember the place
I guess you didn’t want me to be in your way
But then I heard you say
That you didn’t want to hit me
Or hurt me in any way
You continued to say
There was this fire ablaze in your chest
I was a passion so toxic yet more cunning than the rest
I put your better judgement to the test
Then you confessed
Without me your head would be a mess
That comparing me to the fog was twisting your heart
That within it held truth
Your fear escaped the incarcerating bars of your lips
That everything you ever wanted was so close yet so far
You feared taking time from me
You begged to see me this week
Weakly I agreed
When I saw you
You said you didn’t want to rob me of my time
You held my cheeks and whispered sweet
“When you could be out there discovering who you are.”
Then you softly said
These words forever embedded in my head
“But you’ll always own a piece of my heart.”
No no no I will not give in
You continued
“When I have children they’ll ask me about my first love
And I’ll tell them who you are
I’ll explain that I allowed you to break my heart
That I should’ve known from the start that when two souls like ours meet
It will never end well”
Finally silence set
I looked to you and said
Love when the fog lifts back into the sky
When your world is finally clear
It will be easy to see
That I am fear
Fear is chance
Jul 6, 2015
Jul 6, 2015 at 4:41 PM UTC
Trite query from pen so weary
My muse has blown a fuse
The light that once shined has declined
My fleeting hope hangs from a rope
A vagabond whose muse did abscond
With illuminating spark leaving him in the dark
Out on a lark; my scuttled engine in park
Night and day I recon the lexicon
But the literary discourse is no recourse
To a stray itinerate who has lost his way
The stye in my eye has begun to cry
The pus is no fuss; my page is dry
A rhyme for a dime would be sublime
Perhaps, a bartered verse in my purse
Will break the curse, or still worse
Might stain with shame my languishing pain
Incarcerating my fraudulent pen in the critic's den
Oh, if words would rain then my brain drain
Would filter inspiration to my perspiration
The fertile strain if only but a grain
Would fertile sprouts shoot extinguishing my doubts
Aug 8, 2011
Aug 8, 2011 at 8:25 AM UTC
-
not as a hammer, nor a fist,
but as the words on a page
of a book you know so well
without ever having reached for it
as if your brain had been yoked,
it had been your thoughts
draining away through
the tip of the pen,
to be captured
by the permanence held in white
or a syringe;
sodium thiopental,
20mg norcuron or pavulon
the littlest
of hand prints
pressed in concrete,
incarcerating the image
for the parents
who lost their
memories
this is how he struck me --
the wanderlust punk
i saw him
as i see the new moon,
a mirror without illumination
in the dark,
the mind cannot
fill in blanks
besides, my last check bounced
and my word bank got bailed out
-
Feb 12, 2013
Feb 12, 2013 at 9:48 PM UTC
One day you'll find the words
and they will be pure and simple,
effortless as first glances
unfurling a story in your heart.
Clean sheets of paper
are dirtied with confessions
bled from infatuated minds.
A poem is aligned
like dust in the sunlight.
Unlock your doors. Sweep
yourself off your feet.
No commas, no periods.
Words caught in nets taste
like love in the air.
Wake out of your slush pile in the dead of night,
searching for a hand underneath the sheets
or the vague outline of a body
smoothed against the darkness of your room.
Words huddle close against the back of your brain.
Our moments are the smallest handprints,
pressed into the permanence of concrete,
incarcerating the image for parents
who lost their memories.
We vowed never to become them;
our story drained from the tip of a pen
onto a sheet of paper and your heart--
held forever in white and red.
Don't tell me the moon is shining,
show me the glint of light of broken glass
because actions speak
louder than words.
What is love if you don't let him
watch The Terminator--Again?
(Even though you hate explosions and guns).
As the window to your mind tugs shut,
scatter your words into a breeze
like the seeds of a dandelion.
There's always another story to be written
even when this one
ends.
Jan 24, 2014
Jan 24, 2014 at 3:09 PM UTC
I’ll re-evaluate my view on the police force,
On the criminal justice system,
On the prison industrial complex on the government when they stop incarcerating non-violent drug users, beating black children,
And when they release my very much innocent father from his life sentence.
Dec 9, 2013
Dec 9, 2013 at 12:26 AM UTC
We don’t ask the questions we want to ask
out of fear of the answer,
or of the lie.
“Would you miss me if I went away?”
“How much do you love me?”
“Would you visit my grave?”
“ And If I died,
would you cry?”
Jul 26, 2013
Jul 26, 2013 at 3:38 AM UTC
When demos loses kratia
our Greek fathers shake,
their heads in disapproval
unbelieving two millennia,
myriads of wars and corpses
abused, burned, bombed,
imprisoned and enslaved,
did not suffice to effectively mutate,
a thought into a fact.
Establishing governments supposed
to ensure our rights,
cater for the enhancement
of the quality of our lives,
irrespective of gender, ethnicity,
religion, ****** inclinations,
but most of all identity,
personal fundamental beliefs.
The Universal right to think.
Impostors passing off
as modern democracies,
collectively self-labelled
the mighty Western World,
despite more than none are led
by recognised dictators we accept,
as they only harm their own
Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba
to mention just a few.
And though as humans
we can merely hope
for unity strive
to accomplish the utopia
respecting demos differences,
no one can condemn
members of society
exerting their right to speak,
express their thoughts and will.
If division is for some,
a plausible solution
it is not for who disagrees
to revoke democracia,
gaol ideas by incarcerating bodies
fundamentals of authoritarianism,
as Madrid calls for European
arrest warrants for perpetrators of ideas
of independence I recall
famous words from the past.
"Ideas are far more powerful than guns.
We would not let our enemies have guns,
why should we let them have ideas?"
Yours faithfully, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
Nov 4, 2017
Nov 4, 2017 at 9:42 AM UTC
I let my flesh bathe in the calm newborn sun rays,
While I listen to the gossiping topics presented to me by the waves, consumed.
Outside looking in, I'm just a naked man standing aimlessly in natures womb yet,
Through my eyes, I'm standing on a million acres of emerald dust, with my skin reflecting the surface of the Sun, my eyes incarcerating nebulas watching diamonds dancing in all sorts of blue.
And then there's this crown growing out of my skull....lovely.
Welcome to the land of a thousand drums residing in my chest,
Roaring with the cascades of energy my soul has possessed many of lifetimes before I became its host.
Welcome to the mind of primal instinct, where its shrouded by the freeform jungle like crown spawning out my my skull.
Welcome to the love I've had pleasures and pains of watching; wrong but felt right & right but felt wrong......
- Beau
Feb 17, 2016
Feb 17, 2016 at 6:30 PM UTC
Staring at chandeliers.
When my life once was a hollow valley. Nostalgia is not what it used to be.
I can smell your touch, through the cigarette smoke.
I can hear your thoughts through this party of souls.
Sometimes I feel as though I want to breach my soul separating, it into pieces so I can
search each piece for the clues of significant meaning.
Incarcerating my emotions.
I do not give them feet to walk out of my mouth or body language.
Forget how to breathe.
Once beneath such depths of thought, how would it be possible to circulate breath?
Controversial speech.
Stay calm while I caress your hair of dissonance.
Dream of Life
Watching life as I lean against the wall.
Zen
Everything within me is untitled.
It was not meant to be understood.
The End
This place is not my home.
I can’t take this or anything with me, but I will see You.
Apr 10, 2012
Apr 10, 2012 at 3:37 PM UTC
Onslot of drugs
Have left a hum
A constant buzz
A steady strum
Reverberating
Obliterating
Exhilarating
Exasperating
Saturating
and
Accelerating
the
Evaporating
Liberating
now
Incarcerating
©Pauline Russell
Apr 11, 2018
Apr 11, 2018 at 2:04 AM UTC
We had a spark that dazzled the two of us.
The spark that set me up in flames.
I struggled not to burn.
But the more I did, the more I burned,
Spreading like a wildfire within me,
Devouring everything within its path,
Incarcerating my hopes, my dreams,
My everything.
I feared the fire consuming me,
But I realized that it’s not.
Instead it’s purifying me
So I surrendered to its flames.
You see me burning down to ashes
And dying a thousand deaths.
But from these ashes I shall emerge
Clothed in nothing but my strength,
More beautiful than ever before.
Watch my resurrection…
I am Phoenix… rising.
©Penchie Limbo
Feb 19, 2018
Feb 19, 2018 at 10:23 PM UTC