"judder" poems
Advice from Freuchen , the explorer
When Arctic blizzards blow
in Northern Greenland
and your supplies are low
and dwindling
the best advice is build an igloo
and wait out the storm.
And when you hear the wolves
howling with hunger
and prowling on your igloo roof
it’s best to go outside
and sing - only occasionally
though you will fight to be heard
above the judder of the wind.
Inside the igloo will be problematic
the walls seem to close in
as claustrophobic days proceed
it’s not an illusion
but a fact
each breath freezes moisture in the walls
and breath by breath they thicken
spaces close around your body
breathing yourself in a coffin of ice.
There’s no instrument of death
devised by man to so terrify
as being locked in space and time
each breath reminding you
of that closeness to that final loss
of breath and an icy Arctic death.
Feb 2, 2015
Feb 2, 2015 at 10:53 AM UTC
Lazy days and choppy waves
Upon a copper sea,
A breezy, warming westerly
Is blowing down on me.
Sunlight striking wavelets
Below clouds of cotton cool
And seagulls hang in squadron lines
Aloft from oyster pool.
Road signs judder in the breeze
Ripples weave amongst long grass,
Mangroves bend in unison
And asphalt bakes in molten glass.
A parasol of brilliant blue
A picnic basket brimming high
With lemonade and icy beer
Whilst sausages and onions fry.
Two barking dogs cavort with joy
Chasing hard on sandy beach,
Leaping high in summer air
Running, fetching, ***** to each.
The lazy summer saunters in
Engulfing us with solar heat,
The pretty girls wear tiny shorts
Which breathless boys find such a treat.
Pohutukawa’s bursting forth
In waves of rich and scarlet red
Which juxtapose dark olive greens
Of leafage midst each flower bed.
A sky of brilliant powder blue
With salt spray aura in the air
As swimmers splash in gales of fun
Hot sunlight baubles kiss their hair.
Marshalg
Port Waikato beach
15 November 2011
© 2011 Marshal Gebbie
Nov 15, 2011
Nov 15, 2011 at 12:28 PM UTC
Sky is pitch and crystal cloud
Wild figures languor on the dusty ground.
Eight pairs of darken haloed eyes
Strike the blue to blacken.
Bring the night.
And bring the work
The work by voice and light
Work with reddened hands
And verbal glance at a
Smaller place that must
Be walked: a faster pace
To lose the mortal race.
Mellow hours decay with gracelessness
That cannot be dreamed
On April nights no one in the road
Can be exempt. Nothing is exempt
At the stroke of the hour.
A step cracks in the deep
In those woods with painted fronts
A step that eats a flower
Sending up devotions.
****** rocks the riverbed
Hums a note in the still.
White shoes in black line
Mechanical clarity, footfalls.
Frissons from foreshadowing
A judder and a burial.
A burial in white.
It reeks of adrenaline, God's own ketamine,
Is sundered somewhat by a Sunday.
Sunday suit and six strong suitors
Following suit to the spot
No one could say. Still, the air
Is too hot with electricity to suffer it.
Tomorrow we can say
That we all knew the night's dread
Export, but for tonight we pray
Our lambs are all a-bed
And not a one of them
Is dead.
No one taught Ophelia to swim.
The hateful eating orange of dawn
Mocks her slow and stymied progress.
Feb 7, 2010
Feb 7, 2010 at 2:51 PM UTC
Standing in a corner
Back turn towards the light.
Focused on the rhythmic judder.
Not of the heart, or of the soul.
For what I am feels soulless.
Hands held close to my body
My breath beats back onto my face
I'm shut in so close
To the total recess of what
My life has been reduced to.
Eyes slowly open and close
While my head dips down again.
Rises up, I stare off, and down again.
Habitually poised in shame.
Always in the end left with some sardonic understanding.
Dec 26, 2016
Dec 26, 2016 at 12:15 AM UTC
what is this life?
what is this gelatinous mess?
what has been done
has been done
willingly or reluctantly
- I know the moments
that have seen me
judder the gearstick the wrong way
that have seen my bones
rattle with a dreadful calcium clatter
my lungs like sandwich bags
flimsy against my heart
which throbs as some malformed peach
when a white chocolate blonde goes by
it reminds me of ice-cream
the chilly fuzz inside my skull
my nerves anesthetised
gone blue gone slow
- names clamour over one another
until I can’t separate the letters
the worth keeping
the junk mail
a train spewing passengers outside
I am knocked all over as a conker
bruises blossoming into pools of Ribena
where is the asphyxiate button?
that would wipe this page clean right?
- here is what I offer
passion by the bushel
and while I have not fired Cupid’s bow
or slurred my way through a Taylor song
I can make it work
I can learn to drive
and stop being a moth toward the light
flapping my epileptic wings till they burn
- I will scrub the soil from my skin
latch onto you and be the best possible me
float within your ripples
swig the air as if it’s lemonade
just taken from the fridge
say I am not who I was before
I am new I am fresh I am sparkling clean
like a toddler as they wobble
to make their first step
Jul 5, 2015
Jul 5, 2015 at 8:23 AM UTC
the sleeper...
riled in slumber
her face fevered
cussed about the terrain
of a floral breeding
bedding patterns and the print
bunched in struggles
in smudges
an amateur trial with sisters makeup
primal cosmetics
make a mock
daubed
ceremony for slumber
dusty and museum are her dollworks
an amphitheatre audience
overlooming her berth
flaunting the gallery shelves
sustained expressionist menace
Roman eyes and Victorian ridicule
stuffed suffering with Ugly Duckling down
****** sawdust and your sullied label
they bray and they brawl
and they sluice their gull gall
a sick drizzle
over the sleepers form
from the exterior
wild wails the weather
its being
drubbing
peers fragile
at the windowpane
a raid on this vulnerable sleeper
impounded in bedroom aloft
raised to meet the jet stream
she is fumbled in dreams...
abraded adolescent swells
judder out figments
a bleed of vandals
siling her muted childhood
parading the playground
berating old
once loved playthings
adopting no sympathy
adapting in favour
of the wild riding will
of the direful pre familiar
into the woods...
a ***** charmed breath
dressed smartly as boy
stoppers her pathway
insisting a gentleman's assistance
frustrates her recitations
of grandmothers doting
stern teachings
like fragile pottery
come to harm
broken into teeth
the quick blood beating
this nocturnal forest
busy in heat
bonding death
to refract the hustling moon
a company of wolves
fill out the clearing
not a spell too soon
their howls reverberate
jeering
mocking their new glut
sifting followers
from the raggle-taggle array of fools
the foolish dreamers
rounded up
amongst them she stands
red dressed and nervous
one hand clasping
and sexing the other
fortified
a great jaw operates here
an excited irresponsible mastication
committed to this fairytale
...agitation in her sleep
Jul 6, 2021
Jul 6, 2021 at 2:11 AM UTC
What I'm trying to say is
I want that jolt
that sudden judder
of something
you'll give me
without thinking
I want to feel it
throb in every bone of my body
I want to be blown
backwards
as if kissed by lightning
I’ll see you
but want to see you
again and again
like a sunrise on a cool morning
your face being the sun
Aug 6, 2016
Aug 6, 2016 at 10:50 AM UTC
I have an emotion of desperation at the moment, missing love and desiring it but at the same time rejecting it and wishing it not exist around me, a conflict within myself like a caterpillar in its cage of a cocoon.
And I must get out.
I feel held back by strong intangible arms that are relentlessly squeezing the life out of me. Oh, help me god. But Its roper around my neck isn’t dropping me, rather dangling me with enough life to torture me with the feeling of emptiness, a feeling of no love gained yet none to be lost in the first place. Ironically, I can’t die from the misery and can’t escape long enough for my blinks to bring me back to the hopes of an alternative reality.
Every girl I pass by has a feeling of gymniphoria, but for what? I couldn’t imagine even if I wanted to, and yet it’s merely an attempt of my soul to gather the remainder of my dignity and ****** it toward my brain in a way to flaunt it enough for me to feel it sink into my brain that I am strong enough to fight the feelings and live past it so that I can thrive once again on my former levels.
But I can’t get on this level like Kevin Gates, I had to work down and back up but down once more, and here I saunter godforsaken. My voice in a constant crescendo as I yell to the heavens for their attention once more. Hear my ******* pleas, hear the small voice as it raises and sends mountains into a judder as my wounded roar reaches its ****** and shouts passed heaven directly into the space inhabited by my thoughts.
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 18, 2015 at 11:45 AM UTC
There once was a tiny dragon,
No larger than the palm of my hand.
She burned no village, stole no princess,
Her name not spoken in fear throughout the land.
She hoarded not gold, not jewels,
Cared not for such frivolous things.
It was memories she kept in her miniscule cave
She guarded with flickering fire and scrap wings.
I went to her cave in the mountains.
Stumbled on it, by mistake;
As I lay down my head at the roots of a tree,
By an obscure and secluded lake.
She emerged in her miniature splendour,
From beneath a nearby rock.
She let out a yawn of fire;
And I froze: in awe, in shock.
She grinned a needlepoint grin,
Beckoned with one curved claw
Into her miniscule cave,
I followed: in shock, in awe.
I peered through the half-hidden opening,
Only inches larger than my head.
The dragon spoke soft but thunderous,
And this is what was said:
“This is my hoard, young human.
This is all I hold dear in the world.”
And she handed to me a birthday card -
Some edges singed, some curled.
It had writing in a swirling foreign script
That seemed to be etched, not written.
“This is the love of my first ever crush,
In the days when we were still smitten.”
“Is this all?” I scoffed, “Just pieces of paper,
and wrappers and old useless things?”
Her doll-sized body began to shudder
With a judder of claws and a flutter of wings.
No larger than my littlest finger,
She was a smaller version of herself;
But still I froze as she perched on my nose,
To her, a sizeable shelf.
“You hold no value to memories?
Then why don’t you leave yours behind?
Since they strike you as being so useless,
I’m certain you wouldn’t mind.”
Now all my memories are scraps,
Shadows of what they once were.
I wonder if she kept them somewhere,
In that diminutive cave with her.
Notes from a wife I think I had:
About the shopping, the kids? The car?
A card from my parents, a gift from a friend,
A reason for this faint lip scar.
I try to keep letters, tickets, receipts,
Compulsively, I feel I must.
But whenever I reach for that link to my past,
It is nothing but ash, but dust.
Sep 19, 2019
Sep 19, 2019 at 4:37 PM UTC
I know what its like to have your heart heave, wrack, and judder with its broken dreams
and I know what its like to sing, dance, and be free as a bird
But mostly I know what its like to be unthankful for days where hardly nothing happens at all.
Feb 4, 2016
Feb 4, 2016 at 8:34 AM UTC
You know, something always bugged me about love.
I always assumed it was having someone there for you,
someone for you to care for and someone to care for you.
A star in a dark sky to show you the direction you were going,
the moon on your back lighting the way to somewhere warmer.
It was always an ember to me, something small but bright,
how it tricked your eye into being mesmerised by it,
how it danced on invisible winds and flowed like the air was water.
Sometimes it would happen little by little and other times all at once,
and when it was gone, it would make you beg for more,
have you scraping at the burning log to make more little embers.
I suppose there’s a beauty in that somehow, the subtlety of movement,
a staccato as a new breeze entered the ember’s airspace,
and how that little ember would judder in the air but still it would burn.
But years go by as they so often do, without warning or permission,
and you inevitably see things differently from a more mature viewpoint.
You have so much more to look back on, so much more to comprehend,
how everything you’ve ever done up to this point all fits together.
I don’t see love as one of those spritely little embers anymore,
love to me is so much more, a force of magic that binds souls together,
the universe, once thought so unforgiving, actually there to support you,
to guide you through the twilit marsh of existence, to heal the hurt.
I have experienced that magic firsthand, and I know it happens to everyone,
but so often we either look the other way or we can’t fathom what we see,
until it’s too late that is, when memories become cloudy with age,
when all that you had ever hoped to come true has been replaced by nothing,
but that too is magic, my friends, because magic knows nothing of time,
it transcends the very fabric of the universe that binds us.
Magic flows through the connections, seeps through the cracks,
and that is where love resides, not in the intimacy of no distance,
not in the warm embrace of someone who takes you for granted.
It’s in the very fibre of your being, you are composed of love,
of magic and the beautiful light show on display every waking moment.
Dance to the rhythm the universe provides, you are its melody.
Nov 21, 2017
Nov 21, 2017 at 11:37 AM UTC
Cures for a broken heart are painful
- its all in the letting go
Sometimes bit by bit
- and at others in full flood
Your heart can heave, wrack, and judder
- with its broken dreams.
Dec 13, 2015
Dec 13, 2015 at 11:15 AM UTC