"kerning" poems
You can control love,
as you type.
You can change the style,
which evokes feeling.
Script — curvy lines,
fitting for passion.
Sans Serif — Strong,
but friendly.
Grunge — Anger or,
vengeful.
Serif — Elegant,
and structured.
This four letter word —
is a shapeshifter.
Shifting styles, weights and
kerning on a whim.
You can control love,
highlight and change it.
Again.
But, love is fluid,
as fonts are to typographers,
as words are to poets.
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018 at 9:48 AM UTC
The college kids still pump out poems;
my heroes haven't published a book in years.
The academics are moving to visual arts
kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of
the cult of happiness.
And I love to read poems
from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******
I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy
their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion,
as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.
In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs,
and equally interesting but useless adjective strings.
The academics are doing the same, but with form.
It bores us, don't they know?
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
**** these kids for having such easy means to publication.
I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions"
online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.
I long for publishing classified ads and
scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved
and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******
and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.
I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers,
smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands,
watch the chalk run into the red brick
during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe,
light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled
with ages of greater work than these ******* kids...
and these ******* academics.
Greater than me.
Jul 14, 2015
Jul 14, 2015 at 5:04 AM UTC
I feel the wanting
as you are haunting...
my lustful, needy...
greedy..
thoughts
I know I really hadn't ought
to think this way
of things to do when down we lay
and about your warm & rugged arms
keeping me from any harm
I'm swallowed by seductive charms
defenseless you're
whispering the sky my name
know of me ...my secret shame
this need...we share?
words said kerning
we're bothered,
....yearning
I am bare
for you..
I feel a need to share with you
could we face
our darkness together?
on gloomy tides of stormy weather
is written on the Dead Sea Scrolls
a love of two who seem the same,
shared in us our
heart and souls?
I have wandered far looking...
So should we
take a chance and try
instead of always wondering why?
would we
be any good for one another
a raging fire burning
unwanted things unlearning
Could we
find of pure desire
light the lovers hottest fires?
or flames go out we tamper,
smother?
left smoldering
shouldering our way,
and left...
we never learned
ready to rise
and ready to
.....be BURNED?
Cherie Nolan © 2016
Aug 28, 2016
Aug 28, 2016 at 5:05 PM UTC
SometimesIwonderhowIsoundlikewhenItalktoyou,thenithitmelikea
rushingtrain.Itisexactlylikehowyouarereadingthis.Becauseallyoudo
whenyouarearoundistakemybreathaway.
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 4:09 AM UTC
ode to the flower next to belladonna
the trees on south-facing mountain slopes
silently musing into the nights and not
the avalanche's daughter whom the hills
sing praises and woes
her soul's a quiet unison, meno mosso
a choir and composer spun through
***** pipes, doors cracked and never
fully closed, (there's light beneath the
lids...) she'd like to think of herself as
the wind but she's content as still air
between prayer beads--
and if not the star dust--then who? why else
do we call pauses rests? Why then is there
beauty in fermattas? In crescendos that vibrate
the material of the immaterial--if such things
happened to be true for the unwild and untangled
the perpetually pianissimo, the leading and kerning--
because she would much rather be an empty vessel
or a plate without food, a seed or a grape on a vine
because neither go without lords or masters and
she is not her own.
Dec 26, 2015
Dec 26, 2015 at 5:20 PM UTC
wade in where i used to dive
must be something in this sea
my fear see my hopes
fall like the temperature of her skin
standing ashore to get away
her hooks was trauma-cause faded like the sound
kerning away the space I found
Aug 18, 2012
Aug 18, 2012 at 11:33 AM UTC
my thoughts are always best expressed in verses,
and you are the lines
that make them up.
your name is never scribbled across the page,
but you are there in the kerning,
the sensible spaces in between.
you are the punctuation marks,
the pauses and the stops,
the stresses in my ideas.
don’t you ever get frustrated
that i have exploited your memories
into fragments of ellipsied affection?
i am guilty of making you my poetry,
of enveloping you in metaphors
and keeping you close to my heart.
out of the trickles of us,
i have spawned an infinite stream
of feels pooling into poems.
i have always wondered
if you have ever read me
and guessed that i was about you.
tell me if you have,
because if you haven’t guessed yet,
i’ll phrase my poems in equations instead.
for j.e.
081214
Oct 17, 2014
Oct 17, 2014 at 12:59 PM UTC
Yearning for burning
A kind of returning
Unlearning learning
To fix my own kerning
Churning adjourning
My rebirth I'm earning
Oct 16, 2017
Oct 16, 2017 at 1:40 PM UTC
I want out
Storage Kerning
Kerosene dream
Fried Philadelphia sunrise
Shine, shine nutrician
Jun 9, 2019
Jun 9, 2019 at 5:03 PM UTC
The cadence and rhythm of feelings
The thread stitching the duality everything
The kerning of a word
The space between a electron and
the nucleus of an atom
It is a bridge
The looking glass to Wonderland
The wardrobe to Narnia
The ship to Neverland
The platform to Hogwarts
The powder of a firework
It is a catalyst to magic
Dec 10, 2017
Dec 10, 2017 at 2:53 PM UTC