Knobbled poems on Hello Poetry

Jimmy King Apr 2015

For almost two years we’ve been sitting on a conveyor belt
Heading straight for the potato peeler, which will
Slice right through our thickened skins and puncture our vitals;
A cold cruel machine designed to sit
In industrial kitchens
Waiting for Sodexo’s next batch.

But we—
We’re from the farmer’s market and we are not
Four inches in diameter and six inches in length.
We are clunky. We are knobbled. We are
Purpleyellow and we are waterysweet.
We are not
Iowabland or a poem of rhyming couplets, yeah
We are free verse and we

Had *** because we’re friends.
Or maybe because
We love each other
In one way or another.
Or maybe because we’re lost
Or maybe all of the above, yeah—I don’t know, I just know

The potato peeler won’t accept us for a second.
That mechanical grip, slicing slicing slicing,
A fumbling tumbling in countless browntowhite progression,
It won't accept
Our color, our flavor, our beautiful swirling eyes,
And for a while I didn't either.
But whether we have two more months on the belt or twenty years,
I know that our knobbled progression to nowhere
Will have been one of everywhere.

A Mareship Sep 2013

recurring dream: drowning

Prompt: Write about a recurring dream.

…………

They say it’s nice to drown,
peaceful to drown,
swallow your tongue,
shut yourself up like a pearl in a clam,
let it rush into every hole in your face -

I plough like a cosmonaut losing memories
Surrounded by diaphanous tremblings,
Surfacing every three moons or so
To set my eyes on the prize of a particular liner,
To swipe wetly upwards
At the sky and her yellow jewellery.

I’m not surprised by the cold,
I welcome the white frail blaze of it -
Let me break the surface with a
Frothy lace collar
and then
Rain on me,
Pelt me,
‘Til we all become one another,
And I will feel it like a tremulous applause of tiny fists,
Knocking on the sand ten miles away.
I am shivering between shoals,
Joyfully sailing with silver starlings,
(How have I come to it so late -
This joy of flying?)

The water is at times a tortured mask
That I wear like a shifting grey veil,
I wrap my thighs around it’s efforts,
And we churn our legs like a billion dying insects.
(The green will reach out and mouth you,
But the splinters will not stick.)

Colours:
Bleached,
Frigid grey,
Dark wholesome,
Bible black,
My lips part for the waves blowing back -
And my body has no blood,
No organs,
Hollow but for the colours of the gloom.

I am a drifting column,
An angel of sand
knobbled stars **** at my head -

(So this is it -

This is what it is to be dead.)

I will meet you here
in this fantasy of glass,
We won’t even speak,
And we never needed words anyhow,
We will just elegantly teeter on the very edge of dreams -
Floating together loose and unsinkable
Like two formless sheets of hooked reflections
That drape and move and are never lost.
And I could cry now just thinking of it,
I’m crying now just thinking of it,
I want us to live in a miracle,
Two spectres between the spectrum of the layers -

I can’t be up there anymore,
I can’t be part of the sculptures….

and neither can you.

Am I any closer?
How many leagues?
How many times do I have to visit?
How much closer can I get?

And when I wake up saved,
Will I wear this dream upon me...?

Will I stick to my blue sheets?

Will my hair be wet?

a stream of memories, dreams are oddly and sometimes sad.

Kim Keith Sep 2010

You Gotta Live it to Play it Right

Dim, the stagnant *****-air clears;
thick velvety curtain lifts,
reveals
a not-so-grand
piano, scarred and dilapidated
under a single, cutting beam.

On the bench, the wrung-out crust
of a moth-eaten man
slumps habitually, his spine in a “C”
from the shouldered shackles
of negative meaning.  Void.

He weighs the crackled keys
with weathered fingers; arthritically
knobbled notes float into the open air
hung with single malt fumes,
contained in vacuous walls.
Each hobbled finger-stroke and hammer-fall
morphs
melts
molds into agonizing chords, aching arpeggios.
Audible heaviness.

His oddly-angled fingers
abstain from all accountability
for the throb in his injured melody,
punctuated now and again by a dead note
on that neglect-yellow keyboard.

Longing plunks minored
on a downbeat, a song woven with
losing the blue of cloudless mornings
in her velvet passions.  The her that’s missing,
that’s gone and packed the dog
and any solace against the pervasive storms

graying his vision, his beard, his hand—
mangled with grief and apologies—his hand
ever grasping for that lost shade
and the irony of intonating the only hue
his notes will ever know.
.

First Published By: The Legendary: http://www.downdirtyword.com/poetrypage.html

Dena Nov 2012

******

Bells clang with dissonant fury,
they rattle the cracked foundation
upon which the church sits.
Thirteen lamp oil birds take lift
and scatter. The cacophony acting
as hands, throwing feathers and
feces out of the old tower.
The judges house leans a little more
to the left now, as it always
seems to at noontime.
The owner of the pub knocks
his sign back into place with his
knobbled cane.
The rocking chair tilts a bit further
back as the old lady finishes
her last stitch.
The children exit the schoolhouse.
None of them notice the blood,
or how the preacher slumps against
his chair, face pressed to the pages
of revelation.

George Anthony Jul 2017

candle holder, hold us closer, 'til we burn ourselves out

we made makeshift settlements in old, crumbling ruins
and we weren't homeless but we sure weren't home
so we sought out places as broken as we felt
with digital camera clicks and rough clearings of throat
(that hint of asbestos and ground-to-dust brickwork)
laying out soft blankets and forgetting they were too thin:
gravel digging into hunger-knobbled spines as we slipped under cosmic spells,
spying constellations in burnt out stars and speaking wax poetic
with slender fingers intertwined and your soft palm hissing softly as my callouses grated your skin

and when you told me you loved me, i really believed it
it was clear as the jewels that glittered on that midnight dressing gown the first half of the earth slipped on whenever the sun slid away to her lover's second side
obvious and inevitable and woman i loved you too
how impossible a thing it would be, to melt into each other's souls like wax on burning candles
without solidifying and finding a permanent fixture once the heat cooled off
through every wind and motion, all the weathers, where you'd go—there i'd be
but like candles, our wicks were time stamped and endangered
we faded out in a curl of dark smoke, and maybe that's when i turned to the nicotine

#bestfriend #relationship #friendship #breakup #depression #addiction #nostalgia #memories #imagery #pain

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