"languishes" poems
She sits there with her hair left flowing,
Staring out to the sea all knowing.
Singing till the last light breaks,
And darkness comes and claws and rapes.
Lamenting and sad her tears they fall,
Upon her tail and waist so subtle so small.
“Love me forever please the land of men,
For in the sea my heart is spent
Retell my tale but with a happy end,
Where my lover did not bow and bend.
To the whims of another lover,
Who raptures better beneath the bedcover
Whisper lover across the sea,
But stranded here my tail will keep me.
You had your chance to love and hold,
But to the sea my heart you sold."
A mermaid that now is not so little,
Damaged by a man so vain and fickle.
She languishes in perpetual beauty,
Never to forget her punishment and duty.
For if her tail does touch the ocean,
Her heart will falter from that accursed potion,
And to the sea she will fall prone,
And turn to nothing more than the seas soothing foam.
Dec 12, 2010
Dec 12, 2010 at 12:26 PM UTC
they want me to be serious, to take it seriously. To look at sunrises calmly and seize coals and watch over red-blooded, man-fueled wars about bravado, integrity, and land. To look at money, a simple representation of labor, and see what it drives other to do, to do for me.
to crush cigarettes and testicles under my boots,
to crawl through mud and barbed wire, smiling
with grit in my grimace
salt rolling, sweaty brows
twisted locks of dark hair
tobacco-brown spit, ground
and filthy, caked in mud
teeth bared like an animal
white eyeteeth crunching
**Scorching earth where my feet touch down.
A cigarette put out on a tongue. No more talking.**
They want me to see and that, in the dark of the night, in the light of the day, when the sun rises and sets, there is pain, always, elsewhere and everywhere. So I will not tarry or joke or be frivolous with the battered souls of others and to think, to think about applying anything I know, to run along with the vigorous social constructs they ask me to dissect and then revolutionize, because I am young, and I will sprint faster, against accusations, and only briefly.
They want me to look at the world like a runner looks at the red track,
with their toes and sinews coiled as hard as steel, a pinnacle of human
at the height of athleticism and possess the ruthlessness of a rabid dog
drool rushed into foam and mad from dehydrating, my brain swelling
with my hormone driven
red, hazy, athletic rage,
gunning my ambition
for some organization.
No.
I will fight, yes, but I will not fight for a name on a card, shield, or building.
I will fight for the sake of fighting because I am contentious and I am wrong.
I side against hero and villain, because I am the ambiguity,
that languishes, resides in no-man's land, antagonizing both.
Being disliked in purgatory is sometimes more easy than chomping at the bit,
for blood and the power of cracking a black bull whip, so I can avoid this terrible avarice and corrupting beauty that comes with working hard, especially for the greatness
that I did not ask
to be ****** upon me, while I wished to remain enigmatic.
Jun 4, 2013
Jun 4, 2013 at 4:33 PM UTC
a coin harlot he showers the day
with his turn of phrase that would sell
a sunken city to a floating fat man
the floating man
isnt really fat
but he belives himself to be
after all they wouldnt lie on tv would they
so he spends his lackluster days
become a deeper shade of golden tan and thinner by
shouting phrases of strangers arguments at
the passing clouds
nawing on the bone of contentious verbal meat
he floats in a life peserver
from the Lusitania
and its well peserved sanitys sealed in a jar
which he grips with a fevered hand they
are both his bane and plastic fantastic lover doll
all rolled into one evil mocking grin rubber ducky smelling henchwoman
she languishes in her sand and shell embrace of her lips
her rubber ducky superglue scent
is her own chinese man trap
after all dosnt every man secretly desire a love affair with
his rubber duck
they wouldnt lie about that on tv now would they
course not, dont be silly
i wait for first my ride home
but failing that
i will swim
goodnight and sleep tight
least you find yourself a rubber ducky
you can f@%ky
Jul 1, 2013
Jul 1, 2013 at 7:42 PM UTC
Lived on one's back,
In the long hours of repose,
Life is a practical nightmare--
Hideous asleep or awake.
Shoulders and *****
Ache----!
Ache, and the mattress,
Run into boulders and hummocks,
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes--
Tumbling, importunate, daft--
Ramble and roll, and the gas,
******* to its lowermost,
An inevitable atom of light,
Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper
Snores me to hate and despair.
All the old time
Surges malignant before me;
Old voices, old kisses, old songs
Blossom derisive about me;
While the new days
Pass me in endless procession:
A pageant of shadows
Silently, leeringly wending
On . . . and still on . . . still on!
Far in the stillness a cat
Languishes loudly. A cinder
Falls, and the shadows
Lurch to the leap of the flame. The next man to me
Turns with a moan; and the snorer,
The drug like a rope at his throat,
Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,
Noiseless and strange,
Her bull's eye half-lanterned in apron,
(Whispering me, 'Are ye no sleepin' yet?'),
Passes, list-slippered and peering,
Round . . . and is gone.
Sleep comes at last--
Sleep full of dreams and misgivings--
Broken with brutal and sordid
Voices and sounds that impose on me,
Ere I can wake to it,
The unnatural, intolerable day.
2.2k
a bitter exhaustion grips you by the throat
fear languishes your bones like lead upon your skin
a dark cave dripping numb from within
do i dare to look up again?
do i dare to give my heart as the bargain?
are you gonna break my fall,
or will you tell me you can't handle this all?
i dont want to start new anymore than you
for loving, feels like the flu
but maybe you’re the vaccine
ill take a shot of you, hoping then i would feel brand new
tell me, do you feel like this too?
Jan 12, 2023
Jan 12, 2023 at 3:33 AM UTC
There can be
Little said about
The hearts desire
amidst the bustle
of waking life
as the sun
scorches the sky
and burns a hole
in her confusion.
A lazy, discontented
lover strangled by
words that stick
in his throat languishes
in the heat as she
cools off in the breeze
of his indifference.
Exposed, alone in a
translucent ocean of
discontent, she floats on
the surface of indecision
and ambivalence
When at last the
changing tide sweeps
him off to another shore
leaving her free to dive
deep for her pearl and
Much more… much more.
Nov 10, 2011
Nov 10, 2011 at 5:09 PM UTC
water's gravity
moors me to this dome's prison.
washing me to plush blue
is the dream of hands
that puts me out of my sleep's premises.
the bane of existence tingles
the flesh and the suds rise
altogether with the squalor
of its own meaning.
my old hue languishes into
a burgeon of slosh and no friction
nor word could rupture me anymore.
and the scent dangles
mid-air, where all perfumes are born, with sorry fountainheads
peaking through the ordeal
of this sonata.
water makes music with skin
as froth takes to sea, the exhaustion of brine -
all disquiet in foreword
and finality
hung clean, in the backyard
of ordinariness, of consummate asepsis and its breakable concepts,
ready to be worn out
by a day's grime and back to
its fate once more, all of us.
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 18, 2015 at 1:44 AM UTC
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I might as well have stripped and posted ****
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.
I twittered, face-booked, tumblred, endlessly,
but still it languishes in quietude.
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I promised video with poetry;
no cliché, hackneyed rhyme or platitudes.
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.
My blog is but a trickle in the sea
A place of literary solitude.
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I treasured all my followers, all three;
and yet, with heavy heart, I must conclude
I made a blog that no-one wants to see.
I should’ve baked a chocolate cake for tea.
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 5:32 PM UTC
Smile with a touch
Growl an innate hunger
Climb the pillar
To see
At the cropped top
Lies the crown
Thorny and sublime
Creation bows
Zeus sings
Cries of Osiris
Echo his name
Pulling away the enchantment
Veils tear
Truth gleaming fourth
Constricted scrawls on papyrus
He is here
Setting us free
Throwing down shackles
The sun has risen
Nero has sung
Peter languishes in torment
First a laugh
Another kiss
A second betrayal
True to the construct
Doom is here
Armageddon begins
Jan 11, 2018
Jan 11, 2018 at 2:30 PM UTC
Exceeding the passion of these most love torn dreamers
he languishes in the glow of his millionth Sunset
then vanquishes the dreams of his millionth soul
a paradox
lover of night
taker of life
Nosferatu
walks silent and alone
living not by minutes, days or years
the pros and cons
of never-ending life on earth
the ecstasy and the terror of immortality
to never die
to never love
for to love a mortal
is to watch her succumb to the ravages of time
and human time
is but a blink
she curls into a quiet sleep
and dreams of Sunrise
he kisses her upon the cheek
and cries to the moon
May 18, 2016
May 18, 2016 at 5:47 PM UTC
I.
A beat pulses through the song
rising like a plume of smoke
across the ridge.
The night rolls on.
A love languishes.
I can't help but
self-destruct.
The scattering clouds.
Heart-beats to the head-song.
Do you even exist?
II.
Arms upraised like those of a
tote bag. I surrender. Fold
up, like a gunny sack.
Not this, not this.
Stars flicker mourning my
slow disappearance.
You must, when I ask like this.
Dead man's procession. Every
pot-holed road is a graveyard
of dogs. Dead, unsung.
III.
Milk spreads in the tea cup,
shooting out, widening,
tentacles, like fear.
IV.
Why is your voice this feeble?
My face, flatter than is usual
in this mirror?
You mean, you are me too?
I mean, does that even like
supposed to
mean something?
V.
I'm an Olympic hero. All of us.
Hubbub. Throb, to
the music-plume.
Mysterious plume.
Feb 11, 2013
Feb 11, 2013 at 12:55 PM UTC
Unexpectedly he has been cracked
Squarely across his dainty skull
Inevitably to his knees he languishes
Supplemented by a concussion
Havoc is illicitly wreaked upon the delicacy
Of this young man's psyche
As another swift, sucker punch is executed
Stylishly into his jawbone
Followed by an unforeseen series
Of frenzied jabs to the nose
The anguish screams through the brooks
Of crimson oozing from his nostrils
While a dangerous haymaker
Shockingly arises from thin air
Sinking fiercely into his cornea
Rupturing the veins in his eyeball
A circular crown of black envelops
The entire surface of his left eye
Oh, the gruesome consequences of
Applauding the eminence of nonexistence
A truculent knockout that will truly
Abduct one into an eerie coma
And rightfully deliver them back to
The portion of reality where they belong
Aug 28, 2011
Aug 28, 2011 at 4:54 PM UTC
Alone,
Alone with nobody,
I walk down the gilded path
Of the moon
Snuffing out every hopeful star
Like those so far away
They blink in and out of existence.
Sorrow bleeds my mind,
I lament in soliloquy
Like a forgotten friend.
The dark night of melancholia
Spilled like a confession,
A dream grieved
Under the languishes of existence.
My heart adorned with memory
And tears suspended from time,
Her scent faintly in the air.
Oh the sorrows
In the Grey hours of solitude,
They slither like snakes
In cold Autumnal gardens.
I turn out the lights,
My hands stirring the pen
As I write the aloneness and her
Virtues at the delicate lips of night:
May Poetry understand
The beauty of sorrow.......
Nov 28, 2016
Nov 28, 2016 at 9:57 PM UTC
Torture wreaked havoc with his mind’s sanity
The anguish just chilled me to the core
As the beatings continue to reduce him
He is scared he’ll not take too much more.
Again the water washed over and woke him
The bucket clanging as they threw it back down
Once again he was taken to the table
‘Waterboarding‘ I thought with a frown.
He was laid on his back and then tied down
They put towels over his mouth and his nose
They poured and they poured water on him
Once again in his chest panic rose.
A reporter who’d been caught in the crossfire
There was no information he could tell
No amount of hard beatings and torture
Could make him give secrets he’d not held.
Beaten and bloodied he is taken
Back as before to his cell
He’s told them all that he ever could tell them
But he still can’t escape from this hell.
He languishes in his cell I am certain
He cries out for mercy from each pore
I know that they still give him more beatings
I see him as he hobbles past my cell door.
©JRW2014
Apr 7, 2014
Apr 7, 2014 at 10:18 AM UTC
Digestion slowly errods the
Stagnant life
Line, the pulse which
Absorbs
Blow upon,
Blow upon,
Blow upon.....
Open your ******* mind, focus
On that irresistable
Smile & forget
What lies beneath. Deception
Rots the feeble skeleton
Which languishes under
Heavy skin.
Carpe diem!
Oct 3, 2013
Oct 3, 2013 at 1:44 AM UTC
deep with kissing easy trees Spring
wells like blood between the imminent
corpse of day where pennyeyed kittens
and ladybugs mingle with the deliberate
breath of the earth a flower meagerly strives
fragile homely limp and flush Spring languishes
an instant collected warmly into the salient brush
of ******* tingling abruptly pricking a loose cotton
with marble hard ******* round rosey cheecked apple
blossoms in Spring hang briefly like youth without youth
Spring i draw your quivering uglywonderful mouth to my
mouth and creep into your winsome shrill maw my blood
Apr 2, 2012
Apr 2, 2012 at 7:36 AM UTC
Rather seek a mad climate:
happy, peaceful, elegant.
By brilliant abstractions lit.
A revolution must occur
in the people's minds
years before
the Revolution occurs.
Plant a seed. Pray for rain.
Life languishes
where usury pervades,
ignorance doth flourish.
The arts a septic sewer.
The marketplace a God.
Carcasses for sacrifice.
Remove base appetite
and this generation dies.
Send them on their way.
Flush the bankers.
Lose all interest. Live
to write another day.
~mce
Feb 18, 2016
Feb 18, 2016 at 8:06 PM UTC
this poem
took aim
to be the best poem
in the world;
it had no purpose
but to win the title
and so only got worse
and became verse
and descended into prose
which in turn became toast
and today it languishes
in the pages of cyberspace
lost, floating like a ghost
wandering like a goat
neither here nor there
neither this nor that;
and pundits
who took a while
their noses off their obsessions
put on their expertise
and have now declared this poem
with very grim looks
the worst:
a sort of outcast to live outside of Parnassus,
an untouchable
to serve King Midas
Oct 30, 2011
Oct 30, 2011 at 5:58 PM UTC
The timeline of absence of me
Extends in the space that my heart
Languishes in hollow feelings.
I don’t feel presence of anything
And I do nothing but to exist,
Extending the countless seconds
That I don’t feel the word love
Burning my chest in a whirlwind of emotions.
I deeply breathe looking for answers
To questions I haven’t done
And that insist to long in the bed of my mind.
I fill my thoughts of banal occupations
Trying to mask the empty I am.
I insist, I persist in the resignation
To this uncomfortable way of being,
But wherever I go, I see a bit of me
Dissolve in to inactivity.
Words drains through the wall trying to find me,
But I don’t know where to put them
And I lose the verses, the stanzas, the poems.
The passions I once felt are dying
And the loneliness where I get
Don’t sustain enthusiasm in that something
Can really change.
And this is the way I live
In the deep need that solitude got me into.
I don’t run away from the verb to love
I just don’t know where else I can find it…
Sep 13, 2013
Sep 13, 2013 at 7:08 AM UTC
[I am asked if I'd like to go for a walk,]
Speaking freely & feeling speechless
aren't really distinguishable.
- One languishes with language
full of angst (or even anguish) -
[ while, sandwich in hand, I sit on the floor of the kitchen, ]
Liberally flaming the fires of self-blame
creates pain inextinguishable.
- Cough up money often
to soften up your coffin -
[ The toaster-oven's timer ticks. ]
'til the illness is cured, I'll endure symptoms, sure;
This sick still feels relinquish-able.
- I'd be remiss to admit
that I'd sooner just quit -
[ Let me sit for a while, then we'll go ]
Nov 3, 2014
Nov 3, 2014 at 3:04 PM UTC
My shadow is full of moonlight.
I caught it in a sunbeam, stashed it beneath my floppy hat.
Tis the light of my life.
My my how it shines.
Because it's mine.
It doesn't mind, it doesn't matter.
By the power of the densest winter, I'm just the mad hatter.
My diverse shadow is happy, as he languishes under my hat.
(C) LIVVI
Feb 6, 2015
Feb 6, 2015 at 5:50 AM UTC
An old fairy-tale book molders silently
in a cardboard box, in my airless attic.
A coat of dust has stolen its grandeur,
the pages are dog-eared from generations
of small, sticky fingers.
Inside, a castle succumbs
to ten years of neglect.
The knights slip into apathy,
leave their armor unpolished,
and start to ponder
a change of career.
An empty-headed princess
languishes in her tower
among yellowed love letters,
with no hope of the rescue
promised to her
in twenty pages or less.
There isn't anyone left
to fight the dragons, nobody wants
to believe in them anymore.
The children averted their eyes,
and slowly built up
each palisade guarding
the magic left in their heads.
Dec 8, 2012
Dec 8, 2012 at 10:09 AM UTC
just so! many hours to sing!
poet take your chance
while the muse languishes
-in your heartfelt love.
Apr 13, 2017
Apr 13, 2017 at 11:05 AM UTC
I’ll always recall the day you left me here to die
I can change I said, let me try
But instead you chose to fly
Your words of rebuke, how they made me cry
I am sick; it’s no contrived cliché
My mind is in disarray
My heart languishes in decay
But you don’t see it that way
To you it’s all made up; a sick game I play
Already it’s been over a year
I’m all but forgotten, I fear
You are far, no longer near
But, though I lie, I love you dear
You’ll always be my brother
We come from the same mother
I loved you like no other
But with me you won’t bother
It reminds me of my father
Dec 30, 2016
Dec 30, 2016 at 10:10 AM UTC
FESTINE LENTE FESTINE LENTE
Up the Green Road
under an arch of sunlight & leaves
I travel through Time & Space
mastering speed.
Balance still a little odd
as I try to...cycle faster...keep up with my Dad
who is forever far ahead
calling: “Come on, Donall – that’s the lad! ”
All that time I am
that eternal summer
always
struggling to learn
how to do
7 x Tables
(tie my shoe)
master bicycles.
Down the Green Road
under an arch of Time & Autumn
I cycle faster with the wind
behind me...calling to the man
who languishes forever
far behind me:
“Come on, Dad...”
“Take it easy, Donal lad! ”
***
Festine Lente is the Latin for Hurry Slowly!
Mar 5, 2017
Mar 5, 2017 at 2:10 PM UTC