"limbless" poems
Murdered by the sky.
Among the forms that move toward the snake
and the forms searching for crystal
I will let my hair grow.
With the limbless tree that cannot sing
and the boy with the white egg face.
With the broken-headed animals
and the ragged water of dry feet.
With all that is tired, deaf-mute,
and a butterfly drowned in an inkwell.
Stubmling onto my face, different every day.
Murdered by the sky!
9.3k
A Corpse amongst the corpses
in this God forsaken place.
No love to come and hold me,
no lips to kiss my face.
With rigid grasp I hold
the gun my country gave me.
Frozen on my lips the prayer,
I had hoped would save me.
Both a brightly coloured parrot,
that sqawks the coming dawn
and the wondeous scent of eucalypt
are from me ever gone.
Here between the limbless soldiers
in a land that widows dread.
Here I'll dwell forever,
with all the unknown dead.
Until the battlefields are covered,
with a gown of emerald green,
to hide away the image
of the horrors they have seen.
Until war's thunder ceases.
until man's hatred is all gone,
no brightly coloured parrot
shall sqawk the coming of the dawn.
(c) 23/08/2009
Nov 1, 2010
Nov 1, 2010 at 3:35 PM UTC
Through darkness, laced in edges of light,
And rain, falling like angels plagued by blight,
Shattering their heavenly bones and wings,
Onto the eyeless dust of their return;
Through paths stranger to the hope of spring,
Where voices of ghosts hang with cries of “Burn!”
And moss mottled trees, like macabre jesters
Dance, limbless, leaves flailing grotesquely
To the secret japes of wind-bourn nesters;
Through corpse-ridden forests of insanity,
To where the rocks dress as the three witches
And chant midst their vainglorious riches
*“All hail, Eremita, bound to the adamah altar,
All hail, Eremita, your blood soma from the mortar,
All hail, Eremita, thou shalt be dead hereafter”...*
Jun 7, 2014
Jun 7, 2014 at 12:28 AM UTC
So desolate, I walked onward
An expanse of sand running mile after mile
In the distance the sound of thunder
Then as if a mirage at sea a village of ramshackle homes
Single story on a sandbank all with gardens of the strangest design
A flea farm, gooseberry bushes and butterflies in net cages
Children playing, the voices of grandparents
The sea now lapping at my heels and between their twisted porches, where on earth could I be
In reality?
For I no longer walked the earth
The thunder was the howitzers shelling the beach
The vilage, that of my childhood
For my mind in its last throws had given me a thought of memory, that of childhood and family that of loving not war
The sea and sand being of beauty
Now limbless, face down on a Normandy beach drowning.
Then darkness
Silence
Peace
Nov 4, 2013
Nov 4, 2013 at 8:09 PM UTC
For the first time ever; I truly do not care
if you, him, or her wished me a happy birthday;
But, I wouldn’t mind if you did. Though it is fair;
I am one of the lesser friends; I am a boring play;
A play so fake; I am of made up characters,
Sometimes I am the flattering villain in smiles,
And at times I am a copy of the Westerners,
At others, I am gullible, yet I never am;
I pretend to be; but I am miles away,
For interesting I am not; so funny at least be,
Says my brain; for maybe they will remember,
That my birthday was today; It is an endless plea:
I always remember and prepare pages of wishes,
For almost everyone, but all I get is 4 days late
One liners sent out of guilt; to stop the guilty itches,
Not out of care, love, or from genuine friendly state;
I deserve it; for again; I am merely a boring play;
A paradoxical headache of weird introverts,
And annoying extroverts; I barely even weigh,
To a normal person; I am made of endless alerts;
Alerted, focused, attentive; all on your acceptance;
I am what I feel you want me to be; a nice man,
A racist gangster, a diplomatic figure; I am resemblance,
I resemble everything I see in you and scan;
I am stardust that was never meant to shine,
I am a thread; intertwined as I feel pleases,
I am a road with temporary signs; I am grapes;
For you I squeeze myself into juice; or ferment
Into wine; I am a fake play where you write scripts,
I submit, because all I cared about is receiving,
A birthday wish. On that one day in the entire year;
I do not want even want gifts; because when you don't,
I feel like I am ceasing to exist; slowly deceasing
from everything that we were: teenagers ambitious,
WhatsApp stickers collectors, School runaways,
Kids deceiving; it feels like I am dead; for the dead
Do not receive birthday wishes; I feel peerless;
A white beans *** lidless, a body complete limbless,
A walking sickness, a moving flesh in stillness,
unpardoned by my faux and obvious silliness.
I do not care about not getting birthday wishes;
But I cannot not overthink what it means.
Nov 22, 2023
Nov 22, 2023 at 4:25 PM UTC
body genre
at a carnal address
sensory and sensuous effects
materiality
digital images
anthropology of desire
she tied a knot around his ****
a wedding band made of licorice shoelaces
for the art of tongue and ****
driving it in her pink throat
back and forth
like a shift stick
flared for the retina
a puzzlement and fascination
haptic screen of fiction
adventure of being pinned down
an unpremeditated punctum
fucktum sucktum
the stadium of desire
a shop window
banality transcending banality
the literal transformed
into the ******
a ****** smiles red
girl in a suitcase
with a hole to ****
a treasure chest
the leaky boundaries of erotica
sing in
musical blood whistles
I packed her up
limbless and threw
her on the bed
and with tender kisses
of endless
wet permutations
banged
three oozing holes
into finger ponds of oblivion
she taunted
age play- ageless
***** class
a weird ethnicity
from Timbuktu
racially motivated lust for a
conveyance of
fleshy intensities
way past help
a big **** dips
a tender dimple
like a barnacled whale
in a deep dive
the violence of
a preemptive strike
for everything imaginable
across raw lips
in her cosmos
of swinging hips
and cross bone riddles
oh happy *****
suicide ******
at the computer screen
**** bullets birthday cake
in a River Styx of flames
Jun 21, 2020
Jun 21, 2020 at 4:40 PM UTC
A stiff wind broke the morning clouds. It was another gloomy sunrise, in a string of second-rate days. Kiera woke much like the sun, downtrodden and wishing to fall back down. She snapped down on the alarm, knocking it to the floor, and with two blinks was out again—back into a world she was beginning to recognise.
First the flooding darkness. Despite two weeks of this her body still rejected it. Her body hated it. Pathetic. Limbless shakes as the throbbing chill tore its way through her lungs, gripped her skin like sweat. She could smell the sharp stink of iron. When her vision came she saw her arms were covered in blood. A red too bright.
A figure she hadn’t noticed flickered out of her view. She turned her head sharply but saw no one.
Kiera realised she was walking. She held a square, brown-wrapped package, which would not stop squirming. As she struggled to keep hold of the ******* thing, ****** prints coated its sides. A postbox lay on the other side of the road—the same colour as the blood on her arms.
Kiera was furious. The ******* package would not stop squirming. She needed to reach the postbox before she dropped it. She was desperate—scared shitless. Why?
Kiera began to cross the road. Each step sent the package twitching, twisting. Her legs were bone thin. Her skin was shredding apart. Another flicker—edge of the vision phantom—appeared, but she barely noticed. The package was growing so heavy that her toes were breaking on the asphalt. She looked up and saw the postbox had receded. *How dare you? How ******* dare you, you piece of ****
She was on the wrong side. She had never left the sidewalk. How could she? She had no legs. Blood began to pour out of the postbox. It crossed the road, coating her torso, lapping the bottom of the package. The package stilled and began to deform in her hands. It was rotting.
Kiera had an urge to *****
Jan 1, 2014
Jan 1, 2014 at 11:44 AM UTC
I ponder of something great on a sonderous level can a man a sentient being ever exist like an omnipotent being
am I just a subsidized being is the vanity of a self-absorbed world
the pneumatic indifferent fascist question my legitimacy so I question the society of a world more cold and more active than an incestuous birdy and the bee
They question an artesian hand slightly smaller than the average man yet the
significance of the difference in that artesian is not the manic who refused me
embarrassed me
rumored me
****** me to a dark inexsistant inbetween
the coldness of a lover never to be
because she is in league but out of reach
like a lion her simple minded pedagogy has left her to everything and everyone
as she is not mine and I am not hers just the birdy and the defective bee
a farce love story the ending of a never beginning trip why o so dramatic
because I just can’t help falling in love with one
a selfish self absorbed vanity in a repugnant world disgustingly this pedagogy stays to me like glue on this dying bee
this is true of our starcrossed unrequited drug induced comatose that put me into this ponderous level
the inevitability of what truly will never be yet for some reason these
sounderously significantly radical thought I ponder just like a pneumatic bot
have you ever felt this lost
this cold dark nonexistent in-between
a limbless sentient rushed in the ever invoking might of hysteric emotion
I ponder this cold and warming toiling notion
The one like a lion can you and will you requite and love me
Feb 28, 2014
Feb 28, 2014 at 8:44 PM UTC
My happiness comes from me ask my friends and the world around me blossoming in a spark of crimsony red moon glow on forethought walks through the shivering lenses of percept that trickle down our backs as we enlighten ourselves with all that is in between and unseen.
It is as if our aged limbs were caressed into a symphony of leverages and their shapes. We cannot be cadavers. We are arms of cheer and picture jasper, adolescent googled-eyes gathers with virile fixations on our partners as we prey on the map lines subtly employing our eyes as we dart across each dimple, pimple, freckle, and gently worn rash lines.
These are the dogs of our incessant barking. Idling for sincerity, as actors swiftly press Winter into us while our limbless diction presents our inadequacy Rd upon our ugly and I'll-tempered neighborly-things. Aliens of the afternoon, first floor agony and karmas standard for living in a reduced climate One.
Wearing down the hooves, undulates from Pepperdine mark trails with breaking breads and twigs and bones. Undulates from another world, behoofed and bemoved, curdling their sappy reselling a of drat and unkindly remarks. And we have begun to wonder when evolution will kick-in. When will the military come for them at the doors and vacate is all from our nontoxic lie-shrouded apartment complexes, condos, and cabins. Slaughter numbers of letters and integers right out in the street; loonies in the town square and the moose are crying.
Sep 17, 2016
Sep 17, 2016 at 9:52 PM UTC
Swirling colors
paint the market square,
shrimp lie heaped
next to the
bananas & chilis,
there's lemonade,
tires with rubber patches,
a sense of community
hangs in the air.
Deals are made
in hard currency
or in trade.
A natural flow exists,
as if everyone
is on autopilot.
And behind the scenes,
just under the surface,
one feels the depression,
pain is palpable.
You can see it in
the eyes of the dogs,
rib-poking-skinny,
hairless, manged & skittish.
They hang with the limbless ones,
half-humans,
legless & starved,
dragging themselves
on cobbled streets
through ***** matter & *****
wallowing in the mire,
begging for peanuts & money.
It ain't funny.
Jan 22, 2014
Jan 22, 2014 at 3:41 AM UTC
1.
You can never go home,
not to the home you left.
When you leave, you get bigger.
Not necessarily in girth, but in consciousness.
When you come back, everything,
even the walls of your parent's house,
seem to have shrunk.
2.
Look.....
Here comes the parade.
With its paper mache floats
and twirling batons.
Cub scouts and boy scouts,
all in a neat blue and drab green row,
followed by a high school marching band
playing "Stars and Stripes Forever".
From bygone wars, limbless surviving soldiers flinch with every cymbal crash.
3.
I watched billows of cottonwood clouds
swirl down a summer hometown avenue,
they met on the street corner for a song........
"Alley Oop", or "I Like Bread And Butter"
These ghostlike voices will live there forever,
innocent, asleep, numb, waiting.
Soon, the postman will bring your future.
Soon, you will be just a number on a lotery ball.
Soon, you will have to dissect luck or fate.
4.
I took my 87 year old Father to gather his tools
from his long time place of work.
The instruments of his livelihood.
He did not need them anymore, he had retired.
Some tools he had used since World War II,
some he made for a specific job.... never to use again.
All neatly placed in toolboxes built in the 30s and 40s,
yet not a trace of rust.
These were the tools of a tradesman,
a (Tool and Die Man).
He once told me, “Son, if I can’t fix it because I don’t have the right tool, I will make the tool”.
I thought him to be Superman.
But there I was, loading up my Father’s history,
to take home, to be sold to the highest bidder.
I myself have made my living playing music for audiences.
I also have tools.
Guitars, amplifiers, harmonicas, microphones.
There will come a day, in the not too distant future,
when I will have to “retire” the instruments of my livelihood.
Though I will not be as stoic as my World War II Father,
I will go kicking and screaming to the pawn shop,
remembering every song that fed me,
and every chord that made people dance.
May 29, 2014
May 29, 2014 at 8:38 PM UTC
What makes you think
You’re human enough
Visions of light incinerated
And sepulcher demolished
Would never make you
As near as one
Seeing the outlines of
Wax statues
Or the inside of treasure box worn by year
Are just paths to a shallow valley
Of condescending condolence
And folie à deux
Where your madness
Never shares with mine
So my love, never bother trying
Even if you managed to take a flower
From the tree of life
The rest are just poison that force
You to succumb
Limbless
Mindless
Heartless
Shallow
With your guts arranged
In order
Like a marvelous slaughtertastic
Flower arrangement
That I used to adore
Before I perished
Knowing that I never wanted
To lit your soaked thread
With adorned pain
When you called me with names
Improper
When you accused me of
Disdain and betrayal
When you wrote me away
Like words too sad to be told
And when you insulted me
Like the horror you never accepted
Until you ask yourself
What makes me think
That I’m human yet
Nov 10, 2014
Nov 10, 2014 at 10:08 AM UTC
a poet who can't write
a dog that won't bite
a hill that can't climb
a clock with no time
an ist with no ism
undead but not risen
an endless schism
of self sedition and indecision
a two headed coin
a completely missed point
a light in the void
a limbless joint
Bo-Peep with no sheep
the shallowest deep
an unsailed sea
of dreamless sleep
Jan 20, 2019
Jan 20, 2019 at 4:31 PM UTC
Iris’s dance back and forth behind closed eyelids
Chest expanding up and down, steady
Mouth hangs open, inhaling and exhaling midnight air.
Slither between cotton sheets and bare skin,
Against arm hair, weaving between hills of *******
Pave the trail of goose bumps.
Tunnel past saliva soaked taste buds
Slick scales snag on a slippery uvula
Oil coats the esophagus
Where are the lungs?
Hiss down the vocal chords, echo
Limbless body navigates the diaphragm
Weave past ribs
Under, over, under, over
Spot the synchronized lumps of flesh
Dancing in unison to the rhythm of the life beat
Coil around, hug them tight
Constrict the chest until the dancing stops
Locate the heart, file the fangs
Make the ******* beat stop
Release the venom into the bloodstream
Paralyze every nerve, every fiber
But just enough to nurture agony.
Nov 5, 2013
Nov 5, 2013 at 1:36 AM UTC
Shaped by my tongue,
controlled by my mind;__
They were my captives,
limbless and blind.__
But one by one my tongue
they all escaped;__
Took huge and varied
forms while I gaped.__
They stood firmly,
demeanor bold and brave.__
Now they were the masters
and I was the slave.__
Aug 16, 2015
Aug 16, 2015 at 2:29 PM UTC
I don't know any lady
without eyes with zero dreams!
I've found two female legs
walking on the rainbow
At the top of the tree with birds;
I've seen two hands of a damsel
touching blue lotuses
Within thrilling waves of low air!
A pea-green lady soul secreting moonlight
Around orange-sun cracking jokes with clouds.
I've perceived weighty eyes
in the deeper black lake
Swimming with multicolored fishes;
I've seen an off-white body limbless
into an unknown folder
Walking slowly on the water!
I haven't noticed any woman
flying like kites together with a butterfly!
Poem 22
Book 'Beckoning Jade-Dreams' April 2007
Copyright Musharrat Mahjabeen
Mizan Publishers, Dhaka, Bangladesh
ISBN 984-8700-82-X
Aug 26, 2012
Aug 26, 2012 at 12:42 PM UTC
perfect sunny day--
insects sing so loud!
as i surf the web
pond water--
my hair dries as i click,
getting hot again
One summer years ago, at my childhood home, in a nudist colony whose so-called 'co-founding' is my family's only legacy--perhaps right before my grandmother had passed, or when my father's prostate was scheduled to be removed and he thought it best to hire someone for a last-minute memory (despite his sex-negative crutch-christianity, just in case the operation cost him his jive)--i googled, 'prostitute,' while looking for **** and the atrocity i found took all of a second to challenge my complacent illusion that i could remain separate or disconnected from the global oppression of women and girls while i consumed the products (i.e., fantasized about having *** with and/or 'making love' to simulacra-women; masturbated to pictures of them) of an industry whose widespread lack of any substantial commitment to fairness, safety, legal recourse and work-place equality has contributed to a new generational acceptance of the ancient memes that perpetuate bigotry:
dismembered girl
on an open body-bag--
why does this exist??
the insects clacking,
droning in the grass--
summer can't hide death
her hip bones' marrow showing,
young prostitute's corpse--
limbless
her legs gone--
the image chokes me
from speaking
my sisters, too young to tell--
who do i tell?
why should i tell?
i read she'd run from her ****
they put her in the river.
young girl,
her blood still--
i can't feel my heartbeat
young woman,
her torso bare--
unfeeling stumps
young woman,
her legs gone,
skin gray from the river
young woman,
your legs gone--
i choke on words
.
Oct 1, 2015
Oct 1, 2015 at 11:30 PM UTC
Another day in the tranches of life, crawling like a limbless animal.
Dragging its limp torso by clenching its teeth on the ground.
Honor roll human centipede.
Butterfly-to-(NEVER)-be.
I am doomed to life's muddy labyrinthine vortex
Bent and helpless.
The more I try to escape it, the more I choke on the dirt.
Acceptance.
Hello, maze of sick souls
Golgotha is thy name.
Everybody's crawling and carrying their wooden cross.
Attached to their spine like a set of broken wings.
Nailed to the cross -oh, manmade Gods of the tranches!
Half-and-half deities, artificially made in life's hellish laboratory.
Nailed-to-the-cross demigods.
Deceit or beliefs do not exist here,
In this church of mud.
At least there is some comforting easiness in doom, in this acceptance phase.
Faithless, tortured, honest souls, calling this maze home.
Home, sweet home.
Mar 16, 2014
Mar 16, 2014 at 7:33 PM UTC
Sit, sneak a look at what’s left of nothing,
a tree alone, a blur of nimbus and fire above no one,
a diminished frequency of fury.
Sketch my black coat.
Two bucks at the Goodwill, it confides in the dead,
celebrates mother with a seance.
Ah, do you hear that?
The coffeemaker is the Atlantic. It wants to wear hues,
to be a limbless body in someone’s dream,
gestures with white light,
and never sleeps as it studies the moon.
Let’s not talk about that anymore.
It feels like spiders in my ear canal,
yesterday does.
Stay a little longer. But don’t look at me.
Look at yourself in the mirror,
and I will grin back at you—ah, feel that?
That’s what it’s like to wake up as Mark Landis.
Aug 25, 2013
Aug 25, 2013 at 4:54 PM UTC
Pick a length
and focus on it.
It could be somewhere
or on something,
key word here is "on,"
"is," is also poignant,
but focus long enough
and it'll surely blur.
What I mean to seem
is that attention
dissolves and lens
blends retention.
Distance exists more
within hypothetical thought
than in the connection itself.
Contemplate stepping into
a dirt-stirred puddle with
hidden depth and shape
on your daily sidewalk walk.
Never step in it, never;
it'll up past ankle.
Wet shoes and squish,
you're looked at. Rush past
another walker, cold feet, another walker.
It, they, them, out: be limbless.
On the wall, pick a spot.
See a wall be not.
See it tall.
Can you see it?
Is it there?
Make sure it's there,
because it is it is
it is a wall.
Focus. Spot.
Now see you.
"See," is the question.
Can you see you?
See you at me stare.
Let it bend blue
and walk hard on the
ice-covered sidewalks.
Step hard and step fast.
Feb 15, 2013
Feb 15, 2013 at 10:42 PM UTC
a thousand eyes follow you from newly waxed floors
and trail after me with form-filled labels, white on gold
take as needed; do not operate machinery; relax.
the shadows follow our steps, ***** and blood next to God’s poster love.
pin it to the bathroom wall: peccavi, peccavi
two years, fifteen minutes, miles of scars.
we sleep through the days, and whisper
of nights before the hurricane
("what happened to those two?")
("Deus misereatur, the storm took them.")
I daydream of sinking my teeth into the flesh of redemption,
to rip muscle from immaculate bone.
can we not move on?
copper denial drips from our jaws.
and Deo gratias, they say, you survived.
limbless and naked on tiled floors.
Deo gratias et Deus mortuus est.
survival is in our veins.
I watch you waiting in LCD purgatory
as you see my fingers bleed into the vinyl shielded couches of the 12am ER
perception through observation — I let you reveal who I am.
what am I feeling? how do I act?
breathing through each other with liquor in our lungs.
I know how the bile tastes in your throat,
and you know the burn of the whiskey on my tongue
why do we still reach for walls
where cicada-shell notices cling with scotch tape?
take a number and restore the riches;
leave the room and tear them down.
who but God can build over the ruins of fallen cities, fallen worlds?
and ora pro nobis, He is yet unwelcome here.
we are holy, in our own names we pray, and Hallelujah, we are saved
Oct 13, 2015
Oct 13, 2015 at 6:18 PM UTC
The beauty holds herself with grace.
Piano fingers weave a lace cocoon around a golden tress,
In full view of the populace.
An autumn exhalation
Breathes an epitaph for every secret limbless layer of her mind;
And all that she can do is laugh
A brutal laugh. Their smiles are so unkind.
Jul 2, 2012
Jul 2, 2012 at 12:03 PM UTC
Of feet:
Talon dancing,
claws of deadlight whimpers
what fierce, nocturnal
we, flat feet, barefoot in the snowy dust.
Of fools:
Rampant, rampage
of madlight weakness
soft fowl, moon-eyed
we, black jesters, makers of dreams.
Of children:
Wiley charm,
naked of sadlight gestures
limbless folly, red cheeked
we, coiled by birth, the sack of infant sighs.
Of voices:
Time would swallow silence,
by the tongue, by meek silhouettes,
by shadows of the throat, of man
as he enters the cave, black body, old in
stalactite teeth, snowy dust
through curiosity in the black dream,
and birth the birth of folly one hundred times
and sigh the first whimper, at the end
I was here.
Sep 15, 2012
Sep 15, 2012 at 11:48 PM UTC
Who is the Artist and who is the Man, What differences lay therein?
Who is it that struggles more or less, is it a monopoly one over the other?
It is in the minds of all men to seek serenity and peace, to stand and hope for this is common to all.
Yes, we all have this in common, but the Artist has the tools with which to utter man’s dissent. This dissent to the injustices and violence’s waged upon the world and upon ourselves.
However, if the Artist believes that he is inculpable of these same injustices; his beliefs are that of indolence. For the Artist is no different in terms of the flesh and bone we speak of; this cage is inherent to all.
Struggle is also inherent. Who is it that has not done so? In this day and age as in most ages past, we have witnessed the violent upheaval of country against country, neighbor against neighbor. Americans and the world have watched towers and airplanes fall from the sky. And while this is agreeably horrific, we enlist and unleash a nationally based reprisal against our fellow human beings.
Yes, justice must be served, but it must be served by calm and learned hands. Some nine years later we find ourselves wallowed deep in the decay of war. And to what end has it been justified. The soldier will say that it is to bestow honor upon his fallen comrades and that is why the fight must go on. The politician will say it is to ensure stability in the affected region. The businessman will say it is to regain stability in the markets.
But the Man, the Woman and child only ask when will this end? The laid off workers, the new lower class of America, the grieving Mothers and Fathers, the limbless young men and woman. What is it that they see? The world’s future lies wounded upon an uncaring street.
And yet, what is it that an artist can do that a man cannot? The artist is a part of the melee, part of this violent soup. He may sit outside the bowl separate from the rest, but he cannot deny his complicity with this.
We must come to terms with our humanity as artists. For the artist to deny this would surely be the greatest lie. It is the twenty first century and we are the Writer’s, the artists of this age. What is it that we are prepared to tell the future? What is it that will be said of us and our work?
Let us not lie to them, let us not squander our opportunity to convey our perceived truths in the most laudable of lights. However we must all confess that we are first and foremost,
Man, simple men and women who struggle, who live, and die, who at times celebrate injustices, who embrace blind thought and bias’s, who breathe and bleed just as they, just as we… We are heartbeat and pulse of these times. But let us not hold that above our brothers and sisters, Let our combined works embrace the common man. For if not for him, Art is meaningless.
Jan 3, 2011
Jan 3, 2011 at 4:33 PM UTC