"listlessness" poems
walking down park
amsterdam
or columbus do you ever stop
to think what it looked like
before it was an avenue
did you ever stop to think
what you walked
before you rode
subways to the stock
exchange (we can’t be on
the stock exchange
we are the stock
exchanged)
did you ever maybe wonder
what grass was like before
they rolled it
into a ball and called
it central park
where syphilitic dogs
and their two-legged tubercular
masters fertilize
the corners and side-walks
ever want to know what would happen
if your life could be fertilized
by a love thought
from a loved one
who loves you
ever look south
on a clear day and not see
time’s squares but see
tall Birch trees with sycamores
touching hands
and see gazelles running playfully
after the lions
ever hear the antelope bark
from the third floor apartment
ever, did you ever, sit down
and wonder about what freedom’s freedom
would bring
it’s so easy to be free
you start by loving yourself
then those who look like you
all else will come
naturally
ever wonder why
so much asphalt was laid
in so little space
probably so we would forget
the Iroquois, Algonquin
and Mohicans who could caress
the earth
ever think what Harlem would be
like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears
grew sending
a cacophony of sound to us
the parrot parroting black is beautiful black is beautiful
owls sending out whooooo’s making love ...
and me and you just sitting in the sun trying
to find a way to get a banana tree from one of the monkeys
koala bears in the trees laughing at our listlessness
ever think its possible
for us to be
happy
Nikki Giovanni, “Walking Down Park” from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 1996 by Nikki Giovanni.
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 1:17 PM UTC
You're my LSD Nightmare
You, the truth, the light, the way
You're my LSD Nightmare
The man who made the blotter
Did not realize the gate he had opened
And when I went through it
I wondered where I had gone
You, my LSD Nightmare
I love you, I love you, I lived in you
I am your eyes and I see your face
You, beautiful life, I confide in you
I wandered towards you and I saw in your eyes
I saw the sadness of thousands of years
I saw the sorrow of all the lost children
I wished I could tell you, but you were forgotten
When I finally found you, we lost our listlessness
We tumbled through the circles of time,
And found it all back where I'd left you
I love you, I loved you, I lived in you
And when I return, I'll tell you what I saw
Feb 9, 2016
Feb 9, 2016 at 1:43 PM UTC
I'm really sick.
Like ***** is going to come out of my mouth--
an eruption of **** from my ears is due.
I've laid too long dormant
and one by one the hot spots of my petty jealousy,
indignation, and
mistrust are at boiling points:
The Ring of Fire, they call it.
Yellowstone
I'm the ********* Yellowstone caldera.
The great rim,
****** up and blister scarred,
knock-kneed from falling out of bed in nightmares,
weird from the predisposition to volcanic shittiness
(not in a romantic way)
but none the less active,
or reactive.
This vexation is as old as grinding plates.
This repulsion is as old as the poisoning of Aristotle
My head is the Spartan scythe
because I'm a new sign in an old world.
I use old signs to poison this newly dug well between us
But not well can I keep this message
banner
******* billboard to myself.
So let me just wrap the code from ear to ear,
in plain text where you can see
the cypher: **** your red dress.
You see,
those blisters are the gravity between White Dwarves
pulling at skin, and earth, and ending thrown halfway across the universe.
I knew I'd seen you before,
there at the edge of the Oort Cloud
where we tell people we just met:
I stopped eating
I was hurt once
I was ugly too
and no one was really listening.
You and the rest of our red dresses meant too little.
But still then why do you whine over the hungry, and hurt, and ugly
and spit in my face for being there at the Edge,
and for loving the thrill in listlessness,
the passion in mundanity?
And that ******** about the shallowness of victims?
You didn’t learn a thing
traveling and trusting and falling out of beds.
Your drunken honesty is your sober lack of layers.
This isn’t a far reach of space,
your torn dress and cork heels won't work here.
Don’t bring that littleness here,
you're the only one not really listening now.
Jan 11, 2015
Jan 11, 2015 at 12:25 AM UTC
Your troubles shrink not, though I feel them less
Here, far away, than when I tarried near;
I even smile old smiles—with listlessness—
Yet smiles they are, not ghastly mockeries mere.
A thought too strange to house within my brain
Haunting its outer precincts I discern:
—That I will not show zeal again to learn
Your griefs, and, sharing them, renew my pain….
It goes, like murky bird or buccaneer
That shapes its lawless figure on the main,
And each new impulse tends to make outflee
The unseemly instinct that had lodgment here;
Yet, comrade old, can bitterer knowledge be
Than that, though banned, such instinct was in me!
2.5k
When I met you,
my heartbeat fret--
something was incongruous.
And once frantic words
careened out of your mouth--
I saw rapid fire machine gun
rubber bullets bouncing everywhere.
Neighborhood dogs desperately yipped
and barked and howled
as your attempts to weave a conspiracy laden
tragic web of a storybook life into a net
to trap those who will listen unravel
before me.
Storm clouds darken around you.
The cacophonous pandemonium of your voice
and slithering slender body
are fascinating to watch as headlights dance
by while you whirl in the middle of the road,
***** drink in one hand
a plucky smile--
your green eyes glow like melting peridot.
With a train wreck personality,
your frolfing at a busy intersection
influence over some is astonishing!
The next morning,
through a haze of listlessness,
I understand what you are;
Succubus.
Sep 13, 2012
Sep 13, 2012 at 8:44 AM UTC
A Cornish sunrise
is spoiled by bleating tourists;
I enjoy the sunrise
with all but my eyes.
As sure as God is sifting out the chaff
and with mathematical certainty...
my listlessness is becoming an issue.
A fist is shaking at me again,
but I’ve stopped looking at faces.
I reach for a book, not to read,
but to straighten my posture,
by opening it in my lap.
I hear sailing boats
always, living here, the constant
boom swing and rattling of cheaply
made metal clips and whipping ropes.
I hear the negligence of novice sailors
and their secret wishes to accidentally
lose their family on the rocks.
I hear the sound of life jackets
hanging on their pegs whilst
skinny kids think that
the sea is just a big blue
bouncy castle.
I have observed how things
can go very wrong;
I was a lifeguard and then coast
guard working for the RNLI.
Now I try and enjoy the sunrise each
morning but the noisiest of tourists are
walking around in groups of
foghorn and sheep’s wool
and warning us of nothing
— so loudly.
They’ve closed the lighthouse
and the docks, ship don’t
come here anymore.
Just these novice sailors
who, with unerring instinct,
sink for the weight of their
masculinity
or lose a crew member
or be pinched painfully by a crab.
Their kids ask: How do boats float?
They ask that as their life jackets
swing on the peg
— the seas are not calm today.
Jun 14, 2016
Jun 14, 2016 at 11:21 PM UTC
An occasional gust of wind will lift the translucent white voile curtains and then drop them like a child losing interest. The effect is like flash photography, a burst of sudden sunlight that paints our irises, then quickly fades.
It’s a cool Paris morning. In the low 50s. The windows are open and we forgot to turn on the heat. It’s perfect ‘under the covers’ weather. We’ve succumbed to laziness, refusing to get out of bed. Lazing-in is new enough to us that we’re defining it with a gamut of synonyms.
“Listlessness, torpor,” Peter says, his index finger tracking the slow twirl of the ceiling fan.
“Stupor, slumberous, supineness, ” I updog.
“Ooh! total submissiveness,” Peter said, drawing the last word out like it’s *****
“Every man’s dream,” I confirm.
“Inertia,” he says, triumphant in finding an engineering word.
“Good one,” I compliment. “Lifeless, loafing laggard,” I add.
There’s a knock at the door.
We look at each other guiltily, like we’ve been caught.
“We ordered breakfast last night,” Peter remembers.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you get it,” I suggested.
“Why me?” he whined.
“Because you can wear less and because what if it’s an ax murderer?”
“These people work for your grandmother, she employs ax murderers?”
“It could be a revolution - this is France - it happens.”
There’s another knock.
“Get it!,” I bleated, like a helpless goat.
“Am I expendable?” he asked, as a man might plead to a lynch mob.
“Women and children first,” I remind him.
There’s a third knock.
“Ok,” he says resignedly, as he rises, draws on shorts and heads for the door.
“You’re my hero,” I assure him, before I pull the sheet up over my head in case it IS an ax murderer.
Jun 3, 2023
Jun 3, 2023 at 9:06 AM UTC
These days drag on
while I drag on my finely
rolled cigarette of relief
But the relief is only a hazy
mask, fading with every lash
that falls on my cheek
My hair is too weak and
unkempt, for days spent
inside enduring darkness
take a toll on one's
mentality and physicality
I am a shell of who I used to be
Lips stuck together, crooked spine,
fingers jammed from carpel tunnel
Apathetic eyes grow weary from the
vast toxins that reside behind them
seeping through like an absorbent napkin
and rung out with listlessness
These days drag on and on
I hear the same songs
and make the same motions
I miss the fresh air and
the sound of the ocean
I almost miss the faint
smell of burts bees on
your lips--I'm sick with
nostalgia and dying for the future,
hating the present, wishing these
days would drag to an end
Oct 17, 2012
Oct 17, 2012 at 4:26 AM UTC
Barely do my Wednesdays fill with longing,
Lost observers rendering August whims to the scrapheap of infinity,
Galvanized entities downing tools schematically,
A posse of awareness pronating towards incandescent light,
Mostly everything a prolonging of jest and belly laughs,
Dawn brings the sick belly of listlessness,
Hordes of happenchance and imaginers of silence dancing,
The chitter chatter cadence does dim for a minute stretching yonde
Aug 21, 2018
Aug 21, 2018 at 1:27 PM UTC
When I place my heart
in hell,
I place it in your frying pan.
When we ****
I see the listlessness in your eyes,
and I'm not hurt,
because at least you're there,
and you're letting me enter
you
for
a
moment.
At least your letting me be a part of you,
and that's what I think *** is,
more than an entering of the body,
it's an entering of the soul.
So when I push my *****
I push
my hopes
my regrets
my hurtfulness
and my
psycho-sociological
********
Can you take me,
because I'm crazy
and I've got a few ****** up
idiosyncracies.
So when I catch
this love **** quick,
it's on a whole 'nother tip.
I might just fall in love,
and Natalie might come calling
again,
so don't be hurt
when I resume with her
and I chase every single girl
I could have loved
into the distance.
Don't be hurt,
because
misguidedly,
I think I'm meant to be with her.
Apr 21, 2012
Apr 21, 2012 at 8:58 PM UTC
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
1.4k
Damask and Death
Velvet and Violence
Satin and Suffering
Organza and Oppression
Calico and Corpses
Paisley and Pain
Taffeta and Torture
Lace and Listlessness
Oct 3, 2012
Oct 3, 2012 at 1:31 PM UTC
I'm falling apart (again)
and the tight seams of my mentality
are quickly fraying in this silence.
This silence is more than simply just that.
It is built up of sudden unemployment combined with
the empty spaces around me (that once held friends)
and the lack of motivation to do anything (caused by the overwhelming listlessness of my Depression).
The hardest things are really quite simple:
go to sleep
eat at least one meal a day
shower
go outside once in a while
breathe (deeply)
get out of bed
wake up
call someone (to temporarily fill the empty spaces)
feed the cat (which I manage to do during the few moments I'm awake)
clean up a bit
breath (once more).
The Depression has one outlet (that works)
but for once there is not even the urge
to engage in that self destructive action.
The search for a job is needlessly difficult,
for each time I find that the scars on my arms,
all over my body,
make me "ineligible."
The ones that seem not to care about such things
are either paying minimum wage and are part time
(neither of which pays the rent, car insurance, and other bills that always, always add up),
or I do not have the certification or degree to have them
(school is expensive and I will do whatever it takes to never live in the same building as my parents- even being homeless).
And friends?
How can one make and keep or even briefly have even one,
when they themselves don't have even the faintest idea of how
to let others in?
To trust them (any more than one would trust a person holding a gun to the back of their head)?
Feb 12, 2015
Feb 12, 2015 at 4:03 AM UTC
1.
You remembered June when this morning's sun
was there with the care of a father's hand
etching each leaf into filigree--
or with the unsequestered heart of a crazed lover
with his impossible love letters and artifacts
of century's old over-ripened fruits
that even as they hung precariously from the oaks
dazzled and made space for the stark blue.
A change from last night.
The constellate, dispersing fog
that brought the sense
of an overwhelming descent to a seabed,
the submersion a baffling return to a night
from childhood, enclosed at all ends
and unknowable. A shut book.
2.
Warmth lingers on skin even after
a few minutes of exposure, a caress.
Then, step outdoors and the wind,
whose listlessness and beauty
picks up your step and hurries you on
with characteristic mercilessness
through the cold.
While you were sleeping and roaming and reading
it has crept into the uninhabited crevices,
under doors, fuseboxes, the shades of streetlights
to mold like frost.
3.
Cold is a life-form,
growing and budding in the absence of green.
And it is at this time of year we strangle
the neck of uncertainty.
The sun peeks. The cold air climbs
out of the bottoms and hollows of things.
When it reaches an excitement, as now,
her absence reveals herself:
there is nowhere you can touch her body.
She is the thousand particles
she is the spacing in between:
twirling, gathering and thrusting through the streets,
she calls you to witness her now as she comes
like a first snow.
Nov 25, 2012
Nov 25, 2012 at 12:27 PM UTC
( by Elizabeth Squires and SilverSilkenTongue in Collaboration)
In an idle ilk the poet
Did **** precious time
Non pursuant twas he
Of that haunting rhyme
The Tap tap tap of his Thumbs
In pulse to the Anxiety that Comes
Resistant and Hesitant this Choice of Word
Like crows on a wire flitting to and fro
Simply to be Assured who is top Bird
He mulled in thought
On his composition
Yet not acting on it
Due to a stalling disposition
Caught in a Web, of Websters Dictionary
Assonance and Consanace Fundimentaly
He Chews each Syllable to Spit out
The Misconstrued Vowels that he Shouts!
By Elizabeth Squires and Silver Silken Tongue
Special Thanks to Ann who suggested Elizabeth and I should Collaborate
Oct 2, 2014
Oct 2, 2014 at 5:48 AM UTC
Today we have few heroes
Few live the life of Kings,
Few go the extra mile to win
The wondrous praise it brings.
Most walk the path of averageness
Most strive to play it safe,
Where convention glides to keynote
And contention is a waif.
Nobody pulls the dragon's tail
Nobody stretches out,
To walk in shoes of restlesness,
And lash the Devil's gout.
Nobody grasps the horns of hell
To cast care to the wind,
Nobody sticks their neck out
Making ego's soar rescind.
Why do we lie in fallow turf
Where textures are so bland?
Why do we slouch in listlessness
Each idle hand, in hand?
Where is the pluck and passion
Which allows our pulse to flail?
Go find the guts and courage
....TO YANK THAT DEMON DRAGON'S TAIL!
Marshalg
@theBach
Mangere Bridge
21 March 2010
Dedicated with love to my youngest fledgling, Solomon, who is venturing forth in his first business.
Mar 20, 2010
Mar 20, 2010 at 7:37 PM UTC
Misplaced in the listless silence of centuries
My heart cried out for thee
While the sun burned down, I sought out mysteries
Within the crashing waves
Of seas
Wave upon wave seemed amazingly lovely
Yet I did not feel your presence shine
As I watched each one rolling, I still cried for thee
Somehow knowing, each wave
Was not mine
I sighed into the listless silence where I remained
Misplaced for countless centuries
Growing weary of watching waves in vain
However my heart still
Cried out for thee
I looked up into the burning sun about to end my quest
Felt his glorious rays ignite my soul
My heart cried out in distress at all this listlessness
So tired of searching
For a wave to make me whole
Wide and wider still, my eyes began to open
As those rays burned into me
My quest ending in a blissful absorption
What I had sought all along
I could see
Oct 17, 2010
Oct 17, 2010 at 12:13 PM UTC
This disconnected census
is masterfully oblivious
there is no comfort in listlessness
while drowning in indifference
Chemically imbalanced
any chance at repentance
in any single instance
is subtly dismissed
as I crush my heart inside my fist
while feigning interest.
Oct 25, 2013
Oct 25, 2013 at 1:45 PM UTC
Maybe i am going insane,
and nobody notices,
because they're all kinda crazy too.
But not my crazy.
It's said that everyone is on a road to somewhere,
so don't be upset if someone is not walking with you.
But i am tired, and i am lost,
and these feet are weighing me down,
my mouth, it voices abuse, that my ears, can't handle,
my brain is my noose,
my hands seek refuge from listlessness of not being held.
My eyes are tired, they weep tears of nothingness
because my road is being paved
and i must walk it anyhow, without you
And how i miss those moments,
when i had you with me,
those few fragile moments when our paths collided.
And i am sorry i fell apart
because i couldn't bare another person walking with me
because i was so used to being alone.
And how i miss you, and your words
and your conversation, and i could watch your mouth move,
forever.
I can't look back because its too hard to remember
but i know i miss you,
and my brain is heavy from it all
and my heart is wrapped in sticky tape
and i blu-tacked your name to the back of my hand
so i would never forget you, and i am scared to forget, you.
But you were not my crazy, some other kind, but not mine
and maybe i am going insane
but not your kinda, insane...
so i had to walk away,
for my sanity, what is left of it, tagged me on the back, and said 'it's time'.
Still my hand hangs listless, waiting for your touch,
but my arms know there will be no holding you tonight.
Oh god, i cry, but i don't believe in such things..
Funny old thing, in this world, love,
because it comes and goes, at a cost,
and its why my head hangs low from all the insanity that my heart has brought to the table,
in loving you.
Mar 24, 2013
Mar 24, 2013 at 7:13 PM UTC
it is no hidden truth:
writing about those teeth
and twisting schemes of
sadness in my dreams is somehow my dependent everything,
but patterned lists of the same words
in permutation
becomes tedium in waiting;
there's that illustrious want for novelty, no matter how safe the same may be,
and I still just write
about that exact ******* love
and ******** everybody else wants: so, am I this predictable? am I this formulaic?
probably.
so, how does one take some respite?
how does one choke back their routine penstrokes and fabricate
experiences they haven't yet or ever will gather,
when all they've held was in the ritual letting of ladders down ductile tunnel foundations,
the vestigial fathoms that remain floating around in
your eyes, your eyes! your eyes I
tear open and crawl in and curl up inside,
the feigned lust I set out to fake and then finally, silently, made
and now it's all the mistake of concrete stained with
letters heart letters on a date that lasts forever,
but your letters are tiny lies
and mine are misery
held in contemptible disguise and
how I slip just that **** easily into this lackluster story about
I, you,
people I never knew and
never know anybody.
and
*how the grass would have grown and grown if the lawn hadn't been cut down, and the patch of death in concentric center where outside, under the stars, I lay curled, foetal, and drained of bile; for now, in ascension of sterility I am feral once more, I am, at last, just a tremulous, pathetic and miniscule animal waiting to pass through the dirt. That moment hit me, like all stones in august. So I stood. So I ******* stood, threw off my dripping eyes, screaming at the moon 'til I spat blood and cursed life and I swore, I swore down to the skin of my teeth, I would conquer it until it conquered me, for, as far as the wild was concerned, my casualty was a drop of rain in an ocean. So I become the ocean. So I dig my palm into the earth and let dust ground the stray electricity. I no longer lie, I no longer bide time until it's too late.*
But I lied
and I do lie.
I waste abhorrent amounts of time.
I still just hang my head and leave things up to fate. It's always too late.
It's always too late.
Mar 23, 2013
Mar 23, 2013 at 4:31 AM UTC
I have a wound which
the eye cannot see.
Making riddles out of the obvious.
My heart yet not comprehend,
the impervious mischief of brokenness.
A splash of ennui amidst
the savoring intellect.
Listlessness and apathy
endures mortality.
My heart grew fond
of my own enmity.
Bitterness is truancy
that rivals denouement.
Oh my sweet lacksey-daisy heart,
where do I go from here?
Round and round in the roundabout.
River I kept swimming
head over heels.
I'm thinking of a thought
that I don't understand.
As soon as I admit
I'm alive, I am dead.
They say when you're lonely,
you think too deeply.
Maybe, but I don't care.
Should I go swimming?
Or should I be drowning?
I don't know the difference anymore.
White is black, black is white.
But there is no gray.
Oh my sweet lacksey-daisy heart,
do you believe me?
I don't care.
They say good things about me.
But what does it mean
to look beyond me?
I'm already in the middle,
right before I even started.
iamthe_avatar ©2017
Dec 31, 2016
Dec 31, 2016 at 12:31 PM UTC
Tomorrow lies in a sticky-wet puddle at my feet
And all my yesterdays are growing too heavy
Straining to burst free from the shiny pink membrane
That barely separates them
From the cruel, pointing fingers
Of the scandal-seeking crowd.
I do not wish any longer
To share in their catatonic state,
But instead I continue to climb against the raging,
Shoving current of the endless waterfall,
Alone and unafraid
Toward destiny
And I forsake without apology
The security that conformity offers.
I am no longer what I once was:
Merely another mindless piece
Of the glorious whole,
But stronger now
And the eternal clock ticks past morning
And into the crimson before midday
More deeply, infinitely more do I fear the silence
The mendicant and instant acceptance
By which the masses sully me
Than do I dread their hatred
And their offended pride;
Their glaring antipathy
Their cold rejection.
This do I know to be more certain even
Than the coming of the night:
Unless I have the courage to stand alone
I will surely see destruction
For it takes not great strength or genius
To be held ***** by the pressing
Of the single minded crowd.
And so I ascend,
Heedless of yesterday
Undaunted by tomorrow,
Leaving behind everything that is certain
Embracing instability.
Like a star I travel forward
Into the fathomless darkness
And I can't be pulled down by gravity
And I continue forever into no one knows what
But my shining path is followed
By the eyes of many
Drawing them momentarily
From their listlessness
And forcing them into temporary
And vastly uncomfortable realization.
It is the essence of courage to stand apart
And the highest measure of my worth
Lies in my willingness to be complete
Without the acceptance and accolades of mankind
Complete and content to walk alone
To be hated by all those around me.
This is my destiny.
This is my choice.
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 4:19 PM UTC
Come forth, bury your skinny
necks in the full breath of sky
This world is a guillotine
falling and we sing of blades.
Perhaps then, before the flash,
the drifting listlessness of void,
we might dream ourselves
into a room full of our echos.
Masterpieces of memory,
paired and painted with
our love. Perhaps,
we might learn that prayer
Is the creation of something
beautiful. A single glance
across a crowded room,
a students smile, a poem
written with all the shades
of my mothers laughter.
Mar 1, 2017
Mar 1, 2017 at 10:27 PM UTC
It rests indignantly behind eyes,
and in the creases that hold them in place.
It's a permanent gaze,
a glazing of hope and health and most of all,
it's a loss.
Embedded in failed careers and lost dreams is this
listlessness, this blisslessness that some
try so desperately to hide.
I know some don't try to mask their masks
and I'm sure that most don't know
the parasite from their own
black sparkling souls.
The diamonds in their eyes have lost their purpose,
and pupils cannot regain their lustre
easily.
It takes divine intervention or more,
whatever that means,
to shine on darkness.
And sometimes no amount of sunlight
lets broken souls glisten; for that
I have no answer.
Mar 11, 2015
Mar 11, 2015 at 2:55 PM UTC