"martyrdom" poems
As the voice of a dead man might sing
From the depths of his tomb,
For you, Mistress, my tuneless voice rings
False in my heart’s catacomb.
Open your soul and hear the knell
Of my mandolin strings:
This song I wrote, for you, which tells
Of cruel and childish things.
I will sing of your eyes, onyx and gold,
Purged of every shadow,
Then the Lethe of your breast, the cold
Styx of your hair’s dark flow.
As the voice of a dead man might sing
From the depths of his tomb,
For you, Mistress, my tuneless voice rings
False in my heart’s catacomb.
Then I will praise, above all
Flesh that heaven did bless
Whose opulent perfumes recall
Nights long and sleepless.
Finally, I will speak of the kiss
Of your sweet red lip,
Oh, how my martyrdom is bliss,
– My angel! – My Whip!
Open your soul and hear the knell
Of my mandolin strings:
This song I wrote, for you, which tells
Of cruel and childish things.
Apr 17, 2015
Apr 17, 2015 at 10:01 AM UTC
They came like a nightmare and took us away.
Oh Mother! Don't spill a tear, your son's in a better place.
They were scared of our pens so they fired us off.
Oh Mother! Don't cry for their guns have lost.
They pointed us out and asked our identities.
Oh Father! Stand tall, I answered them proudly.
I took a bullet in my head for wearing green.
Oh Father! Be strong, I did not feel a thing.
So bury me in this land and bury me with smiles
Every grain of this soil is a witness of my sacrifice.
So bury me in this land and bury me with smiles
Your son embraced martyrdom and a martyr never dies.
Those monsters just killed, did not let anyone go.
Oh Father! Their hearts were stone cold.
They painted the walls of my school with our blood.
Oh Father! Don't worry, they will be the one to suffer.
I was received by the angels at the gates of heaven.
Oh Mother! That place was full of little children.
And when I met the Lord, I was dressed in green.
Oh Mother! My Mother! I was so happy.
So bury me in this land and bury me with smiles
Every grain of this soil is a witness of my sacrifice.
So bury me in this land and bury me with smiles
Your son embraced martyrdom and a martyr never dies.
Jan 17, 2015
Jan 17, 2015 at 5:23 AM UTC
Unappreciated
i do everything i can
for people that i love
yet they don't seem to notice
the extra miles i walk for them
Unwanted
they choose others over me
when I'd choose them over others
i am everyone's last choice
i am everyone's last resort
Unworthy
i deem myself unworthy of time
for one seems to give me theirs
it's sad how i give every second i have
to the people who won't give me a minute
Nov 2, 2015
Nov 2, 2015 at 6:15 AM UTC
You came to me like a fairytale,
I held you close; I looked into your eyes,
they were deep and full of soul; chancing fate.
I kissed your neck and shoulders, your belly and your ***
We took each others bodies and tasted freedom.
~
I couldn't help feeling this was your one and only,
A secret that you'll keep to your self ~ "A happy thought!"
Secure in the knowledge that you were once utterly cherished;
And that you alone would choose martyrdom; rather than embracing me.
Nov 5, 2018
Nov 5, 2018 at 7:50 PM UTC
I've lived the kind of pain they write about
In the tales of heroes,
who came and went without
Salvation or celebration; and,
instead, became close friends of doubt.
When luck leaves your side,
And there's no one left watching . . .
There is no martyrdom.
No heaven to fall from. No damnation.
Just *nothing.
Nothing and no one*.
But I won't let myself succumb
To the temptation
of self-righteous certainty,
false justifications, or
egotistical self-mutilation -
Just to bleed on those who lay
Below my lowly elevation.
Not like you.
I am not made like you.
No longer, will I distort my own view
To lie to the few, who stand with me in the fire.
It's true.
I am a worthless piece of ****
and even I can hardly stand it
when I speak about myself.
But this time . . .
It's about more than me.
And, for once, I'm going to spend well the wealth,
That I was given and didn't earn,
On those who showed me how to learn
And to never become like you.
Yes -
I am judgmental and self-loathing.
I am selfish and I am wrong.
I am naive, and strung out and strung along.
But I
am not made
like you.
I am strong.
Feb 22, 2019
Feb 22, 2019 at 5:05 PM UTC
When education was restricted
They ran to religion
When solace was stripped away
They ran to martyrdom
Loved ones fell
Hated ones rose
As hearts sank
To the depths of the maelstrom
Fueled by the unholy trinity
Value, vindication, and violence
Bombs decimate Afghan villages
With the precision
Of a needle hitting a vein
And as casually
As a contractor putting a dollar in his pocket
The rubble of their town
Lost in a mist of dust
The rubble of their minds
Lost in a mist of vengeance
The rabid dog chases the subjugated raccoon
The raccoon discovers a sacred hole and hides in it
The predator attempts to encroach the void
The raccoon quivers in it's sanctuary shelter
Finding relief as the hound becomes stuck
And laughs as the infected beast starves to death
But ecstasy turns to terror
As the raccoon realizes it's only way out of this hole
Is being blocked by the gargantuan corpse
Terror turns to sorrow
As the raccoon starves to death
Alone
In the dark
It's holy land now hell
For once it had protected the raccoon from unbridled rabies
But since the hound's death
It's Cerberus size obstructs all progression
Holes become graves
And prey are left to pray
For someone to drop a bomb and clear a path
Jun 7, 2017
Jun 7, 2017 at 4:45 AM UTC
The unorthodox are the true prophets
for their ways are those of the future,
so in the now, most kings get their head cut off.
But as death is the greatest prophet,
for it never fails to come true,
their martyrdom proves their ways truer than the footsteps of their fathers,
so in the face of adversities;
never be afraid to be a lonely Jesus on the Cross.
Nov 25, 2012
Nov 25, 2012 at 12:27 PM UTC
you can try to steal the show
but baby, remember your place
you're a sidekick, not a hero
maybe there's some grace in martyrdom
but that's not where you wanna go
step down, sit down
you're a sidekick, not a hero
Jun 9, 2015
Jun 9, 2015 at 1:14 PM UTC
Dragged out screaming, senseless from the hallows of martyrdom
My father's mother's wayward brother
Baptized in propaganda and searing lead
Kamikaze death machine to paranoia fever dream
A noble experiment in utter catastrophe
Half measure, interstellar tourniquet
Stem the free flow of blood like inconvenient statistical evidence
Dripping down born-again ****** America's chin
Vector-like, everything explodes outwards
And on trajectories like these only friction is holy
Murphy's law in ecstatic altercation
A furious life lived under an anachronistic magnifying glass
Truly the only thing worth decaying for
Dec 23, 2014
Dec 23, 2014 at 3:38 PM UTC
I appeared that one random day some years ago when the stars were galloping.
since then each step I take picturesque the clip I've been rolling.
I remember that day when mom told me that to live was to encounter a blessing and struggling was the way we inherit a trophy for generations that lived.
I was deceived by the unrealistic heroism of many martyrs who died before me.
in fact, the spotlights were not meant for me as I expected. fate put me far removed from any truth I’ve worshiped.
some days I move in urge and fly very high. I heal my wounds and forgive people who randomly get me to taunt.
some days I scream without words and get drowned in my own nightmares. I drop death thinking of any chance to collect my own mythical strikes.
after all, I still reopen my eyes to a bizarre sight; I wonder if it is the answer to all the prayers I've murmured in my solemn nights
or perhaps it is just the doom I've been daydreaming about all the time.
of the truths spoken and the marks of my barefoot steps, I pledge for an eternal gaiety. And a place of my own kind.
Aug 14, 2022
Aug 14, 2022 at 9:21 AM UTC
Henceforth all ducks shall be shackled
entwined in martyrdom
half-shaven and fully aroused
baked and shaked and rattled and rolled
like bunnies, their reproduction
obviously
blantantly
even Freud would scratch his beard
too blatant the ***
obviously there must be another underlying problem
loving alcohol means you need ****
*** obsession means you need
love? Condoms?
Loch Ness Monster came over for tea
drank the imaginary brew
spat boiled liquid onto a canvas and sold it as art
"yes, yes, what does it mean?"
What does it mean?
It means that you think too much and don't feel
and don't think enough too caught up
like me
not perfect just only
and only is all one can do
can be accounted for
one, two, three
fall in-between the divisions of derivatives
damask dames like snoozing penguins
which is
black, white and dread all over
none too sure or very glassy
not too much of anything
just, just.
Jun 9, 2012
Jun 9, 2012 at 9:43 PM UTC
I am a Taurus so stubborn, bombastic, obstinate, and rigid,
But my loyalty brings stability and security to motherland
My patriotism is running in my blood like real violent flood
Being virtuous by birth my style of life is so sweet and grand
Enemies should not take me light because I am soldier of God
Friends appreciate my love and affection believe in my cause
I am bound by verdict of faith to remain to my glorious Lord
I understand my duties and responsibilities clause by clause
I remain winner whether I win or lose or embrace martyrdom
I love my God to the utmost of my domain and my capabilities
No one can match me by the grace of God I am real Muslim
Please do not take me granted I am like a real morning breeze
Col Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright 2017 Golden Glow
Jan 20, 2017
Jan 20, 2017 at 11:13 AM UTC
Have there been any reported miracles
Since the martyrdom of Saint Charlie?
A few crutches left lying around.
A wheelchair.
Perhaps a small resurrection?
Just askin'.
Sep 21, 2025
Sep 21, 2025 at 8:11 AM UTC
The absence of wonder in your eyes and sincerity from your mouth monotonously reassures the credibility of my contempt for casual communication with characterized ?individuals?
My own iris has been stretched by my eager to expand awareness.
I normally pity someone like this,
But your arrogant certainty shook my shadow to consciousness.
It told me to cast you naked into the glare,
Maybe snip your eyelids out of spite. Its fortunate for you that I am not a slave to the fury.
No constructive change would come of my martyrdom.
Oct 6, 2015
Oct 6, 2015 at 10:20 PM UTC
My mother tells me that we will
Never be friends.
Today I believe it.
Love poisons our blood
And familiarity kills
conversation.
I look at her emotionlessly
So to block her influence.
She is an expert at exploiting
The slightest ****** waver,
Or any emotional advantage she
Could have over you.
She will make you wrong
Through verbal martyrdom.
I won't let her speak to me
Like she does the weak who
Are too polite or too submissive
To fight her.
Her style of English is cutting,
Self-righteous, honest, rude, unscientific, emotional, aggressive and often violent.
Never elegant.
She thinks the world is a battleground.
She is often incompetent and on top of that headstrong - to compensate for her ignorance.
She is sometimes funny, and sometimes kind.
She tells me we will never be friends.
Today I believe it.
I will not confide. I will not smile.
I will not joke, I will not listen.
I will help but I won't speak.
I will keep the talk small.
We will never be friends.
Aug 16, 2018
Aug 16, 2018 at 7:51 AM UTC
Everyone dies
Story’s always the same
I just wish I could tell it
Some new, different way
To revivify life
With a vivid description
Instead of this atmosphere’s
Toxic constriction
Malnourishment kitchen
An infant mortality
Failure to listen
To self-absorbed, carbon-based
Standard emission
Way passed overfishin’
For likes on the social de-human condition
Automaton autobahn
Trickle down neocon
For-profit prison bomb
Boomin’ like radical
Islamic martyrdom
Unemployed masses
Of back of the classes
The masking of innocent
Voices in ashes
An **** of power
And greed wretches *****
Mother Earth out to fuel
Their big engines of war
An insatiable thirst for more
Curdled blood screams
As I rot to the Corps
Of America’s Dreams
Jul 17, 2018
Jul 17, 2018 at 4:13 PM UTC
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
2.3k
Kneel before me at your white porcelain altar.
Sacrifice the bits of pieces you had stashed away inside,
Place them inside the holy not holy water.
Watch each piece and place where they were from.
Sacrifice to me
For I am your goddess.
Your martyrdom will be known throughout
For you died for the lives of animals, for their rights to live
By being staked- refusing steak
Not for the 679 other reasons you decided to say no.
Die a martyr for me
For I am your goddess.
Wear red rubies along your wrists.
No one will ask where they’re from or how long you’ve had them
But they will shake in fear for this rosary- your rosy cheeks
Is as holy as the blood I too have shed for you.
Bear my symbol
For I am your goddess
Do not fear the day I come to meet you at the gates.
Stand in your doorway arms outstretched.
Await me for I await- will weigh you.
Sleep at night and dream of my loving embrace
and my second coming,
For I am your goddess
Feel my not hands touch your not waist
And my not lips kiss your not face
For this is not me and this has never been you
Because you are a child
And I am a goddess
Feb 27, 2018
Feb 27, 2018 at 4:06 PM UTC
Seldom am I so direct,
Like Wayne, Parker, Kent,
I prefer my subterfuge.
But these words are penned
(figuratively speaking)
by the penultimate,
tumultuous,
and often callous wordjockey
yours truly.
As I've said, I'm seldom
more than the sum
of my company kept
*[let slip,
reacquainted,
self-righteous reconciliation,
regret, repeat]*
And today, I find
myself
writing thrice,
twice toward pride,
once of consequence.
Que sera sera.
I'm lead like a horse
who had to drink -
or perhaps imbibe?
your softly streaming sentences,
words which kicked like a mule.
Remember, I was hoarse,
parched.
On that parchment, I find these words:
I am a cause...
Truth at last, truth at last,
Thank God almighty...
...you know the rest.
I stand on this principle -
that I cannot stand at all
sin ustedes
your words the salve,
my words the therapy.
"Progress."
Just Cause.
Now, waxing on
toward the triumphant,
anthemic Aye!
If you are the cause and the casualty,
then each daily account
of what might be made martyrdom
should be cannon.
Am I eliciting allusions and assumptions?
Inadvertently, but then precariously so.
So the pieces fall,
the causality, literary
the eventuality, progressive.
Aye, we are naught but what
we are made of by others.
So each concussive consonant chips and chisels
off the ol' block.
To a good Mister John Henry,
my gratitude.
Nov 7, 2013
Nov 7, 2013 at 4:24 AM UTC
I never was a Gryffindor, I said.
Not for me the bravado of the every day,
The martyrdom of intersecting a bullets path
In fact, I did disdain of that reckless abandon.
I understood the slytherins and ravenclaws outwitting the shooter Before he shot
But whoever said you'd meet a hufflepuff in heaven was wrong,
Lord knows I wouldn't jump in front of a bullet for you
But I'd pull us both out the way.
I never was a Gryffindor, I said.
Not for me the pomp and prance of the self-assured, self-entitled Gryffindor,
In fact, I felt at home in any other house.
Ravenclaws do speak the truth, possess originality,
And slytherins are more trustworthy than you'd suspect.
I never was a Gryffindor, I said.
But there's a certain bravery in dancing on your own like everyone's Watching,
Because they are,
They're all watching you, some disdainful,
Some with humour in their eyes,
Some with their cameras out:
I winked at one, and stuck my middle fingers up at the other,
Because I look happier than anyone else in the crowd
And I'm with my friends
And God I love my friends
And God knows when our song comes on I'm going to scream it at The top of my lungs.
And soon we'd collapse but I said no
Dance like the world will end if you stop
Because it will
Because the glory will fade
Because they don't understand
This isn't a dance, it's a victory march
Showing everyone here
That I have dealt with their smirks and their cameras
And I have survived.
And I am unstoppable now.
Maybe I am a little bit Gryffindor, I thought, and smiled.
Sep 3, 2017
Sep 3, 2017 at 5:26 AM UTC
Natures dilapidated rhythms
Carves itself into the trunks
Leaving only an omen
To be enchanted by a passer by
This fellow lone traveler
walking into ceilings of emerald delusions
The saintly stones and the creaks of trowlbrooks
He can not help but to gasp even to deafened ears
Lulled into complacency by decades of broken legends
The anointed ones and their fractured promises
Still somehow a harmony of one lonely leaf called out to him
Echoes from an apocalyptic cavernous wasteland
All the worlds suffering adjoined in one single note
With the agony and punishment
of all the dehydrated souls
The traveler was resurrected by the choice to live in a world of sensation
Rather then some brick containment
He chose to let suffering be fall his confessions
With a symphony in one hand
And a chain saw in the other
He belted the incarnation of freedom
They all tumbled for the rocks
he , the saw and the beauty
The clashing cascade
A blessed rapture and necessary harmonic sacrifice
all to the gods of that ensure we never have silence
Nov 30, 2010
Nov 30, 2010 at 9:10 AM UTC
Melting pots are for racists.
The USA is a salad bowl.
The student lounge features
the veggies at their ripest,
collecting oxygen amongst themselves,
for the corn cannot exist
with the broccoli,
and so on
and so forth.
Don't even mention
fruits
to the potatoes.
And the tomatoes,
they're just weird, man,
don't even know
what they are.
We are all at our most
savory and nutritious,
our youthful wisdom
emanating through our
concrete set of hues.
The chili peppers emanate a color
as red as the blood
of their ancestral martyrdom,
no other color,
just red.
Same for the cucumbers
with hearts so coolly refrigerated,
taking forest green,
taking pastel green
with just a few drops
of ivory-scented beige
tucked neatly behind
walls of bamboo-level peels.
The voices of the onions
thud onto the floor
as if being catapulted
from cumulonimbus peaks,
causing the Iceberg lettuce
to almost drown in its own
dressing.
Lady Liberty,
a series of
produce section fragments
sitting much too sternly
with no regard for sprawling.
In the same bowl, though!
Apr 29, 2010
Apr 29, 2010 at 10:52 AM UTC
Marvel at the mystics
with bent backs
hawking wares in the courtyard
word of gods on fire
in the electric
Razorback armies of onlooking lepers
leap forth at the call of the mystics
calming martyrdom
Marvel at the mystics
who cash checks and built steps
up to the attic of mental harmony
Marvel
as they make money hand over
fist off of your faith.
Jun 12, 2012
Jun 12, 2012 at 12:26 PM UTC
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
1.8k