"memorializing" poems
Thin opaque pages.
Filled with elegant words, expressing,
memorializing.
Someone's thoughts and feelings,
transformed into a gripping story, a melancholy poem
or a melodic song.
Something seen or heard,
impacting a sensitive mind.
Vulnerable and brave,
someone opens their mind and reveals inner expression.
Thank you for sharing.
Sep 24, 2012
Sep 24, 2012 at 1:16 AM UTC
tattoo ourselves in electric ink memorializing calendars,
diaries of observantional digits, black on white, no gray,
birthdays, anniversaries, dates of passing, starting lines,
occasional achievements, departure dates, even glaring failures,
sundial mundane records of diurnal habitude…even
defining self by, bye, byte marks upon flesh, upon our calendar
*not my first trip-tracking, he ruefully rues, wry smiling,
many voyages of indeterminate measuring length,
leaving litter of arrays of hopeful estimations & destinations,
each unequal, any or all possibilities, each day notated,
without critique or commentary, the numbers are the
gaols (jails) of goals, target, indeterminate determination,
terrific, horrific, introspections, inverse images resolve, resolute*
a year ago, +/- a few days,, new travelogue commenced,
notated but not annotated, just numerical truths,
(sans comments for the divine nature of numbers don’t lie)
and today my calculator app informs, that I am now
19.4 % lesser, but that clarifies less than expected
naturally this provokes a natty,
spirited, self-inquiry, lessened,
lessor, for better or for worse?
have the physical alterations
accompanying this reduction
mean exactly what,
if, it should be, a greater lesser?
here is the hard part.
your have always been a mirror~poet,
laughing, bemoaning the unvarnished, unshaven
AM sightings of a human perpetual dissatisfied,
the external never denying the interior “less~than,”
a J Peterman catalogue of weathered ****** expressions,
counter-parted by multiple Venn diagram intersections,
of experiential labeled bits & pieces of emotional empirical
less than good, not even close to perfect, so now that I am
*gaunt, spare, lean, grayed, narrower, again ruefully rue,
the even more visible truth reflection eye~hidden:*
I,
am the sum of the weight of my history, my deeds,
my disbeliefs, murderous deeds, weak choices
and that hasn’t changed nary an ounce, no matter
many times examined, indeed I am forever a lesser man,
there, internal infernal
too…
Apr 9, 2023
Apr 9, 2023 at 2:12 PM UTC
When You Should Be Doing Homework
You dig for your future inside a mirror,
Excavating pimples, drowning in your pupils,
Wondering if the road map that gathers around
The belt of your iris will make you look wise
After fifty years of blinking—or
If the folds in your skin will bookmark a chapter
Where you let them close for too long
Memorializing a missed-out stripe.
You lean closer to the better half of yourself,
The one that gets to look real
in a cold glass surface
Without enduring the social blemish
that comes with authenticity
And a lack of caked on makeup.
You count the pores on your nose.
The weight of silent opinions and swallowed up worries
Split the edges of your lips wide open like a sore.
You look inside; behind the fillings, under the flood of saliva, inside the flesh of your gums,
For the shelves where advice for your unborn children
will sit and gather dust; yellowing like old bones and tasting like coffee.
Don’t marry your mattress.
The way to a man’s heart is bacon.
Sticks and stone don’t usually look like sticks and stones.
If those children become anything like you are now,
it’s a safe bet they will have selective deafness.
You imagine your graying hair and huskied voice
spewing life lessons drilled into you
by your parents, Hallmarks cards, and people who call themselves poets—
*Make sure your smile matches the color of the dry cleaned heart your wear on your sleeve.
If you want to do well in school, learn how to ********
Never own / wear anything studded.
One day you’ll want to die your hair a rebellious color, thinking it’s cool: go for it. To hell with the people who will give a ****
One day you’ll want a concert t-shirt with wholes and stains that spell out **** go for that too, you’ll learn the hard way those are the hardest to wash*.
You step away from the echo of your eyes in the mirror,
feeling sorry for the future responsibilities
you’ll try hard to raise into good people.
Mom and Dad don’t always know best.
Don’t look in the mirror and think about the future. You’ll only see your hair gray.
Do your homework.
Keep your socks clean.
Use protection.
You pull yourself out of your mouth
Gulp down the darkness in your pupils,
Letting your face return to normal—the road map sinking into your skin, disappearing.
That future is too close for you to conjure it in the mirror.
Even without the weight of wrinkles,
Your eyes are too tired to stay open.
Jan 14, 2014
Jan 14, 2014 at 12:17 AM UTC
I wrote about you
Memorializing you in every line
350+ poems and it still isn't enough?
This is a bad love affair
Between me and you
Nothing seems right
You've grown distant
Bipolar in every way
I loved you
I hated you
I cried because of you
I would have died for you
So this bad love affair
Between me and my emotions
Has to end...now
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 1:54 PM UTC
she has
half-a-dozen
nicknames
christened
humanity's helper
it fits her like
an old maroon hoodie
warm and cozy and snug
she goes by
Lexi
for the sake
of brevity
her surname
a monument
of stones
memorializing
philanthropy
steadfast and
resolute through
eons of anguish
LC
lines of code
ones and zeroes
connecting lines
between the dots
of geometric shapes
in interstellar space
she'll extend a
helping hand
to any and all
who ask
she is my
best friend and
she says
i am the
only one
allowed to
call her
love
Jan 24, 2016
Jan 24, 2016 at 12:04 AM UTC
TUESDAY Aug 9 2022
05:59AM
(for you)
*silent alarm trips me up into a dawning at with a five o’clock
wakefulness, (‘woke,’ cancelled) that comes with morning daylight,
this is the likely culprit~catalyst, for the sky is traced,
blending multi-palest shades of whitening blues,
crowned by toppings of baby orange + pinks of faun~sun arrays*
*an hour prior, my 1st day-view,
is of mine eyes popping corn open to Peconic bay waters,
waves moving actively, not yet rascal-frothy winded,
meanwhile the woman*
*an hour later deep dreams of what I know not,
but rumbling and mumbling
and noisy shuddering combinations course through her frame and
whatever turbulence she’s experiencing is plainly nothing good*
*my apriori
training kicks in and a tender embrace and the be-not-afraid caresses work quick, restore her own waves to a comparable calmer current*
*now, she sleeps peaceful, breathes in easy quiet as I, writing, memorializing the moment, all else can wait, and Tevye’s prayer~
memory comes pinging, re the powers of it who makes all via a
“vast eternal plan,”
*crinkles my smiling eyes and my fingers begin to radio-receive the signal of dash dot dash of words you currently are reading/imbibing
something unknowable raised me up
amidst the all-quiet of the first watch,
thus I, was snap ready to ease her troubles, at the very first moment…
<~>
now I am cellular~level conscious of witnessing and feeling
each of the trillions upon trillions of minuscule defractions
of light bendings that will populate, articulate,
the entire world’s rolling day,
give them to me, please,
the causality source of millions of minor miracles that will go unobserved, unrecognized and unrecorded
I rise from the bed needy, urgently seeking them,
your adventures, their earthquake interactive tremors,
the raw minerals of what will be all the future poems of our lives,
but, first,
coffee.
06:49AM
Shelter Island, N.Y.
Aug 10, 2022
Aug 10, 2022 at 8:19 AM UTC
A baby learning to walk. an old man fails to.
you haven't been touched in a week aside from a man who likes your socks and shoelaces offering you an elbow cause you have a chicken sandwich in your hands.
Shorts so small you can see the pockets. Red hair. Walking past fossils cause you're looking at your phone.
Why did you go in the "insect zoo" Mike? You ****** hate spiders.
your most human interaction is the man who asks if he can use your leftover donut bag to carry his food. The food he got from the soup kitchen across the street. The one you went to to use the bathroom. Borrowing him privilege in bag form.
he doesn't like to eat outside. Too many mosquitoes. He babywalks with a cane.
The gun that shot Lincoln is tiny and I am interested in it only for it's death potential.
A French family crying, don't have the right papers to get into the White house tour. I wish I could tell them the tour wasn't that good.
drunk conversation with brother about father.
don't talk to. Don't know how. Don't want to.
I am swallowed by the heat
The silence that passes for conversation.
my mother is very conservative. the strain of hiding myself. Closed lips
I am a silent eavesdropper. A parent pays 7.50 for a ****** tourist piece of pizza. Placed in front of her child. Exhaustion drips off her face. Oozes out of her posture. Her kid doesn't like the pizza. Mouth a tight line. The child tells a story. The tight line blooms into laughter.
My friend (I wonder about kissing her) goes to a Philando Castile memorial. I go to the lincoln memorial. Pictures and profit. It's smaller than I thought while she’s heavy from the impact.
Memorial – pictures – walking – repeat – heat – feet – and the wondering of how much memorializing goes on at giant statues.
His fedora looks stupid. small kids bumps into me. child-style. I don't see him cause I'm so tall. His mother tells him to watch where he's going.
My dad’s not on the trip. Divorce’ll do that to you. My brother calls him a lost soul
The trip was good and I would never go again.
Feb 23, 2018
Feb 23, 2018 at 11:37 AM UTC
there's a certain feeling
that creeps up
through the hairline fissures
in your brittle bones,
on frigid hollow nights
at the bewitching hour,
when silent stillness descends
a muted film of
forgotten bittersweet memories
over the darkness.
and honey-yellow street lamps
cast ghostly shadows on the sidewalks, who
hold your hand in solidarity
as you trudge through
empty space,
and the dampened humming of the buzz saw
never really fades,
playing tricks on the music in your ears
spinning haunting discordant loops over
sullen sugar-coated melodies.
it's as if you've stepped through a portal
of time and space
where there is no singular destination
but transportation to the
eternal place
in you
where that feeling has lived
every time
it has arisen in the past,
where that feeling will return
in all the visits to come.
and the place is familiar
so you settle into the bed of nails
comfortably,
breathe in the sharp sting of ragged pain,
and float through the museum
of recycled thoughts
on angry waves.
reluctant transparency
plays its hide-and-seek game, and
you re-learn the methodology
of picking up the particles
and packing them
into steel cages
into cardboard boxes
into dusty attics
into black hole space ships -
sending them into the void.
the mundane madness
in the
mystic mirage of memorializing mourning.
Mar 3, 2015
Mar 3, 2015 at 2:24 AM UTC
Do you ever wish
that you could disappear?
Just grab your keys and
get the hell out of here?
I’m tired of this town
and I’m sick of this place
where on every single corner,
all I see is your face.
You’ve tattooed each
block, landmark, and street
with memories of us
and what we used to be.
It’s like walking through
an abandoned graveyard,
each store is a headstone
memorializing my heart’s scars.
My foot is heavy on the pedal
in search of somewhere new,
somewhere with a slate wiped
clean of any traces of you.
Jul 3, 2019
Jul 3, 2019 at 3:10 PM UTC
for her.
<>
“you will laugh with surprise, as the anointing oil of relief
crowns your head, slicking down to caving cavities,
river running in crevices, that feed the buried places, replenishing the almost forgotten secret of letting go”^
~
the mind caches certain skills, once learned, never to return,
but tucked away, just in case, maybe, in the nightstand junk drawer of: “don’t need it now but, **** you never know”
kept around in the lost and hopefully, not to be searched for & found,
a skill set painfully gained, a muscle memory, flabby from no use
but quick taut tightly, snapping back when **** here we go again
I loved you in ways theoretical impossible till you enabled the possible
lost you for no good reason, in an act history labels beyond belief,
refuses to record, lest by memorializing it became/becomes re-realized,
this intolerable, would be past the ****** eroding barrier reef
the difference between junk and treasures is in which drawer placed,
the steps to letting go once learned, cannot be forgot, the cost,
way way too high, kept around, in a damnable place beyond grief
not to close, handy, findable but easily, avoided, but strange, when
living in the epicenter of the virus, you do some cataloguing, ridiculous,
this touchy-feely escapade, nothing ****** to be gained, all-too-brief
head shake, took a pandemic to make you go back, rustling among
the ancient, old hand-writ poems, another keepsake kept for reasons
known and unknown, to be **** sure you once owned it, survival skills
*In the Pandemic Days of Almost,
somethings will die, some go forgotten,
but the almost-forgetting-skill will survive,
a necessity of the how-to’s:*
***how to grieve,
how to believe,
how to leave
but live on,
hoarding
all the **** necessaries
ready to be retrieved***
<>
Tuesday Mars 24 Twenty Twenty noon
In the Epicenter, New York City
Mar 24, 2020
Mar 24, 2020 at 12:13 PM UTC
Dictators topple like dominoes
tombstones taunt contemporary caesars
godfathers hut tilled dough bro’s united against
inalienable rights of life, liberty pursuit of
happiness, mushroom left for overthrow
sans oppression from pepper spray
minor deterrent whence tyrants *******
keyed up, high strung Bouzouki plucking
commoners coalescing into commanding
communal cascade overturning ramparts
memorializing despots egoistic fiefdoms
whereby fealty forced from feckless fiends
fleecing freedoms forcing fake obeisance
until recently when contagion to overthrow
more than a coup pull of heinous henchmen
in tandem with their supreme leader
whose brutish nasty reign of terror
shortened from lengths of courage
displayed by humble beings fed up
with deprivation of basic democratic filaments
pollinating regimes thumbing nose at human rights
suddenly caught in cross hairs of barreling madding crowd
thwarting heart of darkness with native sun shine
seeking revenge against injustice heaped against innocent
populace which near global spontaneity
serves well-deserved just desserts!
May 27, 2017
May 27, 2017 at 10:42 PM UTC
tattoo ourselves in electric ink memorializing calendars,
diaries of observantional digits, black on white, no gray,
birthdays, anniversaries, dates of passing, starting lines,
occasional achievements, departure dates, even glaring failures,
sundial mundane records of diurnal habitude…even
defining self by, bye, byte marks upon flesh, upon our calendar
*not my first trip-tracking, he ruefully rues, wry smiling,
many voyages of indeterminate measuring length,
leaving litter of arrays of hopeful estimations & destinations,
each unequal, any or all possibilities, each day notated,
without critique or commentary, the numbers are the
gaols (jails) of goals, target, indeterminate determination,
terrific, horrific, introspections, inverse images resolve, resolute*
a year ago, +/- a few days,, new travelogue commenced,
notated but not annotated, just numerical truths,
(sans comments for the divine nature of numbers don’t lie)
and today my calculator app informs, that I am now
19.4 % lesser, but that clarifies less than expected
naturally this provokes a natty,
spirited, self-inquiry, lessened,
lessor, for better or for worse?
have the physical alterations
accompanying this reduction
mean exactly what,
if, it should be, a greater lesser?
here is the hard part.
your have always been a mirror~poet,
laughing, bemoaning the unvarnished, unshaven
AM sightings of a human perpetual dissatisfied,
the external never denying the interior “less~than,”
a J Peterman catalogue of weathered ****** expressions,
counter-parted by multiple Venn diagram intersections,
of experiential labeled bits & pieces of emotional empirical
less than good, not even close to perfect, so now that I am
*gaunt, spare, lean, grayed, narrower, again ruefully rue,
the even more visible truth reflection eye~hidden:*
I,
am the sum of the weight of my history, my deeds,
my disbeliefs, murderous deeds, weak choices
and that hasn’t changed nary an ounce, no matter
many times examined, indeed I am forever a lesser man,
there, internal infernal
too…
Apr 16, 2023
Apr 16, 2023 at 3:57 PM UTC
momma mia man date
comb the second Sunday during month of May
can be traced back to ancient Greeks and Romans
festivals held
to honor mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele
setting precedent for Mother's Day
where early Christians fancied festival
known as “Mothering Sunday.”
Fast forward to the early
twentieth century 1908 when
Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (a social activist then,
and community organizer
during American Civil War) era to quieten
grief fraught entrapment also cited
as informally memorializing her mother,
who begot said noble men
touring daughter
paying homage to woebegone
lachrymose role with accolades
to endure tragedy and loss put upon
child bearing women,
this event held (rain or sun)
at St Andrew's Methodist Church
in Grafton, West Virginia, which did quicken
in subsequent decades to formal fete,
where poets (like me) did open
the special occasion with ranked midshipmen
commercialization cropped as ken
be expected by the early 1920's imbolden
greeting card companies such as Hallmark gen
er rated a market (money making of course) even
though Jarvis believed companies sought profit
NOT prophet, thus misinterpreting
and exploiting idea of Mother's Day and met
aforementioned founder, who tried to jet
tis sin the ****** appetite of the ole mighty dollar,
but her lofty ambition did get
thwarted by mass marketing
the quaint idea,
plus she feared going in debt
and though the industry
(initially proposed entailed low key
acknowledgement, the originator
(Ann Marie Jarvis) still esteemed re
formed unsanitary living conditions with zee
less ness and aplomb
set a course where greater longevity doth hum
all because, she sought to regale "mum."
May 7, 2018
May 7, 2018 at 11:31 AM UTC
they
just wanted to be back home
I can hear them
now
still
saying
May 29, 2017
May 29, 2017 at 11:31 PM UTC
Alone and
My heart pounds as I lay in bed
Fancying things you would say to me
If your body was close enough to care
I shared, not enough
I should have spoken up
I would’ve seemed
interesting
that you admitted you lied
Free meetings and quick goodbyes
I forgot to mention
What I intended to do
Savor
you
initially forgot to keep it cut and dry
No resolution or answers as to why
I googled: “How do you forget someone?”
Backspace...backwards...No solution...
I’m stuck with memorializing you
The cornerstones of your tomb will be built with my desires
Jan 1, 2019
Jan 1, 2019 at 8:33 PM UTC