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Muyiwa Oyinloye Jun 2013
I'm deteriorating,
Slowly fading to black
I'm barely out the gates
Yet I feel like a weather beaten hack

What's the point to life?
With its fake friends, fake smiles and lost dreams
I look around me and my shoulders sag
This is not the stuff of boyhood dreams

What's the point to life?
A ferocious cycle of failure and heartbreak
What's my greatest fear?
Unfulfilled potential and lost stakes

I shouldn't be feeling like this
but at twenty I've got so much hanging on me
Prematurely coming of age
Midwifed by letdowns and rookie mistakes

But they don't know, they cant see
Hazarded guesses is all they can take
At the turmoil and torment
I mask with wide smile and firm handshake

I'm a man, I've got to be strong
Bear the consequences of my past
You don't know and you never will
A jot of the pain I hold fast

The way of my parents seems right
But putting all my eggs in one basket
Is not a smart move I don't think
Christianity my have some answers, but cant crack the whole racket
Onoma Feb 2015
Can you see Hyperborea's sun, shadowless
valleys where you cut word with tooth?
An unfettered wound stutters, blowing null what
timeless utterance it will.
Where does tomorrow sleep, your prospect in
stomach, cramped with fluxing zeros and ones?
As soon as you spoke your abstraction was pardoned.
Your home's abutted geography made its revolving
bally.
Dizzy you, concentric circles closing in, advising their
babe press forth.
Mythopoetically proud as hell of your circuit, a
metaphysical luminary midwifed in an etheric
manger.
Shadows mark their growth about our encampment--
G*d's peripheral nomads etching story.
Shelter bids welcome, unwelcome everywhere...its
doors blow about as the literature of distances.
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2017
humans born a mess,
messengers carrying blank notepads, sheet music,
brought from within to the without

a baby-sized handful of historical residues retained,
garnered from all too brief a prelim existence,
arriving possessing hints of what may be

most emerging crying,
crying over loss of the womb security,
for seers all, all see unaccountable futures clouded
by an inevitable chance of rain
and death

all of us, no one excepted,
covered for months in **** stained fluids ,
a holy, ***** combination
of amniotic nourishment,
and our own waste

a hint of what is to come?

human then spends the rest of life
cleaning up after himself,
mostly with tasks of addition,
punctuating by the occasional cleansing of
elimination subtraction

making room for the next love,
labored birthing of a baby poem,
from your womb, midwifed,
haunting ghosts of three note tunes,
begging for a set of lyrics and a
great chorus everybody can sing,
a completion competition

going along, all along, to the goings on,
all our routes preternatural crooked,
lived a life of pretense, a straightened out life,
which is the nuanced, connected summary of our components
which are all curves, dots on a line

and the composition source,
the secret chords employed,
tech installed just prior to birth,
effacing glorious sadness, glorious joy,
the human building blocks,
with the certainty that
everybody knows,
that's how it goes
everybody knows,

only fools believe,
you'll live forever

but live at least long enough to sing and write of
a man cleaning up his own life's messes,
and perchance, after our absence,
leaving the world better for it
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2018
for Jeannie Kristufek Hawrysz who once quoted me Shakespeare -
"Of all the words in the universe, when stated thrice, only one royal above all gleams best, an uncoded mathematical tripartite repetitive stating:
love love love this."

----------------------------

third attempt and just not happening
then recall a Ben Folds hand-me-down
heard on Tuesday, passed onto me by Sara B.
about writer’s block

“Kick the editor out of the room”

the best don’t even flow,
they fall out of ya, rough and tumbling,
screaming did ya get that,
are ya keeping up,
you can be the self-editing-I need-perfection roadblock
or the delivery guy, the one with the towel and the scissors, who brings ya a clean new baby, and/or a veggie pizza,
which ya gonna pick?

another nougat nugget:
when you’re stuck, write about the block,
what’s sticking you; one would have thought
some one thousand five hundred poems later,
this one would have been midwifed a long, long time ago,  
but at 4:32am, it’s all I got

rather than throw false news confetti on myself
from the rafters that don’t exist in a citified apartment,
I’ll reward myself with some
rock n’ pop,
a revisitation to the scene of the crime, and listen quiet like and maybe leak back to prone sleep,
in hopes that the rest of the gang,
hoping the words to a  poem-in-transit,
“confetti is just tomorrow’s garbage”
gets off at my dreamy new subway stop


should the wordy birdies shotgun come sneaking in
thru the correct ear
i.e. not the sunken pillow one,
so I have half a fat chance of
recalling its dimensions in an hour, 
when I wake up-officially,


fat chance

later, like 4:56am

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2471979/confetti-is-just-tomorrows-garbage/

— The End —