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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/
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.
Besotted winged pollinators
roistering barrage drowned
amidst general insectivorous cacophony
indistinct auditory signals communicated

intermingled with bounteous wafting fragrance
midwifed edenic floral pullulation
sensate admixture viz colored spectrum
amidst unrehearsed extemporaneous

orchestral suite bedded lambs
amorous ewe man like bleating songs
nature all aflutter actively socially vociferating
profuse living color rainbow pastiche

teeming soundgarden smorgasbord
cornucopia ignites mordent Utopian aural swath
visual vistas stilling spellbinding
spilling riotous carpeted web

uniting doubting Thomas's existentialism
despite unanswered queries
asper diverse modalities each specie evolved
to survive despite countervailing destructive forces

generating plethora pandemonium ironically
promulgating harmonic exemplary convergence
Highland Manor concourse aflame with new life
parented by instinctive imprimatur anonymous patents

now genetic mapping usurped with untold outcome
analysis bred crispr discovery Earthlings fiddling
glorifies honied indemnity Judeo-Christian kudos
leaves of grass kudzo resistance mutation immunizes

biosphere once prolific differentiation shrinks
becoming monocultural setting virtual stage
catastrophe plus food shortage would become
global debacle predicated, sans virulent

viral and/or bacterial strain renting asunder
tripwire unspooling delicate webbed whirl
already widely compromised more so
since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring


**** sapiens population explosion
pits profligate predilections planet Earth in extremis
dire crisis cavalierly dismissed humans
in hot pursuit racking up superfluous wealth

***** deeds done dirt cheap - tricking
mother nature, who will unwittingly
spring scrumptious feeding off scrimmage
forcing capitulation or total extinction

meanwhile fostering long tall floral inflorescence
a composite having sessile flowers
apiary abuzz, cuz queen bee
can no longer wax bereft of royal jelly.
I arrived at six for an early start,
only to find that a cloud had coughed,

spat, or birthed a fog onto the lawn,
midwifed by polearms of corn

under silver doctor's eyes
of cooling car. Beer tabs snicked

away as a giant cheerful beast
slouched and stalked us

with candy heart and whetted tooth,
snapping at pipe smoke enemies,

patrolling our hands with hope.
Lives roll along, we all find:

men and women having a hard go
of it in hornet houses, or exes

who tent us with doubt even now.
The fog has burned away and the lawless

calligraphy of insects weaves and wreathes
the rising air into which exits are engraved.

Time enough to slide the highways
back into the busy hours

of porcelain hearts - easily chipped
but good enough still for daily use.
Oh...and hello
to you, some hours past, I
returned from counseling,
(hence this boy yent -
     albeit beastie boy
     figuratively basking
in fading afterglow)
great kickstarter session,

countless moments ago,
sans treatment plan,
she facilitated emotional airflow
i.e. Stephanie Dodds,
(sat straight as an arrow)
whereat this client purged, avow
hid lee, his ******
logical reflux backflow

(Matthew Scott Harris) did crow
     as said professionally trained
     medicine woman actively listened,
     (no doubt other male patients
     similar to yours truly entertained
     (alignment with see
     thing hormonal concurrence,
where ego super vies iz

     Id dee hot - hook line, and sinker
     attributed to Sigmund Freud,
     who sired, midwifed, and fathered
     psychoanalytic theories)
****** kindled fantasies,
viz being bedfellow
this soul, hood doth not bellow,
but keeps mum

     (during my allotted time),
yet willingly shares
with utter strangers
intimate gal olive
hunt ting fantasy,
that doth beshadow
obviously no intent to breach
     such prurient thoughts, bestow

foolscap upon mine noggin,
    and most definitely blow
future appointments
with aesthetically pleasing
(tomb maa cryptic) bowwow
wing hot diggity
dog inner primate, perhaps,
and not surprisingly get brow

beaten, where dire
***** tor of facility
    wilt hell me
"go take a hike to
****** solitary bungalow,"
where all manner of
libidinous desires wanna burrow
(where warren peace

     can thrive hare and now),
     on par with rabbit - burr reader,
which confinement would
not principally peter out
till dawning transgression vetted,
     and avered final cockrow
trumpeted, norte - til last cornrow
reaped, hence unable

to thwart counterblow
permanently, doth nada
different she hate
lustful zeal from eye
dims sum – genital fateful dayglow,
thence high lee
     grant ting deathblow
to testosterone laden satiety,

     randy proclivity, and
     concupiscent adoration from
combine nation of #endow
ments to ghost of - Grant
yule leases eyebrow
raising candy cane upon fallow

da weeder foreshadow
wing sowing field of poetically
wet dreams plying fecund,
feminine, and fertile ground
godaddy on his gangplow.

— The End —