"morphemes" poems
First you need to learn that they are blocks
compressed meaning and solid like rocks
individual meaning expressed
but combined a new thought is expressed
with a suffix sometimes they merge
and become other classes of words
thus relate becomes rela -tion and added a ship
to relate something becomes rela-tion-ship
the prefixes un-, post-, and de- , be-,for-, and re-
alter words and direction, you see
but the real tricky thing
is keeping track of the strings
of meaning and –fixes, and inflectional endings
Mar 2, 2013
Mar 2, 2013 at 3:48 PM UTC
Drop the rocks
Full-grown pop in the jaw
Bleeding gold
Won't save your soul
Moving again and again and again and again
Until the pacific
Closes behind your back
because criticism smacks
kids out of whack
Morphemes-phonemes again
and again
Given the knowledge
of a recycling bin of
letters
Use them again and again
Won't save your soul
Atom smash logic replaying
and playing before your eyes
Some days it's too much
coal to mine
Mouth covered when you
step in time
Won't make your life
I'm a goner if I can't
stand on the rocks
and if the laundry doesn't burn
If the grim reaper doesn't speak
nonsense words from one
state of consciousness
to the other
Drop the bomb
Call the mob
Stock our shelves
Grow the letters
Feed all those starving
tongues
Let me tell you a story
Once the grim reaper
dressed like an old woman
and bought denture cream
just to know how it feels to
grow old
A human is an animal
Some think an olive is a fruit
A dog is a wolf on the inside
Begging to learn the trick
Speak
Next in line most wait
for straight prose
pinch their noses misguided
Want blood to bleed red
Don't want ideas to smash
their bread
Won't save their minds
from a punch in the gut
Mine closing in their faces
and their Atlantic drowns
shattered glass
encasing words upon words
owned by streams of
Consciousness running
all around
Those nonsense words
running aground
can't swim though all
the world's frowns.
Mar 29, 2015
Mar 29, 2015 at 11:25 AM UTC
Six days left
In this oasis
In this escape
In this reality we’ve created for ourselves.
Six days left
And it already hurts.
Three days left
Where did my time go?
She’s one floor below me, and I miss her this much
What is twelve hours?
Half a day.
This will be the only thing about our relationship
That isn’t easy.
She has an early morning tomorrow.
Sleeping in our respective beds,
I don’t remember how to sleep alone.
If words could describe perfection,
I would paint a picture of phonemes and morphemes
Of syntax and semantics
Of beauty and wonder.
If words could describe her
I would bridge together vowels
Consonants
Punctuation
Grammar
If words could describe this
Trust me,
I would use them.
Shakespeare
Made up words when nothing else
Seemed right
I’m beginning to see why
He and Mr. Geisel
Were so unsatisfied
With the language at hand.
Five days in and I'm
Keeping myself busy so that I can ignore
The Aching that comes.
That always comes.
I'm afraid to hope that she'll
Be different than the others.
But she seems genuine
And I'm so satiated
When I'm with her.
Trying to be a better person for her,
I've never been with someone who could
Keep the panic over grades and schoolwork
To a dull roar.
I think I've got something remarkable here...
And I miss her.
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 3:52 AM UTC
How
I retry
Backside Pen Slide
Lyrics spirits quips glide
Elbows Shins Blood Blot Dried
When Wind Blows Wicked Words Rise
Idioms Soul Grind Infinite rails Applied
Thoughts Ollie Pop Manual quill Pipe bomb
Ultra Stick Ink Drips 360 Plot Shov-it Twist
Push Kick I Pedal Prose Skate Tricks, Morphemes Stick.
Perpetual Pendulums Prop People to Place Peckers in Potato Grits
Times Up!
May 27, 2015
May 27, 2015 at 2:38 PM UTC
What are words, but mere images of time,
Leafy similes that tend to rhyme,
Melodies that fade away to memories,
Written abstractions, proof of obscurities?
What are words, except strange tries,
To express emotions made of ice,
Mere tribulations, left unjustified,
Vague articulations that tend to die?
What are words, when I cannot find,
Adjectives, verbs, nouns, and signs,
That reaches the innermost, essential soul,
Of my deepest feelings, our very goal?
What are words, that leave you speechless,
Stunning languages, sounds, scribbled messes,
Answers of diction, silly confabulations,
Stirring tools, to test descriptions?
What are words, which reach the limit,
Text, talk, vibrations that fit,
The pieces missing, the definition,
Lingering in every other exhibition?
What are words, what are morphemes,
Speeches, utterances, lengths of keys,
To the secret reassurance humans need,
Sensations of steady expressions in a mind?
What are words, boundaries of lines,
Vowels, consonants, verbal binds,
A stem, a phoneme, a lexeme, a note,
On which we all deliberately wrote?
Feb 12, 2010
Feb 12, 2010 at 8:52 PM UTC
At this advanced stage
of our labiodental skirmish
& alveopalatal explorations
Words won't come anymore
Only mangled morphemes going
in & out of you going
in & out of me
Only tangled utterances tripping
over themselves in utter haste
Shapeless & shameless
Proper articulation is abandoned
along with all other senses
of propriety
& The critical period is past
& The critical period is coming
& Words won't come at all
but even if they don't
Using my tongue
I can still make you
Jul 11, 2014
Jul 11, 2014 at 2:08 PM UTC
What does a poet do
When words fail them?
When the vernacular
They so heavily relied on
To convey every navy blue,
Indigo, violet hue of the midnight sky,
Dies on the tip of their tongue?
When the morphemes
That gave life to the phantoms
And pantomimes in their heart
Come out as Neanderthalic grunts?
What does a poet do?
When the discourse once so comfortable
Becomes stilted, halting, and forced
Because their brain has blanked
On their particular patois?
When not even the thesaurus or lexicon
Or revered Oxford English Dictionary
Can provide the adequate locution
So as to appease the poet's need
To be
Understood,
Acknowledged,
Fathomed,
Decoded,
Interpreted,
Heard.
Because that's all we want.
And that's the impossible
When we have writer's block.
Jun 26, 2014
Jun 26, 2014 at 10:42 AM UTC
Sometimes it happens like
Butter on toast,
Smooth, creamy, and delicious.
Most of the time, it's stilted
And halting.
Like hobbling through a parking lot
On crutches with a full leg cast.
Sometimes it comes from
The haunted recesses
Of the traumatized human mind.
Other times a frog
Or butterfly
Or other passing fanciful inspiration
Invokes the need for
Rhyme,
Meter,
Syllables,
Phonemes,
Morphemes,
Words,
Language,
Prose,
And poetry.
We write to describe the world around us
But much more, the universe within us.
Our words give life and tangibility
To the impalpable things,
And they take away some of the fear
And pain and grief and unconscionability
Of the corporeal things.
And in the weaving
And shaping
And forming
And rhyming
And jotting
And sketching
And rapping
And moulding
And writing
We find emancipation and satisfaction.
And thus...scrumpdillyumptiousness!
Jun 1, 2014
Jun 1, 2014 at 11:34 PM UTC
I mean what I say/
I say what I mean/
A pro with these nouns
My verbs so keen/
A word Smith at your service
A shop Steward Indeed/
My adjectives are objective
Some would say Im a thief/
The way I pocketed these words
I guess it's in my Genes/
Down ***** verbally
a factory
Like a sub machine/
Magazine Illustrated with
Pragmatics and morphemes/
Soiled the seed cultivated
To rise like submarines/
Over-Alls
That fabric
is tailored made
Its all me/
No cut
the whole cloth
Endless from seem to seem/
Seem less
One of the toughest dungarees!
Sep 12, 2016
Sep 12, 2016 at 11:01 AM UTC
i have not seen it in the
surge of the next moment. it arrived like a letter from complete anonymity to the familiar gape in the doorstep.
i wish sometimes, now that i am
full with age yet none the wiser,
i were a bottle of wine sitting in hermetic space, where no breaths could go in and out of, as disconsolate light trudges the finite spaces its fingers like a taut grip to a gun, able to drain completely of its poisons.
i have you in my blood
and sometimes its immortality
coils into morbid contortions.
a rally of aches, scraping the sinews well and accurate, paring them of their pretensions, this kinship.
i have you in my mind
and sometimes when the impetus
galvanizes me into stolid incitations, my voice lifts and then vanishes into its shy desolations and without sound,
i pass through the deluge of
all this - of i being you,
and you, being me.
i have you sometimes in my eyes,
when these two brown planets
wax in their postulations,
nebulae of emotions explode
into tiny aggregations and now,
i am a lone star in its celestial ambulation through protruding shards of our battlements.
i have you in this warm fount
and sometimes, like a dog
choosing its memory, i sometimes
wish to forget my station and elude its equanimities and only have in my dull mind, where all
the bones are kept and
guard them in the midnight where they shape themselves into
massive morphemes digging deeper to soft skin and mangled, looking
down on me like a prey caught in a hawk's periphery and lunged at,
where all aches are awakened
with recalcitrance, casting
me away from my own tenancies.
i have not seen this in the
coming of the next moment -
we were firstly, laughing at
the smallness of things, sharing
light and other affectations,
until we came in the way
of our trains and closed their
stations, looking for
a place to go now, anywhere
but home.
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 18, 2015 at 2:32 AM UTC
I will speak interms of confusing metaphors and allegorical descriptors
for You will never know what I mean,
and I will never know what I mean,
all You and I will ever know is what is said
Beyond that thou art which is not
Who I am and what I am is anybody's guess,
Where I am is in poetry,
when I am is poetry
How and why I am is a poet.
an artist chosen by this art
A puppet of words that string me along,
That dangle my reflection on the scene.
and What's this scene?
The dream of this stage, an age to redeem this day, this momentary cage of sound and phonetics, playing on the morphemes, that sort these informants into proteins that fire the works of this neural chemistry.
A cosmic tapestry... And I've lost the plot of this pointless exercise in passing the time as I pass this chime down to the last rhyme.
With no point but a line, a single continuous line that's only sometimes audible.
With no beginning and no end but always a middle.
A halfway mark between now and then
Half and half all the way to infinity,
Trapped in this trinity plus one.
The subject, the object and the verb plus all the fillers in between,
Adding the jective into obviously obnoxious obstancy.
Abstracting words from subtracting the colors of birds...
Man I really don't know when to stop.
Nor does he, when he spots the plot that keeps the inserting eye from searching the skys to admiring this fly.
Zipping in and out of space, never able to pin it down between his chopsticks.
So maybe I should stop this
Right here, left now and take flight,
Tata bye.
Oct 21, 2020
Oct 21, 2020 at 12:13 PM UTC
"Write two poems," I said.
My students left the room.
Some frittered the week away,
No idea how to start,
What to say....
Others found a way to play,
Rolling phrases
Making hay,
Coding words in lines
Testing assonance,
Alliteration,
Anthropomorphization:
A door, a pen, and clouds...
Always clouds.
"Write one that rhymes," I'd said,
And so the rhymers vied,
Stretched morphemes until dead,
Finding words I thought had died,
Bruised themselves with rhythm,
Metered anapests and dactyls,
Resorted to trochees and iambs
And smiled as if inventing fractals,
My little lambs.
"Write free verse; break all rules!" I said,
And though they tried,
No ee cummings Jesus resurrected,
No William Carlos Williams rose
To eat plums beside white chickens,
And no apologies.
Still, when all was finished,
Notes came in,
A treasured, precious few
Wrote to say they'd found
Appreciation for words
Arranged intentionally,
For power of images,
For realization of the value
Found in working words.
May 13, 2020
May 13, 2020 at 9:56 AM UTC
Morphemes clustered in unison
Dancing wistfully
To the melodious tune
Of ink dabbed on empty pages
Drawn from the deep well of art
Framed from freely forged phrases
Adorned in a symphonic clause
Of well taught sentences
Oh the simplicity of it
The art of writing!!
Nov 9, 2020
Nov 9, 2020 at 3:16 PM UTC