"muddying" poems
The sun, so lover-like, ran her fingers
Through the glistening leaves,
Movements soft, so full of intention
Their waxy dew, shuttered in response,
A low moan played in the breeze,
The light of sonority contrasts the electric
Disharmonies in the stormy afternoon.
Though I could feel a forest now eased
The river that runs through
Carried the blood of a plural heart
Beating with a passion akin in power, though enemy in fashion,
As its waves beat the banks
Eroding them into, eating up the aridness
As though slaking were its due, muddying the sky’s blue
From its surface, piercing the eyes from its reflection
Discouraging, this turbid froth, from worth of further inspection.
It rages and rages over rocks so violently
Picking at its slimming walls, making and claiming
Detritus along the path so that all the beauty a river is
Crashes, collides, and disfigures—a chaos growing
Bigger and bigger—the speed of its wrath
Bespeaks of its wake, blasting the earth (Watch it dissipate!)
Out of my sight it runs its due course south
Spitting the detritus that arrives
At the mouth.
May 5, 2014
May 5, 2014 at 12:43 AM UTC
Meaning
They say a drunk man's talk
is a sober man's thoughts.
Frankly, there is some truth to that;
but drunkenness has a way of muddying meaning.
When I said I loved you
I meant it.
However what I meant by it was just what you think,
and so much more.
I love you not just physically,
mentally,
spiritually,
but on an emotionally dependent level.
You have a way of getting me high.
Higher than any inebriation can or ever could.
I love you for being my friend.
For believing in what I believe in
on my behalf.
And, most importantly,
for not shunning me for my flaws.
For all you do for me without even really trying,
I should kneel at your feet at the sight of you,
and thank whatever cosmic coincidence
brought me before you.
For you are walking, talking,
breathing:
Therapy.
So, for the next time I'm too drunk to stand,
and am throwing up as you hold my hair back:
Know that afterwards when I kiss you,
hug you,
tell you I love you, even.
Know now,
Exactly what I mean.
Feb 27, 2017
Feb 27, 2017 at 7:03 PM UTC
Passing around a fatal flaw like a joint in a hot box,
Refreshing baths of Coca~Cola and regretful indulgence
We are wasting away in a paradise of my creation
Poems tinted grey through abstinent romanticism,
and an inexplicable undertone inherent to my prose.
As everything starts to return to a drumming constant.
It all sounds the same.
We've been sunbathing in porcelain skies and empty daydreams.
Drab and dreary and acid washed.
Interrupted like a beach by the sea,
By the little pieces of drug soaked warmth that act as comforting distractions.
A smile or a shoulder or a sunny day to drink from.
Summer and solitude, the likeness of warm bodies in a cold pool.
So.
Compose me an opera of Soda Cans and of choral song. Synthesise two bass lines and slow drip coffee and pollen and folk.
Make it for me so I can watch you as you work.
Let me listen and bask in its ludacris vanity, and clean shallow waters.
How I would relish the time spent muddying the current. Destroying the tide I desired out of boredom.
And black hot frustration.
Flowers painted in acid and acrid accounts of repetative revalations in the context of rude rosy cheeked romance.
Blonde haired ignorance and one dimensional delusions.
Blue eyed terrorists armed with air and arrogance.
Give me seatwarmers and handholding
Or corvettes and convertables.
Give me arrowheads and heart attacks
Humble my bones with a cardiac
!F.R.I.E.N.D.S.!
SITCOMS
ADJASENT PLOTLINES
mumble rap
AND ***** TALK HOTLINES
four letter words with little context or meaning and selfless expression that's often demeaning
Its September in January and it rains for a day
And despite all our efforts
The days waste away
Jan 24, 2020
Jan 24, 2020 at 12:26 PM UTC
Bless me and my finite soul
**** me and end my pain
This agony is eating me whole
Bless me, I’m going insane
I’m feeling it creeping; insanity
I’m hearing its voice call
To lose my humanity
I’m feeling like I’m hitting a wall
Death - I’ve always seen it near
Death - Donum Mortis
Free me from, the chains of life
Fettered to thoughts, humbling, shaking
Emptying, this evil strife
Free me from this aching
Death - I’ve always seen it near
Death - Donum Mortis
Save me from the omnipresent emptiness
Laying thick, muddying my mind
Longing for fulfillment
Of a meaningless kind
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 12:54 PM UTC
It starts as a simple untruth
a spun tale of convenience that slips through well travelled lips
It's intent
never malicious
as it falls before another
muddying what was
*before its creation
vividly clear*
Its very presence changing forever a path that had great promise
to a road undesirable and dark
It matters not the reason it was cast
but it still LIES in the way just the same
Once set
it cannot be undone
as you have unintentionally ruined with your verbal carelessness
what could have been...
Feb 1, 2015
Feb 1, 2015 at 8:23 PM UTC
Six years and I still shudder
I would close my eyes for a minute and see it
I remember the metallic taste of the silver ware
The agonizing muddying look of the concoction
As it swirled around in the poorly washed cup
I really doubt I would have minded much
You see, the water was too much
The cheap chocolate flavored powder too small
It made me think of Oliver Twist
Of the grave injustice on mortal men
I still have nightmares about the kettle
The way she would shake it with a vengeance
And turn it carelessly into the cups
The waiter serves me my coffee and I almost scream
I can see her trying to get all cups to be even
I suppose all of my nagging would be void
If we didn’t get to see the undiluted contents at the base
The way the black residue stared back at me; daring me
No matter how many times I tried to convince myself,
I believe that chocolate should not leave residues
I stare at the cup in front of me
It has gone cold whilst I reminisced.
It is all brown and smug
I wonder if this is how cold coffee looks
I call the waiter concerning the bill
My brain is messing with me.
I swear the chocolate drink winked at me.
Oct 1, 2016
Oct 1, 2016 at 2:59 AM UTC
The suicidal optimist with his noisesome breath
watches the moon for shooting stars.
He talks a lot about it;
but everyone's seen Christ in the clouds.
Picks his way to an early death
with romantic subtitles
and a continental breakfast.
He halts his noisesome breath
and checks for excitement -
"Darling..." he whispers
"I must have you."
Your sob was like a thunderclap
Your sob was like a thunderclap
in the deep and ancient night.
And the stars did sigh
For servitude
in the deep and ancient night.
Clearing his head
whilst muddying the meter
He realises :
Jesus was an astronaut
Smoking zen by the fire.
And everything makes sense
in an unexpected moment
That he thought
would never come
And all our yesterday's lighted fools
the way to dusty death.
Dec 30, 2013
Dec 30, 2013 at 11:26 PM UTC
August is never lost to Summer,
she shares in her sphere of circularity
Calendula's a by-word for prolonging,
dead-heading vies with the flush.
Lunaria's prized seed pods' legacy's boon.
In redolent contemplation.
Autumn bulbs eagerly secured.
Amongst them Colichicums a wondrous shrub
for late September's appearance.
Like a Stallion, August's canter masquerades
the truest of challenges ,
for the final hurdle.
By means of subtle suggestiveness
Russet subsumes the Red.
Blue musters a tired
muddying Purple.
Yellow bleaches
as though touched
by the exertion of congruity
Mar 9, 2013
Mar 9, 2013 at 5:27 PM UTC
War of the words from the very word "GO"
was the warming up exercise for more malice,
makes the galleries erupt in rage, cry for more
But the folks that adore peace is outraged
every jab finds it's mark, squarely on the jaw
making profuse bleeding another spectacle
we reinvent this business as a blood sport!
Even a dog eat dog madness grips the arena quick
each vicious animal bares it's fangs, for long in disuse,
get ready to be paid in return,in what you gave first
Raise the war cry aloud, boys the game is on,
no going back any more, it's fight to ****
Every bit of the act is blown out of proportion,
by the heartless lot of blue eyed boys with lenses.
It pays to narrate stroke by stroke,pouring oil
into the roaring fire, let it rage the longest period,
Merely the tip of an ice berg, all this you've now seen
hidden with in the barbed diatribes is lethal power,
things they hope would get heated too soon,
and would become a full blown "COLD WAR"
It's the post truth world of puzzles and games,
every such story ends in a tragic twist at the end.
for us it'snot,we need a twist to make us smile.
Feb 26, 2017
Feb 26, 2017 at 9:15 AM UTC
*Because you cannot use borrowed breath,
and move lips of another
that are pasted on your face.*
These words swam through
my mind
behind my eyes
and never visited your mind
or saw green swamp irises.
My words wear shackles;
the chain attaches stubbornly
against a cloud of nothingness,
the cloak you wear and the plume that spreads
behind you, where I am--
trailing the ground, dirtying, muddying.
Decomposing.
How nimble the fingers that point at the WomanChild,
the creature who does not learn to grow
because she wants to keep living and borrowing time,
not breaths, not skin cells and DNA and memories
that do not erase without ripping up the cassette and the VCR.
My words were meant to meet yours and touch pinkies.
Your thoughts made your words and body and smile lines
Run, run as fast as you could
from a Monster, a Curse, a King.
I am the sword of tongue and the fist that crumbles
when a beetle passes by.
You are scared of me.
Dec 14, 2016
Dec 14, 2016 at 10:35 PM UTC
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I watched the scarlet specks slap the stage that resided beneath my feet. She grabbed my hand, some unknown perfect stranger, still confined to her own hospital bed, and said, “It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing.” Returning my countenance, that had thus far been afflicted, with a smile. And oh how I wish I could believe her, but even without glancing up I was all too aware that her eyes were out of her lips’ jurisdiction.
Still I stood in place; my palm yet to be released by this compassionate maiden who I knew recognized her own ****** and pangs in my premature senescence. But again, I focused on the crimson beads that remained between my legs, muddying the unblemished sheen of that linoleum floor.
This junction of misery and recognition of loss came to a precipitous end when the nurse tromped through and encroached on our plane. Hurriedly, she jostled and jammed me into a small bathroom; the impression of the unnamed woman’s touch still native to my hands.
Jun 10, 2015
Jun 10, 2015 at 2:49 PM UTC
I
I taste it daily.
The salt of consequence on the side of my tongue,
Burning my mouth.
Punishing me.
Love is lost.
Shallow and low,
Like a pool of water
Two feet deep,
Predictable and **** flavored.
I taste every answer before it’s heard.
But I deny it just the same.
I dig for the unpredictable.
Muddying my hands in search of
A new flavor.
Drunk as I am at 4 in the morning,
I ask for an answer that I’ve already tasted,
Hoping to be surprised.
I’m not.
I’m given an answer that I already know.
But I pursue it just the same.
I send poems to lost loves,
Knowing they won’t answer,
But I do it just the same.
I find myself alone.
I’ve accepted it.
But I crave companionship,
Just the same.
Like the grass in my pipe.
I crave it.
Love it.
But it kills me.
II
Don’t make it awkward.
Don’t say it.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Don’t say it.
Don’t make it awkward.
You already know,
I say.
No I don’t,
She says.
She’s lying
I know it.
I taste it.
She lives in bliss.
I live in fire.
Don’t say it.
Don’t make it awkward.
I don’t know.
She says this to dampen a blow
That I won’t feel.
I’ve felt it too many times.
Maybe she didn’t know.
III
I’ve lost the sense of caring,
I say it just to say it.
Knowing the answer.
Just to see what happens.
And again I’m forced to move on.
To know that it’s unreciprocated
As it so often seems to be.
Insufferably predictable.
Six months I knew,
Yet I hoped to be surprised.
IV
Somehow,
Confidence remains,
Or perhaps it was born.
Resilient as the day it fell out of the womb.
Unphased by negative response,
Simply frustrated,
Urged to move forward and brush off the needles
Poking at its chest and temples and tongue.
How can a heart die if it has already been pierced?
V
I’ll keep digging,
Searching for a new flavor
Until something sweet sticks.
Until some light shines through the cracks.
I’ll make it awkward.
I’ll make it weird.
I’ve been pierced enough.
I’ve been numbed long enough.
Stab me again.
Try it.
Pick a vein.
Try it.
I hope to feel it.
I want to feel it.
VI
True sadness
Is something that can’t be described.
For some,
Fresh and temporary.
Others,
Old and rooted.
Experienced in different ways
Left to ferment
Through a curious cathartic flavor of isolation.
I’ve fallen into that deep void
before.
Seeking companionship where there is none.
Only to be stabbed in a living heart,
countless times
Until it finally stopped beating.
Sep 12, 2017
Sep 12, 2017 at 8:35 AM UTC
Poetry congealed muddying the waters
Hardened into a gelatinous soup of words
A monotonous stream of narcissism
Unafraid to employ half-truths
Unable to regulate the deterioration
Of chemically mutated thought processes
In love with language only
Jan 14, 2016
Jan 14, 2016 at 11:42 PM UTC
If you can convince people to want dirt,
you can muddy the waters
between right and wrong.
Nov 23, 2017
Nov 23, 2017 at 10:19 AM UTC
The words-
pen to page, pull up nothing, just like yesterday.
Day before that, all but forgot about the pen, the words,
Forgot about the Feelings-
must be out of touch with
or did I
let them get so close,
let them undo the sentences,
those ink-blot bandages
wrapped tight around
the graceless lacerations,
Rorschach's mask muddying
the face I could not bear to recognize?
When the words come,
they come in quick as silver, sharp as a needle
and stitch themselves between
sense and skin.
The wound becomes "I am wounded,"
removed from the reality in its quotation marks.
They don't tell you healing feels like losing your best friend.
Mar 29, 2016
Mar 29, 2016 at 10:25 PM UTC
with the la la's and the levellers you have a quartet, akin to: two people and two abstracts of the people mentioned; why write love poetry for love? why not write love poetry to make actual love unattainable? just wondering, because that's what you're doing!
well there's me walking into
the woods, muddying my shoes,
taking mud with lace onto pavements
against what my mother asking me
to not do: i love my cat, look
at my autistic bonsai tiger, look
at him, cleaning himself, ah,
cutie pie budgie, i'm having a beer
and i'm saying:
i was the drummer on billy joel's
we didn't start the fire song...
huh? it's friday, why am i not
in the secular church of crucifix and disco ball
getting groovy like once repentant?
no seriously, i'm surprised it's friday:
here's me air-drumming a thump
to the silences ha ha: you're here too?
but then trying to remember a song,
a journalist writing out all-purpose-defence-dialectics
spotted that i too came across the levellers,
so before you craze and criticise...
i loved the song carry me;
and concerning the muddied shoes,
where you the man in sunset woods,
listening to the wake of owls and the rasp of crows?
where you me sitting on a stump of wood,
with crows and owls, exhausted sitting on
a stump of wood with beer and cigarette in hand...
where you me? where you me listening
to the synchronised claim of the darkened woods
with me and owls and crows? no, you weren't:
all **** free through to the future of me tangoing
with you where civilisation matters.
Mar 4, 2016
Mar 4, 2016 at 3:17 PM UTC
Here I am,
a tangle of roots
buried deep
and reaching down
deeper,
looking for a sign of life.
But no,
I sprawl and
twist around,
widdershins,
round and round
the battering thump
breaking the walls
under my flesh.
My waking hours
remember,
thick with the weight
of words left unsaid,
an iron on my tongue.
Unmoved.
Unperturbed.
Stagnant and decaying,
until I’m a stranger
to my own voice.
A crow lost in a cornfield
lulled by a scarecrow’s
siren song.
Like a crow,
plumes as dark
as a saint ‘s hope
wandering in the arms of limbo.
Wings bruised
for hammering obstinate bars,
voice hoarse for singing the blues
over dissonant chords.
Over and over again.
“Like a broken record,” they say.
Singing the same old song.
I have been.
Songs like plastic bags
of cans that digs into a tender
palm until the blood supply is cut.
What does the sky
Feel like on my wings
The stretch of endless blue
Soft wind threading through my feathers?
Tell me, the feeling has long escaped me.
Emptiness ringing in my ear
in the space between
where song once lived
Time has a way
Of erasing memories,
Of erasing wounds
and hardening them into scars,
of stepping into clear water
and muddying it.
Now the air is stale,
silence dense,
solitude burning red,
my bones rubbing against
my soul,
Leaving blisters and scuffs.
These heavy eyes,
the sky’s allure has faded from their gaze.
they have learned to shrink
into this smallness.
no horizon here
only walls,
and the dust taste of dullness
is vapid.
How I miss
how the sun makes
the salt on my skin rise,
or how the rain can seep
into my thoughts until
it colors it sad.
Now, there’s just fields of
milky grayness, playing labyrinth
until I reach the end,
only to be devoured again.
And sadness is too mundane a word,
at most it’s an espresso
that keeps you awake,
A defibrillator,
that jolt that makes eternity
an agony.
I am but a riddle I cannot solve
Oct 22, 2024
Oct 22, 2024 at 9:40 AM UTC
I don't edit
my poetry
for the most part
it's first draft
final draft
and a writer friend of
mine
tells me that this makes the
poetry more real
and perhaps I'm
inclined to agree
in that it's more real
in the same way that
blood
at a crime scene is infinitely
more real than the grainy
photos that make it to the
papers with the chalk outlines
and the grayscale
acting as formalities,
muddying up the
action and excitement
Mar 23, 2018
Mar 23, 2018 at 1:25 AM UTC