"overtone" poems
*
The girl that I like is young, quite petite, I might add
Bluish-greenish turquoise eyes, like the forest and the sea combined
Her voice, a sweet, gentle overtone; the ocean, calm waves that reach ashore
The breeze, blows the forest trees; a rustle, soothing to the human ears
Her skin that luminesces; the white sands of the Riviera Maya
Here and there, little sprinkles of darker sand on her pretty face
Her natural dark, red hair, as fiery as the midday sun,
And her lips a vibrant red, that melt you in the summer days,
So warm and cozy as the winter rays.
*
Apr 24, 2015
Apr 24, 2015 at 1:32 AM UTC
JANE, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.
Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,
Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.
But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,
Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.
The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,
Cockscomb flowers that none will pluck,
And wooden flowers that 'gin to cluck.
In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,
As carrots or as turnips shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.
Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk's weak mind . . .
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!
2.4k
Verbiage
Sagacious humans would concur
Salacious verbiage is trenchant
Verdant language withers a guileless soul
Hubristic linguists deem limpid oratory irksome
A Didactic, petulant, boorish, garrulous, nefarious, obtuse, and insolent
Overtone is not my intent
Puckish, risible, mannered, jocular, antic, and adroit
Reverberations I am manifesting
TRANSLATION
Words
Smart people would agree
Healthy words are sharp
Unripe words die naive spirits
Self-confident word users find simple language annoying
Moral instruction, rude, insensitivity, wordy, wicked, blunt, and contemptuous
Feelings are not my purpose
Impish (silly), laughable, artificial, playful, clownish, and clever
Reactions I'm hoping to create
Jan 6, 2013
Jan 6, 2013 at 12:15 PM UTC
Lilac, purple, or shades of mauve
There's no defeating the color of the sky
The hue
Of loyalty
Of expansiveness
Of trust
I lay my eyes
On the ripples of the ocean
On the color of the sea
On the backdrop of clouds
Triumphs the anger of red
Gushes out green
Yells at yellow
And black gets dim
The penultimate tint
The top tincture
With an undertone of sad
And an overtone of hope
It's the color
The hue
It blooms and pops inside my mind
When I think of you
It's the color
The hue
It's there
When I go diving
When I go running at the morning
Whenever I awake and look at the windows
Sometimes the windowsill
Makes perfect frame
For the beauty and grace that that color brings
Like a mountain range cuddled up
To look like waves
Like the clouds running rampant
Whenever the wind decides to rush
And I get mad
Because somehow, people link it
To being sad
It is not
It does not bring sorrow
It brings joy
It does not bring melancholy
It brings beatitude
It brings beauty
Like your eyes do
Like your smile does
And like your heart did to mine
How can a color
Be so potent
So mighty
That it has the ability
To sway the human mind
To pinch the human heart
To lift the human soul
How can a color
A hue
Do all these things?
I do not know
But that's alright
Because sometimes wonders
And things alike
Cannot simply be explained
Just like how magic tricks work;
Known by many
Understood by few
And love,
I want to be the only one
That feels this way about blue
Jan 29, 2018
Jan 29, 2018 at 4:50 PM UTC
Ate with South Carolina supervisor with his wife and his parents! He is definitely a country boy, but very awesome lead tech! Thank god I been travelling around the states, while seeing the working environment as it is, and I must confess the southerners are truly nice people! I know good people lies within anywhere, but in the north (schools) it made it feel like the south was lagging in that department, and from experiences it's just media giving wrong impression also! It might be because I am only exposed to bigger cities, but thus far people in the south truly feel like a genuine people with good heart!
Aside from friends in Minnesota, which by the way were good people, it was very hard to feel in place with Minneapolis suburb area. I always had my guards up for racial tensions, and mis-treatment from officers for stupid **** but in the south I honest don't feel like I have to prove anything to anyone! I feel at ease, and I feel job market is more equal in here! It might be because I am with fortune 500 company, and their culture is different, but in Target to Best Buy, and even the same company I work for now felt like they were always dividing people in Minnesota. So **** glad I no longer work for retail giants, while don't feel like I am getting segregated! I felt more like a human being in the southern states than I felt in the Minnesota, and mentally it was super exhausting, and emotionally depressing! While I felt discrimination in Minnesota, writing, art, and classical music was always my escape to ease abnormality I felt as a person! For the longest time I felt like the environment was choking the living life out of me, and I was suppose to be the bad guy in Minnesota! It felt like people were always judging for the wrong reason, and you couldn't hide yourself from those judging eyes, while they made alliances to back stab! If south is driven by racial overtone, then Minnesota was driven by undertones!
I feel I belong here in the south, and meeting right people at the right places helps me feel like I'm a human being.
Feb 18, 2015
Feb 18, 2015 at 10:35 PM UTC
shed the care
she can bear
universal pain
while you stay sane
take care of your own
chase joyful overtone
live wild and free
be who you need to be
Jul 18, 2015
Jul 18, 2015 at 4:04 AM UTC
And I gave my First Snowglobe to them.
…And When I had given that to them, I had told him to give me a gift in return that may have more to itself than just simple life.
“Inahah oona sept amni kquestal”.
Yet I had no other thing to give, this broken soul, beyond more than just flesh, I was naught. And so she had nothing more to me than that of the great overtone, the great silence of the earth, of space, her arms stretching invisible to hold our gaze to her innumerable foreign light show and state--
Perhaps there is another lover of soul somewhere within?
And he said simply to me, that there is someplace for me to be, someone for me to see-- that there was innumerable and inexplicable, incalculable and incomprehensible, powerful and overwhelming deterministic fate that guides my eyes, lets me chose without choosing, think without thinking, know without knowing.
And he knew—and she knew—and they knew with a knowing that I can never know; true and whole and unspoken, I can only dream to describe.
"We made the world for us, for you."
And I felt their love radiate that ferrous heart, steeled with centuries of pain and removal, heated by the ***** of her truth and guided by the loving, tender hand of his true brilliance that blinded and pleasured my aching eyes.
The entire web of the cosmos, in my eyes, dreaming and thinking that maybe I’d be back there one day, whole, float-- bool and cruelty of world inconsequential within the vast expanse of everything—
A powerful, emanative, restorative code of the universe that held itself no information but all, no hate but the misidentified ache of longing love, differed from the soul of the grinding earth—so far away from god through sickly skin and broken bone that without expanding into time and vaporizing into pure light, these feelings which we can never know.
May 9, 2018
May 9, 2018 at 10:58 PM UTC
Sitting in solemn silence
all around me the deafening roar
of thoughts flooding through
my mind
Heads bent over their work
as they contemplate the
significance that this will even have
ten, twenty, thirty years from now
Looking around and seeing
stress on people's faces
as they sit and wittle away
the fifty minutes of
fluid time
Twiddling their thumbs
the equivalent of me
here
writing this poem
Bland revising conversation
with an overtone of educational
******** wrapped in a blanket
of disconcerting melodrama
Whispers of unfocused chatter
and my mind wanders lazily
from one thought to the next
Conflicted as I should be writing for
another purpose
to complete an assignment
that I couldn't possibly
care less about
Oh the joys of institutionalized
education
and yet
the irony:
I want to become
a part of it
in order to remedy
its imperfections
from the inside out
Apr 4, 2010
Apr 4, 2010 at 12:15 PM UTC
Blueberry tears.
We saw through the eyes.
The electric highway.
The lips overtone.
The winds.
Celestial.
Neon Bohemia.
Cathartic Breath of air on neck.
The melting of the surface.
Suffice in the face of thee ocean.
Garrett Johnson.
Aug 15, 2019
Aug 15, 2019 at 3:10 PM UTC
I can only summon feelingfulness like the passing of a dove,
postponing its arrival mid-air, somewhere along the tucked
bramble across Poblacion, starting with metaphorical sensibility
or an insensibly bland space to procure wanted meaning.
Girls prefer roses and their bright foreheads diademed with more
flowers, and boys, their chiaroscuro or lack of a color thereof, seems
to be fitting in this maladroit contrast, and so I begin, as always,
with your very vague and caged memory. Your face, the whiteness
of snowcapped alps. Your strut, my slalom in a treacherous course
of words reduced to whisperings, to flutings. Your voice, though nuanced,
flitters with an overtone of arrogance: if sound was clothed, yours would
be flamboyant ermine. And the line in front of you before I, my arbitrary turn,
assimilates into a picturesque form of waiting somewhere in Cubao.
I wanted to smash myself with train-speed towards the metallic turnstile,
which, would then famish me even so, just as much as I wish to be a car crash
somewhere within the outskirts of your town, heavily vandalized by the swill
of squalor hefting itself like the rest of the world conscious of its viscera.
This is how I start you – like waiting for the sun to emerge by Borobudur,
or the clandestine *** of mildew and grass, a hundredfold of images appear
before me and I cannot choose upon my whims and caprices. Are you a dove?
A spear of Sun? A thunderous crackle of an impending rain? A harlequin?
A moseying cirrus? Or just another by-stander in the crowds where I ultimately
seek your being?
This answerlessness measures my knowledge of star, and my breath snuffed
out of me while I sigh from exhausted penchants, outweigh dissimilarities and symmetries.
A progeny from all superseding conundrums arises: are you a retrogression of a wave
back to its saltine wound, flailing in brine? Or are you just the vast sea and nothing else
on a fine and lucid day where children skip stones and chant name-callings?
I sense the peril in this undertaking, and much to my chagrin, I still
do not know how to end you.
Jan 27, 2016
Jan 27, 2016 at 3:09 AM UTC
The jazzy overtone leaves me alone
In a beautiful world, away from
Difficult to breathe now
I drown in purple terrorism
Just to see if it's possible
Useless absence of past
Torn into pieces that're now pulled through deadly veil
Improper destitute-grey scenery
I am now
I am then
I am after
You can't send your materials into me
You must take them back
You are a monster of loose-luck frill
And then I nod beyond the sod
Of the
Other side
Of the
HILLS
Jan 18, 2014
Jan 18, 2014 at 8:21 PM UTC
i want to ***** out everything held inside of me,
yank the remnant gunpowder from my throat
and load a pistol to destroy the ghosts that crawl forth
from the cramped black holes of my memory.
The sound of your name makes my vision turn crimson
and my feet cling to the ceiling.
What you did
is too much
for me to carry,
haunting me in ways i do not understand
morphing me into creatures i cannot bury.
i never even notice you've seeped into something,
until its too late.
i surface gasping in the middle of a fit of confusion
to realize that your grubby, sticky hands
are tainting
my every movement
waking
and
sleeping,
dancing
my legs on puppet strings.
Iron-locked hinges control my hips opening,
closing,
opening,
rusted and stuck in a position i refused,
a place i did not agree to be folded into.
Weighted down by the heaviness of you
your mass
your gravity
bulldozing me into glass shards, and blindly
mixing my fragments
with
mud
and dust
and
ashen debris.
A resin of my innards is caked dry
under your ragged fingernails.
They snag at the holes in my tights
and i feel the unwashable stickiness of me
skid
against my skin.
The room is pitch black
but i can see splotched neon demons
lurking in the corner behind my back.
And the gurgling of the television
is harmonizing with my rasping,
and my tired anger,
in a key i can't decipher,
although it sounds minor.
What an ominous overtone, dangling
over our dizzy heads.
Stop trying to scare me,
soften me into your arms.
I am the monster in this room, remember?!?!
There is almost too much guilt
in my sandy mouth
to make room for another insistent plea.
Stop.
STOP.
I
am
not
joking.
I
am
not
a
joke.
I
am
not
a
target.
Or something
to crush
and ****
up your nose.
i'm much too grotesque for any of that.
I'm the monster here, remember?
Jan 27, 2016
Jan 27, 2016 at 7:56 PM UTC
Raw burnt fingertips
hell bound blown
overexposed
scull thought to the bone
in the overtone of death's
ever risising crimson tides
still your love for humanity
must never die
I heard it in the rain
falling from so many eyes
you are free from it all
for the meek and mild
were also the bold
blood became water,
streaming
from a fearlfull heart
of stories
never been told.
Aug 30, 2021
Aug 30, 2021 at 1:39 PM UTC
With every shard a picture painted
Of.... a world that has been tainted
By the overtone
And as the colors fade or run
A picture... overworked or undone
Seen or shown...
...Emerges from the ashes of devastation
To become an interdictum
A visionary injuction of ....
... How to prosper or cease to function!
Feb 22, 2018
Feb 22, 2018 at 3:03 AM UTC
Yes,
I am a poet.
I dream while awake,
expressing the ability
to heal with my words.
I have faith.
Poetry is my therapy.
My pen and my words
are my weapons,
of war,
of mass destruction,
of peace,
of love and happiness,
of friendship.
My pen,
is the commander in chief,
the director,
not a dictator,
with an accessible space,
and the key to the
nuclear weapon
i can direct it
to make war or peace,
just as I choose.
I got me a brush to
paint words with
melancholic overtone,
of ecstatic bliss,
for my thoughts to flow,
on the canvas,
with different shades
of colourful words,
time to dwell
and ponder
and meditate on life matters.
The issues of the mind,
and of what the heart feels,
i translate into reality.
The control of the united emotions
of my feelings and thoughts are in
the hand holding the pen to paint
the words of living in the canvas of life.
Poets have the power to make
the invisible things to manifest,
thoughts hidden and
not heard to have a face.
The secular world,
the whole cosmos,
the galaxy is at their command.
I am a poet,
I make the mind see the heart,
I make the heart of man flow
in ecstatic bliss.
To dream is unwritten poetry.
A poets joy lies in the portal
of the divine.
©2018,Emeka Mokeme. All Rights Reserved.
Jun 3, 2018
Jun 3, 2018 at 9:11 AM UTC
On small boats
Beneath high swells
Seeking cash from fish.
Smashing through
Wild white horses,
Spray splashing
The face.
Headway or sinking,
Journey in stasis
Undertow
Overtone.
Feet on terra firma
Shaking from
Quake
And unseen particles
Shooting throughout.
Body tone
Muscle song
And the dissolution
Of being.
Sep 14, 2017
Sep 14, 2017 at 3:23 AM UTC
Open scene, we begin, lights dimmed, back alley vibe, ominous.
Air thick with viscous mist, ambience anxious, overtone venomous.
A young woman walks slow, headed home, fixated on her phone
ambulance tones punctuate the foreboding sense she shouldn’t be alone.
Discounted high heels click, sticking slightly to flag stones, pace quickens accelerated heart ticking,
we feel her doubt, poisonous fear of this, modern Britain.
She cups her hands, lights up a cig, grabs a bottle from her bag, takes a swig,
tosses the empty plastic vessel to the ground where it sits on a bed of moss and twigs…
and hurries home safely, escaping the scene of the crime, unconvicted.
450 years later, a bottle lid chokes it’s 78th fish, last of a long list of murders unlisted.
Dec 17, 2019
Dec 17, 2019 at 10:19 AM UTC
how can you "joke", and then excuse yourself
from the "joke", by stressing you
are "joking" - in that you are actually
being serious - with an overtone of
what would otherwise be held back
subconsciously - stereotypically -
how can you tell a "joke" -
whereby you subsequently excuse yourself
from the "joke" telling others:
it was all, but a joke... huh?!
that's the most clarifying misnomer
of the word joke i've ever heard:
i'm not actually telling a joke, but i am,
i must let you know, that once i tell the joke,
that i've made a joke,
and not a degrading comment;
aren't jokes supposed to be said with
an unconscious uncontrollable *** of laughter?!
i don't think jokes that make you think
actually exist... esp. those that are said
to be supposedly "jokes" in reminder of
a schema of generating laughter...
these western court "jesters" would have lasted
about an hour in vlad the impaler's court...
to tell a joke in order to tell the person
not laughing: oh, but it's a joke!
bad jokes deserve to be moulded
by rabie infested rottweilers,
salivating froth of being
unfed for a week,
into francis bacon sculptures of ripped
off flesh.
Oct 24, 2017
Oct 24, 2017 at 8:51 PM UTC
Sing the song of gratitude,
should the grass grow.
Felt beneath our feet,
the soil breathing its song.
Let it growl a languid tone,
for its tongue rests underneath its greenth overflows and wild creatures.
A picture of placidity it draws, hidden under its overtone of yellow kingdom.
Don't let it loom over you,
for its stature is everything but onerous.
Tell it why you fear not the soil nor its engulfing sky, and it shall move the winds easy.
Speak with candor and imbue it with your love.
Because when it hears your song of gratitude, it too will sing.
Mar 22, 2020
Mar 22, 2020 at 5:34 AM UTC
pumpkin or cup cake
are strange in a male world
Aug 21, 2023
Aug 21, 2023 at 12:11 PM UTC
I am mystified with beauty,
interludes of ecstasy engulf my spirit;
Reflected in bold strokes,
taking me into the realm of beauty.
This impression appear before me
with a childlike innocence
and yet like a child they
remain indifferent to what I think,
but then it speaks.
My eyes gazing away into the distance,
thoughts seemed far away,
deep into another realm,
dreaming in the presence of nature.
This beauty,
so near and touchable,
healthy,strong and alive,
with an exotic impression,
a puzzling melancholic overtone,
an awareness
that something is happening
which I neither know or understand,
but nature intended it that way:
Forever Mysterious.
It is that unfathomable
hidden part of myself,
my divinity,my soul and my spirit,
which no outsider could understand,
I didn't understand it either,
But was able to express this sensation,
feeling,and mood called Beauty.
© 2017, Emeka Mokeme.All rights reserved.
Jul 13, 2017
Jul 13, 2017 at 3:22 AM UTC