"padded" poems
There’s a giraffe in here, in my house
There’s a giraffe in here, his name’s Strauss
There’s a giraffe in here, watching my TV
There’s a giraffe in here, he's got a key
*I think it’s fun to have a crazy friend
I don’t care if we go round the bend*
There’s a giraffe in here, in my kitchenette
There’s a giraffe in here, he’s a great pet
There’s a giraffe in here, in my car
There’s a giraffe in here, smoking a cigar
*I think it’s fun to throw away my meds
My crazy friend, is in my head*
There’s a giraffe in here, in my mind
There’s a giraffe in here, he’s refined
There’s a giraffe in here, in my padded room
There’s a giraffe in here, I assume
Mar 8, 2013
Mar 8, 2013 at 1:21 AM UTC
From padded window seat inside café
cup of tea warms my hands
cold winds shuffle sidewalk leaves
Two tables away sit two men
one in October years
the other May
Soiled clothes, old scuffed shoes, beat up weathered
faces, bloodshot eyes, ***** hair disheveled
The older begins reading to the younger
from newspaper wrinkled by other hands
“Rain and wind coming in tonight from the west,
tomorrow - clearing, with temps in high 30s
toward evening - dropping to low 30s
Saturday, sunny, high 30s”
The young man’s grizzled chiseled face
seemingly stoic
flinched stiff with the words
“Sunday, low 20s, snow mixed with sleet”
Jan 15, 2015
Jan 15, 2015 at 5:21 AM UTC
I am a woman
Dyed blond
Peer pressure I guess
Nice *****
I don't conform
Not because I'm informed
I'm padded room crazy
A wild Daisy
My hair represent the free spirit
Then I cut it off in rebellion
I will light you on fire
You never were a desire
Leave me, I wont be crying
You always be wondering
I'm that insane chick that keeps you staring
Jul 31, 2016
Jul 31, 2016 at 2:53 AM UTC
All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby ---
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
or padded through the door,
grinning through their many teeth,
looking for seeds,
suet, sugar; muttering and humming,
opening the breadbox, happiest when
there was milk and music. But once
in the night I heard a sound
outside the door, the canvas
bulged slightly ---something
was pressing inward at eye level.
I watched, trembling, sure I had heard
the click of claws, the smack of lips
outside my gauzy house ---
I imagined the red eyes,
the broad tongue, the enormous lap.
Would it be friendly too?
Fear defeated me. And yet,
not in faith and not in madness
but with the courage I thought
my dream deserved,
I stepped outside. It was gone.
Then I whirled at the sound of some
shambling tonnage.
Did I see a black haunch slipping
back through the trees? Did I see
the moonlight shining on it?
Did I actually reach out my arms
toward it, toward paradise falling, like
the fading of the dearest, wildest hope ---
the dark heart of the story that is all
the reason for its telling?
6.7k
for the first time
since i was 11
i look in the mirror
and i actually like whats staring back at me
i don't know why it took so long to regain
the feeling of self love
and being content with less makeup
or none
in the mirror
i wish i know what could have happened
when i started looking at my little 11 year old body
and thought i was overweight
Oh my god i'm 75 pounds?! i remember thinking
I could blame my mom
or the boys who paraded naked pictures of me
criticizing my changing body in its early stages
i was made fun of for having supple *******
the first girl in my 4th grade class to wear a padded bra
i hated it
every second of my changing body
i started to get curves
and was known for having a "big ****
and this "best friend" of mine told me she was glad she didn't have one
a boyfriend shot me down
"you can't leave me because no one will want you"
mother and step dad made fat jokes when i was 14
because i'm not obsessive compulsive with my diet
now i look in the mirror and i'm so happy
i love every curve from my arms to my ankles
and my dark brown eyes stare deep into you don't they?
grandma wasn't kidding when she said people would pay
THOUSANDS!! for these lips
and this square jawline has it's perks
i used to get paranoid when people stared at me
until i caught someone
and they told me i was beautiful
Jun 11, 2014
Jun 11, 2014 at 2:40 AM UTC
I peered into the future and saw
Possibilities dancing in semi-reality
like snowflakes beneath a stormy sky.
But the one before us was clear
as ice upon the frosted curved glass.
A madness has spread among
the countless peoples of the world.
A disease of the mind which makes it seem
to the sick man as if they are made
of glass. A fragile thing, so
frail and delicate they might break
upon any but the softest impact.
The afflicted, day and night, scream in fear
at any possible contact harder
than the lightest touch.
“I’ll break”, their blood-chilling screams
echo through the empty halls of history.
The world has broken in this future
like a music-box wound down to
silence. Men and women hide in
padded chambers, for fear of breaking
their porcelain forms upon a pavement
or stones a toddler could step over.
A cure for the glass does not exist,
save for a light tap to show the ill
that they are more than they believe.
Yet the sick would rather not be healed
than face the reality of their own resilience.
The world cannot hurt you, my friend,
but you yourself can hurt the world
and shatter it like a crystalline snowglobe.
Oct 21, 2018
Oct 21, 2018 at 10:54 AM UTC
Insanity Is the comfort of a pillow, used for suffocation.
Insanity Is the warmth of a gun, used for a death shot.
Insanity Is the enabler,
The barrier breaker,
The undertaker.
Insanity Is a safety zone.
Insanity Is a shield.
Insanity Is a guard for all to take part in it,
All who brush with it,
All who dwell in it.
Insanity Is the abstract thoughts, the rotund ways.
Insanity Is the thought that you can do anything.
Insanity Is the fact that people can question, can insult, can pry,
And they never seem to affect you,
And they never will.
Insanity Is a soft room, padded with cushy walls.
Insanity Is a group of people, who try to figure out what's wrong.
Insanity Is not quite knowing what's going on,
Having that privilege,
Having that power.
Insanity Is engulfing, a single being in itself.
Insanity Is the process of losing yourself.
Insanity Is the way you go when you just seem to snap,
Lucky enough to see nothing,
Lucky that everything goes black.
Mar 20, 2010
Mar 20, 2010 at 8:21 PM UTC
After my mother died, my room was filled with roses. When the flowers died, my room was filled with their sweet, rotten stench for weeks on end; it sunk into my pores and into my DNA and years later, I still smell like dead roses.
My sister confuses this smell with dead lilies.
A bouquet of red roses was placed atop my mother’s coffin as it lowered six
feet down into the earth. After the roses died, I wonder if my mother could
smell them like I did? I wonder if she still smells them, or, more likely, how long it took for the roses to disintegrate into dust like her?
We don’t talk about the body after death because we don’t like to be reminded of how vulnerable we really are. In high school, a boy asked me to prom using roses and lilies that were all different shades of reds and oranges and yellows like fire. Lilies like funerals and tombstones and formaldehyde.
I don’t think he meant to remind me of death. I don’t think his intention was to place me in a casket similar to my mother’s with its pink padded walls. I don’t think he realized that’s where I went when I saw his basement covered in bouquets of hellfire. I think he meant the roses to be romantic,
but I looked at them and saw my mother’s putrefying face, saw her intestines eaten away by savage bacteria and bugs, saw her eyelids drying out and peeling back like black and dead and withered lily petals. Embalming does not prevent decomposition, only prolongs it. I have embalmed my mother's
memory in the shape of a teal notebook. I cannot tell if it has
begun to decay or not.
May 24, 2016
May 24, 2016 at 2:31 PM UTC
There is a sequence of small events, signs; that as they occur point us in the direction of the mid-winter festival. This morning: the first snow; iced rain, not the soft down-like floaty stuff, but hard crystal-shaped foot-crunching shards. Yesterday, it was on with the wooly hat, the padded waistcoat and a more than just sprightly walk in a park of leafless trees. Everywhere, a damp coldness.
Sitting companionably after the meal, a fire spitting in the hearth had brought a glow to her cheeks. She was replete with glowness, her speech dancing too and fro after the family phone calls of a Sunday night. Outside, the sound of wind against the house.
Settling herself against him, feet tucked under his reclining body, she tells him about her niece, a birthday girl just two last week. This little one was touchingly innocent of what happens on a birthday. She knew it was coming, next week, soon, then tomorrow. Imagine her the night before: just think you'll wake up and be two! And that's what this birthday business is? She wakes and there is something special in the air, her sister smile-full, bouncy with expectation. Her parents’ voices are louder than usual, there are bigger hugs and longer kisses. Birthday, birthday, birthday. Her grandparents arrive. More hugs. THEN her father appears with a cake! It's only just after breakfast, but the large people are having coffee and there's her juice cup and a cake! Birthday, birthday, birthday shouts her sister. For me, a cake for me? My cake? Daddy lights the candles! Oh, oh, oh. This is . . . and something wrapped in pretty paper is being handed to me. Her sister, being wonderfully sisterly shows her how to remove the wrapping. A book! Read it to me now, now, please. It's my birthday, now.
This is a sign he thinks later when in bed she folds herself to him, arranges his arms and hands to hold her into sleep, still glowing a little. This is surely a sign. A child's discovery of the birth day. The joy it brings, the way it lights up our lives. And never again will her father see quite that measure of surprise and delight in his daughter's face. Next year she'll be full of expectation, know all about birthdays . . and be three.
Dec 2, 2012
Dec 2, 2012 at 1:56 AM UTC
If God is the book then life would be the pages in him,
for us to study and turn to each new page of her.
There is so much paper here, but no place to start a fire.
A fire of words and dreams to chase.
Will you run with me, with feet wide awake?
Please do, and I won't be scared to bleed for you
when the time comes.
These words I have don't dream lifeless
or die in corral conversation or in a helpless blind study.
I will help you see it is in fact that God's home is make-believe
with no welcome mat to greet you. Maybe God never
learned to let bygones just be gone.
Maybe this is why you have never seen the glorious
Matriarch or heard her voice, but I bet it sounds
a lot like the space between a gunshot and a black
male's body hit by the bullet right before the screams.
Did you know this is what black feels like?
These pages feel like an eighth-grade suicide poem
written because it is solely triggered by life, and
since life is so freaking triggering and our only
real competition, then I will write words that are
weapons. I will write real-life pages of myself,
that is more jazz than blues, more biggie than Pac
more Prince than Michael. I will write myself out
this padded room call earth, because after all heroes
can dream too, and our thirst can become hunger and quickly
I learned to eat my own words and breathe in endless
possibility in a world where breathing is no longer a privilege
Just a means to be necessary.
Jesus! I got a life with no religion and still, I manage to turn
doubt into rhinestones right along with these pages
of myself. I will turn page after page as if I were Jesus turning the other cheek, and like Jesus, I can take all my
dislikes and burdens and turn the into sunsets. I will teach
my pain to laugh. Ignorance is not bliss, it is kind. It teaches
us to look deep inside of ourselves to see the word of God,
and I have seen it, I have seen I am half human and half star
and my DNA is all angelic. God wrote his first poem in blood right here on Earth. Her pen never felt writer's block. He never suffered inside the ink. Do you know the difference between God and everyone else? She never starts emotional fires to burn pages of himself and herself as we do.
Sep 27, 2018
Sep 27, 2018 at 10:31 AM UTC
They call this a form of madness because you stepped into my void right out of my dreams where you reigned free in my subconscious waving like the good naval officer that you were returning home after a long mission wearing all-white linen none out of place crisp clean-cut shoulders padded with shiny metals head balancing the white hat that sat tall there like a good boy behaving in the church pew and all I feel is your radiant smile glowing out of you like a million little sunbursts swallowing me whole by the pier leaving behind nothing to prove I even existed.
Now, isn't that madness?
Shalini Nayar
25.11.14
(c) 2014
Nov 25, 2014
Nov 25, 2014 at 4:36 AM UTC
There's a black cat
walking flat,
his back feet
dipped in
marshmallow droppings.
His tail flicks
like a reed in the swamp,
and he can't
help but run through legs
swiftly
hopping on furniture
daintily
belly all soft and white.
Silent is he,
catching the almost-full moon
in his bright whiskers.
Padded paws,
a black tail snaking
twitching as he
squeezes to rest
in tight spaces
wide eyes as green as
a kiwi fruit
with the seeds cut out.
He bats his toy freely,
ears up then
hears a rustle
at the screen door
and sits
transfixed
but only
for a moment.
Jan 20, 2017
Jan 20, 2017 at 12:52 PM UTC
You're sitting across a table, in the next room- and it's the month of July.
And as the beads of sweat chip off your forehead
like a shank of butcher's meat,
your dorcel fin peaks through the sand where my toes peak through. The picnic table where I write letters; post cards.
I take photos, make reservations, and
even after I'm canceled on for walking around
downtown in my bright neon-pink underwear, I still roll to the
left side of the bed sit up and drop the cigarette I fell asleep on. You're just sitting, first entry: Stardom.
I don't have room for you in the corners.
The corners of this room, padded walls,
shifty vaseline sway- the white cotton stick
of a sucker pointing out of your mouth, its red numero forty dye shines
in the specks of light flicking
out of the horizon like a carousel ride
around and around.
I'm getting a bit dizzy, and even less honest.
If you want to see me spring,
like the silly string on my birthday, yellow silly-putty; molding the monster face,
I observe you through a kaleidoscope of dexedrine and morphine.
Your catastrophe with Xanax, passed out
in alien-green ******* at that party in the abandoned firehouse
on News St., how you could lay trust on me after that
(a daydream with sawing you called me)
sixteen-year-old mishap of an afternoon.
&
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 4:31 AM UTC
we whispered missing years
fluttered legs over a withering porch bench
she mixed my hair with white fingertips
to keep the itchy thoughts away
the walls of my grandparents’ house held me close,
my surrogate womb
we shared more than blood and color as
time licked her blonde with
heavy waves of fruit and nicotine and
I didn’t mind
she sung sticky secrets to me:
nights she dreamed on the streets when
rent was too high and
dads that come like rain:
big and loud all at once,
then gone
fingertips padded quiet paths along budding curls while
“mom” sat sweet and safe against my tongue
--
c
Jan 26, 2018
Jan 26, 2018 at 4:34 PM UTC
I
Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her ***** milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.
The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.
The broken halves are fellowed in a *******
The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,
Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble
Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,
And stake the sleepers in the savage grave
That the vampire laugh.
The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded
The wild pigs' wood, and slime upon the trees,
******* the dark, kissed on the cyanide,
And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,
Rotating halves are horning as they drill
The arterial angel.
What colour is glory? death's feather? tremble
The halves that pierce the pin's point in the air,
And ***** the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.
The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.
II
My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.
My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,
******** their bowels from a hill of bones,
Cry Eloi to the guns.
My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.
The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,
Drip on my dead house garden.
Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth
The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn
Through the Atlantic corn.
The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
Bearding the unborn devil,
Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.
The tongue's of heaven gossip as I glide
Binding my angel's hood.
Who blows death's feather? What glory is colour?
I blow the stammel feather in the vein.
The **** is glory in a working pallor.
My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,
The secret child, I sift about the sea
Dry in the half-tracked thigh.
3.9k
I stare at the television news....
Assaulted by violence
Stunned by the inhumanity of a
Godless society
I listen to the radio....
Embarrassed by ads that tout
Promiscuous pleasures
Outraged by the thinly disguised
Decadent discourses of the shock jocks
I read the newspapers and magazines....
Cuckolded by corporate America a
Loser in the games politicians play
Violated
Shamed
Cheated and
Betrayed
I try to turn it all off….
but like a bitter pill the distasteful images linger
nor can I go along with eyes shut and ears muffled
living
or not
in a padded room of my own making
I cannot function without information….
tho my senses are
Wounded by the
Brutality of the media
I yearn for thoughts to ease my distress....
like a mother’s soft whispers to her crying baby
like the beauty that shines from faces that know love
I don’t want the perception of reality that the media rapes me with....
I want the truth revealed by God in His creation
Oct 1, 2016
Oct 1, 2016 at 9:06 AM UTC
Boulevard paved, cloud runnin' chase, to clear thoughts
Mindfulness, craved pounding in, raining pain sought
Free me! bound points pressing in, thorns? BE GONE! bought
padded Dr. Scholes soles.
Trail's bridge truss, wooden way leads to peace climbing
Lean in shoulder first, dig, dig, pistons legs pump hard
Muscles in tighter bundles demand enrichment
Slopes up, roll down, pleasure
Apr 12, 2015
Apr 12, 2015 at 2:38 AM UTC
dissipated and disillusioned worms eating through the last splinters of the rotting universal wood.
the last transmission of regret sent electronically, spluttered,
into a tissue; in a moment of self indulgent **********
live showings of vicious execution, transmitted directly from the electromagnetic waves into the alpha waves of the young and naive. Desensitization, the last drops of humanity into complete disengagement.
endlessly recycled bohemian ideologies whispered into the ear of the eager idealist. spreading like fire, before burning out into the uncatchable reverie up with the stars, with all the other reveries, shining bright, intangible.
Instant dismissal from the old man, as the big curtain draws. Cynicism and fragmented past, falling on apathetic eyes, a proud man treat with a padded hand. faux sympathetic tones, blushing cheeks on old bones.
Begging with your body crumbling to dust with the disinterested doc, looking at the clock counting the milliseconds to the paycheck. Decomposing until you can be swept under the perpetual rug with the rest, Vacuum.
Jun 12, 2014
Jun 12, 2014 at 12:11 PM UTC
bases on the character Blanche DuBois from Streetcar Named Desire a play by Tennassee Williams
Crushed white satin
Hot baths on warm days
Polka music makes me sway
That young man I wish had stayed
Light dances around me
Never daring a touch
Here in the lantern light
All a lady has is her looks
Stranger Stranger everywhere
Darkness always a little too near
Shep oh Shep where are you dear?
"I don't know you" please get off
For star and the common pig
I leave no words of fancy
For now I sit with pen an paper
In the light of a padded room
and the piano was still slow and blue
May 9, 2013
May 9, 2013 at 10:23 AM UTC
Up the stairs went molly Pratchett,
in her hands a little hatchet.
Squealing loud in girlish glee,
at all the gore that she'll see...
Slowly down the hall she crept,
to the room where her parents slept.
She raised the hatchet over her head
and slowly tiptoed over to their bed...
She sank the hatchet into their heads
until alas they were dead....
Now she sits in a padded cell
where they keep here very well.
They closed the door then they latched it
This ends the tale of molly Pratchett,
OR DOES IT?.................................
Mar 20, 2012
Mar 20, 2012 at 4:21 PM UTC
Damaged goods
Hopelessly lost
My existence fading
Too tired to fight
Nothing left to cherish
Complete surrender
Hoping to suffocate my hardened heart
I locked it away in a padded box
Intentionally misplacing the key
Then you appeared...
Familiar stranger
Remembered soul
Such a perfect contradiction
Strong and gentle
Warm and cool
A serious man and a playful child
Rescued by your words
Saved by your compassion
You have awakened my emotions
From their deepest sleep
I breathe for you…I wait for you
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 12:02 PM UTC
Insanity.
Creeps around your mind slowly before it takes you under.
When your eyes finally flutter open, the world is a black and white blur.
Except for that one pair of striking eyes that made you insane in the first place.
Except for that one song, that always makes you think of them.
And you want the music to stop, but if fills your head.
And you can't help,
But dance alone.
In a padded room.
Aug 22, 2013
Aug 22, 2013 at 8:04 PM UTC
I have hid behind broken shadows, disappointed daydreams and somber reminders.
I have been bitten by the black widow of life, poisoning my veins with her venom of death.
I have been mutilated like one of Jack the Ripper's victim on the dark streets of London, left to bleed out.
I have escaped the evil smiles of Pogo the Clown that crept in my dreams as I slept at night, crying my black tears.
I have been Bound, Tied and Killed by the innocent friendly neighbor, twisted in the head by the devil himself.
I could hear the screams of the pregnant actress as the Family took her life in a blood bath, as they began their Helter Skelter.
I can not escape this Alcatraz of torture in my mind, that has been placed there by the lunatics of our time. But it is fun in this asylum.
Welcome to my padded cell.
Oct 22, 2014
Oct 22, 2014 at 1:56 AM UTC
Hymn to an Art-o-matic Laundromat
by Michael R. Burch
after Richard Thomas Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer”
O, terrible-immaculate
ALL-cleansing godly Laundromat,
where cleanliness is next to Art
—a bright Kinkade (bought at K-Mart),
a Persian rug (made in Taiwan),
a Royal Bonn Clock (time zone Guam)—
embrace my *** in cushioned vinyl,
erase all marks: **** vaginal,
****** inkspot, red wine, dirt.
O, sterilize her skirt, my shirt,
my skidmarked briefs, her padded bra;
suds-away in your white maw
all filth, the day’s accumulation.
Make us pure by INUNDATION.
Published by The Oldie, where it was the winner of a poetry contest. This poem was inspired by the incongruence of discovering "works of art" while doing laundry at a laundromat with coin-operated washers and dryers. I was reminded of the experience while reading Richard Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer.” Keywords/Tags: hymn, art, America, Americana, laundry, laundromat, washer, dryer, appliances, clean, cleaning, cleanliness, clothes, clothing, underwear, god, godly, godliness, water, baptism, inundation, sonnet, analogy, humor
Nov 28, 2021
Nov 28, 2021 at 11:50 PM UTC