"petri" poems
By Arcassin Burnham
remembering the times i punched the clock
talking about,
the times,
id love her till the record stopped,
but that i could do without,
{she left me numb for two hours,
leaving my insides turning to sour,
while she was singing in the shower,
thinking when gwen die at the clock tower}
but thats life,
and when you touch me,
i forget that all we need is one night,
neck kisses,
to the bone,
making you feel so right,
bad birdy,
took fight along ago,
along with hearing my exs lies,
{lusting the devils wish,
like throwing a petri dish,
the talking we can just skip,}
like pressing the A button on the controller,
touching your stomach,
and telling you to roll over,
then when its all over,
im glad to say i told ya.
Aug 30, 2014
Aug 30, 2014 at 4:31 PM UTC
I AM THE SAME
AS EVERYONE ELSE.
I listen to music and I watch Netflix and go to work and laugh and love
and boy, do I ******* love.
I'm not some specimen in a Petri dish,
waiting to be examined.
I
am
human
with a heart and a mind
like every one of you.
I'm under the microscope...
Why do you still refuse to see?
Jan 31, 2015
Jan 31, 2015 at 9:11 AM UTC
If I could look past myself to see the world around me,
I know I'd be a better person.
But instead, my thoughts create a light so blinding I have to put up shades that tint the world the color of insecurity just to see.
These shades, this insecurity, is like a funhouse mirror that works against you,
Making those around me immaculate Greek gods who stand a mile high
As I stand lower than dirt wondering how their flaws only add to their perfection while mine stand out like scars on every surface of my body.
But it brings with a comforting sense of consistency in an inconsistent world.
It wraps you in an embrace so tight it both soothes and suffocates you, but you can't bare to let go.
It becomes the overly understanding spouse you both despise and adore.
No matter how many times you cheat on it with false hope and cheap popularity, it
Keeps
Coming
Back
I'm so caught up in my past that I find myself walking backwards so I don't have to watch my future crumble around me
But I found that just because I stand still, doesn't mean time will do the same.
Time marched on and left me lost.
"Here and now" became "There and Then" and I found myself standing in the "Soon to Be".
I realized that at some point, my personality married the wind and left me in a gust that still leaves me cold.
A year ago I was asked if I knew who I was and I said I was like the one thing held constant in a science experiment.
As people were placed in the caged existence, a world the size of a petri dish,
I never changed.
I knew who I was
What I believed
If you asked me today,
I wouldn't have an answer.
One day I questioned reason and existence.
The day I looked to God and said "this can't be all there is, there has got to be more than this" was the day He sent me an instruction manual wrapped in a silver lining.
I was told to look for the best image of myself and work to obtain it
I found that it isn't easy turning the desert into the Garden of Eden
Jul 13, 2013
Jul 13, 2013 at 8:28 PM UTC
a television interview, Oct. 2018 with Sir Paul McCartney
~for all of us, forever~
<•>
**** you Paul, old man
you trying to make us all look bad?
guess you’re just another
‘miner for a thousand years’
or more,
cause we haven’t seen a reason why the vein should run dry,
for the stolid earth resupplies endless old metal and the liquid veins
supply the need, the urgency of a warm gun of composition,
a drug nonpareil
and the things that provoke,
still provoke once more and again,
love and need, even memories,
petri dish cell regrown,
breathing atmospheric nutrients in the hotheaded hothouse air
of the human farm
‘tis why I paean you at 4:25am understanding full well,
better than most, for once I wrote,
it’s always the next one, that will be,
the flawless poem,
that will permit the laying down of the pen, the guitar
but even flawless is not
“good enough yet”
for all of us, forever*
for “yet,”
even more than forever,
is the most unlimited word we share
~
5:02am 10/17/18
Oct 17, 2018
Oct 17, 2018 at 2:06 PM UTC
I want to
swallow your organism,
taste your bacteria,
swim in your virus,
catch your disease
& become viral.
I am consumed
by your fever.
Stimulate me
with sexy-symptoms,
split me
in you petri dish,
mutilate me,
break my cells
into smaller molecules,
help me to succumb.
Take me over the top,
bring me to
ferocious-orgasm,
one without a cure,
leave me
forever wishing
for no antidote.
Jan 29, 2014
Jan 29, 2014 at 7:07 AM UTC
.
Let's go searching.
With hand over heart to
Set the pace, you can guide our
Way through goosebumps. We'll search
Close and thin for meaning
In fears we're yet to shed.
Let's go falling.
We'll feel fuzzy headed
When the bough breaks
With a crisp crunch and
We'll leave to chance
Whose fall needs fixing.
Let's go shaking.
We'll let blurry white stars
Propagate in petri dish
Pupils; A shudder
At the brink with
Nails buried deep.
Let's go dreaming
Dreams of finding
Soft sands stretched limitless:
A place to land
Where respite paints
Over sanguine lips now still.
.
May 16, 2015
May 16, 2015 at 2:29 PM UTC
Do you know
how your body is fed?
Do you truly see
how we make the bread?
Do you wonder the ingredients
concealed like a bedspread?
Well, I heard a fact
That's got me seeing red
About artificial flavors
that 'bout made me drop dead.
Now, it may not be visible
You might see it in a museum
In a petri dish, in a *****
It's called
CASTOREUM.
It's not very pretty,
You wouldn't want to see 'em
Big business would tell you
If they were to take the veritaserum.
I apologize for the nastiness
but someone must be told
Its not on the nutrition label
Though it should be written in BOLD
I'm not sure how to phrase it
But it comes from the ***** hole
Of a dead ****** then
into your coffee, cold.
Once you realize
What's truly inside,
Coffee creamer goes from
Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.
Now, I have been scarred
I don't want it cold, I don't want it fried.
I don't want it at all, I'm mortified
That they would put in the food I tried.
So fear the vanilla
And eat the chicken
And never forget that ******
was kickin'
Before it was deprived of its ***** matter
and stay away from things you don't know what they stick in.
Apr 4, 2019
Apr 4, 2019 at 2:38 PM UTC
Accepted clarity
Muddied only
By half-truths
Perceived as real
A contrived conscience
With volume control
Lowered by convenience
And narcissistic survival
The retail outlet
Of self-patted shoulders
Selling in real time
One's own significance
Safety in numbers
A comfort of thought
The inclusive community
Of light
Through fractured prisms
Individuality
Sought in the scope
Of a petri dish
Hopefully,
There be an artisan
Peering through the lens
An expert in restoration
Aug 3, 2018
Aug 3, 2018 at 7:21 AM UTC
the server (waiter) raps
praise upon the sushi,
its integrity,
the harmonic
of its construct,
the curated singularity of
each rice grain
the innate elegance of
the thin sliced,
nearly translucent,
au naturel, organic,
ginger root
the skin smooth paste of
green wasabi,
grown naturally
along stream beds in
mountain river valleys in Japan
genuinely puzzled,
when he,
the old erstwhile poet
unabashedly weeps before all
no hero he,
just an overcome one,
his tears flavoring his food
mourning the
celebrated abuse
of his verbal children,
those natured nurtured babes
the stuff,
the words of his definition
each weird word,
loved for their cultured,
unique quality of their history
grown in languages's
perpetual petri dish
asked if something was a matter,
answered yes,
"this plated performance,
such an extravagant essay
on the beauteous wonder
of life's bounty,
left me wordless"
and she, burst out loud in laughter
Aug 12, 2017
Aug 12, 2017 at 8:03 AM UTC
Antibiotics may be the greatest discovery of human kind.
Lord knows its saved our soul many of times!
Its halo can be seen in a petri dish.
In the smiles of children on hospital wards.
But antibiotics aren't just drugs, or are you my drug?
Because your halo is keeping bad things away from me, my petri dish is clean!
Yet, the goodness is seeping from my bones and I get weaker with every day that I'm in love with you.
To my antibiotic, resistance is futile but finishing the course might **** me.
Oct 2, 2017
Oct 2, 2017 at 3:07 PM UTC
I see your ghost everywhere
The ghost of who you once were
Before all the **** went down in your brain
The beauty that flowed from you till you woke up from the dream that was your life
That dream shattered right out
Right out from under you
Made you want to forget
Forget who you were
All brought for nought
Fragments still rattle
Behind your eyes
Those candy rock promises someone whispered in the night
Lost that luster, didn't they?
Couldn't find the silver lining?
What was once radiant phosphorescence
Became gangrenous and insipid
Leaving a malodorous taste
Stagnant in your mouth
The feast turned to crumbs left for the rats under your skin
You become to stately for our unostentatious life
Now you've painted the Petunia's colors of your choice
Rearranged your furniture
To play at being all grown-up
Bit of turpentine blotted on the canvas might smear the lines
But that won't erase your past
Your fingerprints are etched into
Every discarded can of spray paint
Lips carved into the pores of to much skin
You'll slice them off to get rid of the feelling
Keep up your newly minted fascade
That caused you such strife
To grow in the petri dish
Under your mothers sink
While you tryed to burn your
Bridges to ashes
Ashes embedded forevermore under your fingernails
Now you linger in ghosts
Haunting cities you've never been to
Places you're naught to see
In them breathes a
Chilly air wishing to keep you alive
Sep 13, 2017
Sep 13, 2017 at 9:25 AM UTC
Drips and drops of lab-tested fluids
pouring lipids in curves all over the place
while pops and pangs of tiny cells
bubble and fizzle in petri disks and flasks
regurgitating out strands of fine DNA
mix and synthesis of unusual entities
bubbling cauldrons of chemical ritual
give rise to spells of mystic creation
boldly configuring new organic oddities
from lab nonsense to ancient theory
mitochondrial splits and caverns
entries into the unknown of man's babble
for the fine and final production of science's silk
that which is life
and undeniable to our being
so creation can forever stand tall and strong
in the triumphant art of recreation
Jan 23, 2016
Jan 23, 2016 at 7:17 PM UTC
hotel deaths are so overdramatic
they're just random people who checked in for a day's rest that just happened to last forever
and hotel suicides
home's not a five star
but all of the murders
because they were still found
after they shaved half their heads
and dyed what's left red
and changed their names
and wore green contacts
and hurried the **** up to hide
hotels are petri dishes for killing bacteria.
Jun 1, 2014
Jun 1, 2014 at 9:48 PM UTC
Water that stands still becomes a poisonous petri dish of parasites
No one willingly drinks it
No one, not even dogs can survive on it
You told me people were changing
Tried to make me promise not to change
I didn’t think anything of it
I’ve always been a creature of habit
But I didn’t realize every still frame you took of us was turning us too still -
Stagnent
Every Creek runs a stream
Every stream runs a river
And water is always traced back to the oceans
The oceans
They support millions if not billions of creatures
Millions of different sources creating a big beautiful constantly moving changing habitat
Every part working together
And while parts of the ocean get terribly still
There is always a storm
Wave crashing destroying beautiful things
Only to be rebuilt in an even more fantastic way
Now don’t get me wrong stagnant water supports life
Like disease carrying bugs
And the bacteria that can give you malaria
Stagnation can take over whole creeks, streams, even ponds
Destroying whole ecosystems
Letting things rot
You said that I have started to change
Tried to make me think I was doing the wrong thing
When I put myself and my family first
When I kept running
You kept yelling
“WE HAVE TO STAND STILL”
Your toxicity can no longer touch me
I’ve found the ocean
An amazing ecosystem working together supporting life
Moving together and separately
Supporting growth
While your stagnant puddles are evaporating from the sunlight,
The bugs keep crawling on you
But your disease can no longer touch me
Parasites can no longer reach me
I’m running and flowing
moving and growing through this ocean
And you stay still
In your still frame stagnant puddle
Nov 22, 2016
Nov 22, 2016 at 10:41 AM UTC
struck by lightning twice by twenty-four
this astronomical record was hers, Guinness proclaimed,
this lady so famed, top of her class at Stanford, then Yale Med,
and blissfully wed, to a surgeon who always came in second
this did not matter at Cabo, or even in their first condo
but as her curriculum vitae grew faster than a Walmart receipt
on Black Friday, he scrubbed up for one bloodletting after another, removing appendixes, and appendages, feeling her shadow
grow heavy, even in the bright lights
of his operating theater
his first was, of course, a nurse, though at least her age
his second, a decade newer model, fixed his lattes at Starbucks
number three was the neighbor with whom they shared
nothing but a fence, and a few awkward stares
her hours in the lab with petri dishes grew, and
she never let on she knew, that her clean shaven number two
was lying with others to stand himself
when he asked for a divorce--number four requiring more
than liquid exchanges in sweet hotel suites--she acquiesced and even let him have the Welsh Corgi, the cabin in Aspen,
and half the 401K
to this day, she recalls imagining his liaisons
while she married menacing molecules to one another
in tubes under faithful light, seeking answers to questions
asked by the dying she would never meet
a lump would only grow in her throat
if she thought his scalpel never sliced
the heart of number four, for five
Jan 26, 2015
Jan 26, 2015 at 10:49 AM UTC
long after these thousand days of
passing years, the eyes will feel a
sparking, I will remember you,
my dear old friends, reviewing
the where, the when, which will
flush, outing the whys
from my
memories
more than the poetic liturgy composed,
but what felled me to my knees,
yearning,
for the soup of love and passion,
pain+no gain, euphorias rising at the
trenching lows of depths
newly explored, hope returning after a
long time abandonment, the
excruciating ecstasy
of creating, the killing tedium of
months of no inspiration but the
glint of a possible tomorrow
but you knot all this,
so come to tell you,
long after the poem
encased in yellowing
emerald unwrapping
aging megabytes, more
than any old poem itself,
I wil remember what you
wrote in return, with insight
all we are, we are an interaction
a petrified yet living petri dish of
creatures re/anew,
r e n e w e d, and I am
young again
and the tears of yore no more,
fresh flowering droplets of
a longer than believable age,
factuals of the sweet,
you will move once
more, remaking me
your lover devotee
and I wil stumble;
the woman enquirer
am I ok, whimsy
respond never,
never ever better
my darling
and I lift a tissue
to erase the evidence
of my happy melancholic
existence, and start another
conversation with you, but no!
one of us long gone, name
erased, poems left behind,
orphaned children, them
and me left alone while
I will be remembered,
by remembering you,
our second of union
as it
reverberates, our amour
reunion is a wetting,
giving forth a burst,
a fluid sac,
again
Sep 20, 2024
Sep 20, 2024 at 7:51 AM UTC
It seems to have spontaneously combusted, but it didn’t. The disease struck long ago, brewed in the petri dish of Depression, WWII, and convergent technologies. Well before that, really, but that was the point of critical mass. By the 1950's, it was an epidemic. The independent Republic of individuals, small towns, coherent communities, distinct cities, local diners, shops and stores tied together with two lane blacktop was crumbling. Things only got worse faster. It was a disease of toxic, lulling dreams. American Dreams. And standardization was its crushing foot that flattened everything and left a homogenized wasteland in its trail. The old gods vanished and the new became despots. Go anywhere in America, Boston or Biloxi. You can’t tell where you are. Most shop at the same stores (real or virtual), eat at the same chain restaurants, wear the same clothes, gulp from the same Internet, swallow similar information, and think (within acceptable variations) the same thoughts. Even sin has become tediously consubstantial. Knowledge has been supplanted by content. Words are squeezed of meaning. Everyone is an expert and no one knows anything. Except Siri and Alexa. The Dreamtime of consumerism, consumption and conformity dominates. All that remains to come is the dominion of AI. Then we will all be watched over by machines of loving grace, free to graze in bovine bliss in the cybernetic meadows of bland utopia.
Mar 3, 2017
Mar 3, 2017 at 6:54 AM UTC
Petri dish children run with punctured neon green veins
Raised in focus groups with the touch of a hungry CEO
Who will sell your youth for another car to drive
Built from the dust of a baby boomer cabbage patch
Poked and prodded by the media of a society flamed with consumerism
Where your loosely draped skeleton frame has no more weight than the quarters you tuck in your pockets at weigh ins
Sunken eyes and sideways grins
Little girls are growing up to kiss the bad boys
Tequila soaked, beautiful kisses
Where your idol is a crack ***** beauty queen
Where your every fatal flaw has a rememdy and a price tag
A generation sick with drinks
Plagued by impulse and energy pulsing in tides
With ****** laughs and magnetic orbits
What ever happened to the petri dish children
Built for beauty and style, but left broken and stunning
Oct 14, 2013
Oct 14, 2013 at 8:05 PM UTC
My skin feels like scales
A piano bench
Metronome passing the time
Impatiently
Perfectly
Living like death
Spreading along Petri dishes
And moving forward in octaves
Like a starving gecko
Eating its own tail
Mar 6, 2014
Mar 6, 2014 at 12:29 AM UTC
20
seems like the end of the line
to me.
Car crashes, bad habits, white rabbits
will reduce me down to just a spec of debris
chillin' in a petri
magnified
by a giant
eye st aring
wi th
disdain.
"Helicopter pilot? Yeah right"
hit me like the last thing through a bug's mind
when it splats.
Its own ***
Switched my postion from
s
t
r
a
i
g
h
t
A student
p
to drop out flying u
Eyes down. Laying to keep on track
low
blinded, cataract, stepped out in traffic
splat
like that bug again
or maybe more like promotion
Brand New Adventure
I've seen the way the world
turns
I don't want any p a r t
Mar 5, 2013
Mar 5, 2013 at 7:58 PM UTC
Lost in a petri dish
Alone with a wish and a can
A list of excuses and a spinning thirst
First and foremost insatiable
The parasitic host of the ball
Falling in a familiar black swirl
Alight and ashamed
Defamed and demoralized
Dancing in divine depravity
An imp to the flame
A slave to the golden glow
Nov 21, 2011
Nov 21, 2011 at 4:34 AM UTC
Mother Edge
You walk with me
To Petri dishes
And light my silver lungs
With a screaming match
Drink the earth with
Me until dawn.
Father Red
I’ve run to your thunderous
Carpet in these shoes that
Can’t breathe through
The narcissi on which
You asked me to balance:
The electric taste.
Sister Shard
Sit like we did on the
Ship’s stomach
Memory has a hole in his lip
And my key broke
Smoke accidental
While you were gone.
Brother Trail
I grew in your shadow
Simple sentence cell
And dreamed, oh, dreamed
Of my black fingers green fingers
Sharpening
Coins for your eyes.
Apr 9, 2010
Apr 9, 2010 at 1:41 PM UTC
i feel much safer with animals
than people, i tend
to close off
when i'm scared
of crowds
or
another human being
and
what's going to happen
in an encounter
that is real
and somewhere along the deathbeds
i forgot any other way to be
i guess it is the unreal i'm afraid of
life seems long, it's not
real or nothing
that's all i can survive
silence i can do
but true
silence
not the silence
barb-wired
with lies
denial cannot keep death away
and in the meantime
suffocates life
god has gotten this
longtime prodigal-thief,
petri dish
of strange
and deadly
parasites,
ready to be
alive
ready to be part of a revolution
of values, a conversation
of justice, a
consciousness
of peace
and
love
despair
and fear-of-failing
have broken my legs and back and neck
for long enough,
i do everything
knowing
i will fail
and that's okay
because you know
this really is not about me,
not at all
i'm ready to be happily lost
in the jungle of life
because i am
happily found
Apr 2, 2013
Apr 2, 2013 at 9:47 PM UTC
I only love you when I'm sober,
so I've been high for, about, I'd say
2.27 weeks?? wild, I know. what
can I say? I just
hate being alone with
the mere thought of you,
cloying and ******** ecstasy
in my endorphins. Newport on my lips
and nicotine in my system; emotions
encased in agar, Petri dish replicants.
sugar skulls crushed beneath timbs and
honey beneath my cuticles and
white wine in the freezer frosting up.
chocolate ganache sealing my tongue
like a sarcophagus and I'm daydreaming
about halcyon days gone by
screaming along to the radio in
your sunsoaked two-seater.
Sep 8, 2015
Sep 8, 2015 at 6:29 PM UTC
i can’t even keep a cactus alive
i forget to feed the fish
my sims, playing god,
kept in bowls
floating squarely upside down
i bet if i kept the cold
virus inside a petri dish
in my ***** room, it would die
as well as any pet,
as sticks and stones
collected as a child, coloured in
snapped or shattered, inevitably lost
and yet
and yet
in nine months’ time
i will be
one hundred percent loaded
a poorly dressed specimen
of adult human life
imaginal stage, caged
bug eyed girl
growing moths, cultivating mould
far too scared to be so old
still packed in with cotton wool
all bundled up inside myself
walking on eggshells
wings wrapped around my head
a feather bed, an endless humming
to block out every bump
in the night
my body is a cephalopod, sucker
attaching to every
rock or hard place, petrified
of the space between myself and
love and caring
needing a taste of everything
that looks safe to ingest
my restless limbs
can neither hold you nor let you go
whereas my cactus heart
tears skin and fingers far apart
the second we huddle in
too close, pins and needles
a pillowful of hurt,
a careful collection,
dessicated exhibit
iron maiden
cold and unbeholden,
longing to be held
i am half empty, i need water,
so much that i could die.
Feb 18, 2014
Feb 18, 2014 at 10:11 PM UTC