"picassos" poems
each stroke of greased fingers on the mohawk
was a result of a genius work of art
an outlet where my soul barely peeks
yet you cut with your hypocritical shears and your rusty hand
and you call it discipline
and you call it concern
I call it ********
the shadows on my
eyelids were davincis and picassos
sketched in a magnificent representation
of inner self which you all want to see
yet suffocate by your rotten curricula
and you call it quality
and you call it excellence
I call it ********
the silver that glitters in these ears
conceals the tortures of my youth
the horrors that dwell in my every sleep
yet you rip from my skin you are unworthy of touch
and you call it decency
and you call it suitability
I call it ********
© Glenn L. Sentes
Jun 4, 2013
Jun 4, 2013 at 8:40 PM UTC
Whatever you thought
of the modern art
you never said
you were impassive
your eyes or features
betraying nothing
you studied the art work
in your usual calmness
no ****** expression
no raised eyebrows
no tut-tutting
even the dead sheep
in the glass case
didn't put you off
or raise
emotive response
you eyed everything
walking slow
holding the programme
bought at the door
looking at each
as you went by
after a while
we moved along
to the small café
in the gallery
and had drinks
and sandwiches
and you talked
in your soft
open manner
not of art
or what we'd seen
but of work
and what you did
and unfolded things
like a magician
without revealing
secrets of it all
then we moved on
and you
were silent again
into the other rooms
of modern art
the Picassos
and Mondrians
and others
you taking photo shots
with your mobile phone
eyeing all the art
showing no emotion
no tilt of head
or wide-eyed
revelation
of surprise
just your own way
of appreciation son
your own
gentle way
of moving between
what is good or great
or seemingly crap
with the calmness
of a swan
through water
your depth
drinking it all in
with no pretence
or show
just that inner knowing
what you liked
and didn't
I am glad
you came with me
that day
the Tate Modern
wouldn't have been
the same somehow
your silence
your calm taking in
of art
your secret
appreciation
made it all
worth while
some way
but now
your untimely death
my son
makes it seem all
the more worth while
that day
that art
the shared time together
but I'd give
any Mondrian
or Picasso art away
just to be with you again
if only
for one more day.
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 2:19 AM UTC
Sonya likes
Paris streets
dark cafés
black coffees
cigarettes
those French ones
she likes nights
with wet streets
like oil slicks
those artists
selling cheap
second hand
Picassos
or such like
but mostly
she likes ***
between sheets
in back street
hotel rooms
with windows
with shutters
listening
to a cheap
transistor
radio
some French dame
singing of
a lost love
as she feels
Benedict
kiss each inch
of her flesh
his warm lips
and wet tongue
slide along
her soft groove
the outline
shadowy
of his ****
rise and fall
as they ride
the wild waves
of hot ***
between sheets
Sonya loves
Paris streets.
Jan 9, 2014
Jan 9, 2014 at 3:35 PM UTC
Do you see me,
right here in front of you?
I'm the girl who's not even 115 pounds
but wants to lose twenty.
I'm the girl wearing pale-pink lipstick Monday
and black by Saturday.
I'm the girl who hates how I look in my glasses
but hides behind the glass and frames.
I'm the girl constantly creating picassos on my arms
and books in my mind.
I'm the girl who is constantly daydreaming
because she never sleeps.
I'm waiting on you
Do you see me?
Dec 30, 2014
Dec 30, 2014 at 11:17 PM UTC
i just want to stay up to midnight and watch the footie...
see, already, it's there, he wannabe blind man
turning phonetics upside down
using optical symbols to sing with his eyes closed
and acting out a sloth piece of a stage's curtain call for encore,
footie can be american slang for football: or ensure a bag of
flour explodes while i get scalped;
otherwise footie means football:
you know it's round enough to be kicked
rather than thrown for a touchdown...
never got the hang of it... n.f.l. means
as much to me as does excess of hair
on a cranium crop of expected hair with no beard,
and vice versa, loss of hair and a donned
beard for the plucked sucker of the 2nd ball drop...
baldy over here met elvis and in levis took
to a cattle stampede with aria: la la la lee lo lo he he
(mike jackson slam dunks a quack for the moon pond,
like it was n.b.a. anyway: walking on ice
the musical... now the encore... signature the
sound of applause);
so this married man is rebelling...watches football
till midnight, rebel...
watches the footie...
a. foot, i.e.
b. foot, e
c. foot eeh
d. footy
e. foo' tea
f. foo' tee
now you guess the accent...
cumbrian? glaswegian?
north london or brick lane? which?
a, b, c d or e or f?^
see what happens being judgemental and sober?
you get drunks doing picassos! and that's not good
not good one bit for the worth of investment in plagiarisms.
the stressor marks / diacritical marks missing in english
obviously gave us scot spelling and a welsh 1 + 1 of
a middle finger longbow stylistic for the v long
before churchill... i wanted gaelic i got trainspotting spelling...
about as relevant as catcher in the rye relevant by now...
so... don't teach accent rubrics... and you'll get a heartfelt
superiority in the former colonies, while the pigeons coo:
or simply curl the famished tongues
that were silenced for man to speak in spasms
of an electrician checking the sockets for an electric depth
of the pigeons' coo into an aqualine echo of a sneeze,
if not snorkel or a gesundheit.
^*i hate how syllable splitting into compounds
show diacritical marks all too relevant, missing.*
Jan 10, 2016
Jan 10, 2016 at 6:06 PM UTC
Our cycle of grit and grind
The brutal societal kind
Left the warm insides dry
To want ***** on the fly
Stretch the muscles sore
Yet he runs back for more
Forget the need to vent
Boy, you need to pay rent
Those arms toned healthy
By street dancing and Tai Chi
Are used as gears of machines
Or to wipe **** ***** clean
Those great young Picassos
Or those potential Platos
Have their way to top so steep
Since ideas and art are cheap
Those beautiful people
Paid to lend their *******
To wolves of superior collar
Proudly sorted by the color
The herd united in this song
La la la, there's nothing wrong
We are all numb as hookers
The system—the avid customer
Dec 30, 2018
Dec 30, 2018 at 7:22 AM UTC
what is our purpose, if not to help,
why do we say these things, when they're not felt,
so focused on our next big break,
we've forgotten everyone it takes.
not meant to sit alone, meant to stand & test,
for those who refuse, for those who can't,
our helping hands only help so much,
set up against social norms & Picassos,
left to bludgeon, burgeon & bargain,
still only to be second best,
what Einstein life is this,
not one we lose to win.
Apr 27, 2025
Apr 27, 2025 at 4:09 PM UTC
~
I drove the spike that bent the spine,
the screaming left me at the turnstile
without exact change and late for the sunset
Slippery tracks added to the conceit
where beggars paint sidewalks
in day-glo Picassos leaking onto the curb
Cardboard memories create warmth
in perforated dreams,
paying cost for something broken
and the conductor signals
a left turn on a straight run
creasing the permanent press avenue
Billboards say “god is not dead”
until their contract runs out
and the labels are peeled for good
Still I stand here holding the hammer
swinging between the rafters
in this life after death revelry
on any night of the week
that brings each moment
to a complete standstill
Oct 1, 2014
Oct 1, 2014 at 8:38 AM UTC
*yes, i understand the politics, or so i thought,
that biology will never spawn a humanism,
that darwinism will only spawn generic attempts
via disregarding existentialism sweats.*
when was the thought ever conceived,
that dialectics needed a mediator?
why would a mediator be needed
when the only mediator
is a park bench in athens, and two people
speaking?
i get the foul animals' existence, i get the whole
wild heart, and shrinking eyesight,
i get that animals are given pristine materialism,
being incubated by overt-sensual impregnation,
i get that they're impregnated by pure sensuality
(over-use of adjectives is like quantifying things,
as many qualities to the legions of ants
as attributes of the sun, ending with deity
and beginning with geometry),
animals are plagued by sensuality,
they are overly given the pentagon,
while man is given the hexagon / star of david,
animals are overly sensing, man is overly thinking,
when the only phobia of wilderness animal
is huger... man's is spider, enclosure, open-spaces...
animal is pulverised by the senses and things
it roams among... man is pulverised by thought
and nothing, roaming ingenuity by the Libra
dimming sight with hearing for classical composition,
dimming hearing with sight for pablo picassos..
the wild animal in fright of hunger...
and man abounding in it to reflect clocked
chicken press of the laid eggs clucks a sudden diversion
rather than adding to a diversity...
change the poetic gimmick of rhyme...
don't end with synonymous spelling,
intertwine rhyming elsewhere, lie:
'a sudden diversion' and 'adding to diversity'
as engaging to lines without an a# a# end of both
to reveal a missing echo, after all echoing is like rhyming,
but pitiful rhyming, because it's written down
and never plotted to decipher plato's shadows
and candle in the cave entered... defeated first-step
defeated to claim the colour of defeat, the page
that dangled in the odds of waving like a signature
digitalised... all in all... animals are overly sensual,
and man is overly abstract... hence man
mediates symbols and thinking... while
animals mediate onomatopoeias sounding a bit
like touch on wood, and the parameters of allowed
petting:
we blink thrice and think we spotted
a thing only once, when in fact thrice.
Feb 20, 2016
Feb 20, 2016 at 7:31 PM UTC
They sit in the humblest of frames,
Faux wood-grained plastic grotesqueries
Purchased long ago from some doomed Grants or Bradlees,
Though one or two enjoy something nicer,
Left behind by some long-timer taking a buyout
Or a sympathetic youngster denied tenure
(She has, for the better part of three decades,
Cleaned up the detritus of middle-school children,
A bit stooped from the work,
Not to mention the burden
Of any number of she’s just or she’s only
Tossed like so much bric-a-brac in her direction.)
The approximations of old masters equally eclectic in origin:
One or two gallery-quality reproductions
Blithely abandoned by some haughty faculty matron
Mentoring children through noblesse oblige,
The odd promotional piece from a scholastic publisher,
Mostly things she has cut from magazines or discarded texts.
She studiously avoids pieces tending to the dark or muted,
No Stuart portraiture or pensive Vermeers;
She has a strong predilection for bold, boisterous Gaugins,
Mad cubist Picassos, lush Cezanne still-lifes,
Even the odd blocky *******
If you pressed her to explain her fetish
For the brightest of the great masters,
She would likely be at a loss to explain,
Having no academic bent for such things
(Though she has been known to curse the shortcomings
Of lithographers and pressmen under her breath)
And, as she freely admits, I’m not much good with words.
There would be the uncharitable suggestion
That their purpose is to mask cracks and pockmarks in her walls
(She has, to be sure, lived in a long series of such places)
But she has never, consciously or otherwise,
Used them for such pedestrian and utilitarian purposes;
They are, to her anyway, beautiful, and that is all they need be.
Dec 23, 2016
Dec 23, 2016 at 11:17 AM UTC
more to me than:
all the picassos at the Met
all the dictionaries in the library
all the concertos playing
all the ads posted
all the beauty the world offers.
For we,
are beyond this life,
M my love.
Jan 3, 2016
Jan 3, 2016 at 9:22 AM UTC
When I was eight,
I would press myself
against the creaky floorboards
of my home
and listen
to their tired groans
of protest from my weight
atop them,
as I ripped the caps
off Sharpies,
and let the ink
spread across the plastic wrap
like a flare.
I’d stick my confused
colorful Picassos
into an oven
and watch in awe
as the wrap
would shrink
and fold in on itself
appearing smaller
to the world.
Now,
at twenty
I no longer listen
to the groans
from my creaky
childhood home,
I listen–
to the murmurs
from the black
cellophane wrapped
shop windows and signs
of tired buildings
tired of wearing
faces, to great
the masses
of the world
that don’t show.
Dec 11, 2019
Dec 11, 2019 at 10:04 AM UTC