"pinnacles" poems
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves
Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,
Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.
Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.
What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.
16.9k
I see two people
so in love with each other
schmoozing numinous dialect,
only a purest of heart can fathom.
I see a kiss I hear it too,
I see eyes pinnacles
lips singing
and heart sinking in love.
Now, do not tell me
I’m seeing
a teaching of Venn diagram
on the display board,
and my explanation for
A intersection B is ludicrous!
Please do not tell me
I’m wrong.
It must be poetry
I'm seeing,
and I'm in love with it
more than anything else.
/*Orginal poem published in Mayalayam, translated by poet. */
Apr 6, 2014
Apr 6, 2014 at 8:30 AM UTC
They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles
Of forest night had hid eternal things,
They scaled the sky with towers and marble piles
To make a city for their revellings.
White and amazing to the lands around
That wondrous wealth of domes and turrets rose;
Crystal and ivory, sublimely crowned
With pinnacles that bore unmelting snows.
And through its halls the pipe and sistrum rang,
While wine and riot brought their scarlet stains;
Never a voice of elder marvels sang,
Nor any eye called up the hills and plains.
Thus down the years, till on one purple night
A drunken minstrel in his careless verse
Spoke the vile words that should not see the light,
And stirred the shadows of an ancient curse.
Forests may fall, but not the dusk they shield;
So on the spot where that proud city stood,
The shuddering dawn no single stone revealed,
But fled the blackness of a primal wood.
9.9k
The eternal tango of the maestro manifests itself in nigh infinite ways.
With the flick of the artist's brush, the stroke of the novelist’s pen or the chicken scratch of the scholar’s nib, legacies are etched, history is written and the world is shaped.
The astronomer, the craftsman and the physician all have one thing in common: Mastery.
Such pinnacles of skill have decades of their lives consumed, nay devoured in the pursuit of perfection, of greatness. Like grains of sand slowly falling into a furnace are the seconds of our lives, trickling, melting into puddles. But as sand melts, it forms shapes; therein lies the potential. Moldable puddles, colourless, devoid of naught but a clear medium.
Sep 25, 2015
Sep 25, 2015 at 12:43 AM UTC
In the dour ages
Of drafty cells and draftier castles,
Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,
Saint and king unfisted obstruction's knuckles
By no miracle or majestic means,
But by such abuses
As smack of spite and the overscrupulous
Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,
One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles
Of God's city and Babylon's
Must wait, while here Suso's
Hand hones his tack and needles,
Scouraging to sores his own red sluices
For the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles
Of horsehair and lice his ***** *****
While there irate Cyrus
Squanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes
To rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:
He split it into three hundred and sixty trickles
A girl could wade without wetting her shins.
Still, latter-day sages,
Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies
Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,
Never grip, as the grandsires did, that devil who chuckles
From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.
6.3k
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had ****** aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
4.9k
Jupiter Mars P Moon
VENEZIA, "May" 19"th", 1910.
Jupiter's foursquare blaze of gold and blue
Rides on the moon, a lilac conch of pearl,
As if the dread god, charioted anew
Came conquering, his amazing disk awhirl
To war down all the stars. I see him through
The hair of this mine own Italian girl,
Adela
That bends her face on mine in the gondola!
There is scarce a breath of wind on the lagoon.
Life is absorbed in its beatitude,
A meditative mage beneath the moon
Ah! should we come, a delicate interlude,
To Campo Santo that, this night of June,
Heals for awhile the immitigable feud?
Adela!
Your breath ruffles my soul in the gondola!
Through maze on maze of silent waterways,
Guarded by lightless sentinel palaces,
We glide; the soft plash of the oar, that sways
Our life, like love does, laps --- no softer seas
Swoon in the ***** of Pacific bays!
We are in tune with the infinite ecstasies,
Adela!
Sway with me, sway with me in the gondola!
They hold us in, these tangled sepulchres
That guard such ghostly life. They tower above
Our passage like the cliffs of death. There stirs
No angel from the pinnacles thereof.
All broods, all breeds. But immanent as Hers
That reigns is this most silent crown of love
Adela
That broods on me, and is I, in the gondola.
They twist, they twine, these white and black canals,
Now stark with lamplight, now a reach of Styx.
Even as out love - raging wild animals
Suddenly hoisted on the crucifix
To radiate seraphic coronals,
Flowers, flowers - O let our light and darkness mix,
Adela,
Goddess and beast with me in the gondola!
Come! though your hair be a cascade of fire,
Your lips twin snakes, your tongue the lightning flash,
Your teeth God's grip on life, your face His lyre,
Your eyes His stars - come, let our Venus lash
Our bodies with the whips of Her desire.
Your bed's the world, your body the world-ash,
Adela!
Shall I give the word to the man of the gondola?
3.4k
Under the weight
of loneliness
I wear the universe
like a cloak,
pressed around me, pinned
holding me close in
its wild womb
gathering up the shards
of warm fire laughter
and voices
that weave into bones
rising in chants
pinnacles gently rocking
into a frenzy
of dark lunar dance
and my
inner moon rises
it's spackled lights
like penetrating eyes
wrapping me in its
blanket of
stars
Oct 12, 2018
Oct 12, 2018 at 12:05 AM UTC
Innocence,
Is...
Cocoons.
Keeping, caterpillars captured.
Keeping, fragility concealed.
Keeping instability confined.
Telling ambiguity it is necessary.
Telling in-culpability it is beautiful,
Until the day you gain consciousness.
Transcending into a butterfly,
Because when you learn how to fly,
You will never stop spreading your wings..
Your cocoon will seem, like it was just a fragment of your imagination.
Your mind will flutter, like a humming birds wings.
You will thirst for knowledge, like a bee for the sweetest nectar.
Your heart will love, like your natural instinct to sore above pinnacles.
Your lows will be depressing, you will stear clear of polluted capital cities.
Metamorphosis unravels your full potential.
Dancing rainbows...
The world is vast place,
And you will explore every inch of it..
Sep 4, 2014
Sep 4, 2014 at 11:10 PM UTC
The source of words
is the very source
of human thought.
If we are to under-
stand one another,
we must find the source
of our words.
The sources of
our streams of consciousness
are as varied as nature;
from the highest pinnacles
to the bowels of the earth.
The nature of the sources
matters little.
The highest may be polluted;
the purest flow may come
from the deepest spring.
Recognizing our own source
is essential
when our streams merge.
Our thoughts commingle,
and still remain our own.
In the foaming tumble
over the boulders
of daily living,
it is well to remember
our innermost selves,
like the river,
need the aeration
of an outlet and a
few
deep
breaths.
Once we have come
to our under-
standing,
we need not remain
below those we now
stand under.
(the beauty of words
is the very beauty
of human thought)
Nov 29, 2016
Nov 29, 2016 at 9:17 AM UTC
If I had a mountain for every time I thought of you
I would have a mountain range twelve times the size of the Andes,
So long it could wrap around the earth twice
And then some.
A lifetime of plate tectonic ruminations,
The lithosphere colliding where I fell in love with you;
That’s what I would have.
And I could spend another lifetime traversing
All of the ridges and the pinnacles and the icefalls of you.
I would reach every summit and look out
Across the endless expanse of you laid out before me,
And it would be the most spectacular view.
As I traveled through my mountain range
I would make a map because, while I don’t particularly mind
Getting lost in the thought of you,
I would like to be able to find my way back to my favorite places.
But like any good cartographer,
I would include copyright traps -- Things that don’t actually exist;
Valleys and cliffs that only I could have projected --
So that no one else could ever duplicate this.
Aug 13, 2013
Aug 13, 2013 at 2:16 AM UTC
On the edge of my windowsill, I sit
And count the little black and bustling heads
Clustered down below.
There is Life
In the pinnacles of the trees I tower over.
I feel It, breathing coolly down my neck.
I am soon to be reborn,
My countenance now aglow.
This is my precipice.
I will soar down from my mountaintop
Bearing word of reclamation.
I will sow my bones like seeds upon the wind.
Apr 6, 2018
Apr 6, 2018 at 7:00 PM UTC
an empty room
I fill it
With my thoughts.
I get to thinking
About everything.
I stand among many
Receiving awards
Reciting speeches
I must win one every day
And the speeches change,
Like the wind.
There's never
any faces,
Not even
my own
Ain't that strange?
Just the
Splintered visions
Breaking through
With spears
Of emotion.
I guess that
The image
Isn't even important:
It's the feeling,
The sensations,
The prayers,
The mantras,
And endless dreams.
It's an idealistic bubble.
Which I could
Live in forever,
But I'd never get anything done.
I get to looking
At my watch.
Only thirty minutes
has passed,
How can that
be possible?
I've already travelled
to the serene corners
of my desires.
I've dipped my
toes in lustful wants.
I've soared to
pinnacles of success,
In thirty minutes.
Then the perpetual
Smog of stagnant
English gloom
Returns to me
In my Utopic chamber,
Bursting my bubble.
I hone back
to the moment,
and then I
put my pen
Down to paper.
Aug 30, 2014
Aug 30, 2014 at 9:17 PM UTC
Today I gazed into the mirror
Realized I'm, I've been and
Different will forever be.
I realized something else
That somewhere out there
There's someone like me
Living within his own confines
Better versions of everyday
He constructs and life redefines
Someone who thinks reality is wrong
And dreams are for real
Someone who once struggled against the wheel
And realized it’s got a stronger will
Someone whose weakness is their strength
Someone who always goes alength
Someone who knows that the normal Train left
While they in the day slept
So they have to wake all night
To think, imagine fight and write
Someone who knows the past is abreast
That they can surf the wave of life to her crest
For while others are in motion
There's always them at rest
And that fact addressed
Now embrace that notion
Someone whose cyclone is cynical
Going past the usual pinnacles
In a struggle to being a pinnacle ladder
Someone working ****** harder
Someone different but feeling no shame
Knowing our differences make us the same
Apr 10, 2015
Apr 10, 2015 at 2:05 PM UTC
What works!
Spires dotted everywhere,
Meaning nothing more, for they are just hairs.
As we know, the turtle triumphed the hare.
What about something more...extraordinary?
Like golden pinnacles, draped like curtains
(in zero gravity of course!)
over the dunes of the Sahara,
so crisp and smooth.
Something like a barren Atlantis if you ask me.
But Atlantis is a magnificent place!
Filled with the ombrés of blue, green, and yellow,
Weaved together beautifully,
seamlessly.
As if the sisters of the Underworld
Were unraveling the quilt of a Goddess.
Venture beyond the golden pinnacles,
Trek the deserts,
Dive into Atlantis and swim further into the blue;
only to find a mysterious coral reef,
filled with peachy pinks and raspberry reds.
Separated, right down the middle,
by a large chasm that sinks into enigma.
This unabridged land,
filled with wonderous constellations
and dark secrets,
simply needs to be caressed and loved
for it to flourish.
Mar 29, 2013
Mar 29, 2013 at 1:20 AM UTC
I’ve faced the pinnacles of darkness
and the depths of Illumination;
but the faces that kept my sight
were always vague but constant.
There’s been dark times of laughter
and saccharine times of sorrow;
but none were so merry as the times
of prolonged grins and short scowls.
When the fires were stoked within
‘twas a friend’s quick gaze pumped the bellows
that quelled the fires so sacrificial
and returned my mind to the mellow.
So forever again ‘twill be those nearest
that will face the hottest flames.
Forever again will those nearest fan
away these flames from a face so fickle.
This breeze will coax the life from dark-
will cull away a smile from lips so grave-
resurrecting life from dead social graces-
until grace finds a perch in a heart once
w
a
r
m
e
d
.
.
.
May 22, 2012
May 22, 2012 at 1:48 AM UTC
I do not remember my father as a demonstrative man,
but, hobbled though he was by a pre-war psyche,
we never doubted the depth of his affection for us.
His love of nature shaped our own perceptions of life
and his love of sport showed us the path of true competition,
that the essence is not to better others but to better oneself.
He transfused the ocean into us so thoroughly
that we will go to our graves with salt on our lips.
At all the painful pinnacles of growing
my father was there like a crampon you know will not fail you.
A towering lighthouse in his hat and dark suit
as he led me through the convent gate on my first day
and gently cut me adrift in the cruel seas of education
where the nuns patrolled the playground like killer whales
in search of seals.
He went ahead to each new town to make things ready for us
when I started boarding school he let me go in confidence
he bailed me out of scrapes with the law,
he was as certain as the mountain of his beloved Taranaki
and as solid as the beams of a whare runanga.
When I returned from overseas
my father and I found a space in our lives
where we could really get to know each other.
Through a winter that sparkled
he led me on odysseys into his soul
through the walkways, forests, rivers and coastline
of the city of his birth
which will, one day, witness his death.
If I were allowed only one memory of my father
it would be this: seaweed expeditions.
The northeast winds blew a bounty for his garden
onto the reefs around Belt Road
and at low tide we descended with our gumboots and sacks
to gather the fleshy harvest with its nitrogen-rich pods.
He had a system.
We heaped the seaweed on a number of high, dry rocks
then bagged from first to Iast to allow time for the seawater
to drain and the burden to be lessened.
I watched him as he moved around and about as deliberately
as a crab,
gathering the morsels,
bending to scoop the necklaces from the sea,
the sun's purple fire in the white, white, white of his hair.
He had seaweed in plenty at home,
it was the experience he craved.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 6:54 PM UTC
No words can share the chaotic precision
Of waves sweeping a sandy shore
Clean of its filth, expired life, footprints
Leaving the ground beneath supple and bare
Find me the words to describe
The confidence of a feisty crest
As it approaches the shore so swiftly
To pound without relent
How the pinnacles raise
A turbulent impasse
Until another frothy height
Follows its thin soapy tier
And stacks its might like ***** keys
Carrying them both to shore
Tell me the poem that captures
The layers and ripples dashing
As countless and intermingled
As the buttery layers of a croissant
I wish I could find the words to hold
This image deep within me
To remember the blur of green and blue
When I am far from their ruling roars
I would enshrine their vivacity
With a razor in my heart
If I could keep their beauty
A keepsake of nature’s art
When the outside world is yelling
I wish I could recall
At will the rumble of undertow
The thunder of admonished land
The crashing sounds that kidnap you
Forcing reality far behind
For no mortal trouble is so large
To ground you by the sea
The only thing to consume a wave
Is the crest rising in its wake
Oct 23, 2020
Oct 23, 2020 at 2:42 PM UTC
dawn's clouds curl upon
the cycle of horizon. light
seeps, wells up in a silent
garden of distant coastlines
and suspensions of dust
particles. torn pinnacles
arrange in geometries known
only to collapsing cities;
boulevards of tremulous
ghostlike figures, swaying
staccato below collected
damping leaves in perfect
symmetries against the sky of
tiled grains.
oh, if time stood
still. if the blood could freeze
in my capillary beds. if this
feeling would last for the
remainder of days.
Aug 1, 2013
Aug 1, 2013 at 11:53 PM UTC
*To someone like me, it has always been easy to pen down the pain
than to just dump it in the violently flowing rivers of the past
and forget it ever happened, it's been easy to etch every bit of it on the rocks
everyday and admire each and every melancholic tear it brought
it has been sour sweet painting every ugly scar and every bruise
and admire the blemishes on dirtied canvas than let heal
those grotesque wounds without any memo to remind me
because to me the hurt has but been an adventure on the map of my destiny
I've sailed past hard waves, I've gone through dark oceans
to both poles of the sphere and witnessed how cold this world can be
and I've even juxtaposed the north pole to the south
I've climbed the mountains I thought impossible,
hiked even the steepest of cliffs,sometimes fallen and fractured
I've gone against caution and whence my ribs ruptured
healed and painted the despondent healing process yet gone
ahead to find fresh memory to paint, to write, to etch.
I've not wasted my mistakes, not a single tear has gone for nothing
for some should learn from mistakes of those who lived before them
and if life is too short and uncertain to live to tell
let the marks on the rocks at the pinnacles tell the story,
let the sad painting on the canvas do,the sculptures
let the cacographs make sense to eyes keen enough to squeeze out some sap of wisdom
I've not cried, bruised, battled or stumbled for nothing
it is not for nothing I've lived my life the way I've lived
with no manual or mentor to point out the rough edges
the looming pitfalls and risks of living in the twilight zone on the fringes
it's not by mistake that the ship of life is rudderless to most of us
every bruise, every mistake, every imperfection has its page
just as every century, every decade and every millennium has its age
I often write about the uncertainty I live so that someday
someone will be grateful I spared some time to say
that those who didn't err,who didn't whimper,
who didn't have the luxury of looking struggle in the eye
and walk side by side with her didn't really know the truth about life
because it's from the tears that comes the beautiful smile
after the blunder that lies the precious stones of a mile
after the pain that comes the long awaited gain
for the star filled clear blue skies always show after the stormy rain
I pen my pain time and again, because laughter's easily forgotten
but the pains are like plastics, so close to impossible seeing them rotten*
May 8, 2016
May 8, 2016 at 4:42 AM UTC
Motions and lies
Oceans and tides
Highs and lows
Waves and thrones
Photographs and movies
like the words you've said to me
Typewriters and documents
Lonesome loneliness
Paintings and art
scientists using starch
Differences and combinations
Treasures and abominations
Pinnacles and roots
Ratty old boots
Holes and patches
Irreplaceable mismatches
An old rhyme
a new game
rules and regulations
all the same
Aug 22, 2013
Aug 22, 2013 at 8:18 AM UTC
Here the body
remains.
Multi-strobe hitting beats
teeth in dark light,
deep bass.
Growing an insurgent
emergent blasting howl
tingling ecstasy.
Where is it from?
Where has it come?
Colour frothing
swirling, hanging bodies,
hand in hand...
bounce and jam.
Here the body remains.
Glued.
Movement,
stretch...
reaching pinnacles...
form and function
yes...
frozen
beasts
alive.
Aug 13, 2013
Aug 13, 2013 at 7:08 PM UTC
*Strung together
within lit poetry,
moon kissed
constellations,
illuminating
lovers midst
fiery horizons,
as perplexed skies
joined the oceans
to see what the
star implosions
were contemplating,
cosmoses metaphorically
sparkled intentions
'pon pinnacles of darkness,
and the light of
poesy was ignited*
Jun 13, 2015
Jun 13, 2015 at 8:06 PM UTC