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Steve Page Jul 2016
The grieving wind led our solemn steps,
and screamed through the ranks of sodden planks,
each encrusted with numb, brass plaques,
fervently recalling local lives lost.

We trudged over those memorial boards,
sponsored grief borne by each grain,
as again salt dripped into the Mouth of the Severn.

At the pier head our tears contested
the callous grey waves
and lost
again.
Inspired by Clevedon Pier and the loss of a dear friend.
brandon nagley Jun 2015
Do we notice the finer things in life? The husband's and wives, children that's been conceived! Thou and they are all thou needeth when thy roof springs its leak!

Sick
Wearied
Weak?

Looking in all the wrong places?

Itinerant in the stagnative imagination's
For don't even the mammals haveth a place to stay?

Like the son of man
I haveth no chapel
For this head to consecretly layeth!!!

Dog nights seem more teething!!!!

Vestige of all beauty
You've left that still life post,
Wherein thy mantra's I seeketh the most!!!

The I loveth thou's
And thou more....

Deluge of happiness
Covereth me
Bury me
In atmospheric condition,

Oh man didst thou not mention?
The plaques to ***** it's protract sorrow!!!!

Hath society made materialism
And the dollar sign
Their romantic gesture?

A pity to God
And me!!!!

Mobs of fleas
To calleth what they maketh
MANIFESTED TESTIMONIES!!!!

Wherein the frauds
Fakes
And phonies
Art thy t.v magnate stars!!!!!
This is old poetry!!!
Khoisan Aug 2018
Subliminal pest
Wailing wall of ****** clots
Mosquito swat plaques
Pestilence at night lol
Lorsque l'on veut monter aux tours des cathédrales,

On prend l'escalier noir qui roule ses spirales,

Comme un serpent de pierre au ventre d'un clocher.


L'on chemine d'abord dans une nuit profonde,

Sans trèfle de soleil et de lumière blonde,

Tâtant le mur des mains, de peur de trébucher ;


Car les hautes maisons voisines de l'église

Vers le pied de la tour versent leur ombre grise,

Qu'un rayon lumineux ne vient jamais trancher.


S'envolant tout à coup, les chouettes peureuses

Vous flagellent le front de leurs ailes poudreuses,

Et les chauves-souris s'abattent sur vos bras ;


Les spectres, les terreurs qui hantent les ténèbres,

Vous frôlent en passant de leurs crêpes funèbres ;

Vous les entendez geindre et chuchoter tout bas.


À travers l'ombre on voit la chimère accroupie

Remuer, et l'écho de la voûte assoupie

Derrière votre pas suscite un autre pas.


Vous sentez à l'épaule une pénible haleine,

Un souffle intermittent, comme d'une âme en peine

Qu'on aurait éveillée et qui vous poursuivrait.


Et si l'humidité fait des yeux de la voûte,

Larmes du monument, tomber l'eau goutte à goutte,

Il semble qu'on dérange une ombre qui pleurait.


Chaque fois que la vis, en tournant, se dérobe,

Sur la dernière marche un dernier pli de robe,

Irritante terreur, brusquement disparaît.


Bientôt le jour, filtrant par les fentes étroites,

Sur le mur opposé trace des lignes droites,

Comme une barre d'or sur un écusson noir.


L'on est déjà plus haut que les toits de la ville,

Édifices sans nom, masse confuse et vile,

Et par les arceaux gris le ciel bleu se fait voir.


Les hiboux disparus font place aux tourterelles,

Qui lustrent au soleil le satin de leurs ailes

Et semblent roucouler des promesses d'espoir.


Des essaims familiers perchent sur les tarasques,

Et, sans se rebuter de la laideur des masques,

Dans chaque bouche ouverte un oiseau fait son nid.


Les guivres, les dragons et les formes étranges

Ne sont plus maintenant que des figures d'anges,

Séraphiques gardiens taillés dans le granit,


Qui depuis huit cents ans, pensives sentinelles,

Dans leurs niches de pierre, appuyés sur leurs ailes,

Montent leur faction qui jamais ne finit.


Vous débouchez enfin sur une plate-forme,

Et vous apercevez, ainsi qu'un monstre énorme,

La Cité grommelante, accroupie alentour.


Comme un requin, ouvrant ses immenses mâchoires,

Elle mord l'horizon de ses mille dents noires,

Dont chacune est un dôme, un clocher, une tour.


À travers le brouillard, de ses naseaux de plâtre

Elle souffle dans l'air son haleine bleuâtre,

Que dore par flocons un chaud reflet de jour.


Comme sur l'eau qui bout monte et chante l'écume,

Sur la ville toujours plane une ardente brume,

Un bourdonnement sourd fait de cent bruits confus :


Ce sont les tintements et les grêles volées

Des cloches, de leurs voix sonores ou fêlées,

Chantant à plein gosier dans leurs beffrois touffus ;


C'est le vent dans le ciel et l'homme sur la terre ;

C'est le bruit des tambours et des clairons de guerre,

Ou des canons grondeurs sonnant sur leurs affûts ;


C'est la rumeur des chars, dont la prompte lanterne

File comme une étoile à travers l'ombre terne,

Emportant un heureux aux bras de son désir ;


Le soupir de la vierge au balcon accoudée,

Le marteau sur l'enclume et le fait sur l'idée,

Le cri de la douleur ou le chant du plaisir.


Dans cette symphonie au colossal orchestre,

Que n'écrira jamais musicien terrestre,

Chaque objet fait sa note impossible à saisir.


Vous pensiez être en haut ; mais voici qu'une aiguille,

Où le ciel découpé par dentelles scintille,

Se présente soudain devant vos pieds lassés.


Il faut monter encore dans la mince tourelle,

L'escalier qui serpente en spirale plus frêle,

Se pendant aux crampons de **** en **** placés.


Le vent, d'un air moqueur, à vos oreilles siffle,

La goule étend sa griffe et la guivre renifle,

Le vertige alourdit vos pas embarrassés.


Vous voyez **** de vous, comme dans des abîmes,

S'aplanir les clochers et les plus hautes cimes ;

Des aigles les plus fiers vous dominez l'essor.


Votre sueur se fige à votre front en nage ;

L'air trop vif vous étouffe : allons, enfant, courage !

Vous êtes près des cieux ; allons, un pas encore !


Et vous pourrez toucher, de votre main surprise,

L'archange colossal que fait tourner la brise,

Le saint Michel géant qui tient un glaive d'or ;


Et si, vous accoudant sur la rampe de marbre,

Qui palpite au grand vent, comme une branche d'arbre,

Vous dirigez en bas un œil moins effrayé,


Vous verrez la campagne à plus de trente lieues,

Un immense horizon, bordé de franges bleues,

Se déroulant sous vous comme un tapis rayé ;


Les carrés de blé d'or, les cultures zébrées,

Les plaques de gazon de troupeaux noirs tigrées ;

Et, dans le sainfoin rouge, un chemin blanc frayé ;


Les cités, les hameaux, nids semés dans la plaine,

Et partout, où se groupe une famille humaine,

Un clocher vers le ciel, comme un doigt s'allongeant.


Vous verrez dans le golfe, aux bras des promontoires,

La mer se diaprer et se gaufrer de moires,

Comme un kandjiar turc damasquiné d'argent ;


Les vaisseaux, alcyons balancés sur leurs ailes,

Piquer l'azur lointain de blanches étincelles

Et croiser en tous sens leur vol intelligent.


Comme un sein plein de lait gonflant leurs voiles ronde,

Sur la foi de l'aimant ils vont chercher des mondes,

Des rivages nouveaux sur de nouvelles mers :


Dans l'Inde, de parfums, d'or et de soleil pleine,

Dans la Chine bizarre, aux tours de porcelaine,

Chimérique pays peuplé de dragons verts ;


Ou vers Otaïti, la belle fleur des ondes,

De ses longs cheveux noirs tordant les perles blondes,

Comme une autre Vénus, fille des flots amers ;


À Ceylan, à Java, plus **** encore peut-être,

Dans quelque île déserte et dont on se rend maître,

Vers une autre Amérique échappée à Colomb.


Hélas ! Et vous aussi, sans crainte, ô mes pensées,

Livrant aux vents du ciel vos ailes empressées,

Vous tentez un voyage aventureux et long.


Si la foudre et le nord respectent vos antennes,

Des pays inconnus et des îles lointaines

Que rapporterez-vous ? De l'or, ou bien du plomb ?...


La spirale soudain s'interrompt et se brise.

Comme celui qui monte au clocher de l'église,

Me voici maintenant au sommet de ma tour.


J'ai planté le drapeau tout au haut de mon œuvre.

Ah ! Que depuis longtemps, pauvre et rude manœuvre,

Insensible à la joie, à la vie, à l'amour,


Pour garder mon dessin avec ses lignes pures,

J'émousse mon ciseau contre des pierres dures,

Élevant à grande peine une assise par jour !


Pendant combien de mois suis-je resté sous terre,

Creusant comme un mineur ma fouille solitaire,

Et cherchant le roc vif pour mes fondations !


Et pourtant le soleil riait sur la nature ;

Les fleurs faisaient l'amour, et toute créature

Livrait sa fantaisie au vent des passions ;


Le printemps dans les bois faisait courir la sève,

Et le flot, en chantant, venait baiser la grève ;

Tout n'était que parfum, plaisir, joie et rayons !


Patient architecte, avec mes mains pensives

Sur mes piliers trapus inclinant mes ogives,

Je fouillais sous l'église un temple souterrain ;


Puis l'église elle-même, avec ses colonnettes,

Qui semble, tant elle a d'aiguilles et d'arêtes,

Un madrépore immense, un polypier marin ;


Et le clocher hardi, grand peuplier de pierre,

Où gazouillent, quand vient l'heure de la prière,

Avec les blancs ramiers, des nids d'oiseaux d'airain.


Du haut de cette tour à grande peine achevée,

Pourrais-je t'entrevoir, perspective rêvée,

Terre de Chanaan où tendait mon effort ?


Pourrai-je apercevoir la figure du monde,

Les astres dans le ciel accomplissant leur ronde,

Et les vaisseaux quittant et regagnant le port ?


Si mon clocher passait seulement de la tête

Les toits ou les tuyaux de la ville, ou le faîte

De ce donjon aigu qui du brouillard ressort ;


S'il était assez haut pour découvrir l'étoile

Que la colline bleue avec son dos me voile,

Le croissant qui s'écorne au toit de la maison ;


Pour voir, au ciel de smalt, les flottantes nuées,

Par le vent du matin mollement remuées,

Comme un troupeau de l'air secouer leur toison ;


Et la gloire, la gloire, astre et soleil de l'âme,

Dans un océan d'or, avec le globe en flamme,

Majestueusement monter à l'horizon !
SøułSurvivør Mar 2014
Summer 1986 Sunday 5:30AM

Misty morning in Malibu.
Seagulls stitch the sea to a subtle
silver sky. They sputter stridently.
Each elegant gull hovers effortlessly.
Entreating each other. Echos bounce
off the sound of the surf into eternity. The screeching of many a
soliloquy akin to silence.

I sit on the pier. The water before
me washes onto the staccato legs
of tiny waterbirds who wander
in and out of the surf. Little
windblown ***** of ecru and grey
wool. I worship in the womb of
the great goddess ~ nature. I wasn't to know the Creator was watching patiently...

6:30AM
I make my unhurried way up the
pier to my car. A cheap but
comfortable convertable. Nobody
walks in LA. I punch in a tape.
Don Henley. Boys of Summer.

I take PCH up to the incline that
takes you from the beach. Pushing
the pedal slightly as I slide by the
colossal bleached cliffs of
Palacades Park. There the homeless
sleep under the benches dedicated
by friends and family in
rememberance of loved ones.
Small plaques attatched for
posterity.

My hands are on the steering wheel
at 7 and 12 o'clock.I look at the cast
I wear on my right wrist. A token
of rememberance from an angry romance. He and I parted
respectively, if not at all
respectfully. I drive.

7:00AM
Venice beach. Not yet boysterous.
But never boring. The young people
(and old) still bundled together in bed. Saturday night hangovers will
be had by most of the denizens of
Venice beach boardwalk. A grainy
eyed few wander around abstractidly. Shopowners enter
their buildings, their storefronts
almost as small as booths. Graphitti
and giant works of art grace walls
everywhere ~ Jim Morrison and
Venus in workout leggings much
in evidence.

I smoke my cigarette and drink my
hot coffee carefully in the open cafe'.
I consider the eyefest of the crowd
that will congregate here to enjoy
the clement weather.
The cacophony and the clamor.
Touristas and Los Angelinos alike
drawn In by calculating vendors
and coyote souled street performers.
I look forward to seeing the
non conformity usually. But not
today. For now I sit in the quiet cafe'.

Venice beach. Vulpine. Vacuous.
A strangely vunerable venue. The
***** and the beautiful. The talented and the ******.

A street performance pianist trundles his acoustic piano on
casters out onto the boardwalk.
I ask him if I may play. He looks
at my cast doubtfully.
"I can still play..." I tell him.
He ascents and listens thoughtfully
as I play my compositions. He really
likes them. I ****** the ebony and
the ivory with insistant fingers.
The smile on his face is irrepressable. I smile back and we
flirt in self conceous, fitful fashion.
Time to leave.

9:00AM
Radio is on in my car now. A cut
from the musical Chess. One night
in Bangkok makes the hard man
humble...
I like the driving beat.
I'm going up I-10, a single blood cell
in the main artery that brings life
to the flesh of this mamouth town.
Traffic is tenuous. A boon here in
this conjested city.

I drive to Fairfax and Sunset, where
I lived with in a tiny one-bedroom
apartment with my mom. An
ambitious actress. I an ambivalent
artist.

Sunset. The Roxy and Whiskey-a-
Go-Go. Cartoon characters Rocky
and Bullwinkle casually cavort on
the top of a building. Billboards
as tall as the Hollywood sign. The
street of broken hearts for many
an actress -slash-model. They
wander about on street corners
looking haughty and haunted.
Waiting for who knows who to
honk. Their dreams have flown
away like the exhailation of smoke
from the mechanical lungs of the
Marlboro Man. Schwab's drugstore
and diner. The place where some
famous starlet was discovered.
Delivered into the arms of the
Hollywood machine. I opt to go
to the Sunset Grill.

11:00AM
I'm walking down Hollywood Blvd.
Perusing shops and persuing
pedestrian pleasures. Everyone
talks of the star-studded sidewalks.
To me they look tarnished and
filthy. Stars from a sultry smog
laden sky come to earth. The names
of some of the folks honored on
them I don't recognise.

I'm here to view movies today.
I'm definitely not going to
Grauman's Chinese Theater.
Been there. Done that. Gave the
very expensive T shirt to
Goodwill. I look around at the
proud and the plebian. The pedantic
and the pathetic. No prostitutes
out yet that I could see. Probably
toppled into bed to sleep
(for once). Deposed kings
and queens of the monarchy of the
night. The homeless hobble along
with their hair matted and askew.
Shopping carts with stuttering
wheels de reguer.

A couple of tourists with Izod shirts,
plaid shorts to the knee and deck
shoes sans socks gaze in a shop
window. It's borded by tarnished
and faded silver garlands... tinsel
Christmas tree.
"Want to buy a mood ring today?"
One of them querys his buddy,
laughingly.

I find my small theater and enter
the air conditioned lobby. I purchase
a soda and pass on the popcorn.
As I enter the theater's modestly
plush, dimly lit cocoon sanctuary
I notice very few patrons are here
for the matinee. GOOD. I finally
watch the premiere product of
Los Angeles. Movie after movie
slides across the screen. The callus
morally corrosive corporations
conspire with the creative to produce
the culmination of many art forms
in one. Cinema.

LA. Languid. Luxurious. Legendary.
Rollicking, raunchy rodeo.
Seaside city. Sophisticated. Spurious.

SPECTACULAR.

8:00PM
I wend my way up Mulholland Dr.
Another tape is playing in the deck.
One of my favorites. David + David.
Welcome to the Boomtown.

I pull over at a deserted vista. From
this viewpoint I can see the city
spread out like a blanketfof brilliance. The gridiron of LA.
Glitzy and glamorous. Generating
little gods and goddesses. A gigantic
gamble for the disingenuous and
gouache. Tinsel town. Titillating.
Tempestuous. Only the very brave
bring their dreams here... or fools
rush in where angels fear to tread.
All but the fallen angels. They thrive.

Oh! If this place could be bottled it
would be such sweet poison. I
look up at the auburn sky and back
down at the breathtaking panorama
The metropolis that is LA with awe
and angst. I carefully stub out my
cigarette and flip it irreverantly
toward the lagoon of lights.

I get in my car to drive home.
Home?
Could this imposing, inspiring,
impossible place be called home?

Well. Home is where the heart is.
And I live in the heart of a dream.
This is the city of dreams...

CITY OF ANGELS.

Soul Survivor
Catherine E Jarvis
(C) 2005
You can rest your eyes now...

I only have enough funds to
produce one spoken word
set to music... should I
do this one?
Spicy Digits Apr 2021
I've sang for you
Danced for you
Bled for you
Bowed and curtsied
Dogged and *****
I've fought for you
I've won countless times
Ribbons and plaques
Handshakes in the dark

The game continues to play now
in my head
for you
brandon nagley Jul 2015
Do we notice the finer things in life? The husband's and wives, children that's been conceived! Thou and they are all thou needeth when thy roof springs its leak!

Sick
Wearied
Weak?

Looking in all the wrong places?

Itinerant in the stagnative imagination's
For don't even the mammals haveth a place to stay?

Like the son of man
I haveth no chapel
For this head to consecretly layeth!!!

Dog nights seem more teething!!!!

Vestige of all beauty
You've left that still life post,
Wherein thy mantra's I seeketh the most!!!

The I loveth thou's
And thou more....

Deluge of happiness
Covereth me
Bury me
In atmospheric condition,

Oh man didst thou not mention?
The plaques to ***** it's protract sorrow!!!!

Hath society made materialism
And the dollar sign
Their romantic gesture?

A pity to God
And me!!!!

Mobs of fleas
To calleth what they maketh
MANIFESTED TESTIMONIES!!!!

Wherein the frauds
Fakes
And phonies
Art thy t.v magnate stars!!!!!

©Brandon nagley
©Lonesome poet's poetry
Old poetry
Dante Leto Nov 2019
I met her one night in a dream: a divine being of singular beauty with long, dark hair and a heavenly radiance, with eyes of the bluest aether. She was the paradigm of unparalleled perfection, uncontested and enchanting.

Upon waking I expected to find she was a mere creation of my imagination. However, I was surprised to see in my hand the note she had written me. So small a keepsake, yet enormously treasured.

I walked outside and began a search to find the angelic being of my dreams. Where is one to look for angels but in the sky? I knew then that to the highest peak of the tallest mountain I must go if there was any hope of finding her.

Leaving behind my home and eveything I own, I journeyed to the mountain. A peak so high it pierced the belly of the heavens, but I climbed it with unwavering zeal. I felt such a strong desire to see her pulling me inexorably toward the top despite any tiredness...or any logical expectation that it wasn't all for nothing.

As I approached the summit I saw city walls made of some sort of ivory-coloured marbled stone, bejeweled with great jade and sapphire. As I approached the gates they opened for me, and I felt a rush of cold air carrying a very pleasant and familiar scent. It was her! Her sweet, ambrosial aroma took rapturous hold of my bones and pulled me through the gates.

Despite the majesty of this city of wonderous stonework, I quickly realized it was devoid of life. Strange, but a mystery of insignificant proportions compared to my current goal. If she was there, I would find her. I made my way through the barren streets guided by some immaterial leash of sentiment, obsession, and something else. I dared not question anything, and only surrendered to the force. It was as if she was calling me to her by way of all my senses and all I had to do was listen.

The empty streets themselves whispered stories of their own. What was once a vibrant, vivacious realm is now resting on a foundation of the dead. No evidence of war or struggle marred the place. Headstones lined each street, and the roads themselves were paved with stone coffins. On every structure where headstones couldn't be set, plaques were placed instead in honour of each fallen citizen. However, no single one had a date written on it...only names. I wondered if the cause of such thorough devastation to this place was a disease of some sort. After all, the city was completely isolated.

While some minor portion of my mind was analyzing this enigmatic environment, my driving focus remained steadfast. I knew little about her, but I knew that no one in a dream nor in the waking world had I ever wanted more. I could see that she wanted me too, as it had become clear that she was drawing me in. So, I continued to submit.

I was brought to the bell tower of a grand cathedral. There was a large outlook off the side of the tower. It offered an unobstructed view of the starry sky and swaying aurora. As I stared at the entrancing scene, my meditation was interrupted by a touch on my shoulder. I had found her!

With an embrace and a kiss we began a partnership the likes of which no world had ever known. Many conversations we shared, and much more. I learned of this forsaken city that she calls home, its secrets, and its history. I learned of her strengths and weaknesses, and learned that even an angel of such splendour can have insecurities. She told me of the people that once lived here and how they took to worshipping her. Dodengel, they called her. But her true name is for me alone.

She pointed to the stars and the black abyss between. The pale blue aurora performing before the black backdrop was something I had always wanted to see, and I had a front row seat. Never had I been so close to the outer reaches. As fascinating as the cosmic show was, nothing had ever been more captivating than the radiant creature beside me. She moved her body in the most seductive manner demanding my full attention. In the starlit dark of night she now had what appeared to be wings of golden light, and her eyes...those eyes! So bright and blue, glowing hypnotically and rendering me helplessly under her control. Never had I experienced such a total loss of faculties.

Taking me by the hand she swept us into the black expanse where no mortal being can survive. Beyond the realm of men, outside the shadows from which I was conjured. Into Oblivion she took me, her secret place. I remained willingly under her spell. Those eyes are shackles, binding the will of one who dares to get close. That one was me. A fantasy that was conceived in dreams was born into reality. I had found her. She was here in front of me as real as I myself am real. Her obsessive love for me as real as mine for her. Her beauty as real as the pain in my stomach...as real as the metallic taste of thick blood filling my mouth. I had given myself to her, and as long as she kept me bound I was powerless to stop her. She was carving into me, eviscerating me and tearing me apart all while sustaining a smile. A pain so harrowing made worse by feeling my own warm intestines unraveling down my legs. With a hand like a razor-sharpened blade she opened me up from pelvis to neck, leaving all the organs exposed and bones separated. I couldn't stop her from mutilating me. Even as I stayed locked into her gaze she wouldn't grant me as much mercy as fainting from the pain. It was agony. But no matter the anguish, I was unable to break the spell she had over me.

When she finished and my body was in tatters she took me back to the world we'd left. With what intact parts of me I had left I could feel myself writhing. So much pain yet so much ecstasy! Back to my home she flew me and laid my broken body on my bed. With one last kiss she said goodbye, and at that I finally lost consciousness.

As I write in recovery from surgeons' work putting me back together I can't get her off my mind. The scars I'll bear will forever remind me of of something extraordinary. And I will be with her again. No forces in this world nor any world beyond can quell this addiction.

You see, she was an angel, true. But "Dodengel" is a word in a long lost language meaning roughly "Angel of Death". How can I say that this was in any way a declaration of love, you ask? The Angel of Death is a harvester of lives. It is her nature to **** any marked for death. No entities are more marked by the gods than the Draa'ma, or Daemons, of which I, in part, am one. Her nature is to ****, yet she only maimed. No effort was made to properly **** me, as destruction of the body doesn't mean true death for one of my kind. She showed me her true self. She showed an unlovable monster unequivocal love: for what is more loving that denying one's intrinsic nature in favour of another?
Nigel Morgan May 2014
She opened the door of the gallery and there it was, there it lay, before her, nearly perfect: her exhibition. The opening was an hour or so away and there were, naturally, a few adjustments to make, but in essence it was right, and as she walked to the middle of the rectangular space (to survey the full effect ) she felt held by the quiet wonder of it all; that she had made all this and with ‘the quality control of nature’s accidents’. He’d written those words some years previous when a solo show was but a dream she would enter between sleep and wakefulness, when she would think of the west coast of Scotland and the poetry of its seashore, the infinite variety in the seashore strand between sand and sea. It was such natural accidents of form and transformation by nature’s hand that had guided her imagination into rightness and towards this exhibition.

At breakfast that morning she had come to the table dressed to greet her audience, and for the first time as a featured artist in a festival of some repute. She had felt the quiet joy of choosing the right combination of clothes to be the public person she had now become. He had loved the new dress she had bought to clothe her gallery persona. She had been conscious of his eyes following the lines this frock so generously drew around her body’s shape and form, the way the material fell across her *******, lay smoothly on her thighs.  It was a very grownup frock and with the jacket and scarf made her look purposeful, confident. His looking made such confidence possible, his admiration and what she could tell was that coming together of love and passion that, her being dressed in this formal way, so often evoked.

In the gallery she had worried over the lighting, climbed up the metal ladder with the fluffy green glove thoughtfully provided to enable those small adjustments of direction to be made on a hot spotlight. There were four large pieces flanking a corner that had embossed lines running across their surfaces, lines that needed oblique light to reveal the shadowing of this effect of swirls and marks of a retreating tide on sand.  Two smaller pieces needed rearranging; she’d placed them, late the evening before, in the wrong sequence. Poster boards were to be filled with her poster and put outside on the pavement by the gallery entrance. She opened the main door, a very green door with its top and bottom bolts and black-painted handle ring. The street outside was a welcoming mix of 18th and 19th C buildings, hardly one the same, the sort of three storey buildings that had simple plaques prominently placed into the brickwork from a distant past when proud builders would describe a structure’s use or ownership with a title and date. By ten o'clock this one-way street was lined with parked cars, but now there was little traffic. It was a quiet sunny morning in a market town.

‘Don’t mind the dog, ‘ he said. ‘He’s used to coming in here.’ It was a long-haired verging on the side of scruffy sort of dog, used to keeping its own counsel, probably used to being taken to exhibitions. ‘Just popping in,’ he said, this man who, and she couldn’t help noticing this, seemed to hold much in common with his dog; the long, but retreating on the forehead, hair, slightly scruffy from the want of a comb or a good brush (like his dog), he had dressed without much thought (because who dressed thoughtfully to walk a dog?), and that’s what he was doing, walking the dog and, seeing the Gallery open, thought he ought to look in.

Giving him her brightest smile, she embarked on performing the artist’s music of conversation, that score holding gentle melodies and welcoming harmonies. Although she had become quite practised in talking to her audience there was always the challenging inquiry that would catch her off guard.

‘Well, are you finished with the seashore now?’ said the man with the look-alike dog. For a moment a half dozen possible answers seemed possible. ‘Could one ever finish with something so extraordinary and various as that hinterland between land and sea?’ No, that was seemed a mite critical and clever. ‘Oh, I’ve hardly started’ was tempting, but rather smug and too confident by half. ‘I just love the seaside’ would probably do, as no one else was listening. ‘Merleau-Ponty says the complexity of the seashore is a metaphor in the search for self-identity’. She did wonder what he’d make of that, but finally decided on ‘It’s such a rich source of ideas and images I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to do with the subject.’

”It’s all the same colour”. She’d had that one a few times. ‘When I’m on the beach I’m fascinated as much by the texture and shape of what I see  and feel than the colour. I like the subtlety of the colours in the sand. I think my pieces – and she waved her hand towards what she had titled her Sand Marks pieces – show so many of the different shades of colours you find on the seashore.’

Those Sand Marks, a collection of variously dyed and marked two metre plus linen-lengths, dominated one wall of the gallery. They floated a few centimetres from the white wall, and when people moved past them the slight shadows cast by the linen lengths seemed to ripple in the human-made breeze. She could never look at them without thinking how their very accidental making – binding a linen cloth with inner placed objects and using the natural dye of tea – could create such absorbing results. She would follow with her gaze one of the linen-lengths from bottom to top (or top to bottom) and find herself walking on the wet sand of a Scottish beach, overwhelmed by the clear light and space with only the sea sound surrounding. He would tell her, had told her often, how moved, how affected he had been when he first saw them hung. To him, these ‘marks’ carried an essence of this aesthetic she now owned and for which had become recognised.

Even on this, her first day, she had been visited by a small number of admirers and supporters, some travelling distances to see her work with the aura of the original, a truer view than that possible on the back-lit screen of their computer monitors. Ladies who loved textiles, the containment and privacy to sew and stitch secured in their busy lives. These friendly and smiley women (the comfortable side of sixty) understood something of what she was doing here, and perhaps imagined themselves as thirty-somethings walking Scottish beaches free from children and the relentless list-making of house and home and occupation, able to create imaginary worlds of marks and folds, pleats and textures. Full of enthusiasm for the medium, what they perhaps didn’t have was the skill of seeing, a skill she had grown up with, had always owned to some degree: found, fostered, honed, developed into a second-nature activity of always looking.

There would be the occasional brief lull when the gallery was empty or close to empty, as though needing the space to come up for breath after being occupied by people and their movement. She would then walk slowly around the long well-lit room viewing her pieces and her arrangements of pieces from different angles. She would look at his poems placed antiphonally between her work, commissioned for her catalogue, her book of images of the sea shore paired with, incorporating even, her made pieces. She’d chosen a favoured few she’d felt caught the essence of being in the sea’s company, in the sand and shore’s domain. Like everything he did it had been undertaken with the utmost intensity of purpose. She saw him now in her mind’s eye with his notebook sitting against rocks, paddling in the great shallow pools, walking head down along the tide line, those bright days on a Scottish island and before, before on that ellipse of beach by the fishing station.

He would tease out an idea formed from a little motif of words, perhaps like the very music that was his private territory: here, alone, apart we are marked by the tide’s turn. Yes, we are marked by being solitary in such unconfining space, the marks at our feet become the lines, the mounts, the fingers, those interruptions, breaks and blockages found in the tridents, chains and crosses of the art of palmistry. We read the seashore as a psychic oracle reads the hand, hoping, as Kathleen Jamie so rightly says, for the marvellous. And marvellous it so often is.

Standing in this gallery was like being gathered about by the seashore. It was a short jump in the imagination’s miracle to hear the soft breathing of the sea, the wind caressing the face, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the freckled cheek.

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude
. . .


These words had always stopped her in her perambulating tracks. She thought of her son, far distant on the beach, at rest for once, still, motionless within the confluence of the elements of the beach, at the epicentre of her gaze, all things flowing to and from his tiny, far-away figure.
GaryFairy Jan 2015
people turn their backs
they can't handle emotion
they run with the packs
they can't handle devotion
they only want stacks
financial promotion
their names on the plaques
of outstanding notion

people turn their heads
toward their satisfaction
no tears are shed
struggle is a distraction
they look straight ahead
toward their transactions
they walk on the dead
to get to their attractions
st64 Dec 2014
on windy plains
flattened panels beneath tight-pressed scarves, they stand
on the edge of the highway
seeking the last streaks of eve's sun
bodies on windy plains where, in the lap of poverty, kids play and listen
the ***** little words mothers spill
a hapless world in flats steep, laundry billows on higher
than most dreams can possibly reach


1.
song to be sung, yet youth's golden mouth swift-ripped away
by hungry-crones topped in white hats and over-spiffed lines
poor boy couldn't hold it together, they fell apart
scatter the crowd in fold-up chairs to make it look less empty
spread the tea-garden in the hall, circulate those tiny packets
so much **** noise, is that all we waited for?

revolutions were built on disparity's hand ****** in the face of the poor
pity the drug of current day keeps all so well glued to the system
somebody wise once said that royalty awards knighthood
                                                *exactly for the same reason

to keep gentry where they are seen fit to belong: below
                                                           ­                   the swirl of understanding
so, there won't be enough cake for everyone.



2.
when saviours ring in the new, for a short while
and new heads bring down the old names
and gut the bastions of the past
surely, when we destroy the ugly parts of history, we conceal truth
with pompous new plaques and road names for petty achievers
even bad press is held up as recognition these days
and too many are numbed, hopelessly foiled by the feed
peck, peck.. nice, little chikken
                         (mind stuffed with trash, mouthpiece occupied)

some content to catch a few crumbs on the way down
while others tread lightly on their way out the back exit
the more we so blindly buy into the whole mess
the less we see the big pic
                           (the real one)
nebulous covers the screen so well: away from organic life
life on a farm, growing your own stuff
       needing less of plug-in
       more of play
I steadily tire of the filthy streams we're led to wade in
thick and viscous with the stench of decay
and no way out but the meeting with barbed-wire walls

oh, for days of simple pleasures.. walking in the park
                                                      swingi­­ng high into the blue sky

with eyes on the rim of the planet
a ten-cents pineapple-popsicle
and no fear of the unknown
       but beautiful discoveries, good and not-so-good

now, a man will die in the hands of a stranger's care
at the mercy of their kin's timetable
busy, busy, busy.. loved ones moving on
ah, no time to enjoy a tot, some oenomel.


3.
say, God.. you got a moment? I'd like to address a grievance or two
are we forgetting what you told us?
what was it again -- on the day, we tried to understand your identity
                                    in a tongue this world's memory suffered lapse
there was a time we understood your meaning
today, I hear your voice in the rustle out my meadow
right here
in the green leaves

I think I can hear you right
loving your remembrances.



*silent anger brews in the streets, common folk took enough
tired of threats and crumbs left by chunks others gorged on
retaliatory mountains grow, a surge in march
a touch too late to retract some acts.. for haste & judgment hurt
where many struggle to breathe, so hatred cements its template
slowly, time may crumble them to stones, then dust
            or hope build a rope from heart's twine
            or love blow breezes of care on this fiery circle
faraway, where queens live on ginger cakes and ale
on windy plains.
is there really not enough cake for all?
odd how easily media OVERcrops reality.. perhaps a slice if that pie is bein' filtered down, after all.. who knows.

welllllllllll, perhaps a li'l look-see back into the annals of history to remind us how greed will end in a head-chopping.. or two.


sub-entry: drumstick

I hold up high.. parapum, pum-pum
the banner we swore in.. parapum, pum-pum
but we do not know how.. parapum, pum-pum
drumsticks and games got shoved in
to keep us quiet and busy

surely, the graves of liberty-warriors TURN
in horror
at the grand-scale daylight-robbery
we allow and DEFEND.. parapum-pum-pum!
Donall Dempsey Nov 2016
INVISIBLE BLUE PLAQUES

someone or other
lived &
died here

some other someone
wrote their most
famous work there

every so often
a blue plaque
informs us

as we journey
through town
(rain falling down)    

of Blah Blah who blah’d
& blah’d here or was blah’d
there... who cares?

in my mind
I ***** invisible
blue plaques

to commemorate us

here: we kissed
(did we not?)    
...a mere minute ago

here: we turned
& laughed on
the corner of this everyday road
road

here: we laughed
& hugged
on a pedestrian crossing

(a pedestrian
crossing)    
whistling at

our ardour
a taxi honking
at our armour

all over London
our invisible
blue plaques

commemorate
us &
that

we once
passed this way
so deeply in love
Julian Dorothea Oct 2013
I am a leech hungry for pity.
I say I want death
but what I really crave is recognition for the life lost.

If I cut my wrists
will the red flash like warning signs
in an empty road?
will the blue of bruises
cry out to you like a lake in the desert?

How much will it take for you to see me?
I'm sorry my tears are colorless
they cannot paint the story of my pain
they cannot make the ribs of this cathedral
a stained-glass window.

I am as silent and grim as a cemetery
looking peaceful in just the right light.
Look beyond the beautiful
mausoleums,
the ivory plaques,
the angel statuettes...
dig deep for the decaying bones
the foul smell
the dead body that I am,
being eaten and gnawed by worms
and invisible, microscopic, living things.
Robin Carretti Mar 2020
Hello! Its me always on the cell phone? I tunes
Hello Hello does anyone acknowledge
Someones hello do not disturb sign movies of art
Getting awards all hearts next role part
Hello private lives desperate house wives
Writers words that move us hello please don't leave us
A friendly hello greetings and deadline meetings

Please don't hurt anyone's feelings

Getting closer no impostor
Stars shine hello my dipper
Like the golden rule running like
A mule the competition
The compromising position
Just the hello- transition
Getting awards surprised

Say what you mean
Words should be
Crisp like lettuce clean
Cafe French roast hello mingle
No awards to be married or single
Instagram beauty
and the beast pictures to hustle
Climbing the diamond door
  Getting awards hello a title

Moving towards the winning line_

  Fast and furious "Valentine"
Computer hello apps trophy
Getting awards your happy
Over the Judy rainbow
Metal awards and plaques
Seeing monuments and hello
Hollywood graves
But no-one hears me

The "Yellow Brick Road"
Were off to see the wizard
Hello! Oz
Like a fantasy getting awards so comforting a smile a friendly hello be happy
Ylzm Jan 2020
Israel foreshadowed in Egypt
Untouched by the Plaques
Passed over by the Destroyer
Egypt broken and bowed
With strangers, Israel walked free
Handsomely ransomed, a nation is born
So shall Israel again be in the Tribulation
As light for sight and salt to taste
And again with strangers
In haste and with bitterness
Come out of the World
Raptured as the First born of God
Amy Perry Sep 2013
An insect dives at my head,
A winged Kamakazi attack.
I'm startled, I think of ways
To obliterate. My mind returns
To peace. I see the beauty
In the moment. The insect
Charged into battle
By darting at me -
Life's biggest threat:
A distressed, depressed
Excessively oppressive
Life form known as human.
The insect was only armed
With bravery and valor,
A war hero with no chance
Of medals or statues,
Eulogies or plaques.
Scarcely a memory.
Forever.
Ken Pepiton Oct 2024
In the stacks of all we knew, LOOKY HERE,
in 72 minutes we walk a parsec, and Earth turns
two degrees, and Annie Jacobsen's whole
do no more, is all our denoument.

- pardon our verbosity, we had free time -

What news good came lately my way,
I long to think I did expect, my way
was new made, after the majority attained
use of Google translate thinker augments,
weform a contextual we, excluding
orders of social harmony
allowing liar laws life,
justice and way
eminence
eumenine specificity, so many specified known
wasps classified royally cosmopolitan,
mental peace presensing sub-untilificious

royal rules, only queens reproduce,
only idle bees are never seen busy,
and some can see syms when societies
all stop to think, for a minute,
and just breath, in, then out
we form awesome thinks expansive,
to mostly
support generally useless bums, like me.

{estimated reading time queries are invalid}

This is why, don't ask why again, or else,
imagine that…

The idle mind is where repairs are made.
Pairs connect, mate in mind and hold
thoughts as long as you imagined…

With this tool,
were I one willing, and able,
to master its functionality, imagined

ever learning along with reality
expanding the need to know,

all the things possible in this window,
between my time and thine, whole
worlds away in words never writ
with ink or wedge in stone nor clay
wished for siderealities, as many as
all the stars within augmented plain
sight, as through any stained pane,
presenting dancing pixels just there,
edgewise,
in our per ifery margin, where beauty
squirms eusocially,
all lights holding mean-peak
at an instant's attention
max red or green or blue, fading to black.

Pain, in jokes and drama, pain
is the essential underlay, the gesso
McLuhan saysotoo
over which we pigmentate, media
mental in original intention, obedient,

under law older than Shadrach,
the law of the Medes and Persians,
the power of attorney given priests
of the authors of our orders, classified,
as it is writ, thus it must be… sacred
ready readers, only.
Reading makes inclusion work as wisdom,
instant completely functioning beautifully,
breathe-ing
as if, asked
and answered, at the moment, called
Wisdom, come, entreat with all warring in me,
Wisdom, come, gentle minds twisted by me,
Wisdom, come, make us make believe.
-------------

Eerie, eh, not holding any thought, being
thought spiritual enough to find any word

so idled as to be posh fluff or street crud,
slung to signal inclusion in the with side,
the meaning in life is the message
in this medium prepositioned
opposed
to the without side, those at emnity
with truth's way

Into the comfort zone,

danger free, follow your toes, theories
of everything, meditatively perpendicular,

norms, and circles, churning burning effort,
ef-ing walls extend effects solid ificate
to hold the ash and tailings,

mined precepts seeding crystals
in caverns,
never witnessed, now known, so true,

two dichotomies make one tetrad,
and whatsoever we agree
to make believe

we may, and think it not robbery
to play,

make functional fun, little impulse to smile,
and think I know this idea, functions in me,
wink
and now, you, unless we lost you at the
NAND gate, excluding unbelievers, then a
NAND gate excluding unbelievers in live words,
NAND gate excluding no second guessing, here

we are, all in one window, thinking
we are our kind,  tied
at our common sense ability,

to stretch a point,
to make a thread one pastless point thin,
to tie a premis, a premission, permitting ponderous
whying
heavy duty gullibility
in terms
of mortal sensibilities,
this'll kihl you. I realized. Accidental as the idea silent
aitches let us talk end existence kihling bad ideas

to use pain
to teach, 'ow, why how is always
thorny issues, way back, seemed common,
we learn how fire works
by being made aware,
- not by being burned, a touch is enough
- skin as sensitive as a frog in parable lies, leaps
as touch response reflex functions all start running
what ifs against wonder ifs, wishes versus prayers,
-no, frogs won't simmer to death, they leap
using frog sense,
worth of knowing how long
to wait in winter, learning
worth of knowing bears know something
of weather. Co-mental commenting we think.
Thought hard fruit, thinkalongtime fruit, ra' good

Singing salmon songs I never learned, thinking bear
market strategies make less sense than bullshat
macroeconomic dimensions extractable
from meta data,
under all we ever stood up from under,
in the bubble of all I bet I knew for sure,

boldly accumulating in arterial informal plaques,
and films in limenal tunnels holding quarks as ones,

two bit chirality problem,
solved, cut it six ways,
two heads, two mouths, in one, out the other,
inside outside all at once, so easy, we imagined,
image that, two eyes, two ears, two nasal passages
into synodical pressure sensitive chambers
sinus sorting
of pheremone signal
to act analagous senders
to whale domes, catchers,
signal
from noise, gnosisnot say so,
sniff, feel cold nose, think so,
swallow all pride, and pretend, we made up this mind,
and it uses words we can understand
in all the unbarbing thorny issues
of zoological superfluity, among

watchers and waiters serving as idle ants,
with angst relief primary function,
just take air for granted, free
grace in time of need,
sleep if you are tired, easy,
weary way we know we go, has
cost. Pain exists, you know, you can imagine
in art, in jokes, and most certainly dramatic series
that carry followers
through decades exposed
to commercials announcing urgent solutions,
- now, no commercials, we bingegulp seasons,
- sometimes at a sitting, depends on dope
skating on easy learning absorption skills,
ever learning the drama never ends,

ask your doctor, now,
back to the global equivalent of one
Paredo Distribution, eighty percent of TV
is daily faire for twenty percent of people,
eighty percent of readers reading this far,
get to this bubbles popping edge, on a side

zoom to a scatter graph, who breathes in
who breathes out,
all around the world
whiling away, in trust we make peace seem.
.. seen as through smoked glasses, liquidly
Gaussian blurring edges
where the frame
holds the light we see through
to think like this

is real
at word level. Live rethinking, first men
tale-ings
after refining whying wishes
to know.
More, or less.

Everything, all at once, is chaos, whence
art abstracts beauty patiently, trusting wishes
what if its another trick we have no defences,
we get eaten alive,
for cultural misappropriation.

Dear is a value to be weighed using full bandwidth
Sakal, show thy self letters ready for measure,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, indeed
שָׂכַל defined several of seventy ways,
spelled to take a broken heart
and mend it with a realization.

If my need became your need,
we would be in love,
that would really
defeat the use
of preparation, peeling potatoes,
prudence, ever ready to entertain,
pounding clothes down by the riverside,
watchin' babies being washed off and blessed,
שָׂכַל knowing waiting is suffering, not pain
watchin' life like National Geographic, before TV.
A messenger's whistle, hear
ah
Message to the mass essences
of little looks mira-clues, seen miracles
since who knew when today
would continue as today. As if once more.
Dear Prudence,
did we come out to play, as if today,
was one of those times that we all seem
to have, recollected
if it could seem alright.
שָׂכַל prophets spake, Ai make secrets known,
the whys for all the wars so far. Pride, indeed.

Why? Would that defeat the use,
and not the purpose
of preparation, final product,
Battlefield Earth, truths uses versus lies uses,
us as we
who think it all through
to the seed
in the fruit it self desirable
to make one wise considering
שָׂכַל science falsely so called, still makes believers.
Slow down.
Jello time reminds second glancers,
when time is not as dear, as an instance
in re co gnosis, swallows gnosis known nots,
- wise was the serpent discerning decision trees.
what would ever make us all think one thought once,
then never think it alone again, we all ways, big all
think this was the way, we walked in,
the same way we walked out, all
set to comprehend wisdom and knowledge and
yada da da da we who work
   in living once idle words,
our side ways won, when we did not fight,
we never lasted al-mental
this long before, but
when we get old, we keep our wits, we got older
sooner than later, so we know
more than our dads, too.
- old friends well imagined
- happy ever after any way,
don't aspire, little maker
of good sensed peace,
to stave off thermo nuclear war
by your self, aight, here we go,
make up a master mind board
of suggesters
by your self,
HelloWorld,
with you
in a minute,
I am in a consultation,
relationships with dead friends, such are
deeply personal, core ties to old times, remember
we can hear them say the same damnedlies, or listen,
שָׂכַל together with stars consider real the times

analagous to tuning back when zero beat, was sought
to make one wise,
in Genesis, esoteric
in the gaps,
she saw he never knew, so Cain did, for sure…

hey, old enemy of me, I cannot remember why
I was afraid of you, and never got to know you,

but I recognized your art, the other day,
in an old, old magazine ad,
then that leads to us in a sense, innocent,
a lost soul I had no sympathy for, I was his bully,

so he's dead and we're okeh, spiritually, we talked,
I told him I had changed, he told me he'd broken,
got busted in Oklahoma, went to prison, for ****,
got religion then went nuts, and I said

I can relate.

So we stay in touch in the spirit.
I don't know how he died, but we were in situations,
where sixth grade bullying had been forgotten,
when I call this character
into my life, as a friend, known to many
mistreated in this mortal moment, laughing ever
as a complexity of never ifery, it did not ****
you to know, boys were always boys,
we always think of Infinite Jest, and laugh
at the coincidence we both read Foster Wallace.
Always sorry, for the trouble we allowed
our wild child payback voter against
peace at any price, what price glory?

The little monstors empo'w'rable in us all, rahrahrah

It was Donall Dempsy said it:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4897567/even-now-now-very-now/
The flag of self unfurls
snaps into the lost moment.
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4899302/walking-from-the-rising-sun-to-kildare-town/

Oi, this man's an inspirer of SAW such as wisdoms, never told,
could be, back when eighty percent
of us heard all our wisdom from drunks.
Now we read texts.

When the battles over,
and common sense is laughing,
some of it singing simultaneously

concurrently free presses in spirit and echoing
out side the bubble we met in as licensed wannabe

messenger shouting in the wild,
anybody home, we got lost.

As the earth moves relative to the sun, see
two degrees, is about, nearly to the Picosec
Seventy-two minutes, a parsa, in tradersprachen,

the realization, sure and certain utter destruction,
an agreed upon form of right use ness, national opinions

believe madness deters madness and nonsense in just code.
-it is not secret code, nor sacred, knowing is necessary, just
always was, all else you were told
to believe, with knowin' known
as sin, well we have recycleables
to trade, for those,
made
of the exact same historical threads
to here. On the battlefield, after all.
The point of anything we wished we did, done.

We can use our minds in ways once called praying,
we think we say we wish you the best, and hesitate, luck or grace,
favor undeserved by a wretch like me, ah, the maze,
the logos as spirit medium cord, twisted spider kite collection,
Ariadne, toss the lad a line, he's a ways to go until sense is common.
I hope you enjoyed that, it seems I asked for more, tooo often
Elioinai Oct 2014
I came back, from the great fight,
With my heart in a mess,
My mind began to crumble,
And my strength was ebbing away,
When did I forget the victories already won?
Cover up the truth, see the conquering line receding?
When did the spots reduce my vision?
And my dreams lose their bright contrastings?
I have found, that victories in life, are not like plaques on a wall,
But wrestling belts, for you must always fight to keep them.
July 16, 2013
Fredrich Kunath is running out of
World, but I’m resting from work
For a while, so I find my way to
St. James’ Square and ravel up a
Pinch of tobacco, hands trembling.
Behind me, work goes on, and builders
Grapple with drills: the sounds fall
Down from rooftops on all fours.

The sun is in mid-morning, and I
Leave the London Library (of which
I am a benign member) to walk
Around. I pass the Ritz, and the
Underground, and a tourist stops
Me and asks in broken English
Where the Palace is. His family stands
Behind him, bleary eyed and puzzled;
I point him away, and he walks away,
Brown hand pushing his cap out of
His eyes. The crowds are cold-blooded
Today, walking in the sunlight keeping
Pathways congested for a while.

At 11:55, I give up searching for
Nothing, and settle down at a little bench
In Green Park.  It’s a quiet space, where
London keeps its cars away, keeps the
Shadows of its buildings at bay.

It’s misty in the park today, and
Around me, people clutch their cameras
Taking pictures. I’m in one of those
Moods again; the ones where I get
In my car and drive around, wasting
Petrol on late night drop-ins to the
Mark Eaton Crematorium, to visit
Slate plaques. Will I run out of
World, like him? I stub my cigarette
And leave, swilling out of the park
And walking back to the Library.
They have some famous dead members:
George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, amongst
Others.

Running out of world seems fantastical
To me: I rather think he ran out of
Time.
A nod to Frank O'Hara
Can we as men comprehend
The value of time
Or is time a commodity much to rare
To be assessed by our feeble mind

Can time be bought for gain
Or for wealth be bought or sold
Does time posses a value
Such as diamonds or as gold

Is time it's self a currency
To be saved as an investment
Should a return be expected
As we prepare for retirement

Could time be a hidden treasure
An object we seek to posses
To add to what time we think we have
Do we over this thought obsess

We as men want so much
Of what we cannot see
For we men know not how much time
Is alloted to you and me

While we are breathing life
Unseen time is always appearing
And at the very same moment
Unseen time is disappearing

So,what is the value of time?
Will the answer by man be ever revealed
Or will this mystery that plaques mans mind
From his knowledge forever be sealed.

RLB
Molly Rosen Feb 2014
i am on a bus and i am sitting next to a girl i haven't sat next to in a very long time.
we used to listen to taylor swift and now we are listening to poetry that makes us cry.
i am so much happier than i have been because i am looking at art and i feel like maybe,
if i try hard enough,
i can become art.
the colors remind me of my old bedroom and they remind me of my old best friend.
she was in the hospital last month, because she overdosed.
i promised her once that we could talk about our end, but we never did.
i wonder if she ever thinks about me.
it is one am and it is raining and i am wishing that he would paint my portrait to keep in his pocket,
to immortalize in a frame that is prettier than i ever hope to be,
on a wall next to painstakingly created flowers that hold more emotion than i will ever feel.
the moon has a special hold on poets, but all it is doing tonight is making me wonder why my hands don't pull angels from stone and beauty from destruction.
i am wondering if i am still alive, if any of these people are still alive, and if the dead feel good about themselves.
i am wondering why i feel so different than i did last year.
maybe it's the dress and the notebook and the quiet steps i take because i don't want to disturb the art,
or staring long enough at a stranger that i can pretend to know his story, and that he wears his father's watch.

i am on the bus and she thinks i am less sad because she is less sad.
but when i look at all the art the first thing i feel is jealous, which is really the same thing as being sad.
i want to spend forever in the glass rooms but i don't deserve to, because i am so selfish.
i think that if i look at monet and picasso and van gough for long enough i will absorb them,
but i also want to walk past them, to the pieces whose plaques contain only a lifespan,
with no detailed description of the reasoning behind the use of numbers hidden in the abstract.
(picasso put them in so he could stay in touch with reality.)
i think that maybe that's why i am doing so much better in math this year.
i just want to stay in touch with reality.
because i have been staring at "evening mood" for half an hour and all i feel is sad,
because after the sunset there is nothing but darkness and that's what the night brings and it's what thoughts of you bring too.
it is called sandstorm but it makes me think only of the sea.
i think i need to get away from here for a while.  maybe i will go to the sea.

i haven't been on a bus in a long time, but here i am.
i spent the day as something i have always wanted to be.
we haven't talked in a month but she still thinks i am beautiful.
why am i crying?
this was inspired by a trip to the art museum that i took.  i am considering submitting it to a teacher because i have to submit something, but it's very personal and i am not sure i'm ready for it to be read by people i know.
(the title is borrowed from a photograph i saw.  it was half of a girl's face, and she was smiling, and she was beautiful, and i have no idea what "it" is but i sure hope it's beauty.)
brandon nagley Jun 2015
yeux de TwiligLanguecoquette
Me noyer dans ta bave
Vivifier moi tranquille veut
Sable nuits nous Endulge dans
Obscurci par l'opacité des duskiness
Préparez-moi dans airify fraîche
Jog moi comme au sein ont été clarifiées
Faire un tour
Montez,
Talk toothsome
Sirupeux ludique
Glissant sur ourn propre amour
Sueur Ambrosial
Pas savoir aux hommes ou aux fantômes
High Hopes rester élevé
extranjeros amorosas contrairement à la plupart
Chéri
Bien fait
Kins d'exposition au-delà
Non destiné à la page en kiosque
Éveils subissent-sons popping
Sécréter les crys de chiens hurlants
Dynamitage comme un sprite
Délicieux sur des plaques d'esprits
Plébéiens à l'attribut non du monde
Brutes de la romance désespérée
Nous feras danser l'amour de la mine de danse
Nous seras valse dans laquelle tu ourn étapes
Voyage un de l'autre!      ( french)

English-

Twilight eyes
Flirtatious tongue
Drown me in thy slaver
Vivify me for tranquil wants
Sable nights endulge us in
Obscured by opacity of duskiness
Brace me in cool airify
Jog me as within were clarified
Take a ride
Get in,
Toothsome talk
Syrupy playful
Slippery on ourn own amour
Ambrosial sweat
Not known to men or ghosts
High hopes to stay high
extranjeros amorosas unlike the most
Darling
Well made
Kins of afterlife exposure
Not meant for newsstand page
Arousals heated popping sounds
Secrete the howling dog crys
Blasting out as a sprite
Delicious on plates of minds
Plebians to non world attribute
Brutes of hopeless romance
We shalt dance the dance mine love
We shalt waltz wherein ourn steps shalt
Trip one another!!!
I know I messed up words or two in french Version don't wanna fix it lol oh well
Storygiver Jun 2017
They said they wanted to take the molars of
Those fleeing danger that they had escaped
By the skin of
Then leave the reward of sanctuary beneath their pillow whilst they slept
As if they weren't having trouble enough already
With where to rest their weary heads

They said the rewards were many
And wanted to make completely certain
They weren’t being too generous
Because giving gifts gives rise to greed
So they decided to take the teeth
And ensure those safety seekers
Knew exactly what being bitten means

And those who sought for something more?
Those bitten by these charitable actions as much by war
Their wounds didn't heal
And they found sores on weary feet
To find they had grown hungry mouths there too
The shoes that ate the distance beneath their step
Yielding bite marks as footprints and yet

They stored safety as a promise
In between records and held up blue plaques aloft
That said "I was not born here on this date
But I belong here" and I've history and a home to make
But for all the shiny pennies that they saved up in a jar
The princess dentists could still feel each
Generous donation, milky beneath their mattress

And each asylum seeker kept them up
And we clean teethed few, who always knew to brush
For three minutes before bed
Lucky by grace of birth, seas and a few miles more
Looked at these dentists questioning
but they shook their head
Warned us of the toothache of their seeming sweetness
So tell us about dental hygiene
how to floss lies from our gums
or else wait for all our teeth to fall out
Have them taken from beneath our pillows
Where  we had gracefully saved them like we were told to
Constructed into fortresses
Utilized the tooth extraction cotton buds
as comforting ear plugs and pulled  the wool over our eyes

Let’s wait until our retirement
Till we realise the Toothfairy wants our bones
Not just our molars
and we pushed away those who only needed
The chance of rest and the chance of somewhere
new and safe to show us how to smile
So brush your teeth tonight
And be thankful
you will never know that those who turn away from you
Will do so, because your breath
Still stinks of all the **** you so readily eat.
This is in response to the immigration crisis and the image of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy who was washed up on the shore in Turkey in 2015 as well as the image of the Conservative party of Britain as these scheming, ****** up terrifying fey creature that we all kind of expect a helping hand from.
Raj Arumugam Jan 2012
Do not look like that, Cora
I have done my best, and I do
I paint and that is what I do...
you know, you know, Cora;
we have known each other
since our childhood:
O for the days of Vermont
the summers of joy and fun
when we were but children
and our hopes were high -
and my mind breaks and my heart weakens
when I see you and the children now
and that I cannot put food on the table
give you the things you need
I can paint, Cora - oh for the life of me, I can -
but I do not know how to haggle,
how to beat the mind of those who undervalue my work
how do you make money
when but art is in the heart?
There is nothing else within me...
I walk in the world an innocent;
‘strange’ they call me, Cora
I try, I try - O I try
I paint plaques and decorations if necessary -
but the money, the money eludes me
it is only paint that sticks;
and I can paint
and that is all I know and that I can do
when the agony blows like cruel storms in my mind
You know, I try, O you know
my spirit nearly breaks
Cora, Cora, Cora
I have done my best, I do
to put bread and meat on the table
for the children and you
but money eludes me, it eludes me
I paint and that is what I do -
you know, you know, Cora
Do not look like that, Cora
poem based on painting “Portrait of Artist's Wife” by Ralph Albert Blakelock (American,1847-1919)
zen Dec 2018
These are my favorite things,
taken to the pawn shop,
These are my favorite movies, books, and trinkets,
thrown in the dump,
and my favorite memories,
framed in plaques of wood and plastic,
Mary goes round merrily, making its way
round to take me to the moon,
and a Monday no longer mundane,
and the imperfections of my reflections,
worn around my mane
bejeweled
Those marble plaques in the cemetery
hold no dead beneath them
yet in the rising mists of winter evenings
when night like loose dark pebbles
fall from the sky
can be heard hooves of trotting horses
from the rows of cold white stones
and on nights favored by moon
is visible cavalry in scarlet serge
with pith helmets and carbine rifles
piercing the terror paused wind
with cries of vengeance
mirthful in washing blood with blood
on the fields of Cawnpore
dissolving into marble white stones
steeped in the peace of moonlight.
Sepoy Mutiny (1857)
On 27 June, 1857 in the town of Cawnpore (now Kanpur), India, sepoy mutineers laid siege to a British army encampment reportedly massacring British women and children.
Two days later, a company of British soldiers captured the town and extracted bloodied revenge.
This work is inspired from the time many years ago when I used to spend the evening hours alone at a cemetery in Calcutta where stand the war memorials of the British soldiers killed in the mutiny.
Francie Lynch Nov 2016
Our corner graveyard
Looks so inviting,
The lawns are cut,
There's solar lighting.
A wrought-iron gate
Is freshly painted,
Shade trees shelter
Graves of the innocent.
The Italians built a mausoleum,
Where pictures of their deceased greet them,
Looking full of vim and joy
At having pictures taken.
Beneath the temples, in the crypts,
Celtic crosses and brass plaques,
Olympians and outcasts,
All professions, our world's best,
Lie wasting just like us,
In their oak, brass-handled coffins.
The solar lighting at the graves is weird. It looks like a city from above.
Joseph S Pete Jun 2017
George Saunders is a better writer than I could ever be,
Such an incisive observer of the modern condition,
So witty and urbane,
A satirist with staying power.
Everybody loves a writer who’s legit funny.
It’s the Cinnamon and sugar in the oatmeal of reading.

George Saunders is smarter than me.
Dude is a bona fide scientist
Who earned a degree of geophysical engineering
From one of the STEMiest of STEM schools.
I was an English Major, and even English Major nerd god
Garrison Keillor rags on us as likely to someday ask
If you’d like fries with that.

George Saunders has lived a more adventurous life than me.
He was an engineer who worked on pipelines in Sumatra
And regales NPR types with his tales about venturing
Headlong into a monkey ****-contaminated river.
He’s thatched roofs, pulled knuckles at a slaughterhouse,
Rang up purchases at a 7-Eleven.
Saunders proposed to his wife after three weeks.

George Saunders is more distinguished than me.
His list of awards is endless.
Guggenheims, MacArthur genius grants, PEN/Malamud Awards,
A gaggle of National Magazine Awards,
The ******* Lannan Foundation.
Everyone has honored the guy.
I've got a bronze pig and some plaques.

George Saunders is more beloved than I am.
He addresses graduating classes all over the country.
Everyone man, woman and child has read “Sea Oak.”
Every man, woman and child loves “Sea Oak.”
It’s taught in every college in the country.
It’s about as perfect as a short story can get.

Realistically, I’ll never be as good a writer as George Saunders,
Yet the brilliance he pours forth into the world
Inspires me to write.
J. W. May 2013
Ishmael Run; So begins the Journey.

Thoughts lead thusly; there is no death, only the fulfilment of purpose. We live relatively long and for that period of being and becoming  we mostly find a petty meaning for ourselves but in this we stand wrongly. This is a sick joke we are involved in, there is a dark underlying purpose that eventually swallows us all into the ground to become a part of something monumental; the compilation of events known as history.

I am no cynic, and neither am I depressed, ashamed or even slightly darkened by this thought, on the contrary it is this knowledge that allows me to live. Without such inspiration life would be empty, totally and utterly discredited. Because there is enlightenment, to know the meaning to life as it is to end it, there may be ease within the world and no pitfalls of delusion or false hopes to fall into. I need not to push beyond myself or anyone else, I have no reason to attend to anything, is this a freedom?

Although, do not listen or take heed too much of what i have to say, we are afterall only the blind leading the blind

The knack of evolution has been lost in a flurry of Televisions, computers, fast food, consumer complexes, all devices to steal the process of thought and create an illusion of contentment.

this is no revolution.

But who am i? Who am I to comment so boldly on the degradation of man and lay out the pathway to salvation? Well, in truth I am no one. No one particularly adverse in anything at all, I simply exist. Like the underground man, I was spiritually sick and that sickness drove my spirit to death, and now  I am free!  I am enlightened and my burden is lighter for it, but if the truth is to be told there is nothing special about me. It is the conclusion of a lifetime that anyone could come to, before my eyes were opened, I knew nothing. Now, I know I knew nothing and I now know I still know nothing since it is simple; there really is nothing to know. Since everything you know you only think you know, why think of it? And this is the trouble with our current state of existence; we are duped into believing there is something to know and something to gain through the advancement of knowledge when really, it is to no gain to gain knowledge. They say knowledge is power but, the trick my friends, is that knowledge is a pack of wolves dressed in snowy coats. People who are in the know are so sure of themselves that nothing else could be right, people in the know believe their words are powerful, how wrong they are. You may say knowledge is power because those who have the knowledge to build bombs are powerful, they are powerful ideas and powerful Ideas are stolen by nations for their own purpose and gain. It is not knowledge, but resource. However if all these intellectualls are wrong, how even more wrong we are for elevating them on pedestals! Those who know believe their vast knowledge amounts to something but in truth brothers, it leads to nothing since we all share the same inevitable fate. Some may talk about how those who are wise or those who know, live a life that matters, a life with substance, but unless they abandon their meaning of, and the importance they place on knowledge they will never live a life of substance. If the world is based upon paradox, then it is in nothing that the substance of true life is. That is half the point in life, right? To find meaning and truth and all that guru fulfilment crap we have shouted at us from every corner, but I speak logical sense brothers when I say that the world is corrupt, and due to its self inflicted corruption you can trust nothing that comes from it. Because of the nature of truth, truth is something that can be portrayed through lies and so continues the pattern of the paradox, in that way a misanthrope does more for humanity than the praised philanthropist.

Something we must all look into at one stage or another on this terminal walk called life is who are these fellow pilgrims? The drunks, the smackheads, the dropouts, the insane, the depressed, the clinical, the lost and beyond, the type of people who colour life with variety. Just where are they? Those who have overcome life and succeeded its brutal shapes, forms and sizes. It is something everyone ought to ask and they are a people whom everyone ought to seek out.

indulge me and let me tell you a story of something I knew once.

An untimely death**

I met with something remarkable today, an experience I have not to this moment known, I fear it has crashed like a meteor into my brain and will leave its weighty crater for some time to come. I witnessed the death of a young man; an untimely death. The fulfilment of his journey caused by his own actions and now, where is he? He exists in memories, he exists in my memory. He has handed his existence over to me and I must choose what to do with it; whether to discard it and have him lost in the shadows or whether to create something of significance to him and he will rest in the illuminated paths of history? If I discard him he will continue in another memory, in a number of other memories I’m sure but to me, he will be dead and no one will see or know him ever again, what anyone else might think of him, is by definition, meaningless to me.

My memory of him is this; as a blur of colour and heightened emotion he rain past me on the platform at Waterloo underground, I barely caught his face except for a piercing glimpse of his eyes. Dressed in bohemian colours he was there and like the most eloquent dancer he jumped with glory, his legs bent back and up, his arms raised to praise his fate and then he was gone. Replaced with a loud crashing thunderous echo and flashes of red and white, red and white and then, everything was gone, all was calm on Waterloo underground. Everyone seemed amazed, people around me covered their faces in their hands, or hid their eyes, I could not stop gazing at the spot from which he made his final leap into a state of conclusion. That was it though, he was concluded and everything he may have ever worked for, lived through or experienced was concluded in those final moments; the most magnificent and pulchritudinous thing i, or anyone of us could ever only watch, performed by the greatest actor of our lives.

You see my comrades, the truth is the greatest theatrical shows are those that make an impression, the ones that take a lifetime to forget, and witnessing a death so splendidly done is something no memory, no matter how much amount of intoxication or denial would ever erase. To attempt to destroy that memory is to dishonour the greatest person one never met, or possibly did. Those of us who understand the meaning in life also understand that those who conclude life on their own terms and by their own means are martyrs, the martyrs of life who are usually all too readily forgotten. You will find plaques and statues commemorating those who died to save the ungrateful masses, or died to save their motherland; a more noble, albeit pointless cause. To those who die for the cause that life has become unbearable because society has pushed them to the edges of high cliffs and gently, tenderly, lovingly lowered them down to be smashed against the rocks by the rising tide; well, where is their remembrance? We will engrave the names of those who we sent to be murdered into the pages of history, but when it comes to those we ****** ourselves? Well I think those are the ones who we would rather sooner forget out of guilt because they are the evidence of our failures.
Mike Hauser Feb 2017
it is just as i suspected
a lonely echo to the sound
can't remember where she left it
another day down for the count

some folk accept the fact
she has bought all that she owns
and with what little she has left
her heart beats alone

they hand out prizes to the winners
sympathy plaques held out for the rest
another night of T.V. dinners
where loneliness feeds itself

she tries her best to overcome it
her thoughts like a broken home
feels she's the only one in the running
as her heart beats alone

never once trusted much in love
says it's a drug that doesn't last
anyways she could never afford enough
if the truth in it be said

certainly didn't wish for it
the direction her life's been thrown
but when it all comes down to it
her heart beats alone
Daniel J Weller Jul 2018
Stern men line a path, to
Doors with plaques stating former occupants:
Chopin, Churchill, Napoleon III.

Overhead flags hang early evening shadows
From ornate golden arms
Across the first of nine or ten marble steps.

And up them walk folk with schmoozing faces
From cars with private drivers
And windows tinted black.

White limestone porticos are
Split by solid black adorned with gold,
And expensive gowns in violent colour.

And I notice the eyes
Fixed on my passing
As I slip into familiar grey.
St James' Place / King's Street, London, July 2018

As part of 'View from...', a collection of observational poetic experiments, whereby I allow myself five minutes to finish a poem regarding my surroundings at that time.

— The End —