"poets" poems
*Never fall in love with a poet
for their words are sometimes lies
on occasions they're a shield
on occasions a disguise
They will take you on a journey
upon which they bare their soul
in a bid to ease your burdens
in a bid to make you whole
But in every word they choose
for the stories that they tell
lies a little piece of heaven
and a little piece of hell
Tormented souls we poets are
sometimes quite broken and despaired
in search of lost expressions
missed by others who once cared
Never fall in love with a poet
unless you're prepared to share their pain
to hold them close on the darkest nights
over and again*
Sep 13, 2012
Sep 13, 2012 at 12:19 AM UTC
The poet lives two lives.
One on the outside,
And one in their mind.
When you look in their eyes
You could see an abyss.
If you looked long enough
You could sink into it.
But most people don’t see it.
Take the time to read the words, though,
And you would know for sure.
The poet lives in two different worlds.
May 22, 2018
May 22, 2018 at 5:08 PM UTC
dedicated to all the better poets here...
don't know much about a quatrain
don't know how to write a refrain,
surely could not compose a
courtyard elegy
maybe after
and still untilled,
I been buried,
'n checked out
the neighborhood competition...
as for limerick,
that is Dr. Seuss
and Ogden Nash's shtick
with whom, eye,
a believed descendant,
cannot compete...
Oh dear me,
no ode node-ed within,
as for a pastoral,
kinda hard to feat,
where I live,
a pastoral is grass cracks
surviving under,
breaking through to the other side
of concrete and blacktop rulers
Maybe one of you
will haiku,
send us a senryu,
send off, see ya!
the doc once diagnosed
a severe case of inflamed iambic pentametery,
with antibiotics and a diet of Hamletery,
was cured most satisfactorily
this silly pen-man-sinking-ship
ain't capable of dat,
boy how 'bout
an epitaph
for a graveyard stone,
should be plenty of room...
as it will be plenty short...
all eye see and all eye know
is vignettes that birth in me
walking down the street,
that's my bread and butter,
my soul's delicacies...
and moments that recorded
here, for a posteriored posterity,
as noted in my all my living
testaments,
drinking and spilling the vin,
from the uninvented igniting vignettes
that consecrate and connect our
knowing each other though odds are
we will never meet...we can yet
drink together
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be."
May 3, 2015
May 3, 2015 at 7:50 AM UTC
~*for M. both
a living one, and
imagined, too*~
10/5/25
just woke up and began to work;
the muses are cofuse-ed
they think when head hits pillow.
it is there then the~moment to
refill my head
with verses glorious, alas, alack,
into the sub-subconscious furnace they go
to melt, meld or even die
iron of ironies; 90% of these words,
were adrift in my head when I
to bed, "for to be repaired" last night, and
only came to be recalled @ 2:34 am
when them muses and you guru,
woke me to 'get outta bed', and you
who
bids me sleep,
this clashing arousal,
starts engine's cylinders to begin
live~composing, stoking and stroking,
to awake, create, reassemble and uncover
the poetic notions trans~versing my head
one-day, someday they will depart,
for cleaner, greener Champs-Élysées,
where reborn poets speak all languages
with equal fluency, eagerly awaiting
my spouting in Hindi (already ✅), in
Hebrew and any/all dialecticals this
god earth
ever mothered
And there you have it, my FPOTD, dear m.,
SUNday 10/5 & writ in the city where I am alive
in the Den of Writing, where the muses
like to hang out with their old companion,
until such time they will come to inhabit
a younger, well rested, equally restless,
a not-my-mine mind
<nml>
Oct 5, 2025
Oct 5, 2025 at 3:08 AM UTC
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and ****** and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.
94k
PLEASE FORGIVE ME
for not reading right now.
1) I've been very busy with personal issues.
2) I've been on the low with some poets
who need to talk.
3) I've been emailing Elliott York all
morning about a couple of things.
a) The asinine war that was happening
here on his site. It's caused many to leave
and it (the attacks on Wolf Spirit included)
MUST STOP. Gary L has extended the olive
branch. THE REST OF YOU MUST DO SO
AS WELL. It's kindergarten stuff! You're
ADULTS. ACT LIKE IT!
b) A couple of years ago I came up with an
idea. The Poet Tree T-shirt and poster. It would kind of look like this...
P O E T S
XXXXX
XXXX♡XXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXX
**P
O
E
T
R**
love.joy Y peace
happiness.pain
other.poet.words.
...FILL HEARTS
The X's above would be POET NAMES!
YOUR NAME WOULD BE ON THE SHIRTS!
You could then get the t-shirt/poster
from Elliott York!
It's an idea that I personally put out
a while back but never was able to
follow up on.
Email Elliott York if you like the idea.
I want it to UNIFY POETS. We are ALL
LEAVES ON THIS TREE!
Thanks for reading.
♡ Catherine
Feb 6, 2016
Feb 6, 2016 at 3:17 PM UTC
dust cloud heavy
in an apricot sky
cottonwood mucker
under ambrose pale
whippet and shepherd
mill at the earth patch
yellow birch hangs
over red bench park
combine shavings
in crack rust brown
scissors chips fall
at the back stop
whiskey jack looters
sing patented chords
siblings (and 2 wheel enthusiasts!)
give thanks
joyous retrievers
master the criss cross
bare maples stand
at settlers way
barred owl and blue jay
whistle in the fore-wind
ghosts
and goblins
pull on the seeds
wind gusts belt
over the west gulch
a blood rush churns
in the chilling fall morn
hallowed grounds still
at the midday
quiet reflections
of the afghan
and hound
jumpers unite
at the oxbow
route runners bend
(on a sultry foray!)
meadows exposed
in the framework
ball parks empty
with pennants past
barrel dirt favors
the brew house
crimson and copper
find bracken ridge gate
harvest hands savor
the honey and hops
blankets of color
for a winter's hatch
brush fire kept
under steady peruse
bark bites fly
and embers glow
pine cones drop
from the timber tops
3 wick candles
grace the dinner place
shiver and ******
at the piper's call
cob web dew
on the shadowy gates
a chilled mist mellows
the season's return ~
poets and artists
and dreamers awake
Oct 9, 2017
Oct 9, 2017 at 11:55 PM UTC
~for those who will read this and weep~
*the quiet ones,
the silent Job ones,
who quote not from the
Book of Lamentations,
but author their own,
based on-the-job experience
localized versions of cryptic elegiacs
accepting the wooden crosses borne,
stepping up to the
unrequested unforeseen,
then buried under, burnt alive,
yet never relieved by dying,
nailed by words, stronger than iron,
promises sworn, promises kept
with no ending date relief,
promises by and to themselves,
but not for themselves!*
*the wearers of crystal glass shackles,
adorned with decorative locks for which
no key did the maker make,
nor any divine creator
dare conceive an early release,
never no escape contemplated,
for the lock human, unrepentant unbreakable,
a decorative useless metaphor gesture,
a blunt “life ***** advertisement
I compose amidst a
bus pond of mismatched city folk,
a tapestry of ages colors and differing views on god/no god,
none would believe that as the bus sways me,
it’s in rhythm to holy choral music,
hundreds year old,
divinity masses and motets worships,
where one human can hide temporarily
a safe house,
to calm his questioning relentless
from the horrors of no answers,
for when the mind has no solution
to the rough and tumbling lives,
lived in glass shackled confinement,
the poets desperation equals theirs*
*summon eagles to transport these imprisoned,
but the shackled refuse,
I come to them but they wave me off,
I go crazy for once I was enslaved,
thirty years war that left devastation,
from which so many poems created
so I speak with heightened regard
of one who planned futures for others where his
non-existence was a founding father (ha!)*
*but the day came and
I was released by my own inactions,
but means nothing until a way to
away found
to release the yet bound early*
got a couch, airline miles, hundred dollars
in my pocket and an unrelenting need
to save them, a consumption disease,
the glass shackled, at ease,
won’t rest till all are freed
this my creed
no one left behind
these cyber words do not mock
for they are unbounded, set free,
when
the flesh connects and the needs of the flesh
are stronger for they are in heart conceived
Jun 23, 2018
Jun 23, 2018 at 5:45 PM UTC
Brave men fighting
Knights crawling
Strong men dying
Kings crying
Emperors imploring
Kingdoms falling
Empires collapsing
Poets writing
Musicians performing
Paintings begging
Statues Kneeling
For a glimpse of your eyes
--Hisham
Aug 17, 2018
Aug 17, 2018 at 8:30 PM UTC
Why do poets always talk about the ocean's waves,
about their single file march to shore,
and yet never talk about my grandmother's farts,
which arrive in time, one after the other, with equal
regularity?
Are these poets too holy to comment on anything
less than nature's flashiest gestures?
Are we going to spend another millenia searching
for meaning in sunsets and waterfalls?
Or will we finally turn our ear to Grammy's ****
and away from all that pretty stuff,
and hear that foul, muted trumpet sing,
marking the end of an era?
Mar 18, 2015
Mar 18, 2015 at 4:45 PM UTC
0 followers?
Dear New Poet:
Then I'm your man,
your very own
Northern star,
one leg up of a
3 legged stool,
upon which all,
we, enthroned poets,
the world-over,
do rule
the honor you
bequeath me
to be,
a first follower,
your very own
first responder,
it, cannot be
disdained
nor
diminished
this instance,
this birth,
a novice revival,
heart transplant,
makes it
the sweetest blessing
to be the first—
let us be
the quencher
of a desert thirst so long
in the parching,
the throat burning,
by a desert sojourning,
of a now ending
forty times
four hundred years
so come to me!
message me a message,
find me a find,
your poem fine,
so now we vow,
our embrace will
ne’er be broken
give me this
honorific!
let us together
be terrific,
raise our glasses,
with arms entwined
toasting you and
all that mind and
breasted chest of yours,
full bursting from
its future~contains,
of which,
its full release,
brings a fuller life
for us both
I am a father.
I am a grandfather.
I am a First Follower.
and a First Responder,
for all who needs a leg up,
so step upon my heart,
it be but a first step upon a
ladder with no top, no end ensighted
my legs are as old as time, but,
measure me not by the rings and
the metered scales of gray hair aging,
shock of white, a cain mark, wizard-wizened
but
by the muscles
of my deep affection,
the solemnity of this,
my irrevocable promise
this,
the blessing
we both make and earn,
when you write,
and while we wait,
in quiet attendance -
for all of your good works,
your kept promises
Blessed
are You Lord our God,
Ruler of the Universe
who has given us life,
sustained us until now,
***allowing, allying, and
alloying***
the treader of treacherous waters,
reader, writer, swimmer,
to reach, meet, embrace
and greet this day,
this new born poem,
with hallelujahs
whispering and shoutings
together,
as one
in one, of one,
one
Mar 29, 2018
Mar 29, 2018 at 1:11 PM UTC
I like immigrants, immigration. Legal immigration,
Jane passionately corrects. Actually my goal is a borderless world.
Gathering the neighborhood like family.
The men discuss sterilizing welfare mothers. I say You're working
around the edges,
humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet,
even those with jobs. And spouses. And houses.
Yet it's an idyll of an early summer evening, new cut grass,
two baseball teams of children playing in it. Safe from Pakistan.
News photos of Muslim refugees, women in blue robes, biblically
carrying children away from holocaust. The fundamentalist army
not far behind, beheading sinners, sure in its righteousness
as the Holy Roman Empire.
Somehow Joel Osteen the evangelist comes up
while talking about how the Catholic Church is irrelevant in North
America,
even Latin America and Africa are going evangelical.
Izzi likes Osteen, awesome extemporaneous speaker, no teleprompter,
up from bootstraps message. My wife says he's probably Jewish.
Fortunately no one claims the Holocaust never happened or slavery
was voluntary.
What is the carrying capacity of the planet?
In China is it each couple or each adult that gets one offspring?
As life expectancy and standards rise,
family size diminishes. We draw together into greener, tighter cities.
The children of three monotheistic religions, atheists and agnostics
play in city streets, work farm fields, explore forests, deserts,
grasslands, space.
Two ancient female poets: Enheduanna and Sappho
are a revelation. The clarity of their complaints:
lost lover, lost city.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM UTC
Ilion gray
poet extraordinary
is away
learning the codes hidden in raindrops
no reason for surprise;
for the mountains of Brooklyn, the Manhattan caverns of Sunhenge^, corridors of narrow focus for trapping the declining sun rays,
neither high enough, narrow blinding,
to keep a good man from doing good things that life provides as opportunities
to do the right thing
he muses that it took five years for the other poets to understand our
poem-dreams;
avant-garde he says,
but I laugh,
never felt more misunderstood
and reply take care, be
en garde!
no matter for he is learning a new language,
the codes hidden in raindrops in a land of wheat
once called Indian Territory and eager
await his return so we may
walk along the Brooklyn shoreline,
beginning from under the Brooklyn Bridge
where Washington’s men escaped a British trap
and he can decode for me the whispery thunderous noises of
NY
showers that come up so sudden, so roughened, but right now,
the seductive sun blinks in Manhattan windowed towers reflecting back on to our East River as golden blinks of nature
We will walk lost in the absorption of our
different commonalities, holding the hands of
his young son, and my Wendy,
both of them equal in possession of round saucer eyes
that give us poems
He calls me me friend,
I call him brother, teacher, master, better than the best,
well recalling a late night message that bred
a five year conversation ongoing
not everything need be coded
what you read here
it is not coded,
for the raindrops come clear and clean
and the poems land on our tongues
bounce on the foreheads and eyes of the babes, all stored and saved for the future blessings spoken in a single tongue
7/18/18
^https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge
Jul 18, 2018
Jul 18, 2018 at 10:41 PM UTC
Are you listening to the whispers? are you feeling scandalised?
Harbouring ***** little feelings that you wanna sanitise?
Walk through the swinging doors of a catholic franchise
Ask em for that sailors knot a black-n-white man-ties
To the pairs of prying eyes his practical rebuke
Is a marital disguise and a tactical puke
Throw the garter ‘mongst the pigeons, the voluntary victims...
Whose single minds are filled with matrimonial conviction
Paired up poets pool their miseries; the price of art
Each miserable synergy - the sum of its parts
Did he swear that he’d hold you ever dear to his heart?
To love and to cherish til your knees did part?
If she wants you like her father and you want her like your mother
What the hell are you gonna do when you’re bored of one another?
There she stands on ceremony all silk and sinew
While the vow evicted from his Adam’s apple continues
To stutter as the panic builds like stifled farts
Til it splutters its devotions on her lady parts
Her eyes sentence you to sit though your neck-hairs stand
She’s the ****** ****** written in the lines on your palm
Old scores squeeze sideways through her gritted teeth
And he takes on the debt of every promise she believed
Hide the love-bites in a polo-neck, your love life in a Rolodex
When the ***** hand of happen-stance runs its evil down your keks
Cos like the indelible digits on your bathroom mirror
Love is for life until you dress it with liquor
If she wants you like her father and you want her like your mother
What the hell are you gonna do when you’re bored of one another?
We are but experiments, seven billion shades of wrong
The clever ones stay celibate, the others pass it on
That’s an easy line to settle-on in present company
Single-riders in the peloton to pick up the debris
Mar 7, 2018
Mar 7, 2018 at 5:44 PM UTC
*I come here and see sad smiles mostly,
I see poets and sad, knowing smiles of poetry...*
Mar 29, 2015
Mar 29, 2015 at 12:05 PM UTC
Out of all these poems I've written of love and longing,
Out of all these years searching in the sea of people,
I still yet to understand how it's possible to have words without a muse
I often wonder what it would be like to have a muse without words
I believe it would feel suffocating
As you choke on all the words you long to exhale within your next breath
For a poet to be trapped by words is to be trapped by passion
Sometimes my heart swells up so big it walks across a sea of words and sinks into the deepness of the waters
Lost among the clearer beats on land
An abnormality pushed away from love like an ancient curse buried in my skin
One day i'll make it learn to swim rather than let it sink and bathe in sin
The question still remains
Would it be better to have a muse and feel like drowning,
Or to have the the words to accompany the lonely?
Jul 16, 2018
Jul 16, 2018 at 2:24 PM UTC
~ Ode to Spring ~
Cherry blossoms filled with bloom
rhododendron’s sweet perfume
warming winds feign summer’s breeze
songbirds singing from the trees
Open windows, déjà vu
sunsets filled with graceful hues
families gather on their strolls
Mother Nature for the soul
Baseball season at the park
evenings lifted from the dark
daylight savings' finally here
patios for wine and beer
Cleaning house and planting seeds
rebirth fills the days and deeds
picnic baskets, hummingbirds
poets find their way in words
Kaleidoscope of bedding plants
shorts in favour over pants
farmers markets, garage sales
power-wash the decks and rails
Hiking, tennis, gardening
inhale the freshness of the spring!
painters, sculptors shape their art
gather here with grateful hearts
Mar 31, 2019
Mar 31, 2019 at 1:15 PM UTC
How to become a poet:
Let someone rip your soul apart.
And in the need of mending ,
You will replace it with words.
May 29, 2019
May 29, 2019 at 1:45 PM UTC
My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,
but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.
She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,
someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.
22.8k
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it' all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I' not jealous
because we' never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame -- not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they' told
us, but listening to you I wasn' sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, " her, print her, she' mad but she'
magic. there' no lie in her fire." I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you **** in the bathroom,
but that didn' happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn' help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
19.5k
The Violent Storm by the Water
(Do You Trust Your Imagination)
was not unexpected
but its fury was without compare,
poet awake in semi-preparation
living by water should be a human right for all,
even a small room, overlooking, gives new meaning to
perspective
we blessed with a patio door, encased in a glass window big enough for a smallish elephant to come visit and play with children
a storm is observed up close and personal as if one was in
an IMAX 3D theater, and the edges of existence were being redefined,
sharpened by fury, tooled by tools untouched by mortal hands
miles of bay illuminated with bass drum furious accompaniment
stand before the screen,
poets arms outstretched as a supplicant,
the light of the lightening passes through him,
yet , behind me, she still sleeps
then the entire house shakes, reverberates, as if to say:
”tremble humans, cower, you are not permitted to watch my majesty, for such it was when created heaven and earth”
bold poet window worshipping
risky answers:
“but who will know
if even a poet cannot declaim sights
no one else has seen?”
”true, true, but you must choose if poet truly,
do you trust your imagination human,
to prove that the powers of the heavens are limitless?”
write of storms unseen and nature endless miracles
***”then you may call yourself
a miracle too,
a poet***”
Aug 12, 2018
Aug 12, 2018 at 12:14 PM UTC
You say doctors will
make the best poets.
They will search your emotions
by the skin; cutting open to reveal
and revel
with surgical precison.
They will play with
heavy drugs and blades--
nothing shall hide beneath
the armors of bone and muscle.
They know the anatomy
of the heart too well.
They will find the things
you have hidden in your chest.
I say
doctors will never be poets.
They are too mechanical,
too fast with their edges
and ridges.
They cannot see the pain
as pain but merely as an anomaly.
That sadness is black bile
not melancholia.
They cannot sing to you
but only clammer in medical jargon.
Poets will use their imperfect words,
and perfect rhymes
to find the secrets of your rib cage
with ease.
They will find every flaw
of your broken body
and make it the best story
you've never heard.
Doctors,
they will put love to define as
a momentary rush of adrenaline,
an arrythmia for another human
caused due to an imbalance of the heart rhythm.
Poets will tell you
that love is the first jolt
of life for them.
They will say love is a state of euphoria
that takes those irregular rhythms to perfect symphonies.
Doctors say that
veins carry blood
devout of oxygen.
I say that they carry your broken emotions
to their feelings factory
to mend it within its beautiful catacombs.
All those doctors
will find and fix you
with perfect solutions.
And these poets
will do their best
to be your perfect solution.
Jan 31, 2014
Jan 31, 2014 at 8:25 AM UTC
a thousand brilliant lies
(Hafiz, Iran 1320-1389); (L.F.P., USA 20~21st century)
- Hafez - - Left Foot Poet-
“I have a if only, in my meager possess,
thousand brilliant lies, but one lie when easy asked
For the question: the simplest damning of,
How are you? are you generally happy?
I have a what is god you ask,
thousand brilliant lies. no lies required,
For the question: many answers upon my face visible,
What is God? unsure if any worthy of believing
If you think that the 8 centuries separate us, yet
Truth can be known, you lie; we poets - you, I, all believe
From words in the divinity of words
If you think that the a thousand brilliant sparkles
Sun and the Ocean, when Sun loves the Ocean,
Can pass through that each one a poem passing,
tiny opening Called my mouth, my wide eyes,
the mouth, uttering a Cohen's hallelujah
O someone should So we gleam, mirthing in glorious
start laughing! and gleeful delight at ourselves
Someone should start for your brilliant happy lies easily
wildly Laughing Now!"
unravel into a thousand laughs
Jun 21, 2018
Jun 21, 2018 at 2:30 PM UTC