"preserved" poems
Twas the night before
Hawaii islands on the radar
A monster opened the door
It shoulders a storied scar
Of the last time, it hit its mark
Rearing its ugly head, ahead of pace
As the eye looms '82 in the dark
Wrinkles on this eve sit sadly in boldface
Kauai sat once in unnatured infamy
It sunny shores hit once by the beast
Clouds of villains played in that symphony
With the next generation looking to feast
As the residence brace for the worst
Of the monster stepping on its paradise
With category four winds and cloudburst
The hope is that the monster plays nice
With the Aloha Spirit preserved with leis
In place of bold headlines of strung wrath
Hawaii can pray rays of light in the coming days
Willing the monster to take a different path
Logan Robertson
8/23/2018
Aug 23, 2018
Aug 23, 2018 at 7:04 AM UTC
I lie on my back at midnight
hearing the marvelous strange chime
of the clocks, and know it's mid-
night and in that instant the whole
world swims into sight for me
in the form of beautiful swarm-
ing m u t t a worlds-
everything is happening, shining
Buhudda-lands,
bhuti
blazing in faith, I know I'm
forever right & all's I got to
do (as I hear the ordinary
extant voices of ladies talking
in some kitchen at midnight
oilcloth cups of cocoa
cardore to mump the
rinnegain in his
darlin drain-) i will write
it, all the talk of the world
everywhere in this morning, leav-
ing open parentheses sections
for my own accompanying inner
thoughts-with roars of me
all brain-all world
roaring-vibrating-I put
it down, swiftly, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into one second
of time-I'll be long
robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City
Fame Immortal & they'll
have to find me where they find
the t h n u p f t of my
shroud bags flying
flag yagging Lucien
Midnight back in their
mouths-Gore Vidal'll
be amazed, annoyed-
my words'll be writ in gold
& preserved in libraries like
Finnegans Wake & Visions of Neal
12.6k
*
*
Your soul is the moon after dawn
A vapour who sings of love as well as pain
A delicate blossom that twirls with zephyrs
Fragrant and enriched by the snow's kiss
The geese have fled from iced lakes
long preserved with whispers of old
In the shade of bamboo, my flute is heard,
carried to you by the frost-kissed air
Your soul, a vapour, the moon after dawn
Hear my hymn of peace,
till winters turn to fawn
*
*
Aug 31, 2018
Aug 31, 2018 at 12:21 PM UTC
120 seconds.
2 minutes.
That is all it took to change my life,
to shatter my heart,
to take my childhood.
Locked between four walls,
stuffed between forgotten papers and books,
I was made prey for my once trusted predator.
Now I understand that I have never stepped outside of those walls.
Those walls have taken refuge around my heart,
and surrounded my mind.
They have preserved the initial scars,
and have supported the hatred, sadness, and pity for the hunter and hunted.
These walls have held me up until now.
Life without them seems intangible,
treacherous.
They protect me from another life-changing two minutes,
but they also shield me from the light.
I want that light.
I want that freedom.
I want to live.
Every nail that I remove leaves a scar,
every board I break off makes me vulnerable,
but I think it is time.
My heart needs room to grow,
and my mind needs to learn to trust,
to trust that life is worth living,
to trust that life can be kind,
to trust that I am worth it.
Jul 2, 2013
Jul 2, 2013 at 6:27 PM UTC
'Why is it so painful to grow?'
A seed.
Just a seed buried under the ground.
Under the pressure of the soil,
It fights to grow.
The seed cracks,
such a sturdy little seed,
opens with a painful snap.
A sprout coils out.
Out of the cracked little seed.
A sprout now crushed under,
Under the pressure of the unforgiving ground.
Yet still... It grows.
A little sprout,
Now reaches up.
Up and away from the little seed,
and up to the light of the sun.
Pushing and groaning it bursts out.
Out from the unforgiving ground.
Yet now new dangers are to be found.
Will it be trampled
Or eaten alive?
The possibilities are endless,
The ways it could die.
And still.. it grows.
The sprout toils endlessly,
always stretching and growing
Reaching for the crimson sun.
The rain falls down
beating upon the sprout.
Pelting it's skin and whipping it about.
It skin hardens painfully,
and sprout becomes stem.
And still It grows.
The stem keeps reaching,
Stretching to the sky.
The stem then splits
It rips in two a bud appears
A little bud,
With so much to do.
Then the bud breaks
A crack appears
a petal unfurls from within.
Then it's a bloom.
Such a sweet little thing.
Until the crack stretches
So the bloom can grow
In to the beautiful rose
We've all come to know.
And still.. it grows.
Thorns burst free
Breaking out of the stem
And petals billow and grow in the breeze.
Then you see me,
And my beauty delights you,
So you wish to see me every day.
And your scissors encircle me
To give you your way.
They cut me in half.
They slice me in two.
being a rose,
There was naught I could do.
You carry me with you,
Your hands coated in my blood,
I'm dying slowly,
All for your love.
And now... I can't grow.
So as I bleed and wither in pain,
You place me in a vase
Or press me in a book,
All to save the bloom for another day.
And as I gasp for air,
Among your dry pages,
You leech me of all life,
Perfectly preserved
just so I could last the ages.
Or else I am drowning
In glass and water
My beauty wasted
hour by hour
Day by day
All to satisfy your whimsical ways.
And now all I wish to know,
'Why is it so painful to grow?'
Feb 23, 2018
Feb 23, 2018 at 10:41 PM UTC
the bus poets
we are the modern day chimney sweeps,
the ***** black faced coal miners of the city,
digging up its grit, toasted with its spit,
the gone and forgotten elevator operators,
the anonymous substitutable,
still yet glimpsed occasionally,
grunts of urbanity
provoking a surprised
whaddya know!
once like the bison and the buffalo,
we were thousands,
word workers roaming the cities,
the intercity rural routes and the lithe greyhounds
across the land of the brave,
free in ways the
founders wanted us to be
us, the stubs and stuff,
harder working poor and lower cases
we were the bus poets,
sitting always in the back of the bus,
where the engines growls loudest,
seated in the - the most overheated
in winter time, so much so
we nearly disrobed,
and then come the summer,
we were blasted with a joking
hot reverie from the vents,
but vent, no, we did not!
no - we wrote and wrote of all we heard,
passion overheated by currents within and without,
recording and ordering the
snatches and the soliloquies of the passengers,
into poem swatches;
the goings on passing by,
the overheard histories,
glimpsed in milliseconds, eternity preserved,
inscribed in a cheap blue lined five & dime notebook,
for all eternity what the eyes
sighed and saw
books ever passed
onto the next generation in boxes from the supermarket,
attic labeled, then forgotten beside the outgrown toys
with our names writ indelible with the magic of
black markers
if you stumble upon a breathing scripter,
let them be, just observe,
as they, you,
these movers and bus shakers,
as they, observe you
tell your children,
you knew one in your youth,
then take them to the attic
retrieve your mother's and father's,
teach your children
how to read, how to see,
the ways of their forefathers,
the forsaken,
the bus poets.
Sep 29, 2017
Sep 29, 2017 at 7:53 AM UTC
If you weren't dark skin you'd blush,
You and your pleasantly "spring" demeanor,
blooming smiles in secret inside your hazmat suit,
from any type of feelings,
you are already infected,
-- and contagious,
yet refuse to admit the goosebumps
on your neck,
without the fortunate luxury of showing your emotion
society has deemed you timeless,
an eloquent flagrant aroma,
the definition of fine wine with a zest -- a spiciness of an impatient "summer",
you are warm,
and the stem of your smiles comes with thorns of poison,
weapons of mass destruction,
so you're cloaked,
tucked away from societal norms,
and expectations -- who are we to judge,
you are correct,
your skin,
is the right tone,
to
grab the attention for all the unwelcome,
literal and figuratively baring a cluster of
ideas,
wants,
desires -- requested by only the elite,
pasteurized and preserved until then.
Sep 1, 2015
Sep 1, 2015 at 7:56 PM UTC
In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In the graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams to not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulers.
On day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.
Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,
or that dead man who possess now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.
Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theatres.
9.3k
Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.
Our Juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late -
Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.
So, chary and excited,
As a thrush linked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.
8k
oh a writer and his smoke
shall never part
and not to gloat
but seemingly
the most important things
are burned,
and not preserved.
Mar 31, 2015
Mar 31, 2015 at 6:43 PM UTC
“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
The Beneficent, the Merciful.
Owner of the Day of Judgement,
Thee (alone) we worship;
Thee (alone) we ask for help.
Show us the straight path,
The path of those whom Thou hast favoured.
Not (the path) of those who earn Thine anger
Nor of those who go astray.”
This we said to you, oh Great One, in the Quran
So many years ago.
But Lord your flocks are fleeing from your fields.
We need your Sheepdog to round them up in their confusion.
They do not see you are a God of many names,
“God” being one of them.
Over the ages you have been Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Mother Earth, Jehovah, God, Allah
And many others.
But always you were The One True One,
Beneficent and Loving.
All men (and women) are equal in your eyes.
All Life to be cherished and preserved.
Thou shalt not ****
Is what you said.
So Allah now’s the time
To correct your children:
Breathe into them
The essence of your thoughts.
Enter their minds as The Holy Ghost,
So many Scrooges there:
Enlighten them
To know what is really Good
And rediscover what it is
To Love.
Amen.
Paul Butters
Nov 20, 2015
Nov 20, 2015 at 6:05 AM UTC
Someone once said,
"A good pun is it's own reword."
But a bad pun
makes me want to strangle a newborn kitten
and then dropkick it into the Cretaceous Period
where it will hopefully be eaten by a Velociraptor
then **** out in a pool of molten lava
and preserved under the earth for the rest of time
but forgotten and ignored by all.
Apr 25, 2013
Apr 25, 2013 at 7:54 AM UTC
They say to keep your eyes open, but your mind closed,
leave your thoughts unspoken
and your body exposed.
We hold such value to anyone who holds a heart,
and when all is said and done we rip ourselves apart.
I've never been one to wake up in the morning,
I love living my life to look at the stars.
You experience complete peace without any kind of warning,
and if you look hard enough you can sometimes see Mars.
If you go back to the year 1944,
sixteen year olds were coming back from war,
and now in today in 2017,
an adolescent is a child and an adult a teen.
We're so far from our natural state,
our entire species is cursed with cancer.
When we were hunter-gatherers we were doing great,
But we thought preserved food was the better answer.
Most live their lives now in a camera,
forever looking for one more person's approval.
Trying to reach a standard of Marilyn or Pamela,
but a step forward would be technological removal.
Let's look back to around 1970,
when people were still struggling with equality,
And most likely by the year 2020,
we'll be oppressed and depressed by the plenty.
Jun 6, 2017
Jun 6, 2017 at 4:05 AM UTC
Freedom At Kannyakumari
“The destiny of India is molded in her class-rooms”
Kothari had no confusion; no vision on the fusion-
of the East and the West, as Swami Vivekananda’s vision,
“The comingling of the East and the West will dawn a new Era”.
As tissue culture, transplantation or cloning
we Indians imbibe the Western Culture;
or as G.M cotton or brinjals,or tomato
Indians are produced, transmuted
destroying the very indigenous genus for material growth.
Ayurveda is preserved not in Sanskrit but in English letters, now !
Followers of Lord Maccaulay as obedient servants,
by experiments,bring up Indians only in blood and colour-
in every other respects-Europeans
(using imperialist - capitalist media);
poor sycophants ,for a visa,
the Indians: now , turn to the West for light,
leaving the bright light under the Urn;
cry for a way of progress, safety and food;
and beg:once self reliant nations as cells of a body
No retrospection or introspection,
only putrefaction, hence , no resurrection.
On August 15th ,at Kannyakumari beach , beside me,
a bare body of a woman(my sister?) lay asleep;
I witnessed at the starry cold mid-night:
the surging sea spitting frothing snow
upon the black rocky *******
protruded, greasy, mossy. bare but fair ,
ever young at the feet of Bharat-matha.
Wet in the salty breeze , from the foul smell of death,
I walked and walked searching shelter,
but no room for a single son with meagre wealth.
The tourism net -workers with the thirst of mosquitoes
hummed around me with highly rented room offer-
source of tourism exploitation- I bargained,
till, morning red balloon rose up in the Eastern horizon
cleaving the vapours of the sea,
when , thousand tongues chanted Gayathri;
then , the locals thronged around the woman on the shore;
somebody among them, staring blear eyed
as the police jeep and the ambulance arrived , bewailed
“O! Gayathri, my darling, O! Gayathri…” Unsoothed.
The chanting and the yelling dissolved in the breeze
that passed by the Vivekananda rock, afar, south
Sep 12, 2012
Sep 12, 2012 at 3:50 AM UTC
the sun will
kiss the earth
each day
and soon
these dashing lines
of youth
hard charcoal, pen and ink
dancing, arousing
the parchment
shall also fade
portraits ought to
be lived
not
preserved
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 7:32 PM UTC
I’d worked late the previous night,
programing applications.
When the alarm went off at four A.M.
I hit snooze- no hesitation.
Eventually my feet found floor,
I stumbled to the shower.
A routine usually done in ten
took me a half an hour.
I was running up the platform steps
but my train just left the station.
Great, I will be late for sure,
I thought, in consternation.
At least the day was perfect,
Warm and clear, no threat of rain.
I fished and found my ticket
and took the next westbound train.
The ”E” was fairly crowded
When I boarded it at Penn
I’d missed the first and I was glad
Another quickly came.
Beneath the streets of Gotham
The subway lurched downtown.
Above all hell was breaking loose
as two large planes were down.
I climbed the stairs up to the street
And entered the inferno
The sky now black from billowing smoke
Bright day turning nocturnal.
A Seven thirty Seven’s wheel-
I heard a woman screaming
I saw a body at my feet
Were we at war or was I dreaming?
I stared up at my window-
where I worked the night before.
Where flames and smoke leapt to the sky-
where my co workers were no more.
They’re jumping, someone shouted
I saw black specks launch from on high.
Better to die upon the street
Than to suffocate or fry.
I turn and ran, I am ashamed.
No Hero’s tale to tell.
I was a safe way away
when the first tower fell.
Had I not hit the button
or dawdled in the shower.
Had I caught my usual train
I’d be dead in the tower.
This is my shame and burden
To live when others died.
Preserved by fate and circumstance
From terror from the sky.
Jan 27, 2012
Jan 27, 2012 at 11:04 PM UTC
In an old...
wallet
box
attic
was an old faded photograph of a photographer.
Meant to be...
left alone
put to rest
forgotten
it was since then brought back by nostalgia and the impossible life that was now to be lived without you.
You liked to be...
behind
smiling through
holding the camera
as you were the photographer but not this time, as you were the photographed...
In front of
smiling at
holding a pose
while I became the photographer, photographing you, the freshly captured photographer in the faded photograph.
In an old...
dream
heart
memory
you never faded but remained the still whole of a perfect silhouette.
The perfect photographer preserved in the perfectly faded photograph for...
love
life
forever.
Feb 19, 2015
Feb 19, 2015 at 2:19 AM UTC
A man once told me
He felt as if he had created me
From scratch, a muse
Conceived by invention,
Rather than the precision of my blood
or the tiny cosmos within my marrow;
He was mine,
But did not belong to me
The path of sirendom
Is paved with gilded lilies,
Soft flesh, and quiet angles
If you let them,
You can drift on through
Your feet hovering three inches above the soil
Saturated ripe with fertility,
Easier than breathing
But there will always be
At least nine of you
In every patch of every field
Preserved in light
The quicksand of reason, immortalized
Delicate whispers convince you
What a lovely work of artistry
An inspiration, the birth of genius
But you are only the vessel
Left empty
But I have never
Belonged to anyone,
No square of grass
Lush enough to rest my head
on a practiced lap
I was not an island to discover;
Sprung from beneath the Mariana,
I was built from the deep place
No pedestal to extend
The unhinge of my reaching arms
I took the long way up
Scratching through earth, long dead
No fruit, carefully arranged
No marble, heavily lidded
The flowers collapsed,
Like your idea of Woman,
To linseed stain
A smashed sunrise
It wasn’t god, but myself
That I met on the other side
Dec 13, 2015
Dec 13, 2015 at 6:16 PM UTC
My Prize for Waiting
~
*tucked in all by myself,
resting dark and quiet
in the thin place^
where the distance between
this world and the next,
is no distance at all,
but a few inches separating,
easily fordable, back and forth-able
my palms, hands down,
come to rest on my *******
and the two thumbs in unison,
begin to sweep the streaming space of their in-between,
conducting a radar sweep-search for the precise point
passageway to poetic mystical places,
hoping to snag any residuals for safekeeping
no hurry to either arrive or depart,
in patient attendance for
rhythms of woven word arrivistes,
coming in no particular order,
asking to be seized, greedy to be
nominated and recognized, immortalized,
as great poetry, prize worthy,
kept for all time inside others poetry chests
but in the thin place,
dream records are not kept,
hazy scraps at best retained,
a recipe for a witnessed totality,
is only a soupy reduction of a
few seconds of hazed video,
that can neither give nor get
no satisfaction
the plastic surgeons attempt to reconstruct
the body of the meal, the real deal,
alas, there are no prizes either
for botched surgeries and pretty but meaningless
poetry scraps
the only evidence of my travels,
a flushing, blushing residual flow,
slow to dissipate, a hangover makers mark
of a sojourn best described as unsatisfying,
my blush, a prize for waiting but failing,
“the most peculiar and most human of all expressions”^^
woe to me when returned in ignominy,
medaled in only base irony,
me and philosopher Pliny,^^^
both dying while recording our own private Vesuvius,
our bodies preserved by voluminous volcanic ash,
but alas, you cannot recite the ash of poetry
so one waits, cut and pasting brown edged
burnt photographs epistles,
that are clinging and clung to the distaff spindle,
insufficient to weave a flax complete
and yet we return perforce twenty four hours from now,
to snag another prized piece of meaningless,
my prize for waiting
in the solitude of the thin place*
3:35am Saturday April 6th, 2019
~
last nights scrap
***cease your whining,
seize your waiting,
therein is your own paid price
for the prize of inspiration***
inspired by Jean Fisher,
a real prize winning poet
Apr 6, 2019
Apr 6, 2019 at 4:26 AM UTC
I time-travel in my dreams.
I am not awakening from sleep,
but returning from a sojourn to the past.
My eyes carry freshly-plucked anguish to the present -
though it belongs here only after being wrapped tightly by years of time,
well-preserved but impossible to taste directly.
Jun 22, 2010
Jun 22, 2010 at 1:25 PM UTC
My flesh crawls, and my blood flows
As I attempt to turn to marble
True stasis
Homeostasis
Oh to maintain beauty to be gawked by muses
And to never have been alive, merely beings of retired faith
But unsurprisingly, just as pointless
I sigh…
I may parish in mind and finally body
But marble will diminish slowly
******
All while watched and attemptedly preserved
I breathe.
Homeostasis
Apr 17, 2018
Apr 17, 2018 at 1:56 PM UTC
a quote of Bernard-Henri Lévy
~~~
the divers’ recovery, diverse,
shipwrecked salvage from different locations,
auctioned to the highest bidder,
tho the excised excerpts are exceptional,
none come to do the bidding,
for the provenance of words
belongs to all, and to none
~~
“so oft we trifle words,
expel them from the country of our body,
without passport and earnestness,
as if they were the cheapest of footnote filler,
day tourists, to be treated as leavings,
refuse for daily discardation,
barely noting their fast comings and faster disappearance,
but leaving not, a mark of distinction”
“the addicted pleasure words granted to we privileged few,
like every enslaved soul to the mind, which I am, I am,
evening dreams, midnight thinkings, sunrise seeings,
how can I infect and thus protect the young to the liberty
to love the crafted content of our human essence to better
comprehend that a moment caught on tape of our shared
words is a holiday, a celebration for the ages...and every molecule,
becomes a human tuning fork in concert, in pitch identical, in blood tainted with the simplicity of we are all the same, only words, this will transmit”
“murmur me, with soft downy charms,
these words discovered
recoursed and intended well to
pointedly offset and contradict
their very own tumultuous discovery uncovering,
tear tongue me
with calming, lapping word wages,
hymns harmonious and fine homilies,
a call, a request,
a bequest
to sedate my shrill life
“some cells, microscopic, preserved digitally,
aged to imperfection, thrash my eyes,
making me speak in tongues I do not recognize,
but fluently possess, no wonder there,
the memory place fairly empty,
room aplenty for passerby's and the imagery
of the vaguest of dearly departed
skin is not the only mot shed,
sloughing of woeful words”
“speak them slow and distinct,
for they arrive slow to you,
a trickling of refugees for your sheltering,
harbor them as full companions,
protected by natural law,
provision them well,
prepared and ever ready for a quick departure,
moor these words at the embarcadero,
for the next restless leg of endlessness,
which they themselves will inform you
will last longer than eternity,
long after there are no humans to speak them”
Mar 27, 2019
Mar 27, 2019 at 4:55 AM UTC
longing to be liquid
a restless wanderer
let loose the lines
unfurled the main
with severed heart
set solitary course
on an uncaring sea
adrift
the lonely sailor
preserved remains
from his lips
the final note
love's lost
refrain
Mar 23, 2016
Mar 23, 2016 at 11:51 AM UTC