"quavers" poems
The Saturday night crowd, all here to see Dave Van Ronk,
sit huddled in the fashion of Antwerp diamond cutters,
sipping cinnamon/marshmallow coffee at the tables.
Caffe Lena is Saratoga's happening place in the 60's and
we're here to forget the war and civil strife in the ghettos.
Sister Mary Katherine, sans frock, is the warmup act,
but no one really gives her any mind,
as she struggles to seat herself upon the stool
intended for the six-foot plus Van Ronk.
Joan Baez prepare to eat your heart out!
Without so much as introduction, she
breaks into a high soprano Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.
Heads pivot like synchronized swimmers toward the stage.
Her silken voice emits notes blinking
into reality from quantum fluctuations in space/time.
Every quivering high-C grafts the audience together.
She's spinning veils of sound,
the like of which our ears are unfamiliar.
The quavers in her throat match the tremors in my coffee.
In the back of the cafe a drunken Van Ronk passes out.
Feb 23, 2012
Feb 23, 2012 at 8:49 PM UTC
“Wind, the continuous movement of Air is the link between all realms & dimensions carrying every form of communication from musical quarks to the sounds of silence”. Poet
<~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>
Wind, Angelic Air ! Beloved of my Sun sign
I listen to bellows pounding sea rock boulders
circling my spine in sharp dagger kisses divine
I listen to you penetrating my marrow
swirl icy chiming voice through mottled skin
pulling hair, ********* throat uncensored ….
my parched lips open as you rip dry logs
to hear red ants scattering into darkened holes
trolls vacantly watch wind arms across my shoulders
I hold dripping amber, as you raucous relay
score, hungry vultures and swallows chorus adore
I walk songs, you unbutton word flames refraining
dead locusts fall in wind tone lyrics whirling
Beloved ! be still that I may touch your *****
feel cold notes ripple between your crescendos
stroke your quavers, obedient to your baton
soul bowing to your transmuting crotchets
all I hear as you settle into playful breezes
a teasing drama complete, is “I Love You” !
Sep 9, 2025
Sep 9, 2025 at 6:28 AM UTC
The finger oil glistens in wide smears across convex glass
and the tired man in ***** Carhartts
asks the price for a rack of beef ribs.
The deli woman answers, his vision
quavers from the gristle and grease
as he dismisses the possibility of a feast,
it just looked so good
he comments, almost
pained or embarrassed.
She offers to cut it in half as
Dave the BBQ cook calls to me
across the fray and I wonder
if he wants my company,
for we talk long
about recent literary conquests
and our love of atypical diction.
The middle aged man
in the old ***** Carhartts
who walks
with the upright pain
of enduring parenthood
through poverty
refuses the meat with wry hurt
and wanders out of my life.
I drive one handed,
twelve ribs covered in tin foil
clutched dripping
as I peel back a metal edge
and gnaw flesh from bone.
May 4, 2011
May 4, 2011 at 1:56 PM UTC
Her song swims in waves into the river,
The swift current cradling it by.
Her melody stumbles across the rocks,
The quavers settle offshore till the wave-bubble
Licks them back.
The scattered ashes come to life.
Shalini Nayar
© 2005
Sep 23, 2014
Sep 23, 2014 at 9:20 AM UTC
When I want to write
And the words are churlish and
Sluggishly slow in coming -
And even when they come
They linger at the door-frame
And rub their soft cheeks
Against the painted grain -
I read in a special voice.
Sometimes it's the voice
Of my English teacher from
Junior class. We didn't get along,
But not a word passed her
Lips that wasn't as gilded and
Mellifluous as edible gold-leaf
On a chocolate-chili sundae.
Or the voice belongs to
Rives, who plucks meaning
Out of words like candy
Out of an Easter egg.
He savors every syllable
Like it's an annual treat
And lines them up neatly
In his throat like some kind
Of spoken-word songbird,
But the things I write are
Least likely to be read aloud
By Rives and my English teacher.
(And reading in their voices
Seems too proud.) So I pen
The last of the stragglers down
And clear the alien voices out
Of my own (often sore) throat.
I enjoy my words, wallow in
Phrases, and praise lines of
Alliteration about as often as
A soldier runs past shelter
Helter-skelter and takes his
Chances with unfriendly crosshairs.
My voice quavers, quivers, shakes,
And shivers when I read my work.
I find every letter and line
And nuance absurd, but
I keep myself in check. Editing is
A controlled demolition of
Punctuation and capitalization;
Sometimes the "submit"
Button is hard to hit after
Splaying one more page of
Myself into crisp computer print.
But I breathe and repeat
The words that are lodged
Under my ribcage like a
Stray bullet: "You are not
Superlative; you are not
Fantastic; you will not be
Famous; you will not be
Any better for a long time
And even then you may be
Terrible, unbearable, and
Infinitesimal,
But everyone is."
click
Dec 28, 2010
Dec 28, 2010 at 10:04 PM UTC
.
*"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter"
John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn.*
.
I'm never sure how I should take his silence,
It's not by choice, that much I know.
For he is a piper painted on porcelain,
Left to inspire a dreamer in an Ode.
His immortal canopy never sheds a leaf,
But offers no shade - frozen in time -
And as it was written, he never came to life and played
His fair maiden her melodious rhyme.
It sits on his lips as they chip and crack;
A dry mouth, a pipe for melodies made.
Sadly for the piper, I don't share Keats' hope
As he said of his maiden, 'She cannot fade'.
This brave boy's riff will remain dormant,
Haunting and quiet - laid on porcelain,
As I can't help this overwhelming jealousy
Of the notes he'll never play trapped within.
How they reel through my mind but leave nothing -
Not a sound or a ripple of waves,
Whereas mine float a while and decay with little grace,
The dotted-quavers left fading on staves.
I'm never sure how I should take his silence,
It's not by choice, that much I know.
Yet I envy more than words his lifetime in a moment,
In a world in which I wait and watch things grow.
May 10, 2015
May 10, 2015 at 1:18 PM UTC
I saw the ruddy sunshine growing wild,
I saw his smiling visage disappear,
the sky, once filled with luminance so mild
becoming dark with shadowings of fear.
The southern wind with angry violence blows
Olympus, perched on Atlas' shoulders' height
who quavers as the tempest's fury grows
and fills the air with thunder in his fright.
But, see! I saw the veil of darkness break
within the morning's rainwater dissolving,
and see! I saw the daybreak's glory take
its former ground, back to its heights resolving;
and to the sky I wondered, "Who can say
if such a change as this lies in my way?"
May 23, 2010
May 23, 2010 at 2:08 PM UTC
Old wooden knot holed thing.
rust wearing; sitting unplayed.
Strings silent.
Manuscripts of faded scores.
Tarnished ink quavers and semi quavers,
ride the weary stave.
This unheard music fills
the room with it's silence.
Feb 8, 2017
Feb 8, 2017 at 6:15 PM UTC
_Spin me some velvet,
Scuff me over with gravel,
Pick me some bluesy strings;
Tie me a bunch of wildflower quavers,
Let’s hear how your phoney sax sings.
Dip me in treacle,
Needle me with soul,
Groove me some dirt and some bass;
Blow me your ***** devil’s pipe strong,
Let’s play us some bourbon and lace.
Spin me some velvet,
Scuff me over with gravel,
Lay me down in meadowsong;
Rent me a dime’s worth of old dust and daydreams,
Honey chil’, you cain’t do me no wrong._
Jul 3, 2019
Jul 3, 2019 at 9:13 PM UTC
In a castle constructed of bones on a mountain high,
our hero sits alone on an ivory throne,
waiting for his current state of jejune to pass.
Whisperings of a voice, mellifluous air,
a singing so beautiful his heart skips a beat
at the gentle murmurings of such an ethereal voice.
And so he vacates his ivory throne
in search of this songbird that has invaded his walls,
the voice instils a certain hiraeth in his mind,
that village once so dear to him that now lies in ruins
due to his incandescent bursts of magical madness.
The owner of this voice, the eloquence, the elegance,
the image in his head that of a maiden on a rock,
as naked as the day she was born
and bathed in an iridescent sunrise.
A scintilla of a break in her voice
and she begins to sob at the meaning of her words.
He finds the source of this angelic sound,
a woebegone but comely creature supine on a table,
her eyes staring into heavenly mountains of madness.
She does not look to meet his wild-eyed gaze,
instead melting away until she is nothing at all,
leaving only dancing embers and phosphenes where she had lain.
He hears this burst of angelic quavers every day
but his madness permits no memory of each
to reside in his brain, comfortable and snug.
Instead, he suffers this delusion every morning,
when his head his quiet and thoughts are oblivion.
This siren swansong has no source in reality,
it is the last vestige of a mind damaged by time and solitude,
where the dawn chorus each morn’s twilight goes unheard,
but the ghostly choral vocalisations of a bitter memory
break his trance and he searches for the only sound not real.
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 at 8:03 PM UTC
the alternate of the next
remember,
close behind
the quavers are approaching
rest„„„
….into another bar
breve
until movement restarts
CACOPHONY!!!
minors gone awry
chasing melody helter-skelter
cycling
the 5th major just walked in
B prepared to
C how trouble is spelt
sharper than the relative
rescuing all but the
F A C E
flattened
formulas augment the coda
intervals feed nerves on queue
inverting modes and mood to suit
diminishing happiness, relishing
rules of progression
perfect ~ perfect
suspend 2
no, 4 from the blues
flood with syncopation
and forget everything I’ve said.
Aug 30, 2013
Aug 30, 2013 at 5:57 AM UTC
Time wavers in and out,
a serpentine force pushing us further apart
seconds are long and cruel as I hunt the space of time searching
Quavers ducking in and out of sync
I find you just as you're gone
only to turn and find you there and blink to lose you yet again
erroneous time you have not been a kind father to me
running out on me the second I think you're there
and never coming when I'm dying for you to pass me by
If love is truly held for all the bastions of time
then you are a *******
shoving me to live in the past and withhold my future
winding twisted in your linear disguise,
I knew when I fell over you that you dip and double back
trip me up at every turn, then pick me up
only to play thoughtlessly with heart beats that suffer your dastardly designs
if only you were real then perhaps
I could rip you apart and find the fragments I'm looking for
and deny your passing as you deny my right to closure.
Mar 18, 2017
Mar 18, 2017 at 8:05 PM UTC
on delicate stems
wildflower quavers quiver
in the bluesy breeze
Jun 26, 2019
Jun 26, 2019 at 5:58 PM UTC
it starts as
a single
vibration
concert pitch
then
a semibreve.
crotchets
and quavers
the crescendo
builds
notes
scattered.
the bow
lurches;
allegro
e vivace
a melody
is heard.
sweet dulcet
tones
fill the air –
wafting,
singing,
passing us by.
May 11, 2013
May 11, 2013 at 1:35 PM UTC
The eyes are a pair of globular organs of sight in the head of humans and vertebrate animals
Or are the eyes the window to the conscious soul?
They call me the Devil’s Advocate
Traditionally on the left side of your shoulder, purring that dead angels lie too
The lost pulse has been cause to abacinate
The light is blinding but you descry right through its laments, where the fleeting hope sings a tune that quavers as classical
The light is blinding but so is the crepuscular, encapsulated in a vessel of defeatism, powerless to shift my sole.
Your shut asymmetrical globes are created boundless by all existing matter that make them a home.
A Molotov cocktail in the shape of a hollow ***** reminiscent of wartimes and tearing without the gas
I choke on the smoke rings of the lit wick and I’m reminded that I hate going in circles and around
But they are also vessels of protection, a place for kumbaya’s around the fire where time is used to back-track
The deepest longings and recollection in my Purple Heart cannot be explained by how it beats 115,000 times each day
To hell with the sorry excuses and fleeting ideas of the Beaujolais
The soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.
Let your spirit descend into you again, fill your body like the dripping of Adam’s Ale from broken pipes
Yes, they are cracked, but your chest is not a bird’s nest in December
They are reminiscent of, but are not the promises your teenage self-made to your mother, saying, “I’ll be home by eight”.
Press your hands to the aviary your beating heart has been trying to escape, touch it softly, and this will be the first time in years you've been kind to the keeper of the grey
Glaze into the looking glass and hold your fists back, let go of the sharpness of your words and risk forgetting yourself
End the match that pinpricked the flame of hatred, and bleed out the blue and black of yesterday.
They call me the Devil’s Advocate,
You hang from the trees, but I don’t believe in gravity.
Jun 3, 2018
Jun 3, 2018 at 2:19 PM UTC
Legends tell of an ancient beast
Said to stalk the night
It flew from the east
Its howel fills the soul with fright
They called it the Rickle-Rackle
After the sound it makes
Its bones do crackle
As it quavers and shakes
Rickle-Rackle is all you hear
Before your time is done
Rickle-Rackle strikes up fear
Just as you are overrun
Few have ever seen the creature
And lived to tell the tale
Or can describe a single feature
Of this unholy grail
They say its teeth are sharp
And glint in the light of the moon
Its taller than any scarp
More powerful than any dragoon
Faster than any man
Stronger than one too
You are a deadman
If you come in his view
The Rickle-Rackle drags his tail
Cutting down forest trees
His breath is like a gale
And will bring you to your knees
Its eyes pierce to your soul
Down to your very heart
Which becomes an empty hole
Thanks to its dark art
So heed my warning
Brave adventurer
Wait until the morning
He can't be worth any venture
Pray you ne're encounter
The fearsome Rickle-Rackle
You are no beast hunter
Fear its evil cackle
Fear the Rickle-Rackle
Hear its sound and flee
Should you hear it's crackle
Its mouth will be the last you see
Nov 4, 2019
Nov 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM UTC
**Thunder roars out there
and deep in my inner self I dance
in the rain that comes in quavers
that gyrate with fervour
These are days of new growth
and soft new turf
Days when we all have a say
about how life must go
when compassion goes walkabout
and falsity becomes king of the block
Let there be unfulfilled yearnings
for things unattainable
To jump-start the cravings in our hearts
till with ravenous wanting
we chart a new course as we chat
about hollow epitaphs on gravestones
desperate scribbles on tree trunks
and surrealistic graffiti in the alleys
of our sordid consciousness
*Let there be giggling girls in frills and laces
and laughing women in killer shapes
that all men must adore in perpetuity
Let there be music about the waterfall in the wood
Let there be birds singing from wild fig trees
and bees a-buzzing in and out with nectar from the flowers
Let there be life in abundance; and
Let there be love in preponderance
While we skim the skies of our sleeping dreams
for even the slightest suggestion of compassion awakened**
Oct 15, 2015
Oct 15, 2015 at 5:18 PM UTC
I can hear the baby quail,
they’re telling me, from in the hay bales
and chirping like little frogs.
While they themselves
**** back their bog pockets,
bloom, press the weak wood, and leak to me.
The trickle-slap pipistrelle
in subito notes, that hit and fall,
that explain to me so frantically.
crooning to me so mutually
and between themselves,
like organs pumping air into each other.
The birds sail on it over fields
relying on the attitude of the night,
feeling out its hot rushes.
In sensory geography,
dependent on a mood of its own.
In an ocean, emancipated from the moon.
The sky-lung, plays its shivering reeds
Where the spores, the sycamore, shattering
in crochets, quavers, in minims,
on any mistral score
are mooring till but a touch of direction.
It hears all of what my fingers feel.
It tastes all of which my eyes are witless.
The asp in the verge tasting me
with undulating flick of forked tongue
in aromatic echolocation,
both received and given by all.
The curious noses of foxes
between the furious foxglove
sifting out the berries of effort,
of strain and sweat in fur
haunting out from the stems.
There they find the scared,
shouting in the language of the animal.
And when the colours leave the flowers with the day
the night is painted in flavoursome air.
The night which licks at your ear,
the night that chatters amongst itself,
sonic charybdis,
whirling in the moth-light.
The dark side of the earth
is facing me.
Dec 11, 2015
Dec 11, 2015 at 11:38 AM UTC
I have eaten red stars for breakfast,feasted on moons and drank comets in cups,
black holes were my doughnuts,quasars my quavers and I never wavered from the thought that
inside me,in front and behind me the universe was there just to blind me from some truths left untold,
I shall eat many more moons before I get old,see stars explode,load lunar eclipses,gallop along the galaxies,expand on my theories and stand on the rooftop of it all,
if I fall it's a long way to go,if I fail it's because the universe won't let me know,won't tell me the truth and that being the case
I will wait on the roof 'til
the end.
Jun 22, 2014
Jun 22, 2014 at 7:22 AM UTC
Shifting perspectives
7cm from dying
Quivers as it quavers
7seconds
From flying
Sorry where were you
When I was trying to
Fry that perfect egg?
Jun 3, 2019
Jun 3, 2019 at 2:57 PM UTC
Last night it dawned on me
That rain and music can meld
That rain and music are one
The notes and quavers of music
Companions to patters of rain
It is your half-note
That flies me to the Moon
Your steady rhythm
Plays with me among the Stars.
And when all is done
Wake me up by your rest
And the rain is gone.
Jun 13, 2016
Jun 13, 2016 at 11:42 PM UTC
except,
when the old eyes tear, with the greatest of ease,
hitched a planetary ride round the sun, more times
to know that the square root of the human is not
his exterior, which without fail, grows and erodes
on a timed schedule not of his own choosing...
but the mystery that never ages, the arousal of
his base metals, when the women looks upon him
with a intriguing askance, tasking a masking of an
invitational challenge, a whimsy expression of hither
confusion is the reigning ruler, mining for her actual
intentions, the push~pull of her contradictions and
her puzzling diction, impossible to interpret until I
admit, jingle jangle woman, I'll come following you
this is a familiar newness, a fresh candle lit for burning,
and every time is the first time, so there you have it,
I'm no ****** but born renewed, when the heated heart
quavers, with the anticipation of the known unknowns
and the old tears free falling, she finds its puzzling,
even troubling, till she grasps my smiling countenace,
and my head, two~handed embraced as she studies my line~age,
my map of wrinkled experiences that whisper yes, I understand
and she kisses my forehead, acknowledging acceptance that our
paths have never until now crossed, what a delightful surprise
will be the reading of a unexplored map of our conjoined palms,
the greatest wonder be that surprise has not died, and I
with one hand waving free, welcome it all, and she grins at my
exuberant silliness, and that we choose to be with each other, on
a treasure hunt for a poem as of yet unwritten, but so so wonderfull
comforting that its mere outline and its composition~completionition
familiarity speaks of the good things that experience has brought
and now, again, will yet bend time to our wills and what fun that
will be, defying odds, reliving new moments unique, hot created,
and this adventure reinstills the awe of wonder at familiar unknowns
*that early morn smell of
buttered brioche bread,
fresh, virginal,
like the sweat
we have shed
and laughs we,
just baked this
day*
Apr 8, 2025
Apr 8, 2025 at 7:43 PM UTC
And I am not ungrateful
But what lingers
Quakes
A stutter deep in the core
A shake emanating
Under the sternum
A question quavers
It starts slow and easy
A low hum in the caverns
Maybe just a light echoing drop
It's meandering
But building, forming, structuring
Rumbling
Rearing
Blistering
A culminating crescendo,
Cresting, climaxing.
Bursting from the depths
Punch. Puncture. Punctuate.
Three letters no vowels.
—Why?
Sep 7, 2017
Sep 7, 2017 at 8:25 AM UTC
*For **** Monica & Jan*
coming in by the side road
a winding path
to the stream
took us down where
we sat for a while
feet bathing in cool water
attending the natural theatre
so many quavers and characters in
the movement of rill and brook,
ceaselessly purposeful, over
stone, sand and moss
this going around, under, through
us, here as we gather, and have gathered for millennia;
we are the ancient flow
from first mothers first fathers first family
the tribe are near
coming out of the ages we
hear their call and chatter,
in time we come to know
this all of us, our story
MChallis © 2015
May 9, 2015
May 9, 2015 at 8:11 PM UTC