"railings" poems
We don’t see the carrots to be cut,
We see the sharp knife that could cut us.
We don’t see the bridge,
We see the other side of the railings.
We don’t see painkillers,
We see medication we could drown ourselves in.
We don’t see the train,
We see the tracks we could lay on.
We don’t see the nice view,
We see the cliff's edge we could jump off.
May 9, 2019
May 9, 2019 at 7:25 AM UTC
Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
in curves are loops of light from prow and stern
to the tall smokestacks.
Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a
hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses
playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.
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AS GAEILGE
( In Irish )
Dún do shúile
(Close your eyes)
Codail go lá...mo ghrá séimh.
(Sleep until day...my gentle love) .
Codail go sámh go sámh.
(Sleep peacefully...peacefully) .
Éirdeoidh an ghealach seo...
...is rachaidh an ghrian seo faoi
(This moon will rise...
...this sun will set)
aire 'gus grá
i gconaí
(care and love always)
gach oíche 's gach lá
gach lá 's gach oíche.
(every night every day
every day ever night) .
Mo phlúirín!
Mo stóirín!
Mo mhuirnín!
(My little flower!
My little treasure!
My little darling!)
Ach anois...
(But now...)
codail go sámh go séimh
(sleep peacefully...gently)
go fáinne an lae
(until the break of day)
le mise
ar do taobh.
(with me
by your side) .
Losing our baby
late into the night
holding this little thing
that only attempted to be human
unable to let go
I clasped the foetus
tightly in my hand
& buried it in the dawn
of our local park
under a recently planted
red rose bush.
In my grief
flower & baby
became one
and night after night I climbed
over high railings & even higher stars
to talk to her in the dark in Irish.
Or sing: My Love is like a Red Red Rose.
Or cry...or...cry.
Almost got arrested one night
by an Irish cop
drawn to the sound
of Irish emerging from darkness.
Guess he let me go because - it wouldn’t look good
on a charge sheet:
“The defendant was talking
& crying to...a flower.”
- in Irish.
Eist...eist
(listen...listen)
duinne eagin ag caoineadh
(someone is crying)
in a dorchasan
(in his darkness) .
Fill...fill...a run o!
Fill a run o is na imigh uaim.
Fill orm a chuisle a stor
agus chifeadh tu an gloire... ma fhillean tu!
Oct 22, 2015
Oct 22, 2015 at 1:41 PM UTC
and if i stop, i'll miss the little things:
shaving my legs when i know you're coming over and
not drinking coffee because you don't like the taste of it on my tongue.
i'll miss
running out to your car with my shoes in my hand,
the very last goodnight kiss that's always sweetest.
i'll miss lying to my parents about traffic
and weather
when we were right around the curve of the road,
stealing kisses.
i'll miss
when you don't shave because you know i like your scruffy boy-stubble
when you touch my face without speaking
when your actions
are louder
than words.
i'll miss
your sweetness
i'll miss
your puckish sincerity
i'll miss
you.
i'll miss your hands
your tongue
and your lips on my cheek.
i'll miss you kissing each one of my fingers.
i'll miss our secret handshakes,
our inside jokes,
our petty fights.
i'll miss our song.
i'll miss our arguments about the beatles' breakup,
our railings against religious institutions
our speaking of souls.
and so what i'm proposing,
from me to you,
girl to boy and
heart to heart,
is that you don't stop loving me,
and i
won't stop loving
you.
Jul 29, 2012
Jul 29, 2012 at 10:31 PM UTC
There’s a broken heart sitting on a park bench waiting just for you
Bleeding crimson down the wooden slats and metal railings
Like a collapsing scarlet avalanche I wait eternally for you
Sep 21, 2011
Sep 21, 2011 at 5:50 PM UTC
I brushed my hand across what you said
then remembered
the exact moment I discovered
my favorite hiding place
where my heart could take deep breaths
and move away from the shadows
speaking as echoes across my mind.
I could feel them move far, far away
from my beating heart
taking me to heights
where I could escape to a better place,
I thought I'd never find.
The deepest pain.....all the hurt I feel,
becomes trivial in this journey
where I define myself
and rises above my existence
here in the solitude
I find
within this hiding place.
Here, my heart becomes softly addicted
to leaving behind
the complications which cling
to the railings
of all my inspiration
when I attempt to write
the song of a nightingale
and every bad memory.........
erase.
Sep 17, 2012
Sep 17, 2012 at 8:21 PM UTC
I was leaning over the railings
Of your condominium's 11th floor fire exit.
It was a beautiful night, just a clear sky
Filled with stars.
I was smoking then while
You were just standing right behind me,
I leaned a little bit more.
You told me to stand back
"Aren't you scared?"
I told you that i have conquered
My fear of heights
Long before we spoke again
After weeks of complete silence.
I wasn't lying.
I wasn't afraid of falling—
dying anymore.
But that morning,
Your hands around my waist,
Lips on the nape of my neck
Just breathing,
I drowned.
My throat closed up,
My lungs filled with your scent,
My heart got heavier.
Your touch wasn't supposed to make me
Feel every inch i loved about you.
I was falling again,
Dying for your love;
I thought i have conquered my fear.
"Aren't you scared?"
Terrified.
Jul 24, 2015
Jul 24, 2015 at 3:27 AM UTC
The thought of flying alone makes me
Stick my hands in my front pockets
For hours.
Ticket; check.
Luggage; check.
Headphones to block the voices
Of strangers, I do not want
To know where you are going
Or what you are leaving.
I do not want to know how much more
Poignant your sorrow,
Your excitement.
I ride sound waves.
I ride the beats of
People I will never meet and
Forget those I have left behind forget
In a few short hours I will
Cry into my father’s arms I will
See the one face that makes
Me
Palms up and empty
Ready to touch railings again.
Oct 12, 2012
Oct 12, 2012 at 2:42 AM UTC
Dear titanic, tell me of how you survived your last hurrah- tell me of how you didn’t see the iceberg, tell me of how it felt to lay down on the ocean floor, tell me of how empty you are, the skeletons of your passengers are all but hollow husks- skeletons from a time that is now gone.
“I am not empty,” the titanic says back to me, her voice muffled by bubbles and groans from rust coated pipes.
“But you are, I say. “You are empty but filled with ghosts- yours, the oceans, theirs. They party and laugh and drink and dance and run in your rooms, your hallways that go on forever.”
“You are the empty one,” titanic whispers, rusty railings creaking.
Dear titanic, how did you feel, sinking, ripping in two- unable to be put together again, how did it feel becoming a broken heart? Did you bleed? Did you do it to yourself?
“Was your sink an accident?”
“What do you think?” She growls- groans and moans echo all around.
“How did the music players continue on as you sank- their instruments and lungs filling up with seawater as their somber music filled the ears of your passengers?”
“They just played on, soothing my pain,” came the reply.
“Dear titanic-” I started.
“Let me ask you- why have you come?” She demands.
“To learn your secrets of course.”
“That’s not why.”
“Who hurt you for you to seek me out? Why have you come?”
“I've come to find out what you did to survive.” I reply.
“Then you know now” She whispers, pipes groaning as she shook with mirthless laughter
“Do I?” I questioned.
“Yes.” I imagined her smiling at me- broken glass as teeth and sharp lines for lips.
“How did you survive?” I whispered, my heartbeat echoing in the stillness- needing to hear the words I hoped she wouldn't say.
“I didn’t.”
— dear titanic, tell me of how you survived your sinking // a.
Feb 25, 2020
Feb 25, 2020 at 9:57 AM UTC
Planks, splintering in solidity
Together twined in tedium
Curving cords of mated metal
Lost in ludicrous loops
Twines of tetanus protrude
Danger danger
Rising flying roaring floating
Above the stillborn trains
Arching acrid aerial arms
Lazy concrete spiral, neighbor snail
Inverse slide with railings
Rumble rumble try and grumble
Jitter in jumpy juxtaposition
Guts of grotesque giants
Flayed flawed under flaming flight
Blink away oblivion
Orange and omnificent, opaque concern
Useful hangnail, table scraps
Rise above
Shocked stillness soon stumbling
Ornamental oasis for the oracles
Unseen unheard untasted unsmelled
Unfeeling unused to understanding
Carry me across
Fly me over
Lift me beyond
Suspend.
Glimpse the unparalleled phenomenon
Ribs of steel, rain has parted
Seeping to the soul
Buzzing through the boards
Immobile, cradle in the wind
Twist
Take off your sunglasses
Be sure to look around as you pass through
Oct 20, 2012
Oct 20, 2012 at 10:30 PM UTC
The dragonflies and meadow-sweet
Follow the banks of ‘The Wandle’
Allowing what is hidden and not heard
Behind posted iron railings
To be noted, found on a map, imagined
Its very name conjures up the river’s journey
Drawing one into its currents and flows
A place of beauty where time seems slow
Rippling the edges of thought, living as a space,
Exploration, given by inclusion and exclusion
Forever to ‘wandle along’ under the sky
Between the gaps in the real
And what finds itself from what
Came before in experience and words.
Love Mary x
The River Wandle is the largest river of the south southwest sector of London, England. Its name is thought to derive from the community around its mouth, Wandsworth. About 9 miles long, it passes through the London Boroughs of Croydon, Sutton, Merton, and Wandsworth to join the River Thames on the Tideway..
Mouth: River Thamesnn
Oct 30, 2018
Oct 30, 2018 at 7:01 AM UTC
She always taps the railings when she walks along the street
No matter the weather, her mood, if she’s early or late
It goes tap, tap step tap, step tap tap, and repeat.
It’s a simple and quiet lived life to the beat
Of her fears, her obsessively organized fate
She always taps the railings when she walks down the street.
It helps her feel calm; to tap makes the walk neat,
Step twice near the fountain and jump over the grate
It goes tap, tap step tap, step tap tap and repeat.
Do her neighbors peek, do they point, do they bleat
About the girl who’s got rhythm tied into her fate?
She always taps the railings when she walks down the street.
And her parents, do they not fear for her feet
And her tapping obsession, psychiatrist’s bait
It goes tap, tap step tap, step tap tap and repeat.
But it’s hers, her own comforting lullaby sweet
It protects her from bombs, famine and food past it’s due-date
So she always taps the railings when she walks down the street.
She goes tap. Tap step tap. Step tap tap. And repeat.
Aug 7, 2013
Aug 7, 2013 at 10:34 PM UTC
Train spotted on ancient rail tracks
Mucks and grants on submerged pasts
Copper and ***** metal poles point
Upwards in heaven above the panelled tops
Price all the intentional conditioning
A paradise of self sufficiency
A dew of ranting , the metal raiding
Price the substitutional compressions
A timber frame of tunnels
The heightened temperature
Price and tag her beautiful mind
An attachment of glorified plinth
The punch of the chaotic medals
Pride and rearrange her plentiful plight
Show all her cast frame in crimson and greys
Jun 4, 2016
Jun 4, 2016 at 8:57 AM UTC
'A triangle on the mount of mercury
is certainly an auspicious sign'
Thumping percussion of a native beat
in my head, a gyrating hindsight
The evening streams down pouring
streaks of grey and mangled orange
Walking past a bicycle chained to railings
front wheel mangled into a rough square
Squaring a circle, huh? How did that happen?
two thumps and a sonant beat...and again...
I see you sipping latte by Nero.
Mangled, stream out of your eyes
many coloured triangles
rushing, wheeling at me.
Vibrant beat, gyrating bottoms.
The mercury is soaring. Ululations.
The night-witch has charmed the city in her cloak.
Stars, oh, I see mangled triangles out of her hat.
Sep 14, 2013
Sep 14, 2013 at 11:52 PM UTC
You came and went again today even quicker than last time... front door carelessly swinging on its rusty hinges behind you & porch creaking under your feet as you ran down its tired steps; the baby blue paint chips falling to their deaths from the railings to your sleeping front yard. No one around here can vividly recall the last time they looked into your eyes. No one around here can vividly recall the way your voice sounds in the middle of the night. You are the start of an engine. You are the gravel that rolls beneath your tires & perhaps sometimes even a passing smile. I don't question your desire to go and go and go. I just hope that where ever you travel you're offered more than old graffitied stop signs and broken windows & maybe one day you can show me which exit to take out of this lazy place.
Jul 23, 2013
Jul 23, 2013 at 9:53 AM UTC
The insects and wild flowers
Follow the banks of ‘The Wandle’
Allowing what is hidden and not heard
Behind posted iron railings
To be noted, found on a map, imagined
Its very name conjures up the journey
Drawing one into its currents and flows
A place of beauty where time seems slow
Rippling the edges of thought, living as a space,
Exploration, given by inclusion and exclusion
Forever to ‘wandle along’ under the sky
Between the gaps in the real
And what finds itself from what
Came before in experience and words.
Love Mary x
Oct 28, 2018
Oct 28, 2018 at 8:04 AM UTC
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.
Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
Lie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;
Holy hard, my country children in the world if tales,
The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
The first and steepled season, to the summer's game.
And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,
Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.
Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,
Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.
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Across the width of the shiny railings
a wooden stick was dragged.
Beneath the beady eye of the peacock
quite a lot of skin sagged.
Through lack of sleep.
The peacock wished he had a penny
for every time he was awoken.
he longed for a decent nap
without the pattern broken.
All he wanted was sleep.
So he became an angry peacock
and showed his venom in his tail
Out shot each and every eye on the feather
a picture of beauty to unveil.
He wanted peace and quiet.
The children delighted in this act
and thought he was putting on a show.
They dragged their sticks furiously
Little did they care or even know.
So the peacock refused to sleep
slumped in a corner forever and a day.
Then came along a peahen dull as dishwater
the peacock was excite, didn't know what to say.
She is dull but I will compensate for that
He shook his feathers to impress.
The little lady strutted by oblivious
thought he was in fancy dress.
Well.
May 7, 2015
May 7, 2015 at 6:45 AM UTC
Smiles are fading like
A fire once watched.
And The room dies,
As detail becomes a lie.
A whore's fragrance lingers,
But it's the dust that makes it hard to breathe.
Breathe is what she said to do,
But he could naught but smile.
You said you'd always be there,
You dared to call me yours.
You dared to hold me in your arms,
And now blood taints the floors.
Heads are dangling over
The railings emotionless and pale.
Pigments have shattered,
Leaving painted glass on the floor.
Shades of gray haunt the realm,
Establishing a harmonic depression.
Asmodeus left his mark,
And he has yet to return.
You had me hanging on a cliff,
All you had to do was pull.
Instead you pushed away,
Leaving me to fall like everyone else.
Stillness.
It stains the room.
But she makes her way,
She'll cross as she pleases.
Even the blood on the corner
Of their lips remain still.
But the girl in the red dress,
She walks the floor.
She grabs the rope.
She kicks the chair.
You lived the life no one wants.
You played us like a deck of cards.
But its your swinging corpse
That brought this room back to life.
------------------------------------------------------
If you cant handle love,
And you cant handle life,
How the **** could you handle ****
Oct 2, 2010
Oct 2, 2010 at 7:42 PM UTC
Southeast, and storm, and every weathervane
shivers and moans upon its dripping pin,
ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain
howls at the flues and windows to get in,
the golden rooster claps his golden wings
and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks no more,
the golden arrow in the southeast sings
and hears on the roof the Atlantic Ocean roar.
Waves among wires, sea scudding over poles,
down every alley the magnificence of rain,
dead gutters live once more, the deep manholes
hollow in triumph a passage to the main.
Umbrellas, and in the Gardens one old man
hurries away along a dancing path,
listens to music on a watering-can,
observes among the tulips the sudden wrath,
pale willows thrashing to the needled lake,
and dinghies filled with water; while the sky
smashes the lilacs, swoops to shake and break,
till shattered branches shriek and railings cry.
Speak, Hatteras, your language of the sea:
scour with kelp and spindrift the stale street:
that man in terror may learn once more to be
child of that hour when rock and ocean meet.
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For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
The hand had collapse,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.
And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand -- just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won't do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won't do it.
He comes in the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.
The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.
Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come.
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It's break time again
The steam whistle blowing
All hands stop
Stacks of boxes
Not growing
We walk outside
To have a smoke on the wharf
Where grass grows up through concrete
And the sea is green and dark
Hobnail boots ping ping
On metal stairs
Wrinkled scarred hands zip up jackets
Old dogs who know nothing but work
Blow smoke in your face
And call you "boy" in thick accent
They don't scare me like they used to
Because I have cuts on my hands now
From diving over a railing
To save an impatient old man
It seems just when life gets to where you want it
You have a dream about someone
And your jumping over railings
Into the teeth of a cutting board
It seems just when life gets to where you want it
You have a dream about a girl
And your waking up alone in the dark
Drinking water and taking pain pills
Even when nothing really hurts at all
Feb 24, 2012
Feb 24, 2012 at 1:27 PM UTC
Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
~Having played serenas to paramours lipping at the cup of an evening bawd~
Like tethered donkeys now with their packsong of pastorela and alba,
No more musical mensurations of the ****** Mary, Cantigas de Santa Maria,
But slung over the railings of dawn-blotted taverns or courts of renown,
Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
Like drinking gourds, their stringed citherns dangle from their shoulders,
Leaking the strummed honey-wine of sound like the retchings of the nearby sea.
Jul 31, 2019
Jul 31, 2019 at 11:33 AM UTC
The fat lady came out first,
tearing our roots and moistening drumskins.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist,
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summinging the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.
The graveyards, yes the graveyards
and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,
and dead, pheasants and apples of another era,
pushing it into our throat.
There were murmurings from the jungle of *****
with the empty women, with hot wax children,
with fermtented trees and tireless waiters
who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.
There's no other way, my son, ***** There's no other way.
It's not the ***** of hussars on the ******* of their ******
nor the ***** of cats that inadvertently swallowed frogs,
but the dead who scratch with clay hands
on flint gates where clouds and desserts decay.
The fat lady came first
with the crowds from the ships,s taverns, and parks.
***** was delicately shaking its drums
among a few little girls of blood
who were begging the moon for protection.
Who could imagine my sadness?
The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me,
the naked look on my face, trembling for alcohol
and launching incredible ships
through the anemones of the piers.
I protect myself with this look
that flows from waves where no dawn would go.
I, poet without arms, lost
in the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.
The fat lady went first
and the crowds kept looking for pharmacies
where the bitter tropics could be found.
Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived
did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.
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