"repetition" poems
For Al, who left us
With each passing poem,
The degree of difficulty of diving ever higher,
Bar incrementally niched, inched, raised,
Domain, the association of words, ever lesser,
Repetition verboten, crime against pride.
Al,
You ask me when the words come:
With each passing year,
In the wee hours of
Ever diminishing time snatches,
The hours between midnight and rising,
Shrinkage, once six, now four hours,
Meant for body restoration,
Transpositional for poetic creation,
Only one body notes the new mark,
The digital, numerical clock of
Trillion hour sleep deficit, most taxing.
Al, you ask me from where do the words come:
Each of the five senses compete,
Pick me, Pick me, they shout,
The eyes see the tall grasses
Framing the ferry's to and fro life.
Waving bye bye to the
End of day harbor activities,
Putting your babies to sleep.
The ears hear the boat horns
Deep voiced, demanding pay attention,
I am now docking, I am important,
The sound lingers, long after
They are no longer important.
The tongue tastes the cooling
Italian prosecco merging victoriously
With its ally, the modestly warming rays
Of a September setting sun,
finally declaring, without stuttering,
Peace on Earth.
The odoriferous bay breezes,
A new for that second only smell,
But yet, very old bartender's recipe,
Salt, cooking oil, barbecue sauce, gasoline
And the winning new ingredient, freshly minted,
Stacked in ascending circumference order, onion rings.
These four senses all recombinant,
On the cheek, on the tongue,
Wafting, tickling, blasting, visioning
Merging into a single touch
That my pointer finger, by force majeure,
Declares, here,
poem aborning!
Contract with this moment,
now satisfied!
Al, what you did not ask was this:
With each passing poem,
I am lessened within, expurgated,
In a sense part of me, expunged,
Part of me, passing too,
Every poems birth diminishes me.
_________________________________
(this poem more than most,
for its birth celebrates
my loss, your loss,
which cannot be exonerated 8/7/18)
_________________________________
written at 4:38 AM
September 8th, 2012
Greenport Harbor, Long Island
May 21, 2013
May 21, 2013 at 7:07 AM UTC
im a self describing a self
a face on a liquid surface
a plasticity
a brain
a three pound infinity
always remodeling itself
and making new copies
a copy
of
a copy
of
a copy
a massive accumulation of copies
each a slight distortion
from it's original eminence
a history of minute alterations
all subtle deceptions
my so-called reality
a memory
of
a memory
of
a memory
a repetition pouring the self out
self corrupting the self
until it is somebody else
a fibbing shifty double-dealing soft machine
trying to remain intact
it's signature
a disjunctured awareness
my cells talk **** about each other
i'm more microbes than human
every synaptic light of the divine casting a shadowed past
a devil to the true origin
a mangled remembering
my pillar of reality
spirit from matter
not the other way around
i no longer recognize myself
am i human
or perhaps a robot
an alien
a walk in
that left the original inhabitant
disembodied
to wander perplexed in a netherworld
lost and crying
or, just a bad copy
of
a copy
of
a copy
of
a co
py
of
a
a
co
Aug 11, 2018
Aug 11, 2018 at 2:46 PM UTC
The poor keep moving
as if relocation
could reframe the algebra.
They cannot see that repetition
traces patterns
in their life.
New beginnings become as hopeless
as stale finales
of debt and desperation.
Wishful thinking makes for certainties
gambling against the odds
of possibilities.
Whispered prayers and incantations
leaves no space
for reason’s compass to steady and settle.
If they stood still and mapped the moment
both sides of the equation
would simplify
and they might construct
a new geometry
of anger.
© M.L.Emmett
Aug 9, 2014
Aug 9, 2014 at 10:09 AM UTC
Touch Upon My Insanity
She whispers
Into the white walls
Touch Upon My Insanity
She cries
To the men and women in white coats
Touch Upon My Insanity
She screams
At the white buckled jacket
Encasing her
In a never-ending repetition of
Touching Upon Insanity
Dec 14, 2014
Dec 14, 2014 at 4:19 PM UTC
porch talk, simmering in a Bud light sauce
everyone chair-rocking, even the boxer dog,
in his self-propelled 360 degree swiveling chair
eavesdropping and spy eyeballing the farm for
strangers and any creatures as of yet, unsmelled
get done with weather, the crops,
the neighbors,
the weird, and the truly neighborly,
grandkids escapades, hopes and desires, comparative literature and regional dialects and philosophical dialecticals tickling,
bs’ing and tall tale telling, breathing the windy geography of the air over the land that dictates the how we live,
open another Bud for the buds,
did I forget to mention
farm equipment?
skirt politics cause nobody wants any
nothing-to-be-done-damn-aggravation,
leaves nothing mo’ to ramble on about ‘cept the
absent women
no worries all above board no secrets uncouthed,
but the mood softens as the pale daylight wisps come rarer
as now
nearer to nine pm, obvious saved the best for last,
a very manly-way of ordering things,
big silent pauses in the converso conversation,
guy-sighs many,
as the last essay of the day is being jointly authored,
denotating the generalized listings of
how they drive us crazy,
listing the repetition of ever changing instructions,
which doesn't recognize bi-coastal mannerisms, non-differentiating
just humanism-isms
and the peculiarities of each (a list kept)
in a compare and contrast,
an end of the day summation,
and the boasting-outbesting,
of each of their
specialisms
which is sadly now forgotten and which haven’t been
brain-recorded so cannot be disclosed
other than it’s now ten
and all that’s left is
to sleep, perchance, to dream,
of private things
and bigger and better
John Deere tractors
Jun 9, 2018
Jun 9, 2018 at 2:13 PM UTC
so I tried again
to train my parrot,
this time more emphatically:
*"Why don't you just
say what I say?
What, they never taught you
Repetition at Parrot School?"*
and my parrot said:
*"What, they never taught you
Thinking at Human School?"*
Oct 24, 2014
Oct 24, 2014 at 7:31 AM UTC
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean—
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
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I feel bad for her because I know she's hurting.
But does she know how much pain she puts on me.
Making me think he doesn't love me.
Maybe I believe it.
That's the pathetic part.
Her pain causing the problems of my future life with Him.
This is not the love of a mother.
Who doesn't approve of her daughter.
Who she is now.
The person that she loves to be.
This is emotional abuse.
Hopeless
Dauntless
Useless
God get us out of this labyrinth.
Set the generations of past free for the future.
For only the hole in my chest is never going to fully recover with this madness.
This is not good madness.
The repetition of the flash on the screen makes my heart panic.
Alas it should be comfort that the soul encounters.
Jan 30, 2015
Jan 30, 2015 at 12:42 AM UTC
How do we begin
The music
Of love making?
Are we sure
That the language we share
Is harmonic?
Who arranges the pulse of the piece?
Who decides which beats are
Accented
Which beats
Are not?
Will they give rise
To our motif?
Will our phrases
Use repetition or contrast
Be weak or strong
****** or repose?
Will our passage
Be AABB
Or AABA?
How many themes
And how many variations
Will we play
on our
delicate instruments?
Will our cycle be
a symphony
or will we
happily create
a one movement work
with an air
of spontaneous inspiration
and call ourselves
a rhapsody?
Jan 6, 2011
Jan 6, 2011 at 6:17 PM UTC
Let's be naughty this Christmas
Santa stopped buying us gifts years ago
I'd rather live in your trance
Instead of watching repetition dance
I can give you the best gift of all-
my heart
And maybe some physical education
You won't forget.
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 12:33 AM UTC
Twisted sheets, mind on stutter
Unable to sort through this midnight clutter
Put it away for tomorrow
But what to do with my gnawing sorrow?
I circle soft blue on color book pages
Hoping the repetition eventually assuages
The raw edged reality of lonely dark hours
Filling the void with Crayola flowers
Sep 2, 2015
Sep 2, 2015 at 11:35 PM UTC
Having defied gravity
(not me personally
but by proxy
namely through
a dog, monkey and Soyuz
and fruit flies and bullfrogs
and lately through NASA)
I defy humility
I brave it, I challenge it
for there’s too much hypocrisy
in humility
For humility is such
that it never speaks its name
For when it speaks of Humility
it is Sans Humility
Take me
for example -
you hardly hear me
mention myself as Saint Humility, do you?
But that’s what I am, my other name: Humility
But people keep insisting on calling me Saint Humility
But I defy Humility
POSTSCRIPT
I also defy repetition
and over-emphasis
and contradiction, paradox
But, it must not be left unsaid -
in defying humility,
I think I’ve also
quite inadvertently
defined humility: Saint Me
Jul 28, 2013
Jul 28, 2013 at 7:42 AM UTC
You are hell-bent,
nostalgic of the stitch in my stomach
and the simple repetition of my words.
A different season,
the same fears,
unknown intentions.
A lovers kiss feels like your drunken mistakes.
Fight-or-flight
perfectly masked underneath sarcasm and closed eyes.
Aug 28, 2018
Aug 28, 2018 at 7:01 PM UTC
Hi, below I copy a humorous hiabun, which I shared as an exercise to mentor enquiring and inspired poets to learn, so they might adopt and try different techniques and then give critique together with awesome comments... Yes, I used the words *** ****** and **** for context the rest was left to an individual imagination as in good poetry!
It included reflective commentary encompasses innocent classification terminology used in the critique, reading, examining, appreciating, understanding and writing of poetry for example: POETIC DEVICES (enjambement, duality, keriji, images, collocation, semantic, oxymoron, repetition, listing etc.), STORY (personification, characterisation, subject, context, voice etc.), IMAGERY (synaesthesia), STRUCTURE ( lineation, breaks, syntactic etc.), SOUNDS (syllables, rhyme, alliteration, pace, musicality, phrasing, beat, assonance, onomatopoeia, mouthed rhythms, patterned) and WORDS (preposition, determiner, verbs, adverbs, lexical, nouns, adjectives) used by poets, critics and academics...
And here it is :
**** tongue-in-cheek haibun - a reflective commentary on writing a popular tanka
Eye lashes flicker
a shared urgent interest
parting - dancing smile
My first inspiration was *** passionate life squeezing screaming *** the thumping wall musicality of *** exhaustingly inventive sweaty and wet.
I wanted to make it a senryu but for duality the female characterisation demanded two more lines each extending to seven syllables.
Arousing images captured her moaning splashing loneliness in unusual collocation.
I was first excited by the placement of a hovering extended enjambement to give life to my final line, whilst also considering the satisfaction in using noisy mouthed rhythms.
I believe I easily hid the wet aroused context with a watery semantic field, that suggested she would choke and drown.
So in my last line I had ‘pleasures’ as a cutting keriji to make clear the dominating ****** context, having previously used a preposition and determiner to maintain duality!
Exhausted shivers
in windowed naked currents
unfolding sinking
then surfing vital wavelets
drowning screams - pleasures wet bite
**
May 2, 2010
May 2, 2010 at 7:10 PM UTC
when swimming with dolphins
lost phase, depth of oceans
recurrence of persuasion
the cavities erosion
a pragmatic extension, the neural hyper tension
grace the evening
split precision aching
remedies for aging
repetition
of the alkaline waste
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 at 7:33 PM UTC
repetition
is never
more
than one
poem.
there’s no future
in this pill.
my mother’s head
is full of heads.
I haven’t a volleyball
in a pond
to **** on.
in the words of my son
a sailor is lost at me.
I go on correcting oddities
in the brain and in the muscle
of a jack
in the box
as a cyclist
champions
hunting mourners
to keep their numbers down.
Feb 26, 2014
Feb 26, 2014 at 8:19 PM UTC
I try to write a poem,
but poems are too hard
Rhyming is for losers
and airy-fairy bards
To put a pen to paper
and write about your life
I've had enough of all of those,
they only cause me strife
Free-verse script is awful,
for fools without a beat
Repetition's far too simple
just repeat, repeat, REPEAT
Those lovey-dovey ode-things,
that wishy-washy crap
And poems about hatred,
you all deserve a slap
Spare me all your ramblings,
I don't care how you feel
Your self-expression surely stinks
of mouldy day-old eel
To tell a tale of wonder
never ceases too be trite
To sing of magic wonders
is nothing but pure *****
Your metaphors are useless,
your imagery is vile
Your sense of diction makes me gag,
I cannot stand your "style"
So save me your quotations,
please spare me all your rhyme
Shove that poem up your rear
and cease to waste my time
I look at what I've written,
this jumble of clichés
Looks like I wrote a ****** poem
so I'm the one to blame!
Aug 12, 2013
Aug 12, 2013 at 9:33 AM UTC
Eighth grade
i texted the suicide hotline
in band class
Hoping for something to hold on to
while i considered going home,
and just slipping away.
Three years later
i sit in photography
messaging an eating disorder hotline
and praying i won't slip further
than i already have.
Strange,
how history repeats itself.
Oct 5, 2021
Oct 5, 2021 at 3:47 PM UTC
I do not see space travel
as an evolutionary event
I look at it as an excess
of dissociative disorder
colonialism and the making
of whiteness
whiteness
justifying the guilt
by searching
and searching
somewhere else
not somewhere better
just somewhere else
there is nothing better
than how we evolved
are place within experience
all that surrounds
us is intimately woven with
our sheer experience
that has evolved
without the possibility
of memory
or redundancy
or even a pattern or repetition
to desire somewhere else
is to leave the best
most evolved experience
of being human
organic intelligence
artificial intelligence
has patterns that are not evolution
or the experience there of
they are patterns that are also
of this desire to be some where else
where ever it may be a space
or an entity
an other
counter-transferance
aliens
colonization
product of whiteness
excess
the profit of colonization
dissociative disorder
from the experience of being human
if you teach people that evolution
is something related to a process
that is merely the documentation
of the desire to be somewhere or something else
slavery is a combination of somewhere else and something else
it is like aliens
inherently under control
of a powerful military
actually the alien extracted from
their home
all mighty whiteness
is the most powerful
dissociative power
evolution did indeed give us the possibility to dissociate
but is was designed for empathy
not as a tool to be somewhere
or something else
the experience of
the dissociative human
declaring whiteness
has other opportunity
but to experience slavery
since it is a dissociation
it is delusional
and although the human
dissociating may not be within
the structure of slavery they conceive
they are without
the original
experience
I notice them
organic intelligence resumes
Aug 9, 2016
Aug 9, 2016 at 10:23 PM UTC
“I remember the bed just floating there” is how Phil Kaye started his ‘repetition’ poem.
I remember pausing the youtube video after the poem ended.
I remember burying my feelings under 3 blankets and 4 hours of binge watching spoken word poetry.
I do not remember the dreams I could have had.
I remember the set of nightmares that visited religiously like the downstairs neighbor tired of how loud my heart pounds at late evenings.
I remember, very clearly, how they went.
I do not remember if I have written them down.
Dream one: he peels my freckles off my skin; he says he needs them because his coffee is too light. I scream while he calmly adds pints of the cheeks to his cup. He says I can never be as quiet as the girl who managed to sneak into his ribcage and build herself a bedroom.
Dream two: We are standing in the great library of Alexandria. He pulls the sea from underneath my feet and stuffs it into his back pocket. He says he needs it because he is tired of drowning himself in uncertainty. I start to cry and he says: Aries is the god of war, and women born under this sign confuse war for love.
I remember the mole on his left ear growing bigger in my nightmares without me ever watering it.
I remember he smelled of tangerine trees and broken records.
I do not remember if his face looked like the man I almost fell in love with last winter, or my father.
I remember the first time I saw my father after he came back from Ukraine.
I remember his brown leather shoes that oozed of old spice cologne and neat scotch.
I remember his hardly worn pair of glasses and the pieces of me they never cared to read.
I remember the wrinkles that seemed newer than his glasses slowly colonizing his hands... the hands that never held me as tight as the dress I wore to my school prom hoping it would catch my ex’s attention.
I remember that dress.
I remember it had a floral print reminiscent of the season that I was named after hoping maybe it would remind him I’m part him.
I remember realizing he will never remember.
And now, I sit on a carpet of autumnal leafs as crisp as my tied tongue and as dead as my fears, trying to turn my love for him into more than just a memory.
Aug 8, 2018
Aug 8, 2018 at 4:00 PM UTC
My generations at a hold up
Force fed lies by society
We're never gonna grow up
Preoccupied with what we need
We subconsciously become devoured by greed
Insecurity is at the bottom of consumption
"You need ____ to succeed"
We're the last of a dying breed
Materialistic makeup
Our genetics have mutated
We're no longer able to wake up
From the nightmare we've created
Identification has taken a new definition
You are what you posess
Unaware the latest trend is only repetition
Sheltered by our ignorant need
Progress is our main goal
Yet we're unsure of how to proceed
So instead we proclaim our need for change
While spending the last of our common sense
On a fee to enter this stage
Which acts as our cage
Locking us into society's game
It's the final act
Our last chance to fame
Apr 19, 2011
Apr 19, 2011 at 9:53 PM UTC
Her arms semaphore fat triangles,
Pudgy HANDS bunched on layered hips
Where bones idle under years of fatback
And lima beans.
Her jowls shiver in accusation
Of crimes cliched by Repetition.
Her children, strangers
To childhood's TOYS, play
Best the games of darkened doorways,
Rooftop tag, and know the slick feel of
Other people's property.
Too fat to *****
Too mad to work,
Searches her dreams for the
Lucky sign and walks bare-handed
Into a den of bereaucrats for her portion.
'They don't give me welfare.
I take it.'
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Good morning body
I called you in for a meeting
because
you can’t sleep again
and I just wanted to tell you
you don’t already seem to know
and no one can read your writing
you already know what you’re wearing tomorrow and you’ll pay the gallery in the morning
and it's all fine
and you’re very much allowed to yawn sigh or take a
deep breath
I know January keeps trying to go on
and on and on and on
like you’re not already over it
a few weeks ahead of yourself
like we’re not all stuck in Deja-vu
despite the fact that it’s fun to type out
soothing repetition
like a hot tea lavender oil or the last smile on the page
like a consoling yoga chant
it’s time you heard this
where are the words you’re hiding?
when you sit down and say you can’t do this again
I will tell you I think this might be growing
it was you under the pile of clothes the whole time
holding the remote
murmuring prophetically in the corner
it was you you see
you already said
you’re everything you know
you’re everything you need
Good morning body
I called you in to talk to me
for us to meet each other
letters to yourself are the new shopping list
or at least
they’re calming to write when you can’t sleep.
Jan 6, 2024
Jan 6, 2024 at 12:17 PM UTC
An artist draw
A writer write
An actor act
And an admirer admire
But sometimes we need to look back
To people that has been supporting us
To ones who helps in need
To that person following the path we lead
I can't write a good poem
That's not true the poem is in you
And If I keep one trying why?
Look at the sky vast and high
We need supporters
One is enough
But two won't hurt
And so on
Life full of ups and downs
Surprise or repetition
Reward of punishment
But think of that as a gift not a burden
We can learn a lot from people around us
Behaving, Talking, and such
Sometimes looking back worth a try
But don't let the time passes by
Sep 6, 2014
Sep 6, 2014 at 12:51 PM UTC