"rootless" poems
.
I’m just a lonely traveler
on this earth
Sometimes it feels as if I'm
waiting for the sky to fall
with each passing breathe
of wind
Standing alone,
a windswept tree
leans downwind;
conspicuously wrought,
naked and bowed
by the grinding
silent forces
at nature's whim
Rootless tumbleweeds
roll by randomly:
broken off,
spinning clockwise,
never looking back,
timeworn and tired
of resisting the prevailing
high desert wind
and its unheld temper
Rattling the tinder
dry sagebrush
like songless wind-chimes;
voiceless fugitives
wreathing a bellowing silence
Jesse Stillwater
Aug 26, 2018
Aug 26, 2018 at 7:04 PM UTC
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
12.7k
Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains. - Jorge Guillén
Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.
The train and the woman filling the sky.
Your shy solitude in the hotels
and your pure mask of another sign.
It is the sea's childhood and your silence
where the wise windows were breaking.
It is your stiff ignorance where
my torso was limited by fire.
I gave you the norm of love, man of Apollo,
the lament of a crazed nightingale,
but, pasture of ruin, you sharpened yourself
for brief, indecisive dreams.
Thought head on, light of yesterday,
indices and signs of what may be.
Your waist of restless sand
follows only trails that never rise.
But without you your warm soul
fails to understand. I must search
the corners of a halted Apollo
that I've used to break the mask you wear.
There, lion, fury of heaven,
I will let you graze on my cheeks;
there, blue horse of my madness,
pulse of nebula and minute hand,
I must search for scorpion stones
and your mother's childhood clothes,
midnight lament and torn cloth
that wiped the moon from the dead man's temple.
Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.
Strange soul of the space in my veins,
I must search for you, small and rootless.
Love of always, love of never!
Oh, yes! I want. Love. Let me be.
Don't cover my mouth, you
who search for Saturn's seed in the snow
or castrate animals in the sky,
clinic and jungle of anatomy.
Love, love. Childhood of the sea.
Without you your warm soul fails to understand you.
Love, a doe's flight
through the endless breast of whiteness.
And your childhood, love, and childhood.
The train and the woman filling the sky.
Not you, not I, not air, not leaves.
Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.
7.2k
You died too young
Your angels' voice
Your deep deep sorrow
Don't you know how I need you?
You left too soon
Your wicked heart
Yourdrunk drunk love
Don't you know how I need you?
You are from the black gold era
Black is for your melancholy
Gold is for your inexpressible soul
You said goodbye too young
Your golden tears in the paradise
Your rousing heartbreak
Don't you know how I need you?
You passed away too soon
Your mysterious disappearance
Your breathless dream brother
Don't you know how I need you?
You are from the black gold era
Black is for your melancholy
Gold is for your inexpressible soul
You fell asleep too young
Your American breath
Your rootless trailer trash
Don't you know how I need you?
You gone to glory too soon
Your curly dark hair
Your heavenly muse
Don't you know how I need you?
Jul 7, 2014
Jul 7, 2014 at 6:01 AM UTC
The mask of vengeance is not to be confused
with the seepage of hurt and confusion.
Something to blame, to get in the way
of a blazing fire providing.
Kindle it with substance and truth,
but instead with damp lies and gritty sand.
An effort of competence in place
of the evading truth that sometimes
the idea of affinity diminishes
in the hole of bewitching fruits.
A spell to take hold of the clean,
turning ***** in morality. Excuses
to remain pure at heart, blame to never
feel the pain of rejection.
Darkness.
Pain.
Loneliness.
Desperation.
Anointing the headless children without
a thought of the purpose. Watering a rootless
tree, attempting to make it grow.
Mar 20, 2012
Mar 20, 2012 at 7:39 AM UTC
Clear, simple blue skies.
Unnerving negative space.
A girl decorates.
She stitches and glues.
Flying machines of all kinds.
A girl must create.
Colors shade sunlight.
Wind gifts them the breath to dance.
A girl must hold on.
She pulls a heart string,
Knots this to her creations,
A girl unravels.
To the skies, she goes
Free in flight, she whips and spins.
A girl, so rootless.
Jun 29, 2015
Jun 29, 2015 at 12:07 PM UTC
.
..
...
When the inflated crunching sky turns into the black hole, one by one the expected stars slowly falling on the horizon, sudden deep dark clouds cover the silky face of moon, or the earth takes the full moon.
Long, long shadows darken the meadows, southern wind can’t open your closed window at all, standing along on the curve of a road, a sigh to fly in the wind, roaming heart finding a home.
See the mystic form of the known objects, distant standing old banyan tree suppose to feel a lonely friend of mine, a friend of rootless time, when silly, bogus thoughts engulfed me, want to break up but change does not cry out.
Melancholy beauty in the dark, floating with the imagine gulls in the sky, draw the red sun on the canvas of dark sky within the wings of dream, again see you are playing with the seven colors across my unfinished sky.
.
..
...
@Musfiq us shaleheen
Jul 27, 2015
Jul 27, 2015 at 4:47 PM UTC
This is your reality, the brave new world;
i just hang out here:
birthed in the Cradle of Elam,
a mourning son of Baal,
smeared and anointed
with the oil from the
***** fingerprints of
countless scores of
sweaty neophytes;
carried, dropped, dented;
brought forth from eons passed,
updated for the 21st century,
gilded Krylon-gold.
This nebulous gift,
made tangible and
whole by blood,
a form fitting sacrifice,
transmogrified kudzu,
rootless, digging
talons' clutch into
our minds' construct,
seeks strength of
conviction, action.
Our ship is now
veering off course.
i must respond in kind.
i will not be led astray.
i will not have my good
intentions commandeered.
i will hijack your purpose,
screaming mutiny,
holding Occam's Razor-knife
to the throat of your jihads.
i issue a fatwa of peace,
as you once did,
before.
i renounce a kingdom of hate,
as you once did,
before.
i seek charity in effort,
as we once did,
before.
Let us rebuild.
Let us move forward.
***** a new Babel,
forsaking the sword.
Let our forks be on roads,
and not on our tongues;
a forging of union,
as we'd once begun:
My sisters, my brothers,
my family,
as one.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 7:39 PM UTC
Sad girl rock
Fills the room with hopeless longing.
Rootless dreams take off out of the open 2nd floor window.
Cold Coffee.
Ain’t nothing
To a Cold, Cold heart.
This isn’t how the story ends.
Cryogenic stasis.
A general lack of brain damage.
Neurological bliss.
Goosebumps when it’s 90 degrees.
If a tree falls in the woods….
Questions.
Paralysis in analysis.
I understood more before the literary critique.
Lost.
We’re all lost.
Thematic speeches
and character monologues.
Overbearing landscape descriptions.
It’s all so oppressive.
Characters who walk around and around.
Past street signs. Past Monuments. Past that same newsstand again.
Circles in grids. So squares, then.
The time of Ulysses is near
So we can all be thoroughly confused together.
Jun 14, 2012
Jun 14, 2012 at 3:40 PM UTC
“To us, white girls are exotic,”
says my Arab American boyfriend.
At that moment, my brain ceases
to make sense of those words
in that order.
Exotic? White? Girl?
Me? Me. He means... me.
So this is what I say
to my Arab American boyfriend
who has
more culture in his pinky
than all of white America combined.
From what I can tell,
to be white in America is
boring static,
AM radio on a Sunday morning
with a broken dial
on a back road in the boonies.
It is the culture born by everything borrowed but wrongfully claimed
as its own invention.
To be white, in America, tastes like
cream of wheat
with no hope of brown sugar.
It is a tumbleweed-kind-of-rootless
and just as desert dry.
It is colorless, odorless, tasteless—
and will choke you slowly
if you don’t build up a tolerance.
But
if you’re lucky enough
to be white in America,
for about a hundred bucks
and a swab of the cheek,
the Internet can tell you
where you came from.
Even if that makes you feel cultured,
tomorrow you will wake up
and still be
white in America.
To be white in America, I thought,
was as far from exotic
as the self-loathing, middle aged guy
behind the counter
at your local DMV.
But white girls, he says, are exotic.
Perhaps it’s because pumpkin spice
oozes from my pasty pores,
or that “there ain’t no laws
when you’re drinkin’ the Claws.”
Maybe he couldn’t resist the fact
that the Starbucks barista
knows my order
better than my name,
or that my hair blowdries pin straight—
no matter the time of year.
I wonder if it’s the combo of
black leggings, messy buns,
and work out tanks—
or the fact that I think I’m saving the whole god **** sea turtle population
with my stainless steel straw.
Exotic?
Maybe it’s my compulsive nature
to buy in bulk, to pet every dog I see,
and to cry over Queer Eye episodes.
It couldn’t possibly be
the steady diet of rom coms,
my collection of Birkenstocks,
or the apple cinnamon candle
burning on my windowsill
that reminds me of “fall y’all,”
but then again, who knows?
To me, my whiteness is a privilege
that will forever be misinterpreted
as entitlement by every person
who checks that “white” box
on the form
without checking themselves too.
“To us, white girls are exotic,” he says.
White girl is just happy
he likes her in spite of it.
Aug 21, 2019
Aug 21, 2019 at 10:10 PM UTC
My eyes are glossed,
I can not see.
I'm just as lost,
As a rootless tree.
Young strong ambition,
Brought down by the evils of humanity.
A good life was once my mission,
Now I question my sanity.
I feel separated from the world.
Reality is a fragment of my imagination.
What appears straight is curled.
Light is just a mere imitation.
We seek justice that is always blind.
For our laws are rooted in discrimination.
Greed serves as the currency of our kind,
And profit the sole motivation.
To see the corruptions of our society,
And sit outside and observe.
Brings a cold chill of sobriety,
and feeling of atrocity to my nerve.
My eyes are glossed,
I can not see.
I'm just as lost,
As a rootless tree.
For every beautiful creature,
There is complementary predation and blight.
For every miraculous feature,
There is a parallel of war and spite.
You can choose to accept things as they exist,
Or be the person that brings in change.
But if our current circumstances persist,
Our decedents will learn nothing but rage.
A wise man once said:
"Be the change you want to see."
So peace and love I will spread.
And live by the same decree.
I will use my tools,
Given to me by my Creator.
To make wise men of fools,
And make the common good greater.
My eyes are now clear,
And I can see.
I no longer appear,
As a rootless tree.
Jan 30, 2013
Jan 30, 2013 at 11:07 AM UTC
we blossomed once
in the desert
two green weeds
seeking rootless pleasure
now flower bedded
horticultured—yet wistfully I miss
the *****
of cactus lips
Aug 20, 2020
Aug 20, 2020 at 8:51 PM UTC
*She paints her world
According to her pure intention.
Pure in her own figure,
Not in someone else's.
She doesn't speak,
Of words in complex.
Her mouth but translates
Her minds complexity into simplicity.
She doesn't need to speak but rare.
You've read her words,
You've witnessed the paradox
Of her pen-to-paper.
You understand her terminology
Of no bad cause.
She wordlessly preaches her rootless existence
Through the essence of her eyes,
As she hides behind the smoke of her cigarette
Extraordinary, in disguise
Amanda. F (c) 2017*
Mar 12, 2017
Mar 12, 2017 at 3:18 AM UTC
All my life from place to place
Rolling stone, no moss and no face
Come and go without a trace
Drifting through this endless space
Must be beautiful, magical
you're free like a bird
No moss as you toss
through the waves of the world
I'll never be, I'll never know
Though I'm free, I've got no home
Rootless, faceless and alone
Wherever I drift, wherever I roam
Having a place, a simple pleasure
I cannot fathom, cannot measure
but what I have, I do treasure
to see, to grow, I'm free, I know.
Sep 15, 2012
Sep 15, 2012 at 11:42 AM UTC
Walking without words and I wish there was talking,
To drown out the noises.
Don't think of the people, or places or faces
They burn and it's burning, drilling holes till I'm brainless
Left completely shameless.
Wandering.
Aimless.
Your rain's the same but I can't help but think first,
I have no frame for reference ,
Can't help but blink away away those drops of helpless helpless
And this mess has me choked on maps,
City streets grown too big, too fast
And I lost track of those ones, the paths already used,
And now i'm just confused, displeased and displaced,
My sense of direction has fallen from grace
And I'm bawling, geology sent sprawling
From all hours till dawn in here we're all wanderers
and our soles don't sink in.
Where have we been?
Where are our souls going?
Give us arts but still the lost are throwing out this sense of
'home'.
There, that word, it lurches
Verses.
Music.
Maps,
They're useless.
We are rootless.
We are growing, shoot-less,
Our searches frantic, fruitless
And passing by we have footsteps we're tracking
But.
That's where they lie,
familiar and lacking.
Jun 11, 2013
Jun 11, 2013 at 7:48 PM UTC
I can't let myself keep awake about you.
You have absolutely no idea.
None at all, how I lie here and just
Think
And think.
Remembering you and me in darkness,
Music all around us.
Sometimes flashes of this.
Sometimes long detailed thoughts.
Trying to remember every action,
Every word said.
It all gets twisted around.
Distorted the more my mind pushes for a visceral connection to hold onto.
To relive again those moments between you and I.
I feel vulnerable in my thoughts.
I had a notion that I kept my emotions closed up tight.
No one could decipher my state of mind.
But as I always do,
I feel transparent around you.
And it frustrates me to no end.
Seeing signs, unwillingly, in everyday things.
Reminders of you in some little way.
Unconscious happenings, until the third time's a charm and I take notice.
Is some higher power trying to tell me something or what?
Is it useless to believe divine intervention could have a hand in my life?
Can't I think God is involved in my insignificant place in the world?
How can happenstance be blamed?
It's seems to me that I know you,
Or what I want to assume you are, given the chance to get that close.
And I can't be your distraction.
The phase that occurred between the running away and the falling back to.
I refuse to accept that role.
To be so rootless to your life.
That's not fair to me.
Not at all.
Especially when I have no idea how I came to be here.
In this complex emotional pond.
I just woke up one day and it was.
And I didn't get to prepare.
And it's not fair.
Let me have my walls back because now I am stuck.
Thanks to you, I'm stuck somewhere across from a breakdown and beside staircase.
Maybe you're a twin mirror of me though.
You might have just been paying more attention to the details.
Been more effected than I was, faster than I realized perhaps?
Whatever the case is, it's thrown me.
And I lay here every night think, thinking.
Somehow paranoid you can feel me conjuring memories of us.
Maybe wishing you could feel it every time you come into my head.
Like a ringing in your ears.
So then I wouldn't have to be alone in all this turmoil.
Not tragic just inconvenient.
It's as if I have a fantastic vision for a painting but no brushes to stoke with.
I'm baffled.
And I don't know where to go from here.
This limbo, half self imposed.
The saddest thing though,
Is that I kind of relish those thoughts.
Because for now they make me feel not so alone.
© NDHK
Jan 5, 2013
Jan 5, 2013 at 6:44 AM UTC
Wide-eyed, piercing contemplation…newborn.
Meeting my gaze, reading my thoughts…you want nothing.
Depth
Focused, deliberate…toddler.
Intently pressuring us to submit…you want what you want!
Concentrated
Fun-loving, cute…8-year old.
Extrovert, star…you know what you want!
Gregarious
Willful, unyielding…pre-teen.
Confusion, puberty…you do what you want!
Inflexible
Solo, driving…teen-ager.
Wandering, searching…you’re not sure what you want.
Rootless
Gone, missing…young adult.
Unknown, mystery…I don’t know what you want.
Mourning
Renewed, home…NOW.
Unlimited, enthusiastic…we’re creating what we want.
Love
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 2:04 PM UTC
I have not changed in years (it seems),
physically I am constant,
six feet and lopping sack of
bone and skin, buck-forty
on my best, wettest day.
These months have flown as
leaves in fall.
November is come and soon
will escape with the wind
as well and I am solidly planted
at a desk in an office with a
floor too hard to deepen the reach
of my roots.
I am like to wither and rot,
left rootless in snow and
ice; ash of autumn, flowerless.
The trees will die—grounded,
yes, and utterly passionless.
Nov 22, 2015
Nov 22, 2015 at 9:23 PM UTC
I wandered in on a world of dead rock. I laid with it. Smelt the essence together with carbon and metallic lifelessness.
To create a place of pretty. A sadness overcame.
I came to feeling. To knowing. Sentient.
A rootless contusion never ending.
A bottomless chasm of void.
The pit follows deeper and deeper it travels,
To the hollows of sorrow contempt I’m born.
I grow to feet from the ground where I lay,
As my body draped the floor sprawling and loose.
Upon these legs I rise, and so rise my eyes.
The hollow void I have lingers yawing in my stomach. Ulcerating my mucosal cavern.
What I see
Before me
On this road
On this desert of the necropolis:
Metropolis mass grave,
A mausoleum for civilization,
Möbius of war.
The reflective glint in my eye was of no mans eyes at all.
The death of hope.
Sea of sky scraping spires.
The dead hollow bones left after a city extinguishes.
Millions of towers with red glowing eyes, where blue life used to flourish, now twinkle in and out of this plane.
These giants graze, on the concrete and sway...with the wind.
Colossus of marble, petrified forever in granite with the internal flora that haunted their bowels.
They now have no agenda...city percolates to extinction.
They will forever amble with no purpose.
Once they housed the hearts and minds of microbes that built them.
The builders of hero worship.
They died in the 20's.
Left are the shells of a dream and a forest of buildings.
New York died circa 1900.
United States crumbles: 1776
Mar 17, 2013
Mar 17, 2013 at 11:38 PM UTC
these are our leaders: ash-born, clay-footed,
emerging in the fudge grays of beyond light,
shadows of the incense plumes
we light in prayer
long washed ashore here from yonder worlds
of darkness and mystery
by a wand wave thieve-made,
exiled our kings to the far realms, alien
then this self-lost band
of otherworldly priests, effeminate
our smiths and weavers, liars
our bards that sung of heroes
and conniving crooks our tradesmen
no we are not to prosper in common
with our kinsmen across the hills
but in the name of God, amen,
say peace to the holy ghosts,
rises deified a language and a nation
so we break the idols of the past
and garland our heroes of reason
clay-footed they come,
and die drowning without an heir
alpha and omega
of our rootless world,
Feb 11, 2017
Feb 11, 2017 at 1:05 PM UTC
This must be what they mean by growing up.
Skin worn with boyish charm,
but I feel old in my bones.
The holes in my marrow house stagnant air;
echoes of unheard words
and half-forgotten dreams
keyhole-peek through hairline fractures.
There must be something in the wind,
the way the dust is kicked up from
the soles of our shoes
to dance with the last night’s
idle bedtime prayers,
and find intimacy with dew
that will never fall out of love with grass.
We said,
Black out the lights so that I can
catch my breath again…
and we looked for shade under rootless trees
and couldn’t quite decide whether the night sky
was everything our grandfathers made believe
in stories that smelled like cigar smoke
and typewriter ink,
or if it was nothing more than
card stock and pinholes.
And as the footsteps that find comfort in concrete
step over our flickering, kerosene city lights,
We hummed hymns into the
crevices of our collarbones
and serenaded the sky with
our songs of sin.
They interpreted the tip-toeing crescendos
for the hearsay of rats
and the cricket gospel of violin legs.
But what they never understood is that
I came clean with careful lungs.
Listen,
the air was a draft drawn through
an almost silent note of a harmonica,
This Town is more fragile than a whisper.
Mar 17, 2011
Mar 17, 2011 at 1:27 AM UTC