"sartorial" poems
Five minute street artists
and insomnia mongers.
****** drunk blondes
and finger snapping phat booties.
Street geniuses
bred by Machiavellian philosophies
cypher dreams over tokes
of marijuana smoke.
Color worshipping narcotic traffickers,
and bread winners
parole corners
sporting fitted caps and twisting fingers.
Senile war veterans
beg for change in cardboard boxes
from the American dreams
they afforded.
Hard workers with every ethnicity
molded into each pore of their face,
rub shoulders with tourists at traffic stops
barely escaping tires crushing their feet.
Sartorial geniuses with no pants
switch hips in knock-off stellos heels,
selling the origin of the world on avenues
next to Arab Halal food.
Cooperate ties and blue collars chafe ***** on subways.
nodding in and out of Daily News articles
while oxygen blessed by asparagus ****
pump through their noses.
Summa *** laude number runners dictate economies
From sky-crapper offices,
And powered rain swallows their concrete each winter,
With no apologies.
Jun 2, 2011
Jun 2, 2011 at 11:01 PM UTC
Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower, if you like woman with petals
Growing from out of their face
And lips adorned with myriad metals
Moving silently with infinite grace.
Fishermen who caught her, in alarm
Tossed her back with dismayed cries
Fearful that she would do them harm
When she exposed her fangs, darting from her eyes,
Forked tongues from each palm.
But apart from all that, she was a delightful creature
As proud as a catwalk model
Sexuality impressed into each feature
Death in each cuddle,
Poison injected from each freshly opening suture.
At the sea’s dark bottom lived the nymph
Devouring fish raw, terrifying sharks and barracuda,
Dining on shellfish and prawns for lunch;
Darting amongst Angel Fish and eels, a hungry aficionada,
Tearing into shreds what she could not crunch.
Gentle with her own kind until coition
Was complete, when if hungry she devoured
Her temporary mate without undue consideration,
No please or thank you. Feeling duly empowered
By her actions, as confirmed by her explosive, acrid indigestion.
No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And in several places, impaling her scaly flesh a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.
The last of the kind. The others are (literally) toast.
Protected by animal charities here and abroad
She gladly subsists on ambitious swimmers who venture far from the coast
All she can now catch or afford.
A capricious tyrant until the last, when, victim of a fisherman’s boast
She was hoist up like iniquitous cod
Out of the sea, paraded on the deck while she struggled for breath.
Shot at. Abused. Poked and speared with a steel tipped rod,
Dragged into the harbour, pummelled close to death.
Screaming out, as she in unexpected agony died: “I thought, I truly thought, I was god!”
Jul 20, 2016
Jul 20, 2016 at 2:06 PM UTC
As we sailed the fast river of Rhône
the steady sun bleached it a sparkling gold
like the treasures of Caesar’s kingdom
A curtain of fawn-silken tackle, shaded
back the fervidly garish star scatter,
and cooling flower-scented airs tickled
the senses like touching down-soft silk
"zhuang hong zhuang sheng" (Chinese)
“Put on airs’ - Peter and I are Gatsby gilded.
Why not dress - on luminous forenoons?
Pick a heart, any heart and ***** it, sharply,
with the sight of a handsome man.
I yet breathless, breathe
What weapon is sharper than libido?
I defend myself, with fashion’s sartorial sparkle.
Frankly, I was hoping for something passively ******
you know, foment a false perception - dazzle
with fancy outwork to tip the cosmic balance
Men will witness what they believe
.
.
song for this:
Desperately Trying by Club des Belugas, Anna Luca
10p.0615
Jun 15, 2024
Jun 15, 2024 at 10:07 PM UTC
I should have thought,
It would be easier,
Somehow haha,
It is neither here nor there,
A coincidental chain of things,
Setting in motion
Something akin to,
A dreamless day,
A wooden sort of way
Of going about,
Cumbersome,
Turtled,
Thiking about,
Nothing while,
Fixing blye eyes,
Analysing speech patterns
A superior sense of spatial awareness
Coupled with sartorial elegance,
That could be counted in kilowatts,
***** is the incumbent ruler of a blank,
Where are our chaperones?
This is not the kind of party I had envisaged,
A monster is as much as you allow it to be,
So take me to solitude.
Sep 6, 2018
Sep 6, 2018 at 10:54 AM UTC
Sartorial elegance
He always wore a yellow silk scarf around his neck
The type actors wear when in blazer having a drink on the terrace
Of a posh hotel, he bought his scarf at a second-hand store
In Cheshire, nevertheless, it was made to fit him
Oddly enough the rest of his apparel was purchased in a Chine's
This gave him an air of seedy elegance that normally comes with
Those who suffer no self- awareness
He was poor and lived on bread and marge, when not invited
To high-born party by people who thought he was an aristocrat
Sometimes I came too because as he said he was writing a novel,
And that made me interested in people with literary ambitions,
There are so few of them hidden in lofts and not spoken of-
His dead was sudden a rope and a beam,
he was missed by the locals
I have not had a proper dinner for a long time,
But I wear his yellows silk scarf for a book unwritten.
May 10, 2017
May 10, 2017 at 2:31 AM UTC
at the Missouri Botanical Garden
The earth paused in its orbit
that peaceful autumn afternoon
as we strolled the garden paths
cloaked beneath a veil of cotton clouds.
We walked through a kaleidoscope
of hanging globes of spectral mums,
Hypericum patches lined the trail -
their red berries exploding into golden stars
and sartorial toad lilies had
donned their finest freckles.
Across the garden lake,
grasses, maples and burning bush
embellished the opposite shore.
a maple leaf floated by
like a delicate raft
painted gold with scarlet trim.
This was the hour the world stood still
in the tranquil grace
of an autumn afternoon.
Oct 24, 2014
Oct 24, 2014 at 4:21 AM UTC
To say that the metaphysical mystique of the human race
is an imaginary condition is a gross denial of evolutional
principle . What then is the nature of problematic prosthesis,
the personification of sartorial perfection , or the picturesque
visage of spectral grace ?
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013 at 5:42 AM UTC
THE NYMPH
Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower- if you like women with petals
Growing from out of their face
And lips adorned with myriad metals
Moving silently with infinite grace.
Fishermen who caught her, in alarm
Tossed her back with dismayed cries
Fearful that she would do them harm
When she exposed her fangs, darting from her eyes,
Forked tongues from each palm.
But apart from all that, she was a delightful creature
As proud as a catwalk model
Sexuality impressed into each feature
Death in each cuddle,
Poison injected from each freshly opened suture.
At the sea’s dark bottom lived the nymph
Devouring fish raw, terrifying sharks and barracuda,
Dining on shellfish and prawns for lunch;
Darting amongst Angel Fish and eels, a hungry aficionada,
Tearing into shreds what she could not crunch.
Gentle with her own kind until coition
Was complete, when if hungry she devoured
Her temporary mate without undue consideration-
No please or thank you. Feeling duly empowered
By her actions, as confirmed by her thunderously satisfied indigestion.
No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And criss-crossing her piebald nose a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.
The last of her kind. The others are (literally) toast.
Protected by animal charities here and abroad
She gladly subsists on ambitious swimmers who venture far from the coast-
All she can now catch or afford.
A capricious tyrant until the last, when, victim of a fisherman’s boast
She was hoist up like iniquitous cod
Out of the sea, paraded on the deck while she struggled for breath.
Shot at. Abused. Poked and speared with a steel tipped rod,
Dragged into the harbour, pummelled close to death.
Screaming out, as in unexpected agony she died: “I thought, I thought, I was god!”
Jul 3, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 at 7:38 PM UTC
Sun high in the sky
Start of my day enfolds
Just in time, and on the fly
Without being told
I gather my books
Into my bag, my cargo hold
Disregarding sartorial looks
My flip flops, my shorts, my tank
I go out the door
With no one but myself to thank
The sky suddenly darkens
The temperature drops
A horn in the distance beckons
As I say goodbye to my flip flops
I'm now moving through the street
Didn't quite expect mother nature
To literally sweep me off my feet
Jun 19, 2015
Jun 19, 2015 at 2:01 PM UTC
says the neon sign gleamed,
refracted on your face
that sullen evening – I do not have
many nights to remember. If from a high
place I imagine you flailing,
what would call you back? What for?
You, coming toward the light – the subservience
of the next face
chauffeurs us. Unfazed, will me to pretend,
if not, then carry on the next meeting.
I will whisper to myself: this is how I sustain beatings
You have no use for poems.
Neither do I. You, dressed in your best,
I, submission refined by sartorial. Notice how my hand
continues to displace geographies. The thinning
horizon of a candle, almost a faultline.
Slumped on your back as if comfort were a burden
to say: keep this time together with its fever. These often times
the last moments seal them shut out of histories.
When we came into,
I had a falling out – there is a straight line we could
run into and this instance might enervate
into a single drop of honey into your mouth. I await that
prophecy like it was the final thing before I resign
to incompleteness. Delicate essence
the neon sign says, glaring through the
glib downpour outside. You laughed at our
unpreparedness, but the readiness that was obligation when
separate had no omen of rain.
I am watching myself again. Everything was slanted
by rain as the living err me. Even when together,
feels like emancipation. Going disparate places.
Outside it continues to rain. You asked if this rain washed
this city whole and gave it a new name, would I still remember.
It is June from time since then, the skies still attentive.
I will not come out until it rains.
Jun 1, 2016
Jun 1, 2016 at 5:03 AM UTC
it is something that has
made me once laugh.
and now that it is something
that is done to perpetuate
a divinity of its savoir faire,
or unfurl the evocativeness of
sartorial workmanship,
it is something that inhabits
me like an imagined pit
that a body should plummet into
and crash, having fallen off
from the boughs of a bottomless dream.
like snow or silence, drops onto its vastness and fastens in it such felicitous rigor greeting it
like an old companion, reminding
me of these unimpeachable occurrences: as a wrinkled log is petrified, where mosses pullulate to archipelagic green, where wild ivies sprawl like children in the high-afternoon, or clandestine Paraneoptera ensconced somewhere within the triviality
of demarcated stones in
the dark's cunning edge,
my body knows its peace,
all borderless without flounce
flourishing in its still life.
Sep 18, 2015
Sep 18, 2015 at 1:58 AM UTC
I mean the rain you drop in my voice
like a cloth cut by scissors, bridling its mare
and my hand sniggering in lust
though a smell of a banana
in an old part of this city, all alone
in hotel rooms and on brass beds
dirtiest hours of my face
a sartor with winter night face.
Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)
Oct 18, 2016
Oct 18, 2016 at 5:42 PM UTC
Sartorial
Not always conformed, to what was expected of me,
The sixties and seventies, exciting times, not what the older generation, thought it should be,
Sample new pleasures, sometimes on a whim,
New music, new stimulants, often, not what it said on the tin,
Dress code were informal, and often quite extreme,
Highly coloured loon pants, that the older folk, had never seen,
Time progressed, matured, and subdued was the order of the day,
Dark blue socks, pin striped suits, and some, a very, very drab grey,
Time sped on, identity gone, I tired of life conformity,
I’m a full grown man, so I hatched a plan, for my own, self autonomy,
I started with the socks, with colours so bright, I always knew where my feet were,
Like beacons in the night, a luminous sight, my feet, a pyrotechnical blur,
A very useful guide, when you’re totally pie-eyed, to know your feet, were still on the ground, beneath you,
If they were at shoulder height, there’s a good chance you’re tight, that things had gone, totally askew,
Panicked thoughts do abound, I shouldn’t be this way around, whilst a gentle thud is the sound, of your **** as it’s striking the ground.
Ah the shirt, a statement, a provocative trait, with designs, you either love, or you hate,
The shirt is the thing, that should make every man sing, at the prospect of projecting an image,
Hawaiians are brash, the colours do clash, but you’re starting a new age, the old one to trash
Your identity is born, let the old identity mourn, be extravagant with colour, be flamboyant,
Burn the beige and grey, stand up and say hey, my colourful image, is my enjoyment.
Parrots and cars, palm trees and bars, and shirts with multi-coloured stars,
Brightly coloured sneakers, baggy shorts that features, a perfectly monstrous clash,
With your new image to go, step out and throw, your wavering confidence away,
Treat people with humour, especially those who are gloomier, and brush away that awful cliché,
Some people may think, it’s OK to link, dislike of your choice,
for unkind remarks, to voice,
Accept it as is, it can make you annoyed, but it’s only a mark of their schadenfreude,
To combat this, it’s absolute bliss, to give them the finger, then slowly depart, don’t linger.
Feb 26, 2017
Feb 26, 2017 at 5:49 AM UTC
Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Why Do Widows Give Me Their Late Husbands’ Clothes?
When old men die their widows give me their clothes
(The old men’s clothes; not the widows’; let’s not get weird)
Nice pullover shirts, expensive blazers, everything goes
And ties to the 1970s geared
I am as Bob Newhart lost in an age
Of tattered tees and designer sneaks
Hardly the attire of a wise old sage
One of the last sartorial antiques
When old men die their widows give me their clothes
I look quite natty in them, I suppose
(The old men’s clothes, not the widows; let’s not get weird)
Apr 2, 2025
Apr 2, 2025 at 9:00 AM UTC
At the zenith
of sartorial sloppiness,
frittered loosely in my scruff,
I clobber,
combats, sneakers,
faux-fur coats and baggy t shirts
stuff that wraps me up,
and I'm OK..
You can keep
your first- world
judgement
see
I've always
been this way
part scarecrow, hermit,
vermin, pirate,
all at sea with
modern stylists.
And by the circle of our
strange unwritten rules
for a season, once in twenty years,
I, somehow, become cool.
Oct 7, 2021
Oct 7, 2021 at 12:08 PM UTC
Strutting Out
I love wearing a well tailored suit.
Strutting in my sartorial repute.
Crisp spread shirt collar, matching tie
And dimpled half Windsor knot
All with puffy pocket square to eye.
Dark navy with a faint pinstripe
Two button coat and Four button sleeve
Blood red silk lining type
British tailored elegance to perceive
Slacks cut just a half inch to the back
Stepping out lady on my arm
Copyright 2014
Richard L Ratliff
Aug 13, 2018
Aug 13, 2018 at 9:25 PM UTC
We were not introduced
but I'd be thinking she
should be called, Lucy.
It was by the washing
line, and not alone,
hence, her inhibitions.
From swaying erotically
in the breeze she began
waltzing in the wind.
When a peg released
her shoulder strap, my
fantasy was surreal.
Aug 8, 2018
Aug 8, 2018 at 12:24 PM UTC
your sartorial opulence arrests me,
mijn geliefde -
but i am learning.
when i pull pants that look like pajamas
out of the drawer
to wear to work,
i think you'd cringe
at my weak monday patterns,
incredibly unconventional for the modern world.
i look at you:
torn up jeans with indigo embroidery
and
a crisp white tee shirt
and
very nice leather loafers!
i'm intimidated.
i look again:
you smile
at me
and
at my weak monday patterns
and
at my pajama pants for work.
"mijn geliefde,"
you said with a softened gaze with no cringe.
Oct 27, 2017
Oct 27, 2017 at 1:49 PM UTC
To say that the metaphysical mystique of the human race
is an imaginary condition is a gross denial of evolutional
principle . What then is the nature of problematic prosthesis,
the personification of sartorial perfection , or the picturesque
visage of spectral grace ?
Mar 22, 2024
Mar 22, 2024 at 11:54 PM UTC
To say that the metaphysical mystique of the human race
is an imaginary condition is a gross denial of evolutional
principle . What then is the nature of problematic prosthesis,
the personification of sartorial perfection , or the picturesque
visage of spectral grace ?
Sep 24, 2020
Sep 24, 2020 at 5:13 PM UTC
For most poets
it's an obsession
a nagging one
a golden thread
through out their whole
sartorial collection of verse
we poets wear
our art
like suits some
fit better than others
and
some garments
well some
just need to be shot
like lame horses
I'm being tangential
and sorry
for the cruel morbid simile
but for my obsession
motels
the art deco flea circus variety
lately though
motel
and hotel art
it could be that
I'm in a really good place
for once in my life
that I can just
binge and gorge
on still lives of
cheap grocery store roses
and
whimsical pictures of prancing horses
Whit Howland © 2019
Sep 29, 2019
Sep 29, 2019 at 3:05 AM UTC
I dress up every Sunday,
but only in my mind
My coat and tie in tattered shreds,
the past and future bind
To celebrate in peasant rags,
as memory dances free
Imagining in formal garb
—what only I can see
(Dreamsleep: May, 2022)
May 2, 2022
May 2, 2022 at 10:06 AM UTC
Inner city limits.
I did get on the bus
no fuss
eschewed the tube
and
got the bus.
No point being early today
even if I was there'd be no
one there
anyway
the
caretaker's got the day
off and not taking care
of anyone,
but it's Friday
and why you may ask
does that make a difference?
all I know
is that as days go
Friday's are one of the best.
Standing room
and on tte
lower deck thoughts
drift silently in the quiet
faces of passengers.
Passing the Boorh memorial
a man of god dressed in
sartorial elegance,
Whitechapel
smells of ether and rain.
The Royal London
looks regal
a
palace for tte sick.
Into the city
past Aldgate East
no one at home
but
at least
the lights are on
and now this bus is jammed
spread so thickly with people
that drip like thick treacle
down the aisle,
in a while I beleive
they'll leave
they always do.
On through the Bank
and down to
St. Paul's,
behind me
a solitary
muezzin calls
the
faithful to prayer.
I'm getting there
albeit
slowly
but
the getting is part
of the process
and progression is
just a bonus.
Mar 9, 2018
Mar 9, 2018 at 1:04 AM UTC