"shadow" poems
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
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Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Curl round me as though you were frightened.
Even so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your ******* smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
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A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky.
But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
Of things unknown but longed for still
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.
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_~a jump-rope chant~_
Black silk handkerchief,
what ya’ gonna’ hide?
A pox that knocks on the church’s side.
Preacher won’t preach where my daddy died.
Angel forgot which soul to guide.
Both arms wrapped in moccasin skin,
open the gate and let her in!
Snake-bone hag with watery eyes,
count to ten when the baby cries.
One for the moon,
and two for sin,
three for the teeth with the rusted grin.
Four for the girl with the copper cough,
dancin' in the attic with the light turned off.
Five, six,
skillet ticks.
Seven, eight,
shut the gate!
Nine, ten, count again--
bathe him slow and cool the skin.
held him close till the fever broke;
air curled white from pinewood smoke.
Chewed the haw and bit the sage,
wrapped his bottle in a bible page.
Ghost stood watch on the porch out back,
shadow thin and eyes coal-black.
Sayin', "I’m fine, don’t mind the cold,"
"died last spring but ain’t been told."
Oct 5, 2025
Oct 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM UTC
Art, a smile like the one
on the face of Mona Lisa.
Curved like the waxing moon
above the sea.
Light a flame before a face
yet to be seen.
What will it prevail,
will it show once for all
a slow tilt on the smiling lips
—a curve softly locks on
a rose from the sun,
or a shadow beneath the moon?
May 23, 2017
May 23, 2017 at 7:35 PM UTC
Just a dew drop, let alone the sea,
and a handful of earth, not the Planet Ge.
Not a shade of blue, save the rose for bee
Purely a clear drop didn’t spill in the core,
because the whole sphere feels the pinch.
Singing chorus rains down, bouncing back
to earth the only open-through planet.
No black hole is as deep as the sun jumps,
dives in the dew on every flower they wet.
Every bird in the trees sings and tweets,
yet one is stone quiet, shouldn’t even hiss.
Shh! shh, the sleeping beauty is sleeping!
Cut above the rest, the unique earth
brimming with the infinite finishing line
by design pans out to the transcended pi.
Pure spring, the waterfront by the Moon,
untouched, unspoiled is her swimming pool.
How she goes by, wetting her ****** toe
Only to bubble high up the transcended circle
If only the sun could rise high in that pole,
for the rest of species could sneak a peek.
She’s there with the capstone of the pyramid!
Shots beyond the fixed circle, netting the eyeballs.
The stars, the Moon on the move for pure freedom.
The thrilled earth did come out, smelling of roses
Off the golden cut pi-decimal-abyss digital spring.
With a handful of earth and a drop of water dew
This is a pure mirroring thanks to the original, you!
At the end of the string apt you lovely took her by hand
and she took it in emptying her heart and soul.
Earth is now too thin on stock, she is no more
Just a shadow, a 360-degree hollow flute!
Oh light at the end of the tunnel shine and show
Play in like in the Night of Ascension once more!
Apr 8, 2017
Apr 8, 2017 at 8:59 PM UTC
I hung myself today. Hanged? Whatever, point is I hanged myself today and I'm still hanging.
I feel fine. Just bored. I keep hoping that someone will come home and cut me down but then I keep remembering that if i knew someone like that I wouldn't be up here. Bit ironic, right? Or is that not ironic? I read somewhere that, like, anything funny is, in some way, ironic. But I don't know if it's funny or not. I don't think my brain owns "funny," you know?
I feel taller. I like that.
I've never been away from my shadow for this long. It had always clung to my feet, parting momentarily for a quick dive into the swimming pool. But never for five hours. I like it. There's three feet of space between my two and the floor.
I wanted something this morning. I may be stuck. But at least I'm three feet closer to it.
Dec 13, 2015
Dec 13, 2015 at 2:37 PM UTC
In swirling clouds of silver lace
The disk of Luna lies concealed
Across the Autumn skies they race
Over this shadow realm surreal.
On evening shadows now, I gaze
A gentle wind swirls through the trees
From depths of sleep, I watch half-dazed
Thin branches stirring in the breeze.
Lights flickering neath mystic skies
Through gaps in trees, they shine within
Entranced, my mind, I watch surprised
This spectral beauty in the wind.
In these dark shadows, spirits drift
Translucent ghosts and dryads old
From this meadow, I sense their gift
Strange stories from the wood untold.
Oh let me join thy sylvan fest
Pale spirits of this Solstice night
Before the Moon sets in the west
We'll revel neath her misty light.
Jun 16, 2014
Jun 16, 2014 at 12:04 AM UTC
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
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Both light and shadow
are the dance of Love.
Love has no cause;
it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets.
Lover and Loving are inseparable
and timeless.
Although I may try to describe Love
when I experience it I am speechless.
Although I may try to write about Love
I am rendered helpless;
my pen breaks and the paper slips away
at the ineffable place
where Lover, Loving and Loved are one.
Every moment is made glorious
by the light of Love.
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Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
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Trapped in a cage with golden bars of light
Of ancient habit and direful duties;
Below the water crashed into the bight,
The whispering waves baiting with beauties.
But her shadow lurked around the coast,
Dashing her to the beach like drifting wood.
Preventing her from what she wanted the most
To reach new shores from where she stood.
She wanted to travel and sail the open sea
Beyond the shingle, seaweed and shells
Closer to the horizon where the birds flew free
Or to the arenaceous ground in diving bells.
And coming back to where she started
She found her seaside changed since she has parted.
Or did the widening horizon change her perceiving?
For returning was not the same as never leaving.
Sep 4, 2018
Sep 4, 2018 at 10:37 AM UTC
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.
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feels like putting my hand
on something sharp kinda day
invincible temporary, of course
fight the system on a february dawn
where the lamp's lambent spheres
bob in and out of existence
as the sunshine overcomes their presence
first kiss with you, like hands
dancing in the fires
trying to stay warm in the winter light
an ogre of a dream, a curse to be this shadow
compared to the glow of an angel like you
Feb 24, 2018
Feb 24, 2018 at 10:46 AM UTC
i think about
a lot of things
and most of them
don't stay for long
but if i had to
sum it up,
for you,
i think i'd try.
i think about my memories
and replay laughs
and lessons, kisses
and the first time seeing
people who i now know well.
i think about the near future
and try to tame expectations
and try to focus on the now
but sometimes it
gets tough.
i often feel like
dipping in and
out of life like
something rolling
back and forth
along the wave break
resting now and then.
but mostly i just
think of that
which is before me
like a map or
flower or a shadow
or whatever form i find.
so when you asked me
what i think
it at first seemed
a riddle, for
i'm not sure
i think at all
now that i
think
about it.
Jun 10, 2010
Jun 10, 2010 at 4:39 AM UTC
Eternal consciousness
in the Void
(makes trial & jail seem almost
friendly)
a Kiss in the Storm
(Madman at the wheel
gun at the neck
space populous & arching
coolly)
A barn
a cabin attic
Your own face
stationary
in the mirrored window
fear of restroom’s
Tragic cold
neon
I’m freezing
animals
dead
white wings of
rabbits
grey velvet deer
The Canyon
The car a craft
in wretched
SPACE
Sudden movements
& your past
to warm you
in Spiritless
Night
The Lonely HWY
Cold hiker
Afraid of Wolves
& his own
Shadow
~~~
The Wolf,
who lives under the rock
has invited me
to drink of his cool
Water.
Not to splash or bathe
But leave the sun
& know the dead desert
night
& the cold men
who play there.
~~~
a ha
Come on, now
luring the Traveller
Mighty Voyager
Curious, into its dark womb
The graves grinning
Indians of night
The eyes of night
Westward luring
into the brothel, into the blood bath
into the Dream
The dark Dream of conquest
& Voyage
into night, Westward into Night
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Was it love? or was it an arrow?
My heart, you took, left me in sorrow
Your heart, may I borrow?
Till death, I will keep, not returned by tomorrow
My fortune is narrow
That what left my heart hollow
And my face sallow
Your secret, I revealed, left me feeling shallow
Running in agony in the furrow
Towards the nearest tree, willow
With no one fellow
Sitting on the branch lonely with my shadow
What a blue life! Thought it would be yellow!
Memories of you are my softest pillow
Such emotions, I shall not allow
Your fingerprints, your footprints, your trail I will follow
With all of my might, we become the lovers of the morrow
The pill of hope, I will swallow
--Hisham
Jul 15, 2018
Jul 15, 2018 at 6:43 PM UTC
The mother is first—
she is for all and down to earth.
She, the mother Fathima,
descended from uncharted Heaven—
that pivotal frontier
only the Prophet of all prophets has seen.
Then, there was no Adam, nor Eve, nor even Jibreel.
Every star across the seven skies
wishes to kiss that golden dust.
Not to mention the Moon at the center,
waning and waxing—openly and secretly—
unleashing its longing to rub
this non-sublunary piece against its forehead.
She knows—only then
the rough seas beneath her will calm,
bathed in the soft raining moonlight,
rubbing off upon a lucky, blossomed forehead.
Oh, if only—
scarcely could they ever see it!
The galaxies, since their inceptions,
have longed for it.
The bliss of the eyes—tucked away from the scene.
Paradise lies beneath the mother’s feet!
It finds its core, its resonant lore,
in the shadow of the original feminine—Fathima.
There, the original matter explored;
Paradise breathed beneath her—
but she touched down at the heart of the Earth
without stepping or touching on Paradise,
only to give her stake away to others.
No land she would take on her way back, indeed.
Not in her name.
Do you know where Fathima’s grave is?
Dec 28, 2017
Dec 28, 2017 at 4:01 PM UTC
*Streaming sunlight, what an intense, insistent lover!
empty catamaran dances in it's sultry embrace,
on the foam bed of gently rocking sea waves.
The dark shadow of this union finds it's kind of fun
swimming deeper, frightening fish roaming in pairs.*
Jul 28, 2014
Jul 28, 2014 at 12:13 PM UTC
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.
I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away.
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Moonlight swimming
bodies of shadow
wet skin-bright cloth
Nov 23, 2014
Nov 23, 2014 at 3:55 AM UTC
A Queen in waiting, a Princess no less.
Each day, a routine before being seen.
For some, a shadow and not of the eye.
The kind you'd find on that of a guy.
An army of pogonophobes in dysphoric confusion.
Each purging our wardrobes,
a repeated delusion.
A leading *******
from a pornographic circus.
The ***** under graduate from
a school of *** workers.
Your Hubby's vision in blue
is our secret down south,
'cause he wouldn't kiss you with
that ***** mouth.
So, I'll stop you there Sizzle Chest
with your cans of Stella
in your pristine white vest.
'Cause this is real easy,
even for you Mr ******
I used to be a Princess but
now I'm a Queen,
recently coronated
after all that I've seen.
Poetry by Kaydee.
Jul 9, 2018
Jul 9, 2018 at 9:43 AM UTC
A howl is heard
in the dead of night
a shadow seen
on the hill
between the trees
a pair of golden eyes
strikes fear into the hearts
of those who trespass
in his territory.
this beast is
the beautiful wolf
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 12:00 PM UTC
#there are the ones
that feel it climb up
the shadow towards the light,
hesitation on every rung,
each wave of the arising
overwhelms unabated ―
and woe betides those
who are on the run
from a storm's deluge
A rousing ocean breeze
stirs inside the memory
of an unframed seashell
lying on the hearth mantel;
heightened sensitivity
lapping soundlessly,
spindrift plashing
the shoreline
of another world's
feigned peace
Perhaps the muted voice
of guilty pleasures,
hushed by their own
hidden truths
Feeling the unfelt textures
of every stifled vibration
left unbreathed
The naked truth befallen
so cold and lonely
Running in circles,
volatile as all those
unspoken excitations raging ―
and the whispers of those
who hear not
the voices in the wind
An emotionally enslaved heart
tarries, marooned high and dry
in a memory on a distant sand bar
lain fallow for so long ―
stagnant darkness
of an unsated soul
gathered on the back
of a parched tongue
sullied wordless
Rising up through
a dusty hieroglyph corridor
through an unlocked
labyrinth gate; vestige echoes
from somewhere left behind
in an incomprehensible
abandoned wake
It's getting harder and harder
for an insatiable soul to breathe ...
climbing up a tree trunk―
up within the silence
of the listening tree
Toes dug into
the rough bark furrows ―
fingers reaching upwards
beyond their deepest known grasp
A shadow stranded
out on a hangin' bough
hearkening without ears that hear:
“perhaps they’ll listen now“
the wingless bird sings
in psalms that fly away
on tattered feathers
over untamed waters roil
Back to nature’s waning youth,
the bough bends unbroken
to taste the freedom
of the wild absolving seas
Jesse Stillwater
June 2018
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 12:41 PM UTC