"shoestring" poems
Take all.
Leave me thin and bone,
Withdraw hope and home,
Shame me in every way,
Blind me, shun me
Punch me deaf and dumb,
Bleed out all of joy,
Fester *** and pleasure,
Blacken me a liar,
Circumcise my art,
Multiply a thousand times despair,
And present me death as a gift
Hobble my gait,
Drape me down in chains,
Rob me of all.
But leave me words.
Grant me poetry, one line, one spark
And the universe ignites again,
Let me roll syllables like dice
And I will chase passion to you,
Give me a sprinkle of syntax,
A magic dust,
Turns sound to shape and form.
Let me own letters,
And I will smuggle tears to you,
Crouch inside your dreams,
Spin the air into scent
Reflect in every mirror a lover,
Make clouds chant a monk’s choir,
Bend light and tie it like a shoestring,
Give me words, just words
And I will stand forever.
Oct 21, 2015
Oct 21, 2015 at 9:27 AM UTC
Do you hear the trees that talk in whispers
see the leaves that fall as spears
can you feel the mountains breathe?
I am ice in flowing rivers on a journey to the sea
Spring came early
and
fooled me
drip
drip
fall off the ledge and off on this trip of a lifetime
my life's fine
I'm just melting.
Swearing to God doesn't help me
the sea rises up before me
and I
disappear.
Next year
I'll be ready.
Nov 7, 2016
Nov 7, 2016 at 3:34 PM UTC
You put a little glass box on the table
Said here's mine now show me yours
So I took out a piece of paper
And drew something like a shoestring
Now this is all I've got you see
I don't have very much at all
But this is down way deep inside me
So deep you would die from the fall
Jun 12, 2014
Jun 12, 2014 at 2:28 PM UTC
Igor & TT were the hit of the new wave
film circuit, reviving thoughts
of vintage Auteur cinéma vérité;
MOTHERWELL [formerly banned]
on a double-bill with _A Star Is ****
American film makers hitting a
glass wall rush to sign the least
talented; shooting on a billion-
dollar shoestring knockoff ****
films about artists & faux art films
about **** stars; Eli could never
breathe the air of LA or the USA;
wanted as he was for the ******
of an unnamed drifter; the actress
at his door, crying it was her dad;
Eli pours her a whisky & having one,
sits & watches her bawl her eyes out;
& picking her eyes from the floor,
handed them back to her, & blind
she thanks him, before putting
the red orbs back in her empty head;
rushing to his arms & missing completely, she hits the wall;
"u'd better go back to America," he said,
"Stay there & send ur mother over here."
"Are u going to **** my mother?"
the echo of the question rang out through the ages;
how many girls had asked how many men
[stepfathers & strangers] [on the way out,
the realization] under how many clouds of doubt,
suspicion & threat, 'are u going to ****
my mother?' inevitably, the answer
was yes, confirmed by Oracles of yore;
Mighty Delphi itself proclaiming
that her mother will be ****** by the man
she desires for herself; yes, always &
for all time in the eternal recurrence
of lust, love & separation; moms always give better head
Aug 18, 2018
Aug 18, 2018 at 10:53 PM UTC
Entertainment comes in many forms
One without Nielson ratings
presents daily shows
below the garage gutter
Weathered leather shoestring
strains under the weight
of unfilled feeder
long exposed to wind
and air until
it's original surface
contains only flecks
of it's original varnish
When filled, squares of suet cakes
fitted between wire grids
entice chickadees
early in the day
before nuthatches, wren
and downy woodpeckers
peck and feed on the
nut, corn and protein
snack. Bluejays struggle
without success to
hang sideways and gather
specks of nuts from the tallow.
Other large birds, cardinal
and red-bellied woodpecker
show-up the jay as they feed
with ease at the suet rack
Each day suet sinks
slowly descending until
little is found by
winged visitors
Begrudgingly he rises
from his chair, tramps to the
garage to find a new
insert for the feed box.
Hands, weathered like the
pine of the feeder
unpack the next cake
to refresh the lure
as the scenery of wild birds
return to their feeding
and refill his soul
Aug 27, 2016
Aug 27, 2016 at 12:38 PM UTC
The Story Of Shoestring Jeb
This is the story of Shoestring Jeb
Everyone said he had a hard head
Jeb was a fighter, one of the best around
Till one day it was that Jeb hit the ground
Jeb had never lost a fight
He was known as being as fast as light
Jeb was a hero in my part of town
Known as the greatest fighter around
For sure now, it was surprise to see
Who Jeb lost to and buckeled his knees
No one would ever think it could be
That Jeb would fall to little Sally Marie
Sally Marie was a bitty little thing
But she used her size to bring down Shoestring
No flurry of punches to knock out his teeth
She blew him kisses and said he was sweet
Jeb was beaten by a punch never seen
No more fighting at the request of Sally Marie
Jeb lost that last fight but some say that he won
Sally Marie took him out with a punch of true love
Carl Joseph Roberts.
I see a sequel in the future. The continueing life of Shoestring Jeb...lol
Jul 1, 2013
Jul 1, 2013 at 8:56 PM UTC
I want my heart to feel like the great Salt Lakes, reaching towards each other, constantly suspended in the moment just before contact. I want to build this anticipation, but my patience is shorter than your last haircut, when we sat by the river to discuss model trains.
I want my mind to feel like a hummingbird when it finally lands to rest on the red plastic device filled with sugar water outside my mother’s kitchen window, but I’m quite a ways from home now and have been for a while.
I want my stomach to feel like the tree roots, the red oaks, the ones that dwarf me and that I know would let me get my favorite kind of lost in their home, the kind we planned on visiting after graduation, but I am usually stuck in maple sap.
I want my mouth to taste like strawberries, ripened scarlet in the sun, the kind my tall friend’s mother mashes up with sour rhubarb for the perfect jam to last us through winter, but more often than not, my teeth are coffee-stained and my tongue tends to be too sharp for delicate berries.
I want my skin to feel like satin ribbons, the kind that tie little girl sashes before holy events and parties where they dance on their father’s toes for the first time, and find it perfectly marvelous, but I am covered in scratches and marks from building enormities.
I am a patchwork from the most meaningless scraps. I was a junkyard doll with mismatch buttons eyes and melted cardboard shoes. My head is a garbage heap left out too long, my eyes are scooping all of it up, and my dress is made of someone else’s throwaway linen. My aluminum can hands stretch out for anyone’s how-town while I think of shoestring revues and paper mache.
Jul 10, 2014
Jul 10, 2014 at 11:52 PM UTC
Living on a shoestring, but
I'm enjoying my Spring Fling
Apr 17, 2017
Apr 17, 2017 at 2:17 PM UTC
Shoestring Jeb
(Continued Part 2)
Shoestrimg Jeb was a very calm man
Always willing to lend you a hand
Jeb would never try to offend
And if he did he would ask to forgive
Now Sally Marie was Jeb's true love
And he gave to her all he had
He promised her he would never fight
Kept his word till they took her life
Sally Marie was home one day
Three men broke in and had their way
Jeb came home and saw his wife
She was stabbed ten times, he watched her die
The bar was dark, Jeb saw three men
Drinking and laughing over what they did
They saw Jeb but they didnt run
A big mistake, Jeb had his guns
Jeb's guns were his arms, never lost a fight
He beat those men, one at a time
Tied a showstring around three mens necks
Pulled it tight till each one was dead
Jeb never felt bad, not for what he did
He used his shoestrings to **** three men
The law looked twice but wouldnt convict
But Jeb never wore shoestrings again
Now if you see a man with no shoestrings in
Remember this story of Shoestring Jeb
Sally Marie was the love of his life
Three men took her,........ Three men died
Carl Joseph Roberts
Jul 17, 2013
Jul 17, 2013 at 10:22 PM UTC
I beg myself, "Stay alive."
I am my own hero
And ******* it,
I want somebody to notice
The dying soul in my eyes,
The shaky voice,
The cold heart,
The scars on my wrists from an absent
childhood happiness
I'm drowning in a puddle,
Everyone looks at my collapsing lungs,
Too afraid to reach down
Save me
The words I scream silently everyday,
Hoping one day someone will hear
Save me
It's too late now
These pills look like a perfect
escape. -DDF
Sep 23, 2015
Sep 23, 2015 at 8:30 AM UTC
-
If plaster of Paris is not made in France
If Ginger and Fred never learned how to dance
If shoestring potatoes don’t grow in a shoe
It don’t really matter because I love you
If airports have doorways but call them a gate
If calories will never cause us to wait
If moisture each morning is something that’s due
It don’t really matter because I love you
If hamburgers aren’t really made out of ham
And no one is sure what they put into spam
If something that’s old becomes something we knew
It don’t really matter because I love you
If plants that are planted are still called a plant
If uncles get mad when we step on an ant
If skies that are happy do always seem blue
It don’t really matter because I love you
If doors that are open are only a jar
If drinks are not served on a sweet candy bar
If vegetable soup is not really a stew
It don’t really matter because I love you
If kings in a downpour get caught in the reign
When birds lifting boulders are not called a crane
If flying the coop came from chickens that flew
It don’t really matter because I love you
Grammatically speaking, my title is wrong
And perhaps this poem goes on a bit long
But who cares as long as you know it is true
The one thing that matters, is that I love you
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 11:06 AM UTC
It feels that our love is more like a shoestring
although it appears to be such a good thing,
and all that we have now which is readily seen
may either be too loose or tight for us between.
If we continue on the path that we are both going
and it still seems little of each other are knowing,
instead of drawing us closer as true love demands
will see us moving further apart into distant lands.
Like people being scattered about in more than one direction
their progress is dependant on overcoming this real defection,
that we may have with each other in finding our true calling
and will help us both walk the path of grace in mutual loving.
________________________________________________
Nov 20, 2013
Nov 20, 2013 at 8:25 PM UTC
Was I worth the risk?
You were worth the sleepless nights
But was I worth the risk?
Of having a shoestring tie
Latch you to the world
Cut me off.
If you need.
Cut me off.
It’ll hurt
Cut me off.
Because I need you to be sound
More than I need you to be
Jun 3, 2014
Jun 3, 2014 at 8:41 PM UTC
Dragon
Swallows
Tail
Left arm
High
My boy Jack
Caramel and honeyed
Union of
Opposites:
Twenty-five
Years
Beyond odysseus
Wandered from you.
Your mother,
No penelope
My picture
Disfigured
Darted
Wounded
Cursed I roam
Wine-dark aegean.
Suitors succeed
And you are
Lost to me.
Goodbye telemachus
River boat gambler
Pencil moustache
Shoestring tie
How I picture you
Jack of hearts
How the ladies
Swoon
Nov 8, 2016
Nov 8, 2016 at 2:22 AM UTC
I’d trade a drunken uncle for five years of warmth
For a family rooted in chaos.
Your father recovered
But mine never will (if I can still call him mine)
Envy is a deadly sin
a gateway drug
An invisible mistress
You have hand painted thighs from a boy who rearranged no
We both know him,
though you have been closer.
(LIAR)
But i'm still a fresh canvas,
Maybe a bit tattered, slightly greyed
But clean of self inflicted hatred.
I've never had to invent my own pain.
I know pre-portioned hatred
Another ******
Food lines
Bottled baths
Gunshot lullabies
Shoestring laced telephone wires.
I wonder how it feels to stand on the edge with everything to live for.
“We” don't do that
(even though I've only been halfway accepted as “we”)
I have someone to take care of.
I wonder if sleeping pills would help me too.
Packaged from white rooms with white lab coats and white skin.
I wish I could hide too
I hate that you don't have to
I hate that you'd abandon everything I’ve always wanted.
Jan 6, 2019
Jan 6, 2019 at 2:02 PM UTC
My cat won't cuddle
Lost my car, too
Forgot where I parked
I'll just watch some
Jeapardy clues
I have no snacks
And my boots are broken down,
Mary Lou
hates the word slacks, and with mixed drinks, she goes to town!
I lost my dog
I lost my truck
I lost my girl
I wonder what's on Cozy TV right now?
Pretty sure it's Monk
Sorry, I got distracted, Mary Lou
Sad you're
Feeling melancholy and blue
I mean it's my only pair of shoes
Can you fix my boots, please ?
With some whiskey
Or some twine
She said
"Try some shoestring
Even try some wine"
Walking all over town
Pondering
Mary Lou
That's actually how my boots feel
Right now...
Very blue
And it's not
Not just my shoes
May 20, 2024
May 20, 2024 at 11:46 PM UTC
She is the ember, glowing amber in the ebony.
The promise of warmth, of home.
The air of her lingers on the pillow.
I want to hold it somehow.
Memory won't be enough.
I need a to stop time’s ever cruel hands,
to find the marrow and hold fast.
These ghosts dwell in my mind,
promising every sorrow.
Merely faceless shadows of childhood fears.
Latchkey kids will forever wear their
shoestring chains of being alone.
She returns with the ruffle of the sheets,
banishes the banshees to some distant land.
It will be days before they can return.
I take in her scent and smile at the knowing of it,
for now I have my Queen to gaze upon
transfixed in eros.
The heart’s fire
keeps the demons away.
She is holy,
mystic without knowing what she is,
only closing her doves eyes again,
only trying to find her dream again.
What do queens dream of
as fools gaze in awestruck wonder?
Feb 14, 2017
Feb 14, 2017 at 5:23 AM UTC
The owl was resigned to the fact that the cat had designed a new method of travel.
The string that was handy presented by Mandy, the turtle, would never unravel.
Perpetual motion brought on by the notion that holidays calm the hysterics.
Providing the crew had those jobs they could do that didn’t involve balding clerics.
After owl asking about multi tasking the cat decided to spin.
The string that was dandy and near to the sandy and frequently visited bin.
Realising the method was not going to pass so harassing the mass of onlookers.
The couple decided despite being derided to disappear dressed as two hookers.
The moral is this:
That an owl and cat’s bliss can only be found on a shoestring.
With strings and a boat and a gabardine coat, perpetual motion’s no new thing.
Mar 18, 2017
Mar 18, 2017 at 7:43 AM UTC
In the weeks leading up to your death there was no fire in your lips and no water in your eyes and you seemed happy for a turn so I let it be; when you licked into my mouth and it felt like feather candy, like I’d ticked off all the right choices, no red lines and I thought that we were safe. As you curved under the inside of my birdlike wrists and fed me praise, kisses where you projected cuts I had no heart for sight and but knots to stomach, that you loved me a little bit. I loved you less than a bit, then, but maybe it was always like that. I wake up to your shoes strung on a wire and that is fine but; i see you strung on a wire and things are not fine.
Apr 26, 2018
Apr 26, 2018 at 1:18 AM UTC
As the leaves breathed relief
upon their fabled flight from trees
I kissed the feet of the former me,
(Or at least the one who bleeds)
For freedom is just a season
that changes with the wind
without a rhyme or reason
unless its a song that we all sing
Only You know your truth
and if your life is being wasted
yet regret is a bitter blade from youth
that most old folk have tasted
but only a coward flees from dreams
and only the lonely are what they seem
yet most slaves forsake faith in change
when its paved the saviours way
Mar 11, 2021
Mar 11, 2021 at 4:44 PM UTC
Blame is a funny thing it seems,
when the reality of your nightmares takes the place of pleasant dreams.
You pray, and will yourself towards outcomes lined in silver,
cut deep, fire again, as you pull another arrow from your quiver.
A light at night that feeds as darkness flees,
desire consumed by placing doubt at the feet of make-believe.
You there, holding a smile hostage behind years of troubled abuse,
make peace, a tempting trait, finding a way to hinder happiness’ truce.
One foot in front of the other, stubbed toes that follow a cemented path,
tears well up, washing smudges from the windows of your soul, you’ll laugh.
An advocate for all things ‘animal’, the scapegoat least of all.
Tying the knot, shoestring situation - wait for me, your beck and call.
deleting inconsistencies, stick around for a little while and you’ll see,
Self-love, outward hate, a slipstream race towards all I’ll ever be.
There’s a tactical, cumbersome advantage to living life so free,
the ability to live and love who we want, until that person decides to disagree.
Place an ear to my chest, and hear the rhythm of lies with each heartbeat,
In this day and age of open hate, no regard to civility, no reason to be discreet.
Advice to die by, said like this: love one another, and like yourself,
we only have so long on this earth before we’re taken off the shelf.
Mar 11, 2018
Mar 11, 2018 at 8:13 PM UTC