"shopworn" poems
We climbed from bedrock
to Idyllwild the home
of Pines to Palms
and Suicide Rocks
but not for us
only for those
poor tired souls
for whom the world's gone
flat
refusing
the night threw
itself boldly into the fray
of winds which blew
from storm to calm
so this morning we awoke
to a placid knap
slipping on snowy piste
to turn cold snaps
hot
spiced Nepali tea
sipped from ice
nipped cups
I see promise
picks up
from backward leaps
time forward flips
breaking free range igneous
into pan
piped sizzling
congenial song
that carries on the tree line
like spring
water sprung from
creeks to go scurrying off
with wet socks
until pulled up
by old school granite skies
hanging pools out to dry
in sopping blue rinsed sun
ahead any bald rocks
or hairline fractures
are long since dialled in
as baseless fears
knowing this mobile age
can merrily slip like air
through numb fingers
while baseline hands declare
“hold me close to gather”
edelweiss echoes gone
rappelling through time
the route we've chosen's
to be tied to each other's
peaks in the way of sun
and moon
come what may
be it creases in our skin
or crevasses
we'll win the battle to slim line
any overhanging ridges
so I take care to tighten
my girth hitch to top notch
and hold firmly
to both your conviction
and reach
that setting
out to move mountains
we call home
achieves more than
staying home
and calling mountains
so bright
you have me forget
all things too trite
banal office hype
shopworn old hat
mowing lawn weekends
too dishy to be clichéd
you polish off the stereotype
slam the Dior on out of shape
and dull as ditchwater tripe
keeping a victorious secret
or two in the slip knot
too tranquil shade
taking allure to new heights
we'll never drop
down from
tonight
Sep 14, 2014
Sep 14, 2014 at 11:03 AM UTC
"Dark Star” by Stephen Stills
Forgive me if my fantasies might seem a little shopworn
I'm sure you've heard it all before I wonder what's the right form
Love songs written for you it's been going down for years
But to sing what's in my heart seems more honest than the tears
I am curious
Don't want to hurry us
I'm intrigued with us
Ain't this song a bust
I don't care dark star
I met you several years ago
The times they were so strange but I had a feeling
You looked into my eyes just once
An instant flashing by that we were stealing
Another time you felt so bad
And I wasn't any help at all as I recall
We didn't know quite what to do so we left the wanting be
Still there for me and you
Dark star I see you in the morning
Dark star a' sleeping next to me
Dark star let the memory of the evening
Be the first thing that you think of
When you open up your smile and see me dark star
It's easy to be with you
Even with the storms that rage beneath your search for peace
We must make some time together
Take the kids and find a world that's ours to keep
Now you've got me dreaming girl
It's been so long that I thought that I'd forgotten how
My heart is once again my soul
We touched we did you know we did no more teasing now
Dark star I see you in the morning
Dark star a' sleeping next to me
Dark star let the memory of the evening
Be the first thing that you think of
When you open up your smile and see me dark star
Dark star I see you in the morning
Dark star a' sleeping next to me
Dark star let the memory of the evening
Be the first thing that you think of
When you open up your smile and see me dark star
Let the memory of the evening
Be the first thing that you think of
When you open up your smile and see me dark star
May 23, 2019
May 23, 2019 at 9:17 AM UTC
Shopworn covers, brittle pages,
faded, handled carelessly -
dime-store dreams locked up for ages
in the musty library.
Risks untaken, words unspoken
stacked in cornered memories
beside the shelves that hold the broken
spines of bound-up fantasies.
Jul 26, 2015
Jul 26, 2015 at 10:37 AM UTC
Shopworn covers, brittle pages,
faded, handled carelessly -
dime-store dreams locked up for ages
in the musty library.
Risks untaken, words unspoken
stacked in cornered memories
beside the shelves that hold the broken
spines of bound-up fantasies.
Jan 9, 2011
Jan 9, 2011 at 5:01 PM UTC
They may call you fatty,
scruffy and ugly.
Your name may be vile
and I bet you smell awfully
smokes and ***** and
cheap perfumes of many different
******
But when I look through you
when I see beyond this fog
and almost feel you inside
I know then
you beat the handsome beasts
you beat them all
with the ruin of your heart that you keep
in the drawer of your bedside table
where you pop off beside
now and then.
And it's usually a.m.
It's always a.m.
Just like now
as another night on earth covers us both
as you wish to be a cat in your next life
as the street-lamp peeps into our loneliness
I raise another glass full of youth and despair.
Toast to you, to me.
To the world who never treats some of his guests nicely.
So
I choose writing.
"it keeps the walls
from
failing.”
I need the sound of the words
making love with the typewriter.
But I make do with a pen and paper.
I know you own a typewriter.
My time,
must be a bit shopworn
Have you ever smiled by doing a bracket after a colon?
Guess nineteen ninety-four was a bad year to be born.
but a nice one to die.
Though congratulations
you did well at the computers
well enough, like everything else
You take things as they come
and life teaches you how to get used to them.
You get used to living, you get closer to death.
It is not a big deal, has never been.
But it is the only deal.
A deal we can't deny.
All I wanted to say was a
"happy birthday"
but not that happy.
@mosquito
Aug 23, 2013
Aug 23, 2013 at 2:29 PM UTC
~
*a secret-possessor, a poetess of riddles,
informs, but my senses don't conform,
claiming that in my possess,
a gift ensconced, a soulfulness harbored,
purportedly outing me as "one gifted soul"
~
this "gift" of cobbled together phrases, on the back of
paper napkins,
words impermanent, undeserving of the firmamen
of cottoned cloth,
they shall not be mourned, when forever lost,
for like my soul, but a fleeting glimpsed visitor,
a 100 year comet, naturally self-destructing,
intended to be witnessed but once in a lifetime
~
wincing at this dear praise, yet it serves me well,
as the sweetest reminder, that we shall all yet meet,
all on that day, all in that place,
from where souls are gifted and returned,
however shopworn
or even disgraced
~
all welcomed upon our inevitable return, no proof of purchase needed,
where, living forever, in such good company is a
certain surety,
knowing this, that we are all certainly possessed with this relief,
easy then, in agreement, every each, born in fluid from the belly of belief,
each of us
"a gifted soul"*
Dec 17, 2016
Dec 17, 2016 at 11:27 AM UTC
the third mate last,
lashed to the helm,
a punishment, a lashing
for having
read and let
the taste of words unkempt,
hash my essence,
thus pelted,
excised, my flesh,
unto a wearied
death by a thousand cuts
my artistic force bleeds,
I am realistic,
there is no
superman savior,
there is only
life after death,
where dear god,
last wishing, it is a world of
silence perfected
I know I promised no more
on this shopworn, discounted topic,
but I read and I weep
my essence seeps, pores pouring,
tried the ancient cure of ignoring,
but anguished curiosity begs
for bliss
asking,
just try once more,
knowing that ignorance
can never be blissful
confounded, words indelible,
the poems tattooed trite,
with an unheard last sigh,
what makes them think
every stray dog of a thought
deserves sharing
tender each with word
with such selected caring,
arguing back and forth,
and always losing
and always winning
the argument over the
Final Selection,
the process holocausts me,
I am not a survivor anymore,
just an over killed victim
to tattered ribbons sliced,
no seamstress can resurrect what once was,
endlessly they celebrate their flesh's cutting,
they cannot know their words,
alpha beta me to where,
the ink is drained and flushed,
and withered fingers lose their moist urgent,
discomfited composure
and
all the words I know are a plague
upon my shotgun house,
I am bleeding, but that does not mean
my poetic permission lives,
it only means my blue blood
surrenders it oxygen upon contact
with an atmosphere of trite
and I swear to you it hurts to much to
write,
hurts more than breathing
do not write to me of your pain,
write instead with painstaking care
and let me read thy crafted composition
and say this,
*thus I am staked to you,
penetrated in ways ,
that each cut of thine,
ready welcomed
for it is sublime,
a human humidifier,
putting back the moisture lost
by tears shed over wastrel poems*
May 27, 2014
May 27, 2014 at 12:32 AM UTC
Unending happiness,
abundant distraction,
uninterrupted good fortune.
Just garden variety
excess.
What I got was best.
A clamped on winter sky
casting doubt, monotony.
A shopworn body,
maintenance required.
Never enough in
the coffers for my taste.
The usual
troublesome happenstance.
Desolation and beauty
are close cousins
pushing and pulling
rough housing,
as they do.
Throw your lucky penny
in the fountain
and walk away.
See if you wish it were still
in your pocket.
Then let it go.
Mar 28, 2019
Mar 28, 2019 at 8:53 AM UTC
Polypolarity
The glorious venom of transformation partitions the (death of) excitement in her eyes. The lies in her vinegar voice tether a shopworn tale
Aimless, then sweet, cold and now caustic, forever formless, a feint felt on a whisper:::
“**Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the eighth wonder of the world!!!... headlining the one and only Heuretic Houdini
pinning her down
only works in the bedroom**”
She did not know who she was (so how could I) It was her greatest strength, something to be pitied and pined for ::: perpetually ephemeral,
the eternal curse.
**Polypolarity dead eyed at a wedding
Polypolarity on a cold street in Blue
Polypolarity spoke two "I love you's"
Polypolarity never knowing what's true**..
Aug 10, 2018
Aug 10, 2018 at 1:08 AM UTC
The glorious venom of transformation partitions the (death of) excitement in her eyes. The lies in her vinegar voice tether ancient chains to a shopworn tale.
She is seamless, then sweet, cold and now caustic; forever formless, a feint felt on a whisper:::
The unending unknowable, my perfect pathogen... I loved to watch her work a room
“**Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the eighth wonder of the world!!!... headlining, the one, the only, heuristic Houdini...
pinning her down
only works in the bedroom!!!**”
She did not know who she was (so how could I) It was her greatest strength, something to be pitied and pined for ::: perpetually ephemeral,
the eternal curse.
**Polypolarity dead eyed at a wedding
Polypolarity on a cold street in blue
Polypolarity spoke two "I love you's"
Polypolarity never knowing what's true**..
Nov 30, 2018
Nov 30, 2018 at 7:01 PM UTC
not played
it is having
a vision
you cannot
see
-
someone knows the someone
who says aloud
piano
-
into poverty’s
overthought
ear
god
puts death
-
I am
than pity
sooner
to my son
-
in every gravestone
a dog
of stone
lazes
loyally
as word
choice
skips
-
rope
-
in one
window, a shopworn
stroller
with a more
cerebral
destination
than decay
exemplifies
the seller’s
push
to mirror…
Oct 31, 2014
Oct 31, 2014 at 4:10 PM UTC
He cut his hair, 21,
because at 13, he thought
it would be the end of the world to
don a skinhead. In the end, though,
his scalp looked okay.
It tickled his palm, touching it.
It felt like a baptism
to have been wrong.
/
Books with no pictures started
appealing to him, 14, when he read
about a highschooler who played tennis,
and a fellow highschooler who attempted suicide
because they got to him, stunned him.
This book was lost one day,
and it felt like the world ended.
A language was embedded there that
seemed to belong to him exclusively.
But it was time for it to be somebody else’s.
Someone needed to own it. Then lose it, too.
It needed passing-around, so that it could evolve.
It might return someday, all tattered and shopworn.
Will it feel the same?
Maybe. But perhaps it would be him who isn’t.
/
He imagines, 25, a life somewhere else.
He’s tired of punctuality and order.
The older he gets, the more
it seems control is mere illusion.
It terrifies him to accept that
at some point, he would have to jump.
He would have leave behind everything,
everyone. A major overhaul of the self
is bound to hurt orbiting objects, but it takes
an explosion, maybe, to begin like
It was the first time.
/
The pain of self-hatred
will never leave. It has distorted
the way he perceives, the way he accepts,
the way he welcomes. Hugs
will feel like something he has to do.
Tears won’t come at command.
Excess will seem ordinary.
Horrors will be regular intervals of stimulation.
That is the burden of not knowing
How to save yourself.
/
He will wrestle with time one day,
argue, bargain with it.
But it’s not something
that gives, only occurs.
Maybe he has to stop thinking
he needs to give.
Like time, maybe he has to
let himself occur.
Nov 17, 2017
Nov 17, 2017 at 12:07 AM UTC