"shorthand" poems
"And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger."
--- Leonard Cohen
I'm the most surprised person on the planet.
Your coming to see me off at the airport
has my mind scratching glass seeking words.
Why is it that in this relationship,
you seem to have gotten all the speaking parts?
You're well aware that I have loved you
for the better part of two years,
bottling that emotion, afraid to pop the cork.
Your eyes implore mine, rotating like
a searchlight over Baghdad seeking
the stealth laying carnage to your heart.
Twice in the last week you've made it evident,
the Grail was mine, but for the drinking ---
That and finding a shorthand for adultry.
I'm guilty courting the love of a married woman,
made worse, you're here at my departure
telling me we aren't free to choose who we love.
I know my desire must die of thirst,
so I turn, boarding pass in hand,
the last words I ever hear from you,
Write me! --- Thirty-five years later I have.
Jul 2, 2012
Jul 2, 2012 at 12:54 PM UTC
Where's the ventriloquist
throwing voices around
like whistling stray dogs
the voice and the vision
a crystal *****
whispering
with mud in the mouth
the ***** doesn't lie
a yammering vantwilaquist
who's voice springs from a blood cream corridor
with electric lips and rainbow flesh
a lost beast dazzled in endless wander lust
in search of a scarlet women
surrounded only
by aspiring virgins
sworn to be true
by desolations caress
in black ash weddings
with white frilly dresses
weeping for delicate cruelties
they will never know
his father a falling star
his soul
an undulating cobalt shrine
to her
who he can not find
a catalog of discrepancies
a noxious experiment
with a wandering eye
lust ******
embattled between reason and passion
is that look your giving me
shorthand psychic humiliation
for my vile indiscretions I'm trembling to visit upon you
I'm wearing my face like window dressing
hiding the obscenity of my true will behind a curled lip
eyes down cast
hoping to use you like a vacant room
to smear the walls and floors
with your flesh like ************ glitter
too bad
i'm outnumbered by good people
there are sky-fulls of them
agitated with moral concerns
ruining my life with logic
those scoundrels
got pedigree
ideologies
religion
folded ears and moving lips
all monkeys see and monkeys do
who are they
and
were
is
their
ventriloquist
Aug 21, 2017
Aug 21, 2017 at 12:41 PM UTC
The literati are moaning
about the crowning
of a comical smiley-face
with tears of joy
springing from its eyes
as Oxford Dictionaries 2015
"Word of the Year"
it's historic
indicative of a generation
raised on media shorthand
though some people think
the distillation of thought
to acronyms, symbols, emoji
is a bad thing too
but in these icons
heavy black heart
face throwing a kiss
reversed hand with middle finger extended
even the simple : )
I see emotion
stripped bare
the whole gorgeous
heart-rending, horrible
hateful range of it
illustrating the dark
and light
of who we are
as a human race
So I say hail and welcome
to the "tears of joy" emoji
may his vivid counterpoint
shine around the world
eclipsing all the words
we've learned this year
for hate.
Dec 29, 2015
Dec 29, 2015 at 11:29 AM UTC
*i once had a girl from poland over,
gave her the tourism of london,
a daughter of my mother's friend.*
i suffered sun stroke one day out
with her, blonde hair and all,
i was bound to feel the cold shivers,
went to a party with a school-friend
of mine and her...
i was left in a bed shivering,
he later said he didn't want to say it
but did, that they kissed...
like i didn't know the shorthand for
oral ***
now i'm drinking a beer, write
one poem weeping, another like this
one laughing prior, slapping myself in
the cheek...
two slaps to the face i didn't receive
from prostitutes **** your moral
relativism, you people only
know that theft and ****** and ****
are equal in the cauldron of einstein's
space-and-time, i accept physical
relativism, but i loath moral relativism,
it's like giving an umbrella to the man
under a champagne waterfall -
and an anorak to a man under a waterfall
of cow **** -
yep, slaps outside the brothel,
the kind women became knights' sparring partners
for the oath undertaken,
it was a practice among knights to get
a handkerchief to ease the sting later...
but when prostitutes don't slap you
for trying to sort your life in order to provide,
you sort of become two knights,
twin siamese, you slap yourself because
all that st. thomas gospel wisdom went into
sex-augmentation procedures and cheap
cancer victims with pill-for-pill profiteering...
leisurely ladies of societies made rich
by easy money, watching operas
but still preferring to notice what
their neighbours were wearing,
the peasant snobism who are more distracted
by what others wear rather than the music...
a herd of wilder-beasts could ease out more tears
at an opera than these "precious" ladies of the new
post-aristocratic society of easy money...
you drink beer, laugh, slap yourself silly on the cheeks
for more laughter... your brain
becomes a monkey in a cage gone mad
rather than turning docile...
so she came over and enjoyed my company,
spotted a fox in an alley to a surprise...
but then i got rudely told that oral *** was a kiss...
well **** me there's a cataphract -
let's ***** slap him silly so no byzantine philosopher
cared to exist.
Mar 31, 2016
Mar 31, 2016 at 8:37 PM UTC
It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until: a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.
Jan 5, 2013
Jan 5, 2013 at 3:13 AM UTC
I used to know a girl named Calypso,
she had beautiful shorthand
and we used to fall asleep
in her mom's house
until that was gone,
until the storm came
and she was an island
I had drawn with ink.
Feb 6, 2012
Feb 6, 2012 at 6:42 PM UTC
before existentialism, and nietzsche in mind, philosophy was written
or spoken of accepting the socratic rigidity of words,
the rigidity of words known through
the socratic method of inquiry:
the simplest of questions imposed on
the meaning of words; e.g. what is virtue?
but with existentialism this old method
of inquiry, the poised posing bewilderment
lost its quality, in that the new method of
inquiry was given to stress not a method
of questioning but that of ambiguity,
even though this new method that simply
said the reverse of what is virtue as
the preservation of a narrative: "virtue" concedes
many variations exampled true, e.g. -
this dittoing going against - previously said /
as above - became staged against
a brick wall - since this method, the existential
method of brushing aside inquiry and entering
the realm of ambiguity was already present -
the pluralism of meaning found in certain words;
it isn't a question whether red or blue can
be ambiguous, this allocation of noun
and quality is all too pervasive - so when
an ambiguity is allowed to exercise its stressor
posit - the word in question is allocated
a verb orientation in its exercise of use and example,
further diluted by the quantity and lack of example,
and ascribed contorting
adjectivity due to the dilution of meaning: with lessened
recognition of sought out qualification to sentence
an enzymic perfection of: banker and philanthropist,
priest and maximilian kolbe, poetry and lack of envy.
even though these examples are idealistic,
they provide the obvious ambiguity already apparent,
hence the double ambiguity of opposites, ideal opposites.
in shorthand - if socrates were to come
upon reading existentialism - his questions
regarding the virtues would be bound to free floating
terms in the ditto bubbles of flimsiness of non-inquiry -
bewildered by the number of prompts to question,
there would be no necessary ambiguity to many other
terms of inactivity - such as the previously mentioned
red and blue, dog and glue, but too many, it would seem,
should a strict belief in categorising virtue as a noun
but not a verb be kept - for categorisation of such nature
only provides a linear cascade without due action
or cared for imitation - ending with the only chance of virtue
chanced and seen as an unvirtuous person
doing crossword puzzles in silence - and already
virtue's opposite is engaged in defending itself
and justifying its ills by first forcing many synonyms to
cover it in ambiguity, and asserting itself as an adjective
within a noun framework blunt: virtue v. unvirtuous
will only confiscate siamese phonetic mingling to ease the definition;
i guess that's how rhyming was born, the opposite
of alphabetical ordering: a, aardvark the violet's blue
****** a doughnut with you.
Sep 22, 2015
Sep 22, 2015 at 11:31 AM UTC
*encloses all with
softened light:
exercise repetitions
as health advisory..
decisions on paths
taken and not..
regrets missed connections
weather limitations..
no shorthand LOLs
a throwback letter
to an earlier time
with instant delivery..
this best of both
old and new..
an ending with
affection..
an email of note...!*
May 6, 2013
May 6, 2013 at 12:57 AM UTC
How strangely coincidental,
it is, how nothing inspires you
with age,
that a shy, withered leaf parting sedentary waters,
is dewy-eyed dead yet unconsciously graceful;
such profanities of nature,
no longer expands your soul
like a burgeoning bubble which whisks you to write
carelessly-composed poetry over forgotten dinner plates....
it's a tragic symphony of desperate piano keys,
a blurring condition of blacks and whites,
age, and nothing but overused, age, is.
And so on lonely train journeys,
you craft a smattering of shorthand poems,
about how crackled, aged people on trains only have capacities
for whimsical jokes,
and nothing but dear,
dear whimsicality as life's
gilded philosophy,
when their bodies are no longer covered with
magic leaflets of hand-strung poetry,
for they are barren,
and if gods were gods of stanzaic hymns,
they'd open bloodless wombs of literary nymphs,
or so boldly believed,
the aged once-artist say.
Mar 18, 2015
Mar 18, 2015 at 9:25 AM UTC
i appear with boots and a saucy smile on
in the doorway while she's cooking the women
gossip over the sizzling pan of hot butter
under her heaving chest on the stove
i'm wearing a magic cape mimicking a windmill
with my bright pink ***** standing *****
big as a barn in the morning sun
lusting after dominance
fat and wrapped like a chorizo sausage
she sends a half-wave into my
direction of space and says--on the counter
i'm ******* an older latina lady with a chiquita banana
deep in my mother's kitchen with
the sticker on the tip of my **** for reference
as the sun dances and rises just
before pancake breakfast
her dank breath smells like
pollo broth and fiesta cigarettes
but her **** is wild soft and new
like a banana being peeled and sliced lengthwise
warm ***** hanging on either side
fat enough to be chewed on
psychedelic salsa blares
on the radio all morning
and i'm holding her skirt up to
reveal beautiful hips and thigh muscles so
i can **** her harder and faster
at her request
hands fly and the big bowl of
seeds spray downward in gravitational collapse
she's singing mexican gypsy secrets
with a cigarette lit and just hanging lopsided
off her lipsticked marshmallow lips
she's holding a yellow crayon in one hand
like she'll be scribbling notes shorthand
and dribbling cane syrup over my naked body
with the other as the floor begins shaking and
the walls shed plaster the cupboard doors creak
on their hinges and mom walks in the room looking at me
like i'm the crazy one
but the cataclysmic miracle is done
senorita is kneeling and wiping my ****
with an authentic mexican flag handkerchief
her sweat and my *** cooling on her thighs
working holes in her new blue kneesocks
and i'm re-zipping her dress over the
glistening expanse of her brown back
she stands trying to fix her freshly ****** hair and
we both light a cigarette try to forget the whole thing happened laughing at our secret as her cherry toes finally uncurl like an ember drifting in campfire smoke she just juts a hip out licks her lips again and smiles
"bueno."
Apr 15, 2015
Apr 15, 2015 at 2:52 PM UTC
The long white curtain is still hanging on. The baby still
sleeping somewhere in all of that. I don’t mind
a thing. I don’t mind at all. See how slow and good
it can be? He says and points to my gizzard. The one he
insists upon me having. The same one I have given up insisting I don’t.
I’m addicted to the pith and gaff of his arguments,
how stalwartly he rows them down the narrow
passage of our trying not to hurry banter. I curl into the slow
lilt of how he doesn’t mind strolling around inside of promises,
like Burt showing Mary Poppins another chalk Paris. Look! A
riverboat! Lights and parasols. Pretty lovers laughing on the prow.
We’re both still wearing your T-shirt
inside the stewpot dreaming we do between sex. Aprons
and porches, babies and waterfalls.
The kinds of props you bandit from other people’s dreams.
Shorthand for lovers, with an hour to prove they exist.
Jan 14, 2012
Jan 14, 2012 at 7:12 AM UTC
I’m a verbal **********
It only costs a moment of your time, and guaranteed disease free
Seems my price is too high, no one’s got the time, and I’m going broke.
I’m a believer in group ************ of the spoken persuasion, giving each other pleasure by word choice
It’s an odd love in a time of finger-keyboard romances
The writers
Poets
Artists
They’ve gone out without a proper blaze of glory, no Tommy gun goodbye
They’ve faded, filtered out like literacy being alarmingly replaced by technological shorthand
Kkthanxbi
Sep 6, 2014
Sep 6, 2014 at 11:08 AM UTC
If Love is shorthand
for Fool...
I have no
hands.
Apr 12, 2016
Apr 12, 2016 at 5:58 AM UTC
You're breaking on your camera hand. Haven't got a leg to stand on.
You tell me
you're making me a colour with your shorthand.
Dropping parts of your mind behind you and I can't pick them up, I can't follow you round anymore.
Kid, you're shaking on the stage again
explain that you can't write this down anymore
and that everything inside your head is a storm.
And I just can't tell you.
I don't have the guts to tell you
that I still smell him on my hair on days when I don't think about you now.
But I can't tell you what I'm thinking
like how you're so wrapped up in your own broken strings that you're not getting me right anymore.
You're not getting me right anymore.
These things I lost down in my chest:
how you made this body your chalkboard fourteen days before we even spoke,
and I don't know what you're leaving with. I can't find the words to leave you with.
Tornado hands. Texas lungs. How this world made you a storyline.
You're an underage drunk on a school night.
Stop dropping yourself I can't hold you up anymore.
This is not a hold up.
This is you forgetting to ask about yourself.
Here are all the letters I never sent you
take them out of me, stop making me write you down I can't write you down anymore please scratch yourself out.
You once asked me if I felt it when you woke up in the middle of the night across all those miles, I told you:
you're a church bell in a hurricane
stuck under all the folded over pages I left you with, and I'm leaving you on a Sunday,
just like all those characters you left sawn off.
And I just want to ask you how many times I have to break myself apart before I piece back whole, and I realise
that we've got nothing left going for us anymore.
Your chipped teeth under my tongue telling me "stop apologising for yourself,"
ripping the keys off a typewriter just take everything I've got.
You can have my apologies love.
You can have my best friend sitting on the tracks.
You can take me whole, take me home.
You're a boarded window, nothing disclosed,
"get away from me".
Candlelight through the gaps on a Saturday night in December.
We're home alone again.
Home alone again.
Oct 30, 2013
Oct 30, 2013 at 8:12 AM UTC
breathe your worries over my finger tips,
i'll write them down for you
scribbled in the shorthand of daydream believers
we never needed a dictionary to comprehend the word hope
in the dusk of summer,
i store my doubts on the soles of my shoes
to see if i can wear them down to childlike acceptance.
Sep 11, 2012
Sep 11, 2012 at 12:50 AM UTC
but always with the pieces.
Piles of information
from conversations dating back
to the spring of '91.
Pieces;
like they're a thought that stands alone.
Pieces;
it suggests that everything will be pieced back
together.
Pieces;
this is how I remember it now.
My records are
Highlights and underlines
and low lights.
Sometimes no lights.
Everything in shorthand, the shortest hand
shorter than a flea circus stands above the ground.
I have kept a professional record of every conversation
and I have been the opposite of professional.
An Anti-professional.
The original Anti-thought.
Anti-Anti-Anxiety.Anti-Matter Inflamatory.
The Anti-Gravity Example.
Unable to keep the track from bending.
And always derailed by these unneeded poetics,
dressing up the few and far
spaces as ghosts between worlds,
or something mundane as impossibly important.
I'm losing track of time, shoving metaphors in envelopes
I'm some ******* who thinks art is everywhere
Nov 22, 2012
Nov 22, 2012 at 3:29 PM UTC
to half brother
a phrase like
intellectual shorthand
is redundant
though half brother
admittedly
is full
of himself
middle sister
she agrees
left
for alive
middle can’t
recall
her sentience
not in front of
this memory
of an army
doll
being named
after mother
but before
father
Feb 21, 2013
Feb 21, 2013 at 3:14 PM UTC
You
Confuse me
With all these signals and shorthand
'wuu2?'
Me
In my ignorance
I can't tell you what I want to say
'143'
Then silence
Until that cursed beep startles me
I've been waiting for it
But I'm not sure now that I want it
'r u ok?'
A choking in my throat
Dare I answer?
'143'
'143'
'143'
Dial Tone.
Aug 10, 2010
Aug 10, 2010 at 12:45 AM UTC
oh right... no social criticism... just a bomb will do? mm, yes, a bomb will fair much better... no social criticism... and only the political class are allowed a backdrop of satire... now i have to be thankful for a 7 year old schizophrenic simulator, the "inability" of the medical profession to misdiagnose... oh yes... i'm really thankful for all of that.
philosophy and its rigid vocabulary,
clutters up the range of ******
expressions, scientific atheism
is still measuring the non-existence
of something via the occator crater
of ceres as: ah... look at that... a cute puppy!
enlaraged eyes of a kitten pleading!
ooh ah! so so cute! mm.
actually, in #a, philosophy is the original
divination of divisions - centimetre in man
to distinguish him into a spider-web
project of thinking, feeling, consciousness,
sentience, animate, zombie,
it cuts cuts in, slashes away at so many
meanings, you end up with shorthand
of 140 character allowances -
so this scientific negativism - i can't
see any scientific positivism right now,
calling something cute as a puppy will
not really do justice to the measure of things,
unlike atheism in humanism,
where the projection of will is paramount
to define life, of how one human influences
another, if at all, atheism only matters in
how humans politicise, i love the fanciful
individualist definition that does not
really wish to congregate... and there we have it:
atypical to the English, the invention of
utilitarianism, the best moral action is
to be polite, or simply nice, to say
'yes, thank you' and 'no, thank you',
to say sorry a lot when commuting in the
tube... ah, mm, oh... and the other grand
pillar of utilitarianism? REMEMBER PERSONAL
SPACE... well spinoza could tell you a lot
about this principle when the rabbis
****** him: about how people were not
supposed to stand at a certain distance
near him... sardine **** of human sweat
on the tube during rush-hour.
Apr 1, 2016
Apr 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM UTC
I have pasta trauma
That’s the joke I tell
But it isn’t funny
It’s shorthand for the sickness
That never leaves
It’s why hunger feels safer than indulgence
Why I can starve myself with ease
But stumble over a plate of something rich
I am fluent in the language of deprivation
Fullness has always felt like arrogance
Nobody talks about the way shame
Ferments in the stomach
How it sits heavier than food ever could
Shame teaches you to apologize for existing
Before you even open your mouth
Shame teaches you to rehearse obedience
Until it becomes instinct
Hunger became my first addiction
The only sensation I could control
I didn’t know then that choosing not to eat
Was the closest thing to rebellion I had
Sep 2, 2025
Sep 2, 2025 at 10:09 AM UTC
you wrote all those songs
each lyric a shorthand
heartful message
that never left our lips
neither heard nor said
i wrote half those songs
it was so convoluted
each poem a missive
never imagined
i would be asked to explain
your heart breaks every time
it weakens my resolve
i am the last person you
thought they would ask to help you
Jun 8, 2014
Jun 8, 2014 at 6:18 PM UTC
often you become bored with gorging yourself
with chocolate fingertips, preferring much her hand in marriage
but you never ask whether it be a digit gilded or cut
or whether the risk is for taking (i say **** up or shut up)
you don’t know the bruises of an ex boyfriend,
nor the shorthand breakup message she got out of the shower to:
picked up the phone and feel the blood rising only to have it all rush
to her stomach and push her lunch up
“she” is not me, you can’t treat her like
a paper bag practice round this time. treat the girl like fine ribbon
that tears at the slightest snare and melts at the longest stare
be not aluminum. be concrete, deliberate and always
Jan 3, 2013
Jan 3, 2013 at 4:21 PM UTC
Only here till’ morning, so the night’s an open road and,
the beaten path only leads to mourning. An off-road traveler,
who escapes the chase of a pursuant sun.
Slow walking through river reeds.
A cupped handful of running water reinforces his state of being;
all but free.
Marathon of miles between, the first date on his gravestone and
the last number his mother reads at the bottom of his eulogy.
The hyphen shorthand for life and,
Missing the meaning through the seams, that connect his first day
to the day he leaves. An often-bereaved purveyor of shattered dreams,
Who stops to smile at every waving tree because,
even in despair he found belief beneath
the bared teeth of the machine trying to syphon from his peace.
A flower born from concrete.
Escaping through the cracked city streets;
out past the horizon line.
Jul 7, 2021
Jul 7, 2021 at 10:12 PM UTC
he thinks
about thinking
sinks
into a greenish-black sunken grin
because he knows
what's what
this
once-upon-a-time hand
is now a fist *******
object of mine
I am an I'm
you?
a you're
we've very little time
to mind anymore
omit omit
the democratic gods
scaffolded
at those five fingertips
progress progress
we are
all of us
so short with each other
taut wrecking ***** so singular
*do not shut me out
I want in
show me everything*
remember when you said that?
we were at the park
holding hands
watching the spent sun gild it all
I smiled in your face
but inside was a calloused thing
white knuckle
grip tightens
Sep 29, 2014
Sep 29, 2014 at 9:52 PM UTC