"songless" poems
.
I’m just a lonely traveler
on this earth
Sometimes it feels as if I'm
waiting for the sky to fall
with each passing breathe
of wind
Standing alone,
a windswept tree
leans downwind;
conspicuously wrought,
naked and bowed
by the grinding
silent forces
at nature's whim
Rootless tumbleweeds
roll by randomly:
broken off,
spinning clockwise,
never looking back,
timeworn and tired
of resisting the prevailing
high desert wind
and its unheld temper
Rattling the tinder
dry sagebrush
like songless wind-chimes;
voiceless fugitives
wreathing a bellowing silence
Jesse Stillwater
Aug 26, 2018
Aug 26, 2018 at 7:04 PM UTC
A little while a little love
The hour yet bears for thee and me
Who have not drawn the veil to see
If still our heaven be lit above.
Thou merely, at the day’s last sigh,
Hast felt thy soul prolong the tone;
And I have heard the night-wind cry
And deemed its speech mine own.
A little while a little love
The scattering autumn hoards for us
Whose bower is not yet ruinous
Nor quite unleaved our songless grove.
Only across the shaken boughs
We hear the flood-tides seek the sea,
And deep in both our hearts they rouse
One wail for thee and me.
A little while a little love
May yet be ours who have not said
The word it makes our eyes afraid
To know that each is thinking of.
Not yet the end: be our lips dumb
In smiles a little season yet:
I’ll tell thee, when the end is come,
How we may best forget.
3.9k
As the wet wind hums its way through our two tower six-cylinder apartment complex. Birds fall from their naked winter wept branches, braced by stiff bones, mapped out in Alexandria, carrying notes from El Salvador. The corner market is closed, never opened. A hair salon stands in its place, it wrings out the "R's" from a Philadelphia warshing.
And like every night, hot air cakes on an extra layer of indecipherable red dots up the arms and around the neck, minute pustules of hypochondria that steal my finger tips from the keyboard. I scratch and tip them, looking under their fiery scarlet caps for, I-don't-know-what disease. Paul says It's that magic school bus melanoma, typhoid drip, it comes at you from a computer screen and eats at your nervous system until you've got the wambles.
Tuesday's used to be the worst, until I OWNED THAT **** I make a pronoun out of aluminum foil and wear it as a hat on a first date. Tinder is not bad for conceptual art projects. I carry it within me like an anodyne complex, out into the frozenness; into my mouth the air comes around my teeth, behind my uvula until winter freezes my voice and I am breathless.
I abandon my miniature house to enter the pyramidal pinetum to the North. Wild paradise shrubs gather with songless animal noises watching as I take naked photographs of my father to preserve his body from anything less than his great immortal end. He lives on black moss and water from a nearby pond,
he authors the face of Anthony Hopkins, thrown about, another casualty of fervid and blurry dreaming.
May 2, 2014
May 2, 2014 at 3:30 PM UTC
I sat beneath a willow tree,
Where water falls and calls;
While fancies upon fancies solaced me,
Some true, and some were false.
Who set their heart upon a hope
That never comes to pass,
Droop in the end like fading heliotrope,
The sun's wan looking-glass.
Who set their will upon a whim
Clung to through good and ill,
Are wrecked alike whether they sink or swim,
Or hit or miss their will.
All things are vain that wax and wane,
For which we waste our breath;
Love only doth not wane and is not vain,
Love only outlives death.
A singing lark rose toward the sky,
Circling he sang amain;
He sang, a speck scarce visible sky-high,
And then he sank again.
A second like a sunlit spark
Flashed singing up his track;
But never overtook that foremost lark,
And songless fluttered back.
A hovering melody of birds
Haunted the air above;
They clearly sang contentment without words,
And youth and joy and love.
O silvery weeping willow tree
With all leaves shivering,
Have you no purpose but to shadow me
Beside this rippled spring?
On this first fleeting day of Spring,
For Winter is gone by,
And every bird on every quivering wing
Floats in a sunny sky;
On this first Summer-like soft day,
While sunshine steeps the air,
And every cloud has gat itself away,
And birds sing everywhere.
Have you no purpose in the world
But thus to shadow me
With all your tender drooping twigs unfurled,
O weeping willow tree?
With all your tremulous leaves outspread
Betwixt me and the sun,
While here I loiter on a mossy bed
With half my work undone;
My work undone, that should be done
At once with all my might;
For after the long day and lingering sun
Comes the unworking night.
This day is lapsing on its way,
Is lapsing out of sight;
And after all the chances of the day
Comes the resourceless night.
The weeping-willow shook its head
And stretched its shadow long;
The west grew crimson, the sun smouldered red,
The birds forbore a song.
Slow wind sighed through the willow leaves,
The ripple made a moan,
The world drooped murmuring like a thing that grieves;
And then I felt alone.
I rose to go, and felt the chill,
And shivered as I went;
Yet shivering wondered, and I wonder still,
What more that willow meant;
That silvery weeping-willow tree
With all leaves shivering,
Which spent one long day overshadowing me
Beside a spring in Spring.
2.4k
Anxiously anxious anxiety, listen to Me;
Listen to my neurons humming you as the song,
Listen to my thoughts pleading to you their independence;
Listen to Me, as I create this lyrics of dolour for you
O anxiously anxious anxiety.
Anxiously anxious anxiety, read the book of Me;
Read the story weaved around you,
Read the epic from prologue to epilogue,
And read to me what is to be scribed next.
Anxiously anxious anxiety, hear the tunes of Me,
Hear the tunes of the Rag out of Me,
Hear the beats dying out of Me,
Tuneless, storyless, songless.
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 4:42 AM UTC
cloud floating,
sea dreaming
of the blossoms of
the breeze,
love, the song
has got restless
like the wind,
it is time to
burn the
alleys and
the sun,
the sea sweeps out
songless and
murmuring to
a heavy sky,
roots that have
shrunk, surrendering
flotsam and jetsam
to the sands at
low tide,
cry for the
rain,
spring, no
longer distant,
waits for a
morn of warming
sun,
you, lover of
the spring,
wait for the
crocuses to
breathe
love.
Mar 12, 2017
Mar 12, 2017 at 6:26 PM UTC
he swore
he didn't have a gun
"Kurt Cobain"
etched in stone
on this songless night
(C)2001, Christos Rigakos
Apr 6, 2012
Apr 6, 2012 at 7:15 PM UTC
Somewhere, it seems as if the hidden, almost Apocryphal-smelling locks of Life are starting to open again; hunger and greedy thirst are following in its wake. The human shadows, like walnut kernels, carefully peel the rarely revealed one-essence from the slave back, as if everyone is waiting for the deliberate fall of their unsuspecting victims. Like tiger claws, the scornful sins of rejections and unworthy attitudes bite a person one after another, with which he can hardly do anything.
Because the World would crush everyone sympathetically a little, if it did not watch in readiness forever, as if a buzzing ant swarm penetrated the networks of blood vessels unnoticed. Because sooner or later, the mere Soul also rebels against its servant, the gaping of its instincts becomes arrhythmic. Even now, in a dazed stupor, this city with the smell of Nineveh slumbers like a drunken beast, which - it may seem - denies itself a little in exchange for petty, flattering benefits at every age, its compromising actions come face to face with man, and everything reveals how much easier it would have been to act differently, in a different way.
- In the grimace-games of dimples, the age histories of wrinkles get stuck halfway, which tell of shipwrecked childhoods... Something still rings better in a holey bag, and something just rings like a sound; making a big deal has become fashionable, just like unadorned, provocative ****** so that the number of viewers always brings the daily quota profit, the grass of innocence, like some unknown marijuana derivative, always rots. It may seem impossible to walk the peaks of silence that have become songless.
Sep 18, 2025
Sep 18, 2025 at 12:16 AM UTC
As the wet wind hums its way through our two tower six-cylinder apartment complex. Birds fall from their naked winter wept branches, braced by stiff bones, mapped out in Alexandria, carrying notes from El Salvador. The corner market is closed, never opened. A hair salon stands in its place, it wrings out the "R's" from a Philadelphia warshing.
And like every night, hot air cakes on an extra layer of indecipherable red dots up the arms and around the neck, minute pustules of hypochondria that steal my finger tips from the keyboard. I scratch and tip them, looking under their fiery scarlet caps for, I-don't-know-what disease. Paul says It's that magic school bus melanoma, typhoid drip, it comes at you from a computer screen and eats at your nervous system until you've got the wambles.
Tuesday's used to be the worst, until I OWNED THAT **** I make a pronoun out of aluminum foil and where it as a hat on a first date. OKCupid's not bad for conceptual art projects. I carry it within me like an anodyne complex, out into the guzzling wind, the air that comes into my mouth and looks for any breath within me that it can go out of me with, and I'm breathless.
I abandon my miniature house to enter the pyramidal pinetum to the North. Wild paradise shrubs gather with songless animal noises watching as I take naked photographs of my father to preserve his body from anything less than his great immortal end. He lives on black moss and water from a nearby bourn,
he's the mien of an Anthony Hopkins, living in a hologram I saw in my dream last night.
Feb 10, 2014
Feb 10, 2014 at 6:25 AM UTC
Love is not so complicated
Is your heart singing sonnets?
Not heart rending but happy
So singing but also dancing
Complicated sonnets? happy dancing celebrating!
Hate is actually very simple-
Is a heart songless dying
Actually heart worth feeling, pitiful
Very songless feeling, sad living
Simple- dying pitiful living depressing!
Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish
Sep 25, 2012
Sep 25, 2012 at 1:49 AM UTC
A little songbird
Once so innocent and free
Now lost, lone, wings clipped
Trudging through the wind and snow
A desolate, ice-locked land
Oct 22, 2014
Oct 22, 2014 at 10:17 AM UTC
I am like a bird.
I have a wide open space,
range,
expanse,
for the adventure that creeps into my soul.
My veins are vacant with the love of exploring,
searching,
investigating,
the different ways to live.
I have always preferred to live alone, with just myself for company.
I seldom feel lonely,
isolated,
apart,
from others.
I am often surveying,
searching,
yearning for beautiful land to build my nest.
However featherless,
wingless,
songless,
I may be, I will never be
flightless.
(s.w.)
Oct 21, 2013
Oct 21, 2013 at 4:08 PM UTC
I try to drown myself in music.
Forget all my sorrows.
Choke down my tears.
Keep my chin up and face my fears.
The posture of a Queen.
But my head is so heavy,
It keeps falling down, starring at the soil beneath my feet.
My hair hides the tears dropping on the unblossomed dandelions on my last walk.
I don't want this to be a farewell,
So I turn up the music til my ears bleed.
But at least I can't hear my own thoughts.
At least I cannot hear the voices in my head, telling me,
I am a disgrace to my family.
That I am not worthy of living
And I can't do anything but be the songless bird in a golden cage.
Yet I do want to scream and yell and curse at the world I was born in.
But instead I put my earphones in
and listen to tunes,
Trying to drown everything in a melody that once had me swoon.
I am trying.
I am trying.
I am trying to walk through fire.
But I still feel it;
How it's biting my skin,
Leaving me bruised.
I am trying to inhale shards of glass;
Yet I can still feel them cutting my throat,
Making me choke
on my own blood.
But all of this goes unnoticed
after the words
"I am okay, just tired"
I am tired!
Wouldn't you be as well?
But don't worry, I am not going to sleep yet.
Maybe later.
Maybe not.
This is not a farewell.
This is my excuse why we can't meet in the evening.
It's because I will be sitting
in a field of Lilies drowning my head in the tunes of once upon a time.
Dec 27, 2017
Dec 27, 2017 at 12:56 PM UTC
I cannot take the pain away
From missing you.
And I cannot interfere
With these recurring memories
The ones I thought I’d buried deep
Inside my boundless ocean.
No matter how many songless walks,
Or bottles of wine,
Poured down my long blue sundresses.
From behind my dark brown curtains,
Beneath my raging waves;
Resurface.
And keep smiling to me.
Mar 16, 2021
Mar 16, 2021 at 8:01 AM UTC
Dispersing into dust motes
As you catch the light
And glimmer as the stars do
Behind the clouds filled with my tears.
No sunshine on rainy days;
Without the sunshine from your gaze,
I am effortlessly lost in my efforts to be empty.
No need for sadness
When the cold freezes my heart -
My mind cold and dark
As songless larks fly nowhere.
Jun 9, 2016
Jun 9, 2016 at 4:34 PM UTC
Was I waked
by rattling buckets
like ticking rain
against the roar
the whistling inhalation
and the musing sighs
of the ***** monster?
Curved pipes blow me
into space, everything shifts
until I no longer have a hold
and my body dissolves in trance
between wringing sounds
Compact like a saucer
I swing increasingly heavy
through octaves of space debris
with withheld breath
looking forward to the redeeming
light of the eternally distant
gravity, which will
melt and burn me
if I ever arrive
A false siren song lures me
with harmonies in which
the dashboard lights up
my thoughts clear again
to chart a course
and go away
from this depression
as if there are destinations
Hope and desire
tumble through the stardust
like the splashing water
from the sources of the Moldau
The monster roars again -
Maddening at the risk
of bursting asunder
and dispersing
in debris, ticking
against the silence
like the end of a downpour
But after the calm masses roll
towering over it, ever
I float
between dream and deed
Sleeplessly
I babble a bit
wading in acquiescence
Songless
Feb 7, 2022
Feb 7, 2022 at 3:28 AM UTC
the wind howls
like a hound
(sans the totality
of sound, as the truck
slurs its final groan)
bespangled crown of the NLEX
festooned by pearled light
all across its furtive stretch
the heaven in my darkness
says Now as silence is drunk
in funeral hilarity. the truancy
of populace says Who as the
morning beckons with its blue entry becoming almost whole (and
ethereally exponential)
Pildira sings like a bird
and self becomes so
quietly rational;
like my heart, (the metronome,
settable configuration of
labile fortuities) gropes
a perspicuous vision and plants
it to mine chest.
Pildira flutters like an
old butterfly in this new morning and i, with the net of
my hands cold with song, will be
songless in the moon without stars, or stars without moon.
Sep 27, 2015
Sep 27, 2015 at 5:26 PM UTC
My heartless time rivers flow'd.
My restless adversary.
My thoughtless mind had show'd,
My inundated tributary.
Flood'd,
By the sleepless anxiety.
Constant reminders of my perfectionist's folly;
My immortal immorality.
My logic's subsided.
Sanity's mistaken.
Slow'd to a dull roar,
Blowing in the wind.
My Intuition's annulment,
Blind'd by the songless hymns.
That heartbeat melody,
What set me on the brim.
My Mindless heart.
My heartless mind.
This is life,
In this peaceless soul of mine.
Time is my commodity,
Ever so rare,
What has me blind,
To this peace of time.
Perhaps, somewhere in this mind,
Ever so scared,
I may yet find,
This peace of mine.
~Robert van Lingen
Aug 11, 2019
Aug 11, 2019 at 12:51 PM UTC
Rick couldn't stomach anymore of it,
He could see the shroud of silence all around her,
Disguising her as nothing short of an abomination,
It broke his heart to see her made into a mere engine of carnage,
Unable to escape her destiny to **** without pause,
It is my duty to set her free from this,
Tragic songless existence...
Apr 22, 2014
Apr 22, 2014 at 6:16 PM UTC
I did know
A pritty girl
whom had wings
not like an angel
they did not spring from her back
like most do
But I like her dance of words
even if her wings are below
*I am a songless bird in vibrant colours. Raspy, breathy sounds at best.
If I could, I would gladly lull you with melodious renderings*.
Sorry Princes, the bird that does not sing
but is good.
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 5:49 PM UTC
I've got a rubberface
Rubber arms, rubber taste
The sloshing pit I make
Does more harm than I take
Peel my eyes one layer deep
And fry the slivers up to keep
I weep, a creature feeds the creep
What you perceive is just skin deep
Crusty crisps of cornea
Sell big in California
But I must warn ya,
What you see is more than bargained for ya
Limping gait on limp old limbs
Swollen canister to rim
Go with him, a restless whim
Bare witness to a songless hymn
Jul 12, 2017
Jul 12, 2017 at 2:34 PM UTC
a single song created
the voices of poets
born into songless scapes
lit up with their verses
Jul 26, 2014
Jul 26, 2014 at 8:52 AM UTC
a songless bird
that would be the nicest
name she’d been
called
the others,
far more common,
being
that little *****
your ******* kid
the little rat
useless piece of **** that came outta you
and others
She liked the term
songless bird
It was a title worthy of her in
all the good and the
bad ways
The songless bird stands
locked in her room
and knocks and waves in
the window
for she has no voice to sing
She gives silent cries to the
neighbors and
the passersby when the noises
from the other side of
her door
get too violent
or when it smells
of smoke
Which happens
every now
and then
Jan 11, 2021
Jan 11, 2021 at 2:37 AM UTC
winter’s chilled stillness,
atoms in ice bundling tightly together
senesced trees, rotted flowers
songless birds, misted sunlight
crushed leaf step, a coat tightened
memories or dreams
What is the difference to me
light or illusion
it all seems the same to me
lie in the shade,
count gray clouds and decayed petals
page turn page turn
the pictures keep flipping
damp moisture dripping insistently
consistency, mortality
totality and ending
happen time and again
true end, broken wheel
impossible,
flickering sparks jump from the ash pile
yellow daisy river sways in the breeze
blonde beauty white dress she runs her fingers over the petals
cicada song, buzz on lilac tongue
Blue skies sun peaked over head
No clouds a kiss of wind
Direction, arrows on a compass
Point to where and why
Startled doves rise divides the mind eye
Motion and stillness
Control and fluidity
Feb 23, 2020
Feb 23, 2020 at 11:12 AM UTC