"staticky" poems
Sadness clung to you like a staticky old dryer sheet
Jun 21, 2015
Jun 21, 2015 at 3:46 PM UTC
A red jumper
in the airing cupboard,
thrown over a pipe,
drooping like it had melted.
“Académie culinaire de Toulouse l’enfant”
on the breast in fractured, iron-on plastic.
It was perfect.
Something that wouldn’t be missed.
I took my sister’s wave-edge scissors to it.
I took it to bits,
all but a jagged circle of a sun
full of furry solar storms
of thread ends.
I ignored the red fluff
falling slowly
like so much ****** snow,
mixing into carpet fibres
under my bare feet.
And my heat
Disperses into invisibility
everything but the colour,
like any memory will.
-
A green t-shirt,
it looks up at me lostly,
toyishly small,
from some forgotten shop
bought at some forgotten time.
A childhood comfort still smiling
but not soft anymore.
The front’s all robots smashing apart tower blocks
with tin pincers and laser vision.
People’s screams of indicision.
Staticky speech bubbles,
broken car windows,
exclamation marks.
And a Marilyn monroe type
in the midst of the fray,
bra half-undone,
hand cupped to her mouth
Calling into some furious colonised sky
into which I pinned my sun.
-
A cornish cream baby grow
with grandmother stitched flowers
hours of sowed leaves.
A polka dot horizon
and an orchard's evening shadow
from a lifetime’s washing.
It showed.
So I sowed my mechanical horrors
and it’s crimson fear atmosphere
onto the pastel world.
And now it’s all there.
Jul 12, 2016
Jul 12, 2016 at 8:11 PM UTC
Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,
sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and
thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.
I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.
In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.
I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.
But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and
when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...
When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.
Oct 4, 2021
Oct 4, 2021 at 3:08 AM UTC
The Doctor named Seuss was such a great man.
He wrote words so deftly like few others can.
In fact, to this day we honor his rhyme,
Or, I do, at least, to waste all my time.
It's odd how with frequence I get up the urge
To write tiny ditties: a poetry surge.
I'm volted to pen any number of things,
Shocking, to me, like a staticky sting.
Whenever I am s'posed to be working,
I notice that my duties I'm shirking.
Perhaps without pressure my mind is more fun,
But by the same token, I get nothing done.
Maybe I study so well that it spills
Onto my other thinking-type skills.
My mind works so hard that it often requires
More wood to fuel my thinking cap's fires.
Anyways, I'm probably ******* for my test.
I wish I could say that I studied my best,
But honesty stabs me for truth til I'm ******
The truth is that I fail when I "study."
Oct 1, 2010
Oct 1, 2010 at 8:26 AM UTC
lately i've been having these good days
i don't have sad wet cigarette saxophone nights anymore
i watched the sun wake up six times last week
i found a blue bucket of tulips &
gave them to a bald-headed krishna girl when
she sang to me on the sidewalk
i hired a boy to hide in the foyer
& peel a fiddle if i rouse from sleep during the night
or whistle through a harmonica
if i'm wet-eyed during breakfast
i finally got rid of all the pictures you stuck
to your side of the dusty bathroom mirror
except the blissed-out polaroid of us
perched on an old oak tree limb
like a couple of soft doves versus the turreted sunset
i deleted your number because you don't call me back anyway
i stopped mailing letters to your father's house
i haven't listened to the Plantasia record
you bought me since you left
i never feel the gray heat from your
staticky hand warming my shoulder
i forgave you for the blood in my kidneys
& old smog in my mildewed vinyl lungs
i sleep under the running green vapor light
of the moon & stars instead of the frothiest pillows
rippling on an ocean of sheets & project quilts
i finally scoured the lipstick stain from my collarbone
after what seemed like two years
i forgot how your armpits smelled
i sewed all your sundresses into a shower curtain
& i never see your delicate ribcage
peaking through the streams of hot water
i hardly ever notice the noose
you left hanging in our apartment
Feb 10, 2016
Feb 10, 2016 at 4:20 PM UTC
I don’t feel very good
She says and she looks at me with those big doleful eyes and
I say
Oh yeah? What are your symptoms?
And she says I feel far away from you even when you’re next to me
And I say me too
And I’m listening to the staticky scratch of the needle at the end of the record thinking about how far from me I’ve been
And how could I have possibly been close to her when I was so distant
From the present tense
I’m tense in the present tense
And I’m sleepy because in the conditional tense I can do what I want
I want to sleep
And dream about anywhere but the present tense and my single bed with its yellow-tan sheets
And that record’s still skipping and has yet to be flipped and I’m
flipping
but externally I’m ice water
crackling on my wobbly coffee table singing me to sleep so I can dream about something else again
something like meaningless ***
because meaningless *** feels good
in the present tense
and I’m present tense
I’m present tense and future tense and conditionally tense and
I just can’t bring myself to flip that record
Because I lost the tracklist
And I don’t know the lyrics
And what if it’s worse than the first side
So maybe I’ll just listen to it skip
Until the skipping
Puts me
To sleep
Again
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 1:30 AM UTC
This new man has staticky ambitions;
Believes the future needs something to do
And talks to me in straight lines
The slut-flavored pears
Now littering my yard
Are only the beginning
For the sake of misdirection,
I suggest we **** Keyser Soze
But he's stuck on his previous observation
*'I said, 'gravity's gone bad for you, girl;
Everything 'round you's up in the air.'*
'Yeah', I tell him,
'I heard you twice the first time'
Jul 18, 2014
Jul 18, 2014 at 8:43 AM UTC
we run like radios, communicating on channels of frequencies
but I’m running on a different frequency and I’m alone in the sea of static
it’s so hard to find anyone’s signal just reach out and call SOS
there’s an in-between channel that isn’t always so hard to reach-
it’s filled with jokes and happiness and we all laugh
with the same vibration
but there are days I search for the channel and the laughter just sounds like static
it’s like something’s wrong with my antenna
but we’re not radios, we’re people and we hear the beats of drums.
I hear a different beat than the rest of you
but not a special one just a mix of many songs
clumsy and too loud and full of contradictions
I twist and run and trip and fall trying to follow the beat
but it’s hard because there’s not one beat there’s thousands
and I listen to a different one every minute
they tell us find your one beat one thing to carry you through life
but I choose a new one to try and save me every week.
we’re people, flesh and blood not stone, but we all try to be marble.
we sand ourselves down into perfect statues carve off all the parts we hate
but when you carve off everything that makes you unique you start to look just like everyone else.
so keep those things. try to accept the pieces you don’t like about yourself
find a beat each day that makes you happy no matter what anyone else thinks
and don’t worry. your radio antenna isn’t broken
someday you’ll find a channel whose signal works more often than not
and on the stormy staticky days when it doesn’t
there’ll be someone to hold you so close you don’t need a signal to reach them.
Mar 19, 2017
Mar 19, 2017 at 7:56 PM UTC
They might turn you into one of those catchy radio hits with a cheesy chorus that consists of two repetitive words like "baby oh" if you let them.
Spend hours analyzing the lyrics to your favorite songs hoping to juxtapose the meanings to your every move
as if your favorite songs were a guide to you
The real you is hidden among the staticky stations that only work
on trucker radios and cars with broken antennas.
don't ask me how I know this;just believe me like you always do
Sep 30, 2014
Sep 30, 2014 at 1:22 AM UTC
She often seems confused, and pauses midway
through a task, unsure which way to go,
and drops her task to move on to another.
With hurting feet and tunnel vision, hearing
muffled, voices staticky and loud,
confusion is a sea she cannot swim.
She is an hourglass, her memory,
slow falling through the hole, and all her days
are passing through a chasm out of reach.
The old one slowly turning back to child,
needs mothering from children till she's born.
(C)2014, Christos Rigakos
Apr 20, 2014
Apr 20, 2014 at 12:58 PM UTC
Winter means cold
It means staticky hair and red noses
But it also means you and me by the fire.
Oct 24, 2012
Oct 24, 2012 at 8:10 PM UTC
A list of kisses:
We sat on the edge of the water tower and you couldn't stop staring at the ground. You asked in a small voice if I ever thought about what it would be like to jump. You only looked up when I told you I did all the time. You pressed me back onto wet concrete and we didn't say anything else for the rest of the night except for "I'm sorry"
I followed you up creaky stairs to the attic of that stupid abandoned house and we shivered until you huddled close and you made me forget about the god dammed cold with your sinner's lips.
We kissed only through staticky telephone lines.
You pulled over on a back road and we got out of the car. Your jacket was spread on the wet gravel and we watched the stars until we couldn't wait any longer. Then we kissed and I watched you instead; your eyes were closed. We stumbled to the passenger side door and squeezed together onto that tiny seat until your neck was bruised all over.
We were by the lockers on the last day of school. You missed the first time, I missed the second, but it's true when they say the third time's the charm. We didn't speak all summer.
I try not to remember your name or your face, but I remember your searing hands on my back.
We left your friends on the dock and walked along the water front, you were carrying my shoes for me and you dropped them just so you could hold my face and you stared for a long time before you kissed me like I was fragile.
May 10, 2014
May 10, 2014 at 3:57 AM UTC
*I do not celebrate Mother's Day
What is a mother?
a polaroid that gradually loses its color?
An air conditioner so broken all you can feel is the chill in your bones?
A staticky sound that turns into an overwhelming shriek?
An accomplice to anxiety?
A trigger to bipolarity?
what is my mother?*
Apr 24, 2016
Apr 24, 2016 at 9:20 PM UTC
I sit
in a puddle
of my own tears.
so staticky
in complete
emptiness
Feb 13, 2015
Feb 13, 2015 at 1:04 AM UTC
Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Ice Storm: Darwin Needs to Re-Think His Errors
The electrics flicker off then on, all night long
Which wakes me, and my wake then wakes the dogs
Who protest and blanket-burrow even deeper
While angry sleet rattles the window panes
When the weather is foul and the power fails
We are left with a flashlight and a book
Staticky noises from the radio
A bottle of cold coffee, and our thoughts
When the night is cold and the wind is strong
One comes to understand that Darwin was wrong
Feb 17, 2021
Feb 17, 2021 at 10:14 AM UTC
open a book and the words shoot
off the page, each letter a photon bouncing
off an orchestrated universe, illuminating
a world that wasn’t there
seconds before.
i am in a chair,
and then –
riding a tram through 1930s Berlin,
black-and-white photos turned into
black-and-white words turned into
black-and-white as ends to a color spectrum
filling in sights and sounds and scents.
and then –
sitting at a dinner table in 1890s Ireland,
witnessing an alcohol-infused christmas
dinner go up in flames,
petty remarks and self-righteous politics
the tinder and faces like embers,
pulsing with heat,
breath stoking the fire
and then –
soaring in a flying car, london
below, the thames a
serpentine ‘s’ winding through the city, bridges
segmenting it into a divided
snake that calls on ben franklin; buildings
sprawling every which way,
swarming with lives.
and then –
i am in a chair.
the clock’s hands are
on its hips at four and seven,
scolding me. my legs are
staticky and unresponsive, on
strike at having circulation severed.
the book is shut but
the words live within me.
a picture is worth a thousand words, but
a reader lives a thousand lives.
Aug 10, 2017
Aug 10, 2017 at 5:57 PM UTC
my fine staticky hair
blowing in the wind
always needing more
than they could ever give
hoping to swim
in a cherry scented dream
amidst the glide
of the violins
I danced on thorny feet
my pebbled shoes
already knew the beat
and the smoke billowed
from a forest fire up north
all those scarlet sparks
waiting to burst forth
Jun 23, 2015
Jun 23, 2015 at 11:23 AM UTC
KISSING THE DOT
Our new black & white
more full of snow than pictures
holding the rabbit's ears just so
(“No...no...no...YES! ! ! ! ! ! !”)
holding it aloft like 9 year old Statue of Liberty
watching with fascination as I DREAM OF JEANIE
emerges
to our chorused 'ooooOOOOO! '
Even turning it off was a thrill
the little white dot dwindling to an infinity
the electric static tingling our lips
as we kissed it goodbye
. . .a pleasurable pain.
Now, after the bus crash
lost in staticky snow
I turn the set
on off onoff
watch the little white dot
die again and again
place my lips
against the fading screen
the electric kiss
of death.
Jun 2, 2019
Jun 2, 2019 at 4:17 PM UTC