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Nat Lipstadt Oct 2017
once upon a wrote


here and there, in fables and tales,
some in no guile and others
in chancier disguises,
some sine-known and some sign-unknown,
some dead in stillbirth,
some penned these words,
some a few decades old,
some of but a moment ago eyelash distant,
making me think that
someday I will scribe,
cobble some truths and
some falsehoods into one
leaping heaping melting scoop,
letting you decide,
which for better,
which for worse...


<•>

"No matter that plain words
are my ordinary tools,
With them I shall scribe the small,
Cherish the little, grab the middle,
Simplicity my golden rule,
Write they say,
about what you know best,
Surely in the diurnal motions,
The arc of daily commotion,
Do we not all excel?"

<•>

the reason we say so oft,
in whispers emboldened,

I love you

to our children
is not the utility of
its summarizing brevity

no, no.
it is because
the eloquence of simplicity
supersedes any other poem
any of us could ever write...

<•>

is this craft that chose you,
not defined by machine millimeters,
precision absolute,
curvatures, so eye-pleasing,
they demonstrate no tolerance
for tolerance of the ordinary?

the skill of words, too, cut so fine,
find the  extraordinary within,
refine, refine, refine,
shave away the trite,
the reused,
discard the instant recognition,
unusable

<•>

There are natural toxins in us all,
if you wish to understand the
whys, the reasons,
of the nearness of taking/giving away
what soully belongs to you,
do your own sums,
admit your own truths,
query not the lives of others,
approach the mirror...

<•>

The Truth Burden
is the accursed need obligatory,
the sacred sanctity requisitioned,
when the whenever,
chooses to drop in and upflag the mailbox,
an uninvited invitation,
announcing with precise bluntness,
that precisely now,
is the tool crafted moment
and you fool,
the selected tool

you must render unto Ceaser,
by your own hand,
render your own rendering,
do your own undoing,
go forth and in haste,
will thyself into the cauldron of the
Great Mystery of Creation

you cannot lie in poetry

<•>

come, sit for awhile, in poet's nook,
soft pillows for our hard Adirondack chairs,
situe hard by the bay, if too hot, we'll slow
drift to the sun room of
lace curtains and suicide poems,
still we'll observe the water, the rabbits, the cacophony low,
listening to all the noisier, nosier
creatures asking themselves,
and the trees and leaves,
where did all those poets come from?

<•>

to the interior delve,
via brush or limb,
pen or music,
the exposition, the exploration,
the reconstruction of composing
one's self, creation and destruction
of your own myths

movement of arms and legs,
sparseness of simplicity,
subsidiaries of centricity,
tributaries of complexity

<•>

how cold are the carpenter's hands,
the weather, but an added obstacle,
this heat, makes dying different difficult,
the wood bearing cross requires additional nails
and flesh, for the extra load he's bearing,
when it snows blood in Jerusalem

the whole world can transition
when one man dies and another is risen,
where oh where lies then, the juxtaposition?

there is none, for man is man,
his divine spark, embedded,
to his maker's mark, welded and wedded,
neither snow or sun,
can ever extinguish


<•>

now I ken better distance 'tween
artist and art,
I, a workingman's
daily dallying in simplistic machine craft,
my works deservedly lost in
the water-falling
of the endless also rans

non-nebulous distances.between skies of
Oregon country blue and
the worldy worn asphalt grayed words of
a graying man aging,
then let clarity speak, in plainest harmony,
know my deference’s soars to the high above,
one of us at birth, god gifted,
was not I,
it ain't me babe, but
one of us, his tongue,
like Moses-stung
with a hot coal
of language's divinity


<•>
gone girl Mar 2017
when your child comes out stillborn, they give you 24 hours with him.
24 hours of bleeding lips, 24 hours of fragile skin, 24 hours of cold toes.
they bring you food every three hours with the knowledge that you won't eat it, but the comfort of it there is.. sort of nice.
things like this aren't supposed to happen this far along is what they will whisper while they think you are sleeping
24 hours of he's getting colder, 24 hours of a lifeless, still rib cage, 24 hours of come on baby, just open your eyes for mommy.
making your way to the hospital, you hoped to come home with a bouncing blue boy but instead you come home to a cribless room.
they say it's easiest if people get rid of the reminders for you but his empty things are the only way i will ever feel whole.
then they start asking you the hard questions as if you didn't just press the button enough times to tame an ocean with waves full of guilt that will swallow your lungs.
24 hours of limp limbs and unreturned breathing patterns, 24 hours of there's some more flowers here for you, 24 hours of please just leave us alone.
we have 1 more hour together and your unresponsive nerves are growing colder. they made molds of your hands for me like they didn't know i would hold them forever.
we have 1 more hour together and the nurses will never be more apologetic in their whole lives than they are the moment they have to take a sleeping child from a mourning mother.
we have a little under an hour and as you wail, people watch from afar wondering if they'll ever be able to understand that sort of pain, the pain that makes you feel god has ripped your body open and left you for dead, the pain that makes you feel that this life really isn't worth living, the pain that there is no or might not be any god at all.
hours, minutes, seconds, days, time can't even begin to describe how long these panicky flashbacks of the moment they told me they found no heartbeat go on for.
Who shall praise the sour wheat?
We shall praise the sour wheat.
Who shall praise the stillbirth?
We shall praise the stillbirth.

We shall be grateful, yea; even for emptiness
And vacancy
For there is still another opposite, even to the
fullness of nothing down here-

We should be grateful even that we realize
there can be a 'nothing' instead of a 'something';
We should be glad-
Even the void here contains worlds of universes
While the echo there just goes on
past the unraveling edge of forever
Carlo C Gomez Oct 2022
I wrote to you in broad bold letters.
I wrote it on a tree.

You know the one, remember
—it called to us from the middle of the garden.

Sassafras: our secret token.

Winter's stillbirth is soon upon us,
and our placement in the sun in peril.

But I have whispered it all to stones
now ****** into the sea.

Remember the tree, and pray I live long enough to dream in its hollow.
Inspired by the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony in 1580's America.
Circa 1994 Apr 2014
I’m lying in fetal position, the bed is the womb.
I am nothing.
I do not exist yet.
I practice breathing.
Sharp in and out breaths.
Growing calmer. More fluid.
I feel myself forming, taking shape.
I do not exist yet.
In out in out in out in out in out.
I move oxygen. I stir the air.
Keiko Larrieux Feb 2010
Impregnated with uncertainty
Long overdue

Waiting on opportunity
My patience is subdued

Attempted abortions
With 4th trimester distortions
Stillbirth ensues

Screams inside the sirens
Struck with hospitalization
Bedridden doormen
Realization…

The time arrives
With labor pains
And liberation pangs

I cut the umbilical chains
Only a piece of me remains

I feel the guarantee
The time is now
I feel parturiency…
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
the ones warring on the flag of defeat can't be called either troll or parasite... too noble such entitlements, they are the **** genus worthy of ignorance, that they are found roaring on the flag of defeat, when such publicity is allowed of public musing deeper than soft-spoken in one's own room, as transcript of thought made public, ironically without one's geographic coordinates... and what lack of honour to be warring with such circumstances being allowed.

i shouldn't have written my words among poets,
too many simplicities surrounded them,
with the poets came made surrogates,
a stillbirth, if nothing more
9 months of **** as the new economics
that gave us appreciative homosexuality,
a curbing of the expeditions of population
we didn't blame on Chinese or Blue Indians
due to having inherited masochistic Christianity,
the last greek mythology, THE, LAST!
and no more from the greek tongue! no more!
then the second feat of the suffragettes
that became the surrogates...
and yet, i stilled braved to sing
for the escapist tongue of
brotherhood that *the misty mountain's cold

encapsulated... in which i braved
the brotherhood, every, second, counter,
to marriage to a woman...
domestication is no adventure! it's no adventure!
there is no fear and sudden death in
domestication... it breeds cattle! readied for
death not ready! two dungeons deep and caverns old...
the pines were roaring on the hight!
   the winds were mourning in the night...
the fire was red it flamed and spread,
the trees like torches, blazed with light.

this... this is my ideal afterlife! take your Koran
and terrorism and take a **** in the desert with
the cats for worth of knowing such "exquisiteness"
as it might be worth mining in the dunes of sand!
while the thirst of metalloid and abstract horse-tow
gives your false timing...
and when you take this anger written on the flag
of defeat, and turn to warring with it on your own
flag of defeat... you will be conquered,
slain and tortured, as is my promise, always
honourable.
His dead!

I suspect Nietzsche did it in morality with a book;

I suspect Platon did it in birth with stillbirth;

I suspect Machiavelli did it on Ruling with the ends to justify the means;

I suspect Darwin did it in Galápagos with birds;

I suspect Scientists did it in laboratories with stem cells;

I suspect Romans did it in Golgotha with a cross;

I suspect Jews did it in Gethsemane with Judas;

I suspect Christians did it in Spain with inquisition;

I suspect Muslims did in New York with a plane;

I suspect Adolf did it in Poland with gas;

I suspect Stalin did it in Siberia with gulags;

I suspect United states did it in Hiroshima with a bomb;

I suspect United nations did it in wars by looking away;

I suspect God did it in Heaven by suicide;

I suspect I did it here with a poem
I suspect You did it.
First posted to reddit and got referred here
james nordlund Nov 2019
Will you, illimitable potential,

indivisible as life, "leap and contend",

as agua uncontainably articulating?



When you two meet, will you not recede from you to be?,

and jump, back to the evolution and the future,

humanity will only have if you do?
Above quote, "Leap and contend", by Isadora Duncan, a great dancer.  I would love to be tres Gaia, yet, alas, my body's receding from reality.  Thanx for all you do   :)   reality
Barton D Smock Jun 2013
(3)
the middle life of hands

say poverty could possess a doll whose favorite and only outfit a schoolteacher mends while picturing

     two pieces of chalk which become the late life ******* of the ghost mother who cannot cradle the crucified yet travels to the many scenes of crucifixion to lade the Christ pale glove onto the hands men think they’ve touched.    



sibling talent

my sister rubs cigarette ash onto her palms.  her lips could kiss a mime and get away with it.  I can’t walk on my hands at night without having my father come home mid-day to find my mother on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with circus cloth.      




husk bearing*

the bath a baby pool for the barren.  I turn the knobs, hear nothing, and call to my mother.  call with *ma
, and then ma again.  most made of one silence but she of two.  my right ear at the door and my other patient.  her knees sound like my father’s cheekbones.  the tears in them he says are shrapnel.  of course I don’t believe this.  when I wanted to paint my treehouse yellow mother straightened me and asked for stillbirth yellow.  then poverty yellow.  for another example you would have to believe my bout with chicken pox left a yellow basket stranded on the still river of my tongue.  

     listen.  the buzz on a delay

but bee
arrives.
Amy Grindhouse Mar 2014
She was gorgeous misery framed
in makeshift bandage corsets
cinched with fall from grace
sutured lace to save face
Her battered life rife with strife
covered in the mock elegance of
a broken wing dress as
the frenzies
in her enigmatic
mascara trail of tears glare
soften slow burn devotions  
hastening their hopeless necromantic
insurrection

He was a fatal attractive
midnight black feathered wraith
Modeling trouble need scar heart genes
and a bleedwork tainted warshirt
earned by tethering himself to a mistake on
countless battlefields
his enemies' rancorous fear resonates
in a crippled ripple
across stillbirth waters
With his outspoken outrage accented
by photographic violence
knowledge of immoral history charm and
disguised threat lodge wisdom
luring her into
their surprised allegory demise

In the here and now we find
uncaring torture chamber musicians
singing in the black ground
as these two scar-crossed lovers entangle  
in a shotgun wedding
and machine gun funeral
Knowing from the start
it would always be
the two of them
together as one
against the old world
james nordlund Nov 2019
Soon to be matter that supposedly doesn't,

it only being 99.9 to the infinite place %

of an evolving, expanding, inconceivable Cosmos,

a Bodhi, as 'twas, everywhere and nowhere at once,

with heart, Like the wind moves, not love nor hate,

only everything and nothing at all, at once, thrives.



A sea of souls, waves crest, trough, love is.

Gaia's imploring, humanity be not my stillbirth,

is all sea's songs accompaniment now, as acid rain always falls.

Will you dance, "leap, contend", be agua uncontainably gesturing?

Will humans be that evolutionary jump, back to the evolution

and the future they'll only have if they do?  Are you life?
Waves wear on stone, it gives way, stone stays, waves go away.   Indivisible, illimitable u's inner-nature's abundance self-actuating in the world   :)   reality
Russell D Nov 2013
The sadness has killed the light
That once lived in your eyes
Resentment has taken hold
The hatred wells up inside

Trading shattered dreams
For a broken heart
Now the best laid plans
At the seams come apart

All the seeds that were sewn
Become stillbirth at best
Can there be no relief
Besides the illusion of death

Could I polish your heart
With the grace I have left
Please open your eyes
Before your light has set
Travis Green Sep 2021
You don’t know what pain is
Until you have encountered stillbirth
Searching for the accurate words to say
But nothing springs to mind
Because all you can feel is an extreme
Emptiness in your stomach
That makes you feel miserable
Hurting deeply inside
Continual cries, crimson eyes
Colorless cheeks, lips dry and drained
Shoulders bitterly cold, excess stress
Swelling in breast, heartbeat weak
And slowing down, drowned
Unsound, bound to borderless
Dimensions, lying in the hospital
Bed staring at the collapsed space
Of valuelessness, drunken depictions
Enveloped in shadow, the walls
All around me indubitably insalubrious
Entrapped in painful sensations
Flaming vibrations glissading
Throughout my body without
Anyone to unchain my heart
Carlo C Gomez Apr 2020
At swim,
girl waits with gun.
She's a half-formed thing,
having entered into it
motherless.
The fault in our stars,
the night sky with exit wounds,
is left to the grace of
a god of such small things:

fabulous disarray,
perilous notions.

It's a common tale
in tragic literature,
but here it now floats.
The red tide washing
back onto shore
as granules of sugar,
sweet as petrified honey
in the hallowed out trees:

in which we begin
to not understand.

The sea breaks its back,
lingering like the wet gossamer
of her nightdress,
covered with the scent
of stillbirth,
and the illimitable
shut-in trials:

they arrive in waves,
she weeps every time they're "borne."
I fly not on wings of folly
Nor in self deceit
Destroying my person
I hover not on smeared words
Of Vulturous mission
Nor on Kiteous skill on mother hen
I swaive  on wings of truth
Surging through the horizon
Souring high above the orbit.

I fly across weathers:
Through the sun
Through the rain
High in clouds above the winds
Finding my strength on will
Favouring my cause on trust
Trusting my vision with precisions.
Like the eagle to the eaglet
I spread my wings of love
Conquering Tribes, Nations,
Continents, Race,Religion and Heights.
Thus i fly to reign.
                             BY OTUOGBODOR, OKEIBUNOR.



In the Beginning
By Otuogbodor,Okeibunor

In the beginning
I am branded the hope of there expectations
At my birth, divinations attest to it
And libations gave seal to this fact.
My training and experiences confirmed it
For I lighten the world as a medical doctor
Shaking the earth with my appointment at the state
Hospital; “He is our son, a great son,I weaned him at birth”
“Yes,I remembered him, he use to run around necked”
“And cry on our way to the stream.”
Such was the echoes of the joy and solidarity in there voices.
But here I am mangled in diversity of ill-treatments. Not I but the system.
Surforcating and subjugating the hope that liven them;
Headace, fever, stillbirth, no drugs, fake drugs, vomiting,  
More death,------------------- the list is endless.
The healer needs healing, for the torch bearer is in-search of light
This is the crossroad of there faith that was not
In the beginning.
  


SMILES
BY OTUOGBODOR, OKEIBUNOR.

A peep at the clouds
A dance with the moon
A view of the skies
A berth in the sun
A flash of the blues
A soak in the rain
A wave of the breeze
A cheer(s) with the lips
A life flow of the spirit
A health to our souls
……………………….
……………………….
……………………….
Of these celestial harmony
Oh! Terrestrials………..
Dance, glo, wave& cheer
In this ballet of time
The rhythm of the hearth;
    Our soul’s joy
The mindscape at peace
A display in our faces.
Falling as recalcitrance of movement – seeks completion – yet the ground
   ballasts.
            There is no path that leads forward as I live backwards.
    There is poetry in the way
              a woman carrying a bilao moves away from the vicinity.
       Sound departs.
I took a deep drag and fell into a thick web
    of smoke, recoiled to fetal nature, into the womb of my unbecoming.

       What seems to contain endlessness: dark.
What punctuates this claim: moonlight.
      In a house that continuously aches,
I am grateful for windows.
                             Night-erased repeatedly, the dance of blades of grass.
       There is more stasis when words flay
                 themselves to pass as something more resolute than there is
     the kinesis of life’s steady abbreviations. We shorten like this,
                             when we curse the destinations upon movement’s mindless
                approval.

We collect ongoing afternoons
                         and cohere to trees. Say falling like you mean it,
     the way we commit to breaking though unwanted, feared.
                 Feel the hands accumulate warmth when propped
  into the sun’s permanent daze – face becomes glare,
                            a day becomes a scar.

This    is  where   I do  not know   what moves   to become fully   stationary.
     Days crumble like this.
   In a poem that is not a poem.
   In a sound that is only sound and not music.
     In a dance that is not life, but stillbirth.
   In notes that are purely rambling, not reportage.
     A voice that champions a fiasco.
                             This is where the   throbbing  afternoon becomes   a part
       of me    that falls   into   a chasm of   a fateful night,
                lassitude    of   debris in  tow,

                                       starting     measures  everywhere  we   left and   returned –
To watch with intent but not desire, his life passed
     him on as he tries to explain which one he
     would take to the afterlife if there is such,
like a convergence at the tip of the horizon or a
     humid evening in Pasay as pyrotechnics scrape
     sky fashioned like acrobats. The breeze he needs
     no longer. And then begins to disquiet the quiet
    with the heavy burden of which he will then forget
    when he starts to move all of a sudden in space,
       capitulating afterlife again if there is such,

 and if everything takes a sojourn into the bleakness, must I remind you that you are all
     variations of the same absence. Remember when
you had your name carved on wood as attendance
    but not for long. You have escaped, locked in the
       arms of a life that you thought was yours but
     still isn't, leashed under the Sun. Bodies pulse
  then fluctuate but not a sign of life. Words function
     more in stillbirth. Never forget, as a dandelion
     hovers and puts a smile on your dreary face,

and a question in search for all available and naked
    answers. Principles undermine caprice. Do not
 adhere. Must I remind you that you are
       someone else apart from who you think you are.
  You have yourself straightened, tucked safely
       like intent, not desire in all its voluminous and
     vehement speeches annotating something unknown
           to the behest of ourselves. If I were a house,
  I am gratified by windows -- your mirage there
       transfixed in a secluded spot, looking out
   brimming with life as curtains oscillate as the
      Earth breathes with you. If I were a house,
   you would ransack everything with a sly mouth
        packed with powerful narrative. How you
   have done over, leaving everything undone,
        moved off-tangent, under impossibly gray skies,
    brindled in prayer. If I were a house,
    
       doors slammed, speculative fabrications sleep
  through evenings and mornings until no difference
   is met -- you meant a word as if it had a lock
       and the key, somewhere cold in the air of
             sleuthing pains making me so, less than
     this and more of a fractured house.
chimaera Jan 2016
As the night unfolds
its quietness,
and distance
is silenced,
and movement
is carpeted
into echoing
rumbles,

a sight unveils
all once blinded
by day light,
by the hazardous
ransom of rush,

and it appears
before me
what lays
within
a trap of sand,
breaking down
the bones of will,
grinding morrow
into the narrowness
of a held back
gesture,

it appears
before me,
naked
like a stillbirth,

my solitude.
29.01.2016
one-sentence poem; a prompt from pw.org
Wade Redfearn Oct 2017
Oh those bodies
on the museum walls
Tennessee Valley bodies and Los Alamos bodies
shining blackly like the stripe of a credit card.

The price of bread fixed at five cents
and we all eat it in slices.
Your name is your labour and
your labour your name.

I have disappeared into a country that doesn’t know me
and I am tearing it up with my teeth.

Oh those bodies
that were once slaves.
Were they pictured any other way
but in idyll or whipped dry?
The dusty Union regiments at Baton Rouge
have made a postcard of one scourged back;
they share it around and die for it.

I have a few postcards, too.
It is strange to see any man kneeling.

Oh those bodies
Cornbread bodies and bodies like a corn snake
crushed among the broad leaves of tobacco;
The ones in bone corsets and the ones
in reed baskets, floating downstream.
The ones in rosy marble and wrought bronze
the ones whose striped backs are coming out in wings
feathers pink and wet
like a new-hatched chick or a stillbirth.

Your body
is a tight machine of grief
packed into homespun like a fist
and relaxes in sepia as it never did in life,
a babe slung underarm and the food
only from cans; they keep the dust out.
Oh those bodies that tend the home, larder and ledger,
and reach for the high cabinets
and keep reaching.

The old voices are back at work.
I am not the one they are speaking to
but I hear them all the same.
They spread out a catalogue of wares
on a sisal blanket in the dark
and every price sounds fair, every garment lovely
unless you made it.

The country workman in bronze now and forever
with his rolled shirtsleeves; his body
raises a hammer and his bicep, mid-shiver
is always striking something, always building
Heaven, and Manhattan, from the foundations.
Stained glass his union flag
and Union Army blood he forgot or never knew.
The thin white arms of Andersonville,
meeting two generations hence, in his arms,
the dark scarred shoulders of the South.

Who brought forth upon the continent this new nation,
and who brought forth the ironclad Monitor
and who put into song the Maple Leaf Rag or Swanee River
and who put that soil there from which the cotton still grows
and who made your dress?
Who owes the debt and who records it?

You and I.

Oh those bodies swathed in light.
Oh those bodies becoming angels.
Bodies bound blackly
and bodies forgetting
which is what bodies do with injury:
they absorb, and they forget.
Just ask me.
Flor Dec 2018
You went into labor, not knowing my name.
It was a shock to you when I came.
You thought I’d be a stillbirth,
Thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue in this Earth.

Dad has to tell you over and over that you weren’t dreaming.
Your eyes, as always, will start gleaming.
You didn’t name me for nearly a week.
You didn’t hold me or even speak.

When I was four,
You said my name in a way I never heard before
Each syllable was hard as a steel ball,
As if reminding me that it’s the only name everyone should call

I disliked my name, hated it even
So sometimes I’ll tell people that I’m George or Steven.
They weren’t mine, but they were better.
Hearing this, your lips will always pursed and turn bitter.

You take it as a personal insult somehow.
I know by the way you wrinkle both of your eyebrow.
Is it bad that your daughter is a son?
You have to accept that nothing could be done.
So this one is inspired by a short story with the same title. Some words came from there. It is written by Nino Cipri. It’s a wonderful story about a trans-man you guys might want to read it.
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2022
How many poems does one individual contain?

Ahh you say!

Why unlimited are our of-coursing emotional exhalations,
our sighted and insighted sparks
like forest fires they come ad infinitum!

THEN the mind’s eye blinks, then word blindness follows
in phased arrays of
gaps that cannot always be easy pencil filled, permanent inked,
as locked and closeted,
and put away in a glass jar of formaldehyde.

I see, I feel, I hear, I read and react;
a notion,
a title born,
perhaps even a line or two follow-on scratched and etched,
even refetched
but followed then
by the deafening quietude of a stillbirth breeched
 fetus,
the emptiness of a blanketing blank,
a glance too short,
a foam extrusion whitening the spark into nothingness,
the death of a poem in a forest…

and you can’t care!

more such wordless poems have I buried than the
talkative children I’ve birthed,
old age delimits me now, my eyes failing, my hearing lessening,
the senses eroding, and worse, the frustration morphs
NOT INTO caring,
for the days of wine and roses, the mid-of-night urgency of
try, try poetic ****** is now a sinful spilled residue
on the wooden floor,
crumpled sheets of spermatozoa failure to perform…

the wastebasket
is a into a silo of mockery, a self-administered glass shot
of saltwater, bitter herbs, lamentations, an impassable gateway nominally know as 502, a wide, emptied moat of “haha on you!”

thus an answer forms,
there is no endless, growing,
inhumanly impossible trumpeting crescendo voice that doesn’t falter, eventually!
a petering out, a tangled, gordon knot of a shoe-laced Nat voice that cannot be untied by creaking fingers that scream ¡no más!

Even though
you believe, you yet possess the tools, though well worn smooth,
the belt lies heavy on the hips and its removal a welcoming
enlightening!

let me abide in peace, trigger me not, and the
answer is and always had been, this one, or the next one,
or the one prior is perhaps the finale, you will never know,
and if you do,
you will never permit yourself to utter aloud,

terminé et terminé!

in sæcula sæculorum imperf!

forever and forever unfinished finish!

!last one out, turn off the light!
10-30-2022
why
as linking clouds and earth
as still life on canvas
born of stillbirth
is still us
Life is real
we lie
we steal
we cry
girl killed me
robbed her womb
too small to see
tiny attic room
we would've
had a ton of fun
you could've
loved your son.
Life is real
we lie
we steal
we cry
girl killed me
robbed her womb
too small to see
tiny attic room
we would've
had a ton of fun
you could've
known your son.
Satsih Verma Oct 2016
Trembling…
the burning coal has gone to sleep,
before igniting the dry grass.

Eye to eye colliding
turning you into ophelian mess.
Light had gone back to black matter.

It was a frisk season―
in sick society. The hidden plaques
have come out in the blood stream.

You are now backtracking
on the uphill, ready to fall
from the green heights to connect with ground.

For keepsake I will
again unwrite the book
not mentioning the stillbirth of freedom.
Andrew Rueter Apr 2021
A king withdraws into his castle
his eyes drawn out while sitting on the throne
now I'm not a king I'm just an *******
but I do know what it's like to sit at home
not knowing what's going on
a court jester growing con
shows I don't belong
to the awaiting bombs
so I move along.

I need time
and space
I'll wait in line
there's no race
just a loss of grace
that needs to be replaced
this isn't ideal
but I need to heal
from the hamster wheel
of ample feels
like despair over what went wrong
shame which is my only law
pain is there and is raw
so I withdraw
like a sick fawn
without its skinned mom.

The doors to my eyes are shut
as long as I'm stuck
in this lousy rut
building walls of muck
as blinders for a buck
who isn't racing
only running
from those chasing
and gunning
but there's no way to dispel
Satan himself
a turtle withdraws into its shell
laying precariously on the freeway
it knows what awaits is hell
but it can't peel away
because it sees a way
it can be in play.

Seasons slink
I need to think
while on the brink
of an overcast downfall
I put up a sound wall
to ignore the ground's call
asking me to withdraw
into its halls
where I'd switch all
the things I've acquired in life
for eternal night
an infernal fight
to do what's right
and keep the damage inner
temptation says come hither
that wily wyvern
always gives burns
but I never will learn
that my plans of stillbirth
cause a fiery chill hurt.

I'm in a delicate state
and need to deflate
no need to debate
please for my sake
give me a break
I need to escape
the chaos
in which I'm way lost
like the sky that is grey glossed
and the ground made of clay frost
we all have the same boss
whose favorite move is a flame toss.

The withdraw gets worse
turning into a curse
I'm living in a hearse
willing to see the dirt
I feel it flirt
beckoning me to my reckoning
everyone else is seconding
that motion
so I withdraw into an ocean
made entirely of land
the soil I scan
only to find desert sand
passing through my hands
to show I'm ******.

Time goes by
as withdrawn I
had delusions I could fly
they were just withdrawn lies
to make me try
despite belonging on the ground
completely covered by the color brown
with a scent that could gag a hound
so when I finally look around
no one is there
they've withdrawn into pairs
making me stop and stare
yearning for tender care
so I shoot a flare
into the air
but it withdraws back into my gun
like the blacked out sun
telling me I'm done
and the withdraw won.
Barton D Smock Aug 2017
[notes from life under bell]

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.                

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller.  the mosh pit is weak.  last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole.  onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch.  dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide    

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.  

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma.  genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea.  this open umbrella.  ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby.  a door was a door.  a ghost was a ghost and a door.  the house was possible.  its rooms were not.  baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub.  I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow.  said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.    

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.  

-

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key.  it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.      

-

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

-

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

-

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.

-

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

-

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

-

the disappearance surrounding said event.  a horse belly-up in water’s blood.  see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

-

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.  

-

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.
Barton D Smock Jun 2018
thru June 11th, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books AND free mail shipping (or 50% off ground) with coupon code of BOOKSHIP18

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~



NOTES FROM LIFE UNDER BELL

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church. an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore. my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth. a bomb is dropped on a bomb.

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller. the mosh pit is weak. last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole. onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch. dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood. some god

seeing me
as a person…

how quickly birth gets old.

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is. day four: prayer is dismissive, but welcome. whose past is how we left it? body is delivered twice. beginning and end. nostalgia and wardrobe. middle eats everything. it snowed and I thought my blood was melting. could be the way you reason that happens for a reason. I was a kid when mouse was a kid. there’s no hope and I hope.



my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key. it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.



aside: we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep



aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise



it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb. his fist has been called: hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard. I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.



sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember



I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.



the disappearance surrounding said event. a horse belly-up in water’s blood. see telescope. also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.



in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.



traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.





WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY



I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

~~~

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

~~~

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth. I say dog for both dog and puppy. pray for things I know will happen. a rooster through a windshield. a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.

~~~

mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

~~~

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

~~~

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

~~~

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

~~~

atavism
(god is someone’s calendar



valley
(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose



pulpit
(rooster ghosted by elevator



subculture
(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down



alpenglow
(the scalp will baby its grief

~~~

on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost

and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.

~~~

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

~~~

because her son can see the future, she is not yet born. god matters to the discovered.

~~~

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

~~~

for the gone and for the nearly, brother has the same stick.

I call belly
what he calls
eye
what answers
to limb

~~~

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

~~~

she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream

~~~

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel
Barton D Smock Jul 2017
it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.
Satsih Verma Feb 2018
A dynamic ****,
when you start crystal―
gazing.

Were you a participant
of an organized
**** of the planet?

Your roots drop,
as you gamble with the
change of coins. It would
become a stillbirth,
of a seaisle.

Telling lies has become
a lucrative job.
Are you going to buy immortality,
in the bazaar of bazookas?

The blast cells were
rising. There was intense
pain in my thighs. Blood
was turning white.
B E Cults Jun 2021
one day the sovereign self
will dissolve away,
iron clockwork oxidized already.

all is heavy when there's a song to play
that'll annoy the **** out
of everyone in the room,
but you love it as it is.
you love that pregnant awkwardness,
the thoughts on the moment,
the contractions,
the stillbirth,
the flowers in nice vases by the bedside.

I always go there.
it all always goes there.
still waiting
for his stillbirth
to
be
over
she is
where she is
?












...
..
.

— The End —