"sustenance" poems
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Not for long, anyway. Cake doesn’t settle well when it’s all you’ve had to eat. It’ll churn like butter inside you, and creep up your throat to project like a cannon, barreling through a wall. Cake won’t sit right with you anymore. At the mere mention of cake, your insides will crawl with disgust and an association of icing will replace your taste buds with ***** You will never be able to enjoy cake—at parties, as a delicacy, with ice cream—because you got greedy and wanted to eat your cake first rather than save it for such an occasion. Now all the different kinds of cake you fantasized about trying—black velvet, coffee cake, buttercream pound cake—will only be a reminder of your pitfall that led you to make yourself sick with desire, for cake. You can’t get the icing off your tongue, the smell of batter baking has festered in your nostrils wired to the pungent taste of red from between your teeth. But it’s all you can think of when you’ve been wronged by your favorite dessert. What sort of chemical reaction in the bowels of your stomach caused all of this sorrow? What rejected the cake? Your body has a way of telling you things—we should listen more. Cake is not sustenance, it has no value as a nutritious food. It doesn’t help, only hurts.
Jun 19, 2014
Jun 19, 2014 at 2:11 AM UTC
A black crow's darting eyes
spans the wheat field
and an orange pumpkin patch.
She sees
tall grasses of brown
seedlings,
bristling in the wind,
soon to be bushels of grain
and a pumpkin pie that she never savored.
She sits, atop her tree perch,
at times warm and storybook,
hidden by tree branches,
and at times out of harm's way
and infamy.
Her friends, the sun, and clouds in concert,
dancing along.
Her other friends bring alms and smiles.
Life is so good at times.
Down the road sits a mill
next to a waterfall
and a cabin,
with reindeer horns
hanging above the doorway.
She is in her element, happy,
carrying for her nestlings.
Back and forth her parental eyes dart
the hilly fields, a smoked filled chimney, and her babies,
all crawling with sustenance and awe.
Storybook.
A mother feeding a worm to her baby.
Storybook.
Off to her side is not a blind eye
watching her,
scary stick figures of
straw tucked under red shirts and hats,
with a tied tinfoil strips dotting
her eyes and tease.
Scarecrows, cease.
At times life is good nature, hand in hand,
knock on wood.
If only life could be circumspect.
Than darkness filling the light
and a stutter of life.
For a sad page is turned,
pause
... tears.
Then, feathers fall.
Hers.
The sound of a thud.
Silence and tears of her friend's swelling.
A baby's cry, missing her mother.
More orphaned tears.
Who would be this despicable?
On that rogue day.
A kick of a donkey,
an ***
one bad rock on her path,
breaks the air,
as three little elementary kids were walking along
to school.
One, me, with a rock in his hand,
taking aim at her perch
and the death of the black crow's pages.
I confess.
... Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
it has been fifty years since
my last confession ...
a Tom Sawyer-like childhood gone worse.
I repent.
Some fifty years later I think of those first cairns,
including stealing the reindeer horns and milling
my brother and sister's storybook.
Waterfalls
stream tears, and a sorry boat
rowed downstream
sadly
thereafter.
Logan Robertson
7/25/2018
Jul 25, 2018
Jul 25, 2018 at 6:02 PM UTC
the river is
drinking it
sequins
blankets
the river runs past
hobos
unidentified
water fowl
two trolls
taking shelter under
the bridge
there’s conversation
in another language
fiendish brains connecting
fiendish yet
beautiful
thunder
tampons
a turtle
a naked boy
on the patio
rain
definitely
rain
unmatched
and the steam
coming from the
bridge
*once there was a troll
on my face
and I swatted it
with a broom
but it came back
it came back
with you*
laughter pounds
with the rain
laughter that wears
emotion like
skin
soft
elastic
still pink
bouncing
on the river’s surface
breaking
absorbed
sustenance for
the trolls
like fiends with faces
like minds with names
these two connect
with spark
and the rain
falls
the stillness under
nature’s
machinery
May 12, 2016
May 12, 2016 at 10:26 PM UTC
Suffering
is the landscape
of life.
Hope is
the sustenance
of life.
To avoid suffering
is to avoid life.
Love yourself.
Love other's
even though
they don't
deserve it.
Be gentle
with yourself,
even when utterly
fatigued and
victimized.
Make you life
a poem that
you create
and hold it
close to your
heart.
The best
you can do
is all you can do.
~mce
May 17, 2015
May 17, 2015 at 11:53 AM UTC
The Red Ants At His Picnic
Her pillow eyes gleamed
at his advances,
inching along slowly.
His anteater likeness,
rising,
coming to an anthem,
frolicking on her picnic,
on her mound,
hoarse and hungrily.
Rendevous antics to form.
Wave after wave,
the red ants at his picnic,
dancing,
dancing like there's no tomorrow,
seducing him in further.
He,
so antsy,
anticipating.
In his genre,
happily along,
on her trail,
like a hunter,
taking her welcoming little red colony,
to kingdom
come.
To ******* come,
where her castle and moats succumb,
relenting,
saluting to his anthem.
Where soon white clouds a bursting,
blue skies emerging.
The sublimity and antidote holding on,
holding on to her picnic.
And the rocket's did red glare,
the bombs bursting in air-
together,
to gather.
And there they were ... chaos, abuzz,
lyrical
then calm.
Sustenance drawn on their faces.
A slight breeze runs through the grass
the red ants at bay.
Logan Robertson
4/17/2018
Apr 17, 2018
Apr 17, 2018 at 6:15 PM UTC
My Little Black Bear
Down by the singing river
Dancing with fate
Little ducks take to the rapids
Away from your dinner table
Off to the banks
You stand your grounds
Tall as you are wide
Your initials in the terrain
Cursive is the eye tooth that reigns
I see you
Posing with the lilies,
Elves and dwarfs
As the western sky looks down
Casting whispers
Is your closet filled
With both helping
The meek and sustenance
Under the skirts of nature
You're having an ****
Robbing all the salmon
And berries
Then slumbering under a tree
Tummy full
Those big black eyes of yours
Catching shut-eye,
a couch potato, a game of the week
Your wide open mouth
Catching a bee,
A refreshment
That long smile on your face
Backpacking a dream
Mama and her cubs having your back
In some ways
My little black bear ...
hear, here
I see you, in me
Logan Robertson
8/08/2018
Aug 8, 2018
Aug 8, 2018 at 6:50 PM UTC
I am a gentle rain
On a cool spring day
I will provide you sustenance
Help you grow
And then I am gone
As quietly as I arrived
Oct 9, 2018
Oct 9, 2018 at 5:26 PM UTC
The evolution of art never halts
Once we began dancing around fire
Our feet couldn't stop
A place in our lives
Where our subpar seeds
Could be seen as glowing trees
That's the way I feel about my poetry
It reminds me a lot of me
I reread it and rewrite it so often
By the end it seems unoriginal and plain
And all I can hope
Is the themes and ideas that were the inspirational genesis
Remain intact
Art walks a tightrope over the most unpredictable factor
The audience
They are the other half of art
Their power cannot be overstated
And as time progresses
Their power grows
And the importance of art always extends an equal distance
But the stronger art becomes
The more it asks of it's audience
In many cases
The audience is not ready to take the call
This is one of those times
Here at the current pinnacle of art
Surfing the web
A wonderful chance as
Art is a reflection of people and society
The Internet is people and society
But just as we listen to songs
To decide what concert to go to
Or watch trailers
To decide what movie to see
We like what we like
And put blinders on to find it
Like moths to fire
We could do amazing things
If we could harness the potential
Of our collective conscious
But the threat of losing our individuality
Is too great for us
Unable to accept
Our individuality is always in the context of our cosmic existence
We are part of something greater
And we can't escape that
Even in death
We feed what lies beneath
The memory of our lives
Shrinks to obscurity
The maggots that cover our corpses
Flourish to maturity
Everything this world creates is art
And we are it's most complex creation
Not necessarily the best
We just have the most parts
And the maggots that use our dead bodies for sustenance
Were once the monsters that roamed this Earth
They had no nationality
Or political affiliations
Or religion
And they're still here
Waiting to reclaim their throne
Once "smarter" species seek suicide
Jul 26, 2017
Jul 26, 2017 at 10:19 PM UTC
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Oct 13, 2015
Oct 13, 2015 at 2:37 PM UTC
We are the girls who walk around with little bird bones,
rib cages ready to snap when we spread our wings and
fly away
and for my next act,
I shall disappear little by little until I am ash.
I’m not eating for four days or until
I can feel the ***** that is my stomach start to shrink
I used to refuse food for weeks
it amazes me how self-indulgent I have become
I am ready to eat spoonfuls of air
spin my hair into a models top knot and
know that water is a privilege not a right
a million screaming girls saying
“but im not hungry”
while a tiger flays their insides open at night
Kate Moss said "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels"
and I suppose she is correct
What happens when you learn the tongue is a muscle not to be used
What happens when sustenance is no longer needed
When the mind decides
the very thing that keeps the body alive is a punishment
What happens when you refuse a necessity of being human
Apr 15, 2014
Apr 15, 2014 at 9:57 AM UTC
There's a mermaid that waits under the sea,
she waits in hope that a brave soul shall surrender to her and in doing so she'll rescue them in return and embrace them into her watery world.
The sea belongs to The Mermaid, she's delved the underworld, lives for discovering and has left the surface for those that are not ready to meet her yet.
Maybe it's part of her enchanting beauty that she is always so immersed in the intensity of the water,
the darkening depths of the sea, her own emotions, the womb of her world giving sustenance.
In my curiosity to go deep into the abyss I met The Mermaid and there she asked me to plunge to the depths of the sea with her.
The water was no longer blue, the rays of the sun no longer illuminated,
it was cold and dark and I knew that I could just about reach the surface of the waters again to leave, but I also knew I'd done that many times before.
I begin to sink but apart of me still resists,
my legs slightly kicking and my hands unsure as I struggle to know what to do.
'Let go' -I hear The Mermaid echo through the water,
her patient voice holds me, I feel safe but still I'm in conflict with all that I'm confronted with above.
My mind continued to battle here as my body naturally slipped down some more,
the deeper under water I went the more everything felt still.
I felt The Mermaid on the periphery,
in a distant part of me I think she's always lived, I've just not been able to trust in her.
Everything feels longer underwater,
time isn't of importance once you've abandoned your anxious breath.
you begin to feel apart of it all,
as though you're a small ripple of an imperminant wave and an untameable current bound into One.
This place feels like I've been here forever now, it's so cold it actually begins to feel warm. The deeper I allow myself to sink the less I seem to contemplate. The less I struggle to let go the more peaceful I feel and the deeper I slip into the unknown the closer I get to her.
I soon reach the bottom, the deepest place I can go and here I meet her where I always knew I would;
It's too dark to see so I wait in the unknown for her to show herself but she didn't appear outside of me, in fact she spoke through me and with my own inner voice I heard ...'If you do not connect to the depth of yourself then you'll never know how you really feel. Just as a Mermaid swims so deep she can no longer see.. You must swim too, even when It's dark and scary and you might not even know what you feel or you feel too much and you feel as though you're drowning.. You must trust. Trust in yourself beyond anything and you shall always find your treasure here...
...There's a Mermaid that waits under the sea,
she waits in hope that you shall meet here and to see without having to see. <3
May 21, 2015
May 21, 2015 at 9:24 PM UTC
The coconut tree is unlike any other
From root to shoot
All valuable all useful
Giving shade when weaved into roof patches
Giving sustenance in the form of food and drink
Even when completely chopped, it leaves its marks
As the bridge people built to cross the river!
Dec 6, 2013
Dec 6, 2013 at 5:19 AM UTC
The chocolate digestive is a marvel of invention
Custard creams are sickly, but worthy of a mention
Shortbread can be gritty, steer clear of the cheap ones
For if you love your biscuits, your pockets must be deep ones
For perfect dunkability, the hobnob leads the field
But prone to going chewy if their packet isn't sealed
Bourbon creams can satisfy when nothing else is offered
Avert your eyes from pretzels, no matter how they're proffered
The lowly Garibaldi is an underrated treasure
A macaroon is excellent for eating at your leisure
Enjoy the home made cookies and the chocolate crispy nests
And save a pack of party rings for fobbing off on guests
But biscuits can be functional, with keen survival craft
A packet of pink wafers can be used to make a raft
Penguins can be hollowed out and used to smuggle crack
And if you throw a ginger nut, you'll always get it back
A Jaffa cake is handy as a snowboard for a spider
And flapjacks are a sustenance and energy provider
Wagon wheels are lethal when they're wielded by a ninja
Brandy snaps cure cancer with a tiny hint of ginger
Experiment with biscuits, they're a versatile thing
Try horizontal dunking or the highland shortbread fling
Keep a packet stashed away for when the end is nigh
And always have the kettle full, and milk in good supply
Nov 30, 2015
Nov 30, 2015 at 3:20 PM UTC
sunken eyes
i watched them
in silent rooms.
breathing people
nothing but
the vents breathing
their moan of
churning gears
brittle bones
i arose to
black and cream elixir
the orange sun peaking over
black branch silhouette
a sight for tired eyes
helpless hands
gripping the red glazed mug
emanating peaceful warmth
unlike the heat of the words
burned in the back of my mind
6:12 a.m
trying not to think
deep breaths
sips of coffee
remembering
how to forget
seems to be
the hardest thing after all
he who
made living a lot less terrifying
seems abstract in my mind now
not solid, not there,
maybe he was a daydream after all
craving sustenance
the only thing that is for sure
is the orange
fading into pink, fading into blue
like the only thing i’ve ever know,
the bottom of the red mug
peaks at me
still warm in my hands,
but not like your reminiscent hand
Mar 3, 2015
Mar 3, 2015 at 11:52 AM UTC
single mother
pale, Chekhovian
her social status an anachronism
the length of her skirt another
dollar bills bring sustenance
while the ends that are ever so failing to meet
remind her of an inability to cope
in every single way
every single day
Dec 13, 2011
Dec 13, 2011 at 12:49 AM UTC
Who is the carrier of the mist?
Who is the harbinger of justice?
I wonder how many sweet reeds
There are that blow in the wind?
The fog, dividing the big square.
The mist, forming a circle.
An encircling protection.
The night has its shades.
We have seen the good mist
Positively rolling along the open field
Towards us
We who make the camaraderie.
“Oh, now that’s a good mist”.
The mist, the fog. Wet dew
Of sustenance
With hope, I bow to you.
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 4:06 PM UTC
A Serotinous Pine there,
Where winter snows soak into thirsty soil but relentless summer sun bakes motionless
Every plant a tinder held close to conflagration,
in a season's Russian roulette of forest fire.
This pine seals precious seed away from every spring’s promise,
lest burning destroys every one.
Only searing heat during torched consumption triggers the last gentle act,
At the knife’s edge of apocalypse itself,
opening cones of seeds.
Fluttering down to new life on the other side of time.
Tiny bright green amid black ashes.
Swimming Penguins
Birds evolved to fly in ocean.
Wings to flippers, feet stepping clumsily from water.
Yet eggs must still nest, their babies still breathe.
Safety is the very precipice of existence, on bitter ice at 60 below,
Sheltering their young clustered from blistering winds,
fasting from sustenance,
While heaven’s glorious Aurora flame silently over their winter dreams.
So what then are we, on This Earth?
Cerebral Creatures, Storytelling Animals.
Minds created to sense spiritual constructs.
Living is the method of our creation,
Sheltering each other from inherited trials
With contrived joys and sufferings distracting each other
from the soul freezing fearful cold of the Empty Void
And consuming fire of electric chaos.
In the End, our sacrificing gift for our children
is God.
Dec 13, 2012
Dec 13, 2012 at 1:37 AM UTC
With a body temperature
Below 96 degrees Fahrenheit,
Wrapping yourself in bed sheets
As translucent as your skin
Seems so nice but
Every minute you spend
Shivering is more calories burned,
So you try to ignore it
Or maybe you do two hundred more crunches
Because being athletic is healthy,
Right?
You open the pantry only to
deny yourself sustenance because you
are unworthy of
These simple pleasures, and
You almost let yourself
Eat an apple but
When you remember how
Good that girl in
the thinspo you have
Hidden on your phone looks,
You stop.
You flinch when your mother
Calls your skin porcelain,
Because that word means
You failed to restrain yourself
And you have always been taught to
Resist temptation, and
This is the ultimate test.
Apr 29, 2014
Apr 29, 2014 at 2:07 PM UTC
The scent of the pollen allured her, hanging in the still air of the morning. She would stop in her travel and visit each flower that she found. The precious nectar oozed from deep within the petals and she would thirstily drink at each one. She would gently land in the scented shade of each blossom and coax the precious nourishment from it. She never gorged, but rather drank from each flower what it was willing to give. Some were full and over ripe and bursting with the honeyed juice. Others had a smaller treasure, but she would drink lovingly of their gift leaving them an offering of pollen as a thanks. Her small, delicate tongue would gently lick and probe the recesses of the flower hunting the sweetness inside. The pollen on her coat would touch with the very deepest innards of the bloom and enter its very core. Her gift, as she suckled each part, was imparted into the scented womb of the softly petaled blossom. Each flower awaited her coming and spread wide it’s scented opening for her to enter. Their swollen pistils would be gorged with the potential for life and their gently glistening stamens would tempt her to feed on their sticky juices. The soft buzzing of her wings caressed the delicate parts of the fragrant blooms with a gentle breeze as she drank her sustenance. She sheltered in the colored shade of petals, hung round her like colored sheets, as she took what each one had to offer. When she was done she would move on to the next, slowly and deliberately milking the juice of life from each one. Every flower needed her and each one did what it could to tempt her in. Some threw heavy fragrance into the air so she could catch their scent while others bared their large and swollen glands so she could see their abundance. She traveled from bloom to bloom, sometimes enticed by the shaded shelter, and other times the sight of glistening pollen. But she fed on each one, large and small, and in each one she left her gift. The pollen that she carried would be imparted on each ***** stamen as she fed. The glistening end of the shaft was soft and sticky and waiting for the pollen that would carry on its life. While she fed each day, there was a gardener who tended to her plants. He took gentle care of them, weeding and pruning and tending to their needs. The flowers that she fed on were his future sustenance and he tended her as well. He would follow her sometimes through his garden and watch as she gently buzzed from plant to plant. She was used to his watchful eyes as he watched her drink from each bloom. He knew that his crop depended on her and he would peer into the bedding of petals as she caressed the sweetness from each one with her tongue. Her long tongue would probe deep into the recesses of the fragrant flower and find every drop of nectar. The gardener watched as she carried on the cycle of life for him and would wait for days to see the swollen fruits of her labor burgeoning from his plants. When she left each flower satisfied with their delicious treat, she would fly off to the next, not knowing that a seed would be swelling in the gorged pistil that she just left. And so it went as the bee buzzed her life away every day. The gardener would be there among his carefully tended crops, watching and waiting as she moved among the flowers. His gaze would follow her as she traveled through the foliage and landed amongst the blooms. Every day he would watch as she coaxed the sweet nectar from each one and left her gift in return.
Jan 17, 2014
Jan 17, 2014 at 2:03 PM UTC
In the divet between mountains
Resides a wooden cabin – ostensibly an amalgamation of the scape
Adroitly - I - quondam female warrior flit
Down massive (ancient) hand-laid, hand-cut carved stone steps
Bounding from contingent step onto the dense pad of turned soil
Tacit compliance between gravity and soil holds footprints bound
A compressed deflating crescendo as pace ignites with bounds
Cadences of protuberant wildflowers and grasses erupt from swollen terra
A winsome chromatic menagerie, dispersed in ecstatic fistfuls
A venerably ancient ritual
My nascent clandestine vocation
Personally meted out - a beatification for my provisional sanctuary
Along glacier-fed stream
Lissome fingers shadow inert stalks –plucking dormant beginnings from their desiccated ligaments
I am austere and unadorned save for a festoon of pyrite flecks trailing my semblance
Residual gilding from my ante-meridian swim taken after requisite gathering of wild blackberries, goose berries, and rhubarb along oft-tamped path
The sun, nestling into its requisite apex endorsed my completion
I reclined into the hassock of soil, feeling the elements settle about with an embossment of my form
Imposing verdure arched subtly as compressed soil beckoned hyperbolic flux
As I lay within the basilica of opulent living columns replete with comestible bounty
Lingering dew honed inflections of sacrosanct petrichor in unison with piquant clover
Wild purple clover buds saccharinely tinted and inundated nestled nerves in mine cribriform plate
Birds pitched and galloped through the frond tips and beyond in the lapis expanse
Frequently snatching damselfly’s and assemblages of midges from their ephemeral drift
Auspicious rays transcended stippled diaphanous gravid clouds
Light inundated ether entered humbly into the cathedral oculus
Pyrite speckled terrain beneath, and my bare gilded form above
Cast a refracted aura about my sanctuary
Precipitously the elusive vaporous embankment distended further
Ashen atmospheric correspondence inaugurated liquescent sustenance to my mountain abode
And I -
Lingered beneath the descending gobbets, curls furled in a puddle
Fresh topsoil cupping my corporal topographic contours
Pressing blackberries into my mouth between smiles
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
a silent metronome,
we know exactly when,
when sleep pleads us enter,
and when it bids us adieu,
when we growls for sustenance,
or begs for plenty of the mercy
of emptiness to cleanse our void,
when to compose,
when to repose,
when to dispose,
and when tempos dictate
lay down child,
fallow!
*but its greater feat,
when sounds the bells of alarm,
when need is greatest,
for arms embraces,
wet lips to refresh,
bodies to synapse,
eyes require delight,
when needs be greatest,
for that very first infant step
to what can only be ever felt,
but is otherwise undefinable,*
for another
+to make us complete,
a unity, an,
us+
Sep 13, 2025
Sep 13, 2025 at 7:21 AM UTC
The gardener*
This is my garden; my apple tree
has over-reached itself. The branches,
weighed down with fruit, threaten to break.
If I had read the signs, thinned out when it was time,
the crop would be less heavy, the fruit less small.
And what there is, is damaged. If it’s not birds
it’s caterpillar, wasp, or earwig.
It will all be rotten soon. I don’t know why I bother.*
The blackbird*
This is my garden; this tree I sat in
and proclaimed my own when it was full of blossom
with war-cry love-call song.
Then mating, nesting, bringing up the brood.
The days were scarcely long enough, but that
was long ago. My children gone,
there’s time now for myself, time for a treat.
My yellow chisel bill breaks in the flesh
of these fine apples. Delicious. This is the life.*
The wasps*
This is our garden – insects do not have time
for individuality. We built the colony, us lads,
chewed wood to make our paper nest, and now
we work to feed the grubs.
“Lads”, that is, using the word loosely – for us
gender is not important; that’s for the queen,
and, as it may be, the ones who service her,
none of our business.
But we need food too,
and if sustenance gives pleasure,
so much the better. When we find a fruit
where blackbird’s chisel bill has broken in,
we eat our way inside, till only skin and core
encase our private eating/drinking den.
So what if it’s fermenting? If we get tiddly,
and roll about, and buzz a drunken hum,
then who’s to care? And if they do, we’ll sting ’em*.
Jul 26, 2016
Jul 26, 2016 at 12:38 PM UTC