"tangential" poems
Silently and scrupulously looking at my dad for a minute, I asked,
"What is it like to get old?"
He turned his attention away from the computer screen
Met my gaze
Took a deep breath in, and began,
"You don't realize just how fast life goes by, until it's gone.
One day, you look in the mirror, and realize that twenty years have gone by.
It's a different person in the mirror than what you expected.
Some days, I look at your mother
And it feels like I've only known her for a few months.
Other days I look at her, and she's just so different from the woman I met.
We've grown and changed so much together.
I am, to this day, learning new things about her,
And all of them make me love her more.
Yeah, she can't cook for **** and she talks in tangential circles
Which I just can't keep up with.
But since day one I was smitten with her.
And to this day I'm surprised that she actually chose
To spend the rest of her life with me.
Getting old with the right person makes getting old bearable."
Nov 29, 2012
Nov 29, 2012 at 8:17 PM UTC
I'm As Real As Your Thoughts, Do not Fear Me
Pornography's hangover
Tangential emotion
Birthed in a string of complacency
Welcome, my Prince of the Edge of Shadows
Jun 26, 2014
Jun 26, 2014 at 3:35 PM UTC
Da Dum Da Dum - melodic sonnet beat,
Ten syllables on each and ev'ry line;
Enough to put the reader fast asleep,
And don't forget the **** thing has to rhyme.
Just fourteen lines exact, no more - no less,
To revel in some tantalising plot;
Two short quatrains endeavour to address,
And introduce the who, the where, the what.
Then just four lines to tell a second tale,
That wends and weaves on some tangential route,
To set the scene that leads to the unveil
As if the reader gives a flaming hoot!
A rhyming couplet finishes the tryst,
To hit them with that all important twist!
Jul 26, 2014
Jul 26, 2014 at 8:31 AM UTC
Wanderlust warlock blaspheme rapacity
Obsequious diligence pier pair appearance
Obstreperously vituperative vociferous tenacity
Consortium eclectic synectics concurrence
In extremis extremity cantilever capacity
Citadel clairvoyance pilaster conveyance
Inductive integration interpolative audacity
Derivative factor derivational appliance
Futurity fatidic’s laconic sagacity
Aseity veracity cacophony compliance
Accidence ambience aesthetics opacity
Acoustical articulation intonational occurrence
Apomixes anabolics histophysiological mendacity
Epistemological somatalogy syntactics refulgence
Refractive reflective semantics complicity
Hephestian dialectics Hegelian effulgence
Linguistic syntax synaptic intensity
totally tangential
Jan 22, 2013
Jan 22, 2013 at 9:10 AM UTC
All sorrow is perpendicular occurring
at right angles of tragedy encircling
the grief-stricken with straight edges
only once intersecting across infinite planes—
Don't dare draw the lines between points
or shade the region with limits or curves
because the trajectories of bullets are plotted
on branes intolerant of slightest triangulation
Woe unto the seekers of sine waves
sobbing thinking of filling every trough
believing surely by now we've offered enough
to sate these bloodthirsty Euclidean demons
Cresting won't ever arrive in this course
filled to the brim with asymptotes, cold corollaries
but never spilling over under our sacred
pledge of allegiance to the 2nd Parallel Postulate
No intersections can be admitted with thoughts
& prayers extending outward barely co-planar
serious public policy proposals axiomatic
insistence on the Nirvana Theorem or nothing
A set of all points remains, mutually exclusive
motionless and always incongruent clueless
about their own particular geometries
awaiting radical Pythagorean salvation
Some paradigm we’ve built here though!
Two hundred years of living polygonal hand
to elliptical mouth without tangential reflection
on the unproven flatness of humanspace.
Aug 4, 2016
Aug 4, 2016 at 4:41 AM UTC
treacherously torrid and torrential torrents of totally tangential tumultuous tortuous ; tyrannically torturous adjunct viably salient seethe.
procrastinating pandemic plenipotentiary prosthesis ; prosaically pragmatic parenthetical predication predilection premise prognostication
panoramic tableau preternatural propensity proclivity prestidigitation gesticulation :
gyration guidon ; ghastly gruesome grotesque hideously horrible horrendous heinous
grotty gnarly
diabolically maniacal dementia brusque macabre abrupt
awful
amalgamated anathema analysis agnate aggregate aberrance
somatalogy virtuoso cognate obduracy
worse
rudiment ebullience , confluence effluent effusion affluent , prolific profusity opulence , cogent fecund secular secund , recondite redolence abstrusely obstreperous mesomerism resonance resilience
protractive perpetude futurity
blither blandishing blabber burnishing boresome blahs
lithe blithe jabber prattle chatter tithe
morose morsel moribundness
stolid stoic
stalwart bastion bulwark
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 5:45 PM UTC
Pertinaciously vituperative irrefragable determinism. Inscrutable axis of spontaneities’ imaginative. Perplexity’s prognosis to prospectus. Elan vital’s preternatural perpetuity. Cohesive coherency’s opaque opulence. Space-time continuum’s natural induction expressed as identity. Exponentially tangential imagination’s immaturity. Entropy catalyst blonds. Spaciotemporal telemetry tactician’s tellurian terrene. Protractive analyses dimensional delineation. Reflectively refractive positional empathy. Prophylaxis protocol. Objectified manifest's self inductive diminutive minutia iotas of interstitial edict. Graspy greedy stingy frugal mingy minions. Manumission’s indentured servant sail.
Feb 5, 2016
Feb 5, 2016 at 12:52 AM UTC
Comes a time
when the mathematics
of the years
becomes more about
- than +,
÷ rather than x.
When wisdom gained
< vitality lost,
and dis-ease > health.
A good night's sleep
and some energy ≈
happiness.
Living is
tangential
to survival,
and not
necessarily
congruent.
Aug 22, 2016
Aug 22, 2016 at 3:06 PM UTC
Tomorrow
I will be
Bigger
Better
Maybe this time
I won't run away
Head down
Hands trembling
Tomorrow,
I won't regret this
But that's tomorrow
Today remains
With all my worries
Insecurities and beliefs
My thoughts
Spiral
Off on a tangential course now
It will pass over me
And I won't be left untouched
But I will grow stronger
Through it all
I will become
The person
I want to be
In far-off tomorrows
Nov 20, 2014
Nov 20, 2014 at 5:13 AM UTC
Hello.
I'll not bother with the trivialities.
I'll forgo the lingering, longing stares
nix the stuttered words and long-departed trains of thought
skip the goofy, giddy smiles and tangential conversations
and I'll never utter the words,
"I think you're truly beautiful"
because you are,
and because you are
you've heard it all before.
Jun 2, 2014
Jun 2, 2014 at 1:15 AM UTC
When you make a mess
and both laugh.
When her hair gets caught in the dial of your watch.
When your glasses scratch her clavicle.
When hands are too cold
and goosebumps ripple up thighs.
When bodies knock
into furniture, and you have to stop.
When you spill water on the nightstand.
When you wobble the lamp
and shadows lean across the bed.
When her flesh dials a coworkers’ numbers on your cell
or the phone just rings.
When your “Harry Potter” audiobook plays on shuffle.
When church is in seven hours.
When the shower is too hot
and you jump back out onto the duck-shaped mat,
she laughs at you, calls you a wimp.
When the bath is too cold and the upper drain
gurgles like a drowning obese man,
there are never enough bubbles.
When she tastes like soap.
When you talk about your days and thoughts
wander to tangential curves and your mutual
acquaintance Steve, you forget what is happening.
When clothing gets stuck on heads, twist of feet,
elbow crooks, and in the wheels of an office chair.
When it is still on your floor, and your grandma visits
at lunch she smiles saying you found a nice girl.
When you try something new.
When you miss.
When straps and buckles never
unstrap or unbuckle.
When your fingers panic,
they are charged like blades.
When the moon.
When you’re late.
When you don’t want to put your bra back on.
When you hair is off kilter like a bonsai tree.
When it was almost like dancing.
When someone sneezes.
When you hiccup.
When she breathes.
When drool.
When scratches.
When bitten.
When church is in four hours.
When the laundry tumbled on.
When the oven started to smoke.
When you forgot.
When tickled.
When kicking.
When hurting.
When doors unlocked.
When his belt buckle shocks your navel.
When arms ache and legs cramp.
When curled the next morning in each other.
When it’s cold across the room, and
your clothes are so far.
When you miss church.
When eyelashes rub each other.
When the sun.
When you try to talk.
When moaning.
When sighing.
When screaming.
When getting back.
When breaking apart.
When getting back.
When your lips smash together like trains.
When you fold the cloths after.
Oct 5, 2010
Oct 5, 2010 at 1:23 AM UTC
it rains
where scattered white mists
applaud the silhouette
of a sharp and pointed moon
whose coagulant light
dispatches an infinite
population of ghosts
to haunt upon the mind
with tangential interests
are reluctant incarnations
of an intolerable vocabulary
with incoherent signs
these ragged images
free float before the eyes
create a straight line
upon a lime green colored wall
whose ghostly contour of shape
has no reason to be there
then it rains in horizontal free fall
from the ceiling to the floor
where these apparitions collide
in an empty sky of stars
creates a mysterious circumstance
that dictates mischievous epigraphs
where the leaves are black
it is whispered to young men
who reluctantly plant trees
whose shade they know
they will never sit in
it rains in this place
an angry and heavy rain
that sculpts the bones
and blinds the eyes
and the young men lie down
like rusted knives
in an antique drawer
without recognizing
this dredful portent of war
May 19, 2015
May 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM UTC
about something else
it wandered off
on a tangential excursion
backpack fully loaded
before I knew it
the cows
had come home
and the gate
was closed.
Apr 21, 2014
Apr 21, 2014 at 10:30 AM UTC
Terry the Troubadour,
Tip-toeing tenderly towards terrible tension,
Touches Theresa the Trobairitz's threateningly terrific thighs:
Their two timid tongues -
Those terse types that tend to tie -
Twist together traumatically,
The tricky tips tamely threading through
To tickle their tiny tangential teeth:
"Tap. Tap."
Twice...
"Tap. Tap. Tap."
Three times...
The tender-tongued timpani teases them,
Taunting their tenderfooted tryst,
Timed tantalisingly to teenage tunes too terrible to tango to.
Sep 20, 2014
Sep 20, 2014 at 4:57 AM UTC
Bending my brain to a mighty confusion
Casting tangential thoughts back through the years,
Try to come to terms with opposing profusion
From the conquering of Everest to Locherbie’s tears.
From soaring the heights in the conquest of cancer
To scouring the depths of depravity’s bin,
In rescuing pilot pods beached at the isthmus
To severing heads in The Killing Field sin.
How man can conceive of a Monet’s magnificence
Yet “Zeig Heil” the field grey of Germany’s brute,
Whilst fashioning spires of Westminster’s cathedral
To pushing ******* in a blue, pin striped suit?
A tenderness shown to a toddler at bedtime
Depravity’s best when they used Zyclone B,
The grace of His Holiness blessing the children
Hiroshima’s glowing from mountain to sea.
This weft in the weave of the psyche of the people,
This black and the white and the right and the wrong,
As long as he breathes on this beautiful planet
Man’s behavioural leap will determine the song.
The yin and the yan, the fall of the domino
Depicting the way the human mind bends,
The roll of the dice and the fall of the cards
Shall determine the outcome… in the way it all ends.
Marshalg
Pukehana Paradise
Auckland
NEW ZEALAND
25th January 2014
Jan 24, 2014
Jan 24, 2014 at 3:53 PM UTC
*Slumbered scratching into a bedside notebook
lying in darkness under a thick blanket of revelation
Afraid that lamplight may blind these 3am eyes
to the dim, wispy glow of mystical comprehension
Trusting that valued mysteries will later be deciphered
from this barely legible scrawl of the night
Refusing to squander such moments of divine lucidity
captured in a poetic hand written outside the lines
Reluctant to wait until morning lest the light of day
exposes a tenuous relationship to reality
Causing rays of enlightenment to glance off its surface
in beams of obscure and superficial logic
Tangential truths
scribbled in the dark*
Feb 16, 2014
Feb 16, 2014 at 10:05 PM UTC
I am dancing with the darkness,
I am flirting near the fringe,
I am swimming through the outskirts,
I am wading on the rim.
The reflection of my perspective is no longer recognized
By the less traveled sparkled stares, which happily float on by.
The peripherals of my mind are growing
Further and further in,
Wandering with broken gaze
My scope is turning dim.
With the darkness the ground is shifting
As I’m drifting through my mind.
The seasons change the more I’m seasoned
By reflections that graze my eyes;
Of broken scales, false fairy tales and smiles used for disguise.
While it's true it's - as the say - darkest before it’s light,
It still holds true
The opposite ensues
As bright-eyed sunsets sink into the night.
An occasional step, while slippery yet
Can bring to consideration:
That my darkened truth may yet be false...
... But I keep my hesitation
Because truer till is the fiction still that lingers in the sun;
Of droned routines, petty cravings, and gains ill-willfully-won.
These basking sun-tanners wouldn’t dare to enter
Where this jagged path tears my feet,
Making broken bones on shadowed stones
And a hopeful soul deceived.
The hope encased
Is slowly replaced
With new levels, planes;
Profundity of pain
And ever eroding faith.
My setting sun
Is nearly gone
While darkness takes its place.
The nights seem so much longer drifting
Into deeper dimensions, I muster.
Exploring further, I forge freshly charted paths
Discovering new tangential ways to suffer.
And all these feelings must be true, if truth lay in the mind
These dim lit paths are real to me, however seemingly blind
So still I wander through the night,
Rootless, lost, in pain,
Desperate for the smallest glimmer
That I might happen to obtain;
While shifting free
Through the scattered trees
Landing on the ground,
I sometimes stay
To catch these rays
Basking warmly on the stone....
.... But all this remains ephemeral,
As the sunray travels on.
So alone, again I tumble,
Lost and aimless,
Through the depths,
With broken heart,
Broken bones,
And a seemingly broken lens.
But perhaps... it’s YOU who play,
Lost and aimless,
in the luminous light of day.
For when all’s said and done,
After the shifting sun,
Retracts its comforting rays...
...Beyond that light...
...It is the night...
That ever will remain...
Oct 23, 2011
Oct 23, 2011 at 2:27 AM UTC
Energy radiates from far and near as the expanding perspective of a speck of dust attains immutable consciousness and a universe is born.
Where linear time is expressed in physical angles tangential to the sum of a whole,
Where the knowledge of life, death, and birth slip seamlessly between misshapen molecules of carbon and nitrogen
And verbose patterns of dusty stars form galaxies unsettled
Spreading as they gather speed.
Mar 26, 2013
Mar 26, 2013 at 4:26 PM UTC
Perhaps everything that has ever existed will exist forever in the psychic clarity of God. Retrospectively retroactive's omniscient ubiquity. Objectified manifest's infinite possibilities exponentially
extemporaneous eidetic prospectus perpetrates incorporeity ideology's perfectible ontology.
Imagination's immaturities would seem to purvey that these things are irrefragably inevitable in the light of noumenal sentience's semantic regalia. Astral projection's distance traveled time spent's dynamic progressiveness to clairaudience clairvoyance existential extremity.
Spatiotemporal telemetry tactician's trajectory extant is totally tangential. Extravagantly exorbitant's flirtatious flamboyance to flippantly flighty flit-ness. Down here at the bizarre bazaar we all believe in the blasphemous farcical fugue-ness estranged ensemble orchestrations and all. Some of us are even into the various assorted forms of related stranger weirdness, similar states of analogous collusion and ancillary subordinateness. Laboriously beleaguering hypercritically meticulous tedium, excruciating exacerbations of autonomous avarice.
I'd like to think that these arguments have leverage on the reconnaissance reconnoiter. Mentality's osteopathic prescience is an empirical substance. Psychokinesis is an art. Eclectic synectics's social contiguities zoomorphic zoolatry to demagoguery could raise us all to new heights of enigmatism and leave our corporeally preternatural finiteness endowed with a fidelity that exceeds itself, foreshadowing life's mysteries. No more dour droll dreary ochlocracy of an oligarchy. Stolid stoic bailiff's rake-ness rails, vicarious recalcitrance for all!
Jan 25, 2025
Jan 25, 2025 at 12:34 PM UTC
Watching the archetypal parable filler sealing his fate with a seed,
and see the walls of the story blossoming off to the sky.
It seems to offer impossibility bottled and wreathed,
a leaf in season to whittle through to the blossom in time.
The time he took to fear it, board windows, ignoring the means,
and flailing crops are not to halt the work ,and question the why.
He finds a seed to bury deep within the walls of his dreams,
a kind of thief to be policing the light.
The hubris in a few ferocious branches,
accruing the subtle stances required, refusing visitor glances at the shrine
The thorns swallow a rich canopy buried beneath
and keep a perilous gift hanging for traveler thigh
Time echoes in hope of lending vestige's light, crying out
to see the breadth of the line.
To see the tangential nature of the leaf,
and know the grief elucidated and reaped
for a return on what we sow in the vine
Another garden enclosed.
A partial view of the sky.
A further longing for truth.
Assume a gruesome divide.
Aloof and hardened to bone.
A carving suited for pine.
A starving forest in roost.
Abuse is looming inside.
Confusing and dried.
He's choosing his pride.
Refusing a guide.
Losing his mind.
Sep 7, 2019
Sep 7, 2019 at 8:08 PM UTC
Is this emptiness
or cosmic space
a love for dark or consummate
absence?
You lay there
and I, here
in the same
tangential uniformity.
we are but together
splintered, then separate,
making no difference.
you, in your place
and I, in mine
like some unattended baggage
dragged mechanically
by a tireless conveyor,
a hound in pursuit
of its own tail in intense circles,
left to my own silence brought
to the brink of all the noise.
*
The morning with its peripatetic
crush of garlic and spry birds.
In an unassuming distance
strip to void, teased to rogue,
the light does not arrive with
its usual taciturn warmth;
your mother gives you a pear
to pare and ******
my mother, the same in giving,
yet another thing worth grazing
say, the old skeleton of an empty
wine bottle,
a cold stride past womb-tender
bungalows and sleep-shaped mailboxes.
the feel of its bone , gutted out of flesh.
a compelling strike of silence
permeates more silence – like a prayer thumbed
down to its last throng.
there will be no dialogue.
this is the same quietude
in miles that assume our places.
maybe once you knew this domicile
like the curve of your bow-leg,
or the glint of your inner thigh.
the word “love” falls flat on the surface,
taking its station amongst the masses,
flying with the birds soon dead in their tracks.
the word “love” slits,
cuts open, unloosening a wound,
your mother in the kitchen paring
the flesh from the bone,
and you hear it,
as we look out of separate windows,
the hush churning sound,
spreading on all fours once in this room.
the morning lays out its hairbreadth
wire of memory
in some place unknown to us,
to size the measure our own,
still yet not ours, you in your home,
and I, somewhere outside the world
fathoming shadows their own things not ours.
Feb 3, 2016
Feb 3, 2016 at 8:45 AM UTC
Staring straight through vivid light
Tangential lines of torrid blue,
Mesmerizing, vivid light
To magnify horizon's hue.
A blaze of pinprick turquoise
Starkly circumscribes the mind
To focus cerebellum's link,
To clearly optimise the find.
Suspended in the nether zone
Floating deep within the air,
Rendered incognito now
As aqua showers rinse the hair.
Beautious recognition here
Of vastness laid before,
In the depth of thought potential
Lying at perception's door.
Marshalg
Victoria Park Tunnel
2 October 2010
Oct 1, 2010
Oct 1, 2010 at 12:36 PM UTC
Of Baseball, Poetry and the Human Condition
~~
From “The Art of Fielding.” by Chad Harbach
"You loved it,” he writes of the game (baseball), “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition.
The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."
~~
and thus, the circling noose grows ever small,
binding the obvious and unblinding the oblivious
more than the mere, poetry in baseball, for both forms of art,
knowledge intuited from watching the catcher's body weave
this way and that, a dancer en pointe, arms raised in worship,
addressing the heavens with a body's broad brush strokes,
all to catch with concentrated skill, a lazy, towering popup,
climaxing oft with an exclamation point -
a perilous desperation leap
into the dugout encampment of the inimical opposition
yeah, yeah, sure, sure,
you knew that,
tho daring to verbalize same,
before the age of thirty,
presumed maturity,
was not an act of the sane of heart,
or the sound of mind with body melded
what you dared not admit was that the conditional principle,
was primal and not tangential, though perhaps,
some itinerant fathers foolishly mumbled incoherently
of life's linkages and motifs parallel
of
that desperate beauty, the ferric magnetic irony,
that our full access pass to envisioning the finery,
imaging the stuff of our own daily creation genesis,
whether concocting undisciplined disassembled parts,
called words,
into a singular line, a stanza that froze your lungs from
the boredom of the regularity of heaving and breathing,
was in no way different
than the curvature of the boy's arm
in desperation outstretched, seeking spectacular safety for
a well hit ball of cork into a worn leather mitten and thus
confirming his humanity to the watching tribal membership
and these momentary moments of momentousness,
will live forever until we die, judged of equal stature,
a soldiers stripes, ribbons of his theaters of service,
medals of the honor and the errors of his own
truthful, youthful and crucial
human condition
Apr 21, 2017
Apr 21, 2017 at 4:57 PM UTC
It's all just a picture
One flash of color behind the next
Each demanding to be recognized as something new or novel
While they both are of the same
Tangential one may claim
So distant from itself
As though its shadow were not its own
Hidden yet uncovered
Dec 17, 2012
Dec 17, 2012 at 9:38 AM UTC
shall i mindless words
form into function, wander
forward without thought?
lead me on, then, muse
hushing unheeded warnings
of writer's folly
i who have no/thing
to cheer on, no one being
caring close enough
yet hundreds, thousands
read, call, respond and react
to fresh-cut poems
both sweet and pungent,
taste vaguely oriental,
smell hints of five-spice
as american
as melting *** and quatrains,
common meter, rhymes
cheeseburger and fries,
routine, familiar and
to each their own taste
flavored by flowered
blossomed imaginations
of poets living
and dead, whose poems'
lovely bones breathe still haunting
my quiet spaces
and take tangential
leaps ricocheting into
inspired lunacy
skeleton crews man
poetic voyages, launch
flights of uncertain
direction, take reason to
illogical conclusions.
Feb 27, 2015
Feb 27, 2015 at 11:50 PM UTC