"telegrams" poems
THE Government--I heard about the Government and
I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at
it when I saw it.
Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to
the callaboose. It was the Government in action.
I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning
and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge
dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a
live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw
this was the Government, doing things.
I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of work-
ingmen who were trying to get other workingmen
to stay away from a shop where there was a strike
on. Government in action.
Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of
men, that Government has blood and bones, it is
many mouths whispering into many ears, sending
telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
"yes" and "no."
Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid
away in their graves and the new Government that
comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood,
ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all,
money paid and money taken, and money covered
up and spoken of with hushed voices.
A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensi-
tive as any human sinner carrying a load of germs,
traditions and corpuscles handed down from
fathers and mothers away back.
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What if people who died in the 70’s would come to live with us for a day?
We would have to make ends meet and make them see how we turned out to out differently from the time they once lived.
We could only imagine how they would try to relate with our unending selfies and making those social networking sites a great big a diary from their negative rolls of negatives and telegrams.
How they would scold us for not being how they were and being us.
We would come to realize that the world is intertwined to change through time.
For while the times changed, the world does too, and we judge them by eras and years.
Nov 15, 2013
Nov 15, 2013 at 1:27 AM UTC
Suppose I was more agreeable
Instead of arguing over coffee about politics, religion
*All those subjects deemed taboo that neither of us truly give a **** about*
Pressing my point like daggers against your ribcage
Knowing the sweet spots that make you moan
I would give in, applaud your cleverness, then leave for work
You would be left wondering if you should feel insulted.
of course you should
As usual,my filterless memoirs have become vocalized
******* them back in tight and quick is useless
Once freed, the damage is done
But. they. are . just. words.
the previous statement is ridiculous and the author should be shot
Never could I slice you deeper, **** your private mind or lay your soul bare
Then with the bitter, caustic, truthful edge of my observations
You are just as vulnerable as the rest of them
Barbed wire telegrams
Frozen emails
Ash and arsenic letters
Cut you to the quick
Delightful.
But I like it better when I can witness the damage
Basking in the upper handed afterglow of my superior ability to mortally wound
For no bit of silver that I've ever found
Was ever sharper than the razor edge of my tongue
Jun 10, 2012
Jun 10, 2012 at 11:01 PM UTC
Do you See
the cracks
in the pavement
and you are the hammer
Sometimes it hurts
to exhale
You are it
a more i'd roller-coaster
What if, you
gave life
to bring our dreams
our intuition and morphology
Becomes we
and i will replace
every me with
the druthers of you
i no longer
exist in singularity
because it's only need
is an abstraction of idioms
Heartstrings & Intangible Things
Strung out like
prayer flags
and telegrams
twelve dots and dashes
i'll forever
make it
My pleasure
to find
infinite endeavor
Me way
to say
.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-
Aug 31, 2015
Aug 31, 2015 at 8:44 PM UTC
Post Office:
Telegrams and Telephones
Tell me how the snow is where you are.
Traffic cones outside, must-be-done road works completed by no one nowhere men,
patched up walls clad in grit painted cream
shutters the same, shutting out the screams.
Graffiti bridges, restaurants on ridges-
river's rising fast, finish your entrée
let's leave.
Walk linking arms looking upon
glimpses of brick, of an old home,
lived in years ago by someone unknown.
Sep 3, 2013
Sep 3, 2013 at 1:39 PM UTC
LET us go out of the fog, John, out of the filmy persistent drizzle on the streets of Stockholm, let us put down the collars of our raincoats, take off our hats and sit in the newspapers office.
Let us sit among the telegrams-clickety-click-the kaiser's crown goes into the gutter and the Hohenzollern throne of a thousand years falls to pieces a one-hoss shay.
It is a fog night out and the umbrellas are up and the collars of the raincoats-and all the steamboats up and down the Baltic sea have their lights out and the wheelsmen sober.
Here the telegrams come-one king goes and another-butter is costly: there is no butter to buy for our bread in Stockholm-and a little patty of butter costs more than all the crowns of Germany.
Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.
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1089
Myself can read the Telegrams
A Letter chief to me
The Stock’s advance and Retrograde
And what the Markets say
The Weather—how the Rains
In Counties have begun.
’Tis News as null as nothing,
But sweeter so—than none.
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SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk.
Snow changes our bones into fog streamers caught by the wind and spelled into many dances.
Six bits for a sniff of snow in the old days bought us bubbles beautiful to forget floating long arm women across sunny autumn hills.
Our bones cry and cry, no let-up, cry their telegrams:
More, more-a yen is on, a long yen and God only knows when it will end.
In the old days six bits got us snow and stopped the yen-now the government says: No, no, when our bones cry their telegrams: More, more.
The blue cows are dying, no more pink milk, no more floating long arm women, the hills are empty-us for the smoke valleys-sneeze and shiver and croak, you dopes-the government says: No, no.
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“Everything crackles when I walk, dear,”
she said as she stood to go.
The teapot was whistling
And the TV blared loud
Because his hearing aid was turned down to ‘low.’
These splendid old bean eaters
These God loving fools
Live out their days alone.
She can barely see right
And her hands can’t much hold
The hair brush of hers
he plated with gold.
She’s hardly annoyed by the ways of this world,
She’s seen it all come and go except—
The caller ID is a plain old mystery—
What happened to telegrams?
This lovely of woman
And her lovely old man
Still live out their days as in old,
He goes to the barber and she to salon
To gussy up pretty for the drug store.
Few worries they have
But tonight without fail,
She’ll screech
“Al! What’s the Jeopardy channel?!”
“WHAT!?”
He’ll yell back as he shuffles her way
From the kitchen where
sleep closed his eyes as he waited “all day”
For that **** coffee ***
that never made good coffee in anyway.”
Then they’ll eat stale chips
And he’ll start to snore
As she turns the TV up to its max;
Shifting thick, horn rim glasses that she’s had since high school
Untill in the blue TV lights her eyes will glow.
She can see her show is over
as the fuzzy credits roll down
She stands up and everything cracks,
Shuffle…
Shuffle…
Step.
She reaches for him
and covers his feet
with a quilt.
Jan 30, 2012
Jan 30, 2012 at 10:57 AM UTC
They call it depression, but it's an addiction to something that's not there-
It's an expression that we wear; it's repressed need-worn mentally.
And torn entities are born, but big men scorn with forlorn identities.
Ungentle mouths sending free telegrams to stop everything stop.
Want masquerading as need.
An embedded seed we tried to prune one day, but grew instead.
Weedy tendrils that push out my head.
Bleeding temperamentally internally eventually until it grows aware:
Despite hiding it or changing it, we carry on:
Recognizing our own ambiguity in another person's stare.
Aug 9, 2014
Aug 9, 2014 at 5:26 PM UTC
I pass myself off as a replica.
previous applicants need not apply?
why?
are we just fodder for cannon when needed
and when needs arise
who dies?
not them tinpot general men
it's us
and then the telegram's sent
to the family?
I suppose they just text telegrams today
it's another institution that passed slowly away
there's much to be said for the personal touch
but we don't get too much of that.
On Sunday I usually hate Sunday
which is the day before what I call
no fun day
a monday
and I want it to be Friday
I'd like it to be Friday in
nineteen sixty nine
but likes are like time mines
they blow up in your face,
that's why I pass myself off as a replica,
I never knew the real me.
Aug 21, 2016
Aug 21, 2016 at 6:01 AM UTC
oh to be the envelope that holds your letters,
your letters that will,
eventually,
make me come,
u
n
d
o
n
e.
broken,
ripped at the seams,
soon to be disgarded.
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 at 10:25 PM UTC
~ for FK
He fell asleep a defunct and uncertain mortal,
but in that night of wavering visions
he dreamed of crocodiles and lilacs
each blossoming according to its own nature.
That made a sort of sense.
Telephones rang and creditors questioned.
Fishermen returned from the sea with boats full of water
which they easily traded for vast quantities of oxygen.
The crocodiles were fragrant and the lilacs smiled.
That, too, made a sort of sense.
One melancholy action flung itself upon the stars
and vanished from the satisfied earth.
He loved God and Satan simultaneously
and in their delight they reopened the Garden
feeling once more the necessity of affection
and directed him to eat his fill.
Who can argue with such divine logic?
All his ex-lovers sent telegrams expressing regret.
The gold he never had swelled his coffers.
He decided this dream was too lovely to end.
And yet, how to make sense of this gloaming cornucopia?
The answer struck him obvious as an earthquake:
forget the prisons of words; take new orders;
laugh with the crocodiles; dance with the lilacs;
become a man of action; imbibe Ambrosia for breakfast;
devour Manna for lunch; **** astonishing flowers.
This makes perfect sense.
- mce
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 7:43 AM UTC
I sit and watch; day after day
but still the telegrams say -
THERE IS NO CROP
STAY INSIDE STOP
I watch as the gardener comes;
the lonely girl in the gas mask, who hums
the sad tune of the seed
doomed as a ****
I wonder, how she survives without shoes
for the ground, it may ooze
poison from the air
in the ground, seeps in your hair
She's just another lonely soul
with an empty petunia bowl
and one of those masks
as she goes out to fulfill impossible tasks
I sit night by night, with nothing to do
and by every noon she's come through,
watering the toxic soil,
a source of such turmoil
How can it grow;
among poison, she must know
planting out spores
in the aftermath - of wars
The air is a haze
and I feel left in a daze
when at last one dead morn',
the apocalypse flower is born
Mar 3, 2010
Mar 3, 2010 at 7:58 PM UTC
nothing i do will you bring back;
not the shoebox of purple hyacinths
watered by the i love you's
i still wanted to say.
not the prose poetries i wrote you
whilst caught in a mania
in the restrooms of dying gas stations.
not the caving in of the see-through walls
mixed with static humming of the payphone calls.
not the pillow telegrams that smell like
bourbon and my mother's cigarettes;
darling, my bed has become a post office
of the letters i never had the chance to write
and of the things i never
had the chance to say.
and nothing i say will bring you back —
not even this poem, and i know that now;
i just don't know
how to live with that.
still, nothing will ever bring you back
and darling, watching you fall out of love
feels like the only thing i can do right now.
Jul 26, 2019
Jul 26, 2019 at 6:33 AM UTC
Dear _______,
It's been hard to write. You were always the muse.
I'm no longer Anonymous. Anonymous is no longer mine.
Once, he smashed my lamp. I heard the sparkle of cheap IKEA glass fanning out on my floor like a miniature Arctic Ocean. When I came back to my room, he had a broom in one hand and your mug in the other.
I told him he could break anything in my life, but not that mug.
I am bound, my dear _______ . Not because I wish I could tell you how much ______. Not because I ______ , or that I miss when we _______ , but by sterility, latex gloves, telegrams. I am bound by the distance and detachment that keeps us safe as we venture inside other humans, other hearts.
The only way to survive terminal love was to induce a coma. Sleep until fixed.
At best I will dream of your laugh.
Mar 14, 2014
Mar 14, 2014 at 10:23 PM UTC
we stood by the doors of the train
in the sticky heat that kept
me from wanting to sit
because i hate when my thighs
hold onto the plastic seats
like it's life or death
i stared into your irises
and noticed that they weren't
what i had always thought they were
in times when we were miles apart and
i had closed my lids tight and imagined
you staring back at me
a drunk man stumbled onto the train
and as we stood stagnant for
10, 15, 30, 45 minutes
he slammed and slurred about
public transportation and the *******
that just don't know how to do their jobs
you and i stood silently laughing,
and the happiness in our eyes
was all we needed
i hold onto pieces of time
like this and it's what keeps me breathing,
knowing that one day, i'll add to the archive
perhaps that's the hardest part,
the inability to make new memories together,
because in the end that's all a relationship truly is
and that's everything a relationship truly is
pen, paper, phones, computers, smoke signals, homing pigeons, bike messengers, telegrams, postcards,
none of them are you
Aug 5, 2011
Aug 5, 2011 at 9:10 AM UTC
She found two packs of cigarettes hidden between binders in his backpack, and his ashtray full of cigarette butts. The cabinets were empty and the sink was full of dishes.
Her heart dries out, cracks. She can't cry out. She wants him to hold her the way he used to.
It won't stop raining. The city tries to overpower the sound of the kitchen clock ticking, but the paper walls and cellophane doors seem to amplify the incense of mother natures smoke still lingering in the air.
Chain-smoking cigarettes like a machine, he doesn't spare her a glance. There were bombs going off inside her chest, her ever-dormant chest, and she wonders if he's noticed yet. And she still hopes her words send telegrams to the farthest corners of his admiration.
She wants to be the cigarette that is ever present in his slim fine hands, and the smoke that fills, coils in his lungs.
Now whiskey goes down like fire,
and they went down
like buildings.
Oct 10, 2013
Oct 10, 2013 at 10:42 PM UTC
Life nowadays is just instagram
Back then our ancestors had to write telegrams
The golden generation engulfed in black mist
They shoot cold heat
While I watch it all through uncertain eyes
Steve Biko with a pen
Robert Sobukwe with paper in a den
It haunts me
Great God,I'm tied in a knot
Great God,they fear not
I walk free,still fearful
I'm a refugee in my own smile
Steve Biko,Robert Sobukwe died for a cause
My generation is cursed
We are on pause
In the paws of a ruined future
As long as I still have my pen and paper
I'm a poet for a cause
Nov 5, 2014
Nov 5, 2014 at 12:58 AM UTC
Life nowadays is just instagram
Back than our parents had to write telegrams
The Golden generation engulfed in black mist
They shoot cold heat
While I watch it all through uncertain eyes
Steve Biko with a pen
Robert Sobukwe with paper in a den
It haunts me
Great God,I'm tied in a knot
Great God,they fear not
I walk free fearful
I am a refugee in my own smile
Steve Biko,Robert Sobukwe died for a cause
My generation is cursed
We are on pause
In the paws of a ruined future
As long as I still have my pen and paper
I am a poet for a cause
Mar 1, 2015
Mar 1, 2015 at 3:50 PM UTC
Trying to tap telegrams
On the back of my iphone
In a faux leather seat
In the back of my mothers car.
Anyone will tell you I have a
Knack
For the contrary
And there’s strangely no argument,
Where I got it from.
The seat belt sits uncomfortably across my throat,
Stopping my words,
A space formerly only occupied by her gaze,
Though my future career may benefit,
My current psyche does not.
Aug 16, 2018
Aug 16, 2018 at 9:30 PM UTC
Lightning spit across the alloy face
of the dishwasher I was filling a half moment
before a high black throat unfastened
with a sunken bellow that scattered rain
like sodden hair along a sheer pane scalp.
Hell, a storm? On New Year's? What an insult -
because it's been a long year down
for the lonely and eroded angels, the poets
whose orchestras of synapses decay gently
into fresh stanzas. I don't know about you,
but my inbox was a chorus of No, No,
Not You, Never You. It ate me
inside out, but I pressed on in new poems,
both mine and yours - I stumbled blindly
into rooms full of your renewed voices -
reassuring me that silence is not the way.
These are not poems, you all told me -
they are beacons, telegrams, phone calls,
they are pleas, they are screams, they are alive
like the cursive lightning scrawl that paints
the kitchen and bids me stand up straight.
It's been a long year but I came here to say
my mouth is filled with thank you;
strange friends and colleagues, thank you.
_To all of you, and your hard work this year.
Your poems were read, and remembered.
Thank you for all of it. It changed me,
for the better, and was appreciated._
Dec 31, 2024
Dec 31, 2024 at 6:58 PM UTC
Messages carried along
meandering lanes
without conscious input
by electronic impulses are
speeding across the sinews,
through the blood avenues
and down the back alleys
to our feet, on the footpath
of life
telling us
that pressing on
is the only
way
forward.
Meanwhile telegrams
travel to the very edges
of our arterial network
sending instructions
to our shoulders
and on
to our arms and hands
to move in beautiful unison
with our feet
thus
allowing us
to set out
using
our form of
propulsion.
And so we amble on
blissfully unaware
of the arduous tasks
our body will carry out
every second
of every day
for
all
of
our lives.
©Joe Wilson - The unseen journey...2015
Jan 16, 2015
Jan 16, 2015 at 11:52 AM UTC
I swear I heard the dog whisper
but it frightened me
I put my fingers in my ears
I did not want to hear him
It was as if a lover was telling me a lie
I could see mysteries of life unraveling
so I shut my eyes
Deaf and blind, I stood
movement of a melodic line
between pitches
hummed in my head
Gods of old
tumbled phrases
similar to ticking of telegrams
into my subconscious
Hades told Pain and Panic
to inform him
when Fates arrived
I threw my eyes open
unplugged my ears
The dog was licking his *****
I knew my insignificance
Apr 18, 2016
Apr 18, 2016 at 9:37 AM UTC