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Ronni McIntosh Jul 2014
My hair stands on end
and I tip over, spilling
into the sky and down
into the dirt.
The stage explodes inwards
in colorful bursts,
black and white bears
strumming and growling
in a cymbal crash
a thunder clap
a tap-dancing
madhouse jamboree.
The threatening noise
reverberateraterating
through the hills
and climbs up inside
until I fly out of my body
straight up into the heavens
with a sigh,
a soul release.
i have a little terrapin i keep him in a tank
he didnt have a name so i called him frank.
he is very cute and paddles round his home
in and out rocks he just loves to roam
he has a little ramp that takes him to the top
where he likes to bask and from the water frank can pop
he sits there for while that is his retreat
underneath the light giving off the heat
then he as feed to fill his appetite
then off he goes to sleep and thats him for the night.
i have a little terrapin i keep him in a tank
he didnt have a name so i called him frank.
he is very cute and paddles round his home
in and out rocks he just loves to roam
he has a little ramp that takes him to the top
where he likes to bask and from the water frank can hop
he sits there for while that is his retreat
underneath the light giving off the heat
then he as feed to fill his appetite
then off he goes to sleep and thats him for the night.
Lappel du vide Mar 2014
jerry's voice weaves a net
to catch my drunken skin,
sagging and dancing against
his cherry pie voice
warm and sweet in the dark of
the 7:17 dawn,
sun still sleeping behind a tall mountain range.

it makes me ache for open hearted
companions
barefeet wet from dew and black from distance
fearless,
unapologetic as they scream their throats out
raw splattering on the gasping earth from
the heaven high rooftops.

flowers poked through the pores
of ocean flavored skin,
peeling from laying too long
in the morning-faced
sun.

i wonder why people feel
so ancient, when their skin is still so young.
we've built this generation in the
imprisonment of fear,
the shrill avoidance of beauty,
we've forgotten what it feels to be living
free and loving
true,
and that's why you see so many young bones
crumble when their lives have just
begun.
i have a little terrapin i keep him in a tank
he didnt have a name so i called him frank.
he is very cute and paddles round his home
in and out rocks he just loves to roam.

he has a little ramp that takes him to the top
where he likes to bask and from the water frank can hop
he sits there for while that is his retreat
underneath the light giving off the heat.

then he as feed to fill his appetite
then off he goes to sleep and thats him for the night.
Julie Grenness May 2016
Once there was a man called Jim,
This tale is quite maudlin,
So, what was wrong with Jim?
He received some pets from his family,
Who decided to give Jim pet therapy,
So, what was wrong with that?
Lucky they didn't give Jim a cat,
So, why, indeed is that?
Well, he had a budgie and a terrapin,
New little friends for poor old Jim,
Which he forgot to hydrate,
He forgot until it was way too late,
His terrapin turned turtle,
A desiccated shade of purple,
But, what about Jim's budgie? You ask,
Daily feeding was supposed to be Jim's task,
Poor budgie mortuus, there he lay,
Jim's family came to visit one day
Eventually, his daughter's jaws did part,
"There's nothing colder than an ex-budgie's heart!"
Feedback welcome.
Geno Cattouse Feb 2013
would walk out of the city on Sunday afternoon after Sunday Mass
Dinner at noon was the custom. then the city would slip into  Sunday coma.
Mantovani, Acher Bilk, and the BBC wafted from the Television less homes we passed
on our way to the river.

Old chocolate men reclined on rickety old wooden porches smoking hand rolled
whatever as we strolled by giving us the lazy eye. All knowing , know nothings.
Sun beaten and calloused to lives of hard labor. every now and then one would just give a
jaundiced nod and look away/ Live to smoke another day.

Half paved tar and gravel roads simmered and writhed in the distance.
but our bare feet.
slapped in rhythm .cut off knee pants and skinny bare chest attested to sparse living but we
never knew it cause the mangrove jungle was minutes away and big
unwanted catfish to hook and throw away. Disdainful (Kiatto).

Off the simmering road now hopping toads. Johnny fiddler ***** for bait .
The canoe awaits us two small school boys in our natural state. One seven one eight.

Pelicans survey slowly above where the river meets the sea A small ripple and down he goes. He knows where school is in for mackerel and terrapin. Bone fish too.
We small boys with no fear . Innocence a pole and cork. One hook apiece is our gear.
Knee deep in mire as we push of and jump. A paddle apiece as we stroke against the tide to traverse the emerald river wide. The far bank. My Aunt Doris's shack.

Man over board to tie of the. Bow.

A snack of tortillas and beans then up the river no fear. Fun and the fish
Sun and the wish for an endless Sunday. We hate Monday. Back the priests and nuns.Slate writing board and times tables.
Let's fish.
Let us dream.
Tied off in the mangrove shade.
Swatting horse flies quietly. Quietly?

Like bird dogs we study the floating cork.
A wiggle, a bob. A bob. Set the hook and out comes the prize.
Then more. More flapping underfoot.we can hardly.walk. The glee
A bonanza.
All fried up and crisp.Catch and release. What madness. Catch and consume.

Day is done in the Carribean sun.
Home eastward. The pitch road is more forgiving on bare feet now
with the September sun at our backs. A leisurely stroll back to the
house. No worries,

A bath  and change for the Sunday evening show.
The Thief Of Baghdad or  maybe El Cid.
The Duke Audie Murphy in a double header.

The walk home along the moonlit seaside.
To start another Halcyon stream.
Another time and place rooted firmly in my memory.
Read  THE RIVER ROCK. More from Memories of a childhood in Belize.
Don Brenner Oct 2010
Five hundred feet from Terrapin Point the Birdman stands with his bicycle.  His face as flat as the quarters he begs for, glares at foreign tourists.  Two boisterous parrots, Larry and Mabel.  They smell like tourists and change, and are footcuffed to three brass chains connected to his backpack.  A Muslim family approaches.  They want a picture.  Birdman places the birds on the hands of the smallest boy, and his mother takes a picture.  Mabel squirms.  Larry squawks.  Click.  A reward for their posturing, Birdman places birdseed on his tongue, and the parrots peck away, ignoring his birdbreathe for an evening snack.  The tourists clap and laugh at Birdman and toss him their spare change.  Birdman stands.  Waits.  For another family to pose with his birds.

Mabel licks her wings
and Larry says, "Picture pic."
Birdman stands alone.
2009
Then a voice comes and says
It was a stranger, pays by the hour
You got jacked, hacked, attacked
Your mind was theirs when we got here

There was a time spent
pretending it wasn't possible.
Sad, sick strangers, ******* you!
But I dreamed of my beloved four.
They ****** my spirit, like a battery.

Then he came, the covenant,
time to turn and escape their nets.
Down into the pit, a crucible.
To treat with my paladin

We tend the metasphere in secret,
Honor bound in sacred duty
Terrapin are we.
©2013 Atalanta Undigested. All Rights Reserved.
brash thunder in the dark is low and deep
it bids us rest and dream of milky light
of other places where with fresher sight
the follies of the seasons slower creep
may well be judged by those who always keep
a weather eye for things to come out right
as safe from mortal horror that's the plight
of one who knows just what hides down in sleep
there's better clarity in the grey dawn
a different heat another sort of life
to be confronted choices to be met
one fearful terrapin seen on the lawn
draws in its head for fear of hurt or strife
but then goes on with no thought or regret
Repentant in the muddy waters
Circuitry of crystal exposure and
sandy bottom
Becoming one with Cotton Indian Creek
The olive cool link longing for an ocean
to call her own
River Birch mother what human frailty
thou hast borne witness of
Terrapin brothers what do you patiently
wait for
Collage of cirrus sky warning , Gibbous Moon
address
A Blue Heron to share my loneliness* ...
Copyright September 1 , 2016 by Randolph L Wilson * All Rights Reserved
Aditya Roy Apr 2020
The more
I walk away from
You, my soul stretches
Thin like a cadence
The more
I walk away from
You, the depth of oceans
Reveals the emptiness
The more
I walk away from
You, I find my shadow striding
Beside me as I leave the light

In the skies
The osprey doesn't turn
Neither towards living or dead
It floats on sleeping wings
Arriving in dreamy nights

Nocturne and pianists
Remind me of the intimate Chopin
I hide from in old age's tepid waters
Like a terrapin
With its ragged claws and cold raw heart

If your lips were redder
Than apples rudded by autumn
I would rather simply bite the dust
As memory may turn to dust twice

Violence has no end
Tis' better this way without vice
Not a murmur of a prayer to restore
I have closed my arms
Around the firmament of the sky, before
Jackson said, “I’m late for the sky!”
Mr Mojo Risin was way up high
Jimi and Janis went along for the ride
Cass brought a sandwich but no one knows why
More and more from the canyon store
Were knock knock knockin’ on heavens door
Supplanted from as far as the Eastern shore
Kerouac and Ginsberg found a spot on the floor
Miller and Kesey would soon descend
The Cuckoo’s Nest was owned by a friend  
Frank arranged an invitation to extend
Even the youngest Beach Boy would attend
Jerry soon came down from the bay
Via Terrapin Station riding Dennis’s wave
The only one not here was Dave
Cause in New York is where Ziggy stayed
Frey left the Motor City schemin’
For Phillips’s take on California Dreamin’
No one ever thought of leavin’
When Dusty sang, “In the cool of the evenin’”
Our House is a magical place
The memories put a smile on your face
They’ll  never take away the Leather and Lace
Because Laurel Canyon has unlimited space
Pinkerton Jun 2019
Fireflies strike lightning in their bellies
all to find that perfect mate;
love spoken in a Morse Code of light.

Lacking bio-luminescence, I shine
my MagLite in your face
on and off and on and off and
you refuse to let me on or
get me off.

I realize we are not lightning bugs
but I’m starting to think
we have no spark;

perhaps I should change tactics.

A male porcupine seduces the ladies
by giving them a *******;
should I pull out the plastic tarp?
A male giraffe drinks the female’s *****;
how thirsty can you make me?

Lady terrapin turtles are won
with just a tickle of the cheek;
lady lemurs like when their men stink;
and a dung beetle will fill a hole with ****.

Look, I’ve taken you to dinner already,
we’ve had a couple overpriced cocktails-
that’s like a peacock showing his feathers
and I’m confident I have ******* pretty feathers;
Daddy told me that should be enough
and that sometimes she’ll play hard to get
and sometimes you just have to take what you want.
Things don’t need to get messy
-that’s on you-

but we are just animals, after all
Third Eye Candy Dec 2020
I love you but it’s stupid.

you with your bifocal narrow Mind
and me with my Un-neglected Imagination.

we are not a pair.

but we pair well with peach schnapps
and mistletoe.
well slay beautiful gods
with parasites
and adorn the fulcrum
of our arch
with a silent
epiphany
too dormant to be
sleep as we know it
and too tranquil
to be anything
than a false start
in an actual
Now.

I Love you and it’s tragic.

tragic like how a terrapin is not
a writing desk in a moist raven
spooling thunder where the lightning
forgets to thunder

About You.
Patrick Kennon Sep 2017
Prize fighter eyes, psych units cry for equality
Bipolar pen drops, manic pinpricks, depressive, progressive
Thirty five cents on this terrapin table, today's tabernacle
Distant, loner, accepting a gentle love, lunar lunatics
Cat paw flower prints on the piano, perfume pack rat
Bed bug bite fest, black blue eyelids, coffee catastrophes
Eyes closed dreamily, internal demons be bustin' my chops
Pig trash slops, prodigal son rain drops as the beat talks
Red haired ruffians showing off fresh filed teeth
Fried eggs delicious beyond belief after starving for days
Switch the pen, shape the clay, jewels in a jar of jawbreakers
****** by all the goodness sakers, we're just givers and takers
Schizophrenic blitzkrieg, a thousand leagues under the sea
Busy bumblebee, do your little dance, show your friends the pollen trail
Sparrow, quail, pigeon **** ghetto gridlock, quarters in a sock
A bandanna and a lock, sheared sheep flocks, Rasta dread locks
Thumbin' down Memorial drive with child wide eyes
Sittin' in a grainer on the fly, on a train to do or die
Spit on the window of the violent cell, no name just VC1
Gunshot one shot ink blot blood spots corpse rots
Hard knocks, break rocks, first men to be shell shocked
Pop goes the weasel, blank canvas on the easel
Monks covered in diesel, Buddhist breathing candles
Nothing left, not even sandals, raise a toast, l'chaim
When you give up you die, face today with wide eyes
Does God cry? I do, should say I try to, skip to the loo
T R S Nov 2019
Baby magpie birdies
Cluck early in the morning

Coyotes have breakfast
on all the worms and birds.

Trout gather nymphs in slurping slurring.

but the longest live terrapin remains inert.
Aditya Roy Aug 2019
It's a bit of laughter, that goes a long way to just you
If it comes as no surprise, it goes a long way if we, you're you
Looking for canvases of fruits, and tapedecks of Japan, dying pretty hard
My life's in misery, but, I don't what, does it fear to live?
My life's in inescapable fear, and I don't know what it means
Oh doctor, tell me why will my thy will open to the eye of sun and heaven and earth, red earth I'm bleeding out in these rags forlorn for the lost feeling
Hold my high hopes, in the kite running skies that leave my thoughts dry as long as the picture is finding innocence in your reasons, two simple reasons why this in spells of manic depression
Trapped in a young man, and old and dead that spurs madness
Doesn't the piano chime with the murderous hope in my skullduggerous soul, I don't deserve this madness
Dreaming up of skulls, suddenly realizing the death of thine light in my eyes very dubious, beyond false compare
He said I'd just write you free-prose poetry, but, I'm looking for another letter of the Hades Gate, who heard him leave
I'm blowing in the wind, but, I'm drowning in madhouses
Raging with innocence, innocuous and capricious caveats, and talk of the passion without immediate conscious experience
I'm a body without consciousness, and I hear you in the starry skies of your loveless dust ordered in the years of rag ***** and talk of artichokes artistic, chokes me to tears to see what we've become
In a generation of hysterical madness, and I saw the best minds in the yearly bestsellers written by droning bickering pretentiousness, looking for childhood, they found their flickering peace in their cooked up courage in the collated document of liverwurst and hog tails that promised the empty soul to offer its confusion in a soup of surly murmurs in this silent sky, what ideal do I love to choose, adding two and two?
I'm forgetting everyone when I realize I should have forgotten them a long time ago, in the centuries that repeated in the song
Dancing with repetition, in the mayday of restoring heaven
How about I tell you that I couldn't talk to my doctor?
'Cause **** was the disease
How about I tell you, that my house smells, wishing it could make love to stylish artists and teddy bears with adorable aromas, fragrances of time and my mother can't read me, I just read her I write about the battered suitcases wanna travel the swirling minds of childish about desultory blues on the Ray Charles blues in
Playing in the back of a phonograph, in the corsets and flowery eyes that spell danger if I pluck a star from their supernatural darkness in hand-churned ice cream sitting on a desolate understanding of the homes of the lost souls, and I talk of the ceramic ashcans that process the changed minds
That had understood the changes, in the wind wondering what hit them or in videos of gapes of bad mouth in stammering broken lips
Drama is the art of success, and thunderous claps and the noise wants me to cut my life into half measures, and half hollow men
Some of them now kids, we are the studied men with the ignorant looks searching for the light
Understanding that a child can accept the light, the real tragedy strikes when we realize that an adult is scared of us
Sovereign in slavery, talk of the broken lip in white pallor that cries tears of emotional tears of cottages that sail in Morocco in Tangiers
On the ***** streets of hunts, and jousting verbal catatonic piano brilliant hurt, balancing on the fire
That I can't see, and the fall feels cold as hell, and the terrapin stays in the recesses of the doves flying above them
Falling into the side of the dark moon, and the colored literature in the stammering men was a white, well that's how we had the grapevine in this haven
Lend it's heralding living, in the clothes exchanged for jazz, and talking about jazz like it is, for the black men forgiveness
White men are afraid of black men because of expression. And black men are afraid of white men because of the lack of oppression, or the means to tell it like it is with their white lies and white fears of the black man sitting on a bench with his hand in ice creams, it's freezing outside...

White men fear black men because of depression, dedicated to cause and effect
Ghostless towns of the crossbones soulless towns, and following the logic that makes common sense, to avoid the ghosts of their past in the ideas that need to be kept in the past
Maybe true love waits, but, it's not my barking neighborhood
And I hate women with attitudes, and dogs that don't latch the reciprocated greed in a bit of chalk and white flame, green platitude, because happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing
Where's her mom?
She's crying?
Where's her mother in the neighborhood suburbia?
Cashing in, and cashing out without her looks of financial fickle frenzy going into the cries of the howling crummy apartment, doesn't tell when the broken tears stop before they are complete
******* single torn child, an ultimatum for no limitations if your whiplashes the dashed chair, in the undulating tumescence of buildings in howling midnight in the secret garden
Sunflower you look toward the time, identikit caress these battered feelings in that we all know that ought to be found in the hearts that have lost them glow
We are lost in your glow monarchical, we are writing writhing souls looking for offensive erosion
And defensive simplicity in oil and water
In oil lamps burning midnight lamps inscribed in speakeasies, crowded in a quickie
Affixed I'm free to taste the reality of the hydrogen bomb, the best defense is the strongest offense
Cliff Perkins Jul 2022
I am drawn to wounded things
The tattered butterfly
The lonesome dove, the long-lost love
The way we live and die

The terrapin with broken shell
The tree by tree rubbed raw
The broken leaf, the mother’s grief
The mouse in my cat’s maw

Why focus I on things that sigh?
Why not sing happy songs?
To live and die, it helps to cry
The wounds help right the wrongs
ymmiJ Aug 2019
turtle eggs waiting
for the signal to begin
terrapin station
Lawrence Hall Sep 22
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                        My Grandfather’s Hayfield

From my own fields I can hear the band
The high school marching band, oom-pah, oom-pah
From several miles away, with merry songs
and merry cheers around the homecoming bonfire

That was my grandfather’s hayfield in my youth
Before the town and school replaced the past
The shaking baling machine compressing grass
Where the team captain now gives his whup ‘em speech

I found a terrapin where the cheerleaders dance
From my own fields I can see my youth

— The End —