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Jenna Johnston Dec 2011
This poem was written after watching a few hours of slam poetry on Youtube. Let me know what you think...it's my first shot at slam poetry.*

There are so many words flowing around out there about the big girls. The thick girls, the curvy girls, the p-h-a-t phat girls. About their plush and soft exteriors, their abundant backsides, their willingness to accept themselves and their hopefulness that others will do the same. Their….thereness.
They are beautiful, don’t get me wrong.
They are beautiful.

But what about the skinny girls?

The small girls with petite builds and large hearts and an aversion to the word short. The size two and under girls, the drive thru can’t gain a pound girls, the I AM NOT ANNOREXIC OR BULLEMIC girls.

The girls who will always be referred to as “pixie-like” or “waif-like” or “twig-like.” The perfect model body girls that all of the other girls hate…because of their lack of fat.

Aren’t they beautiful?

The girls with the size 32 bust line, the girls who, at 24, still shop in the junior sections of department stores. The girls who, regardless of their age, their strengths and weaknesses, their experiences, heartaches and joys, disappointments and triumphs, their want or need for life and love will always look like they missed a meal or gave it back purposefully with the intent of becoming even thinner. The girls who, no matter how ******* HARD they try, cannot even weigh 100 lbs soaking ******* wet.

Aren’t they beautiful?

The big girls have to search and search for cute and **** and attractive clothes because of their size. Guess what? So do the skinny girls. Do you know ******* hard it is to find a pair of pants with a size zero waist and a 34 inch leg? To finally find an extra small shirt that doesn’t have one of the top three cartoon characters of the time plastered across the front?

All I’m saying is yes, the thick girls, the curvy girls, the p-h-a-t phat girls…
They are beautiful.

But ******, so am I.
This is an original by Jenna Johnston. If you like it, by all means write it down, but give credit where credit is due, please
WS Warner Sep 2011
The pierced ego sees
through an opaque lens;
a vestige of hope,
humor and  
intellectual solidarity.
Effigies of forgotten ethos,
the culmination of a
fated dream;
unrequited ardor, abandons
identity to an irreducible
fervor,                      
subtext of tension,                    
enduring ****** privation;
etude of a paramour
ending torture,
tasting mystical polarity.

The wounded heart
once intruded,
bleeds effusive;
the ornament of humility.
Flattened collateral
damage,
primal search,
proves illusive;
portals of hurt, slivers
of pride,
assembled fragments of
thereness
absorb the loss
of my English muse.

Poetry and devotion
punctuated murmurs
of piety,  
depth perception
virtue unfound;
expectation - access
to suffering;  
disinterested love
present,  
desultory carnage
of rescission,   
absurdity personified;
euphemism
of adieu,
the sound of no sound.

The discarded image
finds no favor,
the salt lost it's savor
unquenched thirst;
desire of
diminished purview,
the saporus stream
deferred;
vision eclipsed;
saturated self
hidden in the text.

Poverty asks the
question,
absence summons
ethereal substance
merged into
the immanent frame;
integrating,
in solitude signifying,
mediating - logos
contested
the humiliation of
the word.

Lyrical enigma,
where did I go?
provisional
personality
scorned,
renouncing nostrums
of the prosaic,
surrenders to the
the realm interior
sovereignty
assumed in
provenience,
native
horizon of the next.

©2008 & 2011 W.S. Warner
Carlo C Gomez Oct 2023
~
First we close our eyes

Then we build a cloud

From the late heavy bombardment

A thermodynamic love, this

Like Chinese lanterns

In weightless ecstasy

Aloft from the surface of our sea of rains

--Marriage chords:

Thatness and thereness

Trust and remembrance

Learning to breathe without lungs

Learning to speak without words

It feels not so much like soaring through

Clouds as being made one with them

~
Alicia Mortlock Apr 2018
We were good.

While you were ****** and I was intoxicated.
I saw you through a Rosé tinted wine glass and felt your eyes caress me through the
Constant,
Concupiscent
THC haze.

We were junkies.

Sybarites on substances,
Addicted to lingered kisses.
****** on lust, wrapped golden.
Eye to eye and skin on skin.
Our altered minds in synchronicity.
Our bodies
pulsing
pulsing
pulsing
To instinct's beat, the almost thereness.
The best bit was always the almost thereness
while high as a kiteness because
After there,
Comes
Here and nowness
And

my mouth is dry
And your lips are tight
And you won’t speak to me.
So I try to ask you if...
But you shut your eyes so you don’t hear me and I know the answer.
You make me hate myself almost as much as you hate me so I know you’ll never love me.
But.
Your lips part in the coldest lie as we lie cold and lonely,
In the shared bed.
Sober and resentful.
La petite mort melancholic.

Me? Do I hate you too?
No!
I just don’t like you any more.
I’m not sure that I ever did.
Inspired by the WhatsApp message I sent to an ex lover telling him I didn’t want to do the ‘friends’ bit.
I sit back
And my heart is warm
Physically
Like the heater in his car.
And I cannot, though it feels so good
I cannot stand it.

If I could pick my infinity
Any moment to live forever
Moments from today would be high on the list
Because nothing turned it bitter
I would most prefer
The last hour in the almost-dark

A moment from that would be beautiful
The soft reek of dog food and dogs themselves
Watching him work with the broad head
Of a Lab under my hand
Would be wonderful.

But I know what I want most.

I want the infinity of those kisses.
His lips softer than I thought
They always are, somehow
His warmth and his
THERENESS
I want that to be for me.
And I know I can't have it, I know
He cannot
Love
Me.

But this was by mutual agreement.
I signed myself over to confusion
As did he, but
I can't
Help but feel
That I long for
More.

I sit
Lean and trembling
And I want any part of my day with him
To be forever.

I love the sweetness of the coffee
Though it was too much
Because of the smile
In his eyes
I love his understanding
Of so much
My wants and my feelings
And I know
I will not find this elsewhere
But it's like
I promised
Not to give my heart and I know
If I did he would not take it.

Though he will hold me, and kiss me and
That
Is enough.
Donall Dempsey Mar 2018
LIFE IS A HORIZONTAL FALL

"I...wouldn't do that...if I...were you!"
smiles the mirror

in a voice
silvered with silence.

"Well. . ." I tell it
"You...are not!"

I retrieve my image
from the back of the mirror.

"The bird sings with its fingers. . ."
I say in an Apollinaire-ish way.

This shuts the mirror up.
It not being au fait with the French poets

But, Death takes on
innumerable forms.

Here, it has no human face.

A tablecloth full of holes
more present by its "not-thereness"

than its...
"there-ness."

Only the table tells
what it is.

It haunts me.

"I am the door to your death!"
it says in its holey voice.

There, a staircase climbs into the air
only to turn and return

to where it began.

"I can connect
nothing with nothing!"

so says the rocking horse
staring me in the eye.

Death shows me a room
I will never ever know

as if I were to live in
an installation

in some future
art gallery.

I run & hide
from myself

in my
self.

Death is waiting for me
in my every cell.

She smiles
like cancer.

As Death kisses me
the world turns

on its axis
&

day
becomes
night.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i have no name for this observation,
but it's there,
unique, like a prized marble bust
of some famous woodpecker...
pani (ms.), pan (mr.),
           pani (ms., is that yours?)
    panie (a number of mademoiselles),
pań (those umbrellas belong
to the mademoiselles) -
             but then there's also
this bilingual Ypres -
          trenches, miles and miles of
trenches...
              seemingly going nowhere...
a case of never being able to write
an onomatopoeia for touching
an atom... but there is:
Hiroshima... a history of a place,
like Chernobyl... and from the simple
bronze age artifact, poetically speaking,
into Heidegger's concept of dasein,
from a simple: knock knock...
into a unfathomable implosion
and never a knock knock...
but what's opposite of when we once met:
at the tower of babylon...
then from fear: we meet again
at Dubai, at the Shard, at Hanoi...
                    at Petronas...
a full circle... all a fake:
for we have congregated once again,
but not by architectural madness
to scale beyond Everest...
   within a grain of sand:
       at the abstract gain of sand:
at the atom... and from fear:
we reignited that ancient vanity...
to tobble trees with toothpicks...
as we have: tried: having toppled
mountains with buildings...
but still the new crux of our congregation,
the atom...
                    a new biblical
séance - these new endeavours are
not new, they are cloaks to hide the true
point of our congregation,
our new found "togetherness",
which is circumstanced as the evolved
version of Heidegger's "thereness"
(dasein).... and yes: apologies for
the ref., as such: either cite someone
and continue toward the artery,
or convene for Hamlet to gamble
over vine or vein...
                                     then toward
something beyond belittling:

mały (small)
      and subsequently: the worded
microscope, a process of endearing
something small, into something doubly
small, and perhaps even of chubby-cheek
physiogomy:

    malutki
                       maciupki
   maluteńki                    
                                  maleczki
                              (so where is the harshness
of synonyms? where is the stomping
        thesaurus rex now?),
                   maluszki (a kindergarten throng),
        the technical word is:
zdrobnienie -
      and if translated into English,
probably reveals more affection
toward the language than all the scientific
juggling away from atoms and into
sub-atomic                   quasi-atoms...
      has English really become
an anaesthetic? a desensitized medium
where the only nutrient is to tell a flimsy
joke as a role for invoking a comforting
suggestion? at least the Germans don't
feel awckward when telling a bad joke...
     the English feel ackward when telling
a good one!
                          nonetheless:
degrees... how small can a word become...
                 and by becoming even smaller
it becomes endearing,
          like a sparrow...
                          man could train
a hawk to sit on its arm and hunt...
but could man ever train a sparrow to sit:
in the palm of his hand?
           well: what a word, and a word
among so many: drobnica:
                              a tu Emeryk -
po roku, co rok, ziarnkiem maku drepta,
a raczej czolga: gniecie kolanem prawej
raz w roku, gniecie kolanem lewej
po raz drugi kolejnego rokue -
       asz po szczyt - jego małej: apokalipsy.

and 3 weeks among the natives will
do that for you...
             the tongue will tangle itself into
skorpion insomniac -
                          if only to rekindle
the labrador naiveness -
                               or from Golgotha
  without its eternal flame, to no other
Olympics...
               and who would have thought:
that there was no corner-stone
that would have been rejected from
the architecture...
        could anyone have predicted,
that two pieces of wood, nailed together
into an ornament of torture,
would shower-down upon this earth
the church, the cathedral, the altar and
the sanctified mastrubation of marble into
the cheek-bones of the ****** mary,
by some Italian drunkard, working on
the papist commision? mightly...
   one horseman be missing....
three horsemen, and one grand joke
riding a donkey...
                death yawns... and subsequently
eats up satan's laugh....
                                   from a crucifix:
st. peter's cathedral!
                   meanwhile in Japan...
origami.
Randall Hasper Dec 2019
Someone once said to me, “It’s the little things that drive you crazy!”

It’s not.

It’s the little things that drive you sane — pills, pats and pets.

All honor for what is small: dollops and gobs and dabs, the edges of pie crusts, chocolate shavings.

Hail micro-sacredness of life, tiny flotsam and mini-jetsam — veins, mists, creeks, fogs.

Is it not life’s micro-detail, womp and woof of wondrous world, that moves us to gratitude?

Drops, pinches, dashes, rain, cinnamon, lotion; fermions, flounces, hadrons, hats, bosons, bacon bits, antiquarks — there is a breath-taking thereness in the smallest things.

And then at last there is the weight and force of slivered, severed time.
The massive power of one, tiny, single “was.”

The mighty microsity of one “will be.”

And the astonishing force of this quickly, quarky, snarky second’s “is.
Donall Dempsey Sep 2019
LIFE IS A HORIZONTAL FALL

"I...wouldn't do that...if I...were you!"
smiles the mirror

in a voice
silvered with silence.

"Well. . ." I tell it
"You...are not!"

I retrieve my image
from the back of the mirror.

"The bird sings with its fingers. . ."
I say in an Apollinaire-ish way.

This shuts the mirror up.
It not being au fait with the French poets

But, Death takes on
innumerable forms.

Here, it has no human face.

A tablecloth full of holes
more present by its "not-thereness"

than its...
"there-ness."

Only the table tells
what it is.

It haunts me.

"I am the door to your death!"
it says in its holey voice.

There, a staircase climbs into the air
only to turn and return

to where it began.

"I can connect
nothing with nothing!"

so says the rocking horse
staring me in the eye.

Death shows me a room
I will never ever know

as if I were to live in
an installation

in some future
art gallery.

I run & hide
from myself

in my
self.

Death is waiting for me
in my every cell.

She smiles
like cancer.

As Death kisses me
the world turns

on its axis
&

day
becomes
night.

— The End —