"thresher" poems
Retail-hunter gatherers pick
clean processed bones, digging graves
with their shiny teeth, studious in
their reveries as they drone
past worlds dumped in the thresher;
the trucked-in fields of film-wrapped
gore splayed lustily before the managers
wound tight in Machiavellian design.
A shepherd herds his flock of
wreathed iron back to its pen, its
skeletal tangle lit in riotous gold by
swords flung from lambent eyes of
pre-dawn’s shunting chariots
Cages shunt and bobble like tugboats
chugging stoic up swimming pool lanes
of nondescript tile, cheered on by shouting
colours to float through archipelagos of
paper towel and chocolate blocks past
the vegemite diaspora, and the arctic
wastelands cased in sliding glass fields of
perfect steady storms as wraiths baked in halogen
ask silent questions of the silverbeet, while
Lana Del Ray’s voice falls like
nightshade—slutty and serene—coating
shelf stackers in a Piaf sadness as the
shelves reach their arms out for more.
The check out chick hatches
a sense of déjà vu as carrots
and biscuits drone towards her
mind berEFT of any twitching
sense of POSsibility that wised
up and flew this leering coop and
deep in her catalogue of grey folds
something stillborn and waxen is
perched on gleaming steel, reeling
out her guts like cassette tape with jerky
nightmare arms and laughing like a
banker watching ***** films, mornings
dull cerise an invocation through
auto-jaws as she bursts out to warble
with magpies in car park’s climbing fire.
Jul 25, 2013
Jul 25, 2013 at 9:23 PM UTC
It was after we passed Moby’s Dock
that Ebony met her first thresher shark
He was five feet long or so
two feet shark, three feet tail,
and had just been pulled from the surf
to be proudly displayed
by the fisherman who had caught him
Ebony stood transfixed
her every muscle poised
her feathered tail twitched
as she leaned closer to inspect
and then recoiled from this cold-blooded beauty
still dressed in fleetingly iridescent
blues and greens and purples -
As the sun’s fading beams highlighted
the magnificence of this dying shark
I mourned his loss that night.
The noise and tourists
in the Pier’s arcades and bumper cars
did not detract from the peacefulness
of the Pacific in her chaos
for this was August
and they would soon go home
I watched a distant storm at sea
flashing fire against the deepening twilight
I stood, and Ebony,
gazing at the flashes of lightning
My hand felt her softness and warmth
as I stroked the waves of her black fur
relishing the cool wind on my face
listening to the rigging
of the boats resting at anchor off the Pier
Thinking about thresher sharks
Willing them away
from this place with its fishermen
and cold, baited hooks
Cori MacNaughton
13 Sept 2000
Jun 11, 2015
Jun 11, 2015 at 1:11 PM UTC
When will the day bring its pleasure?
When will the night bring its rest?
Reaper and gleaner and thresher
Peer toward the east and the west:--
The Sower He knoweth, and He knoweth best.
Meteors flash forth and expire,
Northern lights kindle and pale;
These are the days of desire,
Of eyes looking upward that fail;
Vanishing days as a finishing tale.
Bows down the crop in its glory
Tenfold, fifty-fold, hundred-fold;
The millet is ripened and hoary,
The wheat ears are ripened to gold:--
Why keep us waiting in dimness and cold?
The Lord of the harvest, He knoweth
Who knoweth the first and the last:
The Sower Who patiently soweth,
He scanneth the present and past:
He saith, "What thou hast, what remaineth, hold fast."
Yet, Lord, o'er Thy toil-wearied weepers
The storm-clouds hang muttering and frown:
On threshers and gleaners and reapers,
O Lord of the harvest, look down;
Oh for the harvest, the shout, and the crown!
"Not so," saith the Lord of the reapers,
The Lord of the first and the last:
"O My toilers, My weary, My weepers,
What ye have, what remaineth, hold fast.
Hide in My heart till the vengeance be past."
3.8k
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
3.4k
Maiden, maiden, maiden, a depilidate mobious minaret –
Holical, Eris begs an atlatl defection, the
Genuis-from-Mars technique – an erathicus lecanopteris.
Suffretex, past-perfection in pastel gloxinia,
Glowingly acidic and shiftingly glossidic, it’s cosmaltry mariala;
Ungual outmoded, holonym singing Aquilar rapax as demiurge.
Demos and Phobos weep, coruscating terrathos, killing riva.
Swell quickly, optic ophidia, lest the ira florena rise –
Rise, maiden, rise optic ophidia, ignore Irredelphine!
Strut the hematacolpa and pace-willow, but fail flow:
Deciduous telechir beckons, demanding autobogotic-hajra.
Piss-venom and picea hovea, eche verri naught echo –
Beta-decay and COBOL error, fandango with teeth
And sing praise for Eucladanic soignè solaris
Sprint quick, maiden-solidago gesparisè, to Misra pourum!
Majerns and hapax, death-knell aloud and encelia,
Enfloranè, haste! Enatic haste tichodrome, flee, anise!
Apios, harken: tryst-sans-thermobic sweeping of thresher-thrown,
Little-low else yet achroma, de-jubilance:
Fall fairly, ayah! So to be so, blanking systemic,
A thousand steps for one death.
Jul 4, 2010
Jul 4, 2010 at 12:25 PM UTC
We are human
Walking traumas
Left untreated
Open wounds
Being leeched
To treat
The wrong fever
It is incongruous
Being inoculated
Against the wrong disease
Vaccinated with apathy
So we don’t feel
The sores that bleed
But you have to laugh
We are mortal
Not merely men
Nor women
More like
All the things
Around and in-between
Searching
Sub-consciously
For peace
Trying to sustain ourselves
While losing
Everyone else
Crying
But you have to laugh
We are little boxes of flesh
Lego people made to fit together
Chipped
Scratched
Lost and found
Each stress tearing at our flesh
Rending our skin
Like a thresher
Building internal and external pressure
Till we need release
****** and or emotional
But you have to laugh
Ready to cry
Sometimes
We are ready to die
Till the brain twitches
Till the broken switches
Leave you in stiches
And you see something strange
Irony or absurdity
Life twisted in its purity
On the verge of exploding
Not really knowing
But something hits
Something fits
Presses the right button
Slapstick
Stupidity
Intellectual curiosity
Sanity flipped on its heels
But you have to laugh
A chortle a choking gasp
The tension breaks
The air whooshes past
You have no control
You have to laugh
The world doesn’t change
Much
The feelings are still there
But with each laugh
It gets easier to bare
It’s a chemical reaction
With endorphins and stuff
But I don’t think you care
It’s just what you needed
To fight off the despair
So I say it again you have to laugh
Feb 28, 2015
Feb 28, 2015 at 3:43 PM UTC
For the Chipmunk in My Yard
By Robert Gibb
I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.
From What the Heart Can Bear by Robert Gibb. Poem copyright ©2009 by Robert Gibb. Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House Press.
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Sep 16, 2016
Sep 16, 2016 at 10:27 AM UTC
To the limits!
And the heaves are harmed, in our lungs
and arms. Tendons flexed on their utmost,
and breath at play in the drowned coast.
To the shores!
And the leaves are left as specks of colour,
from the moors.
and vacations left the hinterlands
of the decayed, breathless holler.
For the greater good we stood as imagined heroes,
Yet for happenstance to lend a chance in our woes,
required a great many motifs
to clamour and climb
In glamourous time
to the raised butte
of a finishing sublime.
Modulate the past and harmonize the future.
Together tapestry'd, akin to patchwork suture.
We weren't raised this way.
To remain forever at play, workhorses neigh.
And sawing brilliance and sawdust eyes,
rapier wit with no equal.
But together a two-parter,
to the shores to see the sea quell.
Wildfire lick like lit flame.
Burn it all down and give me the blame.
It's a carried burden worth the worry.
In mountains some exist as prideful barons.
Barring the loss of their barren,
their smiles turn smirks of heathen carrions.
Which is fine, and the motif licks again.
And the motive is sublime; it's only sin.
Cherish the children and their rue of thresher-born,
Thomas Ligotti and his party of philosophy,
but I'm too caught in histrionics to allow the matter
to matter.
Beyond the kicking feet of the mirthful pitter-patter,
pitted against the coming solstice of time saving;
forward and back and ouroboros we may.
Hold on tight to this singular day.
Ignorant of the causes of our own decay.
Lost during summers covered in spittle and seaspray.
Only to mount a return, a loss,
to the area most unaccepting of the cost.
To the mountaintops!
**** what you see, and reap what you sow.
Push the mountains down into the crow,
and call out for the all the denizens below,
"Here's another landslide." As you call; Heave, and **
Pile them neat and plant a seed,
of a tree that hasn't belonged or had a chirped song
in a placidity.
Aug 5, 2018
Aug 5, 2018 at 4:24 AM UTC
You can still find our pictures
behind gilded frames.
If you take time and the trouble
You can find out our names.
We are fading from memory
as our Families pass on.
We’re the crew of the Thresher,
long time gone down.
Our boat was the pride
of the Atlantic Sub Fleet.
Five years on our station,
patrolling the deep.
We were out on an exercise
Two hundred miles off Cape Cod
When, quite unexpected,
We encountered our God
A critical subsystem failed
the reactor shut down
Without power or steering
The thresher would drown
Our companion ship heard
A roaring like wind.
We were crushed by the pressure
as the Thresher caved in.
Some worker on shore,
in a hurry to lunch,
Had missed a weld on a pipe
-The Inquiry board’s hunch.
You can still see our pictures
behind gilded frames.
If you take time and the trouble
You can find out our names.
We are fading from memory
as our families pass on.
We’re the crew of the Thresher,
long time gone down.
Nov 23, 2011
Nov 23, 2011 at 6:39 PM UTC
Lost in the blue, trying to winnow the way to you:
Swift flies the sickle; the aim be sharp and true;
The thresher dividing the wheat from the dross,
The clearing, it gleams where the golden rows close.
The day may be long but with scarce a complaint
So long as the grain is kept free of all taint.
With long winter shadows returning again,
The laid up fall stores soon turn sour and thin
Again will I dream of toil spent in the sun
I'll count all the hours till winter's undone.
Aug 21, 2010
Aug 21, 2010 at 12:54 AM UTC
curse the summer breeze,
despise the winter's harsh laugh,
this insanity is in every season,
the more I write, this invasive ****
like the strongest tallest bamboo sticking,
drafts me again and again into the army
of just one more, and for every one I release,
a dozen more inventions, incensed interventions,
come asking, pleading, needy whining, but
for themselves only, not for me,
provide,
do not deny
them their own
new perspective,
an original fabulation,
and I remind them
of Balanchine's wit,
"there are only new combinations,"
and my mental thresher~combine,
explodes that numbered field,
of semi~scripted, planted
yet to be finished,
it only grows larger,
but not higher,
perhaps, sadly thinking,
but not better,
while my sighs of tired only grows louder…as my-race against time, only shorter, the rat on the spinning wheel....
nml
Sep 25, 2025
Sep 25, 2025 at 3:29 PM UTC
Hiding behind the walls of the ceremonial preparations,
the zone of the kaka of the Jews, nourishing the school
always as a current, not pregnant. drank of its water to read,
the water can be a pain that plays Aquarius,
the ambiguity
of the refreshments,
when the planet is in a great tumult.
That is, the name dictated by the jellyfish of the giant
is a strong, a strong giant arm of the lever was heard
in a beautiful lake in the gardens, the Almighty,
the smell of smoke and images of the funeral of DNA
when the ghosts are about Thomas Mark Hawley,
a girl from the Western Hills Western Shadow Association,
sat down too late & was married to meet the Carotis laptop,
two sources of Arab cats, the bag is black,
the black television star, the *** of the white house
is part of the red city on a green mother of the Future, very well.
Dead Americans actually die while recording,
playing, losing music to high school teachers.
Third, as an example, the best way is the most beautiful,
it is the yellow of the sky,
the North America of amino acids of the price that in Latin America,
Latin, Africa and in America are the dead eyes of women,
Europe and South America. Italy,
protected groups and the solidity of the cult of the Latin American
reputation as a lonely woman, and a woman,
the definition of a mother, a star of the black,
red, white, summer and summer in summer, Africa, Europe,
South America and Asia Italy
Third day in the United States,
green for the error of the stars that Britain issued to collect the best.
Lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady,
lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, mistress of the Lady,
lady, lady, lady, lady, Love the Dead Summer Lover,
dead son and red dress from the eyes of the London Americans,
green boy from Latin America,
deaths from third to...
And the wall of the notification of the thresher-low
of Kafka of the Jews, have given themselves to feeding the flock,
as long as the pregnant woman
does not play the current, she drinks
from this water of this one, read, play,
water cannot be intelligent for Aquarius:
the ambiguity of soda, as well as for the planet,
a big name, to the dictation of jellyfish;
a strong giant giant glorious arm of the bar
in the garden's powerful lake *** funeral
of hearing ghosts in the DNA of the brand Thomas Hawley,
a girl sat in the Western Hills and Western Shadow
Association later, was married to know a carotid laptop,
a couple of sources of Arab cats and the black bag,
the black TV ad *** house is red, white
is a part of the city, in the field of the mother of the future,
with excellent results. The Americans died on the recording, tap,
their music off the high school teachers.
The third way, for example, the best way is the most beautiful,
the sky is yellow, amino acid price of America,
North America as in Latin America, Africa and Latin America
from the eyes of women, Europe and America from the south.
Latina Italy, the peasant of the group of active and passive powers
of the sect of Latin American countries,
the report to the list of the female alone,
and the woman that is, the definition of being a mother,
a star of the black summer, red, green, and like in the summer,
in the summer, South Africa, Europe, South America and Asia,
and on the third day of Italy by the United States,
Great Britain's error is green, that stars to choose the best.
Lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady,
lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, glory lady Ama died,
and her son died in the Americans
with red-clothed eyes in London, Latin American young, green with third party deaths
Jan 13, 2019
Jan 13, 2019 at 2:19 AM UTC
wrinkles of the plastic
over the mattress, the mountains
their faces blue
and their
shadows
something arousing.
is your head between your heart?
now along the letters
burrow emotions.
i am hearing feedback from the thresher,
the alleys,
for all creed
or age
the one becoming the other.
they together do not wonder
if the lips
if the lips what?
Jul 30, 2016
Jul 30, 2016 at 2:23 AM UTC
Today I am drawn to Picasso's blue period.
looking for beach-side tragedies in grey fog,
seeing backs where I should see faces.
Everything is askew, backwards, sad.
There is no reason, just rhythm, a muffled drumbeat reminder:
You don't belong here.
You were never whole and don't know what that's like.
Where you are marching,
something at the edge pulls you toward
something else
and that's why you chase it.
My father says we are all part of the same hand.
The distance is nothing.
He pulls his fingertips together, pads kissing the tip of the thumb.
Separateness is an illusion, he says.
It can disappear in an instant.
I am the missing finger
the one lost in a thresher or blown off by a misfired gun.
There isn't even bleeding anymore.
I'm the itching ghost where the finger used to be.
What can you do?
Piece together a life, as if it matters.
Put one foot in front of the other.
March, march, march
Until the moment it slips.
Soften the focus, dim the lights
and maybe you're not such a ghost anymore.
It's that other life, the one on the other side,
and all you have to do is fall.
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 4:47 AM UTC
i hesitate to write
let heart alight
in prance and caper
on blood-soaked paper
squeeze blinded sight
as blobs of night
with ink like mud
scribe life-blood
in skit burlesque
of form grotesque
reveal the hidden
from cell of prison
for pure wine
spirit refined
distilled in heart
through pain and smart
the fruit of mind
from Hades mined,
as minerals rare
as crystalized air,
a c e t i f i e s
'fore human eyes
and poison taints the heavy line
that once in crucible of heart and mind
the hurt and harm from day and year
compressed to diamond crystal tear
in duress constant, heat 'n pressure,
as kernel mauled in wheat corn-thresher
reveals the inner pearl-like sphere
hidden from eye and hidden from ear
now spilt in crave for adulation
for recognition beyond one's station
spilt in scrawl of unnatural saga,
as empty song of Frank Sinatra,
in rigid lines that false betray,
as waves that lie to child at play,
hide the inscrutable, the teeming ocean,
the seething froth of quelched emotion
all to oblige the lust for notice,
as garrulous child, as vivid lotus,
in noisome thirst for recognition
besmirch the purest imagination
where is the true, ingenuous art
the beauty apparent in simplistic heart
without the jazz, the scintillating jive,
the quest to 'have', the unending drive
whose joy is fleeting
as seafarers' greeting
culminates in air
or empty scare,
a ghostly behemoth
of ghastly dedolence
thrives in undergrowth
of curious redolence,
flourishes in hollow
of vacant bellow,
lives in the dark
of empty bark
but yet this world of cause 'n effect,
of light and dark, of sun and reflect,
as sun-drenched wine in oaken cask,
must show its wares in apposite mask,
as gibbous moon to eye discerning
speaks of fire forever burning,
of highs and lows in harmony
of contrapuntal melody,
thus pure must sound as beat on drum
and air give voice to heart that's dumb
Jul 14, 2022
Jul 14, 2022 at 2:23 PM UTC