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Carl Halling Aug 2015
Come away with me
To toil upon the sea,
Come away and see
How sweet sea life can be,
I'll sing Bonnie Dundee
Off the coast of
Old Guernsey, you and me
As toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea.
                                                                    
Help me put that wrecked
Romance away from me,
Help me understand
How it was lost at sea,
It wasn't destined to be,
She belonged to another not me,
What’ll be will be,
For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea.
                                                                    
I can stand it if you're
There with me,
For the solitary life at sea
Is enough to make you
Sea crazy,
With the whales
And gulls for company,
For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea.
                                                                    
We can ponder on
The ocean's mysteries,
I'll unveil a few of
My old sea stories,
You'll see how kind a tar can be,
I promise you'll be safe with me,
When we're out at sea
As toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea.
"Toilers of the Sea" initially existed as a song, written in 2003, and has changed little since having done so, although the third verse was originally a - shorter - middle 8.
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."
Their shadow dims the sunshine of our day,
As they go lumbering across the sky,
Squawking in joy of feeling safe on high,
Beating their heavy wings of owlish gray.
They scare the singing birds of earth away
As, greed-impelled, they circle threateningly,
Watching the toilers with malignant eye,
From their exclusive haven--birds of prey.
They swoop down for the spoil in certain might,
And fasten in our bleeding flesh their claws.
They beat us to surrender weak with fright,
And tugging and tearing without let or pause,
They flap their hideous wings in grim delight,
And stuff our gory hearts into their maws.
ConnectHook Sep 2015
For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ,
    in them that are saved, and in them that perish:
    To the one we are the savour of death unto death;
    and to the other the savour of life unto life.

                                            [II Corinthians 2:15, 16]

I take an ember from the pyre
and consecrate this smoldering fire:
a glowing coal on which to burn
an aromatic thought, and earn
a crown, perhaps… or a stampede:
mad hooves to make a poet bleed.

An ode to the dull-wit herd’s defensors:
self-appointed poetic censors.
Where would we be without the squeal,
their rolling eyes, their bovine zeal?
Quick to enforce what’s orthodox –
(upon their coward souls a pox)
swift to castigate dissent
their peeved opinions swift to vent –
lest people think that poetry
should harbor strength or liberty…
They offer up their condemnation
spiced with righteous indignation:
“Racist, sexist, bigoted too!”
(which means they disagree with you)
Their catch-all battle-cry for trouble:
“INTOLERANT !”  (They are intolerable.)
“It’s narrow-minded, mean-spirited, hateful.”
Such input ought to make us grateful.
Theirs the reactionary faction:
poetic thought-police in action.
To stand opposed, reviled by such
may indicate perhaps, a touch
of true and living inspiration
causing unsympathetic vibration.

If wit in rhyme has touched a nerve
for bold opinion, dissident verve,
then let their frowns be crowns of laurel
rather than further cause for quarrel.
Accusation by the herd
is compliment enough. Preferred
to empty praise for vapid lines
from toilers in depleted mines.

Cows are fattened for the feast.
They have a space to moo at least –
then comes the reckoning at the end.
But a Poet’s curse is to defend
inviolate, his chanted word
against the corn-fed lowing herd.

When they, in turn,  inflict their verse
no vengeance dare we take, nor curse.
But calmly, let us pour upon them
words that build into an anthem
strengthened by scorn, a song of change
to goad their dullness, and derange
their poetaster fantasy
exposed as moral bankruptcy
symptomatic of a dying nation
set against lyrical liberation.

I pray my words may rise to heaven
free of rancor, void of leaven
a fragrant smoke of life to life
ascending God-ward through the strife.
(But let them rot, a charnel breath
to dying souls as death to death.)
https://connecthook.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/incensed/

♪♫♫☺♪♫♪☼☺♫
Mitchell Mar 2012
On the night that was the 2nd of a month not like the last but the same as the others of the time that had come before it, lay nothing but a blank pamphlet written with nothing underneath it; the ink gone dry, the quill white as pearls, an imagination dried up like the desert outside the writer’s window. Gone were the wings of imagined angels, gone was the snow that had melted with Spring, and gone were the mysteries that had once had filled life to the absolute brim. Oh treachery, wicked naked sin – clad in nothing – you smear your own ways on the trials of the women that surround me. For I take your ways and spread them around like a deck of cards; my voice has grown weary and my mind has grown numb to how many you have demolished in your own wicked ways; goodnight to you and I must say a praise to you because you – as I have seen it – have won every single one.

In present form we wake for no one, for we are the eyes and ears of the present past; and how soon we lack to recognize what we never knew we had lost! But praise the naked green hills of dream spent in natural reality! There, on the forefront of challenges never thought imagined, rest the eyes of a man captured by the images of a mere camera! A challenge to the human eye! A man to the machine! A warning for the future!

When the voice becomes nothing but a whisper through the cracks of ****** rocks and the child with eye who doth not wink smiles at the death of their own parents, then, ONLY THEN, does the soft trickle of the tear of the angel clad in nothing but gold and blasphemy, there doth they rest for only the human eye to see who pleases only themselves in the fields with their crops and their small amounts of money and bootleg whiskey.

Empty stomach full of acid that prays on the weak of mind who crosses off the only thing they know is the thing they praise forever! Naked night! Laid wide open on the pine needles of angels wings with velvet for lips and pages of the best of the best for their toilet paper; nigh here I say you are the one I tell only to the one's that I truly love, for the secret in your eye is as fair as the oceans breeze at midnight, where no man can hear or see or even be - unless they wish death upon their physical self - for you are everything that the light encompasses and the snow makes their chill and the ocean doth make their wave, the way you sway with everything, but never asking themselves to obey. If I had quill and ink I would be the mad man and if I had typewriter I would be the noisy man, but since I am nothing but a man on plastic silent key, I am every man, I am you, I am I, I am him and her and she and him and queen and king, we are all the same when it doth get this close, unless the mind is the one true separator.

Where the dust settles and the gold nettles starts to rest on your door step near your bedroom where the boredom smells of dull virginity and lack of serenity, and every single mingle you've been invited to is something you read and cited too, then there you wish you were young with the way you were so tame, and instead of the life you knew becomes apart of you and the game you said was the same you saw the later day, and Oh can't you see that this repetition is just another way to make you go see your own aunt and uncle and Old' lady Jane?

With all the toilers on their tug boats of mismatched love, that swears that they were once the right one, for you and you only when you were high neck in the seas of Brazil, with a naked patch and an eye full of skill, circled with a smile while all the while your mind was away from you, full up with smoke that you never puffed though you already said that it was enough, and in the night you walked from corn stalk to stalk, not looking for that much talk, a place to rest the bottom rock so the mock of the crowd wouldn't keep you down and try to steal your stock.

She then rests willfully beneath God's own light, arched back, her chin pointed up towards His might. There she rests - for eternity or mere second - where she praises not her beauty but the way the moss grows slowly beneath her toes. Naked nettle of the pine tree falls upon her lap, as tears from her fearful face grows in a tight knot; each sky must turn gray, but soon, the gray will lift and life - pleasant for whichever eye wishes to see it so - will soon enough see it. Tangled beauty; uplifting challenge; mystery mother; sounds that sear through even the best seers minds; for where do you imagine man going if they do not know first to go to themselves for your saving? No question asked is ever answered fully; just like the snow is never fully melted - for it turns to water and then enters the rivers, the plants, the sky, and then all of man; man, Oh' dear human! What a responsibility we have...Holding such fragile beauty!

To hold, we do not; we only see what we wish to see, and when the whining knots of notes dressed in systematic "brilliance" tell us that this is us, we praise it, and say that "this", is us and for us and will forever be apart of "us". Clinging child born from a Russian way with a father's like discomfort and boredom; lost like a leaf upon a drained pond; lost like the way of the dog that never had a home; lost like the youth of where I came from; lost like the market workers that hold the same mind as the stock brokers; lost like the poets waiting for their words to mean something with purpose; lost praying in the setting sun that casts a shadow on everyone, not only the ******.

Yes. The face is brilliant tonight, the stars shine for everyone or free, and the movie stars are now just waking up or going to sleep or starting to work as we praise an image no one will forget to remember in a thousand years; naked nothing; naked word for a word, grim satisfaction for a reason to write a novel; stupid mind for a review from no one interesting, a fishing boat full of holes cast out in a sea that no one will swim upon for the waves have already been felt and drunk and swam upon; ideas ***** beneath a chapel steep; a holy trinity of oblivion.

When

One starts to see
Oneself in the sentence

With
Seams of will
Sinews of courage
Muscles of their own original self;

Know

You'll be

Home soon
Work two hard for all the **** that I take
I struggle to much for what I get paid
I sleep on a pill laid up in my room
not wanting the dawn to come into bloom
It's been like this since twenty-four
Can't find or accomplish anything I was looking for
Don't know if there is a god for the tears that have been shed or the suffering bed
Been told i was ugly and better off dead
I am so unhappy with what all that's been rattling in my head
But Nothing's Changable so Stop Wishing they said
I want the life I dreamt of ... Oh?!
They Never said I had to settle for this universe or this curse
But i keep making mistakes, listening to them, and they keep me at my worst
It can be hard with no one to trust but that's a toilers tail in this life full of dust
Shooting for the stars should always be a must
Outlive them in a glory that makes me happy is an absolute must!!
Copyright 2013 © J. Barraza
There's what the World Tells You, and what You Know for Yourself-
There's the Promise of Heaven, and your Own Personal Hell-
Truth is what you believe in, whether your Values be true or false,
it portrays itself on your face-
" My eyes could never show what is not real" ( Red Hot Chili Peppers- "I could have lied")
I will take away your contentment-
but your soul i would not steal-
I love you like my Father-my Mother, My Child-
I love you for your fear, pain, and Humility-
I love you for your proud, instinctual Futility-
Vanity is the falseness which could transform by honest work-
The toilers unspoiled; surrounded by demons who lurk-
My secret ideals, hidden from view-
escape little betrayal; though unseen by you-
Life was hard in those early days
in Swindons rail work shops.
Where conditions were basic and harsh
working long hours in the heat and noise.
Furnaces blazed to create the power
forging the steel needed to mold.
Magmificent living steam engines
made with passion and skill its told.
Workers couldn't watch the clock
wages were only counted in shillings.
The Great Western railway the employer.
new Swindon was born out of the works.
Stone iron and steele covered the land
at the bottom of Kingshill.
Industrial progress increased sharply
where the land once laid still.
Rows  of houses were built for the toilers
and a hospital soon rose from the ground.
The church of St Marks so they could pray
a park to unwind in their limited leisure.
In a community of people helping each other
located by the main London to Bristol line.
Enjoying their annual holidays together
when the steam works looked fine.
Nineteen eighty five the gate shut for good
a retail outlet now where the works stood.

The Foureyed Poet.
This is a part of the history from the town where I was born.
The Foureyed Poet.
Mitchell Mar 2012
On the night that was the 2nd of a month not like the last but the same as the others of the time that had come before it, lay nothing but a blank pamphlet written with nothing underneath it; the ink gone dry, the quill white as pearls, an imagination dried up like the desert outside the writer’s window. Gone were the wings of imagined angels, gone was the snow that had melted with Spring, and gone were the mysteries that had once had filled life to the absolute brim. Oh treachery, wicked naked sin – clad in nothing – you smear your own ways on the trials of the women that surround me. For I take your ways and spread them around like a deck of cards; my voice has grown weary and my mind has grown numb to how many you have demolished in your own wicked ways; goodnight to you and I must say a praise to you because you – as I have seen it – have won every single one.

In present form we wake for no one, for we are the eyes and ears of the present past; and how soon we lack to recognize what we never knew we had lost! But praise the naked green hills of dream spent in natural reality! There, on the forefront of challenges never thought imagined, rest the eyes of a man captured by the images of a mere camera! A challenge to the human eye! A man to the machine! A warning for the future!

When the voice becomes nothing but a whisper through the cracks of ****** rocks and the child with eye who doth not wink smiles at the death of their own parents, then, ONLY THEN, does the soft trickle of the tear of the angel clad in nothing but gold and blasphemy, there doth they rest for only the human eye to see who pleases only themselves in the fields with their crops and their small amounts of money and bootleg whiskey.

Empty stomach full of acid that prays on the weak of mind who crosses off the only thing they know is the thing they praise forever! Naked night! Laid wide open on the pine needles of angels wings with velvet for lips and pages of the best of the best for their toilet paper; nigh here I say you are the one I tell only to the one's that I truly love, for the secret in your eye is as fair as the oceans breeze at midnight, where no man can hear or see or even be - unless they wish death upon their physical self - for you are everything that the light encompasses and the snow makes their chill and the ocean doth make their wave, the way you sway with everything, but never asking themselves to obey. If I had quill and ink I would be the mad man and if I had typewriter I would be the noisy man, but since I am nothing but a man on plastic silent key, I am every man, I am you, I am I, I am him and her and she and him and queen and king, we are all the same when it doth get this close, unless the mind is the one true separator.

Where the dust settles and the gold nettles starts to rest on your door step near your bedroom where the boredom smells of dull virginity and lack of serenity, and every single mingle you've been invited to is something you read and cited too, then there you wish you were young with the way you were so tame, and instead of the life you knew becomes apart of you and the game you said was the same you saw the later day, and Oh can't you see that this repetition is just another way to make you go see your own aunt and uncle and Old' lady Jane?

With all the toilers on their tug boats of mismatched love, that swears that they were once the right one, for you and you only when you were high neck in the seas of Brazil, with a naked patch and an eye full of skill, circled with a smile while all the while your mind was away from you, full up with smoke that you never puffed though you already said that it was enough, and in the night you walked from corn stalk to stalk, not looking for that much talk, a place to rest the bottom rock so the mock of the crowd wouldn't keep you down and try to steal your stock.

She then rests willfully beneath God's own light, arched back, her chin pointed up towards His might. There she rests - for eternity or mere second - where she praises not her beauty but the way the moss grows slowly beneath her toes. Naked nettle of the pine tree falls upon her lap, as tears from her fearful face grows in a tight knot; each sky must turn gray, but soon, the gray will lift and life - pleasant for whichever eye wishes to see it so - will soon enough see it. Tangled beauty; uplifting challenge; mystery mother; sounds that sear through even the best seers minds; for where do you imagine man going if they do not know first to go to themselves for your saving? No question asked is ever answered fully; just like the snow is never fully melted - for it turns to water and then enters the rivers, the plants, the sky, and then all of man; man, Oh' dear human! What a responsibility we have...Holding such fragile beauty!
ConnectHook Apr 2019
If you could only let it drop
we would not need to bear it:
that holy hoity-toity
illiberal burden you announce
from where you wear it.

Would you then be able to live
with your fellow citizens:
fellow toilers in rhyme
buying gluten-free time
at Whole Foods
US; your citizen-neighbors
online cloud of witnesses
Looking at used Subarus
and paying our dues
with you
at the dealership.

Could you only see
through deplorable eyes
and love with a deplorable heart
you would appreciate the art
of the real deal,
loose the seal
of your own apocalypse;
let love reveal
landscapes your pride
has kept hidden for too long.

If you could let your hatred drop,
Slough off the smug and the sneer
If you could stop
signaling to your own
long enough to know REAL diversity, and live
perhaps you’d give
a thought to your own fallibility
lost in a forest of woulds, failing to see
Your neighbor’s Tree of Life. . .
But you are busy perfecting strife,
screaming Timber!
before the axe has even been laid
at the root of your poetry.

If you knew, as the rest of us
how often you have shouted thus
you could understand why
we tend to ignore your warning cry.

Perhaps it could be feasible
to stop blaming
that orange source of all unreasonable
derangement, cease from naming
your neurotic projections
as they are unscrewed
to reveal another inside:
crazed conspiratorial Russian doll
of your own
discredited obsessive offended perpetual alarm.
PROMPT #6: write a poem that emphasizes the power of “if,”
of the woulds and coulds and shoulds of the world.
Hot on the tail of that wily, elusive beast
named ‘inspiration’, I travelled north.

North, where colours mute
and transformative shadow
bends in darklight,
revealing the world as it really is,
as it once was.

Hundreds of years pass,
rolling back time, boiling clouds
rushing over peaks in reverse,
a tiny tornado ***** in on itself,
and hundreds become thousands.

Rain blackens the babies of volcanoes,
engorges forces with greater purpose
and cleanses every shred of vision
from my grasping, desperate mind.

Thousands become millions
And I am stripped of incentive to try.
There is no ruination, here.
No furious nor frantic need
to imagine past lives
in this manicured, managed place.

High-vis’d toilers scuttle on mountainsides
carefully placing and re-placing rocks,
funnelling feet and discovery
on a prescribed and sensible path.

Only the rain
wreathing a secretive misted ribbon,
creeping in glacial cut-throughs,
is possessed of fanciful virtue.

Nothing shatters but the slate
and the landscape does not turn inward
to eat itself
in gnawing, atavistic need.

It says more about me,
than it does of the Lake District
that I would wrench out and offer
my super-heated heart
to see the mountains fall.
I know the Lake District attracts millions of visitors every year who gasp of how beautiful it is, but beauty is subjective, after all, and I simply found it too clean and almost Disney-fied in its smug majesty.

I need desolation, an unsettling sense of melancholia, and to see the broken bones of a place, jutting sadly through the earth, before I proclaim it 'beautiful'.
Elvis okumu Feb 2014
Long do I labor
My back turned to the hot bearing sun.
Long do toil
Until my hardened hands crack and blood begins to run.
And in my labor, my heart turns red with the fires of anger.
At the pointless task set before me.
Why, I question do I place myself in such danger.
When it is all plain to see
That my actions do little to sustain me.
My body though young grows weary of these bleary days.
And my youth drains from me as color from a cloth.
I am left weaker at days end than when I started
And I obtain no recompence To cover the cost of all that I have departed
The weight grows greater by the day
And I fear I grow weaker for the effort.  

And yet at the time of my departure
When i lay down my toils pick
When I go back to the shack of a home
That i wearily built.
And I open the creaking door to a warm lit home.
And inside I realize that I am not alone.
For within the darkness eyes look back upon me
Small delicate hands reach out to embrace my leg
Happy for my presence, for the comfort that I endure to provide

Let it never be said that my heart were made of stone.
For even I in my loss, in my pain, I go to eagerly divide
What little my toils have to offer, what little the world sees fit to condone.
And when I see the smile they all give
That another day, by my effort they may all live.
I try not to weep, for they thought crosses my mind
That if I were to fall to jealosies grip
What wall would stand firm against he horrors of mankind.

What piller would hold the ceiling above them.
What furnace would give them warmth.
What sword and sheild would protect them from evils men
I am undone by my title
Weakened by my bonds
But for them, my pourpose stays vital
And for them do I treck on the toilers grounds
I will bleed so they will not need to
I will fall such that they may rise
And when it is all said and done and I am called on to
Let it not be not be said that my cross I did not bare.
Let it not be said that my dependants  I did not prize
DA Bloomfield Dec 2019
None can defy what there is not
So why and how do you?
As Narcissus reigns, how can you contend?
Contentment with the norm, a shameful folk you are

As the faithless faithful preach
We remain steady,
watching through the distance
silently and inquisitively

So when the time arrives
Haste we do not
They, a pitiful bunch, consider us but shams
"How can the peasants rule after all?"
Oh, their gall

And so the farmers and the toilers march
March under the banner of revolution!
No faith to obstruct, no wealth to envy
'Tis but another evolution

Humanity will once again rule itself
Not succumbing, but becoming
its own god and its own master
Akta Agarwal Apr 2021
The beauty of a woman isn't in the clothes she wear or the figures that she carries or the colour of her face.
The true beauty is reflected by her soul,
it's in the care and love which she gives.
But everyone does have the different perspective of beauty.
Someone who is injured and want love and cares will say, "beauty is kind and gentle like a mother love"
Or someone who is tired will say "beauty is a soft whisperings who speaks in our spirit and give some peace "
Or the watchman who is at night duty will say, "beauty shall rise with the dawn in the face of sun "
Or the toilers will say, "beauty is in the sunset "
but all these things is the need unsatisfied it's not the beauty,
Beauty is not a need it's a feeling of great happiness,
it's an image which you can only see with your eyes closed,
beauty is a garden forever in bloom,
it's a flocks of Angels for ever in flight,
it's a peace of mind
We can feel beauty in a silent waves of water or in the sound of air,
Beauty is eternal.
Beauty is eternal
Robert Gretczko Dec 2016
the mystical mythologies and cantankerous denizens
who color our worlds of chance and charm and breed the sinewy
allure of destinies and courses filled with adroit
memories and admonishments and forgiveness
replete with repentance and giving away of
fortune, fame, youth, and all endeavors of heart and mind
wherein we dwell as toilers of charity with humanities
highest escalations of power, meaning and forthright
values that permeate the ever present alacrity or miasma
that all existences are mere proclivities of the stars long
passed and the hallowed secrets of scrolls and spirit
that weaves the corset strapping all of humanity to
the lustrous, industrious penchant of a secretive smile
from the muse or satyr that has encased, enchanted and
left you no escape from your destiny... thankfully
Sometimes Starr May 2019
Crazy lady with her hair all over the world,
You strangle and cut
Caress and make lovers, warriors
Songwriters and toilers.

I retreated, holding onto one thick strand
Of your crazy, crazy hair.
Oh, I remember how it was
All pent up on myself
Letting locks roll over
With crude musings falling from my blistering head.

I'll unball my selfish body seeking no promise
Because your hair is so fascinating.
It played me like a violin--
Do I hesitate symphonic love
With the thought of a snapping string?

I'll pull my bow across one hair
That passes through the open air
And then another, what a time
To carve out truth with melody.
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themisunderstood Apr 2020
Plutocrats reaping all the money
digging laborers' graves
while toilers work due to necessity
as corporate slaves
The river of Benafim

A long time ago (everything is in the past)
a river ran near the houses its water was calm and fresh
it came from the upland.
Parts of the river runs quite deep
we could swim a little and frolic about.
I had a dog back then
she preferred the shallow parts looking rounded stones
like an egg, she gave them to me.
I thanked her patted her head and put the stones in my bag.
The river is dry now, only an ugly scar in the landscape.
Smallholdings must drive further up to find water.
Bigger farms have small man-lakes that fills with rain,
but it doesn´t rain so much anymore.
By August they too have to go upland for water.
The toilers of crops, tell me it was like this in the fifties
what do I know, I say nothing to keep the peace.

— The End —