"torpor" poems
Hubby,
Our fractured laugh is irredeemable.
It Is reinforcing the heroic microbes.
to brainstorm some tiny schemes.
with a lack of delicacy and tact
to recur the same cynic nights of devastation,
incorporate the sores into our throats; a full-time personification of tangible intrusion, directly to the full portrait of the Meningitis itself.
Distracting the law of the incubation hours for all strains, overpowering the blood cower, and hovering over our jaded hoarse, sneering at our last appalling psyche-knot
After this creative detention,
I’m invoking another forever torpor inside of our hearts' beats to pose another irrevocable damage that would perpetuate a close depiction of da Vinci’s Last Supper masterpiece.
Honey, Light yourself with a viral-bacterial whirlwind and sink into its bleakness beside my bewitching bind.
I'm still loving you despite all my infections.
amid the urge to enfold your tsunami and swallow its combination
Fortunately, we have survived so many different tragedies together, as a full piece of plague
above Utopia.
- The Poetic Soul
Jul 28, 2023
Jul 28, 2023 at 9:54 PM UTC
Specious speculative salacious spectral season
Transmogrify trapezium traverse torsion treason
Erotica errantry erectile endogenic emblazon
Ghastly gnashy grotesque gristly garrison
Larcenous lecherous lascivious latent lesson
Entelechy ethology exsistentialize extant epsilons
Spurious spry squabble subtle specialization
Transient transitive tour de force teleportation
Encephala enunciate endeavor executant emulation
Garish gaudy gambit glitch granulation
Lurid livid liaison limpid laceration
Extravaganza expletives expeditious equilibration emendation
Sly stodgy surreptitious spatiotemporal solicitor
Taciturn tactile transcendent tertiary torpor
Euphoria eminent equivocal exserted emancipator
Garrulous gustatory gung ** gestational gesticulator
Lyricism lilt liberation lambaste levitator
Escutcheon exergonic epaulet exodus extrapolator
Starkness staunch spectacle stolid stultification
Telepathy tantamount tractive tellurian transmutation
Exonerate euthenics exegesis entourage eradication
Groaty gnarly gruesome gristly gastrulation
Licentious lewd lacunar laconic limitation
Extemporaneous exigency embark embargo extradition
Slinky slick sultry stoical snout
Transubstantiate torturous temerarious tumultuous tout
Eucharist extortion enmity epithet eke out
Gross grit groin grove grout
Lentic leister lotic lothario levity lout
Execrating eventuation evocative evitable excerpt bout
Jan 19, 2016
Jan 19, 2016 at 3:59 PM UTC
Discontent and boredom battle mightily
To see which owns my addled wit.
Rain streaks down the kitchen windows
Making worm-like shadows on the floor.
The need to move nips at my torpor
And reads my dictionary of excuses
As I stare at crumbs on the tablecloth
And wish I had another biscuit.
What’s gone wrong, I can’t make right.
I’m stuck here with no options
And I don’t care which way it goes;
I’m too busy being grumpy.
There’s a cricket hidden in the hallway
Nine days now and it just won’t die.
The muted chirping stops and starts,
Loud enough to be annoying
But not enough to be a mask and hide
The thunder of my disappointment
When clouds and rain refuse to leave
And I am left with only empty musings.
My hands aren’t pretty any more.
They used to pose so gracefully
But time has bruised and twisted them
And they no longer reach out to be seen.
That’s just another loss to ponder:
Take a number - stand in line.
Everything depresses me, and then...
There’s that ************* cricket!
ljm
Mar 12, 2017
Mar 12, 2017 at 3:25 PM UTC
I've fallen
into a torpor pit
swirling blackness
seals my lips
I close my eyes
but all I see is me,
Disengaged
Deranged
there is no reason
for this smothering gray.
I feel your hands
but they don't penetrate,
Your breath is sweet upon my face,
laughter comes from another place,
this silence remains my only respite,
My words are stifled
in my chest,
My poetry shoots blanks
where ever I tread.
Motivation is a thing
of the past,
Desire's gone at last,
Being is all that's
left within my grasp.
Lavender love in
technicolor plays
out on a screen,
Life travels on the
wisps of Monarch wings -
Breathe heavy and
hot,
Breathe light and cold,
My words they freeze
when they hit the snow.
I know dances unfold,
But no dance partner knows
the darkness that's become my
trembling soul.
It is to this enclave
I go
from time to time,
the winds outside
still howl my name,
While demons
bang on the walls
of my shame.
Call it a mood,
Call it a funk,
Call it the blues,
Sometimes
these holes just open,
Inside I go,
No ladder
only a shovel
wouldn't you know.
Doors without keys,
Echoes without sounds,
And all there is
is
the
darkness
I
have constructed
all around.
Jul 7, 2015
Jul 7, 2015 at 11:12 AM UTC
*
some nights
I soothe restlessness
vacating the house
for a brisk walk
until steps get
few and slower
I may stargaze
or understand at once
those leaves shaking
in the dark torpor
I may turn to catch
the light patter of
my shadow born
under the moon
Aug 19, 2016
Aug 19, 2016 at 8:38 AM UTC
Vivid with love, eager for greater beauty
Out of the night we come
Into the corridor, brilliant and warm.
A metal door slides open,
And the lift receives us.
Swiftly, with sharp unswerving flight
The car shoots upward,
And the air, swirling and angry,
Howls like a hundred devils.
Past the maze of trim bronze doors,
Steadily we ascend.
I cling to you
Conscious of the chasm under us,
And a terrible whirring deafens my ears.
The flight is ended.
We pass thru a door leading onto the ledge—
Wind, night and space
Oh terrible height
Why have we sought you?
Oh bitter wind with icy invisible wings
Why do you beat us?
Why would you bear us away?
We look thru the miles of air,
The cold blue miles between us and the city,
Over the edge of eternity we look
On all the lights,
A thousand times more numerous than the stars;
Oh lines and loops of light in unwound chains
That mark for miles and miles
The vast black mazy cobweb of the streets;
Near us clusters and splashes of living gold
That change far off to bluish steel
Where the fragile lights on the Jersey shore
Tremble like drops of wind-stirred dew.
The strident noises of the city
Floating up to us
Are hallowed into whispers.
Ferries cross thru the darkness
Weaving a golden thread into the night,
Their whistles weird shadows of sound.
We feel the millions of humanity beneath us,—
The warm millions, moving under the roofs,
Consumed by their own desires;
Preparing food,
Sobbing alone in a garret,
With burning eyes bending over a needle,
Aimlessly reading the evening paper,
Dancing in the naked light of the café,
Laying out the dead,
Bringing a child to birth—
The sorrow, the torpor, the bitterness, the frail joy
Come up to us
Like a cold fog wrapping us round.
Oh in a hundred years
Not one of these blood-warm bodies
But will be worthless as clay.
The anguish, the torpor, the toil
Will have passed to other millions
Consumed by the same desires.
Ages will come and go,
Darkness will blot the lights
And the tower will be laid on the earth.
The sea will remain
Black and unchanging,
The stars will look down
Brilliant and unconcerned.
Beloved,
Tho’ sorrow, futility, defeat
Surround us,
They cannot bear us down.
Here on the abyss of eternity
Love has crowned us
For a moment
Victors.
1.7k
An occasional gust of wind will lift the translucent white voile curtains and then drop them like a child losing interest. The effect is like flash photography, a burst of sudden sunlight that paints our irises, then quickly fades.
It’s a cool Paris morning. In the low 50s. The windows are open and we forgot to turn on the heat. It’s perfect ‘under the covers’ weather. We’ve succumbed to laziness, refusing to get out of bed. Lazing-in is new enough to us that we’re defining it with a gamut of synonyms.
“Listlessness, torpor,” Peter says, his index finger tracking the slow twirl of the ceiling fan.
“Stupor, slumberous, supineness, ” I updog.
“Ooh! total submissiveness,” Peter said, drawing the last word out like it’s *****
“Every man’s dream,” I confirm.
“Inertia,” he says, triumphant in finding an engineering word.
“Good one,” I compliment. “Lifeless, loafing laggard,” I add.
There’s a knock at the door.
We look at each other guiltily, like we’ve been caught.
“We ordered breakfast last night,” Peter remembers.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you get it,” I suggested.
“Why me?” he whined.
“Because you can wear less and because what if it’s an ax murderer?”
“These people work for your grandmother, she employs ax murderers?”
“It could be a revolution - this is France - it happens.”
There’s another knock.
“Get it!,” I bleated, like a helpless goat.
“Am I expendable?” he asked, as a man might plead to a lynch mob.
“Women and children first,” I remind him.
There’s a third knock.
“Ok,” he says resignedly, as he rises, draws on shorts and heads for the door.
“You’re my hero,” I assure him, before I pull the sheet up over my head in case it IS an ax murderer.
Jun 3, 2023
Jun 3, 2023 at 9:06 AM UTC
i knew you were in torpor.
for the winter air, just like before,
didn’t allow you to soar
nor spread your wings;
or create new beginnings.
but now we’re at an ending—
and i could just remember
how close you were
by the dying ember;
singing a tune or two,
of a melody just for you.
but the sad, cold nights are over,
maybe you have heard.
so now—rejoice and fly higher;
sing as you soar,
my little bird!
Mar 5, 2022
Mar 5, 2022 at 8:19 PM UTC
II
Envy darts her wicked tongue
So slick with black desire
To chase the blood from passion and suffocate
The heart of ire
III
Inertia places her hips
Over barren seas
And drinks the lust to fill
Her
Insatiable greed
IV
Solace rests his blunted fangs
Too late
On torpor mottled skin
And echoes haste through empty halls
Still labyrinthine vessels
I
Curiosity ensnares
Mortality, the wander self
With susurrus pulse and love
Drives caution to the slaughter
Nov 19, 2013
Nov 19, 2013 at 12:29 PM UTC
I'm melting
Icicles crashing
snow fashioned animals
melting from beneath
melting
this ice carousel
******* breaking
cant you hear hear me
I shall hibernate in the eyes of winter. Torpor in the wake of fall.
Crucify the image i made of you
Mount corpus delecti Ensconce The carcass on my ceiling wall
I’m reminded now of that creature when i sleep or i wake
I need this stone of guilt wound around my vertebrae
So it hangs so it hangs so it sways with the weather vane
So it hangs so it hangs
So it slowly brings feelings again
We need this Contrition On the roof of our eyelids
To the struts of our mouth guilt through your body infest
Every nook and cranny
I crush all these blown glass animals. They all try and creep to my brain hiding in the amygdala
Take shards of them
Ingest them
Carve your likeness in my arms
No beat can hit me hard enough
No stone breaking bones could slough
How this carnival creature menagerie
Has destroyed all my self conscious stockpile
Esteem was a book that sold millions of copies and mine burnt up
The firemen. Came and disintegrate the pages in a pile a mass grave of individual triumph
Carousels destroy childhood
Holding hands destroys manhood
Just when you think you can finally stomach the ride
Those fingers course up your arm down your throat and pull out your insides
Mar 18, 2013
Mar 18, 2013 at 1:16 PM UTC
I had to smother this lust and aggression
But I found my enemy was my mode of repression.
Suppressed, depressed I watch them dance around
Regressing, listening to the music’s throbbing sound
I find myself sitting here in a lonely stupor
Disengaged languishing in this torpor
The sound of pouring: a dreadful mass
But I still won’t fail to drain my glass!
Oct 13, 2011
Oct 13, 2011 at 10:13 AM UTC
The wind cried jasmine and “east,”
Past the muddied waters
Grande
And mass graves tortured
Tamaulipas;
Past the rasps, taunts, tortures,
And gasps bereaved,
So much so and so could I.
Set and to sail,
I could feel the tumbleweed
Sting my toes, with each and every
Bitter step; One more sojourn
And seeking the earliest unknown,
A celestial sort of gallant,
Faceless and opposed,
The awkward, “welcome home.”
Come earlier, come Mexico,
She’d scarred my stomach
With love, a newer sort of sear,
Notarized the scar I still carry
When I drown at five past four
With the deafening scent of
Mescal and torpor
Atop my tongue.
It’s upon hot nights,
Like this very one, that
I imagine the Melons of Reynosa,
Succulent, a summer night, with
Stars stained sorrow, strayed me,
Stayed you, and fled I did,
Taken to bamboo, and forever’d,
The newest resident, “away.”
Aug 19, 2015
Aug 19, 2015 at 12:49 PM UTC
Kozarev, thou remindeth me of the other one: thy innocence is just as such authenticity that never decays! Thy simplicity, yes-and oft'times omens of languidity, art indeed genuine! O, thy purity which bears no sin! Twists of daring passion that art so listed in thy eyes-brief and witty, yet calming but never at rest. My another, that disheartening past love back then, in the course of many a year ago-is now but a tiny flickering shadow of battered raindrops that I canst only sing of. Like a handful of worn-out ashes, his fatigue is of no more profoundness to me, and shalt it never findeth any further way to my heart. How he turned me-and my confident passion, down! Abrupt kisses as we had, and ah!-light strokes on my hair-all wert terrific, yes, t'ey wert, in th' first place-but suddenly over! But thou, indolent as thou art-docile and hysterical in some lyrical ways-thy soul is but the forest of an unknown world; what a jolly secret cave! Bathed in crisp mystery, engulfed in shallow pathos; a lump of love, young torpor-yet haunting and irredeemable felicity. Untouched as thou art, like a wordless, newborn infant-whose feet art contently groping in soulless darkness-until thou findeth the smiling light itself! O, be it me-be it me, my dear! Thou art but to me a glimpse of wrathless haze; rolling and dancing about as thou always art-in'a sheepish, childish maze.
Feb 20, 2013
Feb 20, 2013 at 5:30 AM UTC
**I put my guts to my glory so that everyone around me has a safety net thrifted into their detailed story
Where does that leave the seamstress at the end of the day, while sewing up tattered ***** wave and watch that memory fade to yesterday
The vice is the voice inside each borrowed choice, the dice thrown down, it's snake eyes now doing all the suffocating in my glass windowed town
I keep stitching up these frays and splits, and each time I know I'm choosing it. Something given to me so it wouldn't be right not to share, but like clockwork I turn and thread that needle with my hair
None of that matters it's neither here nor there. I'm stuck in torpor relishing your dark poison spears. Don't take your cries to the said man of the Sunday hour, the seamstress is here to patch your holes, frays, and splits, and then leave you for the vultures to devour the rest of your ****
Mar 28, 2013
Mar 28, 2013 at 1:08 PM UTC
The sun falls faster and the colour of the leaves I'm drawn to,
No longer am I longing for that lawn dew.
Gotta fight the cold, feel I need to wrap up warm too
As the season turns it's something that I can't warm to.
I see the squirrel foraging within the leaves,
What lies for him fills me with jealousy,
Because once his work is done,
He gets to sleep and just like the sun
We won't see him for several weeks.
Theres something I, just can't put my finger on,
Theres something that burns within
Me which lingers on,
It's as black as the winter clouds
I stop, think and look around
Has anybody else been veiled with this shroud?
Of course, smiling faces, festivities are near,
I can't face it, wake me when Easter's here,
When the sun goes, so does my soul,
Burns me up like Nich's coal,
Winters drawn and I can't go on.
Maybe it's in my breed, when I start the freeze,
My body starts to cease so I need to sleep
Within the winter leaves,
Just wake me please in 28 weeks,
Jeez!
The pain in my chest, it's all too much,
Had since I was 12 and nothing has changed
Its strange, I go blue and slow,
Before we get the snow,
And when we get that very first light
My body start to excite.
Sun worshipper - no I'm not,
I'm guessing its my body clock
No matter how I try to fight it off,
Its a feeling, I just cannot stop,
On the other hand the feeling can't be topped.
Maybe I'm like the birds, the bears and the lot,
Work hard all season now need this winter break,
To reset my brain, to enable me to carry on,
Just ring me when spring has sprung.
Sep 28, 2018
Sep 28, 2018 at 7:53 AM UTC
I fall gently and surely, like dandelion fluff,
Stuffing my face, lungs, and veins with that junk,
Funky, fat freak, I, want to transform,
Normalcy ***** so I'm packing my trunk.
That shear inevitability though,
Flow of time guarantees multiple falls,
Calls to mind fresh bright blood spilled on snow,
O who would know snow? I'm up to my *****
The joints are beginning to sear and fry
My seasonal torpor is at its peak
Seeking now a warm word, and smiling eyes,
Sigh, for the sun sets, and smothers the meek.
Mar 3, 2015
Mar 3, 2015 at 5:08 AM UTC
This anodyne morning *** of tea,
Is clearing the nebulous morning,
Plans that threatened to topple on me
Have muted much of their scorning.
Still there is reticence to put to the shovel
This mound of pending work-a-day tasks
They clutter my head, my week, and my hovel
Snoozing away days behind farcical masks.
Why do you mock me, oh gods of inaction?
What did I ever do to your ilk?
Did I once neglect to grant satisfaction
Tributes in gold, obeisance or silk?
Secretly though, I plan retribution
For what this torpor is stealing from me.
I'll wield hours of output and contribution
Office deliverables and domesticity.
But oaths and threats deliver poor solace,
Whilst I pontificate, not facing my work
The monster of time still tends to his malice
And here I yet sit, among the tasks that I shirk.
Oct 7, 2013
Oct 7, 2013 at 11:33 AM UTC
he lies sleeping under
the sage green sheet
on his side turned away
from me and my intrusive light
the sheet is gathers about him
like grass upon the mountain range
that peaks at shoulders and hip
at tne bead head, a tangle
of jungle vines curled and intertwined
and the sound of a bear embarking
on a short winters hibernation
at the foot, ten pebbles of varying size
attached to two size eleven boulders
of a sunbrowned material
aged by sun, surf and sand
yet on the underside
a pale pink, reminiscent
of the delicate inside
of the finest seashell
the grass on the upper reaches
of the moutain range, waves
as the wind sighes in and out
of the bear-cave mouth
and the plains of the lower
shift in small earthquake tremors
before settling in somulant torpor
when my man mountain sleeps ,he sleeps
Mar 5, 2018
Mar 5, 2018 at 6:58 AM UTC
There flows between us on the terrace
an underwater light that distorts
the profile of the hills and even your face.
Every gesture of yours, cut from you,
looms on an elusive background; enters without wake,
and vanishes, in the midst of what drowns
every furrow, and closes over your passage:
you here, with me, in this air that descends
to seal
the torpor of boulders.
And I flow
into the power that weighs around me,
into the spell of no longer recognising
anything of myself beyond myself; if I only
raise my arm, I perform the action
otherwise, a crystal is shattered there,
its memory pallid forgotten, and already
the gesture no longer belongs to me;
if I speak, I hear this voice astonished,
descend to its remotest scale,
or die in the unsupportive air.
In such moments that resist to the last
dissolution of day
bewilderment endures: then a gust
rouses the valleys in frenetic
motion, draws from the leaves a ringing
sound that disperses
through fleeting smoke, and first light
outlines the dockyards.
…words
fall weightless between us. I look at you
in the soft reverberation. I do not know
if I know you; I know I was never as divided
from you as now in this late
return. A few moments have consumed
us whole: except two faces, two
strained masks, etched
in a smile.
Eugenio Montale
Aug 28, 2015
Aug 28, 2015 at 4:31 PM UTC
sometimes this is
a barn loft filled with crumpled mad owls
like you punching the side of my car-
when your eyes became more rock,
less ice and i sobbed next to
a woman in a lexus watching me wheeze ash and spit
into my wet hands shaped like
the kuiper belt, the bodies within them
(yours the hardest, the most blue)
the condition of the sheets around six in the evening
there are ways of living
milky, the way i am
not currently living
do i confess that as i sleep alone my spine curls with want
to be other, to be nix, hydra, charon?
the black vulture circling your thighs
the water-drinker crouching
at the crater’s languid salt pool
alternately feeling the desperation of
american canyon road, zip 94503
and the thick clarity of
a non-smoking room in
the southern realm of “here”
this was a case study,
bending under you to observe:
your mouth filled with hot water and spilled out onto your naked chest
as parts of myself went missing
the water ran down into my throat
this isn’t moon linen, it’s polyester
your face television blue, your slick hair
your eyes sitting in your pretty head,
hurtling chunks of ice and rock
stealing me into torpor
we stand on a ledge and look up
the nearest planet is clear
we think of invisible things
not knowing that sometimes we ourselves disappear
like mice under the hotel floorboards
and like the highway, all covered in white.
Apr 7, 2013
Apr 7, 2013 at 8:41 PM UTC
without a vision
people are rarely reminiscent,
of what they have been seeking
and fall into a deep torpor
maybe its this slumber
that makes them realize,
all they wanted was right there
in front of their eyes.
there was a girl, brave and bold
carried in her heart, a potful of gold
searching everywhere, knowing nowhere
where she would get her answer.
with such strong desires held in her soul,
a fire ignited in her heart
as she wandered into the dark,
the rustling of a brook, somewhere in the woods
where she would often sit by and ponder
'Is happiness all I seek?
or is it just one of life's very old tricks
and maybe it reeks?'
with such a heavy heart
she walks alone into the woods,
contemplating whether life is something
that she never really understood.
Jan 8, 2021
Jan 8, 2021 at 6:34 PM UTC
The melting toll of empty hours,- chaste
Among the dry-stone steeples,-stirs
The cobbled rune of foetal wonder.
Forgotten waifs, in teasing, see
The scheming torpor of our ways
Then mingle in the vaults of our regret,
Through half closed eyes the
Unremembered rise on drafts
Of innocence, to spell their names
In Spirit in these scuttled, pin drop Realms.
The utters of an arcane tongue that
Whittled horses from the hill, now merge
Into the chiseled henge of lanterned Citadels.
Jul 14, 2016
Jul 14, 2016 at 7:02 PM UTC
Life ****** out of eyes
Throat burning exquisitely
From the volitional disgorging
Hit a new low
On this very day
Left the door standing ajar
And more demons of consumption trickled in
Swift rhythmic beating
Of a delicate heart
Hand on chest
Out of breath
Sliding into bed
To let it engulf me
I pray to fall into a deep torpor
It has been a rough decade.
Dec 27, 2013
Dec 27, 2013 at 4:20 PM UTC
Existential ache,
Visceral and immediate
Occludes all reason,
A fated Solitude.
The myth of dearth,
In prose retold
Retaining fictive resolve,
Tacitly confessed.
Ineluctable Torpor
Petitions my
Ardent supplications.
Present,
Beckoned in the dulcet
Confluence —
Beauty and affliction
Freshets of silence,
Redressing the fallow
Surface of my soul.
© 2016 W. S. Warner
Jul 31, 2016
Jul 31, 2016 at 9:35 PM UTC
Give my sleep its shifting stupor
as tired eyes now dark delight.
I wish the world goodbye forever
or more at least til morning light.
Bed of dreaming, bed of slumber,
mold me in your folds of white.
And hold me as we lay together
far and falling from all sight.
Slay me torpor, sink me under
leave my bones bereft of fight.
I'm beaten as if by some number
greater than Jehovah's might.
Show consciousness my parting shoulder
as walk I do into the night.
Blinded by the thought that never
ought I know a thought so right.
Nov 3, 2010
Nov 3, 2010 at 3:15 PM UTC