"trawl" poems
you had me when you
skinned my hide—the future
and present of squiggled
intestines tilting with the
rotation of earth.
I am macho—no nighttime.
the summer constellations
throw me a bone and big crunch
as my molars snap with my
jaw.
it takes a year to go around the sun once.
it takes a trawl to fish properly.
it takes a dog to chase the brightest
star.
Sirius.
Jun 15, 2017
Jun 15, 2017 at 11:09 AM UTC
have you the seagulls follow fishing boats
gently on the wind he just gently floats
looking at the nets as he begins glide
looking at the catch and the fish inside
hovering overhead waiting for a snack
waiting for the fisherman to put the small ones back
they fly in there flocks twenty maybe more
following the fishing boats all along the shore
they make lots of noise as they begin to call
following the fishing boats as they begin to trawl.
Apr 24, 2014
Apr 24, 2014 at 2:19 PM UTC
1
in the fish market of religions
and faiths
and suppositions and declarations
and fierce revelations
much of the commerce is done
on the principle:
*Who shouts loudest
and shouts longest
and shouts often-est
gets to empty the most pockets
of bewildered customers*
(You always empty their minds
first)
2
You never lose in this fish market
Even the quiet ones
the ones of mild manners and timid ways
can trawl a good number
of faithful customers
3
You can sell fresh fables
or smelly old tales –
they are all good commerce
4
Of course some slap you
right in the face
with their fish:
That too seems to catch customers…
I think you stun them with one blow
and they remain stunted all their lives
Jan 29, 2012
Jan 29, 2012 at 5:11 AM UTC
What is the thing in us who love to pluck the strings of our imaginations
and try to create resonance with the words that float to the page. To create something from the
nothingness .
We paint our pictures in tortured hues or opaque clutters of expression. At times the palate will surprise even we who mix and stir and strive to find a unique shade or texture. We trawl and dredge and send up pretty balloons in hopes they will return with answers. Well I do
I am odd in that regard. I think all who strive to express , to be heard, to hear to see to grasp and
be ambushed by sudden revaluation. To make sense of it all. to look deep within and waft on the wind at once are kin.
What is it for you?
To wash away pain.
To turn your face to the pelting rain and feel the value of your existence.
What is it for you?
To say the things your mouth cannot express, untie your fettered tongue.
Do you dream in color.
Does your poets voice speak to you in hushed tranquil tones
or rumble and stutter or whisper softly from dank and dusty places.
What is it for You.
A way out of your suppression if not expression.
The rubbing of a soothing salve over the aches and pains endured.
The betrayal acknowledged. The Key finding purchase in the rusted lock. The key falling from your hands in the pitch dark once again as you wake up and find yet another door to open.
What is it for you. For me it is validation that my mind is unique as the neurons fire and
speak a language spoken not by many. We are seekers. You and I.
I do not fit the profile. I am rough and hard my facade has bonded with my skin. But look within. I am bookish and brutal.Loving and glacial. Witty but slow. Volatile but pensive . A walking talking conundrum. I do it just to **** withum.
Why do you love poetry.
What leaks out of you mind.
What goes in.
What is it ?
.
Oct 16, 2012
Oct 16, 2012 at 2:40 AM UTC
The Lung.
The broken bone branches hang heavy off knuckled tree. As cold and uninviting as wrapped meat in cellophane prison cells and those sweating milk bottles left on doorsteps. Women cry with the blackbirds as day breaks, rousing their reluctant nests.
As the shadows trawl in from chicken farms and slaughterhouses, across the squalid estates and past a debt collectors party. A ***** drinks his soot like coffee and waits for another years tide to retreat. Holding pith less ambitions and unmentionable qualifications, stewardess pass, uniformed thoughts and averting faces..
The rusty playgrounds sink into the fermenting wood chips, and a plastic bag runs through the scene; only to commit suicide in the oil ribbon canal. The chemical clouds thicken into a duvet of sky whilst arrows of a natural sun run home with tears of fear on their hot faces.
Down here the street lights flicker, and the patched uniforms drape off children sick with the flu that hit the school like a plague. Herding like cattle into the classrooms, to learn about the natural world
that is most unearthly to there reason.
Lunch bells ring from factories and the sky has drained to a sick -off white. The chip shop sells butties with no sauce nor bun, which machine like men guzzle and slurp.
The car parks lay stagnant in the distance and pigeons too fat to fly lay droppings on the bronze statue of a crying hero. As the roaring stops from the factories and high visibility coats are hung, the sky bruises and the men fill the pubs, until wives with children hung on washing lines drag there sweat soaked frames to the table, only to indulge them in a row.
Night creeps in, bringing with it the hooded figures that flutter along the streets. Music plays from a vacant building and seems to brighten the night.
A silhouette is seen standing on the edge, watching the busses bellow run like migrating snails, filled with the elderly and too young.
Cigarettes infest the streets creating a carpet of ash and litter. The city survives, remaining grey, never blinking, never heard.
Sep 20, 2012
Sep 20, 2012 at 6:20 AM UTC
Therapy.
You've made me a walking travesty.
Always trying to trawl me treacherous.
My mind treadling to trench my trifling thoughts.
Only trickling off from the tip of my tongue,
As you're trolling my troublous trigger,
You're no friend to me.
You're only therapy.
Nov 18, 2014
Nov 18, 2014 at 2:27 AM UTC
Barry’s dead.
I saw you dying weeks ago;
An oyster shell turned empty can,
Scrumpled up and finished
By the past’s magnet attraction
In your shakey hands.
It’s just a habit now and you can hardly kick yourself.
Buckets of Grolsch:
My swash-buckling hero
Turned slosh-slurping zero once again
And shiny surfaces
Never suited you.
Scrub away at that black demon matter
With the sole white spirit
Your genius affords. A shattered socialist
Posy primrose ******
That’s the story of your life –
All
most
man.
Now beneath the cowslips
And the heifer’s hooves,
Your saintly-thorny words without a roof:
But who will speak for you?
And trawl the depths
As you once did in youth?
Prizing open oysters…
I hope that where you are
Your silence brings relief.
I hope that where you are
You smell the borage breeze.
I hope that where you are
There’s ox-cheek for tea
And your carbonated past
Is carbonating in mute peace.
Tonight the argent stars
Are dulled in disbelief
Tonight the slate that you’ve carved
Is the hardest you will teach.
Tonight the tumblestones
Are falling down in grief:
For Barry’s gone to rediscover Pearl
And the beauty of her peace.
Feb 22, 2011
Feb 22, 2011 at 4:40 AM UTC
*Is out there on our own lovely streets
In the souls of those the world mistreats
In the roughing waves threatening to wash us all
In the despondence of the **** victim's unanswered call
It's that long journey without a clear destination
It's the desperate cries in the broken heart of every nation
The heartbreak caused with no intention
It's the one without an answer,I mean the question
War is that desperate pregnant teenager attempting abortion
It's the *** slave in a foreign country up for auction
It's the slum child fighting with the bursting river banks
It's in the mind of the soldiers riding tanks
Doing what they can to rise up the ranks
And evade taking more innocent lives in mega chunks
It's the hopeless immigrants drowning on the mediteranean
It's the nuclear threatened Iraqees and Iranians
It's a *** hole forcing the driver to swerve and lose control
It's the tears of the fishermen catching nothing for days in their trawl
It's the worries in that littl'un fearing darkness
The priest's daily prayer,battling temptation, human weakness
War is another name for the famine eating the tribes in the arid north
It's the thought of a refugee mother whose child's got stunted growth
It isn't the opposite but the total absence of peace
It's a robber who loots everything, including bliss
It's a nightmare to the leader stuck in a seat
And the zealous opposition unaware of his inner heat
It's a hustle by the team which can't admit defeat
It's the struggle of an accident victim trying to regain his feet
It's in the believer's hope to see Jesus return tomorrow
Right before the entire globe sinks in ****** sorrow
It's the worries of a father who's spent his entire adult life unemployed
The uncertainty for a recruit in a war zone,just deployed
War is the puzzled gambler pondering suicide when he loses the little he borrows
It's the pastor wondering wether or not to dive in and save the drowning morals
War is that person perturbed, wondering why the hell he was created
War is all the choices you made and regretted
War is a three letter word,with a long meaning
Which some say is the only reason the globe is spinning*
Jun 5, 2015
Jun 5, 2015 at 12:22 PM UTC
You are nothing short of iridescent.
Like the pearls the divers pluck
From the depths of the bay and
Crack open to reveal;
When set into gold and silver, they
Glisten.
As do you.
But the fishermen trawl the very same bay
With their boats and their nets,
And you are iridescent as
The milky smooth insides
Of the clams they catch—
Iridescent as the shells that they,
Hungering,
**** the meat from and
Throw back into the sea.
Apr 9, 2013
Apr 9, 2013 at 12:29 AM UTC
The words don't come as easy anymore,
As if the very act of utterance
Has now become a chore.
Words that once slithered
From my mind and from my tongue,
Seem wrapped in insignificance.
Like the vacuous distance
Twixt our planet and our Sun.
Oh yes,
There are enough faint marks
That we can trace constellations
In the quiet of the dark.
Finding meaning that was never there,
Seduced by mediocrity
With just a pinch of natural flair.
I feel the muse has died,
The last ember of a humble
Fire,
Now fuel deprived.
So I shall trawl through the
Musings of others.
To find a spark and kindle
My lovers.
The spoken and written word,
Perhaps entwined
With a musical accord.
Perchance then? If my ego may be silent
Perhaps I could take pen again
Assault the salient!
Then if determinism agrees
I may once more feel the words
Flow through me like the breeze.
I will ink my conscience once more.
Till my mind is left adrift,
Treading water to
Distant shores.
Oct 26, 2013
Oct 26, 2013 at 7:24 PM UTC
Another day another dollar
Don the thrown on clothes
That worn over washed feel
A face soaped look to begin the start of another start
Another trawl into the big wide world
Yet so held in as my uniform
Becomes my sin
Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life
My dollar buys the tax mans lunch
His change may feed my family brunch
Pay the bills on borrowed time
What a life my common crimes
Twist the fate that follows me
The uniform of life and
I'm the tree
Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life
Holiday beaches from a magazine
Feel the heat and dream the dream
Forget the island sun my son
Paradise park be only for the few
Paradise just aint my glue
Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life
Uniform of life work your magic wand
Take me to another place
Work me to the bone
Feed my luck to the workers book
It's written till the end
Gone my map all washed from the tears of my soul
The chapters complete yet
Empty inside
Nov 20, 2012
Nov 20, 2012 at 5:11 PM UTC
I'll trawl the squalor, if you like,
stick blinkers on to hide the fact
that my life has so far been a charmed one.
I can conjure a face,
small, forgotten
black against a duststorm sky -
There's your poverty for you,
And yes, I was there
And sure, I smelt the days old sweat
and can remember hunger as a curiosity
The boy's name is known to me
but I won't share it
Because he was real
but I missed his reality
and I have no right to it.
***** hands notwithstanding
I was just a tourist,
a passing mote of dust
in his drought-stricken life.
I was there for me
collecting picturesque snapshots
which would inform my return
to an undeserved comfort
(but only slightly).
To say he was important,
totemic, symbolic,
is false.
I remember him, that's all -
My boys,
my clean, happy,
here-now boys
eclipse that shadow in every respect.
An honourable assertion
only in that it is true;
and a brief regret that I made no contact
flickers out before
a blaze of contentment,
a bedrock of good fortune
with little to offer
the vicarious seeker
of hard-won wisdom.
Dec 27, 2011
Dec 27, 2011 at 4:31 PM UTC
Stolen the shawl from the shoulders of night
Slipping away with the dawn
Folding down the duvet, the new day
Stretching glossy nailed sentinels to
Rub the sleep from lashes of tell tale
Dreams that took mundanity into
Fine wine and rich red realms
Fresh out of tactics to ring in favours
The sheets depart my limbs and
Water connects skin on skin
Fluffy spurs washed away clean
Spun out of secret doors into the unknown
Shoving me, nudging me, reminding me
I’m heading to reality
Tipping my head toward the warm air
The continuing whirring of its mechanism
Vibrates my follicles and lends me in the
Direction of humanity, the peacock
Plume doused and preened into shape
I begin the trawl of closet colour
Of mood matching, of image portrayal
Set for the external clock to tick
I trust myself that wheels upon tarmac
Will hold me to my destination
Releasing me safe and sound to the
Jaws of business, its never ending
Narcissism purchasing my daily bread
Released from the bind **** of
Incongruence, sheltering under the
Safe shell of my emerging reality
It comforts my bones, grazing me with
Honesty and genuine intuition that
Hope isn’t baron or depleted
Grandeur awaits me and I am true
To my facing stare.....reflecting
Jul 20, 2012
Jul 20, 2012 at 6:15 PM UTC
They crawl along the streets like zombies:
Heads cowed over Androids and iPhones.
Busily pressing buttons,
Risking life and limb
As they cross the road.
It reminds me of “Star Trek Next Generation”
When young Wesley and the rest
Were hypnotised
By some alien “game”.
Sometimes they sit in huddles,
Messaging one another
Or playing, yes,
An addictive game.
All lost in a dream world
On Facebook or Twitter-Chat Whatever.
Soon we will no longer “fall out” with anyone:
We will “Unfriend” or “Unfollow” them.
I still prefer my laptop.
But how long before I too
Succumb to this addiction?
How long before my “Facebook Morning Splurge”
Becomes a day-long trawl?
Before I know it I will be like the others:
Lost in panic –
Frantic
Because I forgot to bring
My mobile.
Paul Butters
© PB 25\12\2017.
Dec 28, 2017
Dec 28, 2017 at 6:06 AM UTC
So many of us
beaten, heart-wrung care
we share
our hopelessness
our impotent despair
our seismic horror
mounting terror
as nations pile mistake
on fatal error
How do we act
as casualties mount
how do we hold our blighted leaders
to account
We trawl through history
and weakly portion blame
make claim on pointless claim
to show that we began this game
That this was us, and that was them
but all this does
is set the process off again
And little comfort,
stating that we cared
in lieu of just confessing
we are scared
Scared that in the loneliness of night
a sneaking voice
might say this choice was right
that self-defense
is justified
that editors and leaders
can't have lied
that evil really stalks us,
really walks our streets
plots our defeat, prepares
to hoist black flags
into the air.
It does, and always has.
The name may change
but nothing of this crisis
is so strange.
Cry anarchy, revolt
pledge blood to the republic
**** the vote
don masks and balaclavas,
meet in shade
believe this is the place
where deals are made
And soon, to fan eternal conflagration
someone will bring a god
to the equation,
proclaim a nation,
proclaim the right of judgement,
who should live
and who should die
And in the dancing flames,
raise eyes
to thank the empty,
mindless sky.
But what is worst,
among the frantic, wretched cries
is that our comfort
lets us view it with surprise
our safety, compromised
exposes this malignant myeloma -
we feel that we
should never die.
We should not suffer,
should exist
in numb, eternal safety,
empty bliss
no cold, no hunger,
conflict frowned upon
All struggle gone -
we should go on
and on
and on.
But breathe.
Feel echoes, ripples, tremors -
close frightened eyes
and just remember -
this is the road that we are always on
We found it on arrival,
leave it when we're gone
but our survival
is unhindered.
While fools break splinters
from its rugged bones,
we still lay bigger, stronger stones.
This is the world.
Love fiercely, dare
to shout in anger,
weep in care, do all you can
to help your fellow woman,
fellow man
to shatter walls, to build
together, better, wiser things
Prepare
to sacrifice, to will a world as one
and know that evil done
can be undone
Do not succumb
to cold, immobile fear
but shout, in righteous fury,
"We are here!"
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 6:17 AM UTC
I made notes of docking posts
pointing out to murky reflections
of tourists that didn’t have time
for a souvenir mug or a picture
with a black trumpeter content with his brass,
and nothing else, blowing life into the seagull
sky, making the clouds pop and drop spray-
mist jazz, which accompanied his trumpet
with a gentle washboard scrape.
He beat his heel to the thousand pin-drops
of passerby earrings, crab sweatpant draw-
strings, and trawl nets dissolving into the sea.
Baltimore filled the margins
of a travel notebook alongside
pencil sketches of the Aquarium,
Prufrockian split claws
wrapped in algae bandages,
that homeless man weakly thumbing
through a pocket bible, the 32
cents wearing sea salt jackets,
and my cold girlfriend pulling on patron
sweaters in an art museum closet.
But it’s all a gimmick.
It’s $22 crab cakes
and paint-splatter-printed
sweatshirts that say New York
or D.C. or *Everything on a Disposable
Kodak Camera.*
Tired of the idea, I threw the page
over the edge, hoping to drown
it in green, but I never heard it hit
the water. I braced myself on a life
ring rack, leaned over,
and watched it settle into a natural
barge of dead leaves and orange peels
while sea foam circled
it like a bed skirt that’s only
noticed for the few seconds spent stripping
down before going to sleep
just to wake up to rain on the Royal Sonesta,
kids racing down the hall, the obligatory
alarm clock,
and the black trumpeter’s groove
four floors down.
Apr 21, 2015
Apr 21, 2015 at 3:29 PM UTC
It's all slipping through me again
Remind me why I exist
We trawl the seas like fingers
Remind me
God pushed his hands through the earth
And shaped us out of blood
I saw it
I saw it all
We turned the sea
And it pattered for half a century
Crackling like pig flesh
Did we burn it?
Peel it back
Come on, peel it back!
What are you, scared?
What are you?
Mar 28, 2016
Mar 28, 2016 at 3:28 AM UTC
When I was young I wrote about
How therapy was always trying to trawl me treacherous
With only having gone a handful of times as a child.
Today therapy is a friend to me,
Only trying to tear my troubles from my treacherous hands
To help me understand where they come from
And where I stand.
Oct 19, 2023
Oct 19, 2023 at 10:59 PM UTC
I have no strength when I see this woman
The way her finger brushes her lips,
The way she lowers it among the pages
Scattering their words within the grass
Like a swan its wings in the red and soft sun.
Don’t rush talking to her in birds’ tongue, I order myself
Nor sing to her a child’s prayer from the chestnut leave
Thus, in a gallop, over sheets of paper, the knight stretches his arm rigidly,
A snare to the innocent sparrow
With a frail finger she oppresses the lips of this poem,
And they are enjoying the whipping of the purple hair
Which she threw, like the fisherman his trawl, ahead of the gallop.
I have no strength since she raised her eyes,
And their spear was released through my ribs
Towards the thicket of the lake,
Where the mud swallows the lines of a patched up boat.
(on the shore, the fish are throwing themselves, burned by this light and there they lay)
oh happy ones, for you found your pursuit in her path!
Alas myself, for there’s no strength in me to eat and to drink
When I see this woman and words are falling out of my mouth
Like some crumbs for the stray dogs
Like some flowers thrown on the water
Oct 2, 2010
Oct 2, 2010 at 9:57 AM UTC
Lures, freshly baited, trawl each of the Seven seas, for fish aplenty.
Dec 8, 2012
Dec 8, 2012 at 1:26 PM UTC
Tomorrow is your birthday, her birthday, his birthday.
It's thinning this suit of reddened skin. Boy-nails are never
As sharp as they need to be. Toxins don't work fast enough either.
5:00a.m. stop for premium unleaded just outside of Big Sur. Once you were in the devil in a Jaguar, leather biker jacket and a crown of gold.
Mused to be. The insides of the stomach must have claw marks by now.
Panting, misstepping, riddled with whys and whens.
Time is critical, yellow or black nail polish; signature colors. May minutes be returned and reused where aching poison ails but does not deliver. Tomorrow is your birthday and maybe you'll allow for the cleaning of ***** from your hair and the body crooked, lingering over your night-terrors with cool and wet cloths.
This is some tremendous furnace of unrecoverable agony. There is no use chasing the wheat. Into a bunker or hurrying the footsteps into the sea. Ghosts of humans trawl the flesh entombed in permanent suffering. And the men and women glue themselves to its familiarity and melancholy.
So many great hopes were **** into one hand and ******* into a folded over pillow. We are too old to have Fraggles living in our ears.
May my chest explode before tomorrow unless you would unvex the curse who devours language and desire and all these hours.
Nov 28, 2015
Nov 28, 2015 at 11:00 AM UTC
Once a voyager of sky and sea
On Earth I left the vast majority
Of those who chose the illusion of security
Over the idea of living truly free
I have abandoned all earthly possessions
The idea of an unconventional view is my only concession
I leave behind all of my past
To voyage across a universe so vast
I know it is unlikely
That I will find the other half of me
So for now, content with myself I'll be
As I trawl this endless sea of stars
I am battle-worn and covered in scars
Speed past assaults from the asteroid belt
Which lies beyond the red planet, Mars
At the universe's cold black mercy,
It knows of my tender vulnerability
I man this spacecraft all alone
To find another heart to call my home
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017 at 12:41 PM UTC