"tributaries" poems
Streams of colour
In constant motion
showing shades of beauty hidden
Powered by the wind
As it caresses the river of scent
Gently, softly, lovingly
And moves through the rows
Never stopping, always moving
Following the wind
Lavender tributaries
in a Sensual scented sea of colour
Never ending.
Mar 8, 2013
Mar 8, 2013 at 11:34 AM UTC
Everything in quotations marks and italics was written by TS Eliot.
eyes knowing glossy men,
sheer women, creatures,
not all artists, but artists,
always thus,
centrifugal, simple
from their core,
emanate, resonate,
expand the exterior
with interior precision sculpting
to the interior delve,
via brush or limb,
pen or music,
the exposition, the exploration,
the reconstruction of composing
one's self, creation and destruction
of your own myths
movement of arms and legs,
sparseness of simplicity
subsidiaries of centricity,
tributaries of complexity,
oriented to their locality
the simple purpose of inhalation,
to exhale, after transformation,
the calculus of thought into emotion:
*"the tongues of flame are in-folded
into the crowned knot of fire and
the fire and rose are one"*
the dancers hear the music:
*"so deeply that it is not heard at all,
but you are the music
while the music lasts."*
**”Quick now, here, now always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well"**
Mar 10, 2014
Mar 10, 2014 at 10:42 PM UTC
Before his teen age
turns the pages he dies
a life through years
of neglect for the frail
bony frame drowsy feet
dark sunken eyes
wandering the street
craving white pure
pleasures and dreams
sores moon crater arms
tributaries of ****
star marks parched skin
dry bloodied screams
of glorious pills injecting
intoxicated stuffs
forbidden fruits
trappings of worldly heaven
addictive octane ecstasy
tiger terminator of
a young man flourishing
now depleted sad
youth corrupted by a love
pursued but lost
eyes vacant trailed tears
pleading please forgive
me mom and dad
Mar 21, 2018
Mar 21, 2018 at 8:53 PM UTC
A day recedes,
I'll chase down one more night
A lamed and hobbling Spring
tries to outrun the tide
of all the misspent months
and all this wasted time
The northern breeze sings cold,
it sighs through tattered topsails
sea of questions waits.
schools of unanswered voicemails
My footfalls share the sidewalks,
steady,
sure. Still young but glimpsing old and stumbling
Walking outside
soaked lungs need some new air
I'm nervous and shaking
fold the map, don a blank stare
my days wearing on
fill 'em up with a fool's words
I'm saltwashed, stuck and
peeling paint off my memory
for now.
A day's been seized--
a metered length of life
Can't place a price on Fall
and can't outrun the tide
of these layered seasons
as his time unwinds
The eastern wind comes hard
and shreds through mended mainsails
river of answers dried
so ask the waving cattails.
His footfalls know the sidewalks
leaking
down sidestreets' asphalt tributaries
Walking around
A hitch in his slow gait
A ghost of our town
shuffles on with a fixed gaze,
his days playing out,
As he strides down the sidewalks
his life plays a film,
flashing bright on glazed eyeballs
And I'm southbound,
4 p.m. driving Orange Street
completely drowned--
--swore I woke up in Gimli,
Manitoba January
seared into my youthful memories
I'm freezerburnt
Autumn heat, don't leave me
I'll hold your hair if you're feeling sickly,
then drive back home.
Autumn heat, don't leave me now.
...Autumn heat, don't leave me now.
May 12, 2014
May 12, 2014 at 11:51 AM UTC
Against the saturated
Horizon of dawn,
Loitering in the dark timbre
Of emerging consciousness -
Dissipating somnolence
And preemptive despair,
Tacitly adumbrate the
Yawning abyss.
Chastened by the cunning and
Lubricious nihilism,
Igniting fermented provocations,
Silent subterfuge; death,
By mirth - the inane;
Lament of the mundane.
Fallow paradigms, accretions of
The last gasp -
Evaporating empty liturgies
Of suspicion;
Charity and equanimity -
Lost in confinement,
Triumphant avarice bearing
Descendants
Of intransigence;
Wielding imperious
Schemes of orthodoxy.
Pollard fragments of
Silken tapestry,
Miasma draped depression
Abridging;
Conversely,
Permuted flurries of anxiety
Dislodge
The vestiges of meaning
That abide
In brazen equivocation.
Tributaries of dogma reach
Their confluence,
Watershed moment,
Numinous effusion
Streams naked epiphany,
The precarious vision -
A gesture of providence,
Certainty and contingency;
Gratuitously derivative, life
Equals choice.
Verdant branches of intention;
And opportunity the vine,
Live forward -
The pen, my voice,
Piquant conduit pouring,
Exuberant wine.
Footprints found in givenness
Underline,
Penumbrae of my soul;
Mirrored silhouettes,
Thoughts and words engender;
And in verse adorn
Fecund soil, Line after line,
The cosmos altered,
Continuum of permanence -
Artist’s art articulating
Essence of my imagination,
I proliferate, I design
Phrases unique,
Participation mystique.
Words creating world,
The apparatus of infinity
Heidegger, ontologically precise,
Language -
The house of Being,
Ineffable, Promethean
Literary devise -
Envisioning possibility,
And abundance to allow,
I occur
Inhabit
Manifest
Future phenomena
Experienced as now.
©2008 & ©2011 W.S. Warner
Sep 16, 2011
Sep 16, 2011 at 2:02 PM UTC
Write these words on empty stomach
unasked, I spilled my guts.
You said, "My life's a joke
and every choice a punchline."
You just wrote my prologue and the afterword
is dangling off my lips, now;
on the tips of tongues.
Steel night skies thrum and echo
when the bells are struck.
Goose Creek pays tribute to the wide Missouri.
I can't offer much--
clenched hands and mouth clamped shut.
Fling some words at empty wall space
from corners, room warms up
My reddened face obscured
behind two frost-fogged lenses
Guess I penned the punchline. Now my line-worn face
is crinkled up and frozen didn't get the joke
Tried to make a map out of the
words we spoke.
These streams pay tribute to a sea of memories
Now you don't say much
"Good luck," and "Stay in touch."
Clenched hands and mouth clamped shut.
Apr 12, 2013
Apr 12, 2013 at 7:09 PM UTC
#The Battleground Beneath Her Skin
(A Physiology of Light and War)
Before it reaches her;
even before her breath draws it in,
I break myself down..
not as surrender,
but as choice.
Each particle stripped bare,
each atom exhaled
made clean by the reckoning
of my own dark,
infused with the stubborn
weight of light
earned, not borrowed.
Within the responsibility of what
leaves me,
I enter the quiet union—
the kneeling choice
to align with the hand of God,
to let even my smallest fragments
carry His capacity to heal.
Every airborne particle,
accountable,
deliberate,
refined enough
to cross the distance,
to enter her
without deception.
Beneath her skin,
a war unfolds.
It is not loud,
not made of swords,
but of smaller things..
things unseen by eyes,
but never missed by the marrow,
the blood,
the quiet trembling of cells
that have known both wound
and wonder.
Light and dark..
not in theory,
but in matter
thread themselves through every atom,
every strand of her being.
Not metaphor,
but measurable:
*the way shadows lean into the soft chambers of her lungs,
the way light, when chosen,
can rewrite the blueprints etched into the bloodstream.*
This is the battleground..
her body,
her breath,
her most involuntary places.
Where no poetry of
seductive manipulation..
no whispered counterfeit
can cover what is real.
Only substance speaks here.
Only intent.
Only what survives the fire of accountability
earns the right to stay.
The particles come;
stripped down,
atomized,
refined.. not by accident,
but by the slow, steady grind
of volition.
They enter her;
through breath,
through pores..
*through the quiet, relentless openness
that even fear cannot close completely.*
And inside--
the war begins.
.. .. .. ..
Mitochondria spark—
tiny engines deciding
what stays,
what burns away.
Capillaries widen,
rivers branching through her like
tributaries
willing to carry
what is real,
what is earned,
what is Light.
The counterfeit falters here.
Pretty words mean nothing
to oxygen.
False portraits
dissolve beneath the chemistry of truth.
The cells remember;
they choose.
And as the Light infuses
the quietest corners of her..
her thighs, her hips,
the soft stretch of her waist;
there is no seduction,
no trickery.
Only the hard-won intimacy
of substance made pure.
Not by the blending of oils,
not by the friction of skin,
but by the deeper,
unseen alchemy
of what enters,
what lingers,
what refuses to bow
to darkness.
The battleground is hers now.
And though the shadows will not
yield easily,
they cannot claim her;
not where light
has been chosen,
earned,
metabolized.
The war is not over,
but benea.th her skin,
within her blood,
*Light has begun
to rise.*
#
Jun 28, 2025
Jun 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM UTC
Drapes in brown &
bubblegum shades.
4 the tongue,
particular taste.
Salt of sea,
air of new &
wet fruit beneath
erected hairs of
the first tree.
Pulp for me?
Spring of life
tributaries
catching at
your knees.
Pulp for me?
Tell me, if I drink,
am I eternal?
Jul 11, 2018
Jul 11, 2018 at 1:26 AM UTC
Feb. 2015
this writ,
content so obvious,
it begs,
why even bother...
Pen Man Ship
this is who you are,
this is your scent, scripted,
the parfume that memory triggers
declarative self-examination passing grades
if pen and paper
are your skin and blood,
then you, man,
ship to shore,
skinned alive,
in poems verbose spill all
ship in ship out,
the glories and the dreads,
expel ink oceans glorious India blue,
rivulets of tributaries,
spillages of what~where,
you are pen
you are man
you are ship
where intersect these routed things,
one is voyage~bound
for parts unknown
the pen be the oar,
and the man, the ship,
and when the sails raised,
the wind never fails,
only there is no
dead reckoning -
for there are no
landmarks observable
when sit~stand
to commence sail~writing
each writ a latitude recorded,
each poem a longitude drawn,
all together, a
body of work,
all together,
your life's coursework
is the captain's log
Pen is the Man is the Ship
in everyday words
he answers
the questions life poses,
in everyday words,
he realizes
the answers he (doesn't) posses,
with each passing poem
the ship, righted,
though the heading
remans unknown
Feb 9, 2015
Feb 9, 2015 at 3:39 AM UTC
I am as a leaf in the river
flowing down tributaries
dew drops are my sweat and tears
winds billow and brush against me
while waters swirl beneath
whether I was in turbulence
or dancing wild
was my choice
I see it only now
as I traverse the waters
I meet many others
each with their own paths
own pasts
own histories
own stories
was it me who crossed their paths
or them mine?
who amongst leaves, you and I
could judge, or would say,
“that is a life well-lived”
when we are ceaselessly
ushered current upon currents
out
to the great beyond
Dec 1, 2015
Dec 1, 2015 at 1:53 PM UTC
Rushing River
The water rolls past the chain of rocks
Studded steps stand single file
Principles holding against the flood a mighty fortress
Evil thoughts swirling down through the mind
At the river’s edge the reeds bow
Marshes tangled with shoots and flattened weeds
Rich grasses carpet all in all bounty abounds
The earth benefits water given free course this guarantees its purity
Be quick to walk into the swirling spiritual waters your purity the sacred word is the water
The natural shore a poisoning quagmire
Work on the shore a duty but for life come to the spirit to barter
The world’s biggest beggars have false wealth it keeps them from true riches
Fruit is delicate with excess ripeness the result inedible
Riches of the spirit or any endeavor needs proper care and management
Without wisdom you become filled with hollowness
The river contains the richest soil and never will spoil your life
So come to the head waters of the heavenly tributaries
Drink your fill over the land you will flow and spill
Drought scorched hearts you can fill
Their destiny a heavenly ocean fulfilling every emotion of being excepted and loved
Nov 17, 2011
Nov 17, 2011 at 5:10 AM UTC
concrete shades the yellow-lighted symphony.
The peso-heavy take taxis;
security valets motors steaming castle gates.
I ask, which way is the 158?
Indifferent, they say, walk straight neath the freeway —
there is a bus stop two blocks away.
****
****
****
Clocktower hands transpose Cindarella-brick
to embers of electricity,
a factory aside scrawled graffiti;
fingers timidly ricket pitchfork fences.
Palermo is 11 km north.
Where is the north star?
I look straight ahead, repeating what
the travel blogs said like,
Be lost, don’t look lost;
flappy plastic maps scream vulnerability.
Be lost, not rich;
iPhones in gotham alleys are batman signals.
Walk fast.
Don’t pay attention to the eyes that pass.
Careless ponytails and brass hair attract
glances back.
Two blocks deep into the homeless shelter
beneath freeways, blankets
in shopping carts toppled over,
cars screaming away the symphony
into shadowed silence between heels striking.
Tunnel breath emerging on the other side,
gasping past stacked Jenga towers,
wired with antennas and empty clotheslines;
families and crack ****** sleep inside.
Safety’s herd thins as couples dart left down
cobblestone tributaries
that either lead to bus stops or parked cars.
I walk straight ahead with
sleeve-covered hands that swing like sticks
in the wind.
The symphony turns to
heartbeats and footsteps
plucking quickly;
fearing the 180 behind,
to zombies with sunken eyes,
thirsty for a thirty-cent high.
Sep 5, 2014
Sep 5, 2014 at 8:45 PM UTC
the waves break like the days that chase them
and our hardened layers fall down around our ankles
and sacrafice themselves to the edges of the shorline
it's the sunshine season
we don our freckled, olive, summer skin
as we slip into our cut-off shorts and boat shoes
the winter blues melt into their tributaries and take off for the sea
leaving us to blush and bloom like budding tulips
work stained hands toss the rule books aside
making room for a cheap can of beer and an ancient dog earred map
let the dusty two-tracks point you back
to your abandoned spirit of adventure
and your neglected hiking boots
let's go
let's run off towards the sunset
and the lake bed
and get to the heart of what matters in the middle of nowhere
let's get lost sunburned
drunk
and young
it's time to be better again
to be happy as children again
i'll meet you out there
somewhere along the edges of where the water fades to mountains
and the mountains pierce the skies
i hope to see you there...
with a smile on your face and your heart on your sleeve
i promise to bookmark a place for you
let's go find what they are all missing
nurse our hearts
and our spirits
and that primitive instinct burried somewhere deep inside us
that begs us to chase the sweetness
to play
climb
dance
and grow
let's go
but first
a toast
here's to you
and to me
and to every skinned knee that eventually led us to learn the ropes
here's to the countless hopes and dreams that we've had to reconstruct
in order to shape our own realities
here's to sunburns
moonshine
and all that we can be
beneath these summer skies.
Mar 20, 2013
Mar 20, 2013 at 5:31 PM UTC
I am
the highway tunnels drilled in your gums
from when your baby teeth plucked themselves out.
I am
the **** rotting on the bed,
whose gelatin you flayed off with your rusted spoon.
I am
the accused with his bounty price
plastered across the billboard sign.
I am
the dying fetus
jutting her head outside the womb.
I am these tributaries — these waves that thirst — which, at first glance, don’t connect. In time, they will prove
that humanity has claimed territory in them.
I am the mouth, drooling forth my mountain water.
This larger lake! I shall never see beyond it.
I am not the fifth dimension, where the sky hangs its hook.
So what?
I have its might. I am the colonizer in its territory,
and I claim it.
Apr 18, 2021
Apr 18, 2021 at 5:18 PM UTC
(In memory of Norris Hickey 1935-2014)
Love of family and fly-fishing: twin tributaries flowed
into your heart like a braided river.
Paradoxically, a sociable man who preferred to be alone
on some braided river,
basking in the peace of the wilderness,
hearing only birdsong and the gentle whirr of the fly line,
its nylon whipping to where you hoped the fish would rise.
Patience comes easily in peaceful surroundings,
unlike waiting for the blessing of grandchildren.
Eventually rewarded with five blessings.
You always said what a lucky man you were.
I’m glad your luck held because you would weep to see
your precious braided rivers drying up down here,
****** dry by the farmers’ greed for white gold
and the threatened tarāpunga (Black-billed gulls)
getting their nests crushed by callous four-wheel drives.
It would be enough to make your big, generous heart burst.
© Andrew M. Bell
May 15, 2022
May 15, 2022 at 12:41 AM UTC
The memory of her sits on a balcony ledge, cigarette in hand.
My green light at the end of a dock.
And this time I am reaching out
like many before,
in pages and poems past.
Macbeth’s face is a book.
Her body is an atlas
tracing a beautiful continent.
Follow the long tributaries that lead to shallow deltas.
This shore begins softly and forms into slender feet,
quiet but powerful when outstretched an angler waiting for prey.
Odysseus, only, can hear this Siren play.
Follow her legs, those tawny plains,
unbroken, guiding along welcomingly,
inviting curiosity and conscripting imagination.
An oasis.
And her torso is a valley from which
her laughter is ****** upward and resisted until uncontainable.
Dimples break and burst like earthquakes.
A ridgeline is all that awaits until we see her face.
She is the Americas from bottom to top.
Follow her decorated canyon mouth
but know it is merely a diversion.
Her eyes are icebergs, which shyly reveal themselves
to sink ships and drown lovers, for always.
Her hair is aurora borealis,
the northern lights,
dancing colorfully
to an unaccompanied waltz
heard by everyone but her.
As the memory of her sits the smoke billows around
like clouds traveling down a coastline
only to dissipate
and disappear.
Jul 31, 2013
Jul 31, 2013 at 3:23 PM UTC
The joyous reflection
of your smile
in my tangerine dreams.
Tangerine, tangling.
The dunes in your eyes
and the tributaries in your thighs
Never want to be seen.
Tangerine, my precious queen.
I never want to leave your scene
I'm happier than I've ever been
My heart will always glow marine
For you, I will scream:
"Tangerine dreams!"
Sep 26, 2018
Sep 26, 2018 at 2:54 PM UTC
A symphony of woodland imagination , Sycamore trees that mimic the forlorn's indignation .. Persuasive River Birch's cover quiet brooks , compel the fragmented light crossing the waters surface between moss covered stones , Honey Locust armed with their crown of thorns , instruments of the Passion stand majestic as regal Live Oaks command the high cliffs above the swirling tributaries confluence and utter confusion ..
Pan awakens the creatures at Dawn with the song of whippoorwill and Mourning Dove . Helios sets the floor aglow , Redtailed Hawks deliver their morning anthems..
Angels walk freshwater streams without question , forever charged with unfolding the tapestry of divine creation ..
Dec 24, 2015
Dec 24, 2015 at 10:18 PM UTC
there is a fire, somewhere.
the sun/sun making mad love to the mother earth like hey.
hey to the water,
hey to the waves,
& all bits below.
endless mad love.
& electric, sing the youth.
swung the tooth of photosynthetic children trickling like tributaries
into/onto/toward all worldly tufts.
prisoners of the wild.
prisoners of the city, yet swords of something like the heart.
like an amber ale popped spare
& nowhere but up,
baby.
old cassette-tape
as bottleneck netting. this is
stellar
fishing.
who’s wet khakis?
mine.
visitors from the great stars and lush.
tall nettle, tall tent-
city &
popping sap campfires. acid-
dropped and cooler cocked.
rekindle this
bliss,
cosmos.
Aug 7, 2015
Aug 7, 2015 at 6:26 AM UTC
Death is inevitable
Choosing when is not
Launching from the shore
Place the oar deep into our regrets
Haul away from lifes spinning current
Death is something to earn
Justify your parents joy each day
Explore those eddies in your travelling feet
Take the hand of your rudder
Placing certainty in the direction of travel
Death is not an end but a staging post of a earthly pontoon
Experience lifes engulfing tributaries first
Find your anchorage for each night and day
Caulk the small cracks that appear daily before you explore a watery bed
Leave no small seepage pass unaccounted
No day deserves to exist without your helping hand
Bravery is making this world what it is with your presence
Apr 23, 2023
Apr 23, 2023 at 8:22 AM UTC
In her veins is the blood of
Choctaw Welsh Minoan
Flowing like the Warrior River-
Tributaries to rivulets-
(to terror for fleeing silt, at the same)
Secrets flow there as well.
The Waters Women are buoyed upon this simple fact
But in winter there comes an occasional freeze and the river goes silent,
the blood slows in the turtles nesting beside the Warrior, too cold to shift beak or claw and the Waters women will speak of other things buried deep beneath the Warrior, beneath pride and circumstance.
The Gulf clams lick the ocean floor
Blind but for taste - how can they know the tongue from the beak?
It's a mystery to me how they survive at all,
In the Gulf ocean
In the Warrior
In the Waters who live at the edge of Waterfalls, at the Warriors weeping banks, where the snow has all gone.
Mar 5, 2015
Mar 5, 2015 at 3:27 PM UTC
Love is so complex;
too grandiose to comprehend,
too intricate to explain,
lost in some ulterior realm,
in a universe that is foreign
where the only thing of which I am certain
is that I am in fact
lost in you.
My body goes on autopilot
as my hands grip the sterilely frigid steering wheel,
speeding 20 miles over the limit,
body going through the motions
as my mind slips back into love,
into the all-consuming mesmerization,
grasping at song lyrics like straws,
searching the vowels and consonants for the
y - o - u
that I hear in them.
Reality comes and goes,
but you remain,
even in the moments most mundane;
sipping the koolaid slowly,
injecting your poison deeper into my veins
as I struggle to prevent the come-down.
What I feel buried deep inside...
it dries out my mouth,
creates craters in my stomach,
esophageal spasming,
I fight to catch my breath at the sight of your name on my phone,
the sound of your voice as you speak my name.
A thundering tsunami bursting at the seams of my
pale skin, my rosy cheeks,
the ferocity of my burning love
scraping against the bone and cartilage
to rip through me and
devour you...
And the only way that you
allow me to love you,
it's so small, it's so
momentary,
you only able to drink one
drop
at
a
time,
an entire hydraulic system,
streams and tributaries,
rivers and oceans,
forcefully squeezed,
funneled into daily droplets.
Dreaming of the last time I tasted you,
the times you used
to intertwine your body
with mine,
lost in incomprehensible ecstasy,
I can now only love you
through the simplicity of
conversation
and
of sitting by your side;
however,
even in its relative infinitesimalness,
I anticipate, yearn evermore for the stillness,
for I know that if today were to be my last,
if my hands were to slip off the steering wheel,
my body becoming sterilely cold,
your name would be the first word I would
speak
in my survival,
the last thought I would think
in my demise.
And though those moments
do exist
where I grow impatient,
frustrated with the walls you've built,
the dams you've constructed
to guard against my love's roaring riptide,
I would rather lose myself,
drop
by
drop
to you,
love you in the most minute way,
if it means I can
love you
at all.
Nov 21, 2014
Nov 21, 2014 at 1:33 AM UTC
1.
The light that agitates the equator
bounds across your southern frontier,
and being higher in the wage scale
enables trips there to be easier
than the odysseys of those passing
away in the opposite direction.
Where once bandaged soles went
now many machines tie the stitches
between the divides where once again
bandaged souls will traverse.
2.
Our footprint will be larger than life
and beat the earth to an abstract plain.
Where once many names were needed,
our editorial, read as obituary, will need few.
It’s a recursive gesture to prune in order to grow
but who’s hand truly closes the symphony?
Here I find legumes, tubers, a display of sage
and a cold comfort in my palm.
The perfect chicane of the fern’s stem,
tributaries unfurled, reflects in the plastic bucket.
Feb 29, 2016
Feb 29, 2016 at 4:37 PM UTC