"tropics" poems
Like the heavens and the skies
Like the deep seas so wide
When I am confident and true
When I have faith in you
Colour me blue, colour me blue
Like the royals of Great Britain
Like the noble in truth and ambition
In my wisdom, dignity and pride
In my mystery and grandeur so wise
Colour me purple, colour me purple
Like fire and blood
Like the intensity of a flood
In my strength and passion
In my desire, love and emotion
Colour me red, colour me red
Like the warmth of the tropics
Like the sun, my daily tonic
When I am determined and creative
When I am happy and attractive
Colour me orange, colour me orange
Like a smile so warm
Like joy even in a storm
When I am cheerful and happy
In my intellect, when I am savvy
Colour me yellow, colour me yellow
When I am all these and more
When I am despised or adored
With the colours of the rainbow
With the colours that make me glow
Colour me colours, colour me colours
Apr 14, 2015
Apr 14, 2015 at 4:21 AM UTC
And when I met that girl in San Francisco
Off a dusty little pier
with rotting wood
and squawking seals
And screaming bayside wind
She caught me off-tropics
and danced with the grace
of a palm tree
lines between the quaked
concrete
off telegraph avenue
On an obscuring Sunday morning
and no
she didn't go
to church or any silly thing
like a temple or synagogue
She said those were no places
for god
God was the trees
We smoked cigarettes and got off to each other's
carcinogenic practices
oxidizing a little faster in conjunction with hopeful
Formaldehyde
Deriding the formalities
of small talk and trivialities
She liked her guitars with nickel-wound strings
I with nylon
But I couldn't play songs
that sounded any good with them
while she could
and did.
and girl did it ever sound good
She'd laugh at the contests on the radio
while we drove on a half-moon
to half-moon
full and whole of ourselves
We'd stopped in the lobby of a cheap motel
And waltzed to background
muzak
wacked out of our minds
Sniffing in deep huffs of subliminal
divinity
Understanding
loving
that mind-numbing
monotony
muzak...
ppsh.
Who ever really listened to that?
And then she left
at the end of one fine winter day
in a cloudless sky I waved
watched her plane
skip off
towards the edge of a pale blue horizon
back south
to warmer climes
to wherever she truly stayed
The tugging on my heartstrings
chimed grotesque in
precise
D minor.
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 at 9:23 PM UTC
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!
and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
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They call me 'bear' but I'm not,
I live in the sub-tropics where it's hot,
I'm ash-coloured and cute but my claws can scratch,
I feast on the leaves in my local patch,
I don't travel far and i can be quite slow,
But i attract loving stares wherever i go.
Aug 28, 2012
Aug 28, 2012 at 6:11 AM UTC
its unmistakable
not just another caravan of faces
not just another passing year
under a strange sky
iv reached the edge of the world
nothing but open sea to my back
as far as the mind can see
and i'm riding a west wind on a quickness breeze
on a middle of the night skiff
to the the small island
where she waits for me
where she sleeps tonight
the bold song gone soft an slow
the guarded smile relaxed into a champion of joy
and conquers all her sadness
with a single tilt at the windmills
like a knight in shining armor
nothing but deep sea
nothing but night salt and sea
and as i draw near
she sings from her soul to mine
come to me lover
laugh
yes cry out loud with all your joys
laugh pure and easy
i'm the mood for you boy
i'm in the mood for your hand in mine
dance in my heart
its a warm night in the tropics
and we got the world to ourselfs
so may i have this dance
spin
dip
ballroom of sand
laugh with me
run with me
we are free
all our lives people have tried to put us away
keep us down
now look at
dancing in the stars
look at us free and easy
dance with me baby
make love with me honey
on this ballroom of sand
laugh pure and true
with simple joy
here by salt and sea
be young with me
tonight on this ballroom of sand
come home to me
warm me with your touch
comfort me with your eyes
iv waited so long come home to me
nothing but open sea at my back
and i feel so alive
i feel so free
and my lover is near iv never been so alive
running a western quickness breeze
on a skiff heading home
to her
jezebel
Sep 10, 2013
Sep 10, 2013 at 6:00 AM UTC
I like how our conversations bounce back and forth to all types of topics.. one minute I'm thinking man oh man it's hot, she's exotic looking like the tropics.
You're definitely in my optics, visualizing the prize. But let's make it clear I'm not all about your curves I wanna connect our third eyes..
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 1:03 PM UTC
“but if you have to move your best friend’s body…
…you’re on your own.”
Your best friend dies
Before your eyes
Somehow stays alive
Then what?
***** salt-licked hair
Brittle and frayed by medicine
World’s unfathomable weight
Trembling beneath the Wisdom Tree
Her whole being crumples (arrugar)
But her life-force remains intact
Body bone
Running on spirit reserves
Why is that?
She stands and cries
Staring into ether
I sit
Wringing my hands
Her tears strike the ground
In tree-gecko unison
'''
Pacific parasite super-strains
Blood coated throat
The full range of abuse’s color on all fronts
for decades
Attempted assaults, ****
Dengue
Giant Centipede venom to the skull
But worst of all
Rootlessness and fear
the monkey on her back
had a monkey on its back
and was smoking a cigarette
'''
Have you ever seen someone
Completely broken?
Corpsic shell of a woman
Gaunt, wan in the tropics
“Don’t put your trust in walls…
…walls will only crush you when they fall”
Brick-bludgeoned body
The shrapnel lay like
Sun scorched
Novice-woven baskets
At her feet
But now she can see
And breath
Real breath
'''
Genocide’s a ***** yes.
Africans seem fatalistic to Americans
Baby boy body, Grandpa human- shield
“They’re your babies”
Short-lived, yes
But now they have peace
Witnesses still weave the jungle
What do you do with a friend who’s
Seen real atrocity? Evil?
'''
I’m learning.
Prayer is power
Will transcends the concrete (Bunkle, too.)
She serves realness only
Her seeking hands unweave the sacred
Time is of no luxury right now
Serve people through love
and Grace awaits discovery
'''
I’ve never carried a bleeding body.
I needn’t “fear the terror by night,
Nor the arrow by day”
But I saw someone perish
And resurrect
What a gift
What a gift
Gubaadagem, Tinmad.
Mar 5, 2013
Mar 5, 2013 at 1:45 PM UTC
I met a man.
No, not just a man.
I met a gentle soul.
I met a knight hidden in the tropics,
I know he would fight for me if he could.
He is a man of kind words and promises,
He means what he says.
His eyes are dark,
They hide his beautiful heart.
His love is sincere.
His smile is fleeting in pictures,
But it lights up the world.
His voice is deep,
It moves me like thunder.
His intense gaze never makes me falter.
Souls like his are few and far between.
His words soothe my pain,
But they also make me laugh and cry.
He is a rock to support those he cares for.
He never gives up on them.
I met a man.
I met a strong, dark knight.
I met an incredible soul.
I found a love.
Or did I meet Eros in disguise?
Jun 23, 2020
Jun 23, 2020 at 10:18 AM UTC
I climbed to the top of a mountain
And rolled back down in a barrel of oil
I threw a plastic bottle in the ocean
Just to see what would happen
I visited the tropics, both of them
And littered in each one
I am the creator of worlds
And I am the destroyer
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018 at 2:29 AM UTC
you said i was exotic,
and i said ooo
what do you mean?
exotic like a fruit?, like
i don’t know what tropics
you think i came from, was
imported from, but you read
my skin like the label
on a flavour of coca-cola
you had never been
offered before and i
was refreshing, and
different. and you liked
the way my coke-bottle
curves felt beneath your
fingertips, said you’d never
tasted caramel
like me before,
you said i was exotic.
like i was a work
of west african art,
even though my mother’s
from the east, like
i was from a storybook like
1001 african nights, like,
you saw my cover and you were
hooked, never did think to
look beneath the jacket,
just wanted stories like the
ones scheherazade sold,
i was your sheba
and you my solomon.
we rode lions across
the sands, your kiss
was salt on my lips,
i needed to quench
my thirst and you offered
me the brand new flavour
of coca-cola.
you said i was exotic,
like a pretty foreign thing,
some mail-order thing,
special delivery
just for you,
a flavour of coca-cola that you
had never tasted before.
Nov 19, 2016
Nov 19, 2016 at 8:09 AM UTC
honoring the glass artistry of Dale Chihuly
A rainbow of serrated globes,
Friends to the water lilies,
Floats in a sculptured pool.
A surreal yellow glass Medusa
Woven through a white crescent trellis
Gleams in the midday sun.
Choirs of chrysanthemums
Sing with multicolored flora
Blown from molten soda, lime and sand.
Sheltered in a geodesic tropics
Orange herons stand on legs of glass
Amid living palms, bamboo and wild orchids.
Towering blue spires
Lift skyward out of the soil
While butterflies dance
In the misty veil of a waterfall.
Nature and the shimmering world within
Happily converge in the florid vision
Of an effervescent man with a patched eye -
A man called Chihuly.
October, 2006
Aug 22, 2013
Aug 22, 2013 at 4:03 PM UTC
I think of You when I brush my teeth and comb my hair.
You used to dust off your boyfriends just as fast yet
Your hand still shakes less than mine.
The pact I made in eighth grade only destroyed one of us;
we were only trying to shake off the insults of elementary school.
My scars still laugh at me from under my slacks,
while You strut in bikinis during the summer months.
It all is based on what they say,
but not what I bother to tell them
I feel.
I will tell You;
that my heart has been asleep for two centuries,
my soul spends starless nights awake wishing for deeper meaning,
my hands were caught replacing my Bible with my books of Byron and Bukowski
the taste of pumpkin coffee rattles in my mouth
and my voice has taken a vacation to the tropics
while my skin sighs tears it does not possess.
my heart is weeping for the one I cannot see
and my chin trembles more than three times a week.
Yet when I chew on my rosemary leaves,
I will remember how You threw my things to the carpet.
I will remember how You meant it when you kissed me
and I will remember when You borrowed my romper,
two sizes too big,
and worked it harder than that psychology textbook You so despise.
And I will remember the moment
I knew I loved You.
Nov 12, 2012
Nov 12, 2012 at 5:04 PM UTC
Oh Mr Sentinel ***** you *** with the bullwhip and echo tongue
For four hundred years they had your fathers and mothers
toiling the sugar and cotton fields no better than oxen and horses
They were all beasts together without rights or gain
All you knew was what Babylonians put in your heads
Your perceptions are nothing but that of a slave
As bright as those of the oxen and *****
That were your mates
Now you sit here thinking you're Bob Marley without stringed guitar
you may have a pen in hand but nothing much has changed
what you call a brain is just a dusty mirror from ***** in the Plantation mansion
you are just the *** overseer who gives your *** to ***** at night
payment for echoing his words and ******* a **** on Saturday
Who are you really but a mindless carcass with no class
Your momentum comes from ***** and is *****
it's 21st century and you are still a Sentinel on the cotton fields
You come cracking your bullwhip talking trash
your ****** *** still has a ten dollar price tag hanging off it
the mixed blood of your ancestors fight for dominance in vain
four hundred years of slavery and you're still in chains mind asleep
there's freedom in the sun whether in tropics or in snow town
freedom is a mind unchained to massa's bulls and stunted ****
Show me the freedom of a ******* Sentinel the mottafucker chicken
Go find your ******** radicals and do your worst, how did your pimping go in Liverpool.
or where you too busy spinning your **** in Birmingham Alabama.
Oct 3, 2018
Oct 3, 2018 at 9:25 PM UTC
Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
(The rudiments of tropics are around,
Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)
His lids are white because his eyes are blind.
He is not paradise of parakeets,
Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,
Except because he broods there and is still.
Panache upon panache, his tails deploy
Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,
His tip a drop of water full of storms.
But though the turbulent tinges undulate
As his pure intellect applies its laws,
He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.
He munches a dry shell while he exerts
His will, yet never ceases, perfect ****
To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.
3.1k
Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.
For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.
We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.
I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.
You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul.
Some are called, others manage as well as they can.
I accept it, what has befallen me is just.
I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,
In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:
Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their *******
Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring
With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,
*** with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids
In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.
Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,
We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.
The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.
2.7k
~
***TRAVEL TIME TROPICS TRIP TOURIST TOWN TUNNEL TOLL TICKET TAKER
TAXI TOKEN TRANSIT TRAIL TRANSPORT TRUCK TRACTOR TRAILER
TRAIN TRACK TROUBLE TEST TERROR TRAP TRIBAL TURF
THINK TALK TRY TRANSLATE TONGUE TIED
TEMPER TAMPER TIMEBOMB TICKING TRINKET TRADE
TARIFF TERMS TWINKLE TAX TREASURE TOTAL THEFT TAKEN
TWISTING THROBING THIRSTY THROAT TECATE TAVERN TWO TEQUILA
TRES TACOS TASTY TORTILLAS TEN TEQUILA TABLE TAB TIP TINA
TAWDRY TROLLUP TATTOO TABOO TOE TAP TICKLE TEASE
TERRIBLE TUNES TENOR TONES TRUMPETING TROUBADOURS
TWENTY TEENS TICK TOCK TARDY TIME TIRESOME TESTIMONY
TOTALLY TRANSGRESSED
TUMULTUOUS TRAVELER***
Jan 1, 2014
Jan 1, 2014 at 5:25 PM UTC
All of my life I waited
For you.
Walking on a path sometimes,
Or wandering in a mountain wood.
Even escaping to the tropics,
To let the sun burn my desire for you
This way or that.
But each time I looked behind,
There you still were,
Not fully formed at first,
But a shadow.
Or sometimes light.
Then there was a sense
Of possibility, hiding in the air
That shivered around you,
But caused my course to veer
Ever so slightly toward you,
Like ancient footprints in rock,
Deciding for me.
I never believed in Fate
Until I met you,
Standing in the doorway
Of a cottage, outlined
With October’s warming sun.
I did not see your face then
But I knew.
And decades after
The same certainty abides,
Alongside any other gales
Of emotion or
Temperate joy.
Around you a brilliance
Hovers in my soul.
Where you walk
Beyond my sight,
My eyes still see you
And my love
Follows in your path.
Nov 9, 2019
Nov 9, 2019 at 7:26 AM UTC
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
2.5k
When his fingers traversed along my freezing and weary arms,
cruised a little further inside the trenches of my spent thighs and
navigated across the tropics of my exhausted back,
I could only close my eyes and think,
"oh, this dream voyage has to be a dream indeed".
Back then,
I knew that my worst nightmare would be his touch steering away from my aching and craving skin.
Jun 1, 2017
Jun 1, 2017 at 11:38 AM UTC
steel is what controls me,
steel emotions wrapped in spikes,
steel skin holding you back
steel eye hiding my vision
but I'm growing tired of steel
I'm angry at its coldness, the grey flesh and cold heart
the agony of never being warm,
my friends are the same,
we draw our time from the fix,
lets melt ourselves down
I'm braking free
me and my barbed wire birds
I'm done sitting on the fence of angst but not being sure
if I can climb over
I'm done being a nothing following the crowd between rows
of steel and barbed wire
I'm done dancing between laser beams
and nightmare filled dreams
I'm taking my heart in my hands and running ,
Ill treat it like water slipping through my fingers and the only way to survive is by running faster.
so much faster.
Ill not let my heart slip through my fingers as my wings begin to spread me and my pack
of barbed wire birds,
our wings are made of corrugated iron folded to points
and the motion of flying stings my soul
but ill fly
you'll watch me glide
we will dive of the edge our hearts in hands
god
you'll see me fly, broken bleats from broken wings
bound together with the lust for more then to feel steel against my skin
because I'm flying northbound for warmer skies
lets glide past the the equator and through the tropics
I want to feel the heat that would melt a man
we are the hearts
we are the gods
the deity's of my minds
ill build shrines to myself just to scream
WE ARE THE HEARTS
my soul beats free as my barbed wire wings
no longer am i wrapped in steel
Ill take you with me, swap your heart for mine
scream like banshees
a technicolor passion drives me forwards
we will lay down ourselves to show you
as you sit waltzing through your strip wire fences
Ill turn them to wings ill float so high above you..
Ill scream at the 5 am light and bring up the sun
the world is yours
I am no longer a sheep
guided by lack of sleep
we are a pack
guided by our hearts
by our love
powered by our bleeding
battered
damaged
broken
barbed wire wings
L.G
Mar 10, 2015
Mar 10, 2015 at 6:58 PM UTC
The fat lady came out first,
tearing our roots and moistening drumskins.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist,
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summinging the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.
The graveyards, yes the graveyards
and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,
and dead, pheasants and apples of another era,
pushing it into our throat.
There were murmurings from the jungle of *****
with the empty women, with hot wax children,
with fermtented trees and tireless waiters
who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.
There's no other way, my son, ***** There's no other way.
It's not the ***** of hussars on the ******* of their ******
nor the ***** of cats that inadvertently swallowed frogs,
but the dead who scratch with clay hands
on flint gates where clouds and desserts decay.
The fat lady came first
with the crowds from the ships,s taverns, and parks.
***** was delicately shaking its drums
among a few little girls of blood
who were begging the moon for protection.
Who could imagine my sadness?
The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me,
the naked look on my face, trembling for alcohol
and launching incredible ships
through the anemones of the piers.
I protect myself with this look
that flows from waves where no dawn would go.
I, poet without arms, lost
in the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.
The fat lady went first
and the crowds kept looking for pharmacies
where the bitter tropics could be found.
Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived
did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.
2.1k
There was a time when I sang on you forlornly,
So wistfully heraldic,
That I might have thought you worthy
Of a gilded biblical throne of purple-prosed petals.
Let us be grateful then, for the song of perihelion,
And the whispered wisdoms of the dear tropics,
For the fresh breath from these friends whisks me
Back to my wakening, aurelian self.
I weave the holly in my hair,
I hang the mistletoe anew,
For solitary trees stand strong,
Though weighted by the winter’s dew.
I am Helios’s rantipole
I’ve no more time for tears of old,
With so much in me left to grow,
And so far in me left to go.
Dec 11, 2012
Dec 11, 2012 at 11:00 PM UTC
in afternoons i drive through tolls and
smash chicken with a tenderizer, spoon
fed and clean. this isn’t
thailand tropics, not on a scuba dive.
writing’s old, rusty, sick, but ‘oh i
wake and reach out.’
now i live in boston, my sheets smell of
flowers, night bodies, your breath. even when
my frame folds into your side- and you push-
it’s not away, it’s ok. i can fog glasses with my
fingers. i can say hello, goodbye.
once, i combed hair off bath tile(not my own),
searched a loft for reasons to leave
there had to be something, someone
else (you). and now, i’ve stopped—
we watch puppies, magnolias, moon rising
in the park. i fall asleep to a podcast. i smile
in the dark.
May 7, 2013
May 7, 2013 at 1:09 PM UTC