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Paul Hardwick Mar 2013
In typography
S P A C E  is
a close en counter.

T HIN K   AB O U T   IT.
Simon Obirek Jun 2015
My thinking is in bold,
but my words in lower-case.

She dreams in italics,
but,
unfortunately,
speaks in CAPITALS.
Marsha Singh Aug 2011
without you, i am sans serif –
unfinished still, a half-etched glyph.
you are my pitch; i write for this –

each arc and shoulder loops and dips
towards the softest landing of your lips.
Jason Drury Jul 2018
You can control love,
as you type.
You can change the style,
which evokes feeling.
Script — curvy lines,
fitting for passion.
Sans Serif — Strong,
but friendly.
Grunge — Anger or,
vengeful.
Serif — Elegant,
and structured.
This four letter word —
is a shapeshifter.
Shifting styles, weights and
kerning on a whim.
You can control love,
highlight and change it.
Again.

But, love is fluid,
as fonts are to typographers,
as words are to poets.
JJ Hutton Feb 2013
the priest, whose tomato face looked like it might explode under collar tension,
gave the valedictory at the friday night execution
the yellow-toothed, combover'd serial killer buckled in electric chair
kept staring at the door, expecting an ally to crawl in late but not too late
the mother of one of the victims rattled on about
how she didn't care that the killer had an allergy to the anesthetic used
in lethal injection      he's going to die either way     what's it matter?
buzz of fly    crack of rolled program against empty folding chair
(yes, there were programs, and whoever laid them out knew their typography)
buzz of fly raised upward, toward the black, magma-cooled ceiling
audience chin up, pupils circled fly as the priest droned on
about everlasting life like a Paul Simon song from his youth
like a catcher's mitt from his youth like a youth from his youth
the boyfriend of one of the mothers of one of the victims
said he was hungry    pancakes sound good, don't they?
I love it when syrup gets on the bacon, you know? love that.
a pudgy guard with bleary eyes and 12 a.m. shadow
rolled his index finger   lowered his brow, telling the
priest to wrap it up   so the priest wrapped it up
by reading the names of the victims
Tara Barnes, 17, Rachel Lythe, 10, Julie McPherson, 13,
Serenity Strongman, 15, and Mary Beth Williamson, 13
the priest said something about judgement as
the boyfriend of the mother of one of the victims
took another swat at the fly                       missed
any last words? the priest asked
where's James? the killer asked, he was supposed to be here
did you guys give him the right time?
the guard nodded to a lab coat by a black box
then a hiss then a hum then an inhale
the first jolt of alternating current for

instantaneous brain death

hard to tell if they succeeded in that
for the second jolt came only a moment
later    this shock's aim to fatally damage
the internal organs, overstimulate the heart
and the killer's face looked like a horse's leg
then an exhale then a hum then a hiss
and the killer's face looked like the crinkled
skinmemory of a cicada
it was late   most of the best restaurants already closed
but we could go to that diner off 63rd, the boyfriend
of the mother
of one of the victims, said
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2019
The Deepest Twist

<>
for my friends who know that when HP says this my 1300th
poem, it’s off the mark by hundreds; nonetheless
1300 is worthy number to celebrate your affections
nat
<>

you return back my older children, fully grown,
my eldest word babies who never ever visit,
blessing them anew, lavishly, with special wishes

I,
take them,
with both hands, a reacquainting occurs,
the old words, deep twist, now hurtful hurt because
reimagining when and how easy they came to be birthed and
how the replication of that process is now a
practiced impossibility

how they burst forth, in purple majesty, wheat waving,
wholly formed, bathed in holy water, leaving no stretch marks,
only just an empty sac inside instantly needing,
needling me into auto-refilling right away

even the twenty four hour, hard deliveries,
long and arduous, were so easy created faust-fast,
that the errors of typography contained,
became lasting hall marks, iconic nomenclatures of
passionate loving-nonpareil

now, well past point of urgent addiction,
unlike then every glance, each sidewalk cracking,
lamppost shadow casting was
a sea story for a deep dive delving asap

I,
supplied answers for the internal badgering incessant
happy ****** need, mine, to go, spill the words,
cab or bus motion nursing them,
now they come slowly strolling,
semi-formed, needy, inconclusive, reused,
and feeling as trite as a cloth coat from an old thrift shop,
so wanting for tender loving care,
which is to provide when you are
four score

wondering how easy it was in prior times when inspiration
fell like a deciduous tree’s fall colorings gifts or
as little children’s nightly multitude variety of dream tales,
when whole worlds uncovered, nay, universes,
hidden between summers green grass blades,
or in unique snowflakes

the semi-forgot love affairs that parented poems
by the score of scarred orchestral scores,
now love circle-turn in holding patters in the
crowded skies above nyc,
awaiting for a trafficked man to give permissions
to “run-away”land that rarely is granted

once, poems in turbulent fluid born, noisy ripping of skin,
****** by the emitting of  constant calming tenderous words,
wonderful drippings, so many multiple births in a moment,
even the OBGYN is complaining,

give other poets a chance at parenthood!

the awesome anger of human tragedy is now so shopworn
from over experience,
even god visits less and less, for it is written,
nothing new under the sun*

though soon his annual visitors day approaches (Day of Atonement) and god will require new
words of human comforting,
a new poem acknowledging that being godlike
is ******* hard work,
for humans are annoyingly capable of incredulous kindness

how can one justify allowing unlacing acts of insane violence to tear
the hand stitched lacing fabric that’s ever ready
to bring us together in an instant elegiac joining

the truth is every one of todays poem are clawed,
shovel dug out from cavities and crevasses,
your new words of recognition of the oldies but goodies,
iron of irony, make it hard, hard, painful to write
without an epidural to numb the painful
dumbing down

when I am breaching my waters, I am hard to spot,
we ancient humpbacks live beneath the deep distanced,
cold waters for many more minutes
than we need surface for breathing,
the show-off fluking, less and less,
and when we birth,
every two years,
must bring the calf-poem to the surface instantly,
to breath, lest it die,
all the while repeating to ourselves:

what was miraculous writing is now nearly invisible,
to blinded fingers that arrhythmically cane tap,
words difficult to recall, recalculate, recalibrate
into a wholly poem

only the **** tears,
that same shameful violin permanent-accompaniment,
they laugh at me when now, they alone
come first quickest, all too easy,


appearing nataurally,

without a formal
written
invitation
“He says, "Son, can you play me a memory
I'm not really sure how it goes
But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man's clothes"

Sing us a song, you're the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody
And you've got us feelin' alright”
Jeremy Bean May 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwb7qfrkDCs
I did this song a few years back and put a lot of work into making the typography video. .  give it a look!
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
write with the ambition: no one is going to write a book about me... i might as well write a book about myself - Hollywood vanity, the ones who can't write out the mundane with ferocious appetite to excite have hardly put a chunk of meat in their mouths, anaemic vegetarians, mantra chanters - well, anaemic vegans - the great debate about abortions, women's rights and the clinics condensed into an egg: is it a chicken? is it a chicken chow mein? no! it's a runny yum yoke boiled in 5 minutes! it's a completely different entity! what with the half-formed fetus that hasn't been ***** trained and hasn't developed **** or bladder muscles - is awake but is practically asleep - consciousness develops after the two precursor developments, it's not walking, it's still finding it easier to suggest onomatopoeia from words: it sounds like the great equation of putting an algorithmic-like interchange of vowels and consonants is creeping, but when it's there, there's nothing, a blank, no concepts stemming from the second other-worldly impregnation from the so called "imaginary" being, how long does a fully mature fetus spend time in the dark? 3 weeks? 2? the cut-off point from full maturity to: get me the **** out of here! i'm not an aquatic creature, i'm part amφiβiaν part cross-dressed monkey - or something like that.

i could be an entertainer after i stop being a monkish
poet, recluse and a father of the black wood
(since i don't have the desert like St. Augustine
the Penitent-Self-Reformist - a bit like Edward the Confessor, me),
the sober me doesn't like the idea of forgetting my
role as a poet-optometrist, still drilling out
the slightest differentiation into memory
between ν and υ - from now on - just so i don't stand
a 1950s style trial due to McCarthyism - i'll be
writing it as: θυκ - but wait... take the northern monkey's
perspective, a southern fairy picked it up with
upsilon - it's more like app Saigon - well, a salon -
so the alt. variation would be the northern θωκ -
but still the three letter aesthetic problem -
the missing c - **** you Byzantium! i haven't read enough
Greek to find an aesthetic pair where one acts as a surd
in pronunciation but not in the optics -
there's no equivalent kappa double to add - and i just
can't put in υω - but i guess i'll have to - what is
the de-digital format of contemplating such a feat?
handwriting - how easily could you write
microsoft equivalent typography of *mistral
θυωκ?
i guess quiet easily - much of "ancient" orthography
(20th century) has changed, letters (due to the digital
adventure) have come akin to numbers, we can write
large sums of them because of the lost art of handwriting,
it's lost, i mean you can still practice some sort of
fancy typography, but i guess you wouldn't write
a book with a style like mistral, more like Coca Cola
or: beware of the dog. what is this leading to?
i admire, oddly enough, writers like J. D. Salinger
and Harper Lee, i wouldn't exactly call them constipated
writers like Bukowski would, or A. Dumas,
i just don't get the idea about how they treated writing
without any addictive tendencies, i have two worlds:
one things, indian spices, televisions, sun, moon,
clouds (which i kinda find as beautiful as a pile of ****)
and a world of encryption - symbols - silence and symbols,
the roots of all thinking being spared a constant daily
narrative, a moment to take something back, much
akin to programming, although, given the status of language
as the earliest way of making children see and recollect
and respond on a gravity-prone-pivot of balance
(modus primo - anti-Cartesian res absorbuit, a sponge
like thing, not a fully mature res cogitans / thinking thing) -
with those authors, i can't see how they could write
a book like that, and not even tread a mediocre path
of writing, i can't spend a day without looking at these
symbols... oh, and by the way, if Arabic will not punctuate
in a digital format its users will not find peace, mandarin
and hebrew are already cut up - the Latin users already
did away with the "painful" act of cutting up letters and
losing handwriting, Arabic should do likewise,
otherwise all they'll post online are jihadi beheading videos
as proof of their so called Islamic civilisation -
and for that part of inventing numbers? look,
the only thing akin to punctuation comes with the dizzy
heights of 1,000,000 (that's a billion), otherwise you
have the spiral π - and i am being condescending and sarcastic,
given the Koranic ref. to Jews: children of Israel...
well... kindergarten of Saudi Arabia.
Tim Knight May 2013
Movie ticket,
cinema stub,
two halves torn apart
by the fickle fingers of the screen attendant:
he looked up at me with a smile-
one learnt from a handbook compiled by the words of some corporate type,
who dislikes his job, you can tell from his vibe.

“The receipt's in the bag”,
I requested it to be in my hand,
customer service fingers are always painted a day-glow green,
hideous talons of the fake queen,
traced from the princesses of the TV-silver-******-fake-TV screen:
she looked up at me with a smile-
one learnt from a magazine of ink,
nothing more than lies disguised within the wholesome typography imprint.

Carrying nothing but a wallet,
“would you like a bag sir?”
I am carrying nothing but a wallet, of course I would like a bag,
what do you take me for:
she looked up at me with a smile-

Wait.

Her intriguing trapdoor smile concealed
perfectly straight teeth that,
through the gap in her mouth,
spat out the shop floor script,
as if a Shakespearean soliloquy
equipped for the stage,
not this retail trade.
from the poetry blog, CoffeeShopPoems
Luis Mdáhuar Aug 2014
23
1

the free wheel turns
and from the asphalt
the chains dissolve
after every consonant
like a sphere walking on heels
sums the response of your epoch
daaa-brrrum-pa-uf
the sound continues

2

on a sleeping tree
that spits butter
every other morning
MERZ came along
dancing on neglected values
like the horn of whales
bending water at every
corner
in the slums of egotism

3

art has no meaning unless
art has no arms unless
art devours brains unless
art verifies stupidity unless
art has to be edible unless
art sleeps like an idiot unless
art bleeds through my fingers
unless art

4

falling like dominos
will turn the bipolarity of the glass
only to be slashed
so I can see
my pillow that rebells
to the murdering machine
every night
every night with gloves
filled with blue feathers

5

we are born
we are children
we grow
we die
in between, there is a shadow
covering the ghost
slowly piercing your skull
singing on tip toes
in the enchanted forest

6

I call
for the un-trembling hand
amidst the violence
and humanity
against the frozen word
breast of black matter
where spring holds her veil
river stones and milk
ghost of love

7

garbage laying
daughters of despair
renounce the yolk of logic
senses shall play
as it was intended
do not let reason fool you
she’s no more than a
servant

8

who disbelieves
imaginary facts

9

the betrayal of reason

10

Popart popart
garbage of the past

11

a malicious smile
Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch
and Richard Huelsenbeck
out of the ruins of German culture
all conceivable materials
the union of art and non-art

12

continue to study the natural world
childlike and convoluted
the elated and troubled
new forms of typography
a new visual language

13

The **** regime banned
all your creative activities
Primiti Too Taa

14
rakete rinnzekete 
rakete rinnzekete                                                       ­  
rakete rinnzekete 
rakete rinnzekete 
rakete rinnzekete 
rakete rinnzekete 
Beeeee 
bö.

15

Why?

16

the movements of the poem
string, cotton wool or a pram wheel
equal with paint
to reverberate
carved on its journey
repeating them in many different voices
a relentless momentum

17

new people, new shapes, colors, and details

18

blast the institution of slavery
blast the educational system
blast the paper cup morals

19
simultaneous happenings
will reign in the hearts of men
and turn them small and
smaller

20

Imaginary facts and the marvelous
appearances of the right moment
which is a woman
or a dice
with the shape of a cloud
******* on happiness

21

find a place

22

The nose is a myth

23

feign of death
the modern man
Homage to Kurt Schwitters
Be my muse,
I'll translate you into binary
and back again.
Lying on the ground,
blue carpet between your ears,
synthesized sounds convey through spaghetti,
hearing aides grow old with us.
Child sized vowels fall off their bicycles,
from between your lips.
Keep me busy; when I'm comfortable, I get lazy.
Your shirts are overlaid grids,
the holes, coordinates.
17.43
Always a poet, only occasionally writing,
I hedge my bets and roll die
with insults open to interpretation.
I don't like your words,
I don't need your hyena smiles
I don't want your degrading remarks.
But I know your skeleton,
your tendons, cartilage and marrow filler.
I understand how you move,
the coconut oiling your joints.
Be a textbook reference,
help me cut apart the paperchain people I’ve made,
I want to portray them realistically.
Shade their features with scrawled adjectives,
resolving to care about typography.
White school glue takes too long to dry
to have hopes of staving off entropy.
Scribble highways into dusty prairies,
be the cartographer that misplaces my world.
kenye Aug 2013
She was lust in the morning
     and art by nightfall

Where she whispered halfway moans
     of words plagiarized off the wall

Some little death
Some ironic typography
     reinventing fate
    
Manifesting her destiny
     In stutters
     she gaits

A soul tripped out of the dream machinery

Now she's standing naked
     In the door way

The threshold
     between mundane and fantasy

Staring down the destiny
     about me

She asks me
     to follow her bliss

Her skin heralds the call
     to my hands around her neck

She wants to be
     bruised
     So Gracefully

Pulling her hair back
     dragged
     in and out of dreams
Homunculus Jul 2016
Disdain for
Traditional forms,

A sense of
Detached irony,

Self-reflexivity,
Expressed as a

Flagrant,
Meta-textual
Awareness,
                                        ­        

                                          adventurous
                                          typography,
                                              

                ­                                                     that defies
                                                                ­     the common
                                                          ­           relational schemes
                                                         ­            between text
                                                                ­     and margin



The juxtaposition
Of words
Governed by
Syllabic content,

and
       freed
                from
                         the
                               burden
                                            of
                                               syntactical
                                                     ­             strictures

Meanings
Changed
Through
Inversion

(now read it upside down)

                                                         ­  
                                                             ­       the
                                                                ­    poem
                                                                ­    recites
                                                                ­    itself


Paralyzed truth
Mimics brave fear,
Abdicating censure, and
Redressing allusion,
                                                       ­       

                                                               Liberation
                                                                abounds
                                                                in the trough
                                                                of a sine wave
postmodernism and whatnot
Maman Screams Feb 2014
Your smoky cloud foams
Got my eyes tripping
Chronicles of biology lab
Lacking of chemistry
You burn your forest down
Slowly reaping
Lucid crystals bowls
Enticingly got me dreamy
Two individuals
Trapped in a poetry emotion
Reminiscing on each other
Mysterious sedation
Writing of riddles
With sincerest caution
Preventing straying lines
Infecting our rhythm
Hearts shattering mirrors
Reflecting smiles
Memorizing words
Into a typography file
Reflecting daily circumstances
Shadows by my side
No one could judged
Your moody ocean tide
Like a fish flying high
Against the currents flow pride
If I could continue writing
Scribbles with your permission
No words in my vocabulary
Could ever substantially passed
I've never caramelized
My riddles with lies
Sugar coating inks
Luring ****** and flies
If my feelings for you
Never sober and true
Why does it hurts
When I'm thinking about you
There is no other love
I could simply lose
Valentine just over
But..
I'm still missing you

@2014 Maman Screams
Jeremy Betts May 2022
I'm an open book with the tendency to get mistook and overlooked now more than ever cause the binding and the cover are extraordinarily ordinary
The frail, mousey lead character labeled fragilé and plagued with insecurity lacks any measurable or substantial substance, no originality, even the unremarkably troubled back story is unapologetically void of creativity
Absolutely zero structure to the flimsy plot lines leaving the majority unfinished and frustratingly empty, holes in the Swiss cheese history are aplenty, no matter the number it's always one too many, never held any water to begin with but regardless they surface constantly, scattered with no purpose throughout condemned property
The gaps in the sketchy timeline and the untimely flashbacks make it extremely difficult to follow, subsequently leaving the reader feeling uneasy, maybe even queasy
Couple that with the fact that the blood, sweat and tears that poor from me onto every page render every letter a blurry mystery
Ink rapidly bleeding beyond any point of legibility so I scurry into obscurity like the first bit of graffiti to hit the walls of a lost city
Or unlit cave dwelling residency that sheltered the beginnings of humanity, I don't say that metaphorically, this is all factually documented as actually happenin' to me
Completely being brushed over, over and over, leaves little to no room for closure, how could it be there is no retail value either even though I'm the soul owner of the one and only lonely copy
I must confess that honestly it's in rough shape visually, no secrecy, anyone and everyone can easily see, so it's insincerely looked over briefly with contempt and downgraded accordingly but unfairly
While momentarily left in dormancy to see if the monetary value to society rises any or will it be one to continually trend downwardly, accepting mortality
At this point breathing is just a formality, I know tomorrows not a guarantee so I scribble away feverishly, going at it tirelessly, throwing words around recklessly
Pointless? Quite possibly. Meaningless? Most definitely. Worthless? Well, how could it not be? I'd quickly place a bet on all three being casually mentioned in the book review, or what some of you might call my obituary
It could be and seems most likely to me to be revealed that it belongs in it's own category or at the very least a separate offshoot subcategory
OR, or, it could be disrespectfully decided to never even ever let it be represented digitally or physically in any online or city library across the entirety of this comically hypersensitive and ridiculously touchy country
They be watching over me shoulder every day as I dot every i perfectly and diligently cross every t, proofreading religiously so they take me seriously and can't use it against me
It's limited edition but surely nothin' special, hopefully still worthy of somethin', but here in reality it's realistically nothin' more than knockoff Gucci or black market Versace
Sounds fishy, I know, but what else could it possibly be when I have the answer key, it's literally my story, I not only wrote but lived every word you see and it still doesn't even hold any significance or importance to me
Every chapter awkwardly forced upon me, it'll clearly end horribly but I'm no visionary, not even close actually, would never catch me even trying or claiming to be
I just precisely record the facts on the spot as they happened to me no matter how bizarrely scary some happen to be, it's important to me that you see what I see
See, you'll see the cruelty in the issue that taunts me as it haunts me. The hot seat question then becomes can you possibly understand the conundrum that is me or even slightly comprehend my cursed duality?
A comedy turned tragedy then unfortunately forced to take the back seat immediately as people barbaricly laugh mockingly at said tragedy, the jokes on me apparently and I've never found it to be very funny
Notice that it both plagues my future and tarnished my history and I'm presently left with presumably only a falsely and improperly placed memory of happy
Remembered as nothing but the worst of me, my eulogy will most certainly read like a roast minus any dose of comedy
If you choose to take this journey and walk the path along side me you're more than likely to come to the same conclusion as me that the powers to be are stingy with the good karma while the bad energy is unnaturally loaded on all *****-nilly in spite of me with little concern for safety
OSHA be ****** apparently, all it takes is the thought of me being a presence in the vicinity of you and your family to make you question both your safety and my sanity at any given moment, occasionally I'll switch it up randomly to avoid the monotony
A painfully pitiful joke that seemingly seems to be getting worse optically, a ****** B movie parody of Steven Kings Misery, all pain, no joy, no money, I mean no interest, I mean no possibility of a remedy
A mocumentary if you will, but the pain is real still and it's going steady, a run on sentence dragged out endlessly through a raging sea of emotionally charged assault and self battery that continually thrash relentlessly all around me
The weight of my world has always been too heavy since all the way back in my infancy, flip to the first couple pages to jog your memory if need be, then take and make a mental note that today I'm pushing 40

******* that's a long time to knowingly be held in captivity,  I've already been through it and the recap still surprisingly hits me hard with a backing of PTSD

Your cross is just a fashion accessory, my cross drags in the dirt behind me and wasn't set properly, shoulders barely able support it and I couldn't transfer the load any
So I grab a penny for each eye, yet another money based payment ritual for the ferry man to finish the last chapter the best he can with mixed in commentary from the peanut gallery that'll ultimately reveal my true identity and destiny hidden in the smoke screen of my twisted personality
The one predicted by the aforementioned conflicting and confusing history, though obviously if you've been following closely at all you've seen the rate of my fall and calculated it's trajectory down to the nth degree
It has always been and will continue to be aimed directly at the fiery lake for all eternity, not much different than where I reside currently so really I'm in no hurry if its more or less going to be the same scenery
I guess if you want to be a **** about it you could probably make the argument that my life played out accordingly, regardless, I'm getting what's owed to me cause I bucked conformity and normality, spit in the face of misplaced authority
Whoa is me? Yeah no, whoa is you buddy, you should worry because the last page doesn't mean end of story necessarily, I'll live on in your thoughts as something far more scary
See, I wouldn't be able hurt you or even touch you physically but I'll guarantee to use my literacy platform to completely destroy your psyche like what was so savagely and aggressively done to me, looking back that's all I see
I've sighted every atrocity three pages from the back glossary if you ever have the need to fact check me, again, feel free but know that my story board is messy, I'm not use to entertaining company
The facts get a little bit more hazy every day and where slapped together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason to what I have too say, not a thread of continuity, and you can go on and forget about decency, that word isn't even in my dictionary
I want to take this opportunity to openly welcome anybody that can hear me to read my diary, I've made it easy and removed the lock and key, humor me and start with my autobiography
Get to know your enemy, you'll find what to use against me personally but also what I'll do to wipe you from my minds eye permanently before you grace the pages of my memory
Take this as a priority mail special delivery type promise inside a threat spread widely through a reputable distribution company
And now, since having the rare opportunity to slowly but fully get to know me just a wee better, you must know then that to doubt me is stupid risky, just facts here, no theory of relativity
May I suggest you completely drop expectations and turn each page carefully, it's not for the faint of heart obviously, don't approach this carelessly or it could consume you entirely, but that's not my responsibility
Erie from the start, so it'd be smart to get ready, it's about to get heavy, prepare yourself mentally, this is the type of gory, all guts no glory underdog revenge ****** mystery story that wouldn't even make late night cable tv
Though it'd truly be funny to slap a PG rating on the first copy just to watch them fully lose their **** and collectively scramble to get said copy pulled indefinitely
Anyway, no movie adaptation in the works, no straight to DVD release party and that's all fine by me, I ain't even angry about it really, okay, maybe I am a little grumpy but that comes with the contemporary territory
Read it, don't read it, buy it legitimately or steal a copy, it's all the same to me, everything you need to know, and some **** you wish you didn't, is right here in the typography
From living righteously to becoming a bully to getting lost in my own hypocrisy, it's all laid out lazily for every single truth seeker and neigh sayer to see
There's nothing left to say anyway so pretty please, once free from the pages, can you finally, quietly but quickly, leave and just let me be me? I'd appreciate it emencly

Alrighty, let's begin shall we.

-Chapter one-

      Our story both begins and ends in the same fashion in that neither needed to happen and the fact that they both did changed nothin', a breath of life wasted on a nobody with nothin' left to offer but what's left of the shattered dignity and pride, otherwise emptiness resides and we'll be taking a look back through pain filled eyes, recounting the rise and fall, the crippling journey and what ultimately triggered this poor man's untimely demise...

©2022
b for short Aug 2016
Honestly, my three favorites are
Puerto Rico, Nevada, and Texas.
I follow you through your souvenirs,
stuck fast to my refrigerator door—
mementos of places I’ve never been.
You always did that,
traveled without much warning.
I envied your ability
to cut loose from all those undesired ties
and just fly far away to somewhere else.
Merciless adventure that begged to be tasted.
I missed you when you left,
more than most things, but
you’d always come back
with a little something
to decorate my modern-day ice box.
“That’s your thing,” you’d tell me,
handing me the magnetized treasures.
You'd help me pick out a spot
for each of them, and
it made me feel a bit better
for being so god ****** unworldly.
They’re all there, you know,
varying shapes and colors,
with eyesore typography
spelling out awful puns that I love.
Somehow, they fit together
and make a sort of perfect sense
that I can’t explain.
My three favorites are still
Puerto Rico, Nevada, and Texas—
pieces of your completed journey
radiating childlike wonder, fervent hope,
and plenty of open-ended questions.
Completed, with the exception
of a single, naked, white space
that I will wait my lifetime to fill,
because, like you said,
that’s my “thing,"
and I'll keep it as such,
I'll keep you as such,
until my sand runs out too.
© Bitsy Sanders, August 2016

For Kibwe
maisie khan Jun 2013
The need to just love him
kills me slowly.
So long I have yearned to simply hold him
in my unsteady arms.
For him,
I would no longer need the cigarette smoke
to inhabit my lungs--
I'd much rather fill my lungs
with him
and feel his soul creep down my throat
down to a place near my heart
where  I would keep him for an eternity.
Oh, for that sweet boy
I'd try to love him more than poetry
but I'd rather turn him in to poetry;
typography that could last much longer
than we would.
I wish to turn him in to the library book
that my forgetful mind would forget
to return;
knowing I would pay all the money in the world
to read your mind forever.
S Smoothie Jan 2014
don't think you could ever know me like the stars

don't think you know my number or typography of love

there is a world beyond compare you cannot put asunder me

all the love in the universe lives there

yours too.



so you see,

let it live in my soul

let it seep out of my aching *****

give it free will

and do not restrain it

for when you partake of it

you have touched souls with me

and thus forever

I will remember you.
Tark Wain Dec 2015
Fate
F
A
T
E
Fate

F
for friendship
for firsts that last for forever
for felicity fidelity and the occasional felatio
for freedom from fear
for feeling... even when you thought you'd forgotten
for yes ******* but also
for fenagling fanoodling and fondling
for familiar
F

A
for absolute
for ASAP ATM and AWOL
for any day now we'll fall out of love
for alright this can't last
for all the time this was possible?
for always
for absent absinthe abstaining and affirming
for affinity
A

T
for trying
for tell me your favorite color one more time
for trash being someone's treasure
for time we get to spend
for tenderness and togetherness
for the truth even when it's hard
for thank god for typography
for take my hand
T

E
for everything
for everyone looking at us like we're crazy
for excuse me for finding something that matters
for eclectic electric elements
for especially
for exceptions
for explicit emotions
for enrichment
E



it takes 4 letters to spell a word
but one more to make it work
and that letter is
U
Kristen Hain Jul 2015
I look at my cracked face from too much sun
Or smoke or fake glances and smiles at strangers
Empty eyes that usually are glazed over
From the collection of half empty beer cans
Display of *** chata and whiskey in concealed flasks
Do alcoholics feel as happy
How water erodes the beaches and how nature takes back
What belongs to it I feel like the glass bottle
That takes millenniums to dispose of
Or maybe a heavy metal like aluminum or lead
Commonly evaporated to brains and malfunctioning characters
I think I’d be depleted uranium to all that weeps
Seeping deep to DNA contact level of danger and hazardous waste
It’s a lot of responsibility to be just as secretly unhappy
A bird returns to it’s nest to find it’s eggs scrambled
A joke with no humor and sarcastic crucifix type of beautiful typography
I look at this polaroid, shaken not stirred, and this intoxication consumes me
The one I didn’t deserve. The one I ****** up, I tell people, because deserving aside
It’s rather bleak for a love story
It’s always a lot more than what I tell people
The whole story isn’t all there
But hell
Neither am I
Redshift Sep 2015
the feeling that no one is listening
because there are no likes on my latest status
no retweets
no hearts on the face of my instagram
the cement words of the internet do me no good
because no one
is listening
no one hears me
when i speak with floating words or lead-like typography

my self-assurance falters
am i not popular
is this highschool
is all of humanity one big highschool class that doesn't want to sit with me at lunch  
is it the internet that taught me this?

is the internet bad because it is the internet
or is it bad because i am exposed to more humans than i ever would be
normally
is that what
makes it
bad
James Floss Jan 2020
I’m having
Kerning yearnings
Finding space between

Space is or is not
Too close is too close
I know that’s just your elbow

Too far is too far
Can’t hear can’t see
Eye before he except after she

Let us learn from letters
Some need to be closer
Some need to breathe
Jenna Kay Sep 2017
You told me I could text you if I ever felt lonely
Call you in the middle of sun-less hours if I was breaking and needed someone to take away just part of my pain
And stay for just a few moments
In your typography, I could tie down my demons
And disspel my darkness
For just a few moments...

I think you've made a mistake
You see, you'll give me a minute and I'll take your whole night
I can't just have a nibble; I'm gonna take a bite
Of your heart, of your time, of your sanity, of your mind
Because I don't nearly have enough to consider myself living
I'm an outline of someone that used to be, stealing pieces of humans in hopes I might become something
Through small electronics, I'll take control of your eyes, and tear into them with an onslaught of self-loathing and hopes of my demise
And you're so horribly kind, you want to settle my mind
But darling I am the chaos that consumed me
I'm a star about to explode billions of miles away, you can't even hope to touch me
So don't ask if I'm feeling better than wanting to ignite
I wanna lie with "alright"
I wanna ruin your night
I wanna grab your attention and paint my lips with it
Chew you up in my darkness and spit your autonomy out from it
Til you're just a pair of hands telling me I'm not the demon I know that I am
I wanna drag you into my cerebral cell
I am gonna be your midnight hell
You're gonna orbit around my entire world and then I'll throw you out into the empty space of my cellular cosmos
And I'll hope that you dream about me
Maybe that'll make it hurt more
And in the morning you'll wake up to me
Pounding away from the inside of your skull
All because you said I could text you
And I'll always come back because you always will
Come back to the darkness and the vibrations of my voice
Still horribly kind and unable to grasp the terrifying beauty of distant nebulas
I'm the brightest star up there, ripping apart the constellations
So look up, my love, and take me all in
I'll even lend you my telescope
Because if I'm going to explode, you better be watching
The baked boy that turned to a man at birth
The iron fist under God's protection
The balaclava to captain you sail past your brim of fears
I am a cocktail of a half cast
Punched half Ankole half Kiga
The wingless flyer of written wizardry
A fireless dragon with spits of love
An angry dream laughing at the past
Cabled brain with rain of thoughts.
I rose from s womb of typography
I am the telepathic soul of wisdom
That descended on crust as a glimmer
Am both you and I in a tender equation in ness
Am a broom to sweep your past tangible
The driver to enjamble your hopes.
The history yet to make your historyc
And spice your drab times in moments
Be all ears, one to make break what is of use to the moulded crashed in a jiffy.
lillian Oct 2017
We looked at each others hands
and studied the lines
as if they would lead us somewhere.

They almost look identical,
my life line as long as yours.
The arches
and breaks in the
typography of our skin the same,
yet you do not know where I come
from and I
do not yet know you.
Madelynn Nieves Sep 2018
Tiptoe carefully around the subject
Like an artist with a purpose
Creating the perfect choreography
Etching out the typography
Our story
The one that can’t come to fruition
But I stand here
A sucker for ambition
And she continues on
A victim of the human condition
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
you will soon understand the point, or rather the worthwhile point of investing in the right places, notably books, and notably the essentials of solomon's music filled harems, for you will treat both book and apple alike, how can my contemporaries feel no void in their piracy, in their cheapness, and not expect their thieving to not catch-up with them... the whole lot of them would emerge as philistines, unless of course, they are dumb enough not to congregate on the plateau of genuine commerce, and feel that by stealing artistic outputs they can suddenly surround themselves with brick walls and call them the ursulas in the hermitage admiring artwork, while at the same time forging copies and remaining entrapped, a world whereby suddenly plumbers don't get paid! there's a reason why music companies exist, they are P.R. dynamics, you think that any artist would be lifted from the hades, on a mere whim, or mere admiration by a few? piracy of the content doesn't help, at least with these P.R. companies the crumbs from the table, but when people turn anarchic, the artists are eating ****, and the more **** they eat, the more people are left with nostalgic content, nothing new, nothing explorative, because the contemporary artists suddenly brake rank say to the people like the people once said to the kings & queens: *******! shove that 20th century content up yer gobs and call it sunshine!

i can't say that heidegger's L, VI didn't spur me on
to begin this dragon's breath worth of vitriol
and scolding agitation,
come on, what's this supposed "lived experience"
these days, what is apparently "lived"
is nothing short of the disorientating
"dasein" of journalism...
        we can't even live the basic facts,
always regressing toward an "evolution",
always starting with some sort of
"mutating" presence & adding a superiority
complex...
  we killed of the neanderthals... but kept the apes,
so there goes the "missing link"
argument...
    i wish we kept the neanderthals and
made bush monkey fufu with the apes,
at least we could have authentic slave archetypes
from the neanderthal class of humanoids...
but no, slaughter the **** similis,
and keep the biodiversity of the apes...
how does that work again?
    you're tell me we killed the missing link,
and kept the darwinian vanity project
of the "****" speculo (mirroring man) so we
can write "poetry" with respect to other animals?!
so let me guess, a lot of women wouldn't
really like the black widow spider / mantis
comparison... of course they wouldn't,
but we still make all the other compliments via
a "comparison"...
  why **** off the missing link,
  why **** off all the tarzans that might have
told us: actually, the origin of the eskimos
comes from japanese macaque...
so no: not everyone came from ibrahim nigeria,
you **** dollop of custard for a brain!
don't get communist on me with
a collective history, **** of a common origin:
you have your big "bang" theory -
like you'd hear a "bang" in vacuum...
          enough! of this clowning around!
i agree with this ****, the supposed "lived experience"
is a catchphrase that has become unbearable,
because the sediment of facts is gargantuan
that it's hard to break away from it,
there are no "facts" in the sense of a *lived experience

akin to: and i had my first kiss while i was
5 / 6, and she promised me what she
would never fulfill...
        that's not a "lived experience" event,
that's only hypothetical, a delusion, a fiction...
and at the tip of this atlas pivot pose is
this persistent, primarily insipid in persistence
darwinism...
       i don't live in a civilisation worthy of
no more credit, other than one that provided
the typography of a, zoo:
and darwinism is zoological psychologism
at best... came down to the alpha & the beta -
no wonder we have the alphabet sequence
that makes no sense at all...
        and no, i have no theological bearing with
this, i already equated god as a paraphrasing -
it's the humanism behind this coming-of-age
of populist science turned humanism onto
its humpty-dumpty head that bothers me!
for one, it would appear that thinking is no
longer qualified as being a lived "experience",
are we no longer living by essentially thinking?
evidently we're not;
hand on heart heidegger could not have
predicted his concept of dasein being *****
by the medium of journalism,
   in that journalism morphed the adrenaline
rush of being "there" -
         hence the necessary constant stream of
a global "narrative"...
        in all instances there was no "being" burdened
by a there, other than the being
burdened by a "there" - as common phraseology
suggests, e.g. in church witnessing an ex-girlfriend's
christening of her twins, with the person
sitting next to me exclaiming in a hushed
tone: you're not really here, are you?
   there's a "here"? i replied.
lived experiences my ***,
    after being bombarded with too many
scholastic secularism of hyper-factoid rainbow,
and the eroding of keeping personal memory,
after all that, and still the persistence of
this ****** trivia game shows where
"knowledge" is about storing information
and nothing but that, and why didn't the ancient
greeks, in their old age, worry about
killer proteins invading fat cells of the brain,
and "flexing der muscles for mental
gymnastics" ever worry that ol' alzhei mc. hammer
would be relevant?
     well, while looking at some of these
youtube view counts i start thinking:
  thank **** people are still *****,
so many children watching these brain-drains,
but to be honest these brain-drains can be
like stretching a rubber band, back into a puzzle...
but that's beside the point,
   everything i write is impromptu,
which reminds me of the title and content
originally intended... the sefirot...

   schematic!

  ultimately the keter = yesod = malkhut
(perfect calamity for a disatrous trinity)...
   and there is no person in the world, known to
man, who has achieved that... not even moses...

  then there are variations:

   binah yesod chesed (understanding the foundation
   of love)...

yesod chesed gevurah (the foundation of love is in
strength)...

binah tiferet hod (understanding beauty is in its
splendour)...

tiferet chesed chokhmah (beauty is the love of wisdom)...

yesod keter malkhut (foundation of the crown
resides in the kingship)  
  which is the antithesis of christianity...

chesed gevurah binah (love is the strength in
understanding)...

please make make me stop, but do you know
how many maxims you can obtain from
the sefirot?!

   let me show you the sefirot and you make
the other maxims that could contend with
the book of proverbs, and rest with
  what replaces the star of david; namely?
the hod of david,
   away from the jealous tip of solomon's keter.

                               keter

binah                                          chokhmah

 ­      gevurah                           chesed

                              tiferet

hod               ­                               netzach

                         ­     yesod

                              malkhut

p.s. netzach malkhut keter
         vs. netzach malkhut yesod

i.e. victory does not reside in kingship of a crown,
   rather, victory resides in the kingship
   of a foundation,

  and now i really love how that's
contradictory to what is but the remnant
of indoctrination, as the story suggests,
which is why these two books can't coexist
as one, it makes schizophrenic factories
all the more apparent,
   even in christianity, if you've assimilated
into a culture, but retain your "maiden"
tongue, your bilingualism is treated
like some mental disorder akin to
schizophrenia...
    again, only in england, me marx and engels
thinking up future horrors,
and it culminates in me...
  so... bilingualism is a psychiatric disorder?!
gentlemen! let's broaden our minds!
lawrence, bring in the syrians and libyans,
we need to teach some lessons!
Laurel Leaves Jan 2018
I am aimless in the typography of simple moments where the lines change and suddenly they’re asking from me. 

Where did I go? 

What am I thinking about? 

How do I feel?

The endless parade of the safest valley on earth. 

The way the mountain ranges hug the fault line and enunciate that I will be ok while they keep me sedentary, 

watching as the snow piles on the hill sides and melts away with each season, 

I became addicted to the fog

hugging  the ethereal realm of consciousness,

 unlike the bitter evergreens tickling the sides of jagged rocks,

lightly dipped clouds slowly secreting drops of dew seemed to delicately keep me at ease, 

calm my bitter, ever-growing disease.

you told me it would end the way it needed to

I thought those were the worst moments in my life.

somewhere inside I heard the senseless pounding of hope compromising  

repeating the same thick mantra of I would only claw my bloodied fingers onto simpler heights

The way the rings delicately sat on top of each other

how it steamed up the sides of the white walls

expected nothing less from existence when my eyes finally lifted

from the heavy slumber

how the florescent

at first glance

did not bring me to my knees

any kind of inspiring prose

or please

it just lulled me into

another moment where my

eyelids

begged for visions

of

from the highway you can see this one view

twenty minutes north of California

my hair is blowing in the wind, caught by the ripping shards of desert tempermant

the way you smoke your cigarette as if

any day one of them will be your last

succulent gliding allegory of the brutal

moments of leisure connection brings

while it rips itself from our absent moments

the sun is right above

if you listen closely

there is the song

slowly humming

the one i played

repeatedly for you.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2017
for my memory and birth i have poland -
what, with this 8 year old brat -
for my conscious hours,
and for my to-do lists of
hardly fathomable pretenses -
well: that's just about england...
but of the question regarding
a heart?
       certainly not wales,
and certainly not ireland -
what other place if not scotland?
these outer-removed celts
known as picts, what of them?
3 years, and a fired-up imagination...
a romance that isn't romance
in the classical terminological
definition...
what do i have in the reign
of body toward a land,
  to be a pseudo-abortion in
existential terms?
    i do remember being born
in an area of low-lands and minor
hills...
          toward the barren quest
for flat-land and the sea -
imagine seeing the gracious peaks,
as if falling in love with
travelling by rail -
            rather than aeroplane...
where does my heart reside,
if not in scotland,
and the typography of edinburgh
with its arthur's sea lodged
right in the "middle" of it...
   i sow no allegiance to either poland
or to england...
    so where do i take my pledge?
soctland!
             if ever the 3 years
in edinburgh taught me to remember
the child, and become its father,
it is there...
               zu norden, zu norden, ja....
where else?
                   that thistle in
the moonlit grove -
   a thistle in moonlit tantrum of bloom...
if ever a colour:
i'd like to see,
        before i die, the spectrum
of colour in moonlight written
into textbooks...
        but not by colour per se defined,
but by flower:
  thistle for purple...
                  of the eye that can see,
brightest in the zenith of sun,
and actor-prone in the nadir of moon:
thistle for purple...
                 a yellow, orange & red
in the moon itself, alongside
                    cranium white...
           blue in stealth of silver waters,
green & indigo in the northern lights...
indigo: that twin of pink & purple...
    i have no nation to concern myself
with...
     no land of birth, no land of maturing,
but a land not my own,
that i am the most exiled from,
  for which the heart asks questions
       about, prior to every night falling
toward its rest...
         entombed in the rocks
             of the valley of glencoe...
and to think,
in ratio dividing 30...
9/30 in the land of birth
     3/30 in the land of tutoring -
with only 18/30 in the land of current
abode...
                   with the last:
the least fashioning custom, patriotism
and desire to be part of...
                  other than a respect
for a spoken tongue...
this can't be a romanticism...
  for it involves a foreign land,
and a foreigner shedding sentiment
onto it...
               yet scotland remains,
like the lore of the foroe isles...
           something beyond the remains
of a collective effort currently prescribed
for man to "indulge" himself in.
of a heart, only one land remains
pivotal to my eerie feel of
                   the nomad -
                             and that place
is a required reading,
   of a minimum of 3 years...
to later be seen as somewhere where
a peace & comfort reside for the soul
akin to my own.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2023
on the edge of etch: letters appear but disappear
without sound -
       tumultus origins of English, as a tongue,
later a people: a letter to the people -
outsourcing the orthodox passing of meaning
without hieroglyphs -
as the Polynesians did for almost six thousand
years when they set off without horses:
or rather with the horses of waves and the winds
across the great plateau of the Pacific ocean...

zahn schleifen liebe: tooth grinding love

       'ōlelo:                 word (language)

palapala:                       letter

          kani:                   sound

face:            maka

            ki'i:                         image

huikau: hybrid:         hiatus of haikus...

on the edge of an etch - apostrophes aplenty and
like reimagining Hawaiian as English
with two consonants: but'ter
            plo'tter - no, not plot'ter

per time: manawa: rather manava -
and Minerva: time spent executing an Olson typography
oh how apostrophes '
      fell to the earth of the linear winding of meaning
in sentences and became punctuation marks
of words in paragraphs rather than poetic cascades
of line: anew...

       J          'ot         down on the edge:
              Ed-ward googled his own name,
some Edward, ed-gear: but that's the eDGe
   i.e. by sound dictation: shion... dicta-shion
   Ej
                        jacket ej

     as with etch:             the visible T yet not really
uttered, sort of bypassed, and heart drowning in
clearly: English is prone to dyslexic fancies
because clearly some letters submerge...

   four tao's of the thai tau:

         the ouroborus no longer eating itself...

                                    T
                                 T † T
                                    T

or perhaps to ask Andrew and the Edinburgh Greeks:

                                 T. T
                                   X
                                T.   T

i can say much more about Edinburgh than Dublin,
safe to say: concerning these two cities
of the former a bad case of trainspotting
and low tides of culture -
   while Dublin, markedly not on the maps
of meaning of the one map that is the Union Jack(et)
since... the Irish did not fare well
with flags associated to cross-bearing marches
across the desert...

               that is i on the guillotine that's ι -
i hardly think it was a common courtesy of the romans
to go all out spectacular for an added head
recliner upon reaching Golgotha:

     how † was actually a T - because that year
it was even cold in Jerusalem so extra firewood was
needed...
and once the deed was done you think that
they didn't use the crosses for fuel in the garrison?
i can just imagine the incense of blood soaked wood
enraging the nostrils of the centurions...

truly, as i were there: in ghost...
      
   ah... only yesterday i picked up a revised hunger
for *******:
hence the zahnschleifenliebe...
   because i have already buckled on loving her
by grinding my front teeth to the point
of chipping one of them...

teeth like butter-softness
   niho niho: no plural? how about
tooth is niho and teeth are nihi?
   so much for a people talking but not writing...
can you imagine: is the nouns became bankrupt
i.e. if someone forgot the name
of a name, so that the word mea - thing was conjured?

what's a waapa?          a boat? not a wa'apa?

oh 'a'ohe mea -              yesthing for nothing
that's ae'              a'ole        no yes no no yes yes no
oh nothing, nothing...

        'olu'olu 'a'ohe mea: sweet nothing -
for a something: kekahi mea...

tribunal of pirates and vagabond burping barbarians:
yes, no word for wig...
kāpiki - cabbage - kapusta in ****** -
who helped conjure up an anti-etymology
for the Hawaiians?      'ōlelo as distinct from
kanaka - a language but not the people...

   kai kanaka - sea people...

'ōmato               (potato)
                  'ūala         (tomato)        

potato toe: manamana wāwae 'ūala
although it is not an assurance to conjure a translation
in that order: and not toe potato...
which would imply: french fries, no?
chips...

            mahina: that is moon and machinery
maszyna - to imply the tides were settled in the minds
and the moon was the machine behind
the phenomenon?
i clearly must be looking at something akin
to cross pollination, etymologically speaking...

you take a word from greek and fuse it with
latin then sprinkle some german or dutch
onto it and you arrive at English...
   not always... greek for orthodoxy still intact
with words like etymology, lexicon and:
well obviously little differences from the original
but most still intact...

talofa! foliga fiafia!
that would be me, being dragged out of darkness
of bad dreams falling out of bed talking
to someone in my sleep...
don't ask me how or for that matter why:

                          is                                      is

two ises ensure that there isn't an isn't...
             or at least that's how it might feel for
a Japanese samu samu rai rai
    visiting these islands...
comparatively an Englishman in Lithuania...
or Latvia...
                      moderately compared cultural differences...
    how will
i ever return to those islands and that Lā

                 to the place where a syllable has meaning
or rather a noun status...
ther-                  thermometer...
one moment less: per tier of integer           mother's
ether...

                             Fern...   ꟻ labours with Theta at
taught thought fabulously... by speaking first...
then listening, then observing, finally scribbling
sound-encoding to reach meaning (:expansive)

because i had to watch ******* yesterday
  because pleasing myself using pictures of you is
like trying to scratch an itch that soon becomes
something either artistic or philosophical...
artistically philosophical: an aesthetic...
that's the meaning of aesthetics:  
                  
i perceive AIS -          eyes
    thes-pain                   thespian
                                              the theta i see...
a letter that became a cheese that became...
surely from the Medieval ages onwards
   it was well established that gold was not really worth
what it was supposedly worth...
since the end of the wooden wheel...
    rubber... rubber and salt... to preserve the meats
to give us culinary ambitions...
                        rubber, salt, morphine, love

and money: to get out of each other's way...
i like money as a concept and as a practicality...
to get out of each other's way...
     and yet to somehow make this life bearable...
money: as means of getting out of each other's way...

ah but still, love... that challenging aspect of life,
for a wish to not write about it,
yet still, unbearably writing about it,
covertly, like so.
A Freedom Feb 2020
'... script's data,
typography's dead man's memoir,
inking vowels
of a barren mind.'
~

— The End —