"unglamorous" poems
Pimple popping
Lathered deodorant
Awkward tampons
Hair in unwanted places
Drunken nights
Failed hangover cures
Flunked classes
Broken hearts
First kisses and first times
Rebounds
Hookups
Hickeys
Rushes of frustration
These are all
unglamorous occasions
Of a not so florescent
Adolescence
Jun 18, 2014
Jun 18, 2014 at 3:06 PM UTC
Shopping in discount stores
living the unglamorous life, that's me
It's not strife
but rife, with challenge and epiphany
telling me what I want to be
no matter what I see in me now
He talks to me like he's shopping for me
comparing me to these other females
must be making a lot of e-mails
I love your voice, I like your hair, great body
does he even care I feel like a product on the shelf
is he talking to me or somebody else and now
I'm in full blown obsession, no connection but Facebook
messenger tells about his session
and it wasn't with me, you see
What to do, I don't know, he cast the hook,
I wouldn't go just can't know what right
but this feels wrong when I got home
I opened the bomb, the wine and took a big slug
worked better than his cyber hug and
promises of massages
check my phone a million times a day
I'm as crazy as yesterday
It just lies dormant in the night
I can't fight
I check the phone a million times
Oh God, here it comes again
I don't remember when I was so confused
Should I have taken is invitation to go on that impromptu vacation?
Up with his family, how awkward can that be, what to do
I'd be ballin' baby. I can't afford it. I just have to ignore it
and turn off, turn down that voice in my head
that said: you must have him now
you can't survive on your own
you must belong to someone
but I'm just fine with no one
Dec 30, 2013
Dec 30, 2013 at 8:00 PM UTC
A tall elixir
Swirling flask
Unfinished liquid
Thoughts putrid
A shot of elixir
Drowning sorrow
Unglamorous color
Forgetful odor
Another elixir
Heavier, thicker
Unfettered desire
Desiring another
Anosher elishir
Heevy sluur
Unsobur effurt
Bluuring vishun...
Afae afgij
Jealk lli
Ggag..
...
Apr 14, 2014
Apr 14, 2014 at 11:50 AM UTC
When times are hard- as freezer doors or splintered dinosaur bones-
When times are hard and cold and sort of painful by their very touch
A short-term solution may be found
Unglamorous, unremarkable, but sound:
Submit to moderation.
Harder than heroic, searing want or hope
Undaunted or tragedy-
Submit to not-knowing-ness,
To water-filled gardens
Where you float among ferns, and small lights are arranged in your hair.
Submit to plodding, to avoiding the dark-lit streets,
To shedding dread desire for sparse morality
Submit to the temporary reprieve of going the known ways,
Of doing what's societally right, of fleeing the fire and the glory of the fight
Submit
To your better sense, hand your heart to your mind and
revel in the knowing that
You'll manage. It. Whatever it is that plagues you.
Submit to sensibility.
And you'll know in a while,
After the thorns and dust and glass is all gone that-
You can
Raise your head,
Straighten slumped shoulders,
Remove the knots from your ankles
And find
Gladness
The grass, the water, the sunlight.
Feb 19, 2013
Feb 19, 2013 at 2:02 PM UTC
He broke his neck thirty years ago
I break mine more with each
promise of keeping you in my life
but Ian Curtis is on my mind a lot,
grieving for souls I will never know.
Some of his songs are so sad,
like hearing the premature
snap of his bones
Cannot help but resent
how clever society is
to glamorize the unglamorous,
even I am aware
the flowers upon graves are not just for
aesthetics, but we are still always trying
to cover terrible tragedies
with beautiful things.
Am I just as guilty?
I cheat on you with him.
His spirit through my headphones,
hoped if I listen intently
the narrative changes.
purple marks on your neck
just that weekend you
taught me what a hickey was
and how they felt good
yours’ declare ownership,
not declarations of love.
You walk into art class,
purple painted across your throat.
If love could save Ian,
had I lived in the mid-seventies
he may very well have lived forever
and his throat painted by love,
rather than the bruises of a noose.
The letters I wrote you were in vain,
my mistake quoting those Smiths’
songs:
Morrissey is an *******
and so are you.
I still
am too scared to
wonder how far I am willing
to go
to reap the benefits of sorrow.
"New Dawn Fades"
tears into my heartstrings
feeling responsible in
the prevention of another
suicide
I grapple onto
what a savior complex was,
your dead father
the tracks on your arms made me cry
but I thought it was stupid.
It made me hate myself more
why could I not learn to undo
my drive to save anyone,
but myself
The phone call
where I broke up with
you and you
pretend to
overdose on the speaker
One of us had to grow up,
had to make it out alive
And I love you again,
every time Ian's ghost
sings Isolation.
And I leave you there,
sure, to end the album
after the final song.
Aug 9, 2021
Aug 9, 2021 at 10:31 PM UTC
SINS BENEATH VINCENT’S STARRY NIGHT
Ayad Izzet Gharbawi
A Drunken King wept over self-created sins
In his unglamorous life
The corrupt Wedding saddened
The thousand year-old Trees
Burdened by the Cynical Winds
Where Shy Priests
Doubted
Their edict’s worth
That they copied all their lives
The Mature ****** dreamed of lush meadows
Painted and imagined by the Quiet Madman
Where the Illiterates
Cursed aloud
At their colourful tears
That no one could decipher nor understand
As Panting Stars
Spoke
Of their daring homecoming
Scattered Women were venturing out at last
Unashamed to defy fear and threats from within
And Lovers awoke to their hypocrisy
Amidst Family Smiles
And the routinization of boredom
As Beggars of Humanity pleaded
Quietly
For Mercy
And no more abstractions
Distant Stars were swayed by Heavens
Troubled, once more, by us.
The Shining Hope shivers its warning for all hearts
To feel for themselves
In punishments they mentioned too often
Only for the Poor, the Lame and the Meek
In Unruly Nights soured in veiled darknesses
By the Anger of the Dying
Such crimes of the past were recalled
By the minds of the Cold Ones still ruling over you;
You Inheritors of a unique and particular grief
Where Colourless Eyes stare
At your simple
And Unanswered Passions
Yet, the pained and Insecure Citizen begs the
Starry Night to inspire
Fearing your Frightened ‘Self’
You search all the other Selves
As a Conversation is repeated again
In your evenings of darkening anxiety
The gates of weariness burn
As I fear to tell and speak and relate any longer.
Jan 16, 2010
Jan 16, 2010 at 7:53 AM UTC
Silent hill casts a shadow on the moon,
Even beauty has a dark side.
Pale face aloft in freckled night
Feeds me with random musings
As I meander along the quiet pasture.
Excavate the fertile earth and
There you’ll find sterile treasures
Outliving all that’s alive.
I stumble on my clumsiness and taste
The dirt on my tongue.
Strange how life’s ambrosia is so
Distasteful to its offspring.
Just like love, a cloying sweetness
That turns bitter over time, and
When it’s gone, an aftertaste dwells.
Still on the ground, I roll over to look
Upon the freckled night sky.
Fascinating how constellations
Are merely imposed order
On senseless disorder.
I bet the stars laugh at our attempt
To find reason where there is none.
And then there’s the moon,
Indiscriminately shining on even
The foulest of creatures, underserving
Of its generous light,
Although without the sun, it’d just
Be a tenebrous chunk of rock.
Alone, we’d be just as unglamorous.
Mar 13, 2016
Mar 13, 2016 at 2:46 PM UTC
Ecstatic in the sea breeze,
a magnanimous moment of
interloper pride ******* the day.
Uncoil—my heart, my chin,
my unglamorous abstinence
enforced by fear.
This is no lapse, but fury
and fortitude forging me
in the crucible of love.
Yet again I am up against it—
the stage of floating eyes and
overcooked feelings pawing
at my attention like
squids in a pool.
Ink and jelly in a room temperature soup
swirling and sloshing under
the authority of a rented room.
By gods, this time I’ll make it work—
plant leaves and blunderbusses
leaning against teal paint,
the sun really is on a fishhook.
Stand apart from me then and
judge the waters for what they are—
a storm too small to surface
in a sky too big to swallow.
I’m sweating in it
and the alarm clock is going off.
*bleet
bleet
bleet*
Too deep to turn back.
Too tired to go on.
This is where the end begins,
in the middle of it
with no ground at all.
Sep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025 at 7:47 PM UTC
when the celestial judges
organized and codified the
planetary laws, the moon
appeared online but
only in the month
of June
it seemed they,
the judges,
were literary bent,
and had an an
affection for
simplistic rhythms and rhymes
yet the moon,
feeling slighted,
demanded an audience,
asking for redress,
demanding a larger share of
the celestial apartment complex
"Why do the sun and stars
appear nightly,
and I am kept on ice
for eleven months?"
the august bodies debated,
orbits examined for
interstellar larger consequences,
and then concluded and
herein responded:
"Tho the sun appears daily,
it is dismissed and tucked away,
like a baby for a good night's sleep,
to survive its infernal heat
the stars, give light too,
a special twinkling,
but it is a cold, dark one,
that only arrives after
being in transit for
millions of miles,
thus exhausted,
they are many but minuscule,
and many invisible to the
untelescoped eye
But your wish will be granted
with conditions thus:
*"nightly you will appear,
and your beauty will be
magnificent, celebrated, and
duly poetically recorded
but for this boon, moon,
you will supply the gravitational
push and pull for poor cousin
Earth
drag its waters to and fro,
an exhausting job,
unglamorous, even by
Earth's inhabitants cursed
who will see you as
a plotter, meddler in their
global and planetary voyages
but like the sun,
your portion, but half,
like the stars, your light,
will be white, cold and hard,
but lacking in sparkle that
makes the stars so delightful
even your appearance nightly
will be occasional incomplete,
sometimes you will be quartered,
even halved, even slivered,
and once a year
the sun will eclipse your
entire lunar glory!"*
the moral of the story,
if you think moon and June,
make a good poetic rhyme,
you gonna end up
working a lot harder,
pushing and pulling,
dragging your best good stuff
from where the sun don't shine
Apr 27, 2014
Apr 27, 2014 at 8:24 AM UTC
She floats on the lake
Bikini top untied
Sipping a beer in one hand
Smoking a cigarette in the other
Talking to me
Sun in her eyes
Squinting into the sky
Her thick accent
An unglamorous moment
But **** she's never looked better
She makes everything look good
Perfect body and tan skin
I want her right there in the water
But I'm stuck there just watching her
Fantasy land at its best
She makes me feel like such a mess
Always keeps it interesting
There's never a dull moment
Her jokes, her dry humor
Are all the things I love about her
My heart races as she floats to me
She gives me a kiss
I'm stuck in that moment forever
The water is crystal clear
A beautiful sight to see
But fixated on her are my eyes
I'm completely mesmerized
My love
Jul 11, 2014
Jul 11, 2014 at 11:14 PM UTC
It was one of those places which,
We were instructed with stern tones
And the occasional smack to the ****
That we were not to go,
A place of childhood sing-song
(*River man, river man
He’ll sink his teeth right in your can*)
And, later, of clandestine beers and smokes,
Or furtive encounters
With steady sweethearts and short-term solutions.
He’d set up something akin to a lean-to
Hard by a reasonably well-sheltered bank,
One wall of rocky dirt, the other comprised of lumber
Which had been abandoned or purloined or somewhere in between,
And if you resided in that narrow niche
Where you were too old to be scared shitless of him,
And too young to dismiss him out of hand,
He was of a mind to accept a bit of company,
Possibly share a bit of somewhat-warm, store-brand soup,
Even a bit of coffee, if you’d developed the taste for it.
He’d been in the merchant marine, or so he claimed,
Driven there by the search for some constancy
He’d never been privy to in a land-locked world,
Figuring the ceaseless expanse of the ocean
And the regularity of shipboard routine the vessel to all that.
He’d been deeply disappointed, of course,
The waters a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of blues, grays, and purples,
Alternately hammock-smooth and Gothic furious,
All in nothing even mildly evocative of the regularity of the seasons,
And so, he intimated, he’d jumped ship in some unglamorous port,
Living on the run (though for how long was an open question,
And the whos and whys of his prospective captors
Not a subject that he nor his listeners were of a mind to broach)
But he’d never quite been able to shake the lure of the water,
And so he’d set up housekeeping by this particular stream,
Convinced the current held some epiphany, some augury
Which occasional suggested but never truly spoke to him
(*Can’t trust the water, and can’t trust the land,
And that hain’t left me much ‘n terms of other options,*
He was wont to cackle twice or thrice an hour.)
One day, before some of us were of a mind to see him leave,
He was gone, leaving no trace behind,
Perhaps run off by some officious sheriff’s deputy,
Perhaps by his own leave, searching for some river bed
Which spoke more sweetly, more distinctly,
Or perhaps he came to believe there was a third dwelling option
Somewhere on the banks of the jet stream its ownself.
Jan 5, 2017
Jan 5, 2017 at 9:54 AM UTC
Today I feel like a snail
who took forty years
to cross a road to find
that the other side was
the same. And you don't
want to deal with the rage
of a tired snail.
It is sad to find yours is
such an unglamorous totem.
Tomorrow I will feel
like an old philosopher.
I might even go as far
as to offer advise
(tiresome and languid),
and will talk about my
great and epic drift
through the great gray dessert.
And you will say,
here's a wise man,
without knowing that
everything was a mistake.
That it still is.
I warn you, I can change
expressions, seamlessly.
Remember this, cats can't
smile, they can laugh or
destroy it's world,
with the furious sorrow
and as slowly
as a tired mollusk.
And they will try.
Oct 11, 2017
Oct 11, 2017 at 10:43 AM UTC
It wasn't ***
that put me off.
My scalp itches
from being washed
too often.
It helps
keep the smell
off my mind.
May 21, 2017
May 21, 2017 at 11:55 AM UTC