"urbanity" poems
the bus poets
we are the modern day chimney sweeps,
the ***** black faced coal miners of the city,
digging up its grit, toasted with its spit,
the gone and forgotten elevator operators,
the anonymous substitutable,
still yet glimpsed occasionally,
grunts of urbanity
provoking a surprised
whaddya know!
once like the bison and the buffalo,
we were thousands,
word workers roaming the cities,
the intercity rural routes and the lithe greyhounds
across the land of the brave,
free in ways the
founders wanted us to be
us, the stubs and stuff,
harder working poor and lower cases
we were the bus poets,
sitting always in the back of the bus,
where the engines growls loudest,
seated in the - the most overheated
in winter time, so much so
we nearly disrobed,
and then come the summer,
we were blasted with a joking
hot reverie from the vents,
but vent, no, we did not!
no - we wrote and wrote of all we heard,
passion overheated by currents within and without,
recording and ordering the
snatches and the soliloquies of the passengers,
into poem swatches;
the goings on passing by,
the overheard histories,
glimpsed in milliseconds, eternity preserved,
inscribed in a cheap blue lined five & dime notebook,
for all eternity what the eyes
sighed and saw
books ever passed
onto the next generation in boxes from the supermarket,
attic labeled, then forgotten beside the outgrown toys
with our names writ indelible with the magic of
black markers
if you stumble upon a breathing scripter,
let them be, just observe,
as they, you,
these movers and bus shakers,
as they, observe you
tell your children,
you knew one in your youth,
then take them to the attic
retrieve your mother's and father's,
teach your children
how to read, how to see,
the ways of their forefathers,
the forsaken,
the bus poets.
Sep 29, 2017
Sep 29, 2017 at 7:53 AM UTC
I want to promise to build you a castle,
But there are no castles any more,
I want to make you my queen,
But the kingdoms are now countries,
I hoped to make you a house in the suburbs,
With fewer houses we move to urbanity,
Despite my complaints and empty ambitions,
Wherever life takes me, with you is my home.
Oct 15, 2016
Oct 15, 2016 at 12:24 AM UTC
It's made in me
The way of me
So loving & savory,
What do I speak of?
My dear instinctive bravery
Insatiably
A heart of gold engraved
in thee,
Solemnly a gift from God
given gracefully.
Questioned by many about
my dashing courage
Noble-minded behavior,
Intrepidity
Superman-like favor,
Saving a life with intent
& untapped wit
Comforting to the mind
So very major.
Put my life on the line
for someone in need
Even for animals, treated,
As loved ones indeed
Deference
Urbanity
It sits well as my creed,
So many think of me
as crazy, somewhat insane
For having such a desire
of valiance within my brain,
Why salt my game?
Because I'm so in tact
with life?
The beauty it holds?
Mettle with heartfelt
kindness to my delight?
I can't help it
I must protect & serve,
MINUS THE BADGE
Pains me to see a
damsel in distress
No tender heart deserves.
I know that every situation
is not my problem
Shouldn't concern me some
would say,
Like a man beating his wife
while the kids cry & stray
In daylight even
Never could I look away,
I'm sorry
I feel I must jump in to
save my quarry,
Who knows I may be
in over my head,
But I can care less at times
Must save the prey from the
predator, can't consume of spoiled
bread.
Whether its a car speeding
about to run over a baby
Or a relentless fire in a
building coursing to burn a lady,
With my mind attentive, laced
with uncontested audacity,
Boldness
Courtesy
Reverence
All out strong Tenacity,
I'm here, Im here...
Good guys are yet to be
seen
Daredevils that are truly
serene,
But no matter what
I'm here,
With my mind & Valor
Have no fear
A young soldier
is near,
At your service I'll be
around to help
Take a stand with me
Let me lend a hand for thee
With my beautiful, yet
Ravishing Gallantry....
©Michael P. Smith
Jul 4, 2012
Jul 4, 2012 at 9:36 AM UTC
Charlie and D sitting in a tree, Henry VIII comes along, chops down the tree.
part of me constantly and perversely anticipates
what Islam holds dear, the cult of the moon
rather than the sun - sleeping nudges of inquiry
and reminiscence of Freud rather than this constant
pulverisation of scientific safety-nets -
the sun and the scam of diet - Narcissus myth
all too apparent, too self-conscious to feed
the beauty, laboratory type beauty,
statistician's paradise - sun and skin cancer collective,
i'm not an Arab, and i never will be,
but this sort of weather and jet-stream excess isn't
exactly helping either - Einstein might have
saved you from exacting the thought process
(never experiment with it, never)
behind Newtonian cause & effect, but this ****
isn't going away, and you won't be exactly barnacle
jumping mad with Jack & Jill if you voice your
concerns; for all that urbanity the village life
is having a comeback - hello brick, hello tree,
hello tomorrow: the day of never-be -
the Spaniards had a second try at an inquisition
via Gibraltar - the Scots sailed to Brussels -
the village life is having a comeback -
the Americans are hoarding guns prior to enacting
scenes from Bastille Sq. with the guillotine -
they don't know it yet, but they're hoarding guns
to topple the government over - elsewhere
a bunch of Palestinians were throwing stones
at bullseyes for a fluffy toy in a theme park.
Jul 7, 2016
Jul 7, 2016 at 11:35 AM UTC
The human definition of humanity is becoming a conundrum-filled calamity.
Vivid memories of eclectic booming sounds continue bursting around veterans as they lose sanity.
Mothers work through their pregnancies as their children are born into a materialistically filled world of profanity.
Has the wheel of morality begun an uncontrollable spin in our growing urbanity, or is because of the religious wars we fight, the likes of Christianity?
A travesty amongst us all, but this pain brings an unorthodox form of healing, as we learn from our mistakes and fantasy.
We ******** band together, with our thoughts in groups, to determine a path back towards our morality.
We fight with vigor such as if we were the Roman General Antony.
These fruitless and segmented fights can make the matters worse no matter the strategy.
We must all wake up at once from our mindless love of insanity, and finally, throw to the wayside this world's cruel vanity.
Who or what will ignite the single uniting thought to spread instantly throughout, the thought that will bring peace to our mind, sanity.
Dec 13, 2016
Dec 13, 2016 at 4:45 PM UTC
Don't talk to me
Ye vanity
Cladding truth in urbanity
Expressions left to emojis
For Conversations we type
Reassuring through selfies
Relationships through swipes
Get drenched in rain
Get scorched in Sun
Quiver once in a while in pain
Drain out after a run
Get in a fight in real
Burst off of sorrow
Then you ll know what matters
It's today not tomorrow
Let go
Let go
O please
Let go
The veneer of sophistication
The hope of impression
Smiling through frustration
And short term-fad salvation
And if not
Never blame it on generation
For We took the turns
and We paved the path
We are here for what we chose
And we only ll be wondering at last
we always had a choice
Always...
Jul 2, 2017
Jul 2, 2017 at 7:26 AM UTC
*speckled cityscape compulsion
<>
it is 6:40am.
the ending credits roll on a Hannibal horror film
that I’ve seen many times.
but it’s just an old rerun, familiar deviltry,
slept through it thankfully
the kitchen window gives up a sunrise,
but it’s just an old rerun, familiar deviltry,
a streaking swath of burnt and bright,
so oft described, the color commentary
previously immortalized by better poets
than me, easy found elsewhere.
the speckled cityscape in this pre-awakened urbanity,
it is their moment, these red flashes, all about,
tall buildings chanting “stay away from me”
to you sleepy pilots, looking for a strip to safely land
in a tumbled jungled of obscene density.
still, they highlight against a river of deep, bright oranges,
burning surrounded by the most beauteous array of shades of blue,
compelled against my will to thankful write,
for gifts such as these cannot be so casually dismissed,
cannot be willfully ignored, to do so, denies our genetic commandments.
a hopeless, thankless task to ask of oneself.
the perhaps intrusive. Sunday, maybe the babies
will visit, macaroons, pre-halloween bags of candy bars,
at the ready, pre-opened by small, tall inner children for sensory testing.
Milk Duds, Heath Bars, Whopper malted ***** Hershey white chocolate,
checked by adults for safety and quality control.
all these I see, in realized eyes and whimsical musings,
in perfect silence, for the Sunday city morning
is worshiping the coming day in a church like silence,
where each patron fills in the empty sounds
with hymns of their own making...by moving their lips
in fervent unspokeness
the sky river reflects more modestly in the East River,
for a reflection is always a second best version.
30 minutes later the real and the apparition both,
disappeared, and a palest sheer blue, white streaked sky,
just an old rerun, familiar deviltry.
why is the sun rising
is so worshipped,
for there will never be a full day of
just sunrise colorations,
but the speckled reds still
a true color, still showing,
on perpetual guard duty,
bidding adieu to its
morning lovers,
until tomorrow,
in my city of lips.
sun. oct. 20 2019
Oct 20, 2019
Oct 20, 2019 at 8:21 AM UTC
this title has begrudgingly waited for some loving kindness, fulfillment-needy, since October of Two Thousand and Seventeen
which is not quite as long as the decades I have been waiting to
accumulate the words to provide us both, an inspired solution
my days are numbered
in decades, decals, varying lengths of hair,
belts with notches that ain’t reachable,
suits various, both too big and too small to fit,
the who who used to own them,
begrudgingly, writes this
city born and bred, with the pale skin needed to prove my urbanity, each day came unto me begrudgingly,
even, especially, the good ones
when I was ten and rode my bike from freedom to mystery,
and back again in a city that was ok, if you stayed out of its way
and knew the city’s vocabulary and its erogenous zones
when nothing come easy, when even the easy, when it comes, comes begrudgingly
when you think of love, and the next immediate thought is:
how great the cost - recalling too well,
the pain of childbirth and child rearing
and the staining, paining fluid is in perm-attendence,
that doesn’t ever fully departs and
is not never entirely stain-stick-removable,
and the children come ‘n go according to their schedule,
someone else’s vast eternal plan
life in the same apartment
where my parents died,
listening to the stories of joined lives,
listen to the sisters telling them
over and over to a stream of visitors
earned from and of a 98 year life,
given up willing but, begrudgingly as well.
the story-telling skill because of them,
my mist-matched parents who did ok
and their very best,
gifted us hyperbole innate genetic
and all of us now registered
tall tale tellers;
some write for a living,
some live to write,
some write to make themselves clearer,
after honestly confronting their subway reflection
words acquired bot ‘n sold,
they too are stains unerasable,
very always handy,
the one thing we shared, word skill,
was never at loss, words never held a grudge
no matter how long they waited to serve
this fact, begrudgingly confess;
all my-word skill was freely inherited...
and I hope it satisfied the title
and you, those that waited patiently but,
begrudgingly
Mar 2, 2018
Mar 2, 2018 at 4:00 PM UTC
i only wrote this as a genesis of urbanity; and a re-interpretation of the greek city-state, qualifying state to nation and ethnic exploitation; as London was Athens and Manchester was Sparta... but no Greece though!
i'm delusional?
and didn't
Edward Gein invent
the 20th century?
a ******* remnant
of rural life?
silence of the lamps,
rob zombie... manson...
is that etc. or ha ha as p.s.?
yeah yeah, Mudvayne's dig.
May 1, 2016
May 1, 2016 at 7:47 PM UTC
2023, after the rain at Black Rock,
already past Gerlach on County Road 34, north.
not far from Winnemucca, as the crow flies
- you know.
In the bottom of a no longer dry shallow lake.
The People of 10 Principles are dealing with weather.
I feel for the fearful, and pity them a bit,
but the world is in a novel state, bhering up
under the worth of eight billion plus of us,
all awishing
to leave the system behind, out grow the terminii,
for a time,
loose the future on the past, for a week,
with no choice of your own,
overriding the ten principles of the community.
Today, the dry lake
feels like a war zone, f'real
refugee reality chance, t'be with your self, to re-
imagine helplessness out of bounds,
with fidence, confess, the hermit swears
even fasting you can walk to Winnemucca, in three days.
It's eighty miles as the crow flies,
and all the waterholes are full this year.
But I got a pint of RSO and a box of toothpicks, so
I'd mud trod over to the nearest puddle,
and offer dabs to my neighbors.
This I'd call my gift, fret-less.
That's the essence of the whole experience.
I'd imagine.
Had I had the need to be radically included,
in an unsustainable urbanity exercise this year.
Sep 5, 2023
Sep 5, 2023 at 5:48 PM UTC
you would never say about a Kandinsky: where's
the Mondrian?
luckily we have enough information
about Goldberg's sardines,
without asking another poet (other than O'Hara)
to sniff out Billingsgate - and so too:
if Burroughs said: all writing limps behind painting
by 50 years - enough said,
hence came speedy Gonzales
with his shotgun and his canned paint...
and i know just as much as sardines in
see-through tins -
well: it was worth a joke,
someone was bound to **** into a champagne
bottle at some point, and celebrate:
in abstract - or to the point:
in concreto - ecce artifex!
at least enough
humility would be worth the same dosage -
specialisations are such:
demanding concepts as aboriginal
in anthropology -
likewise anthropological:
schizophrenics in urbanity - after all...
a concrete jungle - like any half-wit
and butt-naked in the Amazon...
applause for
comrade Gagarin and Laika -
and if Darwin wrote in
cyrilica - then it too would have been
Mohawk and Brain - salutations and applause -
and if ever in doubt:
call it versailles - to denote all forms of
luxury -
i know: versailles better hides luxury
than the hermitage -
or as King Duck could say
being a burden on the Vavel Mount -
even the Vavellian
dragon died from laughter, even though
he was given a sheep stuffed with sulphur -
and drank the Vistulla dry...
but only when King Quack was laid to rest:
and the volk - the naród said:
Katyń 1 - Smoleńsk 3...
and there was even
a composition by wojciech kilar.
so then... 50 years lagging?
disorientating? muddled, spaghetti loops?
well, as the introduction already mentions,
painters can't write - suddenly everything
has to have geometry!
any geometrical instrument
in an art's class is seen like a Sunni in Iran -
or a Buddhist, at a Bar Mitzvah:
boom-town slap-head -
choppy waters, brightly illuminated
by the polished
cranium sheen.
so why except a Mondrain from a Kandinsky
?!
what a brain-drain!
Jan 7, 2017
Jan 7, 2017 at 3:18 PM UTC
today i saw a woman who was tall
she walked with no apology at all
head and shoulders above the rest
her freakishness to test
her back was proud and straight
highly poised in her gait
she chose grace in her distinction
outstanding in unique perfection
sailing tall with urbanity
in a sea of ordinary humanity
i liked that!
May 19, 2018
May 19, 2018 at 3:14 AM UTC
Ushered from lips divine
are sweet symphonies -
potent in composition.
A flaxen breath wielded forth
to fissure the pillars of Babylon.
Her temperament quakes,
sending shivers across terrain
my frame stays staunchly rooted to.
I'm jolted conscious
by might to scar mountain stone,
a statue with the presence
to balance the weight of bearing.
Her pigment bleeds a bronzine hue,
every pore succulent with sun
from a land afar - dialect closer to home.
Our cultures synergise
in the smouldering *** of diverse urbanity;
surrendering to harmony in juxtaposition.
I wish us be, though I doubt my willing fruitful -
I'll swallow the bitterness of division,
just to manifest it true.
May 11, 2018
May 11, 2018 at 1:12 PM UTC
We voyaged with contented vigour,
not a second glimpse to the blackened moon.
Bodies numb, fallen stiff to the chill
beneath dim urbanity -
only the warmth of us
thawing glacial palms.
Fractured hearts ruminate,
filling scars where voids once evident.
Further the night wandered,
I embark its goading path -
tantalised in speech
from such copper-buttoned eyes;
steeped with stories
of a past torn from its flesh
and dressed to resemble me.
Our ghosts confide,
beckoned forth in rich exchange;
the currency of gilded tongues.
Stitched as testament to brick fabric,
where apparitions tucked rest;
those musty Shoreditch steps.
Jun 20, 2018
Jun 20, 2018 at 6:13 PM UTC