"uselessly" poems
As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--
Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.
19.4k
I.
And my hair became too much
It overtook the walls
made its way into the office on the sixth floor
and then hung
like a dripping willow’s branches
over the desks
By the time they thought to find me
I’d already been wrapped up in a cocoon of brown hair
indistinguishable from the walls
that was now
also covered in the thick strands of undulated hair
II.
everything and everyone became consumed.
III.
In hairy chrysalis, the scissors uselessly
hung on some poor frantic pair of hands
forced into pupa
IV.
It was on the third day that the streets surrounding the corporate buildings were once again
populated with people, that a young woman in heels swore she heard a
faint choral singing coming from the 5th or 6th floor of a dreary grey building.
V.
everything cocooned
everyone consumed
all in pupa
VI.
During metamorphosis, a caterpillar digests itself leaving only behind imaginal discs
that shape it’s adult body.
everything becomes consumed.
Jun 28, 2018
Jun 28, 2018 at 12:05 PM UTC
I was sick of being a woman,
sick of the pain,
the irrelevant detail of ***
my own concavity
uselessly hungering
and emptier whenever it was filled,
and filled finally
by its own emptiness,
seeking the garden of solitude
instead of men.
The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.
Even when you arrived,
I tried to beat you
away with my sadness,
my cynical seductions,
and my trick of
turning a slave
into a master.
And all because
you made
my fingertips ache
and my eyes cross
in passion
that did not know its own name.
Bear, beast, lover
of the book of my body,
you turned my pages
and discovered
what was there
to be written
on the other side.
And now
I am blank
for you,
a tabula rasa
ready to be printed
with letters
in an undiscovered language
by the great press
of our love.
4.9k
Empty days, lonely nights
How i long to hold you in this painful life.
I'm the product of misery.
No, i'm not asking for you to save me
I guess i just miss your company.
Forever lonely.
Why doesn't this place seem like home to me?
I'm uselessly drifting through this beautiful nightmare.
Maybe i'm just scared..
Of what? Maybe myself.
Oh god this hurts like hell.
This mental state makes me want to yell.
Trying my hardest to stay strong,
Yet everything i do and say is wrong.
Constantly slipping into isolation,
I just want to change my situation.
Finding myself lost in my mind,
doing nothing but wasting precious time.
Always dreaming of a better life,
doing my best to avoid the knife.
If only i was better at standing alone.
Maybe then i could figure out my life and find my way home.
Too pre-occupied fantasizing about finding another,
to love, to trust and have a good time with one another.
I carry with me a damaged heart.
I'm trying not to fall apart.
So focused on trying to be a better me,
Still nothing is working can't you see?
I ache to find someone,
to have a better connection.
to travel the planet with a better sense of direction.
Feeling haunted by the demons in my mind and the ghosts of my past.
Still chasing a happiness that i hope will last.
I'm still trying to rid myself of the darkness that follows me.
Only to find that i'm fading away, almost completely.
Dec 18, 2013
Dec 18, 2013 at 1:40 PM UTC
The sad part is that most of us, writers,
are almost ashamed to say it out loud.
We do it like a bad habit we can't escape.
****** junkies with the leash around our necks.
Treat it like a disfigurement; our
malignant entries spread like cancer from
under our pathetic, hypocritical hands.
We're sad.
Depressed.
"Heart broken".
Angst ridden.
Jaded.
Coping.
Coping.
Learning to cope,
but often failing.
Stepping on each other;
a sea of cadavers with
no bottom, surface, or center.
Full of brilliance/ brighter than the sun.
Collectively, we are a diamond made from ****
A uselessly expensive commercial good,
nonetheless.
The next Bukowski will be a child molester,
or a sociopathic spree killer. Too bad
no one wants to be the great writer of course.
What greater shame could there be?
What bigger embarrassment could exist?
What insult and tragedy is more than being
a writer?
Apr 27, 2014
Apr 27, 2014 at 3:47 AM UTC
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive -- don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
And listen with deep emotion, but not
with whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen -- your final delectation -- to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
2.5k
I was asked to explain what I mean by
"Dead Inside"
Typically I pawn off a joking motion
waving my marionette arms
to hide the rabbit in the hat
I adequately nick-named misery
because it keeps me company.
But if you sawed me in half
I'm quite certain all you will find
inside is a silhouette of man
dancing around in a light box
doing the same fruitless jig over and over.
A couple of loose strands
and a few holes in the images
but the end is the beginning
and I am putting on a show for you all now.
The curtain is my mouth
strung so tight you'd think it was a smile
And the words I say spin round and round
not a genuine frown in sight.
The light may be on inside
but the picture never seems to change
day after day,
collect the pieces off the floor
get up,
fall in love,
trip over the same type of girl
have my heart shatter into pieces
fall back down on the side of the road
remember how uselessly alone I am;
rinse and repeat.
This is paper thin love
and see through expectations that will not fail.
And it doesn't matter which way you spin it.
Its A tragically bad silent comedy
that doesn't need a narrator to explain
Just how miserable the person inside really is.
My heart is just a silhouette of a man
and if you think you can put some tangibility
behind it and not have it shatter into 1000 pieces.
Congrats you too have joined the circus.
and spin round and round in my light box.
Oct 31, 2023
Oct 31, 2023 at 11:56 AM UTC
Hate and ridicule comes to the forefront. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot you see. Differing opinions must be silenced, that is just how it has to be. Hiding behind children used as human shields, to deflect attention from the problems that are all too real. Spreading lies and fomenting dissent, that is the mantra they live by everyday. Dissenting at the ideas of cutting a budget or project, that uselessly gives tax dollars away. Individualism is overrated, on government you must depend. If you dare to move off of the grid, you must be insane. A disease for the unwashed masses who walk around like a heard of Lemmings. Liberalism, the modern incarnation of Marxist communism.
Nov 17, 2016
Nov 17, 2016 at 1:21 PM UTC
If I listened to every advertisement
hollering through the static
of my cable-hooked television,
I'd have a mammoth bottle
of Hidden Valley Ranch
sitting with the ego-quenching sheen
of recommendation in my fridge,
a Weight Watchers membership
(it told me to join as soon as possible
with the speed of a steroid-devouring treadmill),
Children's Tylenol
(despite being situationally barren),
and a Bowflex-shaped elephant,
ivory tusks slumping uselessly in the corner.
My living room would be the fraternal twin
of the American Smithsonian,
a faux-genuine quilt
of our Founding Fathers'
present day descendants
draping over my popcorn ceiling.
I return to the latest
sacred cow in the flea store
cartel of Lifetime Movie heroines;
it's "Vengeful Vixens Sunday"
and Elizabeth Berkley shooting men
and stabbing women in the back
all while eating buckets of Ben and Jerry
and getting addicted to crystal ****
The dialogue is as freshly
packaged and slovenly edible
as the Minute Ready Late Night Dinner
with a cartoon grandma plastered on the logo,
all to remind you of down home,
or in the case of this Lifetime screenplay,
a time when the brain wasn't fully developed.
Same difference.
We all hide our guilty pleasures
as if our tolerance for the
secondhand existence of these favorites
were deemed malignant
by a cardboard kingdom
of young adult sophistication,
but I ask you:
who hasn't slipped into the comfort
of a mind turned to mush?
Apr 29, 2010
Apr 29, 2010 at 10:55 AM UTC
Put this matter with trowel and ***
Into the dark and fertile ground,
With each hit, he loosed the soil
A once happy man thou condemned to uselessly toil
His claws, cracked and broken shells
Jaundiced with the duty long days that did require
Lamed by grief and forced to work
Here, till the end of days, within this garden, this mire.
Deep does a ****** live here, past the clay and bedrock
Like the pride and valor and resolute spirit of the domineering ****
Or so her mien, it does beget
Or some other erroneous sentiment
That she, not he, were to bear this labor.
Within the ground, he did remember, in his spritely youth,
He planted, and thought none of, but a seed,
Into this verdant splendor, which bore that infernal ****
And, thence, thereof came a fruit,
Of malignity infinite,
All the while it poisoned the Virgin’s white and water’s pure,
As its eerie little spines proceeded to take root.
Her garments poised to emulate white, instead
The ****** to him, had lost her white
Or never had white at all,
The ****** to him, had lost her white,
To him, the ****** was dead.
The fruit and seed, effulgent and pretty, to those who saw them bloom
Attractive were they so to them, irresistible to behold
That they, to him with great chagrin, did immediately consume.
“But the ****** he cried. “The ****** has poisoned them!”
Yet they continued to eat.
“We do not believe you,” they replied, and slept ceaselessly on their feet.
One by one did they all collapse from the toxin of its juice.
The ****** watched and laughed, of caution was there no use.
Powerless and sullen, he stood, for remedy was far passed.
The ****** now regarded with delight,
Has he, poor, poor man, to tend to his blight.
The garden gone, its cleanliness perverted,
His words were ignored, and thrown wayside,
His admonition he so heatedly asserted,
The ****** her words never to be trusted
Had won over the people, whose homes she sought to entreat,
And with her rite, so treasured, so adored,
They enslaved and force him to his mire, to tend to the rag and filthy lands
Where he would remain with the garden
His words, his skin so like the sands
Sep 13, 2013
Sep 13, 2013 at 7:44 AM UTC
Why did you bring me here?
The sand is white with snow,
Over the wooden domes
The winter sea-winds blow—
There is no shelter near,
Come, let us go.
With foam of icy lace
The sea creeps up the sand,
The wind is like a hand
That strikes us in the face.
Doors that June set a-swing
Are bolted long ago;
We try them uselessly—
Alas, there cannot be
For us a second spring;
Come, let us go.
1.7k
She's a sultry one, I know
seducing me with words I've used before
but never felt the weight until they came
From fingers nimbly graceful as her' s
When I see her profile I smile
Knowing what her words will do
though she's a thousand miles away
she can whisper clear as day
Make me feel again all those things
I ran from and forgot (or tried to)
She reminds me that I am not
Pining alone, or uselessly
If written words were miles
and reading the same as traveling
I'd be at your front door by now
begging for one more verse
Dec 4, 2013
Dec 4, 2013 at 8:20 AM UTC
Sacrificial droves
wildly waving
antenna-mills,
charcoaled palms outstretched
merely feeble
attempts of withstanding poor decisions,
my decision
already calculated,
minute tongues warn
pleading wide-eyed,
muted by a dishwater gull
peg legged watching -
understanding with a single bulging eye.
My top buttoned suicide
finally undone,
shaky windswept fingers
childlike in efforts made,
those made to measure ambitions
superbly shined
befriended balconies,
that leap of faith
faith,
belief in my own boldness
stream uselessly in rivers
from numb sockets,
one single step..
White feather.
Oct 25, 2011
Oct 25, 2011 at 1:59 PM UTC
Compliments of unwarranted origin in my halo
Have the creatures running uselessly in contempt of one another
Two years of the dynasty have left,
The wreckage of a village.
Sky have you fallen lately?
What do you think about the invention of humanity?
Paper, lies, love, and things,
What has become of the flower society?
Thinking too much about the wrong issues
No need for there to be an Armageddon,
Have fun while you can, how you want.
Today there are the definitive and the restricted
Can there be a sense of well-being amongst us
No good will come from a perfect day,
In which we are all content.
Wires will cross
Fire will fly
Wind will blow
And insignificance will be annihilated.
So much for our own self-righteous nature,
We have no idea.
Nov 15, 2012
Nov 15, 2012 at 11:21 PM UTC
Can a broken heart,
be compared to a lily field,
where every stem a sword it wields,
their smiles sweet, their words bitter?
Can aching feet,
be compared to footprints in the sand,
from days of old and days of man,
where journeys traveled over yonder?
Can a hoarse voice,
be compared to howls of dark wolves,
cinnamon tasteless and not of cloves,
when taste buds are uselessly used?
Can red dry eyes,
be compared to blazing suns,
ones that do not walk, but do not run,
and never fly faster than the wind?
Can a senseless poem,
be compared to fickle hearts,
where it depends on a person's part
in their imagination?
Jan 8, 2019
Jan 8, 2019 at 10:15 PM UTC
***Too tired to fall asleep,
I stared at a vivid flickering screen
And forced myself to eat.
1:15 a.m to 4:45 a.m
The hours- I didn't notice them,
But asleep I almost fell.
I dragged myself into slumber
And into a trance I clambered,
The blinding darkness I remember.
I awoke moments later
Under my demons' satire,
Stuck in a crater.
Everything was a blur
Four walls were six saboteurs,
And colours astir.
All attempts to cry for help
And get away from a faint death knell,
Just shoved me deeper into my shell.
Uselessly trying to move around,
My gasps were so profound
And I could hear the deafening sound.
I tasted my own fear
And flung it with tears,
The end must have been near.
The agitation was intense
Sweat ran down by head
And negativity within me spread.
I was trapped inside myself,
To a gust of wind against my chest
I almost succumbed to be at rest.
And then I ran as fast as I could,
Although blind, I said I would
Escape this maddening noose.
Silenced screams were now heard
And out loud I said "cursed"
I was finally free from paralysis unheard.***
Aug 24, 2014
Aug 24, 2014 at 2:44 AM UTC
There are those ugly burdens of life and We are greatly overburdened with those Absurd,ugly,and sad pressures of life ... We try to overcome those ugly pressures Of life ,but all in vain and hopelessly .... Unless we are standing on a hard ground, Then all we do is useless and absurd anytime ... Life pressures us to fight back its atrocities,but All comes uselessly and all in vain anytime ... _____________________________________________________________
Apr 15, 2015
Apr 15, 2015 at 9:51 AM UTC
I am a traveler
I am a foreigner to myself
My smile is 50/50
and by this I mean that it is unsure
My eyes are undoubtedly truthful
and I am always looking for light in uselessly dark places
My hands are shaky yet steady
My confidence wavers
it comes and goes with the wind
My body is a creaky robotic shell that is always tired
I am incredibly indecisive
My mind is like the ocean
sometimes it is calm and clear
and others it is a raging storm in which I struggle to stay afloat
At night I look to the stars hoping to find a piece of myself
I am a strong believer in horoscopes
because I want to believe that the stars already know who I am
I am a traveler
and I wish to see the world
and I wish to meet myself.
Mar 19, 2016
Mar 19, 2016 at 12:32 AM UTC
On the high mountain,
there is no time, the watches --
tick on uselessly.
Aug 13, 2023
Aug 13, 2023 at 4:18 AM UTC
I'm starting to feel like
They don't matter.
Parents here and there
Strewn about uselessly.
Because all I really had
Was my mom.
And she's beginning to slip away too.
My words
Seeking support
Are trapped in
Smoked out throat
While she utters
Her own life,
Controlling
Conversation
And the car,
With wheel between her hands.
While she talks and talks about
A life I'm seldom
Interested in.
And yet I lend the support
Anyway,
Because she has dreams now
That need completion.
And there is barely
Any room for mine.
Jul 23, 2014
Jul 23, 2014 at 1:10 AM UTC
In the early mornings when the cloudy haze of the night hovers weakly over the earth, and the sun is hidden behind the great bundles in the sky, my eyes open to the stillness of the shadows, the junction between night and day. I exhale. My father's soft sighs can be heard through our thin, crumbling walls. My fingers slide over my bare legs and I curl up like a caterpillar, not ready to shed my layers of blankets and confront the stinging, cold air. My head feels heavy and empty at the same time--misty, as if the thick, morning fog had been ****** up into the space where my skull should be. My eyes are grainy and dry; my skin feels raw and cracked. I pull the cocoon tighter around my body, ready to sink back into my state of unconsciousness. Suddenly, his name is on the tip of my tongue, bitter, burning the insides of my mouth. I am pulled by my neck out of my reverie; uselessly, I struggle. They come to me in waves--the realization, the recognition, the understanding, the pain--rocking me while my body lies shriveled and numb.
It was a matter of time, I think.
I hate waking up to this.
Oct 22, 2013
Oct 22, 2013 at 7:45 PM UTC