"whir" poems
- Listening doesn't always mean understanding
- Listening could mean getting lost in your own thought of tranquility
- Or even your own devastational whir
- Listening doesn't have to be with your ears
- Just the exhaustion of emptiness that outlines your skull;
- Or even the numbness that conquers every length from spine to external excellence of your mind;
- Gliding from one emotion to another could be the loudest transaction without making a single clamor;
- Listening doesn't always mean understanding
- But the utter perplexity of ones thoughts drowning in the sound of nothingness.
Jan 10, 2016
Jan 10, 2016 at 11:05 PM UTC
Feel empty in your post apocalyptic City of Angels,
Where not even your pets are real!
An electric android, a sheep or a frog,
The whir-flutter of micro-electrical wings of a butterfly.
Good, and so you ought.
Now grab the handles of your empathy box,
And in a shared virtual hallucination –
Feel: empathy, depression, pain, delusion and despair,
The outré myriad gifts of consciousness.
Billions of discombobulated and disconnected wrecks:
Adam's sons; Eve's daughters,
And among them simulations too,
Fakes! androids!
A phony circuit of implanted semi-conscious memories,
A hive of neural malaise!
Welcome to our world;
know how dead inside I am.
You, yes, you:
Need a pet to make you more complete?
Maybe you can afford
A Fake Fakir Flake like me who looks like Jude Law,
Sounds like Richard Burton,
And silently romances you like Rudolph Valentino.
Come and stick what’s left of your mind,
In here,
In hair,
Hear her:
har, har, har…
A box of lies...
A voice, Mercer's,
With texture from an age you neither lived in nor dared in:
Al Jerry's, a TV actor,
Droning on in pre-selected tones.
The real thing, the men, the women, the children - their animals -
Made in the wild, wild desert,
In the green pulsing savannah,
On the open crusted sea;
Now too, washed, choked, and drained,
Too many spliced and diced mutations,
Iterating your image:
The thing that was my heart,
My Child, now its imitation.
Oct 15, 2017
Oct 15, 2017 at 7:42 AM UTC
Only on me, the lonely one,
The unending stars of the night shine,
The stone fountain whispers its magic song,
To me alone, to me the lonely one
The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds
Move like dreams over the open countryside.
Neither house nor farmland,
Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me,
What is mine belongs to no one,
The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,
The frightening sea,
The bird whir of children at play,
The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.
The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine
the aristocratic groves of the past.
And no less, the luminous
Vault of heaven in the future is my home:
Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,
To gaze on the future of blessed men,
Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.
I find them all again, nobly transformed:
Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,
Shepherd and gardener, all of them
Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.
Only the poet is missing,
The lonely one who looks on,
The bearer of human longing, the pale image
Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world
Has no further need. Many garlands
Wilt on his grave,
But no one remembers him.
9.5k
Life is not a blur
It's a whirl
You know you're spinning
But there's no stopping it
The whir of the vortex
Is my White Noise
That only I can hear
And only I understand.
Jan 28, 2015
Jan 28, 2015 at 8:15 PM UTC
i.
monet's passion written in
whispering tears.
the still lake smoulders
in ripples, all shadows and smoke.
a dragonfly presses the air
into whir, memories in my
pocket saddled to fire.
ii.
the air murmurs with death-shouts.
is this to sink, deep in a dungeon
of opulent blue
or to shimmer, iridescent
like a moon-lamp, empress
of ocean green and river blue
beyond the stilling light.
iii.
this is a bed of decadence
drowned moment of golden fire
in the sipped leaves that trumpet
to the clouds, that this is their day to
die.
iv.
water lily, white light of the pond
following the drowning dark,
flower of drifting quiet,
flower of dream.
v.
root treading past
the stillness of dusk,
utter existence,
daughter of the moon,
daughter of the silence.
May 27, 2015
May 27, 2015 at 1:40 PM UTC
I awaken once more.
The loneliness of my mountain hovel a constant.
The walls embrace me in their warm silence.
The wind blows around me.
My container a bubble of stillness
Perched upon stone and earth.
With too many stories for one lifetime.
If you blink the bubble pops,
Shattering the illusion of safety and solitude.
In a second blink the perch is gone,
There is now an ocean.
Six blinks ago there was nothing.
For now i'm in between a blink and a dream,
Struggling to make sense of things
in a world where nobody closes their eyes.
Where creatures assign meaning to the meaningless.
I close my eyes.
The mind as real a world as any.
Where thoughts bring me warmth and
I listen...
Above the dull hum of electricity...
Above the whir of fans
Above the sounds of distant people whose purpose escapes me
Above the screaming of the cold wind...
Above the sirens of troubled folk...
Silence.
An inner silence.
I lie motionless
Observing.
I stare into infinity.
I open my eyes and stare into another.
My heart marks time to a third.
With this i'm reminded of my luck.
What a perspective I'm allowed!
From here alone I bare witness to three infinities.
Among these I die endlessly,
and am born again.
I smile at the thought of myself smiling,
Living lifetimes between breaths.
Jan 12, 2014
Jan 12, 2014 at 6:44 PM UTC
hand reaches under the pillow -
flick the switch, hear the whir
screen lights up
night passes swiftly as
jedi and sith battle in your hands
Sep 6, 2014
Sep 6, 2014 at 8:03 AM UTC
red airplane:
whir whir whir.
red airplane:
whir whir whir whir whir
over cliff
under sky
in the currents:
fly fly fly
ᶠˡʸ ᶠˡʸ ᶠˡʸ ᶠˡʸ
Oct 20, 2018
Oct 20, 2018 at 10:21 AM UTC
This is what animates me
The force to set the motion of my soul
Gears that grind, thoughts that whir, the sustenance of something holy.
I do not think I sprang from Adam’s Rib
I think I must have been struck into the ground like a stone
A thread of lightning from the leaden sky,
And the mechanics that rose after
Demanded fuel, demanded heat
And thus was born in the cooling core of me
This mad desire, this stumbling, ceaseless search
For words to light a fire in my head
For eyes to light a fire in my bones
For some weapon of beauty
Some flaming sword
A tool- nothing more-
To sift among the dust and grit of time
To stoke the embers and evoke a spark
Prodding, prospecting
As for gold
Searching for a remnant which still burns
Softly, feeble, buried but unquenched
I chase the fire
For it must always be:
It cannot die
But cannot be held
It is escaped and never captured,
Only felt and lost, an infinite second-
A running step to overtake itself.
Jan 30, 2018
Jan 30, 2018 at 4:01 PM UTC
~
late winter’s dusting,
on tarnished ores;
a dreamer’s seeds,
these rails once bore.
rain-washed colors,
on sun-warped steel;
their conjured hopes,
an age once real;
oxidized
by rust and time
blackened timbers,
no longer bind;
what still remains
are worn out ties,
a distant memory,
of centuries gone by,
now mere after-sighs.
structures standing,
but just by chance...
a gust may blow them down;
these buildings where
men’s dreams once danced,
now a ghost, this town.
though no soul is left inside,
still a body here resides.
so long ago
her carried goods,
these rails rode,
to distant homes,
built dreams of wood;
like dandelion wishes,
scattered... gone,
tracks going nowhere,
now a fading ode,
just another dusty song.
for advancing progress
never fails to leave
someone's dying dream behind.
~
*post script.
Oregon’s hills and back country hide these relics of a time when a nation’s spirit was fed by the sounds of industry, steel and steam, the whir of saws, and men calling, “timber”... long before the age of wood and rail were left in a saw-dusty bin of history by the sweeping hand of time. i could easily be persuaded that this change was for the best, yet this can't erase the longing sense, left beneath my breast... advances do not come without leaving something or someone behind.*
Mar 12, 2017
Mar 12, 2017 at 4:11 PM UTC
Hummingbird heart flutters in your throat.
It's like having someone squeeze your lungs slowly.
It must be what dying feels like,
Hummingbird heart.
You know how their wings beat so fast and hard,
How you only see the blur?
Hummingbird heart,
It HURTS to be so fast inside.
Whirring like a machine out of control, overheating,
Friction fire in your throat,
Tears escaping bare and raw.
It hurts to be so vicious, like a runaway train with sparks flying.
Hummingbird heart,
Stuck on the other side of glass, pounding, pounding to get out.
Hummingbird heart, faster, faster.
A balloon about to burst.
Whirring, spinning, shivering.
Hummingbird heart,
Nowhere to run.
Hummingbird heart,
Nothing to be done.
Hummingbird heart,
Hemmed in, stuck fast, immobilized.
Hummingbird heart,
Speeding up, frantic, painful.
Hummingbird heart,
You don't have long.
Feb 4, 2013
Feb 4, 2013 at 9:21 PM UTC
My Best Friend
It's cliche to say I'm in love with my best friend,
Or to say that she's my soul mate.
But those are the only words humanly possible to describe it.
I can tell her anything
Everything
Whenever
Whatever.
If I have a random thought at two in the morning
And I wake her up,
She won't be mad.
She's half awake but she listens. She'll tell me it's okay
Hold me until I fall asleep,
Wait until she hears my steady breaths
Wait until I stop shifting.
It's so intimate in those moments.
When there's nothing around us but the soft whir of the A/C and the warmth of her love.
Or when she's crying in her room and the only words she can muster are apologies for things she didn't do and can't control.
And I sit,
Soothing
Repeating
Whispering
The only words that calm her down.
She knows them well.
I sit with her,
Sometimes unsure of what to do,
Doing the only thing I know.
And wait.
Calmly,
Patiently,
Understandingly.
I wait until it subsides.
And I wipe the tears gently from her eyes.
Push her hair out of her face,
Kiss her sweaty forehead,
And whisper lightly in her ear
Everything is alright.
Letting her know
I love her,
And I will always be here for her.
For she is my best friend
And my soulmate.
-1:30 a.m. K.E.
Jul 21, 2016
Jul 21, 2016 at 1:34 AM UTC
hummingbird boy
seeking
hummingbird girl
(seeking only a long summertime of hum
sipping dark red flowers and then some)
summer hummingbird
hummingbird hummingbird
hummingbird unfurls
hummingbird whirs
hummingbird twirls
twirling hummingbird
twirl twirl hummingbird
hummingbird whirls
whirling hummingbird
whirl whirl hummingbird
hummingbird pearls
pearls of hummingbird
pearl hummingbird pearl
humming hummingbird
hum hum hummingbird
hummingbird hummingbird
humming hummingbird
hummingbird bird hums
hum hummingbird hum
fuming hummingbird
fume fume hummingbird
hummingbird fumes
watching... waiting
for any hummingbird girl
humming hummingbird
hummingbird summer
Heard hummingbird’s whir
Within a bright summer day
A whir... now... heart beats
© 2019 Jim Davis
Aug 23, 2019
Aug 23, 2019 at 11:14 AM UTC
black bee
head first in a
hibiscus flower
waxy pollen beads
dabbled down
its gleaming back
foraging done
it shimmies out
to spy the next
allurement
darting and hovering
as it chooses its mark
close enough
to feel its pulsing whir
breeze the hair
on my arm
I hover too
allured
and unfurled
before turning to dart
through this
shimmering world
Tom Spencer © 2018
Aug 24, 2018
Aug 24, 2018 at 7:03 AM UTC
Many thousand glittering motes
Crowd forward greedily together
In trembling circles.
Extravagantly carousing away
For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,
They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,
Shivering with joy against death.
While kingdoms, sunk into ruin,
Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered
Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,
Have never known so fierce a dancing.
3.3k
Annabelle does sit at play,
In her usual, cheery way.
She does not worry, nor does she fret,
She hasn’t reason to be scared yet.
Then, the seizure overtakes her,
Perhaps caused by a noise, an innocent whir.
“Mom, it’s happening”, she cries,
With her hands she covers her eyes.
“Annabelle, Annabelle, ‘twill all be fine,”
We calmly say, with deep fear inside.
We knew that this was epilepsy,
I wished it wasn’t her, but me.
But she endured the pain and strife,
Now a part of her daily life.
She was strong of heart and head,
Even in her hospital bed.
After a minute, the nausea stops,
And our level of fear gradually drops.
Annabelle returns to her lovely self,
But we know that more seizures will take this sweet, young elf.
Aug 10, 2015
Aug 10, 2015 at 12:41 PM UTC
the weight of the days,
weeks, months, years,
crush me
and all i can see
is the tiresome monotony
sound, speak, repeat
click clack of the keyboard
strum of guitar
whir of the milk i steam
metal pitcher, pull the shot
latte's made
and studying
biology, trigonometry, literature
then off to the real world
a piece of paper, i qualify
to live my life
work forty hours a week
just like before
but a desk,
papers, a phone number,
and pens with my name engraved...
i feel each of these days to come
and i don't want
any of them.
Dec 13, 2013
Dec 13, 2013 at 3:38 AM UTC
Trill of beak into birch. Dawn spooks
the graveyard into silence. A heart
hardens at God’s withered finger reaching
but not reached for. I trim the hedges
and the whir of weed-eater disturbs
a nest of yellow jackets into tornado,
dust devil, of translucent wings and sting.
I walk among the dead three times a week.
I am learning their language. They relearn
the mundanity of white noise above
and quietly forget, quietly forgive.
This hill is the crest on a wave of coffins,
each one a boat through the world below.
Submerged in a bloodshot morning
I listen to a woodpecker in its throes
of building a home out of the depths of bark.
In the chill, the soft fog rolling, it pecks
and it knocks. The doors to these lives
long closed, I hush. I do not believe God
will visit these grounds to reclaim his clay:
I plant flowers in it between the plots,
each name engraved of marble a blank stare.
The flash of red flushes from budding branches
and I return to work. No one answers.
I relearn the dead’s language, their silence,
relearn every day how to repair stillness.
Apr 22, 2016
Apr 22, 2016 at 12:38 PM UTC
having decided that your duty is to bring music
and a little bit of danger to the lifeless streets
of suburbia, you draw yourself up as a rebel with a cause,
hold your arms out like the spirals of the milky way,
sending the glowing children congregating around you
into a feverish whirl, because space is curved
and so are the suburbs you traversed across to bring them here,
winding through hills and streets to conduct
this sermon on a mount, so even the things that
appear to move straight are really spinning around.
you have stolen your father’s turntable,
and his old records, and his oversized coat,
and while the sunset begins to stain things
in a golden light, you put the needle
on the vinyl and open old wounds
while the only voice you have ever loved
claws its way out of the box and into
the grooves of the sky, making the stars
scratch and whir, and time instead
settles into the beats, breaks its lineage,
and begins to, like everything, spin.
Sep 4, 2012
Sep 4, 2012 at 1:47 AM UTC
When I think back to the past, my memories seem to blur together as if I have spent twenty one years on a non-stop merry-go-round. Ups and downs, too much to take in at once, the people you love only a splotch in your spinning, ever-changing field of vision. You wonder how long they’ll stay, leaning over the metal railing separating them from you; you wonder if they’ll call out to you until they become hoarse…but no one stays for long.
You think it’s fun and harmless until the carousel stops and you realize you’re the only one left. You clamber off the platform in a drunken stagger and wait for your mind, still caught up in the whimsical whir of charisma and carelessness, to catch up with reality. Eventually your thoughts slow and your vision steadies. Everything comes into focus. It seems eerily quiet compared to the cacophony of conversation and carnival music that was swirling and intertwining in the air just minutes ago.
Now there’s silence and you’re left to contemplate your past…and your future. This is the reality check, the wakeup call that sends so many adolescents into a panic; an early mid-life crisis if you will. Twenty one years spent so quickly, so carelessly…only eighty more to go.
And you can only wonder, “How will I waste those?”
Apr 28, 2012
Apr 28, 2012 at 10:08 PM UTC
mom betrays us.
headlights into the night
& up the breakneck boulevard bluff overlooking town and terminus.
she brings his heart in a ziploc bag,
an offering
to that old burnt-out oak.
[husband\father\corpse]
front porch blood trails forever. she
claims self-defense and the camera-eyes caramelize her
fame & fortune & stepdaddies & book deals & ziploc pb&js & dead dog omens.
when did the heartache begin?
heir\son\brother\body
racing car ****** and fluxed up the boulevard in a ritual reach for daddy and the oak.
the girls are waiting. one two three, seeds.
brakes sabotaged. he
bursts into death, a molten ball of mazda.
father and son laugh there on the brim of here and hereafter.
apparitions uncoiled.
[home movies]
where mercury avenue ends
the woods begin.
& those woods are evil, an eldritch place, she laughs.
even the indians wouldn’t bury their dead there.
america.
caught between the whir of spokes and windshields reflecting
sky and skin, the blue hue
of television flickering on the hands of a family.
grandsons conjure grandmaster demons
on the ply of their treefort high.
the heart of grandma in a ziploc bag.
jupiter and saturn are in conjunction,
twelve past midnight on a tuesday in september.
a school night.
[the babysitter brings over an unlabeled video tape, says its scary]
the children watch.
slumber party screams and pb&js.
ghouls blunted by pungent neighborhood inertia.
son, a ghost returned in rhythm and electronics,
hungry for pizza and pure vengeance.
Oct 26, 2015
Oct 26, 2015 at 12:32 AM UTC
64
Some Rainbow—coming from the Fair!
Some Vision of the World Cashmere—
I confidently see!
Or else a Peacock’s purple Train
Feather by feather—on the plain
Fritters itself away!
The dreamy Butterflies bestir!
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune!
From some old Fortress on the sun
Baronial Bees—march—one by one—
In murmuring platoon!
The Robins stand as thick today
As flakes of snow stood yesterday—
On fence—and Roof—and Twig!
The Orchis binds her feather on
For her old lover—Don the Sun!
Revisiting the Bog!
Without Commander! Countless! Still!
The Regiments of Wood and Hill
In bright detachment stand!
Behold! Whose Multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas—
Or what Circassian Land?
2.7k
Amber drips from the 60’s-style lamps
on two end tables.
Brassy-orange and bulbous,
they illuminate the tangled tracks.
The light spills onto the floor
like heavy freight abandoning its car.
It spawns the locomotive shadow
cast by my grandmother’s sunken-in couch.
I nestle myself snug between the pillows,
dense and flattened by years of Sundays.
Sundays that bring my father
close to his brother, not a brother at all.
I peer over the edge
and heave a hushed “all aboard.”
Grandma sleeps to unwind
the day’s knot of exhaustion.
Each bone-bleach white fiber frays
from the chemotherapy that robs
her gnarled hands of their strength.
This one-way ticket marks the end of a journey
of a once well-oiled machine.
The exhales of a CSX
spout its peppery breath out in opaque puffs.
I am a conductor, tearing the ticket
of tonight’s traveler.
Rising to my bare feet now,
I sink into the cushion like wet sand.
The train thrusts and in a single bound,
I leap from the ledge and leave my lone passenger.
The cars whir and hum alongside me.
Deafening metallic wind rusts the edge of the rug.
I’m still waiting for her return,
and in denial that it was her last train.
Sep 23, 2013
Sep 23, 2013 at 3:38 PM UTC
Under this canopy
of dark
gleaming stars
I now sit
allow my body
to take residence
in the aura
of my own
glowing
let thoughts
of reason
slowly unravel
until they
become
one
long
thread
connecting my
mind but
releasing it
to the air
Molecules, like
the tiniest of crystals,
gently whir
energetically
about me
in almost
invisible stirrings
letting the power
of energy centers
take over:
Red,
for my root
for I am
tethered
to this earth
Orange, for
the passion
so strong
and truly knowing
my own worth
Yellow, for
my gut,
instincts open
and a-light
expanding into
universes, broadening
my sight
Then my heart
washed through and through
in shades of green
its own incandescence
filled with verdant,
fiery sheens
It beats a lantern
of vitality
in this ocean of pain
sending a beacon in
the darkness
helping to break old,
patterns
prompt them to
snap like rusty chains
Here it pumps in growth of
leafy, budding light
Guiding my spirit
in ripeness full and bright
I rise up
into the
indigo-turquoise
of my throat
as words burst forth
in surges,
in the salty froth
of ocean spirals
they float,
get pulled by
mysterious urges
Like waterfall mist
just kissing
the tips of eyelash
flickers
these words that
have the power
to calm
or make my blood
run quicker
And then:
the deep purple
of my crown
that tapers into
a shimmering white
and I know
I can now
receive myself,
calm, in queenly
presence of mind
of spirit
in my highest
form of
light
Jul 5, 2016
Jul 5, 2016 at 3:39 AM UTC