A poem you wrote or like?

Post Reply New Topic

THE BREAKFAST MOUSE

There is a mouse
Inside my house
Who comes outside to see.
When he comes out
I look at him
And he looks at me.

With his teeth
He mines my wall
To make his living room
And hall.
My architecture,
No conjecture,
For his pragmatic taste.
My house is just a warmer hole
To make his Winter living space
Where Summer always seems to be.
When he comes out
I look at him
And he looks at me.

The round small eyes
To take in facts
Like shiny headed ball top tacks
Regard me with but little fear.
Just let me sneeze -
He'll disappear.
But sometimes,
When I'm drinking tea,
Then he comes out.
I look at him,
And he looks at me.

Since he's the guest
And I'm the host
I sometimes offer him
Some toast
Which he accepts most gratefully.
And as he eats
I look at him,
And, he looks at me.

I do not mind,
In my house
A single solitary mouse.
But it happens frequently
Mice start their own
Community.
I cast a worried look at him,
And he looks at me.

If he brings a girlfriend home
With her suitcase, brush and comb,
To have a family,
Soon every nook and every cranny
Will fill with kids and aunts and granny!
Frankly, that's a bit too many.
Nervously, I look at him
And he looks at me.

If he over-multiplies
He'll fill the walls
With small mouse cries.
They'll gaze at me,
Near and far,
Eyes like
Russian caviar.
They'll drill my walls
Like Swiss cheese
Admitting in
The Winter breeze
And we'll cough and gasp and sneeze!
This is what I could foresee.
Panicking, I look at him
And he looks at me.

Toast in paw,
He looks at me
Trusting in humanity,
Gnawing very steadily,
Extending friendship readily.
"Oh well," I think,
"I'm sure he's single.
Let him stay and hang his shingle.
Allow this fellow to exist.
Perhaps he's a misogynist !"
My house is nice, we both agree.
I smile at him.
He grins at me.

My house is like the Earth,
You see.
There's room for him
And room for me.
But we must plan
Most carefully
So space for both of us
Is free.
I at my chair, he in his hole
Can make it very comfortably.
I wipe my mouth,
He scrubs his nose.
I nod my head to him, and he
Shows his tail to me.

Luv it. Most ppl are freaked at by mice, I think they rule.

"Drinking Alone by Moonlight" by Li Bai

A pot of wine in the flower garden,
but no friends to drink with me.
So I raise my cup to the bright moon
and to my shadow, which makes us three,
but the moon won't drink
and my shadow just creeps about my heels.
Yet in your company, moon and shadow,
I have a wild time till spring dies out.
I sing and the moon shudders.
My shadow staggers when I dance.
We have our fun while I can stand
then drift apart when I fall asleep.
Let's share this empty journey often
and meet again in the milky river of stars.


A man after my own heart

THE JANITAUR

There came a time, at last, for the race of man
To pack itself into a huge tin can
And, puffing plasma, set out for the stars.
With a sidelong glance at Mars they fled
From off their planet, which they'd made dead.
For a million years they'd picnicked on those grounds,
Then left them, bleak with blacks and browns
Of ragged rocks and rotting wrecks of trees and stinks
And oozing slimes and burning fogs smoke out of chinks.
Off to find another place on which to plant the human race.
Three quarters of a century it took to far Centaurus.
A multitude of winking beer cans marked their daily trail,
And stubbed out butts and bottles; a cracked recording
Of the Anvil Chorus. They'd scribbled on the firmament
With several hundred million miles of toilet paper
In jagged lines across their spoor of ion vapour,
And tastefully distributed along their run
Were gobs of dog and catshit by the ton.
Four hundred trillion cockroach corpses
Tumbled in a cometary tail
To advertise man's glory
In departure from his sun.

On planet four, Centaurus Alpha, lived a race of crystals.
Pristine, cubic, pyramid, cylindrical, prismatic,
Airborne, groundbased, and aquatic. How they shone
And twinkled in the sun as they rolled across the stones
Of their tesselated highways, threaded
'Round their crystal flowers
Reflecting intersecting rays of light
Connecting glassy towers.
Catching, tossing, juggling light beams just for fun -
But then...their huge reflectors duly noted,
Since they had been vacuum coated,
The approaching garbage complex fleeing from Earth's sun.
Facets flashed with fright and horror
At this disgusting Earth explorer
Come to desecrate their purity,
Violate their clarity, security,
Rain detritus down on everyone.
So, with haste and hyperspacial radio
The crystals sent a frantic call to Scorpio,
To the Cosmic Cleaner Consultation Center
Complaining of the coming filth fomenter.
"Earth," they screamed, "has done a flit.
And now is wildly flinging s**t!
Frankly, we are in a snit.
By your oath, you must stop it!"

And the Center answered, "Cool it kid,
We'll make it quit."


In Scorpio there is a place between the stars,
Stuck out in space, a place with bars
Which tight entombs a monster out of death and doom.
When the center acted on the call to banish
Earth's star ship and make it vanish,
It initiated mechanisms to enforce the ostracism
By directing cataclysm of the very fabric
Of the geodesic of its trace.
One parsec tall colossal doors on this place
Parted to divide and free the thing they'd kept inside.
It took six months to open wide at speeds FTL
And wake the beast that snoozed inside this convoluted shell.
The Janitaur pricked up its ears,
Wiped sleep from off its sensors,
It yawned a yawn and belched a belch
That squelched three nearby suns
And turned then into meteors
The size of hot cross buns.

"Janitaur," the Center spoke to now evoke
An action in this thing it woke,
"You are assigned to launch yourself
And search and find, eliminate
A new distress. Sector five, quadrant eight
Is the place you must address.
A steel ship out of Sol contains
All that now remains of humanity.
And with pandemic, systematic
Quite erratic antisanity
They've trashed their Earth, despised its worth,
And now they've quit their native sun
To litter up another one.
So..sic 'em baby, bite their tails
And knock their blocks right off the rails!"

At this command, the Janitaur unrolled its lacy wings
Which spanned out to a million miles, composed of cosmic strings.
Its flashing eyes - two neutron stars,
Pulsed out with spinning beams
With evil glances, left and right, from out of horrid dreams.
Grinning wide gravitic tide, its mouth a large black hole,
Each wicked tooth, bereft of ruth, a pointed monopole.
On winds of stellar fields it soared in hyperspacial mode
And gathered speed in looping glides and gyrals, so it rode
Swooping down galactic spirals hewing to its plan
To intercept and countervail the garbage can of man.
It gobbled moons like salted nuts
And sailed through stellar clouds
As cosmic dust streamed off its wings
In trailing ragged shrouds.

At sector five, quadrant eight, the Janitaur soon sighted
Where Earth's ship had left its trail
And thoroughly had blighted
The calm sterility of space.
With its black hole, the Janitaur
Swept clean the dirty place.
But this act could not console
The fearful driving force
That held it to its destiny in its destructive role.
At once, the human ship appeared,
The monster twisted, swerved and veered
To watch in fascination
The Earth ship unfailingly perform its aberration.
Spewing out with gobbets, with gigatons of garbage:
Apple cores and orange peels and leaves of rotten cabbage,
Worn out scraps of rubber heels,
Corroded chunks of rusty steels,
Dented trays from TV meals
And mashed up cars with wiggly wheels.

It flapped its wings and moved in close.
So much garbage made it savage,
Lachrymose and bellicose.
Confused, bemused, enthused by so much mess
It all induced internal stress.
It curled, it twirled, it whirled, became delirious,
And swooped in flopping manic arcs
Exploding out in corruscate displays
Initiating strange atom decays.
Bright beams of ions, neutrons, quarks
Flashed and fizzled, squirting sparks.
The edge of its event horizon twitched.
The space around the Janitaur became bewitched
With garbage boundlessly enriched.
It rippled out gravitic tongues
To sweep debris at all degrees
And would have laughed if it had lungs.
But these wild enthusiasms
Convulsed in waves and jerks and spasms
Causing cracks, fissures, chasms
In its black collapsar core.
Into itself it deeply plunged
And was, peculiarly, expunged

From this known universe of time and space.
And so, garbage, all of it,
Dogshit, catshit, mainly BS,
As before, and ever more,
Was the savior of the human race.

Great works, Sand!

Here is something, I wrote. It would need a melody, but it works as poem as well until it has one:

These hours

If the world is playing a dubious game
which for my species makes me turn red in shame
every day it goes by a different name,
you know...
And the world will change at the strike of a clock
these are the secrets, which I have to unlock
Everyone just seems to go with the flock,
not me.

I want to be
less confined, less in need
and from this problem freed.

If the life is not in the way it should be
if the rest of the world is threatening to me
and no one knows what the score should be, I know.
And the world seems to change at the drop of a name
but the way that you're feeling will remain the same
and it all seems to be the most pointless game,
to me

I want to be
less confined, less in need
and from this problem freed.

Here's something I just came up with now. Before you read it... I'm not depressed or hurting anyone. I was just playing with random words that came out of my head.

~ ~ ~

"Nothing More Than Memory"

Dripping through the atmospheric
Pressures I wind through your heart.
Seeming to dry after you drown
Only to regain my sea.

It's my torture that I show you,
And you see, 'your majesty',
That you can't control what's sacred.
Worship sorrow, still you die.

Screams from your simple ignorance
Seeing fate close as it should.
Red drops, rooftops. Rain falls gently.
But the flood comes; Noah's dead.

Your Earth crumbles as you wanted.
See what your poisoning says.
Your life's fallen and your flesh is
Nothing more than memory now.

PASSAGE

My mind is waves curled with wind,
Is smoke that twists and flares,
Is leaves that tumble in a dance
To flapping slapping airs.
But when the wind has gone away
And smoke hangs up like string
And leaves lie still in still embrace
Nor moves not anything,

And water sits as flat as glass
And holds the blue eyed sky,
Then I am gone and never been.
There is no eye nor I.

BUG BLUES

I happened on an arthropod,
A jointed legged fellow,
Who sang a tragic little song
Which ranged from shriek to bellow.
It glared at me with facet eyes.
It gnashed its sideways jaws.
More threatening, I'd say,
Than many mother-in -laws.
"I had a lovely love," it sang,
"Six legs of sculptured form
Would make Brancusi grit his teeth
Or drown in chloroform.
Her thorax glittered like a gem,
Dark green with streaks of yellow.
Emotions went all loop-de-loop
In me, a simple fellow.
Behind, her convex abdomen
Promised me for eggs.
Ten thousand babies, could she make
With sixty thousand legs.
Four transparent wings she had
For flights profound, profane.
They glowed with spectral iridescence -
Enchanted cellophane!
But then an evil bee flew by
And saw her as a morsel.
It flexed its pincers as it swooped
And grappled her by her dorsal.
Off it flew! I stood transfixed.
My love it stole away.
I swore revenge on all its tribe.
They will regret that day.
So now," he sang, "I stalk the land
Through grasses and through trees.
I am the great bee bopper
Because I bop the bees."

PUK-A-PUK

Puk-a puk the sajint say,
Do puk-a-puk when I do.
An’ we scrunch in bunch
On truck an’ sajint is who
Make front from all, he jump
An’ jump we too an’ run an’ squat
An’ wait an’ sajint he make fist he pump
An’ run we too an’ come thing house
An’ sajint finger make he point an’ inside do we go
An’ ha we laugh, make we ha ha when break
We glass an’ break we walls ha ha
An there we see thing wife hide
An’ thing baybee. Sagint he say puk-a puk
An’ guns we take an’ puk-a-puk thing wife
She scrunch floor down an’ too baybee.
An’ red is floor an’ thing baybee is squash
An’ insides come like snake with blood
An’ mix with thing wife red an’ thing he come
An’ howl and scream an’ we make puk-a-puk.
Now thing he too on floor an’ red an’ sagint he say puk-a-puk
An’ puk-a-puk we do. So ha say sajint, ha ha ha
An’ ha ha ha we do. An’ sajint he say good, is good.
But now is baybee blood on shoe,
An’ sajint say my shoe must shine
An’ so I wash my shoe from blood
An’ now my shoe is fine.

That Was the First Day & We Never Forgot It
by Matthea Harvey

Our questions started small: why was the radio warm when we came home, why did the souffle fall not once but thrice? At noon the sun shone as per usual, but there were moon-glints on the garbage lids. On the train rain began to fall among the silver poles and onto our heads—we didn’t see the man in the corner clutching a rosebush, couldn’t know that its roots were remembering. That was the first day & we never forgot it, never forgot anything ever again. Within minutes the minimalists had all gone mad. Graffiti artists grumbled, carried whitewash with them. The neighbor’s obstinate child chequers my lawn with small white squares— Polaroids she’s taken & hurled over the hedge. The cardinals hop backwards from boxwood to boxwood. Today I ducked under the tent-flap of an abandoned bigtop & watched elephants swell from their tracks in the sawdust. I remembered the acrobats & they remembered their nets. But what of the tightrope walker tiptoeing to the supermarket, the clown who can’t seem to get his face clean? Sweet one not beside me holding last year’s cotton candy, the past is sticking fast. The beaches are sprouting fossil upon fossil & last night at the opera, the spotlight wouldn’t stay still. These are the rules I adhere to—one painting per museum, dinner one day, dessert the next. I wish I could see just you.

RETREAT

They spoke once of
The broken edge
Where world and sky
Made meeting
In catastrophe.
Where seas fell down
In steady roar
Into the sky,
Or pits of Hell.
What happened there
No one could tell.
No one had seen
Or cared to see
This horrific mystery.
When Magellan
Sought to find
This birthplace of infinity,
The Earth had sealed
Unto itself.
Grand horror fell
Back into the mind.

Once there were
Great man-shaped things
That lit the stars
And ate the moon
And rolled the Sun
Across the sky.
They shook the earth
And pissed the rain
And laughed with thunder
And disdain
At mankind’s loss
And silly gain.
They told when
To plant and sing
And fear and die
And everything.
But, somehow,
Upon looking close
They proved far
Too bellicose.
The rules are calmer now,
It seems.
They’ve tumbled back
Into our dreams.

One God, at times,
Is still up there
Behind the stars
Somehow, somewhere.
He fusses on morality
And fiddles with
Our destiny,
But seems, most times,
If will is free,
Existing inconsistently.
His eyes are red,
His thoughts are tired.
His beard as white as snow.
The ovens in his antique Hell
Are burning very low.
The World, I fear,
Will soon dismiss
This Father of
Immortal bliss.

There is no longer
Any spoor
Of Moon creatures
Of Cavour,
And Mars has turned
To rocky dust.
Barsoom, it seems,
Is a bust.
And so the monsters
File away.
Locally
They’ve had their day.

But out beyond
Centaurus lies
The monsters
With their death-ray eyes.
There, around alien fires,
The spooks and gods
And monsters stalk.
The gods strum softly
On their lyres
While things
With twisty pseudopods
Drip acid slime and talk
In garbled yowls,
Soprano howls,
Of starships come
All filled with men,
That monsters reign
Supreme again.

Edgar Allen Poe you see, is my Ancestor.

So here is my favorite: "(silence falls on)Mecca's walls" by Robert E Howard

Silence falls on Mecca's walls
and true believers turn to stone
a granite wind from out the east
bears the rattle of bone on bone
and to the harlot of the priest
comes one no man has ever known

The Black Stars fall on Mecca's wall
the red stars gem the pallid night
the yellow stars are cloaked in grey
but Ammon-Hotep's stars are white
who weaves a web to hold at bay
the castled king of Mekmets light

Darkness falls on Mecca's walls
the crescents glimmer in the gloom
along the cornices and groins
the scorpion weaves her trail of doom
a woman bears her pulsing loins
to one within a shadowed room

The stardust falls on Mecca's walls
the batwings flash in Mekmets face
the lonely fanes rise black and stark
what brought what shape
from what strange face
across the gulf of utter dark
to span the void of cosmic space?

Here's a poem I wrote and I really like


The people turn in multicolored smears and their eyes start to blur
Addicted to speed talking - speed-walking - speed being
Completely covered with makeup and jewelry
Will they ever learn the true secret of life?

The child giggles as she’s chased around the playground
Oblivious to the spikes lying ahead
Her pigtails bounce against all those who hate
But eventually she’ll grow tired
And the hand of reality will touch her

People have forgotten the golden road
Where silliness is praised and harsh ways are banned
Worries drift away as you skip along
But you will eventually be forced to walk the cemented streets
Unsheltered from the rain, the dull Grey surrounds you
You can never go back

Anybody want to comment on my poem?

The Rainbow Bridge poem is both sad and touching. I can't read it without getting a major lump in my throat.

Shortly after Stephen Hawking came up with the idea of Hawking radiation - that black holes do radiate, thus losing mass - it was assumed by many physicists that since we can know nothing of the interior conditions of a black hole, the radiation must be ultimately randomized - heat. Hawking maintained that since the conditions are unpredictable, the radiation is similarly unpredictable - "it could be heat. It could be light. It could be a television set. It could be the collected works of Proust in ten leather-bound volumes." (I believe that Hawking has since rechecked his math, and changed his mind about the nature of Hawking radiation, but that was the idea at the time, at least.) This prompted Michael Bishop to pen "For the Lady of a Physicist", a poem which appeared in the Jerry Pournelle-edited collection Black Holes, and which went on to win the Rhysling Award in 1979.

If I with her could only join
In rapturous dance, loin to loin,
Deep space itself would soon discern
Galactic rhythm in our burn.
Our bodies stars, our debts all void,
Then we would waltz, and, thus employed,
Inflate with megacosmic thrust,
Through night, and death, and sifting dust.
Godlike lovers, we would hang
Beyond the cosmos, whose Big Bang,
All these mad millennia past,
Is but a popgun to our slow blast.
And, as we reel in raw elan,
Pulsing plasma in vast pavane,
We would shame the Pleiades,
Relume the Magellanic Seas,
Deliver all our Milky Way
(Ionic flux too fierce to stay)
In supernova, and so rehearse
Our own expanding universe.

But my small body is no star,
Albeit something similar,
A blind pool vacuuming into it
All the lambency it's not fit
To redirect and render strife.
The woman I would take to wife
Sees only blackness in my eyes,
Rapacious ebon, hungry skies,
An O-gape gravid with desire
To aggrandize myself in fire.
And so her light sweeps down the hole
That is the maelstrom of my soul.

Therefore, I have become to her
A dark, entropic murderer
Whose chiefest virtue is his pull.
Now, while my strength is at its full,
Let me crush her to my embrace,
Collapse her will, and show my face.
With her my Beatrician guide,
We'll tunnel with the thermal tide
Into the arms of Betelgeuse,
With Quasar sets and Marcel Proust
Emergent with us, glory-bound,
Detritus of God's Lost-and-Found.

Thus, though we cannot create light
From love, yet we can vanquish night.