Poetry

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I have noticed a dearth of poetry in this forum, and hope to stimulate the sharing of our creative works! Anyone who writes poetry can post their works here, and hopefully provide constructive criticism for the works of others. On that note, here is one of mine!


The Siren’s Call
One day, asleep, I heard the siren’s call
Enticing me, a tune beyond compare
A sign, a vision, myself to enthrall
An odyssey to this land, I would fare
A beacon in my sight that I must reach
A message in the Fates’ astute design
My destiny, inscrutable, they teach
Their plans a woven web of our lives’ lines
Beyond the paling edges of what’s known
I meekly look with new dawn’s wondering eyes
On boundaries which wondrous light has shown
Beliefs are shaken in this new land’s rise
Now to this land of wonder, I draw near
This dreaming new reality sincere

not bad. i might not use "wonder" twice so close to each other.

here's one of mine that's been published:

You Be the Judge


He says he’s not cautious.

He never lets the gas tank go below half full.

He drives five miles per hour under the speed limit.

He keeps the checkbook and the registry in separate rooms.

He shreds EVERYTHING.

He’s healthy and he has a will, jeez Louise.

He always sleeps on it before he sends correspondence or finishes a poem.

He never leaves without a check of the kitchen for plugged-in appliances.

He turns the doorknob after every locking to make sure the door is REALLY locked.

He cries in objection to me offering a ride to someone who won’t fit in my seatbelts.

He won’t let me wangle out of a painful biopsy. Who knows what could be missed?

He says he’s not cautious.

xena sophia. i gave you feedback. can i have some?

Sorry for the delay.

I really like your use of repetition of the first and last lines, it emphasizes the point that the subject makes, which the speaker is refuting. I also enjoy your not-quite stream-of-consciousness style. It makes the reflections of the speaker on the subject sound more authentic. I am a bit confused, though, about the necessity of the capitalization of "EVERYTHING".



Bibliophile
The letters flow before me on the page
Their forms concealing lovely second sight,
A dance of hope and joy and sin and rage
All flowing, one to next, perfect delights.
Escape into a world beyond your reach
Refuge beyond the call of the mundane,
Another life with new lessons to teach
Outside normality’s repressed domain.
In knowing characters you come to see
Yourself in new and unbiased aspect,
The literary world will set you free
It’s cultivated wisdom to collect.
For one of bibliophilic tendency,
Imagination easily flies free.

i love how the rhymes flow naturally. i identify with the theme of the poem. i've been the world over by book. you say it so well.

here's one of mine just for fun.

HE PREFERS VANILLA


He prefers vanilla, that favorite of the bourgeois masses.

His other tastes run to the finer things: classical music, fine poetry, theatre.

He would have come by a love for exquisite chocolate honestly;

his mother enjoyed all things chocolate.

I feed him two dark chocolate kisses daily for his health.

He eats them without complaint, but

his choice would be that blander pleasant-enough colorless flavor,

a good complement to pungent earthy brown chocolate, but lacking

that je ne sais quoi to stand alone.

Who ever heard of coating a strawberry in vanilla?

Who woos with it?

Chocolate is the sine qua non of a treat.

Wow, I like all the poems posted thus far. You guys seem really talented!
Heres one I did a long time ago. Its not very good, but I only did it for fun.


Love is so brittle, so tight,
And no matter what I do
It never fits right.
Here it’s too pointed,
There it’s too bright,
And no matter what I do
It never fits right.

Its always so perplexing,
And really quite vexing
That love that I find
It never quite entwines
‘Round my heart or my soul
And always seems to roll
Down the gutter away from me.

Oh, I’ve known love
From my mother, and my father
And God above.
But really it’s quite chilling
That no matter my deep drilling,
Love remains an enigma
And a blasted sticking stigma
Upon my heart and my soul and my time.

Blast it.

Perhaps I’m to bumpy
Or my heart is too jumpy
To truly appreciate the value of love.
But instead of angel choir,
When ere’ I feel desire
It surrounds my soul like a wire
Till I fear I shall expire
And my body burned on a pyre
While love goes dancing round!

Mercy!

Perhaps I should run? Yes, what a plan!
I shall never be caught by any blasted man!
My heart will be uncluttered
And its depths so deeply shuttered
That no matter what words are uttered
I will never let love in.

Hah!

Oh dear, oh gracious,
It all too damned suspicious,
For my heart is jumping,
Bumping
Blast it all, it’s thumping
And I fear it is something,
Much akin to love!

Oh, God no!

Fire, murder! It can’t go any further
For my dears it’s like a girder
That is falling on my head!
Oh dear, how dire, I think I am dead
For my heart is thumping madly
And my breathe is speeding badly
I feel like I would gladly
Much rather die!

Oh, the horror!

Help, it’s got me, I cannot get away!
It’s sunk its claws,
It’s sweet little jaws
Right into my heart!
I fear that I have fallen
And no matter my desperate calling
My blasted, smitten heart
Is tearing itself apart as it follows that wee monster
Called love!

Ugh.

Love is not brittle, not tight,
And no matter how I struggle
It finally fits right.
It’s by no means too pointed,
But it’s certainly bright,
And no matter how I struggle
It fits quite right!

It really disintigrates towards the end, but again i did it for fun, in like half an hour. I was sixteen when I wrote it, I think. Anyway, oppinions, advice? and sorry its so long.....

^ Personally, I love it! You personify love in a poignantly perky sort of way and it quickly descends into sonnet-like bouts that pose interesting questions. It's catchy and has a good sort of meter/pattern running through it!

I wrote this a couple of hours ago and it's just totally insane and stream-of-consciousness and can't really be considered a poem, but I was just so pissed I figured I needed to get this out in the anonymous open. (And while I am pretty crazy, I might also defend myself by adding that I'm sick and it's rendered me a bit hysterical, lol.)

Doesn't help that this is my first post, not the best introduction, but for whatever reason I wanted to find a good autism website to specifically post this particular insane-poem-rant on, although of course I plan on being an active member too from now on, haha.



Realty

It’s not so easy to own it.
You either feel too much, and of the wrong thing at that, or not enough.
Some strait-laced and lined pattern across my life
(It’s not so much that we see patterns that aren’t there; patterns are the ones to hallucinate us.)
Asperger’s, high-functioning autism, whatever exactly this is.
The little judgments.

I always thought it was trite to say you thought you knew someone and it turned out you didn’t.
But now I get it,
It’s like sentential satiation or prosopagnosia, and the little pet theories on which you based your life
And tried to feel around for something
(Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and bumbling half-dead in the ashen nothing
Taste of blood from what you’d coughed up.)
“She’s maybe a little…different. That’s one of the reasons I roomed with her in the first place.
I wanted to protect her, I guess.”
(The. Little. f*****g. Judgments.)

I see myself in hoary screens and look at my bent, keening, submissive, lost posture.
The giant hands doing all the wrong things to prove to myself that I’m straight.
I dress femme and it makes me happy sometimes in other ways too –
The mall has an unironic comfort; say “blah blah capitalism blah” but
The white Xeropolis brightness and nebulae of colors is more than what we’ve
Constructed it to be.

Anyway, it’s no use. I’m a husk of someone appearing in the form of an awkward autistic
Lesbian with rickets and sometimes pretty hair.
The slightly deep voice that’s the absolute essence of something – not even self-consciousness,
Exactly,
But something deep-seated, as if everything had been beaten out of me years ago.
Sometimes I wish that idea would occur to people (if the factive statement before was still
Ambiguous, none of those things have happened to me,
And what a fetid, monstrous wish it is anyway.)

“Now you’re just being really, really, stupid.” (Shit-eating tone that I fear more than death.)
It’s slow and maudlin and prepared and me and the opposite of me.
We have the same smile (and maybe there’s still hope).

The guy in poetry class who (maybe) had a crush on me
And brought me cough medicine/drops and then there were some
Kinds of assorted pills at the bottom of the bag, like mouse droppings,
And I remember (maybe) melodramatically thinking that this is a metaphor for my life.
Who and what to trust and he bought all this stuff and what is it
And it’s a paradox because I can’t do anything on my own,
I need to be “protected,” “protected…”
I have no interest in either trusting or not trusting this particular crusader-for-whatever.
(Maybe he’s like me, maybe he’s a face and a world of true limerence,
Maybe he’s familiarity…)

In the end I throw them out because my mom thinks I should.
Could have overdosed, there was enough, cliché-hey.
And I was sort of a b***h to him too
(Accidentally, of course, I commit enough faux-pas-gaffes that way
Without adding to it by pretending I know a damn thing).
I texted him, included was "sorry for being uptight,"
something meant to sound tongue-in-cheek about "pedestrian drama."
No s**t.

(My roommate who also thinks I’m weird plays Ed Sheeran on acoustic guitar
And it almost makes me cry since of course I’m vulnerable now
And she has no idea. No idea.
And as for you, boy, you dodged some monstrous-yet-gutted-yet-nothing bullet.
Thanks for doing whatever it was you did. Bringing me whatever it was you brought.)



All I can say is that I feel a lot better now. Heh.

to autistic belle: cute. and it's optimistic and that's what sells. mine are autobiographical. is this? if so, good for you.

hecaebe - reminds me of lawrence ferlinghetti in "a coney island of the mind". i didn't understand all the vocabulary, but i get the overall confusion and the gratitude for a small, even if flawed, act of kindness.

welcome to WP.

Oh, thanks! I love checking out new poets and must admit that I usually flock to the ones whose style is the closest to mine (albeit usually much better in terms of the actual content), plus "Coney Island of the Mind" is such a striking, rich title! And yeah, definitely in the habit of choosing words I favor sound-wise or for the meanings I make up for them (rather than the words that actually make sense). "Xeropolis" is a great example, it doesn't fit and has nothing to do with malls but I just love the word! I really need to invest a bit more time and practice finding words that fit and hopefully are cool visually/aurally too. But yeah, this recent poem's just kind of an angry clusterfreak overall, I might save a few of the lines if I ever revise it but that'd be about it. x)

I really like what you've achieved with your poem! It balances the broad and the specific really well and seems to be a sort of treatise almost. I love the idea of vanilla as just a complement and not something one could woo someone with, something that amplifies other tastes but means nothing and has no identity on its own. So the fact that the character likes it speaks volumes in a subtle way. And I think the tone is great, relaying all this sophisticated and romantic imagery but staying objective and telling this guy's story. I find myself wanting to know more about him! It all seems symbolic in a way I really love - he could have been perfectly high-brow and was raised that way, and people are trying to impose it upon him with good intentions, but he prefers a certain blandness like a necessary empty canvas. (Slant rhyme, I'm a badass now, guys.) Really cool!

(EDIT: Whoops, I didn't realize you had another poem posted until just now, I'll take a look at it!)

Hecaebe: Thank you! And you wrote that poem just now? Wow
cathylynn: Thanks. I never thought about selling poetry, can you actually do that? And no, its not really autobiographical. Just my imagination

humane nature
 
bright as night, dark as day
a burning wind, with fires that freze
a crystal tree, with a lost way
a clear fog, with deadly ease
 
a score to settle, with the light
a garden dead, with end of snow
a darkness grows, with fear of night
a nature lost, with start of sorrow
 
in the end, we have won
we alone own now roam the world
 but the price for killing life?
a dead rock, open to the sun
and a slow death, humanities end of strife

I love all your poems, they are very creative. Heres something I wrote for my wife some time ago.

A Pot of Gold.

You make me laugh
You make me cry
You are the distant star that meets the eye

You are my strength
My weakest side
The force behind the ocean tides

And when I sleep
You’re in my dreams
The silent flow of mountain streams

You are my life
My best friend
A pot of gold at rainbows end...

That would make a fantastic song!
I wrote this in high school.

"The Edge"

Oh, damn.
I've hit the edge.
There's nowhere else to go.
And after all this time,
I'd always thought there'd be more
But after all this time,
There's nowhere else to go.
I've hit the edge.
Oh, damn.

I Have shared poetry here on occasion. I liked Siren's Call. It was lovely. Human Nature was definitely interesting =) I did not have the attention span to read the others. I will hit them later.

Here is one of mine:

This one is a sort of play on words

I had a hole
The whole world fell through
And a hole field
Where a whole lot of nothing grew

And this one is sort of a metaphorical comparison between humans and flowers

Flowers speak in silence
Brilliance is all they know
Like rain only knows
How to fall into the earth
Humans are like no other
They love and hate altogether
Surgical Cruelty an art
We have come to perfect
While Flowers have their beauty
And flowing storms their might
We have the words to wound each other
More so than swords and arms