Death Of An Angel
by Joseph Smith

I once knew a lady named
Misery
she lived in a damaged world
she calls to me in transparent dreams

a lonely star
outside
the closed universe

she was my twisted soul

long ago
she experienced
the darkest of
pain

beauty was something
she could not
believe

I once knew an angel named
Evil
she traveled like a
ghost into the shadows

her heart was dying for some form of
life

all seems balanced
now
the angel burns to
die

starkitty said:

And just to piss you off so early in the morning and put you in a foul mood for the rest of the day...

Tosshat.

starkitty said:

You're inventing words now? Can't use any old suffix, you know.

Coffee Maker


Sobriety kicks me out of half-slept sleep
again. Unbound and starved for a routine
that favors day, I'm drawn toward this machine —
the twin-globed, bubbling keep
of caffeine grants plastic-coated access to
achievement, ritual, speed. Which is all I need
these days — to watch the water, bead by bead
unyield itself and be drawn up into

each elementally alien ground, to give in.
It's almost selfless, brave (to me, at least,
it seems) as I mull over last night's pieced-
together bourbon-driven
dream, which concludes the process nuanced nightly:
we leave the bar, I take you (in my head)
to my near-empty apartment and empty bed.
Reversing cause and effect, I hold you tightly

and wait for bliss, for anything but regret.
Meanwhile, within my plastic odalisque
the water is disturbed enough to whisk
uptube and be beset
by the grounds, or is it the other way around —
the valence fluxes between subduer and
subdued, undoer and undone. I stand,
also propped on the counter, as things compound

without me and within. The torrid brew
ceases to bob and seethe, and with gravity's grace
(and changed) descends into the lower vase —
the final follow-through.
In vicarious absorption and half-awake,
I can only hover here and try not
to think of you, and grasp the steaming pot
from the maker that never makes mistakes.


Cecily Parks

On seeing the scan - Herbert Hemmings

The most insightful thought
i ever had, looking back,
occured at the tender age of five.
They should warn you when you
leave the amniotic sac:
"Brace yourself. I'm afraid you're alive."

ODE TO BROKEN THINGS

Pablo Neruda


Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
It's not my hands
or yours
It wasn't the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
It wasn't anything or anybody
It wasn't the wind
It wasn't the orange-colored noontime
Or night over the earth
It wasn't even the nose or the elbow
Or the hips getting bigger
or the ankle
or the air.
The plate broke, the lamp fell
All the flower pots tumbled over
one by one. That pot
which overflowed with scarlet
in the middle of October,
it got tired from all the violets
and another empty one
rolled round and round and round
all through winter
until it was only the powder
of a flowerpot,
a broken memory, shining dust.
And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold --
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway.

Cat's Dream
Pablo Neruda


How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings--
a series of burnt circles--
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger's great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.

Poppies in July
Sylvia Plath


Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker, I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloodied skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colourless. Colourless.

If, After I Die

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
mine.

I am easy to describe.
I lived like mad.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because
I never went blind.
Even hearing was to me never more than an
accompaniment of seeing.
I understood that things are real and all different from
each other;
I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.
To understand it with thinking would be to find them
all equal.

One day I felt sleepy like a child.
I closed my eyes and slept.
And by the way, I was only Nature's poet.




'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin.

this one always makes me cry, because my mother had it clipped from a magazine and posted on the refrigerator. the christmas after my mother's passing, my aunt had it calligraphied and gave it to me as a present.



Warning - When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

By Jenny Joseph






When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.



You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.



But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

starkitty said:

NCC2012 said:

thanks. it is still really, really hard.

the thing is, she never got old, and when she was alive i could never envision her getting old. she died at 42.

starkitty said:

That's rough. I know how it goes. My dad died at 60, but he didn't seem that old. He never got to retire from his job like he had planned. In fact, he went in to work the day before he died to just check up on things for what he probably thought was his one last time.

death sucks

we need a happy poem

Can Tie Shoes but Won't
– for Brendan Constantine


it said on his report card, five years old, the boy
so slung
against the river's current he was later lost
in his paper canoe, paddled
himself lost, or half-lost, or less lost than most, not
in the mid-river flotilla with all the other boats
fighting the main and churning current,
but instead along and beside and even under
the river's banks—the place of overhangs
and eddies, sloughs
and whirlpools, the shaded
place beneath the bug-brailled leaves,
the python-laden branches, the place
beneath the bank's cool clay, between the roots,
where the toothy creatures
cache their prey
for later. Did he travel always
on one side of the river? No.
How did he cross to the other side? Carefully,
cutting the current without fighting it,
giving up some distance to it, in order that,
just so,
the shades, the light, the slight un-
dulations of the river's bends, are changed,
with intention,
and for years, upstream, a lifetime,
this way, upstream he goes,
this way, upstream,
on his voyage.



Thomas Lux

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

We grow apart together.
You must be to blame.
For I have defined you by my desire,
and you have failed to achieve.
How dare you !
I gave you no permission to need.

Insight gleaned from your departure.
Frenzied scuttling abolition of
distance does not provide nearness.

I have become one of those
lonely people who wait by mailboxes
Condemned to isolated occupancy
by a failure
to exsight.

Deane P. Goodwin

i am going to write a pantoum tonight. i promised someone a poem, and that is my weapon of choice.

i have a feeling it will suck rocks.

here it is, the fruit of my labor.

i present to you my attempt at:


A Pantoum
by me


I sit at the keyboard ready to play
an instrument of sorts, one of words
my lofty visions of a creative type
silently spoken, infrequently heard

an instrument of sorts, one of words
connecting letters, meter and rhyme
silently spoken, infrequently heard
attempted again time after time

connecting letters, meter and rhyme
stringing the words arranging just so
attempted again time after time
constraints of format stymie the flow

stringing the words arranging just so
neither beautiful nor moving just plaintively plain
constraints of format stymie the flow
of words with desire to break from this rein

neither beautiful nor moving just plaintively plain
my lofty visions of a creative type
of words with desire to break from this rein
I sit at the keyboard ready to play.

starkitty said:

I like this.
Great use of words with a tight flow.
Good job.

This is one my poems I wrote quite a few years ago...

BLESSED EARTH

A breath of air
A lingering sigh
The times you're blessed to be alive

These things are the ground we walk upon each day
flowers in bloom we see along the way
The laugh of a kookaburra; the stare of a snake
the love of our beloved pets

Cherish the sun that shines on thier face
and cherish thier gentle, caring embrace
too many times we take life for granted
we walk past the flowers along the way
not stopping to realise these things are precious

Every waking moment
every glorious day we're blessed with
take note of what's around you
before it's taken away

crazyhorse said:

you are going to make my cheeks break from smiling. thank you crazyhorse. there is a strict format which i found maddening.

Natisse said:

true, true
thank you for sharing, natisse.

Blood by Melissa White (c) 2001

Crimson.
Its thickness
Spun in water
Washing through
My vains
Trapped within
The confinement
Of my flesh
And waiting…
Waiting in anticipation
For that sudden
Gash by a knife
Or broken
Wound.

Blood rushes
To my head
My hands,
My feet.

It is a substance
Of life
Blood
Is love
Is pain
Excruciating…

Blood is Blood
But not
In vain.

starkitty said:

what format is that?

crazyhorse said:

like this:

PANTOUM
(5 verse example)

A
B
C
D


B
E
D
F


E
G
F
H

G
I
H
J


I
C
J
A

the last stanza writes itself.

starkitty said:

what the hell is this?
afraid your gonna have to break it down lol.

crazyhorse said:

my bad, i gave you the cliff notes
each letter represents a line of the stanza (composed of 4 lines, also called a 'quatrain')

the second line of the first stanza becomes the first line of the second stanza
the last line of the first stanza becomes the third line of the second stanza, etc.

look at that pattern, and compare it with the poem i wrote

(now your head will ache like mine did)

and with that, i bid you sweet dreams.