30 Poems in 30 Days

[4degrees]

20-12

let the words free
capricious and un rhyming
feathery floating
on some distant wind
bend the bars wider
enough for prose to pass
their liberation
and your own are one
double negatives do not
always produce a positive,
and vice versa
my vice is a verse
befogged because
my vision is still not clear.

 

[StepStransky]

1-9

For
the ice
outside stays
perfect. A week ago
you'd have never guessed
the burning at the centre, the
private grief at loss unknown, that
there was anything to lose in the first place.
A single crack could be the top of a slippery slope.

It is extraordinary how no-one seems to notice, particularly
in the morning, when there is a slight melting in the two corners.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-7 Valentine's Heart

There is a slurry sound there
just there every so often in the pump
of my blood through my body round and round
like a ride with little cars but there
in one place the track narrows. Few
can pass there. You have to get
out of the cart but you can see
the exposed roots and nestled within
some bit of red jelly that spasms
dances for each of the letters of your name.

 

[StepStransky]

1-10

For R

From across the tables we sometimes sit at, I have
seen you scratch at dry skin drawn tight, laugh off
the band-aid over the vein, dismiss
our enquiries. Days at home
are not an option, you add. When we speak,
your voice sings to me, as it always did.
We made the mistake of thinking
that maybe it wasn't quite so bad.

I struggle to hold in a single thought
the good which you have given, your kiss
to the lives of children who have no-one; nothing.
I have lost count of the smiles
you have thrown them, even when they are unable
to catch. When K asked you straight, "How long?" you smiled.
And answered her.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-8 haiku for a tea lover

sugar in earl grey
shocks my lover who distracts
himself with my breasts

OOPS should be Senryu. Ah well.

 

[4degrees]

20-13

my lucky thirteen


lucky like a friday
or a lover, my other better
half, having to master some
pre planned expansion
of alternate transension
lift us all up before
thirteen rounds of disaster
plant us all back in
the ground.

 

[StepStransky]

1-11

Free, in digits fierce within the cloud,
words define close pictures in my head:
the form in which we love, in which we exist.

This corner of the room where we exist,
between two walls which meet is formed the cloud:
in the space within I push my head.

Words between us fall upon my head.
Together, in their shower, we exist:
we think of skin and touch within our cloud.

The cloud is in my head, where we exist.

 

[4degrees]

20-14

you make
that small part of me
poke out, red and angry
like a pulse, it throbs
and flows with the strain
and when i push you open
like big soft scissors
planting need within heat
-your slick excitement consumes me wholly
when ecstacy meets evil
every back-wrenching and
fist-clenching thrust
-rammed with a fucking freight train of force
still i never am inside
you deeply enough

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-9 POV Persian Rug

Water seeps into the roll, duct tape
waisting the middle, as the body spins

us down against seaweed and other men's
dropped burdens. The dead girl twirls
inside my sleeve of fine knots, spiraling pod
to the dark feet first, bare and pale and stiffening

below a rising breath of petals.

 

[StepStransky]

1-12

So,
here we are again, back down
from the usual ten per cent
to the one per cent minimum that covers the
it's-for-yous and the
don't-foget-to-turn-the-heat-offs.
When the morning goodbye gets dropped,
it's officially serious.

I won't moan, then, about my crappy day today.
I won't mention the guy going off the
rails who seems to think it's my
job to shield his temper.
I won't mention the near-impossible case
given to me because, "Hey, Step,
you have such great people skills." Yeah, thanks.
I won't mention the woman who shouted
across the table at me
during the meeting I skipped lunch for
or the news that, this morning,
an angel finally admitted
she was just too sick to come to work.
I won't mention any of these things because,
let's face it,
that other nine per cent never got filled
with this sort of stuff anyway.

But it's funny:
when we hit the one per cent again, always
there will be one of those days
or weeks that slaps me. Perhaps
I'm being told that ten per cent isn't
such a deficit after all; perhaps
I'm being told I might just as well
go without completely.

 

[4degrees]

20-15

a man's shameless misuse
of words, combined with
excessive abuse of imagined
violent acts, and a pinch of
fuck, occasionally is greater
than the sum of no parts

walking a thin line
daring fate to come
catching a word on
hooked hands
chewing it to mash
and spitting it onto
a clean white page
it once looked like a
blooming flower
but now it's like
a crime scene photo
in color

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-10 Pull

One'd think the pull would begin in
extremeties: fingertips, elbows, toes of those
light with rum but it begins in the liver

or the womb, depending, the throb
of dance and possibility filling that bubble
of emptiness one might not have known
needed filling in the first place.

Then it rises like champagne up the spine
until one's eyes haze with it. There calls
the vacuum, the crisp sheet, the open
grave left rough with visible roots. Here
is the refrain pulling one along, aloft--
scarring the sky.

 

[salman22]

This is a TEST Comment

This is a TEST Comment
Salman Khan
Salman Khan
http://www.google.com/

 

[StepStransky]

1-13

I'm sort of glad I don't get idle
moments at my desk. If I did, I think
I'd spend them sitting, thinking
about you, pushing
the pieces around with my pencil, looking
for a picture.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-11

On Friday the Thirteenth I avoid
thinking about cavities, trenchcoats,
the police blotter, and narcoleptics.
It's bad enough to take a bus with all
those interdependent pieces rolling
under my feet.

Friday the Thirteenth
should be reclaimed: why don't you
put on your trenchcoat and bring me
chocolate liqueur? Piece together
the torn paper with my address;
come be my pen
to strike the un
from the lucky.

 

[4degrees]

20-16

she is a dog
in eastern zodiac
born when i was twelve
her flower blooms every
sunrise when grace allows
her to open her eyes
bringing a piece of peace
to this world
this day, when i was twelve
i never could have known
how she would change my life
this day when she was born
little did she know
a man would love her like this
many years later.

 

[StepStransky]

1-14 The Gift

In seconds measured since
digital birth, a milestone
passed us by whilst we
waved from our corners
and debated plans.

I make it 17,525,160 since
that first hello, incidentally.
I make it 16,436,220 since
you got rid of the ground, accidentally.
And it's now 63,900
and counting
since the knots - and your whispers - cast
their shadow, permanently.

And two aftershocks. And I
am still reaching out for furniture
to hold on to.

 

[dawnzky05]

I am hesitant to try this one. However, if old poems are allowed to be posted then I would dare to join this one.



---------------
literate arts

 

[4degrees]

20-17

roses are red

and valentine hearts
the blood that pulses
through every inch of
my manliness, and the
soft folds of velvet
-like the cake, somewhat
where my mouth lingers
and where i drive you home
deep into the hot caverns
of soft redness
with so much ambition
that you must be tasting it all
while we fuck...

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-12 Faults

Under the beach where waves crawl
up, timid after their raucous crashes,
under the sands and totes filled
up with shovels and plans, there
we are, parallel fault lines. Your tremor
crumbles me at the edges, slipping
warm stones from the surface
to rest between my folds. Tension
builds along my hanging wall for I would
reach for you in my microfracture
vines of disobedience to the footfall
calendars above us and perhaps if
I run crosshatch laces of breaks
through the crust I will collapse no
bridges when my fingers at last
reach yours.

 

[StepStransky]

1-15 Words from my father

Not entirely happy with this... a first draft, for now.

----

On the road to home each Sunday, I work
on my inheritance, the heart which let him down -
eleven years to this day - and his own father before.
My lifestyle now is the promise to the next in line
which was never made to me. The last hill
punishes, but I arrive on time, gasp
as I turn the key, pull the stuck door open.

The house is always empty in these months. Dark. I push
the piled post out of sight, turn on the heating, which struggles.
Water still flows from all six taps; the air is free
from gas; all windows, all doors are shut. And so on.
I open a curtain, just to see light spill into the room once more; it falls
on papers and clothes, which I am not to tidy.

In front of the untouched shelves, I always pause, run
my fingers across the spines of books and records, stuffed
haphazard, as they should be. His life was like
a scrapbook, but one with hidden pages. I think today
of words spoken this week. "He would never
exclude," she told me, and I wonder why she waited
until now. I think of it as a message stored up for me, and one
I needed to hear. In the middle drawer are clippings, photographs,
cheque book stubs, torn envelopes, folded letters, endless strips of negatives;
back to the day when she worked with him, it all reaches, and further still.
We don't open it, because the bottom sags, but I like to edge it open a crack
and peek inside, wonder what words remain within –
and in all the other unknown places – and when
it will be right to hear them.

Outside, upon the road from home, I lift the door,
push it shut and turn the key.
I break cobwebs cast between bushes
as I take the boy's exit.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

4-13 Heartburn

I know it sounds old fashioned to use the word flame
in this instance, but it licked so, blue-tipped.
This remainder of last night burns
greasy scent of home
cooked in inches
under the
skin.

 

[4degrees]

20-18

numbers move me
rewinding me into
unpleasent past or
fantastic future, the now
is always set at zero
always underrated
underappreciated
the thirteen replaces
the four, while both
lack the possibilities
of that big empty inviting 0
the zero of now
has room for a million
beautiful moments of
this very moment.

 

[StepStransky]

1-16 Heartburn

Couldn't resist it, Dora

----

Heartburn
is a hijacked word.

Surely it should mean
longing,
craving,
staring-into-nothingness-yearning.
That sort of thing.

Who the hell attached it
to indigestion?
The idiot.

 

[4degrees]

20-19

love shackles me
my poem is a loaded rig
missing the vein of your junkie soul
like zombies or natives
the notion of ingesting another
to harness their strength
comes again and again
katasexual surplus energy
is churned into the
smoothest grease
society can muster
and dare speak of.