30 Poems in 30 Days

[Lauren Hynde]

1:10

Difícil é escolher palavras
quando línguas cortam como facas.

 

[ShyErraticTable]

13

Sonnet: Of Poets

What can you know of people you don't know?
Here we chat, we flirt, we argue. Suffer. Whine.
Yes, we connect, but only partially. Sometimes
we're close, sometimes we're not. Just goes to show
the importance of embrace, of touch. How
just to see your face would seem so right—
or his, or hers. Lives so connect on sight.
We're visual creatures, and as such, are low,

but nervy, interested, often pervy,
founts of jealousy and doubt and more
gossipy than older maids. At end we are
poets, and our verse can be very good or
simply bad. We write. We write of sex, of war,
of flowerpots, of how lemons prevent scurvy.

 

[4degrees]

6-7

speaking silently
speaking in tongues
a fretful masturbatory
dream with eyes
peeled back, the skinless
grape like shape
and texture goes way back
blindfolded with hands
shoved in a bowl
of cooked spaghetti-
to a kid, its worms
or guts
today i braid those noodles
without having to look
the feel of them sliding
through my fingers
and thoughts of warm red sauce.

 

[champagne1982]

2007-1-13

Tough Life

Every morsel counted as if her eyes
could not see through hot anguish.
What stings more, sweat or tears?
No time for leisure or regrets.
Just move on, work hard for a meal,
for a roof, even, for a living.
Keep smiling for a meagre stipend;
someday your labour will pay well.

 

[Sara Crewe]

5-13

.....

 

[Liar]

7-2

Around the world in 80 ways

On and on we pick the Phileas fashion,
we prance with a glance through a monocle eye,
and we try to stifle passion with a coffin of cash
and we try to walk away yeah we try to say goodbye.

But every road paints a curve and we're back where we started,
every arrow on the compass draws a circle anyway,
and no globetrotter dream, no venture in the mist
gives us any other heartbeats than the ones that beat today.

Still on and on we pick the Phileas fashion
painting petty little circles on a pretty little sphere,
drawing dreams in diameter, burning twenty thousand hours
buying plastic pioneering as if anyone would care.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

1:11

Each hour
the cold
that blood brings to the heart
freezes us as the river
of time to the last glaciers
when the foam of the seas
turns to stone.

In the desert
of the frozen sky itself
if only you could sustain at in its descent
any old star
and in its warmth dissolve enough snow
for the single tear
our death asks for.

 

[champagne1982]

2007-1-14

Sabbath's Child

She gathers her weekday memories
and tucks them into her heart;
food for the soul and salve
for a conscience worn thin
as she regrets her blessings.

Contemplation of the smiles
aided to the surface of dissent
as she takes Solomon's role
in solving sad dilemmas coiled
into tangles only patience
and knowledge can untie

and wisdom can keep the thread free
from frayed ends and severed knots.
She gathers peace and cheerfulness
back to her breast as she prepares
for another week of living.

 

[4degrees]

6-8

eaten alive
libido feeds on the invisible
you, the physical
too if only it were so
sew up another self
infliction, prima of
premeditation
weaving mental intracacies
exhauseting all my faculties
struggling against a
currant while wild
whirlpools look strangely
like your picture
fixture forever
don't lecture lover
never always happens again.

 

[ShyErraticTable]

14

Rubliw for a Younger, Better Poet

................My sweet:
............I can't compete
........with your great poems, their neat
....spare elegance, the way you mete
out words like diamonds among the sleet
....and slush of mine and others weak-
........er offerings—elite
............ and such a treat.
................I'm beat.

 

[Liar]

7:3

Skagerrak I

Storm roared black ridges,
high on hurricane gale,
raise a liquid ridge at the shoals
on a flash draped horizon
to stretch its fingers in curse
and spit its rabid salty froth
to stain our safe rock.

We call children in,
tide is surging and currents rise
with surface. We turn our heads
west, south west, and wait

for diabase to rattle
and a thousand mile anger
born on a distant shore
to whip our faces.

 

[Sara Crewe]

5-14

.......

 

[ShyErraticTable]

15

Sonnet on Infidelity

You tell yourself that you're not tired. The weight
insomnia lays on your body's light,
compared to guilt, and there is guilt. You fight
the feeling, ugly as it is, but fate
so coupled with your carnal need, your mate
was tossed aside, asea, and sheer excite-
ment then became your focus, fresh and bright,
with ever varied charms. It is too late
to change back now, so celebrate the new—
as seasons change, we change attachments, so
be joyful, be now liberal, be true.
Our politics so very rarely skew
that even love's more fickle. Proudly go
out in the world no longer red, but blue.

 

[champagne1982]

2007-1-15

Illusions On The 17th Floor

Last night we danced on a floor
of swirling lights that shimmered
as the world continued on its way
painting neon psychedelia

on a black velvet canvas like Elvis
grinding pelvis against that dark
curtain you pressed me tight with palms,
flattened and breasts, hard, on glass.

Long exhales leaving steam
trails against that wall; so high
I feel I'm soaring over the world
with wings spread and you,

my pilot guide, easing me over
the landscape and cutting
the atmosphere, leaving nothing
but heat behind. I climb and yet
you urge me higher, to the stall

then back into your arms,
captured in your skill and brought
safe to my senses where I plead
for you to stay and take me again.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

1:12

Birds
of this astral song
sudden as dreams
or lightening
torn from the stars,
take us
from the ground where cities
pollute us
to the sky deserted
and pure:
ships,
to the uncertain sea.

 

[Sara Crewe]

5-15

......

 

[Liar]

7:4

Skagerrak II

Before the day
the German morass
in officer robes and
salt bleached swastika
came on a rurly wave
and stuck his prime
war quality boot between
glacier clicked boulders,

the rock was just a rock

and Johan wouldn't go there
to troll for wrass and eel.

Because who'd carry
a quivering catch
from just
a rock?

But Gunnar toed
a bloated devil to port,
and Alma washed
rotting toes out of
prime war boots,

Because you don't
waste good boots.

before insisting
on a proper Godly prayer.

Because even Germans
must have mothers.

The next day,
Johan went to German's Rock
and pulled seven wrasses
a dozen and three eels
and a trout.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

1:13

A wave you are a wave and I tremble
as your hands and your mouth feed
the fire your tongue in the mouths of my body
as I write and your nostrils
quiver and I tremble and I breathe
your perfume and you wash the mud that covers me the vertigo
of the city and your face
moves across my womb as
waters
dissolve in my skull and nails dig
into shoulders nails of light milk blades wind
as I write as I dig
in your breath and you're an ocean
where I'm unafraid an animal
that lets itself be drunk chewed and drinks me devours me
and so I love you as the waters
and the waves the sands
that possess them.

 

[ShyErraticTable]

16

I, a Bad Poet, Lament My Lack of Talent
in the Rickety Form of a Faulty Triolet,
While Drinking Too Much Cheap Wine

A king who's never clothed is always dressed.
A writer who writes crap is just a drone.

I write confused. My God, I'm such a mess!
A king who's never clothed is always dressed,

but, hell, my writing is what is distressed.
I write such dreck, I'm sure I'm just a clone,

a king who's never clothed, always undressed—
a writer who writes crap.



Leave me alone.

 

[vampiredust]

1:1

The Calf

You'd think, looking at it
hobbling out of the dark
that its life was destined
to be short and sweet:

a quick slit at the nape,
blood mopped up, ready
to be hung up. No-one
anticipated the grunt,

a hoplite already equipped
with armor and a spear
for a tongue. And then,
when the first blow struck

its captors, it was not fear
that drove them away
but the clenched fist
of a black shadow charging.

 

[Sara Crewe]

1-16

......

 

[Lauren Hynde]

1:14

Found Poetry
in George W. Bush's 04.Feb.2004 speech at the Library of Congress


some cities are mass graves
drawing tight with despair and anger

with unshakable determination
their blindness
passed unnoticed

one by one
they will overcome

that's what they think
that's what they know

 

[Liar]

7:5

Skagerrak III

Kneel by the shore line,
with September ruffled bangs
and still bare feet,
to tickle the ocean, to sign
your name in surface tension.

Feel me
read your fingertips
from a distant shore.

 

[champagne1982]

2007-1-16

Me, Feeling Sorry For Myself

I hate to hurt like this.
It's been so long
since each movement
roused a new agony
each flex awoke pain.

I hate to hurt like this,
but I know there is more
much more and there's no
stopping it, there's nothing
I can do. So I wait. Pain,

being subjective, can only
be as bad as you let it
get, but I hate knowing
it's going to hurt like this.

 

[ShyErraticTable]

17

A Sonnet about Number Theory

I am not visual. It is our talk
that links us, makes us one. You don't believe
that sometimes. That's OK. I do not stalk
you, as you know, but just the same I breathe
your very body in, like—every breath
I take? (I'm sorry, Sting.) It is your words
that I keep telling you, your words that mesh
your soul to me. At least it isn't surds,
which is a math term on the ratio
of integers. And integers we're not.
We are irrational. Unique. Alone.
We are not number, even. Purely hot.

We are an even number though, yet prime.
Not mathematical, though made sublime.