all of a sudden passion suddenly

[Tzara]

Ritual

I know you don't believe
that any of this makes sense.

I gesture at the stones,
all set at their

required positions, a grid
I hope has been laid out right.

Jason says, smiling, "Break an egg?"
and cracks one over the corner stone,

the yolk yellow on the granite,
the white running down.

And, tensed, we wait for the revelation.
Surely, surely, it will come now.

.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I sit here at this time of the morning,
knowing I should be in bed, wondering
how many other star crossed lovers
there are in the world and missing you.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Daddy says that even
adult Daddy's girls
get spanked for pouting,
but it's not punishment it's correction.
Correction sure stings!

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Asleep through Morphine induced dreams
you hold me, keeping watch
when the pain still intrudes so I whimper
and cling to you. At least there
I have your comfort, your shoulder,
your love when my world
turns upside down and the pain
is all I can think of, makes me unable to cope
and words crush what is left of me.

 

[cascadiabound]

All things purple and red
Roasted beets seeping
deep purple juices
Staining my fingers and sink
Red raspberries so sweet
I can't stop popping them
Into my mouth
Surely fresh berries are
Calorie free
Lavender blossoms
Already past prime
Still pungent heady scent
Purple politics may yet save us
Red blood runs in every human
Heart...
No matter parentage
Race, national origin or faith
What color is corruption?
Will it stain my soul?

 

[champagne1982]

tragic

I looked through that gruesome
photo album on the Reuter's page
and saw the unholy artwork
painted with an evil brush

The ink of despair drawn on faces
dusty with the ashes of collapse
and loss, the deflowering of us all
by the strokes of madmen's pen

I remember how much it hurt
to draw another breath as the fire
turned stone and bone to atoms
blown by wind to heaven

I remember how for weeks after
these images surfaced and then
too soon another supplanted
in horrible sequence of more pain

more calm on faces falling
as their choices made
stepped across space to
become one with eternity

How is it that a Christian world
would paint another faith so black
that though few choose destruction
all of Islam feels the hate?

How can worship lead to graffiti
sprayed on mosque lintels?
Go home in childish hand
though we know it was penned

by brothers frightened by what
they cannot understand, by mothers
for their children's future though
they destroy another family's hope.

Fathers who believe their way
must be the only way and those
sisters who want so desperately
to believe that love has disappeared.

I want to shake them all awake
to see the wonder they are too blind
to find again. It is not extinguished,
merely dimmed and waiting

for the sharp knife of intelligence
to trim the wick and the flame of justice
to ignite a light to burn through the darkness
and show forgiveness and mercy in its light at last

 

[miss_trust]

lost + found

found me
Searched and found
from doldrums plucked
slammed splashing into whirlpool whip
to explain, make understood
and it’s done
he knows I never
No
no, he says we must be again..
before it’s too late
Oh
oh, then it already is

 

[butters]

i think you never want to see
the total fucking bitch in me

although it's buried deep and well
behind the flaming gates of hell

and alien to intrinsic 'me'
a bitch has the ability

to ride out limbo and to dwell
until the dices roll to tell

the depths unfurl in fiery glee
to light the fuse--the bitch will be!

 

[HarryHill]

i think you never want to see
the total fucking bitch in me

although it's buried deep and well
behind the flaming gates of hell

and alien to intrinsic 'me'
a bitch has the ability

to ride out limbo and to dwell
until the dices roll to tell

the depths unfurl in fiery glee
to light the fuse--the bitch will be!

..
Line six has one syllable too many. Damn near Shakespearian.
The Holocaust: Act 1

 

[AmericanTrash]

young gay ambitious
Shakespeare

bowing scraping grasping
Shakespeare

loved his villains
again in the morning

you know they tried to steal
his words from him

attribute them to
bloody plagiarists

 

[Tzara]

Too Much Time on Airlines,
Watching the Food Network

Chef plated my food so beautifully
I could not mar her art
by eating it.


.

 

[todski28]

I shake
hands clenched so tight
I can feel my bones grind
nails leaving bloody tears trickling down my palms
a stigmata of my inability to emote
the way you tell me I should
as if your way is the only way
I pace
my teeth gnashing
chewing it to pulp
jaw shakes

Later as the car
cruises through the laneways
and back alleys
lights of other cars reflect
back those things I hold to
where you can't see
because
your disgust is as palpable
as hatred
I swallow down thick lumps of shame
and move forward
find a way through the agony
the helpless
eating away at the snake that swallowed
me until I can digest
where it went
wrong and why you believe
I can't grieve this way
trying to tell me it's unhealthy

And I say
What the fuck would you know

 

[OpenField]

I lie still, very still
in the wreckage of this house,
trying to avoid discovery.

The are footsteps all around me.
I sense beings poking at the ash
of the building

prodding to root out any life that survived
the burning of the building.
I wallow low in the mud

that has accumulated in the basement,
still as a rat, hoping
to evade detection, to make it back

to that temporary hole
I almost feel safe in. The one
under the discarded wood in the corner

that my enemies simply thought was a flaw
in how the baseboards met
at that one odd seam of this unused room.

 

[annaswirls]

sometimes
rush of butyl
spiral into maroon
surfacing from warm water
into warmer air
you come back
through
open summer pores

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Can it be? After all this time? Sweet Anna swirls in. Hey you, you've been missed, stay a while.

 

[Tzara]

I would like to leave my love for you
in this litle ditch
where love and tears and Astroglide
puddle into some kind of stew
that if it isn't love, is something
starting with the same capital letter as love.

Anyway. Let me lace my arms
about your shoulders, preferably bare,
and relax into a life supine and sweet
where we are intertwined
as comfortabally as spun jute, spooled

and mute and ordered and coiled,
because love should really be
as organized as a light bill,
and paid for, regularly,

at the end of each and every delicious month.

 

[Tzara]

Ballad

I fall in love too easily,
I fall in love too fast.
I fall in love too terribly hard
for love to ever last.
--Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, via Chet Baker

It is, I suppose, the problem
of the Internet. We find love
in textual interaction
as if words made bonds better than

sitting face-to-face over cocktails
in a bar, where at least we could know

that our correspondent, however kind,
however sensitive to issues
absolutely important to us,
like homelessness or immigrant rights,
or the second amendment of the United
States of America Constitution

would be heard and honored.

At least then we could drift them
because their nose was too big or their clothes
not attractive. But

online, my heart should be well schooled,
'cause I've been fooled in the past.
But still I fall in love too easily.
I fall in love too fast.

 

[miss_trust]

Taste the sound of stars
Count the color of water
Hellbent on midnights
pain in spasmed relief
Grasses do drop low
for aunts who cheat life
and death deafening to dark crowd
Crowing source of soundless advice
Water falling words willowy
switch to cut a thigh
Milky, bare, barren baron’s bear
Tinshifting crumple catches
offguard the guard as she
Tastes the sound of stars,
Counts the color of water

 

[RitsE]

it knows what's best. go with the flow

)) straight to the point my friend

 

[butters]

..
Line six has one syllable too many. Damn near Shakespearian.
The Holocaust: Act 1

and you had me counting where i didn't before...

and i get 8 per line, including L6... also 4 beats per line which is what i was working with. are you messin' with me or is it your american ear again?

 

[Tzara]

i think you never want to see
the total fucking bitch in me

although it's buried deep and well
behind the flaming gates of hell

and alien to intrinsic 'me'
a bitch has the ability

to ride out limbo and to dwell
until the dices roll to tell

the depths unfurl in fiery glee
to light the fuse--the bitch will be!

..
Line six has one syllable too many.

and you had me counting where i didn't before...

and i get 8 per line, including L6... also 4 beats per line which is what i was working with. are you messin' with me or is it your american ear again?

The problem, I think, is how one pronounces "alien". Merriam-Webster's web site gives two pronunciations for the word: ˈā-lē-ən (the first, generally preferred pronunciation, using three syllables) and ˈāl-yən (two syllables). I pronounce it the first (three syllable) way and haven't really ever heard it the second way, which I assume is more like how you pronounce it. The two-syllable pronunciation is like what people do with the name Juliet ('Jool·yet instead of 'Joo·lee·et) in "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." If you use the two-syllable pronunciation in your poem, the poem is in perfect iambic tetrameter.

The odd thing is that the word "fiery" doesn't have the same problem. Even the dictionary notes it should be pronounced with two syllables, though it seems to my ear to flirt with three.

 

[butters]

The problem, I think, is how one pronounces "alien". Merriam-Webster's web site gives two pronunciations for the word: ˈā-lē-ən (the first, generally preferred pronunciation, using three syllables) and ˈāl-yən (two syllables). I pronounce it the first (three syllable) way and haven't really ever heard it the second way, which I assume is more like how you pronounce it. The two-syllable pronunciation is like what people do with the name Juliet ('Jool·yet instead of 'Joo·lee·et) in "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." If you use the two-syllable pronunciation in your poem, the poem is in perfect iambic tetrameter.

The odd thing is that the word "fiery" doesn't have the same problem. Even the dictionary notes it should be pronounced with two syllables, though it seems to my ear to flirt with three.

ah, L5 then, not 6... yeah A-Li-un IS how i pronounce it but with those last two syllables sort of running one into the other stress-wise, with the actual stress of the word placed on the A there. by that token, i'm still good for my 4 beats. i do say Joo-Li-et as a distinct 3 syllables, and find 'fiery' closer to 3 than 2 but akin to the Li-un in all these instances, it's where the stress falls in natural speech that really counts

my thanks to both of you, really, for taking the time here. i'm not around too much, not poetically, at least. today we went and scrounged up a cute xmas tree for the corner of the living room and i've been decorating it.

 

[annaswirls]

pussy monologues

signed up for
then graciously declined
(no, that is a lie)
declined two days late
and without explanation

or grace

turned down the part
in Vagina Monologues
after an enthuiastic yes
yes yes!

my vagina has her own story
and feels like a liar
being attached to a woman
who speaks another truth

the director asks us
what do we call our vaginas
around the table
hoo-hoo
tee-tee
I pause and say
perhaps with too much enthusiasm
"pussy"
they laugh
next woman up gives
the right answer
"I call it vagina.
I want my children to know
the correct term."

I stutter
say I, well I
of course do not say
"pussy" to my sons....
just vagina...

but today my vagina
is not interested in formalities
or correctness

it wants to be startled
by straps and slaps

intruded, arm twisted around my back
pressed against a tree on a trail
behind the after hours sculpture garden

my pussy wants to be fucked
beside another pussy
being fucked by my date
watched by voyeurs
on the other side of the door
of the club

my pussy wants to be stretched
fist sized
fighting the instinct to fight and
resisting the flight
and moving straight to "freeze."

cervix bruising depth
vacuumed pumped unnatural size
my pussy wants a flashlight
and a magnifing glass and
perversion of a black doctor's bag
full of instruments of experimentation
my pussy does not want to know in advance
what will be pulled from the bag next

it wants to be followed into the gender neutral
bathroom of the blind date resturuant,
the sound of dishes being stacked
orders being called, twenty-something girls
talking trends in the hallway

fingered with force
at redlights
patrol car beside
soaking my dress
and seat of the car rental

my pussy wants boys half its age
with teacher fantasies mother fantasies
my pussy wants to take charge
feign superiority give direction
my pussy wants you to turn the tables
flip me on my belly
smack my ass
take it out on me
teach me a lesson

my vagina overpowers my sensible desire for stability,
reliability, security, responsibility
that wakes me up morning after
waiting on the side of the road
downpour, two tires blown by the median
alone
my pussy has no one to call
to bring it home
I hire strangers
to drive me to the ER

my pussy
does not have a monologue
my pussy is running out of time

my pussy does not know
how to end this thread

 

[Tzara]

signed up for
then graciously declined. . .

Whew! Now that's certainly "all of a sudden passion suddenly" if anything is.



Nice to see you Ms. swirls, even if it ends up being a drop-by post.

 

[Piscator]

Originally Posted by annaswirls View Post
signed up for
then graciously declined. .

.

Whew! Now that's certainly "all of a sudden passion suddenly" if anything is.

Nice to see you Ms. swirls, even if it ends up being a drop-by post.

Blew me away too - love to hear a spoken word version.