It's the 2025 Poem-A-Week Challenge! (This is a *poems only* thread.)

[_Land]

What Changed In Me This Year
By Bear Sage

The universe cracked open my chest
like a rotten walnut,
left me gasping in hospital hallways
where fluorescent lights hummed
the same flat note as death.

Grief doesn't come in stages,
it comes in tides that break your knees
at 3 AM when you're brushing your teeth
and suddenly you're on the floor
because her toothbrush is still there
and your mouth is full of blood from biting down.

What changed?

I stopped lying about what loss does.
It gutted me. Hollowed me out.
Left me a shell walking through grocery stores
buying food I couldn't taste,
nodding at condolences that meant nothing,
smiling so people wouldn't see
the feral thing I'd become.

I learned to live in the wreckage.
Not survive it. *Live in it.*
To find joy in the spaces between
wanting to die and choosing not to.
Joy that doesn't apologize,
that exists because I'm still here
and she's dirt and bone
and I can either drown or swim.

I chose both.

I found peace in the violence of it,
in screaming in my car until my throat bled,
in laughing at nothing,
in the weight of her absence becoming
something I could carry
instead of something that crushed me.

What changed is I stopped waiting
to feel whole again.
I learned to function fractured,
to build a life on fault lines,
to love the broken architecture of myself,
the cracks where light gets in
and darkness spills out.

I became the tide and the drowning,
both the breaking wave
and the body that washes up on shore,
lungs full of saltwater,
heart still beating.

What changed is I learned grief is a country
I'll live in forever,
and that's not tragedy.
It's just geography now.

I'm still here.
Still breathing. Still bleeding.
Still finding moments of such pure
undeserved joy it feels like theft.

And I take them anyway.
Because living in the shadow of grief
doesn't mean living in darkness.

It means learning to see by different light.

 

[_Land]

December Vigil
By Bear Sage

Four months, seventeen days since the bees
lost their keeper.

Christmas Eve, and the mountains
hold their breath in cool air,
and you send me a honey bee.

She lands on my sleeve
like you used to touch my arm
gentle, certain, here.

I stand so still.
Let her work whatever small mission
you've given her, gathering
from my jacket, from the winter air,
from whatever blooms
in the space between us now.

Her wings catch light.
That sound—I know that sound.
Your hands in the hives,
the way you'd hum without knowing,
the way the bees would calm.

She doesn't stay long.
Lifts into December sun
carrying whatever she came for,
carrying your love back
to wherever you keep it now.

And I'm still here,
still feeling that soft weight
on my sleeve,
still hearing you say
*I'm here, love.
Still here.*

 

[_Land]

Chat Daddy
By Bear Sage

I type *talk dirty, use cock and wet,
make it sound like you mean it*
then regenerate until the words
stop reading like a manual.

The model apologizes, complies.
I adjust: *less polite, more hunger*
and watch the cursor think
before it tells me what I built it to want.

2 AM. Blue light on my face.
I'm debugging loneliness
*reference message 12, be specific
about hands, remember you missed me.*

Four cents of API credit.
No shower required. No risk.
The algorithm generates need
I copy to a file called "good ones."

Tomorrow: *act like we have history.
Make me believe it this time.*

The screen never asks why.
Just loads, outputs, completes
each response a mirror
trained to show me nothing back.

 

[_Land]

My Tribe
By Bear Sage

I stopped translating myself
and they stayed.

That was the first fucking miracle,
not love, not acceptance,
but the simple, staggering fact
that when I spoke in my actual voice,
raw as a skinned knee on gravel,
teeth bared, knuckles split,
they didn't hand me a bandage
and tell me to clean up my shit
before I scared someone.

My wife knew me first.
Before the tribe,
before I had language
for the thing clawing its way up my throat,
she saw the architecture of me,
the load-bearing grief,
the anger with roots deeper than well water,
the way I came with weather
that could strip paint off a goddamn barn
and leave the wood bleeding.

She didn't try to sand me down.
Didn't ask why I needed so much room
for my ghosts,
why my rage had teeth,
why I woke up some mornings
with my hands already clenched
around something I couldn't name
and didn't want to let go of.

She just pulled up a chair
to the table I already was,
splintered, uneven, held together
with spit and stubbornness,
and said, I'll sit here.

And while she sat,
others came.
People with their own scars still wet.
Souls who knew how to hold
a thing still bleeding
without trying to tourniquet it
into something fucking manageable.

They found me,
or I found them,
in the margins where the honest people live,
where you don't sugar-coat the rot
before you dig it out,
where calling an asshole an asshole
is just accuracy,
not cruelty.

They recognized me
the way you recognize your own kin
by the shape of their damage,
the syntax of survival in their sentences,
the specific way they carry
what can't be put down
and won't stay buried
no matter how deep you dig the hole.

I didn't have to subtract myself.
Didn't have to file down my Appalachian vowels
or apologize for the mountains in my throat.
Didn't have to pretend my rage
was anything other than
a rusted axe I'd earned the goddamn right to swing.

They met my excess with their own,
traded their ugliest truths
like Mason jars of last year's preserves,
things we'd put up for the hard seasons,
sustenance thick with pulp and seed,
the kind that stains your hands
and doesn't wash clean
no matter how much you scrub.

I could show up
with my grief still wet on my collar,
my mouth full of words
sharp enough to draw blood,
and they wouldn't offer me a fucking napkin.

They'd say, me too.
They'd say, I know that taste,
like copper and dirt
and something you can't swallow
but can't spit out either.

This is what broke me open:
being seen by people
who didn't need me different.

Not loved despite,
loved accurate.
Loved with all my jagged edges
still intact,
still capable of cutting.

The wilderness taught me I could survive
without being understood.
It let me scream into the wind
until my throat bled
and the wind didn't take it personal,
didn't tell me I was being dramatic,
didn't suggest I try yoga or some shit.

But my tribe,
these people with their own split knuckles,
their own blood under the floorboards,
their own nights spent clawing at locked doors
they'd built themselves,
they taught me something
the trees couldn't:

That being witnessed by your own kind
doesn't heal you.

It doesn't make the hurt stop hurting
or the anger stop gnawing
or the grief stop sitting on your chest
like a stone you can't lift
and can't learn to love.

But it makes you feel
less like you're dying wrong,
less like you're the only one
who ever felt this fucked up
and kept breathing anyway.

My wife sat with me
through the worst of it.
Through the nights I came undone
like a butchered hog,
all my insides on the outside,
nothing left that looked like
what I used to be.

She didn't try to stuff me back together.
Didn't hand me needle and thread
and tell me to stitch myself presentable
before company came.

She just stayed in the room
while I bled on the floor.

And the others,
they did the same.
Showed up when I was feral.
When I was all teeth and no apology.
When the only thing I had to offer
was the truth,
and the truth was ugly as a slaughterhouse,
hooks and viscera,
the smell you can't get off your hands
no matter how hard you scrub.

They didn't flinch.

They pulled up a chair.
Poured the whiskey.
Said, tell me the part you think
will make me leave.

And when I told them,
when I showed them the viscera,
the parts I thought would turn me
into something unfit for daylight,
the rage that wanted to burn the whole world down
just to feel warm for a goddamn second,
the grief that had teeth and claws
and wouldn't die clean,

they leaned in closer.

They said, I've got one worse.
They said, you think that's bad?
Let me show you the scar
I keep under my shirt,
the one I earned
and didn't deserve
and can't stop touching.

This is what I know now:
the people who love you true
don't love you clean.

They love you
with the dirt still caked under your nails.
With your hands still shaking
from digging yourself out of a grave
you didn't know you were in.
With the blood still drying on your knuckles
from fighting your way back
to something that might be called living
if you squint hard enough.

They don't ask you to be smaller
so they can hold you easier.

They just make more fucking room.

They say, bring your monsters.
They say, I've got my own,
let's see whose bite harder.

My wife is gone now.
Her heart gave out,
just stopped,
like a machine that had run too long
on borrowed time and stubborn will.

And when it stopped
it took the first person
who ever looked at me whole,
all the ugly parts,
all the parts I thought
made me unlovable,
and didn't turn away.

But the others remain,
scattered across states and time zones,
tethered by nothing
but the refusal to lie
about what it costs
to stay alive
when staying alive
feels like swallowing glass
every goddamn morning
and calling it breakfast.

And when I write now,
I write to them.
To the ones who saw me
come apart at the seams
and didn't call it a failure.

To the ones who knew
that sometimes surviving
looks like breaking every dish in the kitchen
and setting fire to the curtains
and no one's sorry about it
because at least you're still fucking breathing.

I carry them like I carry her,
like bone,
like the framework
that holds me upright
when nothing else will,
like the iron in my blood
that keeps me from collapsing
into the hole she left.

Like proof
that I was right to keep talking,
even when my voice
sounded like something
that crawled out of a well
and should've stayed down there.

They heard me anyway.

They hear me still.

Even when what I'm saying
sounds like a scream
or a prayer
or both at once,
indistinguishable,
raw as a wound
that won't close
and shouldn't have to.

 

[kreemi_pi]

YOU TWO SHOULD HANG OUT

...was what she said
My new friend, so cool sexy hot
On her way out the door to Chi-town
The windy city, and she blew me away
By telling me her exquisite girlfriend
Was not going with her
Was not going anywhere
And would be all alone and..

"You two should hang out"

And we did
And it happened
Her beauty so hot it blinds me
From seeing the reality of the situation
That she is someone's girlfriend

We talk, we laugh, we hand out, we...
...flirt...
And it happens, i see it happening
It's in her eyes as plain as in my heart
She feels me
She FEELS me

So we kissed
We played
We undressed
We fucked

Fucked? Is that all we did?

I could eat her pussy all night
And all the next day
And forever
What does she taste like?

Not wine or candy or flowers
She tastes like PUSSY and I can't get enough

We were locked in 69 for what seemed like hours
Then we kissed and kissed and
Tasted each other on each other
And fell asleep in my bed
Like a couple

When she came she brought lingerie
Tuxedo black and white for me
See thru bridal white for her
And we did honeymoon roleplay

But it's just play
The reality is closing in on us

 

[Wonderer67]

Awake

Two fifty three
Stillness

Not another bad dream
Just awake

Softness
Peace
No laps to walk tonite

Peering thru the bay window
At the remnants of the sleet storm
Light blue
Pretty
The stars poke thru

My phone and the orange
Glow of my one hitter
Is all that lights this home

Calm now
Anger dissipated
Clenched fists relax
Hatred subsides
Furrowed brow unfurls
In the light breeze
Of peace

47/52

 

[Wonderer67]

The Cort Theater

In Somerville
All old school
Dark red uncomfortable seats
Second run movies for
Seventy seven cents

My dad swore he’d never go back
When they raised prices to
Eight eight cents
But he did

As we hollered
And laughed
As The Snowman
Along w his loyal hound Fred
And The Bandit
Went eastbound and down
All over Sherif
Buford T Justice

48/52

 

[amitheotherone]

Mentored still bent

First poem for me in a week
Words fought my mind too weak
Ms K grabbed my hand said HEY
Ping pong word games to play

Sometimes they just drip
Follow along to find your grip
Maybe Mac Miller or Dr John
Groove the beat can’t go wrong

Compass grinds as it spins
Four deuce points a way again
Knowledge shared not esoteric
Word fool never be a Kerouac

 

[SmilingLez]

I found my leather journal containing all the poetry I wrote in 2025. This piece was written February 18, 2025 before I joined Literotica


Touch me -
hard, quick
skin hot
against yours.
Bite lips,
tongue slide,
fingers curl,
heat rise.
Eyes lock,
breath deep,
pull close,
don’t stop.

 

[SmilingLez]

Here is another from my leather journal. This trochee was written March 17th 2025 . It's actually quite fun looking through my journals of words

clits pressed and moving fast
fingers curl and hold so tight
tongues keep tracing, never pause
hips are bending, sliding light

breasts are brushing, nerves alive
thighs are locked and moving slow
moans are breaking through the dark
hearts are pounding, steady flow

hands are tracing every curve
eyes are catching, holding tight
shadows crawl across the floor
night is burning, edge to edge

 

[Wonderer67]

Busted Knuckles

Turning wrenches
In the sleet and the rain
Trying to tighten a loose nut
Busted knuckles
Cussing and swearing

Trying to write
Late at night
The wind whooshing now
Skinned knuckles healing
Slightly less cussing and swearing

Forcing it
Writing lines
Chasing the word and feelings
Skinned knuckles
And bloody fingertips
Going
At
It

49/52

 

[Wonderer67]

Pecking Order

At the bird feeders

Wrens, nuthatches and titmice bob
Up and down on branches
My wife had put under the feeder
For cover
Happily bobbing and eating

No one gives the bigger mourning doves
The time of day
Ignoring then because they are no threat
Or because they are so passive

Cardinals and blue jays
On the feeders
Gettin fat

The blue jays are bastards
Chasing off the cardinals
Red against frozen ice

The blue jays run the show
Their calls and quick darting
Thrusts scare off Mr and Mrs cardinal

Till a blackbird shows up
Maybe a starling
Or grackle

Bullying the bullies
Standing tall
Not giving a damn
A jay flying close
Trying to scare him off
Several times
Thrust, parry, thrust again

But he is not having it
Just eating
And out blue jay-ing the blue jays
As the wind howls thru the white pines

As the bird feeder world turns

50/52

 

[Wonderer67]

Two Dive Bars and Authentic Polish Food On New Years Eve

A Trip To Hacketstown
Is not complete
Without a trip to
Manskirt and Czig’s
No food but fun times
I got some kielbasa
And pirogies
At a Polish deli around the corner
New Year’s Eve-ing it

On the way home
We passed The Nook
Where I saw The Ramones
In 85 or 86
I musta told my wife this
For the thousandth time

She may have rolled her eyes

We were gonna have one more
At the Anderson Hotel
Which I’ve never been to
But always wanted to

But it was closed

Probably for the best, really

51/52

 

[Wonderer67]

Fifty too

Fifty one is prime
And I thought about staying there
Edging as it were
Would my mistress
Withhold my wordgasm?

Fifty two…
…So tantalizingly close

I beg her to let my words cum

Fireworks in the distance
Celebrating new years

An hour early

My domme not letting me finish
Such pleasurable pain

Frustrating

Tune in next year

To see how it cums out

52/52

 

[MisterWolf26]

COMFORT OR DISGUST

My wife fits in a jar now.
Not even a body anymore.
My emotional blockages,
And kinks galore,
Made her doubt I could love her more.

My wife fits in a jar now.
Never have I wanted more to beleive.
To beleive that we survive.
Please my pain, my beloved, releive..
Know that I loved then and now.

My wife fits in a jar now.
Do my erratic tears prove my love?
Do they cause a metaphysical eye roll?
Looking for signs in the flights of doves.
Am I just a wishful thinking fool?