Poems and Such

Lots of ideas but not a real blog post this time, just a smattering of poems that have come to me lately.
They need to be distilled perhaps but they are who they are for now.

Thanks for reading if you do; it's always good to be grounded by the sounding board of other's ideas and thoughts!

At That Age

It’s not teenagers,

But the twenty-something’s that should bear

the grimace of society.

Teens hunger and thirst, they struggle and bend,

Emotive, restless, straining toward.

20’s sit smug in pools of stagnant ambition,

Mouths open like baby birds for warmth and food and approbation

Tossing no longer jacks or colored balls but ideas back and forth

Stretched out on couches like the Enlightenment’s elite

Noshing on lattes and relevant ethics

While their parents, with aching smiles, stand beside.

Nothing for them but bland replies,

Whose backs were bent at 20 forging paths

With delicate dreams

and pocketed coins to pay the rent.

 This is (obviously) about my own introspection and selfish tendencies in my early twenties. And also about what I see around me from time to time.

Night Falling

Sometimes the moon is just right,

Over the house

A crisp crescent the cow jumped over

And the sounds of the music are just right,

Slow, steady, moody and blue

 

The evening sky pale through dark leaf-lace

Luminous, colorless, grey-scudded clouds

And the garden lamps glow on

The evening shower that passed

Minutes ago

Leaving drips on dim flowers

Musky in the gathering dusk

 

And the moon is just right,

When you look up,

The night’s soft arms are folding

‘Round colors of grey and white

 

It’s a good time to be alone and breathe

In the voluminous air of the night.

 This one I wrote quickly on my phone memo-pad one evening after a rain shower as I was walking into the house. The moon was perfect, and the radio still coming from the car speakers fit the mood exactly.



Free

I’ll rent a space, where they race snow machines over high fields, and swings go up and down too high to hear the recess bell.

I’ll climb a tree in the dark, where they can’t find me and wouldn’t think to look. Or wander through the pitch black where the noise of an animal, probably wild, doesn’t scare me as much as going back.

I’ll take a walk in an odd direction, and in the space between being lost and being gone too long I’ll feel the joy of heedless breezes that come from anywhere.

I’ll climb some stairs to a grey haven, an attic room with a rectangle of window and just a bed and a wood floor.

I’ll bend to buttercups with my child self, little girl with no care too large to hold out and drop on the world.

I’ll pay my rent when it is due. In the space between I’ll hide from you.

This one also dropped out of my head in a hurry. Sometimes I like these better than the ones I tweak and puzzle over for an interminable length of time. The fast free verse stream-of-consciousness poems don't win prizes, though.


 

Disappointment

 

Tin taste and lead

Grey stone swallowed

And stuck

Long white hallways

End in space

Pace the miles

Drift right and left\ backward/ forward

A sneeze dies behind the nose

 

Burst into laughter once

Glitter in the eyes

A caked-on smile

A wait-a-while

 

Burnt smell and dead

Fish in the pan

Not fried

Not half alive

Indelible

Print inside

On the live wire

Pulled out

Frayed, splayed

 

Push the whole mess off the counter.

Push      the      whole

Green, purple, and some red. Same as the dead. And guns going off all day in my head.

 

 

 

(Quick! Call a psychiatrist! Ha ha!) This is a strange one but I love the way it pulls the angst out of my soul. I read it now and then for catharsis.

 

Bye for now!