A bit trite and a bit short, but this will have to do today. An Irish stout has designs on my mind!
Adrift, but found
my course plotted
without my ken,
without approval.
Yet when my course
pointed me to
where I'm now,
I found this port,
suited me just fine.
47/100
I wasn’t going to publish this, but I have nothing else to post.
“Come,” they say, “let us get wine, let us fill ourselves of strong drink; and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.”
—Isaiah 56:12
Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.
—Mike Tyson’s original quote, 1987
I didn't have plans,
assumed life just carried on
unchanging at its core. Her
"I
want
out"
paralyzed me, uprooted
me from where I'd planted
myself: in challenging soil,
yet gamely trying. She saw
it similarly, acted where I
could not: shook my dust
from her sandals, moved on.
A younger she healed me or
I healed myself while
healing her, perhaps,
unable to address what
drove her to like me at all.
"Rapacious" said those
gossips around me.
"You lucky bastard"
from some friends.
We parted semi-friends
permitting my truer healing
with my truer partner, this
time with eyes open, no
longer encumbered by
thinking tomorrow mimics
today. No longer presuming
it will last. No longer secure:
I take nothing for granted,
stay present today instead of
presuming tomorrow.
45/100
Man, I hurt. My accident of three weeks ago has left me two stiff knees, broken bones in both forearms, assorted pain I think is more broken bones in my hands and wrists, and perhaps a strained tendon in the ankle which rolled. My shoulder hurts from what I suspect is bursitis, and if I told you how it occurred doing nothing you would shake your head. The minor but ever-present ache in my right hip seems almost superfluous at this point. All of this inspired this poem.
New pains attack daily.
Old ones settle in like
fringe relatives who won't leave.
Memories don't fail, they
crowd each other out.
Challenges also pile up,
sapping desire to grapple
'yet again' with those never-
ending tasks which repeat.
But....
Small moments harbor
poignancy unfelt in youthful
years. Sunsets seem
more magical, plants
more interesting. Good meals
sustain constant pleasure.
Music, books span decades!
Undoable projects, now doable.
Time? Alternately your
friend, your enemy.
44/100
Severely compromised
immune systems
require bubbles for
environmental
safety. What will
protect us from our
world's toxicity?
What bubbles have we built
which protect? Which ones
trap us in noxiousness?
34/100
Missing my old choir buddy who died last December. He always, always, stayed deeply involved in life. In his 80’s, having just beat his battle with cancer, he trained for our local crisis hotline and began counseling the suicidal and the abuse victim. Anyway, thought of him today in mass, and this poem began.
Why his clarity, his ocular spark,
so near does death's shadow creep?
Others, with near-dead eyes, long
encumbered by that dark shadow,
seem to have surrendered. What?
Something. That spark, that signal,
that engagement. Oddly, we note
both say similar words: "I'm
ready to die. Take me, any time,"
but our engaged example
has said it all his life.
33/100
A funny thing happened when I started writing my poem for today. Halfway through a different poem said, “No, write me instead!”
A true tale….
I once read a book
where every distinct idea
received its own line,
prose as poem,
purposefully presenting them
in bite-sized pieces.
I remember it because
at sixteen years
I learned about infinity
this way, how
one infinity can be bigger than another.
Before this, I had thought
"Infinity is just Infinity,"
never dreaming
"it" should be "they,"
never considering
they could be quantified
(kind of).
"Think of all the numbers on a number line,
how they go on to Infinity.
Call it Set A.
What if we add one to Set A?
Call it Set B.
Set B must be bigger!"
"Think how a number line goes from Zero to One.
If you go halfway from One to Zero,
then halfway again,
and so on:
obviously you'll never get to Zero.
It's an Infinity, but...
since it's contained between Zero and One,
just as obviously it's smaller
than the infinities we discussed with Sets A and B."
My mind was blown. No
wonder I took psychotropics.
What else could I do to
fill the spaces it had made?
23/100
O children of our thoughtless world,
Rise up to claim your prize.
We've left you worthless baubles,
We've left what you despise.
In times long past, when 'things were good'
Rewards fell in our lap.
We now disdain your plaintive cries that
All we've left seems crap.
Times get easy, times get tough,
It's not our fault we won—
We cashed those chips that came to us
As we think you'd have done.
Wonder not why we don't hear
Your cries for fairness' sake.
All we want lies in our graves
Where we'll be when things break.
We know deep down your reckoning
Will come as in life's past.
You'll wonder as you're winning why
Your children stare aghast.
21/100
Perhaps not everyone will agree with me on this one. Should you disagree, we can discuss in the comments.
Ankle rolls, fall looms!
Poem will be short today—
One-handed typing.
19/100
I’ve heard a writer should never apologize for his work. If I didn’t feel the compulsion to put a poem up here, I would work on this more. As may be: like a little boy who’s never quite clean enough for company, “it’ll do.”
for fifty years plus five or six
he carried words he wrote. they
traveled in one banker's box:
to everywhere he'd stay.
they seldom saw much light.
he carried dreams for less than that—
they died in his mid-life. he feared
his will, lost hope, discerned no path.
life handed him ways he found weird,
brought a future bright.
throughout bright hopeless times he wrote
to capture what he felt. his
prose earned bread but poems' notes
sustained his soul—it is
what kept dull paths away.
electrons now contain his thoughts,
self-published at his whim.
without his dreams he found he'd bought
release from what trapped him.
dreams died but words found day.
17/100
Every day
I want 24 hours between today and tomorrow:
Breathe
I want to quit feeling this tightness across my chest:
Breathe
I want my stomach to desire food as much as my mouth
Breathe
I want to enjoy beer as food not medicine
Breathe
I want to feel as if I know what I'm doing
Breathe
I want to feel less as if we're doing something wrong
Breathe
I want to get out of here
Breathe
Full of breath
I ran screaming; mere hellish jobs looked great
Compared to my hell-hole.
11/100
all the voices in my head 