Poems

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Been writing more poems recently and thought i'd share them

Haikus

Sometimes you feel like
you want to run forever
away from yourself.

Others you want to
curve inwards like a black hole
away from people.

Friendship Band

Friendship's an elastic band
you stretch and release.
As you increase the distance,
I navigate the tightrope of potential
and snap painfully back to the start.
It's the uncertainty of emails
sent to a cyberspace void,
the hung-up non-calls because
you're "too busy to talk":
constant emotional vertigo.

Stretched to breaking point,
I sometimes want to cut
the quivering band, run
until pain burns nausea and
distance merges memories.

Alice (i)

As she grew, so did her experiences,
broadening, deepening in intensity,
sense-sharp spectrum of feeling.
When she shrank, the world contracted,
telescopic, microscopic microcosm,
narrowed perception through muted senses.
She'd been shape-shifting for a time
fixed in perspectives, unquantifiable.
In her mind, it began when her up-and-down
parallel lines softened in space, curved relatively,
and she realised she was already falling
down a rabbit hole of emotional vertigo.
It was a place where you run
until you choke on burning breath and
still only reach your starting point,
where surfaces shift through paradox.
She's moving in all directions at once.

Alice (ii)

There are times when it's easier
to pretend you don't exist,
that you're just a vehicle
for shifting perceptions of others.
Falling down the rabbit hole, she
reached magic constant velocity,
total release from self-imposed self.

Wonderland's a mesh of mirror-maze
detachment and full-force feeling
and she rides the pendulum like
a long-distance run; time contracted,
relative to a microcosm of perceptions.
There are times when she's sure
it's all just a dream; except that
she doesn't dream, usually, or not
that she remembers. Memories meld
pseudo-memories, neuroplastic neurons
forged by transient imagination.

Logic-lost, she's drifting in a world
where time has no meaning and
light-wave perspectives curve space.
You can run but you won't get anywhere,
distance dissolved infinitesimally in
an illusion of motion. Like herself.

Hale-Bopp, 1997

I liked the stars because of maths.
Year 5 times tables challenge won
a book of constellations- all stickers
and glow-in-the-dark pictures and myth-
and I was obsessed. Science and stories,
fiction and facts fused with wonder.
The book stayed in my schoolbag till Year 9,
long after I knew it by heart, tracing
Braille-like stars with nervous fingertips.

Homework was less scary against
a backdrop of darkness and infinity.
It's amazing what a ten-year-old
can absorb, swallowing information
with the intensity of black hole gravity,
freaking out to Bowie's Space Oddity.
Even as an adult, the song still spins
my head with nauseous vertigo.

We watched the comet through the gap
of curtains in my parents' darkened bedroom.
Lights out and shadowed, I stared at
the fuzz of two and a half thousand years.
Leaning out the window, I breathed in
the wonder of millenia, willing my
stardust cells to merge with comet magic.
Now, years later, I can still feel
the vertigo of infinity, the sense
of everything and nothing at once,
your own contingence in the universe.
In the scheme of the cosmos,
you hardly even exist.

me too learn write pretty one day.

I find poems really hard, took a really long time to even work out what one is! But have realised there are no rules which is why it seems scary and overwhelming, and it's basically a series of moments and images. You don't need character or plot which, for me, is actually easier than writing a story. I think of it like a jigsaw puzzle and playing with words and images to get them to fit together

thank you for the encouragement, my friend Bubbles
here is a slice of my life in rhyme of sorts-

i'm a big slob-
a human blob.
i collect stuff.
it's never enough.
my place is a mess.
this i will confess.
i could be on the tube,
like those other poor boobs-
on TV shows about we hoarders,
all disorganized old molderers.
and all of us are so alone,
with nobody which to atone .
i'm only slightly blue,
but don't know what to do.
my sis will inherit my mess-
she will exclaim, oh god bless,
or maybe a few different words,
synonymous with fornicating turds.
lord please help me,
i pray to thee-
i can't fix it all myself,
i need providential help.
otherwise one day they'll find my skeleton
under piles like a heap of rotten gelatin,
and stinking to heavenly hell,
with my spirit in heaven to dwell,
but for ever and a day,
in my real divine home to stay.

Poetry is really interesting, I mainly write lyrics myself but I've always admired "proper" poets.

^^^
hiya Wrylion welcome to our cool club
lyricists are also "proper" poets IMHO. they have it one step tougher because they have to write in a musical template.

That's good! I can't rhyme I used to be able to when I was little but now I can't seem to make it work. Need to practise... I like playing around with words though.



I'd love to be able to write lyrics! I'm trying to learn- I think they're so much harder and definitely count as poetry. One of my current obsessions is playing guitar so would love to be able to write songs.

Any true expression makes a proper poet. Some of the best poems are wordless <food for thought >

A guy on my course at uni would totally agree- he writes 'graphemechanical' poems where the process and structure are as important as the actual words.

do you think you could supply an example of a graphemechanical poem of his? that sounds very interesting

I'll ask him if he minds

just thought i'd post one on here to see what you think.


Burning though
Burning though,
My mind is racing with ideas and Plans
With no end to them in sight.
Burning in minds eye
The flames consume me
Their smoke blinding me
Their heat warping my minds supports

In their wake little is left
Little but a shaking feeling
An uncontrollable motion which destroys that which is left
Causing the already weeked statures to collapse
Completing the chaotic darkness
Which is what remains of my mind.