Paul Tubb (2/9/2010 5:49:00 PM) Post reply

If you view my book on Barnesandnoble.com, you will see people who purchased my book also purchased, Dante, Chaucer and Angelou... (Also The Night Before Christmas)

Wow, maybe Respectability is something I'll achieve after all? Probably not though.

http: //search.barnesandnoble.com/Please-Do-Not-Encourage-This-Nonsense-by-Purchasing-This-Book/Paul-H-Tubb/e/9781425189860/
 

John Lyday (2/9/2010 3:52:00 PM) Post reply

The poem I wrote yesterday was so bad, I decided to try something new for me. Criticism is, of course, greatly appreciated.

Letter to Despair

Despair, I cry to you.
Comfort me in my sorrow.
Clasp me to your sultry breast.
Soak me in your tears
that I may wade through the flood
of anguish and desperation.

Feel the loss and heartache,
confined inside this musty vault.
You alone bear the key
that could open its weighty door
and release the demons trapped inside,
grappling with my resolve.

Suffer for me the gloomy dew
that dampens my existence
and rots, in moldy shade, my will,
food for the moths that circle
the kerosene lamp, beckoning me
from the rim of my depression.

John Lyday
 

notalot tono (2/9/2010 3:34:00 PM) Post reply

The Reckoning

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.

Theodore Roethke
 

Becca Wulf (2/9/2010 12:01:00 PM) Post reply | Read 1 reply

It was never one step and then another.
It was never left then right nor right then left.
It was never a sequence.
You ask me how I remember, but there are no words, only movements.
My thoughts don't tell me the next step;
My body transforms into the next motion; emotion.
The moves are feelings of placement, but mostly soul.
The step and lyrics might be sad, but I don't feel 'sad', I don't think 'sad'.
The movement IS the emotion's core; itself.
I'm speaking a language without words.
In that moment my body becomes something too pure to mere words.
If there is a God, this is how he speaks:
No words, No connection mind-to-mind.
Only music as breath and dance as unaltered, unpolluted essence of all that there is.
I cannot teach you what you ask, I cannot teach you to dance.
I can only show you the movement, the rest you must discover on your own.



my fist on this site: feedback?
 

ash609 blogspot (2/9/2010 10:05:00 AM) Post reply | Read 1 reply

Trade and Herbert - have you received your invitations to the Intelligencia Blog yet? Surely she'll include you, since you have such great senses of humor & all...
 

Sherrie Kolb-Cassel (2/9/2010 9:28:00 AM) Post reply | Read 4 replies

Wow! So cool to see all the mindblowing discussion of poetry going on here! It's like this place morphed into a cacophony of brilliant voices overnight! Okay, okay...enough snarkiness, truly, hope you're all well and that you're out fulfilling your dreams. I'm digging university life...it's a lot of work, so, I don't have as much time as I used to, and certainly not as much time as many of you do - to play anymore...not even at my own blog - which is on temporary hiatus till the summer months.: (

I appreciate the occasional hits on my one poem here though from my long time admirer and his cohort. Thanks.

Off to my research design class - yikes. Toodles.

Ad Hominem

by Nicky Beer

The Poet:


Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—
where’s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?



The Octopus:


It must be a dull world, indeed,
where everything appears
to be a version or extrapolation
of you.


The birds are you.
The springtime is you.
Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—
everything becomes
you.


I, with a shift
of my skin, divest my self
to become the rock
that shadows it.


Think of when
your reading eyes momentarily drift,
and in that instant


you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text
gone before you can focus.
That’s me.

Or your dozing revelation
on the subway that you are
slowly being
digested. Me again.


I am the fever dream
in which you see your loved ones
as executioners. I am also their axe.


Friend, while you’re exhausting
the end of a day
with your sad approximations,


I’m a mile deep
in the earth, vamping
my most flawless impression
of the abyss
to the wild applause of eels.

Source: Poetry (December 2008) .