Midnight Poetry Thread

[listenup]

I saw your face as you were looking
into a silent eye with no emotion
I tried to hear you but I could not
even try

welcome home. Mr Desert fighter
welcome home I think I know you well
when you looked you couldn't see us
it was night and you couldn't tell

there were those, like us, there to kiss you
welcome home my brother
how I missed you
I would never turn a silent eye
whatever that means I wouldn't
even try

I hope you can take your place
where you were yesterday
I tried to hear but couldn't hear
anybody say

welcome home
you did well
we were here for you
though you didn't see
we were here for you


Welcome home!


edit: forgot to say: Please write a few words?

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

1. wow. nice start for the thread tonight...

oxycontin has left me wantin
more scandals, lies and gore

much more gore
who should be in charge

[listenup]

2. Thanks my friend

oxycontin WILL leave one wantin
poor people trapped in that lie
within them selves
they see
what you and I see

We all want something
poor people understand that lie
I'm looking forward
I see
what they see

Tomorrow may be a better time
I've been thinkin'
again, poor people thinking
no lies, I see, I can tell you
the results of policy

I'll see tomorrow
when it comes
don't look at me.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

4. you see what happens when someone who knows what they

are doing runs with it?
Very nice.

[scarlet_owl]

3. My haiku

It is Friday night
I am in my jammies now
I am a loser

[listenup]

5. Haiku

please explain how that works?

[scarlet_owl]

6. Five syllables in the first line

seven in the second, and five in the last line. Technically a haiku has a reference to a season in it.

[listenup]

11. okay

I was not born here
I guess I was thrown on them
Damn those bastards. I..............................

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. Syllabification. 5-7-5.

Example:

This is a haiku
I am writing for you now
So you will know how.

[noiretextatique]

8. nice one, listenup...very poignant

i don't have anything of my own to share just yet, so here is my favorite poem...by someone else :7

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love the freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnett XL111 , from The Portugese

[listenup]

14. I shall but love thee better after death.

uh oh.

Beautiful words - thanks!

[SiobhanClancy]

9. Mine

Cats in the window
A darkness far too deep
The moon is nodding

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

10. ARMISTICE DAY

ARMISTICE DAY

Here's to your death, my lonely friend,
laid in your foxhole deep.
By land mines, zip guns, M-16's,
or mortars from the hills.
Japan, Hitler, the Axis force.
The Romans! World War I.
Attila, or the Kaiser! Korea! Viet Nam.
Yes, I've been there, my tired friend,
among the countless wounds.
I've dodged the hefted spears, the guns,
the rocks from silent slings.
I've lain among ten thousand dead,
and heard the dying moans!
I've seen the endless bodies of the mutilated dead.
Beheaded, shot, or city bombed-- It makes no difference.
The dead are dead, my silent friend.
The blood all runs dark red.
The screams of pain won't reach my ears!
It's all the same to me--
The innocence is gone, I know, my friend. My enemy.
We wasted it so long ago, as well both of us see!
It's all a losing game, you see. Just look at you and me!
Make sure, my friend, you don't mistake
our living for your dead--
We hurt! You don't-- But, in the end....
when battle's done.... you're me....

COPYRIGHT © 2001 STEVEN A. HESSLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

AUTHOR'S NOTE: War in any form is inexcusable, and just plain WRONG. At the dawn of a new millennium, I believe it's about time mankind started to grow up and put away childish things such as violence, killing, and the attempt to dominate others by using terror, torture, forced deprivation of food and medicine, and the threat of death. The devil walks the earth, and will continue to hold sway until mankind opens its collective eyes and minds to the fact that the madness of the world can and must end.

To do my small part, I hereby release the rights to the poem 'Armistice Day' to any and all who would use it in memory of all those killed throughout history, whichever side they may have been on, and whichever battle they fought. Color, race, ideology, or the specific conflict makes no difference at all, once their blood has been spilled, if someone somewhere mourns them.

This poem may be reprinted by anybody without restriction.

[noiretextatique]

12. melancholy friday poem

Release me, love
Let me leave this empty facade
Love, or let me go

Love, let me go
No traversing the wall
So high

No reaching the top
I languish in vanity
My effort for naught

My effort for naught:
a prisoner here!
Love’s empty facade

Release me, love
No traversing the wall
Love, or let me go

[listenup]

15. No effort is for naught

no one is a prisoner
we release ourselves with
time
and love
and never let those feelings go

No facade is empty
there always is something
I take myself to quiet places
and see what that may bring

Love is never
for naught.

[noiretextatique]

18. Then said Almitra, "Speak to us of Love."

And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:

When love beckons to you follow him,

Though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,

Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,

Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.

Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, I am in the heart of God."

And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

"On Love" from The PROPHET, by Kahlil Gibran

http://www.columbia.edu/~gm84/gibtable.html

[listenup]

24. Talk about emotion

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.


great words from.........................

[noiretextatique]

25. some of the most beautiful words

ever written (or at least that i have read) are in Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet." these words always soothe me...and inspire me.

[Duncan Grant]

26. The great Persian poet Hafiz wrote:

It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day

It will begin to happen
Again on earth-

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,

And women and women
Who give each other Light,
Often will get down on their knees

And while so tenderly
Holding their lover's hand,

With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,

"My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more
Kind?"

[noiretextatique]

27. tender and lovely, and loving

thank you for sharing. you guys are making me feel much better :)

[roughsatori]

13. John: 11:13

John: 11:13

“Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick”.



I wear the mourning arm-band.
You model the shoeless blue burial suit.
I can not play Jesus to your Lazarus;
the real God has seen to that:
Life is firing your synapses,
under your shroud, flesh,
dewy and ripe as an apple
begs for my tongue.
You amuse me by mimicking
the hiss of a leper from your coffin.
My darling, the dead can’t script dying.
You are startled that I breathe
your exhaled air.You are contagious,
as is all beauty. My healthy Lazarus,
the electrical impulses in your brain
transform me into an astronomer
discovering a super-nova.
My love, you haven’t noticed,
but you already are resurrected.

[Duncan Grant]

16. Mind if I share an old favorite?

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

[listenup]

17. That

IS

[Search Party]

19. the mad and the involved disarm

wagons carted by rail
carried the last remains
of the family fool

(what is this place to the west)

who had this big fat idea
in the first place
all this packing
all this getting to leave

(and who is this man i married that invaded my list of good deeds)

hurrah for the day
we arrive / the lilac
will love my skin

and a fresh skirt
and i'll mend his broken sleeve

i'll telegraph daddy
mail all this mail
make a new blanket
for the baby
and figure out
how to get home

[listenup]

21. very good

very very good.

thanks for your thoughts and words.

[Search Party]

23. thank you

nt

[ZenLefty]

20. My Haiku...

The thin white duke sings
And the autumn wind echoes
Ziggy played guitar

[sexybomber]

22. my (somewhat drunken) haiku

the cops come hither!
therefore, I chill in my room.
Drunken nights are fun.

[Search Party]

28. almost last day of may

word processor conked out

lightning
more than likely

little miss tit-tit
sleeping on desk
in the poncho

we are all nuts

[AlienGirl]

29. Evolution by Langdon Smith

EVOLUTION

BY LANGDON SMITH

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in the newer day
And the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush was gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet --

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that I shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.
---

Tonight's selection.

Tucker

[Duncan Grant]

30. Now that's an EPIC poem.

There must be a great story attached to it. ;)

[AlienGirl]

31. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance

these monsters that you love.
---

Tucker