Love that poem. It moves so seamlessly out from itself, from the personal to the universal, like gentle waves carrying you farther and farther out to sea. It's strangely soothing and undeniably disturbing at the same time.

And my contribution:

Incandescent

You are tungsten.
I blaze across you in the space
of a hummingbird's wingbeat and we

Burn

brightly in the vacuum--
a miniature, glass-blown sun--we

Illuminate

the room with a
warm
amber

glow.

---------------------

"From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."

- Sigmund Freud

Weight

She's got a young body with tired eyes.
She doesn't tell me things with words.
I trace her outline with my hand;
It's like reading a map.
She never looks me in the eye –
She says that's where everyone keeps their secrets.
She always had sore shoulders.
She never told me why.
She's long gone now –
I can still remember her body,
Although I can't remember her face.

He hands were older than her body
Wiry fingers with long, creased palms,
Freckled but always cold

Just like her heart.

I speak of walls and chains; of the vials of wrath; of limitations, denials, derelictions, fallings from grace, making them yours to save my face:

Though you live in the desert eating manna, you will not be happy until you have rasied a house;

Though you build, yet chaos will stoop like a girl by the hedgerow to pluck your towers like lillies;

Though you gather flowers, the dust of a thousand carriage wheels will settle apon them;

Though you journey into the interior you will long for the reek of salt and the noise of the gulls;

Though you cross the seas your heart will remain buried beneath the hearthstone;

Though you stay on your arce you will sweat with rage to see your enemies riding upon the hilltops;

Though you conquer your enemies at last you will wish you had spent the time making summer love;

Though you tumble her in every haystack between here and paradise, there will be a question at the end and no answer from the night;

Though you grow wise with the slowing of the years, time will not forgive you for deserting your youth;

Though you live you will long for death;

Though you die you will lack breath.

I like all ur poem. I only write poem when I'm really really sad lol. It's when there is a lot of emotion. Here is one I wrote about my mom.

~to the woman i love most~

Dear mother, how I’d miss you.
Tears are beginning to fall as I write.
Forgive me for I had sinned.
I was suppose to be an angel,
but life had clipped my wings.

How I long for the harsh words of your scold.
How I long for the comfort of your soul.
Many tell me about theirs:
The good, the bad and the care.
So mother, why can’t we be like that?
Me being a punk you’re mad at,
or just simply a snotty little brat

I got your image glued in my head.
Yet I’m so afraid one day it will fled.
Distance makes it hard for us to connect.
Even if we try, there’s no affect.
I have many secrets piling up.
It’s so hard keeping them from erupt.

Sorry mother for not letting you in,
and disappointing you with my sins.
The weight on my shoulders wants to collapse.
I walk heavily in this trap.
Words fail, tears drown and rain drop.
Please mother, help me make it stop.

I think some of you would enjoy this poet's work:
 
EACH BONE OF THE BODY

Each bone of the body
sounds like prayer, sacrum,
sternum, scapula, as if those
who first regarded, then named
them, belonged to an ancient cult
of architects who built temples
which resembled human forms with
limbs outstretched so that
they faced the stars like stars
and offered back this planet’s
elements as five spokes
on a spinning wheel.

If each bone of the body is holy
it is because it gives shape
to mortal love~ bowl of the pelvis
like a cradle, sickles of the hips
like two moons, every angle
open as the mouth to a kiss,
even though we will all be torn
one day from the comfort
of our usual orbits, and broken.

Yesterday, a woman I didn’t know
unbuttoned her blouse slow
as the unraveling of a long summer morning,
held the violet silk slightly
apart like those statues of Christ
from my youth with his private
smile red as the hook and eye
of a surgeon’s needle, his crimson
nimbus, cold fingers resting
against his quiet stone heart
which was forever on fire, wounded,
crowned with bloody thorns
and worn like false regret, or like
a ghastly pendant hung
at the precise center of his chest.

Once I believed
love was like that. A cruelty
which haunted the empire
of my childhood with the hushed
voices of black-robed nuns
who spoke of Adam’s ripped side,
how God drove his fist in
until that first man fell
silent, then snapped off
a single rib which looked, at first,
like the waxing moon until
he crushed it beneath his
heels like dust, mixed in blood
from the season’s first kill,
then gave it to the wind for form,
to the man who called that
new shape Eve, though she cared
little for his list of rules
and names, preferred instead slender
throats of irises, pomegranates
with their skins of fire, the orb
of gold at morning, silver-black
at night, and the circular logic
of stars. She was judged to be
too much in love with the sleek
tongues of fallen angels,
the taste of what was sweet and forbidden
and sin. What could she say
except that she loved the heft
of her bones, the way her mouth
had wrapped around the promise
of knowing all there was to know?

In a room whose battered wooden
floor was always covered with
thick curls of white wax and so
seemed in perpetual winter,
Sister Ignatius would read aloud to us
from a book of martyrs bound
in sanguine leather~ those who
were wrapped in sheaves
of wheat, set as torches against
night, whose skin was slipped
off like clothes before love~
stones, arrows, hooks
in the glistening air. Teeth of the lion,
claw of the bear, the wheel
in flames on the hill. Sebastian,
Agnes, Catherine, Paul, all
destined for statues and stained
glass, blood being the coin
and currency of paradise.

Once, I believed faith was a gift
which would help me turn
away from everything that woman,
her open blouse, was trying
to say. Now I think it is a science
of probability, as in
The sun will rise tomorrow or
This woman will stay
with me tonight.  And if I’m
wrong, if faith means I must
turn from the truth of her body
beneath mine, the late autumn
hues of her lidded eyes,
then I am content to be damned
to this world, where the sky
will grow heavy with seasons,
wings, or swathes of blue smoke
rising, and rivers at sunset
will burn but not be burning.

All my prayers will be simple,
unspoken, the union of bone
against bone. I will pray
to the body, which never makes
impossible claims of perfection,
and to this world, which promises
this much this morning~

the sound of rain on slate shingles,
the scent of last night’s
candle burning down
by white curtains which float
in the mouth of an open window,
and the skin of the woman next to me
which turned to silver
in the moonlight, whose shadow tasted
like the powdered wings of a moth,
an angel, who will wake to this
gift I offer, a branch of forsythia,
its fleet fire bright against
the burnt umber of her hair.

I am telling you this despite
the six o’clock news.
Despite Death who flicks open
the cover of his expensive
watchcase, turns his collar up
against rain, who, after all,
has been mistaken
for that dark child named
Pain with his quick temper,
stamping feet, who stoops
to tie our nerves in knots as if they
are nothing more than
the troublesome laces of high-stitched
boots. I am telling you this
despite Christ’s flaming heart,
the wound in Adam’s side,
despite martyrs who upset
the general equation, who refused
to flee, but lingered instead
like cheap perfume, then bent
to kiss the cruel angles of strange
and glittering instruments~
morning star, scimitar, stiletto
teeth of the iron lady.

I am telling you this because
it is the only religion
I know to be true, because
the blades of our shoulders are
almost wings, because, whoever
you are, we are alive on this
blue planet, because rain has
overflowed the gutters
and the bruised sky looks only
like itself, which is enough.
Because this is the only life
we can be certain of. Because
this world, each bone, is holy,
and never, never enough.

From Out Of Eden

For all the love and
pain we have shared: look, for you,
this pillar of salt.

We loved like blazing ice
coolness fading with every touch.
I can still feel you dripping through my fingers,
tracing the worn angles of my face
I still remember your glow,
the dark fire of your eyes.
This flame
This tear
and I remember.

I wash my hands in you. 

"Brains grow love."--H. H. the Dalai Lama

http://www.myspace.com/ysubassoon

So many poems are sad, and yet...there's something beautiful about that ability to express that which cannot otherwise be expressed. When the words come from the depth of the poet's soul and reveal..."the truth."

Ah, ysubassoon...there's such an intermingling of contrasting images in your poem, but that is how life is at times.

Fire and ice...

Love and pain...

Your Beloved...
who lives so far away, and yet...is held so close.

Thank you for sharing your poem.

I read a little poetry and write some too-  I think it's the best way to jump start any other kind of writing as well, because there really are no rules-

 I like moody poetry generally- because not much of anything else is, except for some novels-

I'll be back and post some things I've written, and maybe this all will prompt me to get back into it a little more-  here's about the shortest one I've got-  just kinda stupid-

"Die and get out quick,

they're telling me, better die and get out quick,

 too much living only makes you sick,

 better die and get out quick..."

Good works here! Well done to all!

Granpap of Gladden Road

Here's my Granpap, with Aunt Edie in Cannonsburg PA circa mid 1960's-  He was a WWI veteran and a coalminer who raised 7 children. He loved his "hooch" and Grandma had to hide it from him when his health got bad.

Here's one I first wrote back about 1985- A few years back, I was writing a screenplay I'm trying to sell, and it seemed to fit into it, so I threw it in there. The moral I guess is " Save your work!  It may be useful for something else later.

By the way, any producers out there who wanna read my script?

"The Ever Changing Wind"

Within the trees the wind is like music

And her gentle fingers caress the leaves

As delicately she plays her forest harp

A wispy ghost unseen

From afar you here her coming

Swirling, dancing as an innocent child

Yet with an invisible, ageless purpose

Stroking symphonies that are never twice the same

The wind and I have spoken often

Her voice is a soft lilt of perfume

That surrounds her winged and chirping children

Lifting their timbres through the timbers

Within the trees the wind has a lover

In the rain from the darkened sky

And as he dews, he dresses her in hues

To nurture all the forest life

But within the village, the wind is a wild ram

Funneled and stampeding through  narrow corridors

Buffeting the sturdiest in her way

And moving all that yeilds

As a cat, she pounces! 

Clawing at your nostrils

Shrieking! moaning!

Along with the voices of the warring, roaring dead dinosaurs

That twirl and scatter her,  here and there

(Like common air!)   

 Within the town, wind and rain no lovers are

As she's no longer pure

And he's washed quickly down the sewer

So give me wind- and woods,  with trees!

And rain that lingers on the leaves

windmill to nowhere 

(Took this photo with my digital camera a couple of years ago traveling out to California)

Here's one of the first poems I wrote. This one is from the year I graduated college in Journalism, abd I felt that the strict journalistic style had given me a writers block.  So I jump started it with some poems, and ended up putting a volume together ten years after, including the years I went through "the change"- and began living as a woman.  It's never been published.  Calll this one

"REFLECTIONS"

Reflections are all I see

Reflections of me

Turned tonight to watch the news

Watched the Arabs fight the Jews

Turned it off and sniffed cocaine

Watched my body fight my brain

Reflections are there to view

Reflections of me and you

Passing a mirror

I felt myself nearer

My reflection there then said "hello"

To some  unknown fellow

Reflections are there to scan

Reflections of a thing called "man"

Turned off the lights to make it black

And saw myself just staring back

Maybe I'm more than simply a being

Dependent on lights and the illusion of seeing

Mirror mirror on the wall,

Who's the fairest of them all?

The mirror answered with it's curse:

"You're no better, or any worse"

Walking down the street I see

Frightened eyes, reflecting me

Could we ever see our own disguise

Looking through another's eyes?

Texas backroad

(The forward to my collection and first poem)

Dear Readers:

In 1977 I was a senior at Indiana University. My main goal in life then was for I and my teamates to win the big Little 500 bike race there. In the usual dreary and nervous months before the big day, I scribbled some verse about some of my feelings at the time.  The notes somehow survived in my parents basement for several years, which was unusual because I usually destroyed any real baring of myself on paper. I was living a lie.

In 1982 I was a married transvestite. By 1984, I was an unmarried transvestite.  By the years end I retired from 14 years of competitive cycling and begun living as a woman openly.

Writing then became my release and continues so now-

This is the first poem, written the day before my 23rd birthday in February 1977

"24 before 23"

Scorekeepers in a game

the game is life

who's ahead?

who's winning?

It's so obvious it doesn't matter

The game is rigged

An infinite number of scorekeepers

keeping an infinite number of scores

While the infinite couldn't care less

We count the fuzz on a peach while the flavor stays inside

Self-appointed referees twisting the rules of the game

Who else sees it my way?

The crowd boos and everything's suppossed to be different

Morals, judgements, laws, grades, evaluations

Cultural values, religious beliefs

Inventions of the scorekeepers

While only love is natural

Only love endures

somewhere in texas

That's the name I gave this one dated 7-15-85.  I lived on Grace Street in Hollywood at the time.

O Oracle!

Open our own observances

oozing oodles of odd op-art

Operate one's opinions often.

Offer offensives of other oratory

Opposing onslaughts of ordinary origin,

Ostaracizing old obligatory othodoxy.

Occasionally orchestrate ornate opuses

Oppress offbeat obstacles occurring

Organize optimistic options only

Omit outrageous obviously overstated ostentation

Oust odorous ordure

Ordain order,

Or else!

big tex

This is somewhere in Texas, where everything is big. In fact, in Groom Texas, which is EXACTLY half-way between Los Angeles and my hometown of Indianapolis, they have the "Tallest Cross in the Western Hemisphere" It's hard to miss!

That's where these Texas pics are from I think- Northern Panhandle between Witchita and Amarillo

I changed my screen name because, hey, I'm the terre of Hulman Street!

 Helmsburg IN

Keep it Down on Main Street please!

"Breaking Glass"      (Winter 1985)

The sound of breaking glass is on the wind

It's garbage that's missed the bin

Falling and scattering on impact

Moving to a greater entropy and consciousness

Away from the formed opinions

of a Coca-Cola engineer

or a figurative ad for higher life through beer

It now rejoins the glorious chaos

it's molecules had long since lost

A former slave conduit

now becomes a thousand daggers there

Daring those with souls bare

to tread on to it

bottle to nowhere

Yeah, it's a bar room blitz!

also dated winter 1985

Psychiatric saviour of emotional behavior

Can you place us where we face us?

Can you reach a mind behind our veneer,

an inner lust, beneath our outer crust,

the part of us that's insincere ?

Can you bring about a change of brain?

Or is your understanding merely psychotic branding?

For yet another temporary landing

in a sea of schizophrenia?

Can you help us through the day

tomorrow

can you bring us relief from our sorrow

Or are we paying for sanity,

that we merely borrow?

Lake Lemon IN

4/15/93

wanna hit 'a prana

wanna hit 'a prana

don't wanna move to Ghana

wanna hit 'a prana

wanna see some fauna

wanna see some fauna

wanna see before all gone-a

wanna see some fauna

wanna place to be warm

wanna place to be warm

don't wanna have to be in storm

wanna place to be warm

wanna hear some nada

wanna hear some nada

da noise is getting lotta

wanna hear some nada

wanna feel some tender

wanna feel some tender

got no interest in a lender

wanna feel some tender

wanna see some rain fall

wanna see some rain fall

don't wanna see the stains fall

wanna see some rain fall

Trevlac IN

Hit me with your best shot...

The World War II crowd's gotten old

Now they want to take us with 'em

Warden Wally gives us country wit

While greed supplies the rhythm

The peanut's gang breeds bloody hail Marys

And Woodstock's just for fun

The competition's cutthroat now

To see who's got the biggest gun

The fertile minds are easily fooled

Who've never seen the dogs or mace

Their art is judged by critics blind

Whose brains are at a military base

So light a candle for old Ernie Pyle

And let his ghost remain

A reminder of a younger time

In a world that went insane

Now no more talk of harvest time

From little ones in school

Tha Captain won't be the only one

To sink with this ship of fools

Indiana University

1/7/87

The injured oriental Jewish boy meets the deodorant queen of the Bronx, while the chief of guru justice hangs it in the balance. What strange overtones for the fate of mankind, this upsetting of the natural sexual tension between the cosmic combatants. Lo and behold, I bring you tidings of great ploys!  The Gods must be laughing at someone.

Who are we to believe a dream so outlandish as to infringe on reality?  Please think me away... This can be no ordinary intrusion, we must have broken through to the inner sanctum. The wave configuration has been altered through constant subtraction, and now spreads rings of cosmic disturbance through the space-time continuum.

And far off in the dark recesses of the space mud, the alien machine gains further power: it's organic human microchips further binding against the mystic white sell-off, represented by the rise of the Om computer. We see the red cellulites coagulating against the perceived threat to the domination of all main arteries.

The end result must be an allegiance of all earthly interfaces, leaving a controlled planet ripe for disk storage. Too late will our memory realize that upon completion of this task, the machine will throw us into a larger database, necessitating the cycle of war/peace/progress to begin all over again.

EXPERIMENT 77-19-000

Purpose: To study the retrieval capability of a Level 4 planetary system devastated by thermo-nuclear war

CODENAME: BABEL 8

METHOD: A small charge is introduced into a mature planet cell, in the form of cancerous greed and possessivness, thereby inducing the system's self-destructive mechanism.  Cancer is injected via system's own terrestrial communication system via language cloaking genetic flaw previously bred, also known as "advertising" The end result is the system's natural organic response, which of course in a Level 4 system means a self-destruction of previous growth by approximately 98 percent.

System is then monitored on retrieval of previous database levels. Projected recovery with current species of human chips is anywhere from 2 to 500 generations, dependent upon survival of key interfaces and destruction of negative response factors that are able to continue the organic response, defined by the character <WAR> within this system.  Mutation figures to be be monitored and factored in as well.

Texaco 66

Poetry threads will never die, at least while I'm around...

Here's one dated 1977

I'd love to take this car

and drive it into the lake

It stands for all our failures

and distorted dreams

We've heard it said before

yet we don't listen

We all know we're too greedy

and no one else listens anyway

So we force this pace on each other

until we've burned ourselves out

with the tiresome misery we've made

I'd like to take The Bomb

And launch it at the sun

To watch all the fireworks

and laugh at our castrated leaders

What fun!

ghost fill

Winter 1985

Alone alone alone

I sit

at home, at home, at home

for real really real

Hastily I’m writing

for I feel the pen’s exciting

As I grasp the narrow shaft

enticing, spewing words

Rereading can be misleading

while pure thought is coming, bleeding

twitching from one thought to the next

pulsating seeding

Finally , pausing as a critic

a reviewer heretic

I try to second guess the flow

ingesting instead of continuing to go

Or is it adding, summing the lengthy coming

I don’t know

________________________________

“Straighten up Manuel Perez”

Is what the teacher says

As she waves a finger in his face

“Your tomfoolery must be ending!”

“No comprendo, I’m ego!”

Lake Lemon In

7/13/85

Billy Lavelle, Billy Lavelle

born in paradise

raised in hell

the miracle is that you lived to tell

now don’t look back

live every moment well

I met him one night

at the coffee shop

He walked right over

and stopped to talk

of a joy he had within his soul

despite a wasted youth that took it’s toll

behind the prison walls of stone

to a peaceful man who wanders now alone

At seventeen, his father took his mother

then turned around and took his brother

The next life he ended was his own

leaving Billy all alone

in the bayside city he called his home

Another year hadn’t passed

before Billy’s free youth breathed its’ last

with three friends sentenced to a robbery

of fourteen silver dollars

some fast spending cash

They sent him out into the bay

where for the next ten years

he was destined to stay

Billy Lavelle, Billy Lavelle

born in paradise

raised in hell

the miracle is that you lived to tell

now don’t look back

live every moment well

You look up into the night

As I stand behind you and whisper,

Let me be your sky of shining stars—

Giving you my secrets, revealing my signs.

            A Near Collision

            Avoiding disaster,

            I shift my weight

            And tip my wing

            To the East, the rising sun.

I will fly home to myself now,

Building my nest of regrets.

But, from time to time,

            I will circle in the sky

            Above the spot,

Along that rocky shore,

            Where I avoided disaster

            And caught a glimpse

Of  Paradise.

I believed in your words

Strung together,

Adorable. I believed.

And then the string broke,

Your voice went away.

This silence, it hisses,

It hums, it is killing my mind.

The lips curl around silence,

I can’t even whisper your name

Without being shouted at

By your soundless goodbye.

                                                                                                                       YES--Yoko Ono

I am between the body and the sky tonight.

Eagle brings a message from you—

You are not the trickster Coyote,

You are Kindred. You are a hungry owl like me.

I carry you within me now---

A secret madness, a precious truth.

The drumming sound of my heart will be your name,

J--, J--, J--, J…

 or 'Fast Food, Fast Sex: Junk Diets Make You Dead'.

-------------------------------------------------------

Tonight, Matthew, I’m feeling in the mood for

Group sex, penis size five,

No lesbians please,

Just the odd bi for sugary spice

And all things vice

No further than a mile

I’ll walk

Not back

Tonight, Matthew, I want to go weak at the knees

Feel that surge, taste that zest

Run my face against his chest

Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to set him on fire

We’re going to burn this town to ashes

This is gonna be one hell of a funeral pyre

And who the fuck cares where tomorrow goes

When tonight I’m aglow

Tonight I’m a porn star, and he’s

Who ever he wants to be

Stars in our eyes

Mud on our knees

Thumping and pumping beneath the trees

Catching the falling glitter between our teeth

Mother never saw me like this

Down on the floor like a piece of meat

God, I feel like an oven, I’m aflame

Stoke me and stroke me, any way you want me

Inside, upside, flip me like a coin

For one night only, I’m a slave to your groin

Tonight, Matthew, I’m where I fucking wanna be

Tonight I’m wearing holes in my dreams

This is life, this is living

Down here on my knees

Where the view sure is different

It’s a long way up to those great globes of flame

When you’re flat on your back with a guy with no name

Tonight, Matthew, I’m nameless, faceless, pastless

I was never a child with skids on my knees

I was always this rough and this tall and this hot

I am skin, I am sweat, I am mankind defined

I’m Casanova, I’m a supernova

Tonight, Matthew, I’m on fucking fire

-------------------------------------------

I got mad a gaydar.com.

NB: Titled 'Holocaust' because of the literal meaning of the word, derived from the Greek 'holos' (completely) and 'kaustos' (burnt sacrificial offering).

"When you're flat on your back with a guy with no name"

Oh God that's a scream!  My on;y reply is "been there, done that."

Good poem- Let's hope Matthew doesn't turn out to be his gay lover...

Capice?

Did you hear? The Italians are coming!

9/11/07

"To Davad Maschil"

Bondage kings and whores

and sadistic military killing pieces of shit

Suicidal racetrack golden Palomino slaves

In Pump and Sir Cum stances

Restlessly wrestling the rest of the rest

Live and die and kill

by the PUNISHMENT invested in ignorance

and enthusiastically described in terms of anal sex

for ecclesiastical tomorrows that never arrive

For the bloodied blood passion play

always points the other way

Ha ha,  ha ha,  ha ha!

We're Number One, We're Number One

a poem with the words mole and snail in them posted on AE...

Harvest Time

The killer frost

curls the leaves

and ends the cricket's song.

But the mole still dances

beneath the earth,

as a lone snail

shivers across

my garden path.

a lil taste of wut i've written, my writing is still maturing i think so bear with me for a while :-) hope u like

Fate

T’was fate I thought that I should meet

A being the likes of you

Memories of a time bittersweet

Stir up emotions strong and true

Unquestioning looks of admiration

Barely perceivable with a glance

In a moment of unforeseen flirtation

Inebriation tore down my protective stance

Like-natured were we, destructively

Expectant of openness pure

Unawares in all sincerity

A bundle of youth still insecure

A child of this earth not long have I been

Yet experience will stand true

If of my innocence I was long robbed clean

Then all naivety left with you

Fate it was that stripped me bare

Of all that I could churn

And if t’is fate that in my mind doth stare

Fate’s purpose in this; for me to learn

and another one

The Space Between You And Me