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I.
Box fans and mowers drone below,
distant traffic murmurs through summer’s heat.
Memory presses: teeth and old thunder.
Regret. Punishment. Hope. Repeat.

My ears ring with histories,
sometimes cicadas, sometimes sermons,
sometimes her humming, barefoot by the creek,
sometimes the sting of my father’s belt.

Sunlight slants through bloated magnolia leaves,
thick as tongues,
slick with old rain.
It stains the walls with a color like yolk,
like aging joy.

II.
I wake in moonlight,
before the rumble.
Step barefoot onto concrete
still warm from the last sun.

The sky is full of stubborn stars,
hung from the last funeral.
I watch. I wait.
No birds yet. No breeze.
I stay.

I tell myself this is peace.
But the silence knows better.
I loved a star that never knew my name,
a silent flame,
fixed in the wreck of night.
Her stillness fooled me
into believing she sang.

She blinked once
in some long-dead century,
and I’ve lived ever since
by ghost light.

They say she's gone,
burned out or broken,
but I keep whispering psalms
to her afterglow,
drinking to the shape she made
in my sky.

I don't need the truth,
just the dream
of her burning.

Like something that waited for me,
not knowing I was too late
the moment I began.
met a friend for lunch and tea?

done the wrapping, sticking
and packing, most work has gone,
some has been hung, so i am left
with paper and bits below, new work
coming in.

the bottles are up for sale, and
am drawing an erasure with all
my might.

have you seen my writing site?

yes, we had kippers on toast, tasty.
 Jul 18 irinia
Crow
Armada
 Jul 18 irinia
Crow
fleeing beyond the horizon
a retreating sun sets ablaze
the rigging of aerial galleons
vapor masted and cloudy hulled

running before the wind
with full sail aloft
they press in hot pursuit
their unobtainable quarry

the pale mountainous island of the moon
secure in her fortress
regards the fleet with haughty disdain
as they hurry past

endless blue waters of the sky
deepen towards black
and breakers
on the great reef of the Milky Way
come into view

the fleet softens
losing interest in the hopeless chase
the ships dissolve and stretch out thin
on the last gasp of the failing wind

day sweeps over the edge
of the diurnal shelf
passing from shallows of dusk
to the starlit deeps of night
it ain't easy, when you relate, restrict and delegate,
when you draw a narrow lane on a highway that says
only left footed
poets need apply
<>
it does not say
slow cars stay to the right,
only trucks,
or oddly even,
no trucks



I love seasonality,
without thickly thinking
you take a break
from the poetry writing

one day I'll figure out a way
to monetize my love poems,
publish them as Shakespeare's couple(t)s,
"new edition plus
a couple of
newfound poems!"

maybe some fools will buy some thinking Shakespeare has been, resurrected!

love grows goes hot all over and
grow slower older
and grow colder,
in between those fine
ticklish teasing moments


when the miracle of resurrection repeats itself

something is said
a gesture is made
a finger strokes the cheek,
unexpected
and it all comes
rushing back again,
overfilling
that coffee cup mug she bought
just(ice)
for you

ain't gonna check how long it's been
since last I declaimed, disclaimed,
inflamed,
these pages with an only love poem

but I do know this:
it is something I think about,
It is something I know about,
it is something I feel about
daily
even on the nothing days,
when routine takes over
I know you couldn't remember of its passage,
is the waking up and the lying down to sleep


but the poets eyes are always open his emotive secret senses,
always alert,
what's that thing they always say,

his heart just wasn't in it!
(🥴if they only knew the truth😘)
 Jul 17 irinia
Nat Lipstadt
Stumbling into ancient scripts, authored a decades plus ago,
ago being a modifier of time quantities, minute or large, unspecific
without an objective adjective additive, that faucets a stream of an interlocutory elocution of a batter of rooted emotional histories,
but not histrionics

fanciful words for dredged up memories, acute, but tarnished,
powered yet worn by a cousin of ago, a/k/a,
age
and yet
renews as of,

at this very second, as if it were a first, a tumult of visions, swelling of remembrances, embodied scars, and I weep anew but not
for me, as much for the resonating simpatico souls with whom
they even  now vibrate with resonance of the immediacy of
If not now, When?

Aside: The exterior environment is noisy wet pelting of thunderstorms and ****** sheets of bulleting rain, piercing projectiles, but I am safe in the sunroom, sadly happy my dog is no longer here to shiver and tremble, cuddle and be soothed by steady stroking

But I am here, wrestling with this dredging operation, digging up
tons of sand that require dumping, and I ask, inquire, beg:

Who will take this detritus off my hands, once more, now uncovered,
now recovered, the soil is already soaked and can absorb no more,
the soul is already soaked and can absorb no more, the weakened
heart, damaged and occluded, suffer cannot bare twice the

outrageous misfortune

of unbared recollections, twice, or thrice, and I feel myself drowning in revisiting pain, **** **** ****, these old poems, not nuggets, but boulders dropping from night skies, shot from a pitching machine, without letup, piercing of agonies that once ago  
freshly desecrated and decorated my basic training in humanity.

Enough whining:
I wrote those poems to
eject out those pains,
and I write this now, once more,
to realize that so so many still face
uncertain and unrelenting similarities,
doing their own sums,
and I wish them easing,
strength to compose and
thereby dispose of
the ineloquent
and eloquent
words of staining suffering


3:30am
Thur
July 10
2025
 Jul 17 irinia
ismail
i’m tired of writing these poems
tired of chasing the right words
for a feeling that never wanted to be named

tired that nothing i write
comes close to the way it felt
to love you
and lose you
and still carry it all

no stanza, no line,
no late night whisper into the void
has ever been enough

the love i have for you
deserves more than language
and yet
language is all i have
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