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sandy Jan 2019
Old women
Old women
Bent over
Or straight
Bony thin women
****** women
Soft but deflated
Old women
Sitting alone
Holding a plate
Of half-eaten food
Of all-shattered prospects
Of blowzier days
Romance and contexts
That never materialized
Or did
But then vanished
Or slipped away
Leaving so many
Silenced and banished
Useless as pennies
Sitting in corners
Under old women shawls
With little to do

But hold onto plates

Old women
Old women
Boarders in
Somebody’s house
Or some institution
On somebody’s orders
Or out on the street
In old woman confusion
Holding a plate
To hold onto something
Old dried up promises
Lingered impressions
Of young women hopes
Things that once mattered
All in the past
Leaving old women tattered
Trying to atone
For young women sins
For whatever they did
To be so alone
Or whatever they didn’t
In those
Rare lucid moments
Old women quicken

Still holding their plates

Old women
Old women
Hide old
Beating hearts
Beneath sour old garments
Old women scarves
Hide old women failings
Hold old women tongues
Against old women wailing
Of things that have gone
With unsteady fingers
Still gripping plates
To show themselves living
To avoid being left
- Tho’ some old women prefer -
For the old women train
Taking old women wherever old women go
To never return
Around an old women curve
The young never see coming
Are never prepared
To face old women shaken
By old bodies broken
Of old women forsaken

Hold onto your plates
A friend of nearing 70 called me one morning, distraught because the world "is getting to be a lot." I spent the rest of the day when I should have been working writing a not particularly symmetrical poem I call "Holding a Plate."
William A Poppen Jan 2019
Present
Going slowly
A good time to explore
Venture toward the unknown
Gently
*notes — The cinquain is a poem form with a strict syllabic count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 in five lines. Usually used to express brief thoughts or moments.
nja Jan 2019
She’s highness, deaf but not muted.
Still dignified, past perfect, but still pushing.
Withering tea addict,
laughs at her own sophisticated and immature jokes.
Farts.
How the highness gracefully descend.

Relaxed, reclined,
hands placed still on abdomen, yet they’re itching.
Noisy breaths lift her sinking body,
till she’s plastered to the bed,
not quite motionless.
Can’t decline.
Sits up. Peering, active, but stunted.
This one's about my grandmother. She used to be this royal lady and she still is but with deteriorating hearing.
William A Poppen Dec 2018
Old age *

Growing stillness

Know one day at a time

Pound the piano key’s of life

Softly
*notes — The cinquain is a poem form with a strict syllabic count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 in five lines. Usually used to express brief thoughts or moments.
William A Poppen Dec 2018
Old Age

What are you for?

Do life at a snail’s pace

Notice the drone of slow breathing

Wither
*notes — The cinquain is a poem form with a strict syllabic count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 in five lines. Usually used to express brief thoughts or moments.
Nikos Kyriazis Dec 2018
I touch you
and through you
I experiencing
the reflections
of all Gods

I step out into the void
and amidst the sandstorm
I call out the names
of all i read on your skin

And now
there is no way back
My fate is bounded
to the elderly tokens
that rule these worlds

The ages have stamped
with blood and that was inevitably
From the annihiliation
a flower always sprouts
The sought gates of the Purgatory
will always be inside
our innermost lust for power

Many talked about the aftermath
Who will accumulate the souls?
Who will take over the segragation
between the ''corrupted''
and the ''virtuous''?

Sentries sent by Warlords of yore
often call in to see if i still endure
And i grin at them and
share with my fellow ghosts
the bitterness of truth
Nik Bland Oct 2018
You and I will crack one day
The smoothness will all go away
And as our hairs fade into grey
Will the love still stay?

We promise love until the dust
But so often forget the rust
Failing frequently to discuss
What happens if nothing happens to us

The porcelain will splinter and chip
Marking, for some, where the veil rips
But my love lasts more than just a stint
Of smooth skin on my fingertips

For if the twilight fades the blue
It replaces it with countless hues
And so will grow my love for you
In seeing, remem’bring what we’ve gone through

You and I will crack, no doubt
But my love will faithfully pour out
To endless bound, in copious amounts
A quenching water from an undying spout
“I believe when I fall in love with you, it will be forever...” -Stevie Wonder

“When I give my heart, it will be completely, or I will never give my heart...” -Nat King Cole

“In time the Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they’re only made of clay. But our love is here to stay...”
Ken Pepiton Oct 2018
'Put my hand in the hand of the man from Galilee,

that song keeps playing in my memory, and I recalled

Or I thought I did, I imagined he'd walk with me
and talk with me
Along life's merry (or was it narrow?), way

a light touch, his arm around my shoulders,
as boys are wont to do,
I axed 'im,
help me fill the darkness behind my eyes,
which I think may have been blind, at that time,

I have memories like that.
packed away in old memes. That mean something...
Gold-something...
color maybe, Goldfarv? Bloom.
Right, my augmentatious savant
looked it up and I sorted what I recalled

Google The Global Brain, Howard Bloom,
where he named a kind of
category of knowability. Memes, he called them.

And I thought, memes mean something more,
not Dawkins's, nor Bloom's, but these,
heteromemes bubbling out my belly button,
look real close.

Here a seeing being done, words appearing...

fractally featureless by the time a clock could have been imagined,

the point of the story was made,
and there is no end in sight.

Pop. Another apocalypse bubble collapses by mortality. Whaddyaknow?

What remains when a bubble pops at a positron level,
after the charge is touched and
the tension-power-loss collapses the bubble?

You should think, you know atoms work, this way.

Touchy bubbles disappear when their form is disinformed,
the wall of a bubble,
one quanta of power thick,
vanishes
as the charge that formed it flees.
That bubble,
not cloud-based, random super positioning,but
elect
tric-magi-tech, a touch screened
at the quantum accounting point of real-ification,
but, probably,
a bubble,indeed,
powered, one way or another, with a single charge,
Go, that's it.
(I charge thee, son Timothy, go)
That's all an electron does.
It goes, as soon as any sense can be made of it,
outa here, oughta hear it, clear,
ping. No charge, no bubble, but next sure as...
No, ah, when I think about that..

Hell,
somethi' from nuthin musta hapt one time,

but ya'll take no heed, this voice,
m'fallin angel, Tantan, droppin' in ol-fren, tricky hybridbast...

Noah was a tellin' Ham the truth
found in wines that moved themselves aright,
slurry tongued, and laughin' but pisstoff.

The idea of somethin' goin' south in a family,
that started up again when
ever Noah started drinkin' old wine, sayin' sbetter'n...

Old story, God damened 'em, not me, I just
built the box.

Who told you I was naked? Noah queried Shem.

-- aye, ye know, Noah was drunk,
No excuse, but you know.

Things were said, that maybe could be forgotten, after a while,

But those father wounds a man imagines worst
are the one's his son's forgot.
Forgot can't be forgiven it seems, sometimes...

The story being told is complicated. See,
the Bible is a lens,
not a map.

I've looked so long through that lens,
that I began to see the bubble formed around me,
charged powerfully with fear,
'yond my bubble monsters lurked.

But, my bubble bumped another,
purest of happenstance,
the bubbles merged and merged again,
their power building to a wave,
crashing to the shore and no more
was I bubbled in my safe place.

I found this trail up from the beach.

It got me much farther than this, should you ever
visit me.
Did you regret the defeat at Ai,
or were you
Aachen, bold?

No, irrelevant, obtuse allusion to Yahshua,
that's not in the stack,
that card's about as relevant as McLuhan's hair of the dog.

Information unformed begins to boil deep in me.

Somethin', ain't it?  All them three meter dishes shrunk down
to the size of a spoon, a teeny weeny spoon, a coke spoon,
like on Miami Vice, back when.

Satellite TV changed the desert, fer sher, but 4g, brohan,

that was the trick. Elect trick.
Future, on demand, where outhouses are still de rigueur.

Before you know it, country kids,
too poor for any but outlaw dreams,
can audit courses at MIT,
if somebody
shows him, it can be done, prove t' him
it works, faith can make things happen,
but
happening as an event, in the Deep Field,
is sorta hard to nail down to one thing,
until the very last
Planc-sec.  
Astrophysics is part of the metagame, fer sher.
But
there's some stuff that takes some patience,
to learn. Fifty year'r longer.

Everything that's old and still works is only old, not rotten.

Olde time religion, at the oldfo'k dayroom,
where the clock runs the whole show.
It's another game show. Saint Bob Barker takes a bow,
and declares the potential worth of all your eyes behold,
behind the curtain,
lies the prize.

If, if, if you are a luckywinner and
you arise when I call your name
to come on down,
fall on your knees and declare the worth...

pure gamesmanships required here, golf whispers only,
worship, 'smuch more difficult to aim for than praise.
I agree.
Praise, appraisal, worthyness, worthship, prize, what's the diff?
How comes a thing to be worthy,
in your estimation? Tell me no lie.

A feeling? What's it worth?
Depends.
Safe? Priceless! Don't shout. There's money to make.

'Got a busy-ness pre-positioned high above the rest.
A super-positioned superstion. The darkness.
See, safety is a human right.
So we sell walls, impermeable. It's always, lights on
within, then
We'll be rich and powerful wallbuilding,
citi-zen warriors fed and fattened
by those we make
feel safe, from the dark unknowns seeping in.

That's the idea. It's worked for years, at least
since
we saw the Power in Myth and
capitalized Campbell's bliss and Sagan's billions and billions of stars.

Within these walls workers will work for food and a feeling.
And Facebook.
They choose a place and stand, and do what comes to hand.
Heartily
grip what's easiest for you to hold on to,
they are told.

Attendants bring the meds, settling every disruption
of the peace the patient craves in his comfort.
The price ain't right, m'mouthmumbles...

You are absolutely co-rect-allatime, tekayepeel.

There are wishes being made,
on all manner of stars
for happy ever afters.

If wishes were askings, what if
connecting to the source of haps which,
every expert knows, haps are
all happiness can possibly
consist of.
Oh, consist.
That sticky, gluteny idea stuck in my daily bread.
It's related to resist, desist and the command to stand.
Sistere. Shield-wall and all that. Turtles all the way down.

A disruption!
Day room Now! Granpa's shouting,

This is that bomb, this is a dam buster Jesus H Christ Bomb!
I'll drop it. I swear.

Something's bound on earth to go wrong,
ever since Eve bit that apple, if she'da left that apple on the apple tree
Nah, that ain't how it went down and
songs about it don't change it none.

But, maybe this is me interrupted... in my meander.

What if, nothing is immaterial,
as an idea, it can't go wrong,
and Murphy's law, obeyed, is good, all the time.
If nothing can go wrong, it won't.
Ask the pilot flying by faith in his checklist.

What if,
asking for help helps?
Was that a message? A touch by an angel?
Spirit, the idea? An answered prayer?

Are you familiar with its role in reality?
Something makes these bubbles spin, y'know.

Ignoring is bliss, nay,
No more,
precisely, nevermore,
quoth the raven, shall the man who can read
be locked away from all the stories,
telling eventualities that
men, wombed and un,
have told and tested for ever, it seems,

Stop
striving for perfection and let patience have her way witcha,

whatcha learn can change the world.

Look back. Good news from a far country come our way.
Grandpa made some sense and we built a fort, of pillows
This is a reworking of Good news from a far country, I am attempting to rein in my scattered mind. Let me know if you see improvement or parts in need thereof.
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