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Piano keys are like humans,
Both black and white
Alone as notes,
Just producing sounds
But together as chords,
They produce symphonies.
Every one of us has the potential to create harmony in their lives, but that often takes a great deal of collaboration and working together.

Individual sounds won't give you that pleasure and harmony that a musical chord can.

For a colourful life, we must appreciate all colours.
Jack Harrell Jul 2020
My sunglasses twinkle
While they lay on your breast
I say “Go mingle”
You say “I’ll do my best”

We’ve been doing alright
We’re getting by
It’s been what, a week now?
Since either of us has cried

“Time to go” keys jingle
Crunching through the snow
It sounds like stale Pringles
“Why’d we have to go?”

“Why were we there at all?”
“I don’t know? Welfare call?”
“I just want to go to sleep”
“Our blankets run deep”

Keys jingle “Back. Finally.”
One slow upstairs trod

Above my door frame
A white board hangs on a rod

9 \ Days since last breakdown

“Scratch that”

Zero
I wrote this a while ago when I was a different person. May it bring you solace should you need it or a reflection upon your past self.
Gabriel Girault Jun 2020
I wanted to give you the world,
Unfortunately it wasn’t in a college student’s budget.
So I gave you the next best thing,
I made you my world.
Gave you the keys,
And I threw away any locks.
I let you free roam and play around my heart,
and I prayed you wouldn’t play GTA 5.
I may have a big heart,
but it can only take so many drive-bys.
Once you hit five stars,
All I could do is spray and pray for my feelings.
When you finally said goodbye,
Everything hurt exponentially.
So I tried to find the locks,
Before the damage could be done.
But they disappeared the first time I looked into your eyes,
Eyes that completely changed my perspective.
Once I opened up everything to you,
Now I can't go back to heart lock down.
My world has transformed,
For better or for worse only time can decide.
ogdiddynash Jun 2020
there are so many
types of pockets,
especially for jeans.
my favorite is the “ticket pocket,”
that little pocket stitched
inside a bigger front pocket,
maybe also called a
“watch” pocket,
supposedly
a cowboy designation
for safeguarding
their chained pocket watch receptacle.

who ya kidding?

anyway, a second naming
more to my liking:

seems cowboys put their train ticket where they could easily
retrieve them as the conductor conducted himself properly,
asking each passenger after every stop to show his ticket.

so it came to be,
Levi gave us pockets of variety,
durable, baggy ones to
carry our jewels comfortably,
one for tightly ticket embracing,
and further inspired that
sewn on the hat of
every railroad conductor,
a russian motto,
Trust but Verify.

I myself use the ticket pocket for
my keys,
which in any other jeans pocket, movement
causes cruel and unusual pain,
but not if that huge bunch of jangling
instruments of torture are tightly tucked
in their own prison interior,
incapable of doing hot yoga or
any other stupid exercise requiring
Bo jingling jangling movement

Just don’t you dare ask me
what the purpose of each key be,
it is just a tortured secret for men
in the private parts of their soul,
to confess that keys carried
for three houses ago,
are a metallic proofs that men
are indeed as dumb
as women think they are...

show me a rusted lock somewhere,
I got an hour to try ‘em all
Em Glass Jun 2020
I’m collecting keys,
weighed with opportunities
that stretch my pocket
a poem a day, but the opening is ramping up
SpiralDancer May 2020
I got wet.

Then I got more wet.

Then I lost my keys.

And my shoes were filled with rain,

chattering teeth, soaked to my thighs

through to my skin

shrivelled up feet, trench foot set in

but then I think about real trench foot
and silently apologise to the poor sods
who died with wet feet

I cried when I peeled off my clothes

I felt sorry for myself

But the little un had made me a hot drink

So I thought myself lucky

I am not native to wet and cold

The sun is needed for us growin' old
When you've been rained on so much it feels like emotional damage!
My hands do things I’m not aware of

They hide my keys
In the pockets
Of freshly laundered pants

Behind
Under
Inside many
Many
Pieces of furniture

Dangling from my bicycle lock
(For 3 hours)

Hanging from the front door lock
(All day long)

By a flower growing
In the crack
Of a sidewalk
That I had knelt down
To examine

In the fridge
Yeah
I know

My hands lock my keys up
In the backyard shed

In the trunk of a car

In a car’s ignition
With the motor running
No joke

And of course
Inside my house
While I am
Outside my house

One day my hands
Unbeknownst to me
Will lock all of the doors
And throw all of the keys
Away
Andrew Rueter Apr 2020
Nighttime is perilous
pestilential predators lurk
evisceration entropy envelopes everything
wounds are collected like keys to doors leading underground
and I can hear a jingling in my pocket
so I denounce the nighttime
unlocking the door to a home
where one can sleep at night.

But once I go outside in tomorrow’s morning
the sunlight shines into my soul, cooking my sutured skin
along with the keys I’ve collected
burning through my clothes
and into my body
flies can smell subcutaneous sizzling a mile away
they yearn to feast, buzzing all around me
crawling through my insides
multiplying
while vultures fly laps around me from above.

So I throw a nocturnal drape over the tumultuous foothills
and begin imparting my basement keys onto others
an imposing locksmith
a charitable safecracker
Johnny Applekeys
prowling with pouncing predators
masking my petulant bitterness with false wisdom
my edgy perception of maturity tells me to be jaded
hey, that’s just the way it is
I call myself an honest realist
a self ordained keymaster
I wear my key ring proudly
and distribute keys to those around me.

Stuck between persistent motion and paralysis
my key chains start swinging like pendulums
dancing like an opposing militia
like my eyes once I start getting nervous
waiting for the receipts to my exchanges
reflecting how I’m living in the red
and the debt I owe others
I can only pay in keys leading nowhere.

I try to convince them that the doors I unlock lead to riches
but we all know they’re paths to the hell from whence I came
my words are for myself
like the hell I man the ferry for
selling keys to scary doors
used as lifeboats in my shipwreck life
surviving off of other people’s strife.

The keys are overflowing from my makeshift pit
they poke into my veins like needles from the past
suffocating me like a rat in an hourglass, buried in sand
I imagine it’s the beach to the shore I can reach no more
unlike my swamp where I act as lifeguard
to a lagoon no man inhabits
I say “the water is fine, hop on in”
when I don’t even know how to swim
so even the trees think that I’m dim
when I hang my keys on their limbs.

Surviving night means eat or be eaten
yet my decisions effect daytime treatment
when scars put me behind bars
I inquire as to the depth of the dungeon
digging a subterranean home then diving deeper
finding company at the bottom with grim reapers
where the ostrich that flies is ostracized until it’s fossilized
so I sit in my estranged egg
not wanting to ever hatch
but no matter how much I beg
my keys unlock the latch.
Cameron Fischer Apr 2020
The door that was once unlocked
Is now the one I am not allowed through
Was it something I did
Someone just give me a clue

I am now alone in the one-room
With no one who cares about
All the trouble I've been through

I am trapped in this place
A place in my mind
I can not escape my own
View of how people aren't kind
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