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anonymous poet Oct 2024
Don’t you feel bad for Grendel,
His mind is poisoned by the devil.
He is just a lost boy in a harsh world against him.
Voices in his head push him towards the brim.

He hates the world that he roams alone,
The Dragon’s charm; his flesh hard as stone.
The Shaper's voice; his head is aching,
Wealtheow’s beauty; his heart is breaking.

Grendel's mother’s embrace—a silent plea,
In her shadowed depths, he struggles to be free.
From Beowulf’s strength, he cannot hide,
The warrior's might marks Grendel’s tide.

Grendel's anger seals his fate,
Fatal madness will not abate.
His demise is in the mead hall,
“Poor Grendel’s had an accident. . . . So may you all.”
The final draft a poem that I wrote on my old account after reading Grendel by John Gardner. The original is reposted on my page.
Norbert Tasev Aug 2024
I wonder what it will be like in the future, standing in the ring of what can be called polite handshakes believed to be respected, among the profane self-seeking attempts, groping glances, when everyone already thinks they can do whatever they want. While the inner soul sheds its rain-smelling crocodile tears and finally moves out of this earthly existence?!

After repeated compliments, the sole, insidious goal of which is the all-encompassing bed scene, the unconditional culmination of Everything. Even the golden and heroic ages - if they existed - are exalted only out of habit.

Among the raging daily grind and inhuman hunger wages, what will the miserable life of forty-year-olds, which they tried to scrape together for themselves, be like one day?! – What kind of cast will there be among the familiar faces?!

Again and again, everyone repeats the pathetic dog comedy around themselves for their own petty and hypocritical amusement. Self-important, boasting, and licking Alamus *****, he climbs the donkey ladder, jumping over the curses of successful and unsuccessful generations of donkeys.

And each of the babies stares at him, bewildered, in a barrage of brainwashed obsessions. Will the earthly metamorphosis of the vulnerable, human-smelling calvary and immortal lovers be recognisable? A cosmic comet-sphere beaming in the rose-scented holy glow of dawn, which got stuck halfway and then finally fell to earth?

Can we still find our way after so many self-inflicted, painful disappointments? In the manner of obsessed emotional frenzies, we even cling to the last straws, which we once approached with a humble heart!
Norbert Tasev Aug 2024
Because sooner or later, someone always returns to the houses. No one can yet know whether it is the betrayed husband, or the bohemian lover who holds a grudge, the diva lady who tries to hide her own girlish confusion by pretending to be a superficial, hysterical canary. So many questions and answers, to which we can rarely find proper, logical answers. -

The self-destruction that is so envied by many in the intoxication of LSD or ecstasy, in the usual ******-warfare, when the manipulation is no more than a transparent and definable chess game played by two competing parties, there are wild jerks who just like that fight with stone axes , and they fight, just like their hairy-backed ancestors did a million and one millennia ago.

The gravity of the Universe sooner or later pulls everyone along and pulls them down. Because everyone is locked in a lowly cage of minimums and pitiful deadlines, so that they can languish for a lifetime between the prison walls of careers. There will be no one to take a direct interest in the life of each person!

"Just tell me, my friend? Do you still have humanity left in your heart?!" - Lét manufactures and distributes hijacked, lousy end products, as if everyone can be recycled and replaced at the same time. Curses and actions that want to curse have become a daily headache because of indifference and lack he already measured us by the kilo, like straw puppet wrecks, and that's precisely why you can't look into the depths of crooked mirrors with impunity, because he is ashamed of himself whose grotesquely distorted reflection is wolf-eyed Apocryphal codes...
Kitt Aug 2024
I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.

Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?

But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.

“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--

Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.

As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?
“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art... like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”
Joseph Fink, 2018

“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.”
Margaret Atwood, 1985

"The morally cultivated man, and only he, is wholly free. Either he is superior to nature as a force, or he is at one with her. Nothing that she can do to him is violence because before it reaches him it has already become his own action."
Friedrich Schiller, circa 1801

"Mrs "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest."
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

“I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
MetaVerse May 2024
How, or when, or what is not the Akond of SWAT?

Does he pick his nose with his fingers and toes?
When he smells a rose does he slime the rose                 with SNOT,
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat?

When he texts a text does he always press SEND?
When he chats online does he chat with a friend            or a BOT,
                                                            ­                      The Akond of Swat?

Does he breakdance, jitterbug, krump, or twerk?
Will he dance a jigg? a jive? a ****?                                 or GAVOTTE,
                                                        ­                          The Akond of Swat?

When he eats a banana, does he eat the peel?
Has he eaten an eclectic electric eel                                or a BRAT,
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat?
Some one, or nobody, knows I wot
When or how or what is not
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat!
NOTE.—For the existence of this potentate see Indian newspapers, Passim.  The proper way to read the verses is to make an immense emphasis on the monosyllabic rhymes, which indeed ought to be shouted out by a chorus of Jumblies.
AP Vrdoljak Sep 2023
Is a poem not just a song
with rhyming verse
that’s not yet sung?

With repeated chorus
not yet stuck
inside one’s head,
amongst the muck?

Is a poem not just a song?
A daisy chain of verse
not yet strum

around a fire
among some friends
deep in the woods
on away weekends.

Is a poem not just a song
not yet proclaimed
by a choir’s tongue?

But uttered silently
in a bed-lamp’s light
at early hours
of the night.

Is a poem not just a song
that peacefully rests
in black ink upon

a white page
inside a book,
upon a library shelf
until it’s took?

Is a poem not just a song
quietly set to lips
that read along

on a train,
on the way back home
from visiting gran
for tea and a scone?

Is a poem not just a song
unset to keys
and not yet begun?

Not yet major,
and not yet minor.
Just metered in beats
and little other.

Is a poem not just a song?
I suppose it could be
but not this one.
Laissez-faire and free,
Nothing bothers me in
Bohemian living.

Fruit fresh plucked,
On the grass with the bees
Relaxing and eating.

Read a play, finish a novel
See what's up with sister
See what's up with father

Laissez-faire and free,
Why are you so worried
That I'm not worrying?
Pagan Paul Jul 2023
I was sitting in the waiting room at my GP surgery and noted that there was a distinct lack of reading material provided. Just a couple of leaflets about ****** and a few old Mills & Boon paperbacks.

Mills & Boon, a very strange corner of fiction indeed. A strange corner in which the sight of a ladies bare ankle can cause a dashingly handsome cavalry officer to positively swoon with desire. A strange corner where the mere use of the word 'hosepipe' can cause a nun to blush. A strange corner in which the heaving ***** of an 80 year old great aunt causes palpitations and sweat gland problems for her even older gardener.

Mills & Boon is a very strange corner of fiction indeed. A strange corner that makes Austen and the Bronte sisters  look like purveyors of ****** ****.

I reach for the leaflets, and wait.
Mills & Boon - A popular publication in Britain for the Lady of a certain age and disposition :)
Carlo C Gomez Mar 2023
~
You're alive, my candle
You're a beautiful and unique wick
About to blow out
In the night of falling shapes
In the night of fever walk
We did the igniting
We did the melting
We do the killing

~
Meandering Words Nov 2022
a flat white cools
far too quickly
for prolonged enjoyment
steaming the window
above the table
where it rests
next to it
my latest trial
of literature
at times
lengthy of word
ponderous
but probing
while others
lesser
   in page number
though not
   in meaning
brief yet pointed
but always
formidable enough
in name
   or title
to impress
a wandering eye
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