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Claire Waters Aug 2013
i don't think that you know
what privacy means to me
i'm staying drunk in the quiet
of my safe liturgy

of thoughts because concepts
are honest and curious
they aren't gonna judge me
and that's what i need
some company with peace

but inside them i'm violent
i'm rough to the touch
i try to be silent
so i'm not caught searching
the corners for love

when every house party is about
"that idiot who said" or her "stupid makeup"
so i'm not sure where i expect to find
any sort of understanding
in these social engagements
i don't see meaning in
ripping down others just for being
in the same room as you
and minding their own business
it always makes me uncomfortable
i don't see the usefulness knowing it's
easier to call someone else useless
when you feel so

and draw your own conclusions
than admit you don't really know
it's easier to stab the surface
than to learn someone's breathing well enough
to understand the way their blood flows
it's easier to make a snarky comment on their clothes
than to sit down and get to know them

so admit it
our darkness thrives on judgement
and you will feel so much better
because once you let go of them
emotions flow through you like weather
extend your arms for once
and realize that every single person you know
knows something you don't understand yet
instead of barraging them with
the ways you wish you were better

you thought i was going
to say they weren't you

because everyone's partial
to weak knees and weak ankles
it's easier to strike the person
who opens their arms to you
even once is enough
to break them because you justify
they allow themselves to be
so breakable

and though i feel these things to be true in my gut
and want to validate every single person
i can see needs the love
i'm in need of my own breed of saving
and i'm sick of this negative engaging

i just don't have any more chances
to be so kind
as to offer you
a target
M Clement Sep 2013
There's an alarm going off;
it's not a siren, mind you,
but an alarm.

The very same buzzing and
beeping that oft
assaults our dreams
and sleep-havens;
bringing us back to the
dreary sunlight of day,
or the last few moments of night
clinging to what life it has left.

This alarm, of which I speak to
you now, is continuing.
The continuous assault on my
eardrums throughout everything
I do.
I walk through the leaves that begin
to grace the ground, saying "hello" to
the dirt that it's been so far from for so
long.
Within the sanctity of the classroom,
where professors grace students
with life lessons and years of experience
or lack thereof.
Within my own home where I continue
to make a meal for the evening, desiring
not to go hungry.

Continuous.

I hear it everywhere, and
as I reach for the button, to stop
this incessant noise
barraging my thoughts
and ears, I realize, I'm awake,
and I've been awake all this time.
There is no off button for this alarm.

What is it reminding me of?
What do I need to awake from?
I'm not sure I'm satisfied with how this turned out. May come back to it.
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
How can I search for Truth in a world that's built on lies?
A lid resting heavily over a once glistening eye:
Shielding, masking, concealing
What last droplets of wonderment are trickling and asking to pierce the concrete ceiling...
...Instead I cynically note its off and aging colour...
"Yellow: Choice Number 4!"
Relays my proud voice, with a more
Assertive tone; I, the host...
Discussing aesthetics to collectively pathetically awe-struck guests, over specially served toast...
"Yes, I'm an impulse shopper, so it seems"...
...(Well, according to the ******...something article I read in my monthly subscribed to magazine)...
Happily consumed by consumerism...
But still unable to consummate
Anything really, Truly sacred...
...Unless I'm exactly half naked...
(That includes wearing Calvin Klein SoCKs)
And crucially still sporting my brand-named top,
Designed for tight fit to cull any ounce of shoddiness,
Whilst giving the impression of an existing healthy body, no less,
And then, due to superficial attraction,
An end will occur, hopefully, of distraction,
From the absence of my once healthy mind...
...but that never happens...
So then, how can I search for Truth when the bricks of my own guise
Only resonate deceit, sealed to create a facade of falseness?
Sure, I can articulate,
Wielding words like swords,
Pure, planned alliteration...
Baffling the bemused by barraging both beautiful and brutally belligerent brilliance...
But...
Showmanship is the tool of the restlessly minded,
Those who search the hardest for the key to authenticity but yet cannot find it,
And then paint their walls with vibrancy set out
By observing the mass hysteria of the layman,
Because nobody wants, Truly, to be classed as grey...
Do they?
Or it may
Be that that is exactly what we're all tactfully missing:
The fact that appearance, in some sense,
Is reliant on one sense,
And thus, in defiance of what we're meant
To wholeheartedly believe,
It is, in its very nature, subjective.
We were not designed
With a panel of judges judgmentally judging what pair of shoes should be selected,
Our mind's
Blueprint was principally a highly charged and thirstily receptive
Open book, with no printed prose,
No preordained guide to "Truth",
Merely a transient vessel:
A glowing red beacon of vulnerability in glorious, continuous distress,
Uncompromisingly afraid of its own ignorance, which, through an act of defense,
Strives to follow other's paths,
In arbitrary hopefulness that someone knows the meaning of it,
The answer to it,
The code that locks it,
The spark that drives it,
So in our fearful and ever conscious lives it,
Makes us want to hide behind this
Fantasy of an apex being,
Where our car seats vibrate and our carpet is soothing,
So that we seem to have a clue of what we're doing,
And instead of resting our ego-bulging heads and choosing to accept,
That we're just not quite, you know, as adept
As we might have thought, we choose to reject and neglect
Our opportunities
In communicative
And interactive discoveries of the beauty
That goes beyond and lies behind that neatly fashioned fringe,
Within.
Love is humble as we are stupid:
We'll see that one wise man has cottoned on, and knows
That even though
He hates that smell that his wife
Adores, he incessantly sprays it lovingly from a canister for the rest of his life.
But he'll never say a word,
Because, from what he's heard,
Truth no longer exists:
In fact, as soon as the larynx allowed the habit of opinions to persist,
It became a frozen entity,
A vague depiction of pure, untampered quality...
A poem I wrote 7 years ago on the back of an envelope in terrible handwriting when I was struggling to sleep.
Andrew Rueter May 2020
I found my call of duty
inside your warzone
after leaving my pressurized cabin
and dropping in randomly
I started collecting money and items as fast as I could
to match the competition’s capability.

Everyone’s an enemy, everyone is hostile
I fear them and the weapons they’ll use on me
barraging me with dragon’s breath shotgun blasts
to put me down quickly
or silently sniping from far away
so I can’t defend myself.

The only way I can survive is staying in your circle
which keeps moving away from me
so I sprint through the fields and forests
making my way through already looted homes
hoping no one takes advantage of my vulnerability
racing to your circle before I suffocate.

Once I finally get to your circle I realize it’s too small to hide in
because everyone is so close together
I must engage them before they attack me
but they all lay siege to the small shack I’m trapped in
lobbing grenades and firing at me
I can’t even poke my head out.

So I stay inside
donning my gas mask
letting the circle overtake them and pick them off one by one
as I wait inside anxiously worried someone may try to join me
but eventually they’re all gone and I’m the only one left
and in that moment I have achieved victory royale.
Varshini Mar 2016
We meet, I obsess
I wait for a text, end up barraging them with more
I overthink myself into a crazy stupor
The cycle continues on.

I tell myself to stop
It's one more thing for me to think about
It's one more situation to waste my time
The cycle pauses, then restarts again.

Everyone knows about it because I tell them
I stop myself with metaphorical duct tape
I rip it off and tell everyone anyway
The cycle has no ending once it has begun.

This is the mistake I constantly make
I feel clingy, even though I probably am not
(But I am, so it is fruitless)
The cycle rotates in the backburner, a solid reminder.

It’s not a crush, it’s just a shortlived fascination
I declare my love, as I do for countless others
Masochism is apparently inbuilt
The cycle goes on, an infinite loop of repeated thoughts.
Elaine M Smith Sep 2012
I don't know what to feel,
how to feel.

Too many emotions are barraging me,
and it's overwhelming me.

Something akin to love,
maybe closer to friendship than anything...

Desperation for my wants.

It seems pitiful, and admitting it just
makes it even more gruesome.

But looking past the gruesomeness,
there is truth. Honesty.

A lack of denial...

I have to face it.
Guido Orifice Dec 2016
I did love you once.
-Hamlet

Light floods the road
invisible from the pavement
turned into beds of beggars
begging for the godly hope.

People plainly pass
perennial plot of pretensions.

Peace tonight is fragile,
so fragile that car honks fade,
so fragile that tire screeching
dies in the night.

Above are stars eaten by smoke.

The father and daughter
shared the night
with the blanket of stars
made of dusts.

(The night so fragile can’t hide their stomachs growling)

1.

Clarita, 24
let the night pass
under the warmth of coffee
and her broken press
whose myth died years back
but never in memories.

2.

(An old woman passed by with her cane fiddling the asphalt. I can hear her wishes. She wants to die.)

3.

It was Clarita who smiled
to all foolishness of childhood. True.
It was her way to ****
the marrow of life
knowing Thoreau or not,
from the threads of forgetting
& horrors of remembering.

4.

Her communique
falls flat from what she supposed to say
for she can’t utter a syllable
so ironic that she just tend to pretend
she never remembers
she never cares
for all what she need
is to let things reveal themselves
so apocalyptic that even herself
don’t mind when.

5.

(Lovers passed by with their hands swaying, either by gravity or by air)

6.

Her mother tried her luck to pick cherry blossoms.
Her father stole her past.

Clarita killed them in the vignette of her neurons.

7.

If only she can turn back in time
and live like her diary’s wishes
Clarita, whose heart pierced by a chance lost
will redeem what she has to,
& sleep like a child in a dusty bed
where the blanket hide her
& her universe.

8.

The phone rings. She can’t ignore the line.

9.

She hates the feeling of falling in love
like how she hears the phone ringing
in the middle of the night
where insomniacs finally sleep
from a distant snoring of customers
barraging like thunders of senseless
predicaments and tongue-tied promises.

10.

Tonight, Clarita made a promise.

She will let the night pass.
Eric Noble Feb 2018
I'm going to bed fully clothed, which happens from time to time
Not because it's cold, or I need to leave in a rush later
Or because I even think it's that good of an idea
It just feels like too much tonight
To even take off my pants

There's a spot in here for you... if you don't mind the denim jeans
Or the blankets, set aspin, like loads of clothes in the washer
Or arms and legs barraging you in limbo 'tween wake and sleep
A brain too restless and concerned
Can't lay still to save your night
Taru Marcellus Dec 2023
Peace.                 Peace- short lived
Boredom.                Boredom- soon come


A hum.     A chirp.     A shattering of glass.
Questions. Questions. More questions.
Rampant questions. Barraging questions.
Stillness       stirs muddy
Strained mixing of unknown content
Syrupy. Thick. Sticky and difficult to wade through.
Questions.     Answer. More questions.
Distressed confusion.


Silence- uncomfortable.
Stillness- uncomfortable.
A thrashing of drums. A clashing of symbols.     A chirp.
Noise for noise’s sake.

Say something! It’s too quiet in here
Talk to me. Talk at me. Say something
A conversation about everything.
A conversation about nothing.
A chirp.




A chirp.



Aren’t you glad I didn’t just stand here in silence for a minute?

An archeology of silence.
Peace.                 Peace- short lived
Boredom.                Boredom- soon come
John Prophet Mar 2018
Modernity.
Technology.
Racing
head long
helter-skelter
into the
future.
Like a
runaway train
speeding
out of
control.
Historic
societal norms
breaking apart.
What to
think,
what to
believe
losing
resonance.
Explosion of
information
barraging our
senses.
Overload.
Current institutions
clueless
of what’s coming.
Acceleration.
Biotechnology.
Information technology.
Nanotechnology.
Artificial intelligence.
All converging
on top of
our heads!
More change
coming
in the next
twenty years
than seen
in the
last three hundred.
What to
do?
How to
cope?
For now
at lest,
step away.
Relax,
visit nature.
Walk in the
woods.
Meditate,
sit by the
ocean.
Leave the
technology home.
Our minds came
from
simpler times,
not designed
for
light speed
change.
Step away,
at least
for awhile.
Reset your
sanity.
Less you
implode!



.

— The End —