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peter oram Dec 2011
They come and go like coloured birds migrating
with maps of other countries in their brain.
You are a tree in which they pause, awaiting
an inner signal to set off again.
You stop, you listen, straining to decipher
the simultaneous songs that they intone,
knowing that so many men would die for
the chance to hear just one of them alone.
Summated, though, their singing’s but a jangle
of jarring chords and rampant dissonance,
the chaos that’s passed on from age to age.
And in a daze you dare to disentangle
a single thread of perfect eloquence
and tease it free and lay it on the page.
From the book 'Tease it Free - 76 sonnets'
Tawanda Mulalu Nov 2018
I am the expanse of purposeless selves before me,/
summated like the stickily-shaded colours under/
a calculus-course curve, whose trajectory marks me across one axis/
to the next, just as I am the small drops of cloud squashed/
into one another as an ocean I now glare at, whose sands/
meeting the horizon are later stewed into the clearer edges/
of a mirror so that this glare may continue. There was a myth of a man/
who projected himself into a pool of water until he thinned away/
into anorexias of young girls with camera phones pointed/
towards their white faces. Snakes eat their tales sometimes./
Narcisuss is a poet. White girls are poets. I've swallowed them all/
into my large black mouth. When I speak: soft-spoken integrations,/
meagre, selfless, hollow-- filled with stagnant historical airs formatted/
cleanly now on a word-processor-- while my hand reaches across my navel,/
bored, digging: then a birth there as my spine cracks across my bedsheets/
with my lamplight flickering as candles once did,/
and shadows wall-dancing with the idea of ancient meanings/
now lost but never once there, self-defining, self-signifying, self-pointing,/
self-shaking self-but-not-self./
MS Lynch Nov 2013
the human body
has three hundred and fifty bones
when we are born
which fuse together
as we grow
to two hundred and six;
further simplifying
down to condensed calcium
and summated marrow,
growing our skeletons down
to simpler beings as we grow.
if only the human soul
was not the opposite;
******* into
spreading stardust
particles so quickly that
we cannot put a simplified
finger on exactly who we are.
black & gold.
tЅЇЯ Apr 2017
Proud of This?(Terrestrial Entanglement)
A toss; ruminating murmurs echoically stir me from my vision, eyes pulled to a close...at once they shutter open to attain the light that flashed between my waking sight and where I found myself just before. A turn; lavish sound corrupts my perception from an active interface; to cathode radiant coincidence. Coinciding incidents, to be most literal. In crude paraphrase "I'm not going to begin to act like I understand paradox'"...an ironic character movement that summated what i saw as a whole...a fish-eye take on the constitution of your shape, peering wildly; might I add mirroring my own resolve; as real as static screen splashed across the blank canvas. That which is the void within a blink..a twitching lens advance.."what are you looking for?" The chills...electromagnetic allowance...lasting the length of the slight a second-hand travels. "why were you looking there?"
One man's hell is some woman's seemingly, audio-visual hallucinatory lectern. From wherefore all is one and none are spared. An exponential singularity, turning in and out and on itself until one is many. Too many to count; see where this is going or don't..."don't go!" or "is this where the sea opens up?" No. One man's hallucination is another man's seemingly orthodox dream, teeming with deja vu, but then again tomorrow is the only time you'll know the night before. Astral apprehension... Differentiate the physical form; a fraction of true manifestation; the spirits been warned. Fractally wandering this fatal wonderment. What was I thinking? Was i waking? Was I dreaming?
"why were you looking for..."
Aditya Roy Aug 2019
It took me a long while
To really understand how we inure each
Other in two or threes, taking each number
Like a closed leading to an open door
Contraltos and passive ancestors have one thing in common
Lies and literature, it took to you to be a good person so what
You took to prison and a cell of broken speech and schools took you in peremptory pleasure, with some loquacity and leisure
Mellifluous or mundane, quoting has some substrata of truth, broken down into placid men in Lenin's underground communist movements
Black and broken like the hungry poverty, of the speech and resplendent sum, inventively locum tenens more than the summated parts of clients
Remeasuring the men around me, finding the inclination within singularities
Violent and breathless broken poetry

— The End —