When cage is cask,
And whip is knife,
Blood's to flask,
As wrist's to life.
For every sip,
There's but cage and whip.
Tis better to skip,
And equip your grip.
You get me drunk
On the sound of your harp
Wise man
And I come for more
And I come for more.
With nothing but a jawbone, I
unhinge the night, let silence die—
book of broken psalms, toothless songs
of what was right, of what went wrong
beneath the hush of watchful sky.
No prize, no game, no lullaby—
just marrow's oath and blood gone dry.
I didn’t mean to last this long
with nothing but a jawbone.
Still, blood remembers how to lie,
to shape a myth, to justify,
to kill wordsmiths who don’t belong—
the kind who bite and call it strong.
What legend lives, and who will try
with nothing but a jawbone?
Your seawater stirs in me where fire balances high on oil
You clasp my candlefire, wick's motioning coil —
A sweating kind of missing
A burned open kissing
The glass shared between us two
Flames in our faces as we move
To the synchrony past
Our dressing these masks
These temperatures rising in veins of you and I
God, brief tourniquets in time —
Where I drown my highbrow in your heat
This hard body now heartbeats
This translation
My intoxication
Summer Hiku 34
jasmine flowers in bloom
fragrance fills my room~
drunk with perfume.
As happiness now, Johnson thunk,
Requires that a fellow be drunk,
Pursuing the happy,
A literate chappy,
So happy became that he stunk.
Whispers
Long and lost
Loud and low
“S e i z e t h e d a y”
Touched my ears,
Poured into my soul,
Vanished my inner ghoul,
The night nostalgic, new,
Nectarous and nefarious,
Feathered my hands,
Floated me from my desk,
I sniffed soul soothing poetry
Intoxicating from the dusty old
Buttery books shelved on, inviting.
I drank one poem,
And another,
Then another,
Until I was dizzy drunk,
My eyelashes winged to the window
And it was dawn.
A night in fragments—
Breath reeked mildewed regrets,
and static collided behind my eyes.
I tasted shattered neon,
sipping cheap club gin.
Even alcohol can’t silence the poet—
I mock her perfumed clichés,
but still draft her eulogy
in thrifted elegance.
“I hate writing blind,” I muttered
as gin bled through crooked verses—
March 14th,
a drunk poet sighed—
Her pen staged the week’s second tragedy.
At least yesterday’s wasn’t on paper.
Write Eight Beautiful Lines Poetry Contest
Constance La France
Wrongfully wheel with wanton wills which wastefully works
By Author
In the aftermath of his tragic fate
When adding two plus two is too late
I don't understand drunk drivers
Why risk it all and leave survivors
Now he's resting at a funeral home
Lifeless because of a unwise syndrome
Yet yesterday he's weaving on a thread
And today he's knitted his fate, he's dead
Old Drunk McNab stumbl'd to confession
The priests waits and waits to start the session
The priest then knocks on the wall
“Occupied…, comes a slurr'd call,
…an’ no TP so don'ask the quess’ion!”
You’ve lived through loss—
you’ve battled unuttered shame—
yet you hold onto Love like it is more
than a Delusion—it is Honor—precious
and rainbow-like—shimmery and
shadowy all in one.
You speak to her with Soul,
truths that seem simple—
truths that survive in warm hands,
in melodies,
in cadences,
in overtones,
in steady Voice.
You are creased at the edges
like a letter read too many times,
but your words—
your words are both
soft lanterns and sunlight—
lit from somewhere deeper than breath.
Some people are put here
to hold others when they cry,
to remind them that they are still real—
still seen, still envisioned, still worth
writhing, weaving weights of
Dream-drunk Love.
3.3.25
Fog unravels its gray threads to smother the sky
and numb the mind,
words slip away to find other mouths
to fall from.
Wallowing in a low funk,
enveloped by a dull dislike
of these sprawling hours,
and this gun-metal sky
shuffling along
as a ghost in carpet slippers.
Into a deep glass of wine
shrinking spirits sink,
listless lips sip mechanically.
Words wriggle away as if escaping a fire.
Idiom and phrase morph into clichés.
Too few words arrive
to pin down or hammer onto a page.
The wine has no taste
it was poured too early, drank too late.
A mist lingers in that headspace
where creativity slumbers listlessly.
Daylight grows old, the mist turns red
it's not the sunset painting these thoughts -
it's a sullen anger.
That anger began to grow around 3pm
with the realization that I really have been
unplugged from myself,
and that today no eyes will see
those lost or found words which appear
when I allow a white electronic page
to turn me on
and not off.
Rudolph and Santa, two jolly good friends,
On their own friendship, so much depends.
One day, they both fought,
'Cause someone stole what they'd bought
But soon, they were able to make amends.
Later that day, they caught the thief,
But learning he'd sold their goods caused them grief.
They then informed the police,
Who gave them ten Pounds apiece.
That their kind gesture brought them relief.
While heading back home, that same day,
They both discovered they'd long lost their way,
Because of the beer they'd drunk,
They sat in a blue funk ~
That Santa was drunk no longer hearsay.
They embrace the illusion, loud noises of praise - in lieu of
the mirage, I opt for unblemished soul.
Hidden symphony conjuring reckless gambit, in the open
they unveil their virtuous guise.
They are drawn to one another like magnets,
embracing shared values, dancing with darkness.
They cast stones at the different, branding diverse worship as heresy,
but God's ways invite diverse devotion.
If your laughter dances too closely with his,
you're in the waltz of flirtation.
If you lock the door of greeting, you've sealed
the envelope of rudeness in the church's mail.
They sculpt divinity from the clay of humanity,
crafting a godlike statue from the very beings it resembles.
And to souls like mine,
they label us intoxicated by the spirits of transgression.
If I choose to swim against the river of man-made language,
am I cast as a rebel in the sea of sin?
Have you ever been drunk,
and submersed in a funk,
as if trapped in a trunk
but then asked to write junk
in a poem which stunk
though your mind has been shrunk
by a psychotic monk
who’s been beaten punch-drunk
and if not a slam dunk
as a poet you’ll flunk?
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