Best Bilge Poems
If we’re all just dreaming and life has no meaning
And tomorrow’s no better or worse
Than what we do now is pointless somehow
Including another new verse.
To this one uplifted
From one that was shifted
From down in the deep bottom bilge;
If life is a squander
Then why do we wander
In search of our fortunes and fills.
If love has no reason
And winter’s no season
And snow never falls from the sky;
If the past is pointless and memories dim
Why even open our eyes?
From this slumbering state
This giant mistake
Of human existence and emotions;
If we’re all just dreaming and life has no meaning
We should all go drown in the oceans.
And you will know me by the trail of dead,
the whistle of wind in cutthroat pipes,
the jolly japes and spring heeled capers
in the sepia pulp of the Sunday papers
and in all the Jack Tar bilge in your head,
for you will know me by the trail of dead.
And you will know me by the trail of dead
the gory tales of bright crimson stripes.
the intestinal spool of viscera and gutting,
the slashing swipe of steel blades cutting,
and the opening wounds awash with red,
for you will know me by the trail of dead.
And you will know me by the trail of dead,
the love-a-duck and strike-me-blind,
the dear boss letters and cunning stunts,
the hunter or hunted in Whitechapel hunts,
and the feverish sweats in every bed,
for you will know me by the trail of dead.
And you will know me by the trail of dead,
the buckle-my-shoe and daily grind,
the Juwes and gin and pea soup nights,
the whore flesh slaughter and ghastly sights,
and the legends of all I did and said,
for you will know me by the trail of dead.
Mother said, “Avoid the bilge,”
Keep your dreams clear, don’t let them delve.
No depth in anger, nor strife,
“Steer clear of paths where woes are felt.”
Do not let your heart be like a delft,
Cold and rigid, set by a protective shelf.
Live close to the warmth, shun the frosty guise,
Let no icy barriers govern your heart’s ties.
Happiness isn’t found in mere eighths,
It blooms in each breath, in small and grand states.
Life’s not a problem to be conquered or braced,
But warmth in moments cherished, unspoiled, and embraced.
When the world feels coated in a sticky glaze,
Remember, love’s the beacon to guide you through the haze.
Mother said, “In all your face, stay near warmth's embrace,
Value love and moments, not the race.”
In the warmth of a hearth, not the delft,
Dreams unfold, and joy is felt.
Mother said, “In all things you see,
Stay true to warmth, and let it be.”
Twere a blisterin day, on da Fundy Bay, aboard da ‘ Black Angel of da Blue”,
with a crew of 32, whilst resting a spell, wid a thunderin clap of grog ,
when da Jack o’ Cups , his Jib a hangin, spotted a Jolly Roger aft.
Aye! ye coulda sinked me! When dem thar scallywags gave chase.
So we pumped da bilge, droppin a load of crap in thar path, weighed anchor,
turned three sheets to da wind and tried to outrun dem thar sprougs,
but me mateys' deadlights twere blinded by da grog -
as useless as dem thar lanlubbers, and soon dem thar scallywags
overhauled da ‘ Black Angel’.
So! wid a heave to, we blasted dem thar swabs wid da balls off da Brass Monkey...six pounders dey be, but nary-a-one hit da mark and nary a one came back. Dem thar scuffeys' didn’t aim ta sink us, fur da botty be all dey be wantin.
Arrr! Fur sur now we be black spotted,
but I not be ready fur Davey Jones locker yet.
One more clap of thunder be what I be needin ta clear me groggy mind
and figger a way outta dis hornwaggle.
So I spliced da mainbrace and it come ta me in a flash,
da only cargo we be a carryin be Rummmmmmmmmmmm.
so we set dem thar kegs adrift and it wernt long afore dem thar
sprougs was a drinkin grog and a fine time be had by all.
~~~~~
Inspired by: Paula Swanson's contest
Awarded: Second Place
Author's Note:
In order to understand this narrative, you need to understand Pirate's language. You can
find it on the web - just type Pirate language in your search engine.
To the North, South, East, and West...
Geniuses are lost in the jaunty jewels of rakish cads,
The hazard morsel palaver allot odium on idioms...
Rankle virulent mishmash wheeze addle chagrin jives,
Loosing a volley of expletives ordure waft charmed oafs,
Self-iniquity gull maven heresy when blighted wizardry jinxes,
Ticklish cynic infidel swindle dupe cozen duress...
Squall patois and whammy sham schemas wriggle hoaxes,
Charlatans and hoodlums melange to dunce vows,
A shyster unquiet quivers with jester gestures now...
Semi-sacrilege vitiate and endemic jargon raze imps,
This collides as a white energy as dolt hooligan knaves beget...
Colloquial bilge putrefy, the rascals soon flatter us,
Bollix of potpourri lingo wanes to tutelary tongues,
Harlequin coercion argot musical novellas in history,
Pray our shifting shrapnel of karma, varnish boor minds,
Erstwhile, live grenades made of better lives are unvanquished as they are
thrown by unsung heroes into the North, South, East, and West,...amen...
Silence is my favorite crypt,
and when I'm feeling pious, or
magnanimous, or greedy
or alive,
I go there.
I go there because
in silence, I can run so far
away from the creeps and the
whores, the moneygrubbing
clerks and the bilge of puddles
splashing my pantlegs. And if those
shadows catch up to me, I can always
close my eyes and pray for them to
go away.
I'll pray forever, crouched and blind,
but never break my silence,
because that's my wormhole out of this
luddite galaxy,
my trapdoor in the floor
of this devolved society.
I want to talk of days of old
and a story that was never told
and I will tell you this story is true
and here it is without further adue
many trips I moved green bales from the keys
on my coast guard cutter called "cherokee"
I smuggled marijuana right under their noses
In the bilge and around the hoses
many years I did it without a hitch
then in hurricane Hugo the ship started to pitch
next thing was the port engine blew
and how it happened nobody knew
a fire broke out and the sparks did fly
and with all the smoke my shipmates got high!
hard putting fire out down on our knees
couldn't see a damn thing we all looked chinese!
then when all the smoke did clear
from his cabin the captain did appear
he was very angry it was easy to see
his investigation pointed the finger at me
so this is how my career was bludgeoned
but in low places I became a legend
even though I saved lives in the perfect storm
I was just a scallywag in a coast guard uniform
By Captain Mike
ps I come from the seas of pirates and drug runners
but now I fish cause I thinks it's funner!
Grog
Gulping down a flagon
Gives one a gibbous glow.
Gather 'round ye hardies,
Grab one and have a go.
Ghostly foam and farting
Gnomes bilge one gushing flow.
Garish gaffe...drinking Grog!
deborah burch©12/4/2016
_______________________________
Form: Pleiades
Brine kisses window impermeable
Impermeable to sea’s hydration
Hydration fills the hull, so visible
Visible in ship’s flagging flotation
Flotation, bilge pumps’ precipitation
Precipitation steaming on motor
Motor caked with salt crystallization
Crystallization of need to defer
Defer to elements, a requisite
Requisite to survive the Nor’easter
Nor’easter which does not invigorate
Invigorate soul of the mariner
Mariner looks homeward, does deeply pine
Pine for his love to the fragrance of brine.
4/3/16
For Contest: Elements, Part 3: Water
Sponsor: Brian Davey
Chained Sonnet, Shakespearean rhyme scheme
abab bcbc dcdc ee
I hear their idle chatter and wish that sound was optional.
A box checked in a menu, a simple click and forget.
The rapid dilation of my pupils brings me back.
Back to hypnotic aisles of temptation and necessity. A selection of the finest they say.
Right there see, on the cardboard, next to charts and columns of calories and strange
numbers I’d sooner forget.
But buy one get one free still gets me every time.
I stare intently at the dancing numbers until the man with the tie moves away.
Glossy pages shine brighter than the fruit racks they mirror,
Competing for importance in my wallet and my life
The magpie wins and the bananas will wait.
Half the magazines hawk five a day in rounded sans serif, bold against the background of a
chef’s haircut.
Maxims of bizarre cosmopolitan playboys and hustlers marked up at 3.99. Landscapes of
polished flesh glow beneath the loving airbrush of the paycheck. Competing for nuts at the
zoo.
A vanity fair for the hollow, shining in the fading light of a red top sunset.
Paraphrased blogs and condensed morsels of crude celebrity nudes for the I-Generation and
the remnants of New Labour and Thatcher’s Britain.
Anglers, caravans and 50 cent, half the demographic, half the price. Count me out.
I finger a few and find no real desire. The Internet offers this bilge up for free.
They’d all be nude and crapping on each other.
The great silicon toilet of humanity
Past freezers of long dead prisoners, pulped to perfection. Pigs in tubes and flat cow
concoctions.
Pancakes of vomit and fish dishes I won’t ever try. No time for it.
Frankenstein's monster behind glass slides.
Packets of sugar in various disguises. Cereal and chocolate, soft drinks and sauce dips.
Lattes and ladles, loofahs and loaves. The prattle returns through the shelving
I turn around the curries and there is the tie. Talking sport and hard drinking, women and
the weather. Looks me in the eye.
I turn before any interaction and feign interest in something, a scouring pad. Intricately
woven metal coils waste major concentration and he’s gone. Box checked, minimize and move on.
Everything shines in this weird three-quarter light, hypnotic. Confusing. Conscious of the
bottles ahead that I can’t ever touch. Seedy and appealing, puerile and appalling.
Something for everyone.
And nothing for me.
On the morning of Dec. 7th 1941,
429 Marines and Sailors lost their lives.
As a result of a surprise attack on battleship row,
The brave souls perished to an awful demise.
She was a part of the Pacific Fleet when 9 Japanese,
Type 91 aerial torpedoes pummeled her that day.
And then her port bilge struck the harbor bottom,
Commencing to overturn, she began to rest in the bay.
She was the oldest of all the battleships there,
And the first to go down and capsize.
The battleship’s crew went down with their ship,
As horrid black smoke filled the Pearl Harbor skies.
The USS Oklahoma was moored at Pearl Harbor,
And a memorial was built at Ford Island in 07.
The Servicemen gave their tomorrows for our today’s,
And Pearl Harbor is the tomb of USS Oklahoma BB-37.
I have long loved sailing ships, and stories and movies about them. I have even spent a few months designing and making a couple of models to erect inside bottles. Fascinated with the subject, I empathize with the men who built them and the men who sailed in them. It was a tough life on the sea, but with great craft and skill ships that could ply the waves were built and our world discovered as a result.
Sing me a song of fine old ships,
Of fine old ships and the sea,
With hulls that ply the rolling waves
Like a claymore flying free;
And bulkheads that can bear the strain
All built of wood and steel,
That rise up like a cathedral
From a massive bolted keel.
Sing me a song of hardy men,
Who toil in the shipwright’s trade,
Who bend their backs from dawn ’till dusk
By whom these ships are made.
For months on end with saws and nails,
With red hot bolts and steel,
They build a ship from bilge to deck
On a massive bolted keel.
Sing me a song of men that sail
In ships on the seven seas,
Who ride the waves in storm and gale
And laugh with the ocean’s breeze;
Who man the decks in rain or shine
In ships of wood and steel,
With hulls that rise like a great church roof
From a massive bolted keel.
From massive bolted keels they rise,
These ships of wood and steel,
Built by men who toil all day,
With muscle, sweat and zeal.
Built with the shipwright’s craft and skill
For the lads who sail the seas,
Who ply the foam in a hull for home,
And laugh with the ocean’s breeze.
Tennyson's Revenge
Unknown bumbling stumbling reading,
Of an old poem, its story older stored,
About the 'Revenge' of English men
Who died keeping Spain from our shores.
Sir Richards blazing stand, one I never knew,
The gallant English David, standing despite sick crew,
One little English ship, sailed out in Spanish deeps,
Her heart English oak, the oak we longed to keep.
For those acorns were all oak in every part,
The simple offspring, sailing English hearts,
And they took 'Revenge', like a terrier amongst the flock,
Outgunned, outnumbered, Spain the job to stop.
Unknown English acorns, half bilge sickly lain,
Such bravery they showed, difficult to explain,
They called quarters, forgetting sons and daughters,
One little English oak, against all the forests of Catholic Spain.
All day, all night, without any hope respite,
The acorns tore the forest, nails to the fight,
And lay shattered, in bloody morning light,
Spanish sorely wounded, such an impossibility of sight.
Now Sir Richards dying wish, was to sink their only ship,
But his officers denied, saying we fought here with pride,
Let us face our captors, for our victory cannot be denied,
Then the weather upped, and every man then died.
And I cried at Tennyson's 'Revenge'.
@Andrew Carnegie, wiping tears, Wiltshire January 11th 2017.
I was born in a landlocked getaway town
Where all the colors were black, gray, or brown.
Jobs at the steel mill were ratcheting down.
It was not in my future to stay.
So, I took a long walk off a very short pier,
An unschooled, untraveled recruit buccaneer
On a quest to cross Neptune’s vast salty frontier.
Hopped a slow boat to China one day.
Underway on the Crescent City, it seemed
The ocean was wider than I’d ever dreamed.
A ship load of sinners, our souls unredeemed
Steaming west toward whatever there was.
Keelung told Hong Kong to call Singapore.
Subic Bay badgered Mombasa for more.
Sea legs, as always unsteady ashore,
Even more so with liquor and drugs.
Bilge water sloshed in the depths of the hold.
The mizzen mast learned what the typhoon foretold.
I was sea duty tempered and Shell Back enrolled;
Wasn’t nothing but maritime norm.
I was born in a hard luck blue collar town.
Half the way broken and half the way down.
But time gifts its renaissance scepter and crown
To a jack tar who’s weathered the storm.
Golden brown
and wafting
in the air,
mingling
with the
dust, flecks
of nothing
clinging to
the wanton
parallel
streams that
dripped from
my nostrils,
burgundy and
thick
from a fleshly
gravy boat.
I was walking
around on the
base of my eyeball,
trying to see what
it would feel like.
I didn't feel
anything, probably
because I realized I
was dreaming.
Cursed realization.
The bus-stop
between realization
and consciousness
is littered with
leftover entrails.
Better get to work,
men, we're on
contract, here.
Fat and muscular,
and, of course,
wearing a wifebeater.
Countenance bearing
flab coated in what
could have been
grass clippings
dyed heliotrope.
Bus stop, sidewalk, brain matter
strewn, resembling lucky charms;
entrails stain the
daily news with golden
brown.
Soakin' it up.
Snow shovel, blistered
ring finger, shucked
from a stroke. Wet, now,
is the
plastic handle.
A crater of pulpy
pink sponge beef,
dripping body-bilge.
Dust was
wafting into it,
specks of nothing
clinging to the
rim.