Best Bric A Brac Poems
Back then,
backyards were big enough
to nurture a growing soul
and provide a space
for the earth to play out
its seasons in full rehearsal.
There were wide tracks
of grass, trees to climb,
old sheds to rummage
with their interiors full of tools
and bric-a-brac
webbed in history.
There was food - ripe tomatoes
and corn from a vegetable patch,
grapes swelling
under a cool canopy of vines,
soft skins bursting
their dark sweetness
inside expectant mouths,
almonds, apricots and the luscious
dribble of a warm peach
down sticky cheeks.
Some had roaming chickens
with their bounty of eggs.
Backyards were blotting paper
for a child's hurt, a hiding place
to get away, a theater
for projecting the phantasies
of a sheriff or a princess
high in a golden tower.
And in summer, a sprinkler
casting a gauntlet of cold spray
for tiny feet to challenge.
Then it all ends
when backyards become
too small and more exotic places
call a restless soul to leave
its Eden and break the spell
of its beginning.
Categories:
bric a brac, childhood, growth, home, in
Form:
Free verse
The art was most masterful on the dark canvas
Within the thick of night his hand was full of sweep
beneath the Muskan moon the artist quivered not
Etching silver dollar stars the artist took a leap
as he painted up the sky with orbs of sparkling dots
Celestial objects bright as light, a candle spark
moonlight, starlight, airglow, all a work of art
Applying white on black creating a celestial ark
he mastered in the light with darkness off the chart
Tinted colorants of amber midnight grains of gold
every brushstroke took him, to a journey home
Van Gogh signatures and visions stories yet untold
all night long he painted, from a sonic neo zone
Light to dark, with different distinction
he played shadows with God's bric a brac
Twas' a Masterpiece of fact and fiction
Oh ! He really had the knack !
Categories:
bric a brac, appreciation, art,
Form:
Rhyme
If you found a fragment of an ancient Greek vase in sand on the edge of the surf, you can find as well all the others, provided that you have an eternity.
A time;
a sea;
salty and warm surf's hands, sorting through a treasure,
gifts from who knows who to who knows whom,
a bric-a-brac* of life:
green,
white,
orange shards of glass, turned into gems by numbers one and second on this list;
a button;
a dime;
a cork;
a toothless comb;
a children's plastic scoop;
an oval shell;
pebbles, tangled up in the algae's brown beard;
a cheap,
enamel on silver,
ringlet (my girlfriend lost it here in July. We got married in September, but she still feels sorry of this ringlet).
* (fr.) A collection of all sorts of rarities, art objects or just useless stuff.
24/07/2019
Writing Challenge 3, July 2019 - List - Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Dear Heart
Categories:
bric a brac, giving,
Form:
List
There are days
when I don't look
for much, just an old chair
on the back porch,
a few thoughts
to pick over, perhaps
a memory to recall and,
to entertain the eye,
splotches of sunlight
to dance around
a cup of coffee
cooling on a table.
Life distilled
to such a simple array
of mental bric-a-brac
set in a familiar scene.
Cezanne knew it
in a bowl of fruit.
And yet how clear
the moment, how
this bright beam
of consciousness illuminates
a patch of existence
making it a lens
into a world trembling
on the brink of becoming.
I keep returning
for more.
Categories:
bric a brac, art, creation, life, world,
Form:
Free verse
Let it be recorded
my wish to live
where I can sleep
in good weather or bad
on a beach festooned
in the bric-a-brac
of the ages.
Perhaps a vanishing glow
far to the south
all that is left
of that common pestilence
known intimately
as a lifetime
of earthly dues
Now I am leaning with shoulders leeward
still eyeing the reef submerged
a ship's pilot
steering his vessel
beyond the shoals
victorious
to the open sea
From breath to breath
I exhale the plague
once tyrannical
against every stemming cell
once dominant
over every
pulsing heartbeat.
The sea now
lives inside my cells
where time itself
tunnels the sun
through woven matrixes
a surface below
tethered skin
I can only hope
as I fall into sleep
that I soon be awakened
to sea birds squawking
at something of interest
in the tumbling
surf
Categories:
bric a brac, beach,
Form:
Free verse
Wisps and scurries
flights and flurries
eloquent beasts of beauty and brawn
fields of wheat, girls of whey
suns of glory, told never the same way stories
grassroots often shoots like bamboo sticks to
the sky in the day and age of the Zrome.
The Zrome rears but how it dares to ever be known
to man who may topple it dawn. Bric-a-Brac, hit the
sack. Dreamland, lights out. However speaking, Zrome
is an eloquent beast of beauty and brawn. Like,
fairytales gorn awry, it's so tawry. Let loose, mother
goose stories de jour. to be continued...
Categories:
bric a brac, imagination, beauty, beauty,
Form:
Dramatic Verse
I dated a designer named miss Quiche
And walked her chow at the end of its leash
But she got irate
On our second date
When my tchotchke got too close to her niche
Although in a week she asked for me back
And let me polish her two bric-a-brac
Then below that ledge
I struggled to wedge
My doo-hickey inside her knick-knack
Yet she had the nerve to mock my trinket
Which that, of course, effected to shrink it
But I seized from the rear
A select souvenir
Hoping in the end she would rethink it
Categories:
bric a brac, funny, word play,
Form:
Limerick
The elusive, furry platypus,
Is a surviving monotreme,
Living above and below the water,
Of any Aussie stream,
Where it lives a pure autonomous life,
With a bric a brac design,
Made up from bits of others,
A sort of animal Frankenstein,
With its duck bill mouth and otter foot,
And beaver sort of tail,
And then it’s got its venomous poison,
In a curly black toenail,
And, as a mammal, what’s really odd,
It lays eggs like a chook…
These are reasons I love spotting platypus,
When they’re swimming in a brook.
Categories:
bric a brac, animal, creation, cute love,
Form:
Quatrain
Once within these very walls farmers woke at dawn.
The field was full of vegetable, the cows were in the barn.
Life was full of chicken clucks, and Mother's who could darn,
bales of hay stacked within but, all of that's withdrawn.
Within my walls, my embrace, I hold one matron chaste
a Smokey cat, and bric-a-brac, she's a lonely one.
Surrounded left, surrounded right, all her chores are done,
I can but hold, I can not mold, the ones that I embrace.
Four walls within, four walls without, a box of reverie
meant to hold the dreams of tykes, of pets and chick-a-dees.
Head held high, I seal the deal by denizens decree
and in the night, the shadows talk to comfort such as she.
A house, a home, a room, a box what stories people tell
but walls will not for you see, these walls are ancestral.
Categories:
bric a brac, devotion,
Form:
Personification
When something of substance is written,
It impedes the senses.
When bric-a-brac is offered,
People flock to it.
At the end of life
Those of common taste
And full of depravity
Will never escape
earth's gravity.
Categories:
bric a brac, sin, world,
Form:
Free verse
1. A dangerous vision coveting another,
blurred by envy to need a mental monocle.
she burns in such deadly blast
not to realize the soul already promulgate itself
to the better one.
Nothing can serve as a wake up call
to warn against the penalty point.
What was once a silent partner in thoughts
transform to wicked acts and a stench
not to be overlooked, wanting a friend to be less.
2. Sees up through her friend
both are fine, she wants to be finer
both are well, she wants to be better
a onetime dove becomes arrogantly disloyal
a part-time energy with flashlights
relevant to the downfall of another,
exhibiting abrupt vagaries,
playing billiards not even to win
but to break the board,
watching closely in a bad timing
to revert all positives with negatives.
3. In the flowing dam of our love,
you poured strong acids of your crude emotions.
you are the one downgrading your worth to a bric-a-brac
your unexplained anger proves the more
that I’m by far better.
On this affliction, you stay rat-arsed,
giving jealousy so much importance
to be obsequious to it.
Time to be matey with the envied has passed,
let this dark heat continue fighting
for the devil may care.
Categories:
bric a brac, anger, anxiety, dark, evil,
Form:
Lyric
"Simon Edy, known as Old Simon, (1709-18 May 1783) was a London beggar who may have served as an inspiration for a popular nursery rhyme. He lived in a derelict "Rats' Castle" in the rookery of Dyott Street. He was born in Woodford in Northamptonshire in 1709 and died on 18 May 1783. He had a succession of dogs and the last of them was a drover's sheepdog called Rover.
He begged outside the churchyard of St Giles in the Fields and was a well-known figure, being portrayed by artists including John Seago and Thomas Rowlandson. He wore several hats, coats, and rings and collected much bric-a-brac such as cuttings from old newspapers like The Gentleman's Magazine, from which he regaled passers-by. As he was a simpleton, he is thought to be a possible inspiration for the nursery rhyme, Simple Simon, which was published in the Royal Book of Nursery Rhymes nearby in Monmouth Court."
Simple Simon met a pieman,
Going to the fair;
Says Simple Simon to the pieman,
Let me taste your ware.
Said the pieman unto Simon,
Show me first your penny;
Says Simple Simon to the pieman,
Indeed I have not any.
Simple Simon went a-fishing,
For to catch a whale;
All the water he had got,
Was in his mother's pail.
Simple Simon went to look
If plums grew on a thistle;
He pricked his fingers very much,
Which made poor Simon whistle.
He went for water in a sieve
But soon it all fell through
And now poor Simple Simon
Bids you all adieu!
Categories:
bric a brac, allusion, analogy, appreciation, humor,
Form:
Rhyme
Your suicide
Wrests the act from the hand
So that fire can envelop the bottle
And skyward
And bright
And living
Technicolour dances in extremes.
We effervesce and burst
We rise up and with a fury
A million or more
We wilt back onto the vine
Waiting to be harvested and
Transformed into feed for machinery
The blocks and the slabs and
The blocs and the Slavs
And the pointed jagged teeth
Of a rusted saw three thousand times the size of the moon
We jigsaw and puzzle and pile up
And bric-a-brac away the inheritance
Of dead men coming into dead men’s fortunes
We store up and cascade
And chisel
At the face of a dam
As a plague of locusts descends
Within the imagery of Uncle Sam
We shoot in succession
And with twenty-eight barrels
We could split the world to pieces
And commit
Several of the greater nations
Turn and shoot and all goes black
As the litter is circulated
In samizdat and under purple cloth.
Categories:
bric a brac, allegory, anxiety, conflict, fate,
Form:
Free verse
cloves in oranges
cinnamon and rain
steam condenses
on cabinets and windows
and as tears
on bric-a-brac angels
purely decorative
their existence in
my mother’s kitchen
I never understood
Categories:
bric a brac, culture, day, environment, family,
Form:
Free verse
Waif.
Land outstreches.
Wooden bric-a-brac, the dead man's coat
And shoes.
Dowager.
The mirror is a blade
Slanted and glittering.
A world within a world,
A sea upturned.
Decadence won and lost.
Earth
The skins.
A shade of untermensch.
A shade of obscurity.
Foreign clothes,
The blood of Eden.
These are the combinations
A lock and a lock.
Question mark throughout.
Sepia, sepia, sepia.
Categories:
bric a brac, art
Form:
Free verse