Best Calcified Poems
“Wicked Web of Woes”
Is there a reason
to rhyme when
lifeless fingers
breathe toxic agony,
whilst disgraced
quill suffocates
from wildering
riddles swerving to
the stillness
of calcified air?
As today, my heart
keeps pacing,
searching for a
symphony of serenity-
amid wayward clemency,
and when the first star
of the evening sky,
fades and shatters
upon a celestial canvas
of colorless dreams.
I feel the sweeping
wings of salvation,
resting amidst
clipped faith,
drifting swiftly towards
abandoned clarity;
exiled into
barren fields of
vast polarities,
where hope collapses
into an eternal demise,
tangled within a
wicked web
of woeful sagas,
trapped between
heavy clouds
of unshed tears,
beneath the
crisp cusp of sanity.
Yet I stand in
sweltering silence,
recollecting lost
chronicles of
who I once was,
whilst I’m drowning
in waves of
vexing numbness,
screaming into
the oblivious
spheres cloaked
in smoky
arctic haze,
questioning the
captive chains
of reality,
in dialects only
the moon
can comprehend.
Am I destined
to be caged
in sinful darkness
that the
world fed me,
with sharpened
knives at
empty tables,
with faceless
ghosts of yesterday?
Perhaps there’s
still a poem
that can unlock
the mystery
to a future that
thrives with
fruitful orchards,
where rain that
tastes succulent
wouldn’t burn
your flesh,
for even the
milky-ways would
unravel a realm where
everything should
be as it seems.
Vanquishing the
strings that bind—
daring me to breathe.
Ink Empress
Fading Star Silence
In sleepy
synaptic
catacombs
theorems dream beneath calcified floors
neurons stretch filaments of light
paleontologists of lost certainty
tracing the memory of what
once
coruscated
alive
each recovered syllable rises in luminosity
trailing sediment from older visions
when knowing shifted
steering truth by
extinguished
stars
their light arriving as memory does
late and changed
waves breaking against my palms
sometimes a word returns
with
a
quiver
a neuron long faded suddenly firing
unmasking me
language has a pulse too
memory susurrates in its syllables
tissue pressed beneath the skin
a word returns and with it
a face
already
fading
In dementia's neural ossuaries
they slowly resurface
refracted through time's
fossilized
strata
what returns exceeds what departed
yet what returns also slices us
so softly
with its incompleteness
a small lance lodged behind
ribs and bone
each restoration births knowing
part excavation part genesis
claimed by no century
reshaping me in return
moth-wings brushing my cheek
We become the archaeology of ourselves
hands cupping reverberations
charting the contours of our hearts
hearing again in the filamented dark
the pulse of neurons stretching
filaments of light
spelling the names
we thought
we'd lost
You are not enough...
Your body, the lethargic blood in your veins, little red rivers...
Your aging heart, gallantly beating –
I want to kiss its straining crimson chambers,
Bless it, the poor doomed thing...
You are just not enough
Your skin is too frail, your hair too cashmere-soft,
Your calcified bones are so – breakable
I lie beside you and trace my fingers over your face,
Receiving the butterfly kisses of your brittle eyelashes,
And behind them, those cocoa-dark eyes, windows to a soul that sleeps
Benevolent in its oblivion...
Then down, softly down my fingertips dance, to the cupid’s bow of your lips,
Unstrung, slack with weariness…
I bend my head and touch my lips to yours – and shudder, tenderly
Your kisses have the seal of death upon them, the bittersweet reek of coffin fodder
You are not enough…
You could never be enough, not for me
My hunger for you is insatiable, unquenchable,
I want to swallow you whole; I want to climb down your throat and sleep,
Tucked safely inside your skin,
A parasite composed of love and ravenous yearning
I want to eat your very soul, or catch it in my fist and pour it into a
Diamond jar, never to be unleashed –
But to be hoarded, like a magic ring, a Holy Grail of gently glimmering love
I want you to be mine – forever…
And once I have you,
Locked inside that little diamond vessel,
Oh my sweetheart…I will never let you go
Why is it the intransigent
find the intransigent
to be pigheaded, willful,
inflexible and pertinacious?
Engaging, as it were,
in an endless “tug-o-war”
neither side allowing
for consideration of
the fallibility of the inflexibility
of calcified recalcitrance.
Stags, horns locked,
dying on an empty stage
bleach-white bones
rattling in an unfelt wind.
©7/14/2019
Intransigence Poetry Contest
John Hamilton sponsor
Captivated by the flesh
never reaching the buried spirit
captured deep within.
Looking for trust; we are sidetracked by lust.
First, look into the whites of their eyes,
watch their smile, measure their laughter.
For then you shall find what you truly seek.
Smell, the freshness of innocent breath.
And know assuredly
That hate, and selfishness has not
calcified their hearts.
Recognize lust as ignorance,
that ignores spiritual wisdom
and taints the mind with deceit.
As we seek the soul, we are sometimes
captivated by the flesh.
Never reaching the buried spirit
captured deep within.
Be guided not by the glitter,
but let the love of righteousness be your bow…
Aim your arrow STRAIGHT toward the soft marrow of the soul.
If to know true love is your aim, and spiritual peace be your goal.
It looked like a bleached tongue
pulled from a mouth,
petrified and incapable
now of letting a word slide over
its calcified silence.
I picked it out of the wet sand
and held it in my hand.
It had little weight, smooth
on one side and pitted
on the other. A cuttlefish bone.
It was a marvel of engineering.
My fingers followed its shape,
took in its texture, the pleasurable
feel of its form. I lifted it to my nose
and smelt its salty, faintly fishy
odor, sea washed to a clean
unsullied smell. It had undergone
a change into something
beyond life, into an artifact of time.
I kept it cradled in my hands,
held it like a sacred relic.
I have seen them too
shrink wrapped in plastic bags
on the end of supermarket shelves,
a calcium supplement for birds
to be hung on a hook
inside of a cage.
They were selling for $2.50
or thereabouts.
h e a r this h e a r t …
as hurt hangs low
with cursed fidelity
of fame-lit fakeness,
attached to expectations ~
as wraith-leaves coil
around my neck,
under the veil
of mockingbirds,
wearing a cape of blames
and futile boldness,
caught up in
the hypocritic hisses,
where life is tangled
in a sprawling spool
of moon-moths ~
dwindling in
dreamless desires
where materialistic
monks lilt away
in fatal laughs,
and your crimes
remain lethal,
mummified like a
feather-dressed devil,
taming the loyalty
that laments
without the lustre
of Lucifer
in calcified flames …
lifeless … I lurk ~
in the estuary
of dyslexic dialects
running across
those spinal clusters ~
stemming aimlessly,
from the
kryptonite backbone
of kohl-kissed sky,
these headless
accusations
cannot kill me
with the haunt
of telepathic terror,
because, I am
massacred till the
apocalypse of ashes,
pressed between
barbaric petals
of sunset sapiens
and sea-smiths,
one amongst the
awakened dead ,
feasted upon
and forgotten ~
by those
opportunistic
omen-keepers
roaring in the
carcasses of
vivacious vultures …
some skeletons
do not weep
waning fossils ~
within fondescent tombs,
rather, they
metamorphose
into a twilight-
tipped tree ,
bearing the burden
of unblossomed
spirits who refuse
to let go ~
of their delusional
weightlessness,
as they remain
a shackled souvenir
of satanic inflictions,
that the reaper
could not obliviate.
so, you cannot
set me aflame
with aries eyes,
for, there … uprooted,
I am the Madonna ,
the skull of a
hopeless sorceress
left abandoned ,
as an obsidian oasis
of the femme fatale,
shipwrecked
in your deserted heart …
for, this horizon is nothing,
but a vessel of venom,
a framework
made of bones
and stardust frost ~
where poets perish
pulse by pulse ,
and souls lurk
in osteoporotic caves,
like ticking grenades
in the monet of time …
" but I wish,
if only my satanic tears
could be touched by painless paint ~
unafraid to the horror ,
of the artist's frozen eternity … "
*** Inspired by the artwork ~ Ghosts on a Tree, by Franz Sedlacek, 1933.
Her heart is located in every part of her being
and bones, calcified with the vitamins of meekness.
Peace begins and ends her collection of any intention
and her reaction, irrespective of situation
always avoids its rights of being thorough.
Softer than a hot dough, and more flexible than a rubber band
even in the midst of hungry chewers
and the threat from playful band stretchers
she holds strong to the emblem of her personality
putting the eyes of calm in a shock dilation
to the awe of her tolerance and irritability.
If nations were like her, humanity would have no scar
her deeds incarcerate pride and incriminate greed
with an intuition structured by static trees
beside a slow moving river
enveloped by the faint whistling of happy resting birds.
The healthy mystery of such an existence
adds royalty to the privilege of being human
because she gets hurts
only when the devil himself directly strikes
with the mercenaries of hell yet unknown to possible actuality.
The wicked souls like gasoline light up
Afire without remorse sorrow and heat
As if Hiroshima Nagasaki
In bright atomic pillars of fire burn
Unquenched like a mad lunatic bonfire
The judged the condemned the damned all around
Without mercy are swallowed engulfed by
The supernatural fates and their white-hot
Enraged furies as if to disgrace men
And fallen angels at war against earth
As gamma-rays consume their calcified
Bones they cannot withstand resist before
Megiddo's Jesus Christ whose burning light
Flash-cooks their soft moist fleshy tongues in
Their mouths like steaks as the sight of him melts
And liquefies their eyeballs into ooze
In their sockets as heads and scalps ablaze
With radioactive fire's decay and heat
Whilst ashen clothes like death's sackcloth robes fall
From rude and roasting flesh such that even
Thews sinews ligaments and tendons of
Flesh melt in the wrath of the Next Advent
Until they are gently slain by his love
Without forgiveness hope or the grace of
Redemption and salvation and are thrown
Into the lake of fire forever where
The damned are “weeping and gnashing of teeth!”
Your face contorts in a twisted effort
Plaintive in non-decorous reverberation
A terrain around a pair of distant orbs
Lost in extemporaneous consternation
To ward off the fear of unwanted evanescence
Upon the wanton revelation
Of a day you wish had never existed
Tremors beset a set of fingers
While the mind steadies the hand that lights
A random electric cigarette to calm the nerves
That being the fact of how you face facts
Always taking an indirect approach
Which has led to the current page of fate
And the smoke from nothing rises
Of nothing, to nothing, vaporous memories
Images of shadows addressing empty chairs
Avoiding the real elephants in the rooms
Treating image as symbol pointing to symbol
God is a symbol of God type thought
Abstractions that shy away from syllogism
The twisted logic of counter-inference
This may not be what you think it is
(Depending who you are and where you stand)
But you will fall back into your own constructs
And reconfirm the calcified habits of defection
In tandem with the anthem of rigorous rejection
Of all that follows a labyrinthine trail of thought
And seek out digressive thought patterns
A complete refusal to sit on concrete
And count the chips on palm of hand
Daydreams of consummate approaches
Please show me a thigh; I mean, a sign
Followed by a sigh, of the kind
That follows such frames of mind
Toothpaste words
Squeezed out
With all the vigor of a three year old;
Smeared across
The surface of our marriage-
Abrasive and Burning.
Warning!
Harmful if swallowed.
Killing germs of trust and respect
Fighting calcified love
Results proven. It works.
So keep squeezing the tube.
When it's all washed away,
I will have a fresh breath,
And you'll be holding
Just an empty tube
And the knowledge that
Toothpaste words can never be taken back.
JSC 2004
This is another archive piece, I'm sharing here. It is not current or personal, so comment as you wish.
Calcified bones from spent lives
etched in stone above and around you.
You lie with others
unable to hear
or meet these words on any page.
It's cold even though you won't feel it.
Part of me wants to introduce the
others with whom you lay
to somehow warm that place
with blankets of sunlight.
That would make me feel better about you being there
since you have to be there.
Another area of my mind faces
an equal challenge:
Whether I should be thinking about you
as my Dad, or as a person or after 9 years,
as being gone.
I foolishly fell from a mountainous high only to land on a desert dry
Images of liquid lust within my emotive eye calcified to a crusted cry
Warning winds in delusory distance holding hurricanes of resistance
Conjuring catacombs of assistance within isolation of nonexistence
The pensive pain penetrates as the perfidious palette perpetrates
Limbic resonance that hibernates awaking the storm that obliterates
Manipulation of the mangled mind Benedictine battery of the blind
Twisted temperance that is twined the cervical citadels are confined
Dormant delusions that may weep defiant deluge of twilight sleep
Restless roars that reap screaming shadows of the saporous sheep
Bactericidal beacons that bloom wandering the wounded womb
The slings and arrows of doom ebulliently entrapping to entomb.
March.24.2019
Pick A Title, Vol.3 Alliteration
Sponsored by: Edward Ibeh
Placed 1'st...Thank You
What ponderous rouge of Titian red,
Creations juiciest from an earthen bed.
From royal king to drunken red head,
The one fruit you truly never could shred.
Piquant and sour the need of the hour,
Without your ketchup? left partly fed.
Sometimes, well blanched and made into puree,
Enjoyed by both, the judge and the jury.
Stuffed with mincemeat or well mashed potato,
A good thick soup laced with ajinomoto.
The seeds could leave you petrified,
Some kidney stones well calcified.
With all his tangy and acrid ways,
Still finding his way onto salad trays
- Prince Freakasso(Artist & Poet)
poem by :Samira Obaid (Poet From Qatar)
ABSENCE
-------------
Do not wait another cloud in the sea messages,
Absence, like a tinkle Trees fall.
Waiting ,like a pile of smoke,
wind scattered me,
Slapping my cloud fires.
I wandered in self,
calcified tear.
Absent when nostalgia increasing.
Do not wait another cloud in the sea messages
I'm no longer need to
salty Cup full of pictures.
Only, pictures of yesterday are enough.
Enough, to make a weakness juice,
while, wait the rest of me.
-----------
A poem translation from Arabic to English.