Best Calyx Poems
In a moment of juvenile jealousy
he envies his red rival
with its intimate and greedy embrace of her angels’ share
of honey and vanilla spice
as wet stretchy hands of fervent fabric
possessively cup
her brandied beauty
amidst wistful notions
to revive his parched heart
he craves to be ladled with her ardent spirits
to be cradled in the tulip of her essence -
evaporating every chill from the calyx of her sweetened cordial
warming her in the hearth of his hands
as she melts
like buttery sunbeams
intoxicating the bleached beachy sands..
his dreamy grin falters and his tantric trance fades
as tattered edges of reverie unravel -
a haze beclouds his aged green-eyed gaze
graying his white periwinkle pipe dream
as he sees that his best days are long past
Susan Ashley
July 18, 2018
A Cup Runneth Over
My cup in dry abyss boils over
Condensing dewdrops in vapors of blessing
Into foaming condensed extracts
Like effervescence of divine dust
That bubbles up to the rim.
Rescued like a fallen star
From arid droughts
You send my thirsting emptiness
Like a winter deer to search for streams
And find deep pools of dawning glory.
Purified elixir drips mercy
Into my crumbling calyx,
Molding a new chalice,
Brimming with benediction,
As tides of absolution rise into oblation.
A frozen vessel washed with snows set free
Bathes my nascent cup in all ruth
In swirling celebration’s release
As levees of grace break free
Spilling into this my new fashioned grail.
7-20-22
Contest: Pick a Title Vol 31
Sponsor: Edward Ibeh
Title Chosen: A Cup Runneth Over
Flight of the Rose
Soft petals of pale pink rose,
Each engraved in eulogy,
Rise on the white wings of dawn,
Take flight over calm waters
Lapping at the line
Dividing land’s end and endless sea,
To shoulder tears
In intervals of benediction’s breath
Reflections of a full bloom –
Courageous warrior and woman -
In final surrender
To the invading army that overwhelms
A single soul in the dark calyx of fading night
Rose, alone with only shallow breaths
To caress her hand
To prepare for her last flight.
Sea scented morning
Gives wings requiem
To chant the sojourn’s odyssey,
A solo elegy sung
By one voice as the four winds
Gather four seas
And fleeting four seasons
Into resurrection past the good fight.
6-16-22
Contest: Flight 2
Sponsor: Chantelle Anne Cooke
Based on a true story told to me by a hospice nurse friend who tended a dying woman, alone. She was so touched in grieving she went to the ocean and scattered rose petals in the woman’s memory – her final flight into Heaven’s caress.
Written: November 24, 2024 for contest Sponsored by: Kai Michael Neumann
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In a calyx of ambivalent dreams,
where shadows swirl as silken strands,
I slip through the surface,
a sailboat in a tide of thoughts,
where colors speak in whispers,
and sounds weave a tapestry
of guffaw and sighs.
I am an astronaut,
zipping into a cosmos of canorous clangor
past comets with names such as chimera
and planets blooming with a corpulent deluge
simmering under layers of desultory dust,
each a sun waiting
to ignite an encomium spark.
Footfalls on the ledge of splendor,
swirling in circles,
a kaleidoscope of moments —
jumping from the quicksilver
of a fleeting glance,
to the deep sinkhole of silence,
where time slows to the pulse of heart.
Here, on this canvas of perception,
the boundary of self dissolves,
melting into the esoteric ocean
and excruciatingly eviscerated thoughts
are squid jauntily joined by caring currents,
amber-colored fires dancing on the horizon,
unraveling secrets hidden in their stings.
I chase shadows,
those swift-painting phantoms,
a ghostly gap in gnarled grooves of life,
seeking sincerity in a swirl of sights —
the stillness of awareness,
longing wrapped in vibrant coils,
darkness stitched with fragile threads of light.
In stillness, I stroll.
feeling every pulse evolve into a quilt of colors.
tracing trails tracked by supple notions.
as the clock spins dizzy tales —
my pen touches the sky,
gathering glimpses in gradients of glides.
a jaunt laced with lingering layers.
charting caverns of concealed aspirations.
where wisdom blooms in wild gardens,
Inviting all intrepid inclined to intrude
the twinkling, tantalizing tones
of existence, endlessly entwining
every exhale an echoing essence.
of something that yearns.
to be liberated and let loose.
Written: February 25, 2024
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A sun sets in the west; oh, boy, he has gone to rest,
Mama grips her breast in an apocalyptic pain quest.
Each diaphanous creature feeds on crimson land,
Grass on city streets—an effusive sight as we stand.
After the juice ran out, the town turned silent,
Silence, a somber speech—no swoon is violent.
Yet, something has splashed up on the beach,
A man who is still alive but too flabby to reach.
After millennia, a desultory one can fathom,
The chimera, an epiphany of root phantom.
Humanity perished—ephemeral rapt by the void,
Lambent nature likes a vacuum, such a devoid.
Earth purged, and no desuetude of amort era,
Ideal and dwarf beings graze on reddish terra.
Lawns on sidewalks are an emollient reminder,
A vibrant town, now conflate on a flow grinder.
Washed up ashore, just a transient figure,
In a post-man scene—an evanescent creature.
His arrival bestows a nostalgic gaze on the past,
A calyx relic from a world that couldn't last.
The town remains quiet—a haunting hush,
As nature reclaims what was once lush.
But a man on shore is a relic of our fate,
A transient being left to contemplate.
In a post-man script, beshrew a world once alive,
But now, it's just a memory, a fading strive.
The man on the beach, a symbol of our demise,
He gazes at the sky with weary eyes.
Apocalyptic distress engulfs us all,
As we witness the closing, the final fall.
But amidst the chaos, a sparkle of hope,
In the transient nature of humanity's scope.
Grass that grows on city streets is a resilient sign,
Cynosure nature prevails, even in mankind's decline.
Cities may be quiet, but echoes of our past remain,
Whispers of the wind and the rhythm of the rain.
No rosebud should ever experience a seed of fear growing in them.
Quote by poet.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seed of Fear
A cryptic shadow slithers
Across a moonlit floor
Past tea parties, glass slippers
And naïve unicorns
Wearing feather boas
To reawaken a seed of fear
Deeply planted
By ashes in driving downbeats
Of thick moonbeams
That penetrates artless innocence
In a requiem for mercy.
Paralyzed in a coma of terror
A rosebud hears
The strident flute song mount
To sing an epitaph for stolen magic
As it bursts from its calyx
On rotting moonbeams
Sowing repeated ebony nightmares
By the full moon
That whirl and spin
In shades upon the ceiling
And like a thorn
The pulsing root sinks embryonic genes
Deep into shivering petals.
In satisfaction the shade withdraws
With skulking footsteps,
Oblivious to the rosebud’s tears,
Leaving pure petals wilted
In muffled agony
The callow flower’s story
Told in silhouettes
Of shadows on a moonlit wall
Each moonlit night
A ravished garden
Watered by mangled tears
A eulogy grows for ever after
In an epitaph for innocence
Written: August 05, 2025, for contest Marathon Mile 3 Poetry Contest / Sponsor- Mark Toney
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As it rises shakily, the aurora radiates,
Shore gets battered by periwinkle waves.
Scarce alabaster turns to an ebonized sheen.
A sacred, somber, and katabatic sorrow.
A mild ache dances around joyfully,
As kindred souls merge in a forlorn embrace.
And halcyon as paradisal opiate utopia
It is as vast as the unclaimed love.
Your skim was both ethereal and brief,
It hinders my span of lethargic wandering.
Chest pain at every peak: a fipple passion,
Gossamer scenes that wish to last forever.
We gamboled beneath auric heavens,
Effusive murmurs in dulcet hush.
Stringent crave twirled in tricky loops,
A mental usufructuary, weak and eternal.
The limb caresses a vulnerable, airy speck,
An ambrosian ache in a weary world—
Meticulous truths submerged in the deluge,
A shredded hope, a shriveled flame.
Love is a chimera—a ripple on a palimpsest.
Crestfallen spume claws the coast calyx.
Then resiles, bedraggled, into amorphous dusk.
Amort embrace, undone, beshrewed by time.
Now, balmily, you are my nepenthe,
A calix once held—an ambivalent ache.
And I, a desperate-looking romantic,
Forever ephemeral, forever asunder.
Written: August 16, 2025, for contest by Unseeking Seeker
Line of inquiry:
"conjoined with the whole - we play our life role
exuding a scent - granting love consent"
************
Conjoined with the Whole
Not as sovereigns,
but as sylphlike strands,
woven into a ductile tapestry—
Each act of kindness forges
a bond within the communal consciousness.
Love is not a shadowy incantation,
nor a glamour to inveigle us into isolation.
It is hortatory, beckoning forth...
a rosy summons to convene,
amid the clangor of squalor and sojourn
to supplant the slipshod ache
with a warm intention.
We are not mere wanderers
adrift in nebulous vacuum—
We are emulous embers,
thirsting for the amaranthine,
avid to imbue our days,
with seraphic resonance.
Community is not a chimera,
It is pavonine in its iridescent truth,
multivocal in its sweet sorrow,
edacious for connection
but never laden with avarice.
We do not dismiss the burden—
We collocate it, we share it
withdraw from silence,
and cast aside the Icarus myth,
a tale of solitary flight,
Even the untamed child.
crumbles for the quest of kinship—
Even the weary elder winnows,
the soothing balm of a neighbor’s touch.
Love sanctions its courtliness—
not merely a whispered sigh,
but as a philanthropic deed,
a calyx protruding,
amid the clamor of desire.
To love is to be an iconoclast
to find solace in a gentle embrace—
to forbear the yearning
to anathematize others
to witness the evocative elysian—
in the eyes of the distraught.
We are not aphonic.
We are harmonious,
even in our disconsolate times.
We are evocative, full of meaning,
even when our souls feel drained.
And when we reflect,
We accomplish this together—
in the emollient of shared grief,
in the soothing touch of shared joy.
So let us frolic with abandon,
Let us explore the hidden meadows of our lives.
Let us gather in our joy,
transcendent in our understanding,
Our sense of self is transient.
Let us be love—
not as an elusive dream,
but a tangible act.
Let us be united with the whole.
And play our life roles.
with eloquence
vibrancy,
and grace.
Written: November 17, 2025
****************
The night used to gargle with garrulous joy—
canorous crickets, a capacious choir
beneath the diaphanous veil of dusk.
Now, only the hissing of wires,
the gaseous hum of machines
careen through the cloudscape.
I prowl the porch at the moon’s behest,
a flaneur of vanished felicity,
searching for the fetching fipple-song
that once gamboled through the grass.
But the calyx is closed.
The petiole wilted.
The elixir of sound—evanesced.
Where once the heron slept
and the wisteria wore its tiara of dew,
now lies a threadbare hush,
a dismal hex of silence.
The garden, once gaudy with chirps,
It is a byzantine grave of elision.
Did we disassemble for too long?
Rake too deep?
Abase the earth with hubris
And flapdoodle dreams of dominion?
Did our egregious hunger
for luster and control
writhe the world into quiet?
Written: June 22, 2026, for a contest sponsored by Silent One
Quote: Your name is upon my tongue, your image is in my sight, your memory is in my heart. Where can I send these words that I write ? By Rumi
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Remember Me—
Not as a wimpy palimpsest pressed in dust,
but as a melodic requiem
Swelling through sycamores,
a voice that thrums in amber air.
Stands out as brilliant, warm, and vivid—
candles in our memories for days.
I was your hubris and nemesis—
your panacea of song,
a sylphlike sigh whispered
woven in the welkin’s velvet veil
pure awareness of your heart.
Do not shred me into ephemera,
nor replace my passion—
with forgetfulness
I am the obelisk in your memory’s scope
the oculus through which eternity gropes.
Since death may alleviate with deceit,
Since shadows unravel the nexus of our days,
my love wincing, scintillating—
a sumptuous aurora
that presses the stygian night.
Remember me—
in the whispering calyx of summer blooms,
in the susurrous lagoon
where cicadas chant,
in every wistful whisper of wind
that morphs weariness into wonder.
I am not lost,
but vestigial luminous flame
a perpetuum pulse
a virtuoso of silence
hunting for your sapphire necklace
everlasting will,
singing still—
commit me to your memory.
from: "The Calyx of the Oboe Breaks", by Conrad Aiken:
"The calyx of the oboe breaks,
silver and soft the flower it makes;
and next, beyond, the flute notes seen,
now are white and now are green."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The ides of March have gone and come.
Still, strains of vernal music sound
clear echoes, in my ears, of early times,
of other years: an orchestral swell
of oboe, flute, and violin.
The feel of warming wind,
the scents of orange blossom,
daisy, buttercup, and clover
I once enjoyed --
are those days over?
My recent times are flavored
with metallic clank, with oily odor --
my eyes fatigued by newsprint
and small-screen glare.
And music: the blare
of claxon-horn and siren-wail
and, sometimes, noise which
issues from a box borne on shoulders
through the street; an empty, but compelling,
quite insistent, loudly pulsing beat.
I welcome all new, although slight, intrusions.
Pale sensory perceptions bring back images,
now faint, once acute, of places, times,
and pleasures past. Faded sights and faces
and shadowy, unquantifiable pursuits
evoke a time when love, like freedom,
didn't cost a dime.
We separated like wave and shore
Leaving our feelings bare like sand
I heard goodnight and replied in kind
There was a love song humming on my mind
And I longed to be a butterfly up in the sky
Carried in the cuddle of the wind anywhere
Far enough from fret and tear.
I turned from constructivism to solitaire
And the love song in my mind keeps humming there.
A shadow across the light at edge of eye
A shuffle, a tap, a heart summoning sigh
A form between a drape and wall
A neglige like wings defining the butterfly
The game was done
The call of manhood from its cave found light
And with the silence the eyes told delight.
Appealing womanhood textured by night
My life is the opera, how ravishing the beauty of her eyes
She showered him, he showered her
With praises tender as kisses, with sentiments
Sweet as the melt of chocolate in caresses
And in their tenderness we were born again
A long time coming
To the spray of the shower out of the rain
How the bed like a calyx welcomed us
How your body like petals responded to the chorus
Of drizzling sunlight from my fingertips
Of cooling balm in the wind on the moon's soft lips
Every part of your body was an anthem of praise
My love was fount springing up like eternity of days
I want to love her always like that night
The groom longed to ravish the bride again
To lavish on her kisses suckling her toes
And play love's concerto on her legs
Adante, adante, adante says the opening thighs
Allegro, allegro, allegro says desire
And I heard the crescendo breaking in my heart
When our mouth met in tender places and long again
O I long again for the silk sweet of velvet softness
For the uncorrupted innocense of flesh with flesh
As the wave rolls in to cover the naked shore.
Petals falling
from unseeded bud
opened by midnight sun
sparkling it to love
then leaving
to return on its course
dressed in candle lights
stolen star to star
unmindful
of ice pellets
tearing at the calyx
teardrops
frozen in the throat
lacerating heart
throbbing to harden
like winter in silence.
February weeps
meet a new face
lights start dancing
in the eyes
glances caressing
two hearts
whispering to each other
sweetness
crushed grape
turns to wine
tinting two goblets
crimson!
Eternal seed
buds new life
flame of God's
everlasting light
running through veins
of two hearts
saying to each other: Yes
I love you
First Place Winner: Brian Strand-Podium-1/11/21
Eighth Place- Anthony Bianco-Crushed-6/18/20
Seventh Place: Brian Strand-Late July-7/20/18
Lonely the flower lied by the beach
Counting the bees that ate her each
Alone, she cried though alive, she died
Hoping to see a soul she finds
Takes her home, loves her blind
Fades the hurt the bees remind
Her colors bright, a god's gift
Scent sinks with every sniff
Petals soft as a quill could be
Her poor fate, she's found by me
The one she thought was a mild rain
Wrong she was, invited pain
The flower though did never knew
The love she needs, he wouldn't give
He cared the flower to his hearts best
But god had wished her something else
He gave the story a little twist
Her beauty made him feel selfish
Greed overtook love in a swish
He wished to trap the color and scent
Stupid he was, he made a chest
He locked to keep her from the rest
She cried to make a lonely wish
A wish to swish past, on the beach
To never be mine, out of my reach
For bees cant eat her soul, she felt
She wept, kept quiet, her last hope melt
Next day, petals shed, the chest had bled
He opens, she's dead, the calyx remained..
Mere means of being master of all labor, this power
Overthrows all virtue, and write the metered history
Nations spin web in web, and now it is the cocoon hour
Emerge the spider on spindly legs from calyx tragedy
Yelping bankers and their merchants billed for all wars
Consumers credit lost, money minting on us its scars
Ruined trust in men awake us to being pawns of greed
Economy after economy in goldless tatter and its shame
Dies, drizzle, toxic in resuurection the fawned at weed
Industrialist used to circumvent taboos in the blind game
Trapping with historic dream the energy of men stagnant still.
I come not to Zion yet but old Jerusalem in desert sand
Sighing at the prints, O garrulous the nail marked hand
Debt and deal transacted, the calyx shrivels in winkless sun
Orbituuary of Babel's history, Mammon's feathers unwaxed
Nature in sure cycles recovers, wind breaks the spider spun
Emancipated faith confronts the Ceasar, ransomed and taxed