Best Catharsis Poems
Tears of the past invoke frozen footprints
When fears rekindle flares of dire misery
Feeling the ache, straining blood streams
As wrinkles pop up swelling deep worries,
Holding dialogue with sustained poverty
Attempting to traverse shuttered streets--
Bent, but not broken, in grip of tragedies
Trapped in the pathos of agonizing grief
Building escape still, flexing meager means.
When in my solitude, these images I’ve seen
Awaken me hauntingly in frightening dreams,
Grudgingly I go there, where I used to be
And see a child deep in hapless poignancy
Bleeding profusely from veins melancholy
Revisiting relentlessly orphaned memories.
Time unconsciously releases those feelings
When ode to new morn happy robin sings
As sun rises gleefully from deep blue seas
And life illuminates in golden hued beams
Oscillating winds, gleaming through trees,
And I walk with pride on the bridges I built
And thank my bright stars that lit my path
Twinkling diligently to show me the light
When obscure was the face of my dark night.
Silhouettes of yesteryear are purging now
Cleansing dread with vibrancy of spring
And jitters of nightmares in aspiring dreams
Seeing new growth in parched winter land
Like flowers rise through remains of ashes
Confronting what was, with what could be.
I have staged my play to my own melodies
And the rhythms I set to my own music
No longer evoke the prompt life gave me
As I write new chapters, create new scenes
I’m planning the ending as I wish to see it:
The story that was past, my future won’t be.
December 7, 2020
Placed 1st: Catharsis poetry contest by Silent One
A dark angel writes in the air,
“There will be no tomorrow for you.”
Then puffs of shiny cloud ebb,
Ebony night surrounds me.
I tremble in fear.
I hover between now and never,
as if I'm traversing a rough river
on one bank: life, on the other: death.
I feel an ebbing of nothingness,
like gulping down bad breath,
or gasping in asphyxia,
between a being and non-being,
sandwiched between heaven and hell.
Which way must I go?
Lord make the right choice for me,
for I tremble in fear.
How oft had I been told,
hell is an illusion, don't believe!
Now it seems like reality and I fear.
I see my past, its rights and wrongs,
a sort of blind imbalance,
not a hair is lost.
Where is the illusion now?
Or worse is it delusion and regret,
that I could have achieved much more?
Thus I tremble in fear.
Spirals of fog surround me,
whirls of fatal mists envelop me,
a long dark tunnel with a faint light ahead.
But what lies at the end?
An ephemeral awakening or an eternal damnation?
What weapons are left for such a fight?
I can only give my soul up and pray:
O Lord, I trust in Thee.
I fear no more.
Attune yourself to see the miracle of music.
Merging with the dance is truly ecstatic.
Hey! Swing, sway and frisk, every way it’s fantastic!
Stir your senses, I wanna hear your riotous roar.
Unbound and bounce, in you I see Terpsichore
Just dance, just dance! Forget every frightening chore!
I call it meditation, the best way of catharsis.
Whirl, twist, sway and spin under wonderful hypnosis.
Dance! Just dance, it needs no basics!
Hey! Go with the beat. Dance to the tune of your heartbeat.
Don’t stop, keep stomping your feet.
Groove, groove, groove!
Don’t stop, don’t stop that move!
Yes! You are a blend of perfection.
I know dancing is an addiction,
Unbound soul’s reflection.
Groove, groove, groove!
Don’t stop, don’t stop that move!
To hell with the stares!
Come on come on who cares!
Dance to the music of spheres!!
17/03/2019
Catharsis
By Carolyn Devonshire
heart
wisdom
comes with age
experience
so many emotions and events stored
flushed quickly from memory to my page
release, let go
catharsis
gives me
peace
*Entry for Michael’s “Where Your Poetry Comes From” contest.
Ah, ‘Love’! a lover’s repeated mantra!
I see me mutter it, just now, very now.
Sigh I high, a busy, burning furnace,
scrolling lines with aching, grieving woes;
she, a charmed worm, wriggles, snorts,
while floating on a fluffy, velvety cloud.
Is this repeated mantra pricier like a jewel:
a sapphire, a diamond, pregnant with
quintuplets? I know she never touched,
- she grieves! - a sapphire or a diamond.
Even necklaces howl at her golden neck —
It’s only a dream: a fluffy, airy dream,
A snorting, never wakening, dream.
When I say, “Love”, LUST - in me
SMILES: luscious, vicious, LUST —
that stays like a cat-snake, light-red,
cool inside “Love”, coiled - hiding —
its head in mid of his slithering body,
and approaches its prey - the victim
of love – STRAIGHT! - straight at night.
Jealousy, the quintuplet brother of Lust,
chuckles on hearing my mantra, "Love",
“There exists a hairy thinness between
Love and Me. We’re quintuplets”.
On my face, jealousy reads sky-rising
Flames in Troy and in an ivory pearl,
And I see Theseus puffing a mount
of flames at Hippolytus
and Love drowning in rising flames —
and other two quintuplet brothers moving,
blindfolded, round and round the dazzling pyre.
*A 3rd Place* in the following contest (Judged on Jan. 5, 2021)
Jan. 4, 2020 (originally posted on Dec. 2, 2020)
Your best free verse 2020 Poetry Contest
Contest sponsor: John Hamilton
* A 2nd Place* in the following contest (judged on Dec. 10, 2020)
Dec. 2, 2020
Catharsis Poetry Poetry Contest
Contest sponsor: Silent One
Inspiration from my own poem, “Jealousy” (published in 2018)
Why don’t you come now
To the plot of blue river shore
Where we would
In an intense chocolate mood
Sit in a sun rise satisfaction
On the grainy sand
And create pearl drops of time
From the rhymes of waves
With the vibrancy we behaved
Exchanging those fine chimes
From our moonbeam dialectics
And converging synthesis
Of our hilltop thoughts and marine activities
After a diamond quest
Like the river
Or inside the river too?
How wonderfully we regressed and progressed
Making those radiant rings of time
Sometime winged
Sometime pink tinged
Time is bland and monochrome
Unless from your chromosome
You paint it like Van Gogh
Arresting the wayward clock
During which
Regardless of Greenwich
Taking colours from our river-wave flowers
Taking flavours from our cellular tremors
Taking sounds from our nascent heart pounds
Yours and mine
In our proximity alkaline
Would paint the wavelets
In the cups and plates
Opening the normally closed gates
Of sweet sweats
From each pore
And millions of such pores
From smiling to laughing in a petrichor
Unlocking the thousand doors
Of a colour continuum
From San Francisco to Baltimore
As we exchange our breath
From our deepening cores
Raising a rivulet
In the blue pigeon’s breast
And the bulbul’s beautiful crest
A supreme rest
In a purple tumult
Shadows lengthen in ecstasy
As sessions come to a termination
(No termination is possible though
What happens is a slow transformation
Of one melody to another music
Speeches flowing into lyrics
The sounds into stillness mystic)
So therefore
Bringing to the fore
From the amalgamated core
A flower of fusion
Pure and fresh
Out of the flood
No mire or mud
Looking at us conveying greetings
We look too
And from the meeting
A poem is born
Why don’t you come any more
Very often I look through the eye hole
Of my expectant door
The wishes naturally soar
In case I may see you coming
Dulcet sounds your feet strumming
But it’s all mist
I almost don’t exist
I miss the oasis
Of the cleansing catharsis
_____________________________________
19 May, 2017
For the Contest sponsored by Neyda Ivette Negron
the pearly night---
moving into dawn now
catches me
half-awake at the window
breathing in tangy air
and scent of golden leaves
that twirl as quickly as they fall...
from the sidewalk
created for prancing around,
a dove whispers from across the lane
gazing back at me
and knowing I will place both feet
on grounded earth,
locking the eroding door behind me
to release my cathartic world
of unsolved past hurts:
and it's here where love will come
just moments within my dream
for I believe this soul is cleansed,
or else there isn't any reason to take a new leap.
Nayda Ivette Negron's Contest Catharsis
6/1/2017
a mystic poetess in her thought patterns
of iambic heartbeats, makes new rhythms
with a symphony...joy and pain in cadence.
in her confetti of stars moonbeams cadence
caressing love in ivory and ebony patterns
perforated feelings careen melodic rhythms
in her sonnets, words entice in rhythms
lovebird's lyrics drift in endless cadence
cratered lands embellish crystallic patterns
Catharsis traces passionate patterns of rhythms in cadence.
I feel it
Shifting within me
Wandering in open space
A gypsy striving to get
From place to place
Whether it slithers
So slowly
At a snail’s pace
Or simmers in an
Utterly poignant disgrace
I feel it
Gliding amidst my organs
Making my heart race
Venturing forward
As if on a wild, stormy
Chase
In search of an exit
Burning its trace
Through my every sense
I therefore rest my case
And simply write it
Down
The mushroom cloud stunk up the smog,
And milled the metal into the ground.
We were left with all our hairs blown off,
Soot black, standing without a sound.
All of the earth was madly aflame,
Like the wick of a thick, drooping candle.
People were pulling their skin off of the pavement,
As you grinned with the pride of a vandal.
We stood alone, like Adam and Eve,
Like Noah after the Flood.
When they all died out, you kissed my forehead,
And parted the sea of blood.
Then you took my mangled hand in yours,
And we walked beyond the gloom.
You had held the gaze of my vulnerable eyes,
And all you said was, “Boom.”
Catharsis of a King
Twisted trees, gnarled and warped
by wicked winds, curled in crippling
curling toward faint warming of the sun,
clinging with clutched roots to rocky crags,
overhanging the crashing roar of foam tipped
breakers. Stone face of shear cliff etched by
fine chiseled rivulets, tears shed by dark clouds
pummeling a world below, shaping the prisms
for a future sunrise, deepening the chasms of
canyons, uninhabitable but for their beauty.
Creatures that defy the bounds of “beauty”
yet define the artists form, call us to stare
at simple brush strokes. Explosions, eruptions
of hot, steaming lava, scalding and denuding
mountains, torturously flowing to a
roiling sea. Swirling vortices of
madness, vicious brushstrokes tearing through
the gentle country landscape as if change was
overdue. Humming birds and fireflies,
mosquitoes, gnats, and icky things
one feeding on the other,
the warring and the gnawing that would
discourage even mother. Sunrise in the
jungle, moonlight on city street, church bells
that daily ring, calling us to celebrate
the catharsis of a king.
John G. Lawless
9/18/2014
for Brian Johnston - God's Kind of Poetry contest
Loose lips and smooth hips
In movement, in rhythm
I couldn't fathom the explosion of ecstasy that follows. There’s dripping
on the sheets, walls are skinny;
ears perked to hear the neighbors trying to compete in a competition of
positions, twisting and turning like two master physicians riding sexual collisions; colliding
providing; simple pleasures.
Never felt a love so deep, a stroke so complete that is completely completing
tasks of hitting that spot; making me scream to the heavens.
The only dialogue is a syncopation of breaths.
The only language is him reading my body like braille unveiling every layer of my being just by being
inside. He lives inside.
Him riding with me to the peak of my release.
I am pleased to be his curiosity. I am obliged to be his temptress.
He is my catharsis.
Purification
Rinsing away the debris
Hidden for decades
Until one day you woke up
Trying to regain lost years
Pisces woman
come to your Pisces man
riding an ocean breeze
goddess of water...
She is angelic
a native mystery
her eyes pierce
my wildest imagination...
She is all
the love stories
and soap operas
of the world...
There is a
faint shade of light
in her eyes
transforming grief into relief...
She speaks
in Creole cascading rhymes
overflowing music around her
that soothes my troubled mind...
I texted her
wanting her over
forever again
She said
maybe tomorrow
I just gave you
a catharsis twice
last night...
No, no, no,no.
Catharses catharsis abounds equals equal being worth.
Jesus Christ beauty bastions newly grounded work.
Furthermore my love,
Apologize to that guitar man.
His sentimental chimes.
Are shaking my rebricate quill.
Greasing both pork rinds.
Do as I do.
Not as I say.
I don't know.
Get saved anyway.
Rinforzando!