Best Consumptive Poems
William Bonny AKA Billy The Kid
A Tale Of Billy The Kid
By Robert Gorelick
“Quien esta?”
Bang! It’s over,
you’re a legend now,
Billy.
Born in Hell’s Kitchen in
ramshackle consumptive squalor,
New York’s crammed gang infected
rat-infested shacks
and alleys.
Amid the iniquitous stench
of rot and the soul’s decay,
in a nation at war,
pulling, stretching, ripping
to shreds the frayed fabric
of its precarious union.
An abused juvenile fleeing west
emerging from the muck
to where a soul and body
may heal, breathe deeply,
expand.
At last—life
New Mexico territory spreads open
and wide, easy to be seduced by cynical
range-war ranchers’ welcome greetings
they pay you well for
every cattle rustled,
then desert you as you flee the
sheriff’s posse.
“Quien esta?”
With a concealed knife
you stab a drunken gambler,
self-defense is no excuse
as the ruffian had
important friends.
You’re set to hang, Billy
in a daring display
you shoot your way out,
steal a horse and gallop
off to your woodland
shanty.
Midnight, your shack’s pitch dark,
there’s breathing nearby,
your Mexican novia?
Why doesn’t she speak?
“Quien esta?”
Bang. Pat Garrett guns
you down.
A throw away kid from big city squalor,
becomes a legend of the wild west.
You’re a legend, Billy
1/8/23
Metrical Tale Contest
Sponsor: Hilo Poet
Manhattan hi-rise nestles
a yawning head-in-the-clouds woman
ready for another consumptive day.
Shod in Choo's, coifed in beige
arising from a long slender nape,
she leaves her nest
after a wave to Amin, her Bichon Frise.
Down-to-the-lobby sashay,
swinging a Gucci full of plastic,
belies an air of loneliness
as she walks to a waiting limousine.
Always caged, the smile is frozen
beneath a botoxed brow.
And the point of it all?
Well, for this life ...
there isn't one.
Devoted rays of sunshine heat,
Like ribboned baubles on the lake,
Ride slow the roll of waves to meet
The pebbled shore where urchins bake.
Sporadic faded slate-gray clouds
Invade the space of empty sky
Away from crushing caustic crowds
Where silent sounds are sure to die.
The gilded glitter mixed in sand,
Will sparkle through late afternoon,
When new dawn wakes another land
And evening breezes greet our moon.
The darkness calls eternal stars,
As old and bold Orion sighs,
We drink our tea from half-quart jars
And plaintive loons cry their goodbyes.
The moon is blue and cold-bone white,
Illuminated lunacy;
It steals your mind away at night
Transforming your identity.
A fairy tale we know untrue
But children love to hear it told
Though even they don't misconstrue
What is the truth as lies unfold.
We huddle round a heated pit
With sleeping angel progeny -
The product of a perfect fit
When eros was reality.
The measure of this treasured day,
Now dimmed by night's consumptive cloak,
Is cherished children as they played
With us the shell around the yoke.
Cells and fibres exploding, consumptive thirst! Lip vibrate
A leaf trembling in dry enegry of summer's sizzling heat
Come turn to the modern oasis, the city's teeming spring
We came like pilgrims to a holy place, or children drawn
To village well, or city hydrant spewing, and through a glass door
The electronic winter humming, the Coffee House.
Not soda fountains, nor hot or cold brewing, the languid tongue
Desires a purer drought, a drink in heaven's fair clouds wrought; restoring
Vital urge, the passion of surging life, water simply sweet.
Joy had it bottled like desire, some fizzed, mine drizzled cold
Amidst the smiles of rejuvinated lives, a dew in every eye
Rain in our desert dawned camaradie and Coffee House
Water like a morning kiss, dripping to the tongue in bliss
Passion sperming life again, cold glass on fingers flesh, the caress
Of hope deep, deep beyond spine and brain, the Coffee House praise.
I quest my love from the depths of silenced shadows,
amongst the reclusive dimness…
Where I compose my Soliloquy of Solitude
as I gravitate to a ghostly grimness…
Fortitude I have none, for my hermitic heart
pulsates within its penumbra prison…
I walk these calamitous corridors with the stench
of sulfates that have ruinously risen…
All I seek is you, my love, for you have gone,
and thus I’m trapped in tangled thoughts…
Where rivers of tears sing a sad song,
my lachrymal love tied by katabolic knots…
My hidden heart lays to rest, confined and consumptive,
for many other hearts here weep…
My eyes of devotion become blind,
and Symphony of Sorrows rampageously reap.
April.28.2020
Shadows Poetry
Sponsored by: Chantelle Anne Cooke
Placed 5'th...Thank You
All I did was blink
and suddenly frail and forgetful
had stolen the vibrancy
I’d taken for granted.
Your look still bears that familiar smile
which sparks an ebbing life
and brightens dimming eyes.
But when you think
no one’s watching,
I am…
as this consumptive malaise
pervades your sagging face
and spirits you off for poppy naps,
the flickering star-light fades,
I watch your mouth turn down
In that soft dreamtime curve
and my heart cries the river
that floats you on eddies
of timeless sleep
I know a day will come
our connection will be broken
your star gaze will not return
and I’ll cry a new empty ocean.
But until then,
in sleep’s folded caress
a slow river runs calm,
its watery fingers polish
the unforgettable shine
on the touchstone
of my love,
hoping its undying spark
reawakens you.
Evening reaches out with an open hand
Like a forgotten presence appearing.
Every last hair bolts up by your command
Charging my living tissue with searing
Thrombosis to push those gusts to endure,
Rallying in your splendor with wonder
Opposed as delicious harmony pure,
Goading such playful rumbles of thunder,
Echoed throbbing, our obsessions collide
Nebulous in consumptive carousing
Electrified to blaze purpose inside
Slickened hope both divine and arousing:
Isometric ripples welling with glee
Sustaining the spark that breathes into me.
Wandering winds wind through tall thin trees
sending constant consumptive croaks
with sustained sonority.
Quaking querulously
a mellow message,
a somber song,
sweetly sung
by a
zephyr
Turtle by the Door
The bears and wolves are few;
one threadbare widow mourning,
two grays as consumptive as smoke.
The large dwindle,
their bodies grow more awkward,
more at odds.
The heavier beast's sway
like drunks in the scant woods.
Under a pelting dark they come.
Beneath a stabbing ice, one by one-
the animals.
I listen to their shuffling,
the scrape of delving claws.
They are scavenging,
pulled closer to me by visceral prods.
Hesitant paws withdraw as they near,
a restlessness keeps them gnawing
a middle ground.
I crane my neck from its ribcage;
they fall back and return,
wanting - always wanting.
The small creatures enter
where cracks fill with moonlight.
They scuttle and hesitate,
a little way,
a little.
I am Turtle,
a makeshift thing,
cloud-splashed and sullied.
I sing back the needy shadows,
cast my lamplight eyes
onto their weltered
hair-streaked hides.
~~~
Turtle Speaks
I did not bundle this day’s flesh,
nor did I carry it to a pathless end.
I merely watched it pass over black mountains,
slip away over thinning trails.
The sky-tent will catch fire again.
I am a roughhewn turtle.
I am starlight in a mud-pool.
A blind faced mole has carried
the moon up from the dirt once more,
though it is only a white bone,
only a hollow tooth.
Turtle am I, an unwrought creator;
one who watches,
who knows not to say
what cannot be said.
~~
Turtle Goes to the Light
Turtle's carcass is nibbled
into threads of brown river water.
His empty shell tumbles lazily
in slow currents.
Turtle stays where the starry mammoths
beat sunlight into skin and bone,
and he waits.
Mole, beaver, and badger
heap the dead upward
until light licks them away.
The world feeds upon itself,
time weaves new moth wings
from long buried evenings.
Then turtle reappears.
He hatches from an egg pushed through
green sludge and marsh fire,
he returns as a burnt shadow.
Turtle's leathery tongue clacks
he calls to all the blood-filled:
“Come again,
come around and around” he calls.
When his song is done
he perches on a scorched log
in the middle of everywhere
as silent as a stone.
Sit Transit Gloria Mundi
Rick Folker
Our current consumptive culture
Salivates over
"Tech" and "Cell" and "Screen"
That transmits the lurid, pornographic
Apocalyptic scenes.
We long for the end
Of the endless 24/7 hollow info
Hoping, even praying that
The Moral Arc would start to bend.
The dreadful, the destitute in their death throes
Are caught by our ever-present lens;
The Schadenfreude tourist
Documenting the world's worsening
woes.
We check off the trauma
As part of our Holy Bucket List
And tune in and tune out of another
Kardashian/Jerry Springer blitz.
All along we lurch from crisis to crisis
Bankers scot free, Blacks burned in worship
While blaming the ever-elusive Isis
White supremacy in the land of the free?
The clown in the White house doesn't get it ....
Or does he
For the chrysanthemums in the back yard
Are overly dignified,
For the cosmos in the front yard
Are simply too tall…
When I alone looking at the troubled world outside
through the window, the Cyrano’s bluffing fades out
but, instead, the brownish smell of the dead leaves
fill the mouth.
For the loneliness unbearable, on this very night,
even a cricket behind the sent of brownish leaves
does not chirp because his wings were torn to pieces
from last night’s hoarfrost.
At dawn, the consumptive maiden, the moon,
sits by the window of the white ward sickbed,
hiding her face with the curtain, weeps
because Roxanne cried twice for her one and only
true love. Sobs because she had to be blown away
like a last leaf on the wall in this autumnal chilling wind.
Battlefields littered with energies spent
erode the code that once held all firm
as spies disguise to resurrect consent
under malformed skies pacing out a term
transcendent in treacherous manifests
insidious to stave osmosis pure
from organic elements as protests
isolate issue from health to ensure
commonality malfunctions as cells
atomically unravel from function
towards black science sigils unleashing spells
infertile to force our grim injunction
oblong in consumptive revelation
nefarious to plot such stagnation.
Evidenced
FIFTYFOUR
CharlaXFabels
The Church Parsonage on Church Street the old Methodist Church where eye
used to go to church it Burned down.
My mother died a horrible murder death.
My brother died in a car wreck.
We used to fight each other though eye was elder he was bigger.
Eye was a weak and sickly child of GOD.
My Father died and eye do not knoe what of.
Eye was not always allowed to live at home.
My room was taken and the things in it like my toy box and the comics and the
yearbooks were all destroyed.
Eye was given a hardship discharge from the ARMY.
My home at Morrilton was burned down by a natural gas line leak which then
exploded. My family always hated me and wanted me to die alone. Eye stopped
my consumptive habits and was in a real fight in Arizona only was beaten into
Jesus and left to die half dead eye still try to live and love and write this is mye bio
mye evidenced.
Remember great climatic transitions,
memories etched in regenerating systemic syntax,
DNA coded,
but also RNA's much older eco-equivalent health scripture
through God of Time's bilaterally balancing norms,
organic love incarnating
and sacred life outcarnating,
full-polycultural
crown/root systemic health.
Each plant and sludge cell,
eco-therapeutic consumers and producers
of ecologically balancing air,
some seasons warm and more productive
of nutritional outcomes,
other seasons for cold,
with dualdark past meets future
tipping poignant decomposing health and therapy events
composting fertile transitional rebirthing issues
and transformational death opportunities
to consider warmer,
more pregnant days
and nights,
less consumptive of last year's eco-embryonic promise,
like sucking oil out Earth's AnthroSupremacist
privileged monotheistic
nationalistic
narcissistic,
LeftBrain verbally dominant,
codependent Me v They
win/lose 0-sum ableism.
ReConnecting great climatic health v. pathology transitions
through bicameral lens (0)-centric DNA/RNA
Double-fractal
8 to the double-boundaries
of great spectral circles
revolving historic trauma/therapy re-memory
spirals of Time's ReGenerating Health
for springing ReNewing Global Wealth
and falling failing
unknowing
decontextualized
dissonant localized despair
Win/lose oppression
suppression
depression
negative impression
Re/De-Genesis/Exodus
Promised Love
of Her Win/Win Muse Story
and NoPromise Absence
of Win/Lose AnthroSage-dominant
dissonant WarLord
monotheistic SunGod
unenlightened disempowering
misogynistic
unecological unhealthy
un-coempathic lack
of secularized
LeftBrain verbally dominant
SWM clerically privileged
West v East as xx v xy
DNA v RNA
patriarchal v matriarchal-linear scripted
monotheistic v polytheistic
oral trauma v therapy-informed
history.
Don't Work TOO Hard!
The phrase, "Don't work TOO hard!" rolls off the tongue like breathing out into
a vacuum 'vampires' dream (that sucks space dry between consumptive hearts).
Some folks may shrug 'phrase' off as being vacuous but there is more!
Its overtones symphonic to blessed ears that plumb curved rainbow's staff.
But what is "work" and what's "too hard" (if you'll permit the ask)? I write
this poem, love the task! The poet's bliss I'd not call work, would you?
If gold's not there, some hearts get fed and ALL enriched by feelings mined
as rhymes reveal their art to world. Chords poems strike are rarely seen!
Frail leaves a poem sprouts (too) colored by the sun (some evergreen)
survive a 'viewer drought,' reflect life's beauty, are a light that's shined
into life's shadows at their best, still God's the judge of what's askew
and what's more Right! Does 'phrase' bring note of jealousy into the light?
It might! Or voice concern that I'm obsessed, rhymes barely worth a laugh?
That too! Hint health's at risk? Moot point! Let path to God be open door
that sinners (all) may grok God's love (APART from sex - ALL hidden parts)!
Our labors be life's true reward! Man's 'Truth' seems more our point of view!
Long Tooth
February 11th, 2013