Best Decomposes Poems
The paint recalls, layered and petulant, groans
mindless in its ground, it decomposes.
Granules of hematite, pale traceries of gypsum,
the crevasses of cave wall are soot soothed.
Layered and petulant the palm of man appears
charcoal dusted, amongst the antelope and bison.
Do you hear the drum’s call, the hollow
wail of bone flute, the slap of bare feet,
the drone of chant?
Red-lead or orange crystalline roars atop
the gummy white in Pharaoh’s tombs.
See the deathly desert and the blood of power
as it paves the way; ochre, gypsum,
copper blue, groan mindless in its ground.
Do you hear the drums call, the hollow
wail of wooden flutes, the rattle of the tambourine
the clink of bell, as bare feet dance entranced?
Decomposed, composed, each grain
calls to mind pale traceries of the ages left behind.
Soot-soothed, charred coal outlines the faces
of God and man upon the walls of time.
First Published by Mused 2013
The foggy tenderness a balmy buffer,
smiling oblivion decomposes anguish
and pain...
In frost a cloak to keep you protected:
cosset without bruise.
I greet you, wheel through space,
after initial slumber subsides,
and pain
kicks in, but not actually, chant words
shaped into sentences...
A poem of friendship through the days,
orbits, spheres, clouds, stars, smiles,
and pain...
Spring is budding, after snow flowers
will blossom, offspring will vault.
This too is going to be alright
***
Poem by Darren White
February 13, 2017
VALENTINE SCHMALENTINE
Walking on bleeding hearts like eggshell parts
My valentine broke Cupid’s angel wings
I don’t know what to believe when he brings
Ample heart-shaped boxes of Chocolate darts
We’ve been together since I don’t know when
He loves me he loves me not a gold ring
He comes home when he wants to, it’s his thing
Doesn’t like when I question where’s he been
Hopefully he’ll propose on bended knee
Expecting a dozen wild red roses
Or lay some myself where he decomposes
And his valentine, that’s me, will be free
1/21/2017
Contest
Twilight's color is ashes of roses
the horizon glows crimson as sun sets
the round cerulean sky now decomposes
to invite a charcoal night that love begets
ivory stars weave a soft nocturnal shawl
lover's swish absinthe by dim candlelight
we toast to shadows floating on the wall
from lambent flames that burn in passionate night
candles melt in their porcelain holder
night falls darker like obsidian glass
moonlight's smoke warms lips that start to smolder
silhouettes, drift until the dawn trespass
wrapped in soft sable tranquil and content
as divine passion was inhaled and spent
This Body
Those on the bottom can see but can’t act,
Those on the top can act, but can’t see,
O Lord, please free me from this body of Death, America.
Dear Lord, How am I to stay composed, as the very fabric of justice decomposes from
beneath me?
My footsteps are weighted down by the sounds of my ancestors screaming for my freedom, as
they realized that their deliverance was only in the life to come?
Am I to wait until the life to come?
Like some passive animal, always turning by backside to be flogged by the excruciating
hypocrisy of white supremacy,
You ask me to hold to your precepts, you ask me to hold to your law of love,
And yet for me it is like Atlas, bearing the weight of my oppressor’s ignorance, all the
while attempting to free them from their codependency on my subjugation,
Even for those who see, their loss is still their gain, Privilege,
But for me, loss is the sound of riotous rage burning the streets of Chicago,
And yet my Lord,
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen,
I must believe, even as my circumstances bludgeon me from the inside out,
I must believe that you have a plan.
We need not loans, but a redefinition of what it means to prosper?
Can you grant us at least this my lord?
A vision of repentance in which top and bottom begin to fade away beneath the sound of
righteous equality?
If we can just touch the hem of your garment?
If we can just touch the hem of your garment, then we shall be healed.
And this body will know the sublime language of harmony.
Lord God, do not free me from this body of death, America.
For in my freedom, my brethren will still suffer.
Rather, free this body from its insanity.
So that we all may sleep and dream soundly.
Heart is where my home finds graceful relationship,
where my soul simply breathes
beneath my memories of becoming,
of being at my best,
sometimes my worst,
but always my most full, complete,
most abundantly contentious
and both loudly out
and quietly in
content.
Home unveils life's liturgy.
This home wherein I was conceived
and born
rebirths me each dawn
and decomposes all my dreams
where I grow up and out,
where siblings moved away
from whom I married,
from where I buried my grandparents,
and then my parents.
As my body houses identity
my home houses body.
While home and self-identity
I can distinguish,
one self from other,
this is never a benign
or wisely severe discrimination;
better as a distinction
without prospects today for contented difference;
dishearted separation.
My soul and mind and body fade and wilt
withdrawn by force and circumstance
from embryonic being.
To awaken or sleep away
in any profanely alien place,
without power or even hope to return
to more sacred memoried space,
fades my eyes and ears and nose,
my skin down to my spinal bones,
despair this senseless loss of sense
of life and breath and bread that once was mine
and could be mine to share again.
My home is where I live
my view of neighbors and town and Earth and life
flowing sedately toward, then past too quickly
on my backyard river of memory,
greeting ducks and swans
herons and eagles soaring by
to hunt this fertile rippling home with me
now fading into memory
as shades of sympathy
not entropy,
sad self-isolating apathy
from my heart's dismembering womb.
Lavish price for a new bodied home
invites sublimating new constructions
with best familiar practices and intents,
artifacts of golden memories from past days
and life
and loves
reframed by unfamiliar
but grace welcoming
trees
and birds
and a few persistent weeds.
elephant tusks
harvested for ivory towers
truncate the wisdom of time
blizzards hail snow flakes
weather a storm or two
before they melt into memories
Babylon refutes Jericho
an eye for an eye
that money can’t buy
Rosetta’s stone
gives a clue to incomprehension
and sometimes the monolith
takes on new meaning
when frosty crystals meet
eternity in shining armour
Midas touches mammon and greed
blistering peeling forms scabs
on lost conscience and souls
the snow flake melts
because it knows about destiny
eventually ivory decomposes
once humanity has died
I belong to metallic soiled Earth,
solar-fired water's atmosphere;
these oil and blood-fluent elements
would feel freer
not belonging to you,
to us.
They
we
are our belongings
but not our property,
commodity.
Our multicultural values
measure and calculate
design and develop
investing primal qualities of time
predicting secondary quantitative spatial outcomes.
Less time constrains freedom and value and love.
More freedom responds to surrounding needs and wants and relationships
with less dissonant restraint,
competitive response;
with more cooperative invitations
for mutual mentoring regenerate options,
our pacific path revealing positive intentions.
Missing freedom suffers,
as missing incarnation dissonates,
as absent polynomials disformate.
Incarnation's value grows enculturing time
measured with Earth's elements,
temporal functions,
systems design and development.
Each element
identity
system and set
contains regenerative potentiating value,
functionally forming network constellations
of prime-frequency, flow,
rhythmic relationships,
sustaining balanced harmonies,
an ecological economy
static until its season to unfold again.
Limited value decomposes from ego-systemic mortality.
Regenerate value emerges from eco-logical coincident, co-arising comprehension.
Space enacts time's liturgical rite of passage,
as time incarnates space's ambidextrous function
with fractal equivalent information.
Ambivalent eco-normic tipping points
out equi-valent ecological potential,
permacultural regenerate systemic nutrients
for sustaining polycultural maintenance.
We grow adeptly incarnating cooperative economies
as we become allergic to commodifying competition,
win-lose systemic incorporations.
Well-apprenticed permaculturalists,
Taoists,
Buddhists,
Fullerian Synergists,
enthymematic communicators
re-ligious self-with-other integrators,
economic ecological care of Other,
Earth Justice,
perhaps even Universal Intelligent therapeutic care,
evolves yeastfully prime rooted in multisystemic integrity.
We reach deeply and widely within remembering
our justice womb of poly-solidarity,
regenerate subsidiarity swimming
remerging toward light's bright flashing flight.
We belong to Earth
and feel freer longing with all of us together
in one Earth-bound network cycle.
Harbours quick repugnance and self explosive memories
Anger heats up the heart, burning any string of positive emotions, but
Torture is not escapable by the body covering such an oven
Rage in quantum amount produced by aggression even in atomic sizes
Eagle’s eye fixed on the negativity and mistakes of the victim
Dead compassion then decomposes to emit biogases of evil
she filled a cup
with ambrosia
and handed it to her enemies
so they'd live forever.
she died the next day
with a smile on her face
watching their laughter die away
and their smiles slowly decay
as their guilt grows in a bouquet
of wilted roses
their sanity decomposes
The Age of Man
Is but a brief, abbreviated span
Of seconds ticking in a moment’s course.
Infinity: the final source
Is like a charnel house, with cypress tree
And yew and myrtle, growing in the graves of Space,
Where decomposes Time’s own face.
Life is imposed
By a great power, we suppose
Not something we chose
Just a thing we compose
Petals shrivel the rose
Blood runs down the nose
Gravity on all things is imposed
And eventually we are all deposed
And unlike the ones who arose
At the end of it all, we will remain forever disposed
Put away in an endless doze
Life, Death, Solitude and Resurrection.
But as the material decomposes
To our real selves we are interposed
Dressed in our spiritual clothes
A life this time we truly chose
And as the fleshy part is inherited by crows
We will be elsewhere, with nothing to oppose
No sin, because it is unnecessary
No kin, a new hierarchy
No one to ignore us
None to bore us
Only a rejuvenating vibration
In a new life, our true incarnation
Peripatetic movement impedes as I draw near to an atrocious condemned king
Probing him, in conceptualizing & equating potential
Composure rapidly decomposes, investigating potential future
Ever so sickening to these eyes, sluggish gags massage my throat
Am I to develop in any fashion of this creature?
Recuperating composure and ingesting gags peripatetic movement finds its place in
contemporary time
The words I articulate to such a fiend, “Hey dad, how’s it going?”
Turquoise tears stain my face
Like violet varicose veins
Stains of sentimental sensuality
Wrapped in white fears and black feathers
For love has fuschia flown away
Ruining reverie’s red roses
Turning them black decomposes
Any ink dried died in letters for love
Would have fell on silver sword
Sacrificed, sliding through heart
Silky bloody poetic death
He saves a cutting of brown hair
And a crimson rose of despair
Pressing between pages of art
Like my onyx broken heart
Was only a notch on burnt belt
Firey from love’s hazing hell
Wicked love spell wilting passion
Kisses rationed refusing
To hold wet tongue’s telling
Of rebelling rose’s rise
In spirit despite demise
Petals of purple pain
Painting passion with rain
And teal tears tangerine train
Of torment trailing behind
Like a wedding dress
Of jilted beauty
Doing duty during dilemmas
Flower to remember
Pressed between pages
Of a little black book
Of love unreturned
I'm on a treacherous journey down a barren mind,
a cavernous abyss of unintelligible revelations,
void of any comprehensible inspiration.
I am perpetually staring at a blank canvas,
continually foraging for that illusive phrase,
ransacking my hollow coffers of recollection.
Parchment decomposes from abandonment,
as does the ink drying in the quill.
There is rumbling from within,
fermenting familiar reminiscences.
Might this evoke envisions of my opus,
or the rancid sustenance I have consumed?