Best Distracts Poems
Our oldest light goes by the name cosmic
microwave background radiation—
CMB for short. She's everywhere:
fluorescent birdsong of modern offices,
hum of corner store ice cream cases.
Have you heard of her? This gal was born
screaming into freedom from the expansion
of a bang so big we're still talking about it.
Expelled from the recombination's gender-
less cervix, before there were names for things
like body, or heat, or quiet. She slid through
the pitch of first dark, not yet sure what
edges were, dragging the weight of a beginning
behind, shelter for and shedding of photons
loosened from a fire she didn't start.
Somewhere in this thirteen-billion-year drift
her lips kissed the eyelids of stars that hadn’t
learned to die yet, passed the chubby fists
of planets still cooling in their cribs. Fell into gravity
wells, bent her spine around a gape of black holes,
and climbed back up again, tired but full.
We call her background now, like she's an afterthought,
the hum of hums beneath the humming—we call her 'it'.
Add a T to her beginning and we might as well
call her mother. And when she reaches us, frail
and stretched thin, we catch her in our instruments
(where we found her), our desperate, outstretched hands.
For our effort, like a good genie enduring a bad rub,
she tells the story of our origin from a certain point—
then distracts us with tricks when we ask her about
the end of it.
No– shadows do not love
the angles of your face.
Reflection in a cage;
the mirror— enemy
in atmosphere of age,
no.. shadows do not love
the smoother skin of youth.
Your worries; furrow wears,
a trench where troops retreat,
—accumulated years.
No! shadows do not love
mascara and soft light;
distracts from sense of time
and wishes drowned in wells…
damn clock’s incessant chime—
no, shadows do not love
the wrinkles and the lines.
They etch your map their ink;
topography of life
where sun o’er valleys sink.
I
The turbulent, windy sea calls me,
where wild foam waves break on ageless rocks,
crashing unfailing, unfading, where sea birds
are singing from overhead, and great swirls of
whitecaps scream and above the sky is azure,
beyond the breakers.
II
And on a distant beach the sublime
waves cascade along a rocky shore and water
washes over the sand and I am swept away on
a voyage and I am tranquility and peace and lost
in the changeless flow that comes and goes always,
beyond the breakers.
III
Oh, sea waves endless, immortal in
time, crashing on weather-worn craggy cliffs,
rolling around and around, over and over echoing,
and falling back into the sea with a mighty whisper,
again and again, eternally plunging, and rumbling,
beyond the breakers.
IV
This is the sea with its infinite rhythm
of strength and power, boundless the roar of waves,
undulating and tumbling on breakers. I am enthralled,
with the energy, the sea gulls dance, with rollicking
exuberance. I stand on a breaker rock as the sea
washes over me and there is no end- no way to stop it,
beyond the breakers.
V
So, mesmerizing is this awe-inspiring
majestic, beautiful, wild sea, timeless and free, and
forever. Oh, the beckoning sea caressing breakers
created by nature- it stirs me to tears this sea that
goes on beyond the horizon. The long screech of a
sea bird distracts me and I am lost in the moment,
beyond the breakers.
____________________________
February 3, 2017
Poetry/Verse/Beyond The Sea Breakers
Copyright Protected, ID 17-8723-23-0
All Rights Reserved. Written Under Pseudonym.
Submitted to FTI Blog Series 20 - sea
Brian Strand
Podium Place 1
Growing older is a garden of graces . . .
disgraces, wild goose chases, closed in places.
It is an imperceptible tottering of time on a
conveyer belt, where at the end time drops
into the slipstream and becomes the mobius .
Growing older is wanting to be older when
you are young and younger when you are old.
You wish away the days, never dreaming that
you would give a king’s ransom to have them
back once again, treasured, appreciated.
In our youth, we squander time, kick it to the curb.
In our older years, we try to tie it to ourselves.
Age sneaks around when we aren’t looking, spreads
its poison pollen and is gone without our seeing.
The business of living distracts us from noticing
until it is too late, when we look into a mirror,
only to behold the ruthless signs smothering us.
It is realizing men no longer turn and whistle.
You have become invisible, crayoned out until
some young man says, “Grandma, the time?”
Growing older is smelling of Icy Hot instead of
Beautiful by Estee Lauder, seeing people sniff.
It is keeping L`Oreal in business long past the time
you want to stop, but can’t bear those gray hairs
that are the mute testimony to the inexorable decay
Growing older is breaking the shackles of propriety
Wearing that purple, and at least four sweaters.
It is joyously realizing you don’t care a fig what
people think or say about you or anything else.
You can laugh at the absurdity of fashion, style.
It is the delicious capability to say anything
you want, vent your opinions, disagree.
You say the most outrageous things freely,
and are forgiven, because you are getting
more than a little fey and just a little dotty.
And, oh, growing old is the sweetest blessing,
for you no longer are frozen in fear at death
and it's coming soon, for your years have
worn you out and everything changes so much
there is scarcely anything left of your world
What does it matter what god you worshipped
This earth has been hell enough for an eternity
and if there be heaven, it is icing on the cake
First rays splash lines of love
across naked bits of detour
dawn's door distracts
chills of the night dissipate
and I am free
Free of fight
held hostage ever tight
First rays flash and I see :
yellow bits of honey dripped
scarlet tanager at play
horizons filling out the day
Darkness held at bay__
A clinging coolness in the morning air
Makes boyhood autumns live once more—
Blue-ribbon produce at the county fair,
Father trimming a newly sticking door.
Walking to school on frost-crusted leaves,
I worry about what awaits me in fifth grade.
Water dripping from icicles hanging on eaves
Temporarily distracts me from being afraid.
I develop a crush on my teacher, Miss Hales.
She stirs something mysterious inside me.
It’s clear in this season I will face new trails,
Including the allurement of a grown-up she.
Peers make light of the patches on my coat
Lovingly stitched by my Mother one night.
I find it unseemly they are wont to gloat,
But they are unaware of my family’s plight.
Radio was the rage during my tender years.
I ran home after school to hear more and more
Spoken by heroes who vanquished all fears.
While real heroes were dying in the gore of war.
Autumn’s advent brings a flurry of emotions.
They happen like snowfall year after year.
I smile at them now, noting boyish notions,
But morning air leads me to hold them dear.
Somedays I feel like I'm surrounded by bars and bricks
encaged on a stage in tar that sticks.
There's an agonisingly unfamiliar reflection in the mirror,
as my eyes detect an unrecognisable inferior figure.
I can't see the stars in the sky at night,
and the sun doesn't rise to provide daylight,
creating days filled with unpleasant darkness,
feeling the hate, I will for heaven sent brightness.
It would be nice to see a flicker,
a shooting star or something quicker,
as my impaired eyes see unseeingly at paradise.
It seems these days have perfected imperfection and sadness,
as though infected but immune to antidote injections that stop madness,
and the bad feel projecting out onto these days seemingly disastrous.
So I turn to alcohol and slowly increase the dose
and down the booze until I doze,
to awake with the shakes that alcohol creates,
reaching straight for the glass of straight voddy,
drowning myself down in hate toward the junkie category.
A way I find carries me through this hell that flattens me,
clouding my mind, shielding hurt that comes with thinking clarity.
Leaving me imprisoned and unable to escape this reality.
………………………………………………………………………….
Somedays I feel like I'm surrounded by bars and bricks,
so I drink water and take vitamins to get far from my minds tricks.
My mind digs up thoughts sick and twisted
from the ditches of the mental scars life inflicted.
I see a full moon but no stars in the sky at night.
There must be a faint cloud blocking that far travelled light.
Throughout the day I stay active as it distracts the gloom
and subtracts it until a world seemingly more attractive resumes.
I shrug off the booze and don't meet the thugs
that deal drugs and rise above a life for chumps.
I start these days feeling down in the dumps,
but if I live the right way I move passed the grumps.
I feel that just the moonlight moves me to comfort,
I perk as I forget today and all that work.
Tomorrow is another first,
I think life offers more than I deserve.
- The Goodbye Goose-
Winter polishes at four o'clock, shining all the rocks aglaze.
Reflection, stretching shadows.
Longer thinner men - longer thinner still.
Shadowy tall , feeling small.
Sunmangled window in a diamond quadrant.
Keyhole orifice and creeping becomes nostalgia.
Why dont you just shut up and call?
Home going geese-slipstream in a vee.
High honking traffic, trailing vapour leaves you exposing me.
Cascading spirits slipping down the walls, swirling eddies
and smoky waterfalls, draping over furniture like slimy octopi...
Drunken weekend metaphors , Monday morning remorse.
Up and down the ladders of my memory, tinkly piano playing on my spiny vertebrae.
Permeating lies of my story told not of voice or tongue or lips-no.
But of crafty bits that left unsaid, untold encyclopaedia of me.
T'would be so simple to top you up, yet dark forces warn me ,
to pimp me out to you is to forfeit martyrdom and victory crown,
deprives the joy of shooting you down, shifting the blame.
Denies the stature as abuser , distracts my winner into loser.
Never be a frontal goose .
The DJ shuts the fader by mistake,
yet speaks his words in slick and practised tones,
but doesn’t hear them coming through his ’phones,
berates himself: That’s quite a gaffe to make.
That’s five whole seconds, nothing but dead air.
I’ve dropped a clanger. This is just not done!
The programme’s live, it’s not a trial run.
The punters might retune and go elsewhere.
But more important is that what we give
distracts, amuses, offers light, bright, trite.
Dead air is not an option. Get it right!
They need our pap: it tells them how to live.
Although this little lapse is but a blink,
it might just give the punters time to think.
Utopian dreams of HALCYON days are blind to devilry.
Where OPULENT wealth with SONOROUS, grandiloquence,are feared by JEALOUSY.
PENUMBRA casts it's shadow dark, so prying eyes don't see the Light,
And DESULTRY whose changing ways, distracts observant eyes.
EXUBERANT spirits are deluding, masking minds from clarity.
CREPUSCULAR, earths twilight night, and eerie shades of dawn,
Where evil hides in virtues guise, as Faith then Hope and Charity.
Those VISCERAL feelings deep inside, are lampooned by pasquinades.
These sarcastic, CYNICAL tirades, arranged by evil to avert, the devil in disguise,
Who tempts with promises he will not keep, beware, be very wise.
1/ 30/ 2016.
I walk into the room walls appear
Nothing less nothing more
I feel my heart crawl as the emptyness hits the floor
Once a home but now undone as the close of the door
The stillness surrounds my pounding heart distracts
Windows the vision of fullness outside within its crowds
Nobody sees my place of coldness that freezers
Deepness of ivory cream painted easel
The memories that have past make this a box now
The pictures inside my head like an old black and white film
No ticket needed just an overwhelming knowlege of whats gone before
For this is my empty apartment
sarah hales
contest empty apartment
Still
He sits
In deep thought
Reflecting on
His last eighty years
Nothing distracts his thoughts
Of disappointments and joys
A smile then appears on his face
As he remembers his deceased wife
Still smiling he lifts both his feet and rocks .
~
Written on 24th April 2019
For Writing Challenge 2 April 2019-
It's All About 10 - Poetry Contest.
Sponsored By Dear Heart .
The anorexia is not conspicuous,
being half-submerged, just
breaking through.
She’s a powdered mirage.
Her skin a hyaline shear
drawn over a necklace
of clavicle bones.
She knows her chest
is returning to childhood,
she wants to shelter there,
to be her own child.
Small breasts bob under
burgundy nipples,
buds made more prominent,
anchored as they are
to shipwrecked ribs.
Designer bling distracts.
Cameras whir, she poses,
one hand on a denuded hip,
not resting there,
but stealthily carrying
an ounce of flesh,
toward a spotlight.
We collude with her,
applaud the way
she decorates a condition.
We all know her emaciated beauty
is a mutual hoodwink.
We know that the closer to death
sexuality becomes,
the more rapacious our appetite,
the more we will wail,
as she slips
through our hungry hands.
A girl
Leads an eager man to a cab beyond the door of drunken rants and soaked
sorrows.
His lucky day it seems....his lucky day.
A kiss she lends with no resistance distracts them from the headlights that
follow in the distance.
They arrive....
A man
Once oblivious to her ways watches as they stumble.
He knows now the answer of his questions....He had hoped them different.
Vengeance rules him.
He follows....
A couple.
Fumble with keys amid passion and desire.
The door opens and she leads to a bed secretly shared with another.
His lucky day!
"what was that sound?"
A cigarette
Burns slowly in the corner.
A man, a weapon, a hateful heart.
She reasons.
He tries to explain.
He fires.....
You see the scars
Your scars to harm
To harm yourself
To harm yourself for how you felt
How you felt with all the pain
The pain that won't go away
The pain that won't go away until you feel
Until you feel something real
Something real, real pain
Real pain that distracts the way
The way you feel
The way you feel, your heart aches
Aches from something lost
Something lost
Taken from you
Taken from you, something you loved
The thing you loved
Gone for good
Gone for good but not these scars
These scars that reminds your heart
Reminds your heart to never forget
To never forget, all of it.