Best Earmarked Poems
All I could do was stand and stare
Your actions caught me unaware
I’d got it earmarked all for me
To enjoy with my cup of tea
I arrived in the room – my eyes grew wide
The very last chocolate éclair, it was inside
YOUR mouth
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
MEN!
11~25~14
Contest: Green Eyed Monster
Sponser: Verlena. S. Walker
It's a list,
a simple one as you will see
the list identifying me;
a shelf of books
intended to be read,
a bible
worn and weathered by the bed,
a lined blank book
awaiting inspiration to be fed;
a curled up dog
snuggled and content;
a birthday card
waiting to be sent;
a calendar earmarked
with meetings and plans well spent;
an album filled with memories
pictures marking my history;
a prayer whispered on the wind
remember me and how wonderful
my life has been.
7/24/2019
Writing Challenge 3, July 2019 - List
Dear Heart
SPRING GARDEN PREPARATION (20150213)
After the winter season
But before the rains begin
Catalogues of heirloom seeds
Delivered just in time
Earmarked and prioritized
Farmer’s Almanac consulted
Given planting periods
Horoscopes included (but useless!)
Individual seed varieties ordered
Junk mail shredded and added to compost
K (potassium) added as potash
Lumber purchased for trellises
Mulching around transplanted seedlings
Non-Genetically Modified Organisms only
Organic fertilizers only, too
Planting by phases of the moon
Quick-fix pesticides are anathema
(Round-Up kills everything--US, not just weeds)
Seed boxes keeping seedlings warm
Testing the soil for minerals and organics
Unleashing ladybugs and pollinators
Vertical gardening to conserve space
Watering just enough, but not too much
Xenocide, killing unwanted weed species
Youngsters helping (or hindering)
Zoning plants to vary root depths
The train approaches in the distance
Through a tunnel we gave birth
The chimney smog marries the low clouds
Of increasing heavy traffic and haze of garbage fires
Red roof tops absorb long wave radiation
The neighbourhood’s listening to the world
Through aerials and satellite dishes
The potholes feel like exploding landmines
As vehicles detour onto the pavements
People stroll in the middle of overcrowded streets
While children play soccer and drive brick blocks
Through new eyes,
Everything still looks the same or worst
Who will drive the train of progress,
Who will pilot change?
The township must be demolished!
It symbolises everything wrong with us,
Stagnation, procrastination and assimilation
The corners are occupied by gangs of ‘nyaope boys’
Who have made it their career to be unproductive
It’s a gaping sore of apartheid’s legacy
That will never heal, not in a century...
It is on the periphery, a dumping ground
Not prime land earmarked for human habitation
Through new eyes, we must have a clearer vision
A landscape with a lush vegetation on the horizon
No amount of money can ever buy a slum,
The infrastructure of a safe neighbourhood and good sanitation
When the very same people who seek to improve it,
Don’t reside within it and merely claim it to be their roots
No RDP can ever be a beautiful home, through new eyes
No amount of Shoprite stores will make it look right
No township will ever evolve into a City proper
I repeat, demolish the township!
There is a building down town in the MIDST Of POVERTYVILLE called the
POCKET. The pocket is used to store supplies and house programs for the poor.
Open the POCKET DOOR. No need for proof. Of IDENTIFICATION.
LET it be a source of Charitable DONATIONS FOR anyone
In need.
Let the money SURGE.
LET ALL PHILANTHROPISTS SPLURGE.
AND screams of DELIGHT the impoverished plight.
Open. The POCKET DOOR. LET THE POCKET MONEY BE
EARMARKED for the poor, PROVISIONS and PRIZES for
Prosperity.
Grants in tow. Watch. BILLIONS POUR .
DESTITUTE UNITE. PARTIES AT THE FIGHT. THE LAND OF
MILK AND HONEY.
Tear. Stained faces UNFUNNY. REVOLUTION AT HAND.
VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS, IN THE STRANDS.
PROSECUTORIAL PROCEEDINGS HAVE BEGAN.
DNA IN QUESTION
DNA INFECTION?
In actual WE NEED billions in capital for ANTI-POVERTY
PROGRAMS.
Hear the people roar WE NEED MORE, OPEN THE POCKET DOOR!
The POCKET is a PROGRAM for ANYONE in need.
Money KNOWS not where it FALLS. WITNESS all the poor
ENTHRALLED.
Let the POCKET have earmarks for poorly proforming SCHOOLS.
APPOINT TZARS to oversee COLLEGE PROGRAMS IN MASS.
The POCKET should be EXPANDED not discarded as trash.
OPEN THE POCKET DOOR WIDE AND STILL WIDER UNITIL EVERY
IMPOVERISHED MOUTH HAS HAD ITS FILL.
HOW PROFOUND.
The year 2000 about to done with,
and only the Atlantic Ocean divides us.
Now around me the snow falls.
If I could see you in months,
I shall turn the months in snowballs.
All January will sever me,
A step more- February will brush,
March will bring you closer,
Spring will remind me of you,
May-wreaths will bind me,
and...Denmark not far away in June.
Oh, How would it be?
After such a long wait,
How would I greet thee?
But Alas!My boat was on a smooth sail in June
Undaunted to find the land
to sow the seeds,
but missed a little rain.
Unlike Columbus,
dolefully sailed back.
What was to turn to reality
became a distant dream.
That dream stays with me
altering the colour of emotions.
The love remains well,
The rest is unsavory.
Indeed misery outlives the joy
Denmark remains a distant dream.
+++++++
November 30, 2014
Form : Lyric
Contest: Waking Dreams by Gautami Phookan
============================
October 31, 2014
Form: Lyric
Dr. Ram Mehta
First Place Win
Contest:C'est la vie by Judy Konos
=====================
April 5, 2014
Form Lyric
Sixth Place Win
Contest: Many Miles Away by Roger Horsch
If my phone can reach your throne,
It is my heart who sent him.
He( my heart )is playing strings and singing soulful songs
If you can hear the words, my tongue had genuflected before you.
By a unanimous decision of my entire being,
The lord is mighty
When he breathes, mansions of burdens collapse.
When he sighs, waves of captivities lay humbly at the shore.
When he lifts his hand, dunes and mountains of oppression lapse.
His words are thunderstorms that rumble and make the lion forget to roar
The lord owns wisdom.
Philosophers can't fathom his presence,
Thus some say he's absent.
Wisdom thinks about his excellence
Researchers have given up on methodologies earmarked to trace his thoughts.
The Lord is wonderful.
He never made mention of operation tools during creation.
Yet on the first man he performed an operation.
An operation which brought forth his rib (Eve)
Oh! His deeds had even brought my hand to a stand still.
?
Must I be a Premi'm Member…
To be a worthy contender?
Must my name be kissed by a star…
For my poems to travel far?
No cov'rage for me on FB?
Don't you think that makes me grumpy?
Right now my finances are tight
So I am stuck in this sorry plight
Thought my words had their own appeal
So I’m waiting to close this deal
Poetry Soup, you feed my soul
But exclusion's taking a toll
Won’t let the battle of the “views”
Compound my monetary blues
My bonus I'd earmarked for this
Got traded for my daughter’s kiss :)
She went abroad to find her dreams
More important to me that seems
The Star Membership will have to wait
Be patient…I’m just running late! :)
Curse of the twenty two
Ole Con he was a Yeoman at bloody El Alamein,
And he lifted out the mines where lead fell like bloody rain,
Driven sort of crazy, with death buzzing all around,
And the butcher shop of blood an guts, sort-of made him friggin frown,
Bronco Don had earmarked Bally Watson,
after a fight at the bar,
Put a bullet through his earhole ,
So he left the town hurrah,
And the coppers couldn’t find,
A witless witness, bloody now,
cOs they thought ole Johnson,
might get the word of “top-off” any how?
{Aussie, Police spy or dobber}
Con he did borrow the same rifle,
That earmarked Bally’s ear,
And his son was using it the rifle,
To shoot Rabbit, eat him here,
Rolled up in his swag ole twenty two went off,
As the swag it hit the ground,
Shot the boy dead .22 lead,
Bloody sadness all around,
Ole Con came racing up the stairs,
Plane crash very near,
Four Dirran. Men, were burning when,
The word old Don did hear,
At a hundred miles an hour he drove,
to save the lives of none,
The police said they are bloody dead,
Though he battled the flames yes some,
Four funerals we all went ,
Our friends were surely dead
Four young men to heaven sent,
Our hearts had the weight of lead,
So I swapped it away, the bad luck gun,
Ole Nodder Smith he got it,
He built a special case for that one,
The curse of the twenty two, on-nit…
Don Johnson
Somewhere out there in the world
There was a girl, No! strike that—a woman.
He saw as a girl, but knew as a woman.
And loved her only like a man, only a real man can.
A full grown man. Past his trials and tribulations that plague an adolescent youth, posturing while attempting to prove his valor, worth and to much a female’s ambivalent chagrin, his dominance. In his tiny kingdom. Which was really the vast universe of all that crazy phenomenon human beings gave the quirky abstract thing a name. They called it love.
That’s been written about by bards and authors alike. Between a male and a female, the dark to your light. Hey, who is dark anyway? It must be Eve.
Anyhow. Somewhere in the world this forthright, upstanding citizen of a girl, this woman had such an “understanding that she’d see him [in his entirety] like a poem or a story. And "find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her.” The Gestalt view of the man. She knew him entirely. Read him like a book. She knew the plot the exposition, the conflict the Rising Action (wink wink) the dénouement and the resolution. As the French would say, n'est-ce pas.
No, like a poem. A poem she wishes she could write. She knew where the best pages of him were. Existing in dog-eared pages with phrases that described earmarked features. Monumental features that tore her heart asunder. Features that filled her up. As god as her witness shed never be hungry again. To lie awake and think of his soul, seeping out of his mouth with words reverberating her own. Oscillating tiny bones, giving semiotics new meaning with each locution.
Don’t over analyze the symbolism here reader. She’d lie awake and ruminate his gestures, his mannerisms. His smile. And the way his face would look in different light. And how when he laughed the crinkles that formed around those intelligent eyes after he eloquently would mouth some truism. And she knew this face appeared throughout history. And she knew a writer of ballads wrote “don’t shove me while I’m drowning… were all just hunting for love” and she read once an author noted: “almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into couples.” The end.
When the stomach of a child
Who has overfed rumbles, it is not
In memory of the empty hands of the past
Or what the future holds in hand
It is to mock hunger by saying all is well for now!
All is not well for tomorrow’s grinding hunger
When the Ministers of chronic poverty
Are the symptomatic children of gluttony.
The politicos eat their fill of the national cake
Down to their kin, while the dry crumbs
Are earmarked for poverty alleviation.
Today, like yesterday immemorial
They formulate policies, sign MOUs
Host conferences, organize seminars
Then publish readymadecopypaste reforms
Before the press and assembly
On how to terminate the gene (ration) of poverty.
But then, await aids, charities
Foreign loans, Sani and Diezani’s loots
Which are then looted again.
Only for the political meme
To procreate poverty, a social gene.
All is not well
When inflation drowns and hunger mounts.
You who eat until your every anatomy become fibroid
And then you say all is well.
Have you ever heard or felt
The roar and bite of empty stomachs
Or the crackling ribs of raving hunger?
And have you felt the hopelessness of trying
To perceive the aroma of tomorrow’s break of fast?
We cannot live by charities
Palliatives and crude empowerment alone
But from every sustainable development
Infrastructures and industrialization.
Our palms cannot always be spread under the sun
Awaiting bronze coin and silver manna.
No more nagging stomachs, colourless eyes
And furrowed brows
No more the darkness distributed by PHC
No more the public wealth shared by NASS
And their fellows, the contractors
No more business monopoly, hoarding and inflation
No more the love for foreign lands and goods
To the detriment of the homeland
No more insecurity, hate speech and division
No more fraud, immorality, tribalism and mediocrity
No more laziness, vain speech and promises
No more the birth of the almajirai and abandoned projects
No more the suit, cassock and agbada ministers of poverty!
The essence of wit is brevity
which interestingly evinces chivalry
delivered verdict to hex hoar size
(once and for all) president
dons mantle of deviltry
and trumps constitutional credo
defining American elementary
particular edicts denoting, enshrining,
framing, grand honorable inalienable rights
when foolhardy lobbyists prevail
evicting execrable“enemy”
i.e. forward thinking (progressively liberal)
which subsequently might help
timid citizens to invoke probate, procure, produce cojones
in opposition against rabidly power hungry,
misogynistic courting among the body politik
fostering future feverish fortuity,
toward risking life and limb sans
Uncle Sam selfless gratuity
(especially as Benjamin Button syndrome –
reverses aging process
acquired thru heredity
gets in full swing) stamping mindset
nonestablishmentarian identity
with my Kosher blessing despite any infamy
permission to go ahead with jocularity
from a superstar coach named Kennedy
thereby garnering homespun liberty
where icon bank on direct
laudable, linkedin longevity
with unrolled Scottish grandeur
(Pomp and Circumstance broadcast)
synchronized with precise
unrolled welcome mat
yule receive granted “FAKE” feted soiree
as curtain call doth close toward
final decade of mortality
yet dismiss bing hash-tagged
a scofflaw at any opportunity
especially if legislated mandate
earmarked as priority
in tandem with the key quality
apothegm stipulates decrease sing sanity
as the hands of father time
spin (Doktor Dude Little) backward
away from present day turbidity
increasing revanchism uber victory.
A silly superstition enwraps and grips me,
It holds me and will not loosen its vile, crushing deathgrip:
It is a numerical one, this foolish superstition to which I have my subscription,
For this is the numerological sorcerous fallacy to which I've subscribed:
That, as I have yet published a baker's dozen of poems hereon,
(Though this poem or that preceding it, might have in fact made it fourteen),
I must exceed the number somewhat, and do for today the writing of
Four poems, yet the dilemma in which I currently awash,
This quandary, this conundrum, this balk and qualm of mine,
Is as follows:
In my troika of notebooks and journals and leather diaries I've earmarked
For poetic use, the tally of poetries I've written therein today is but two,
Thus I would not reach the somehow sacred number,
That numerical goal I've set for myself of seventeen,
Unless I were to write two more poems, extra-notebooked ones:
Being ones beyond and without the notebook,
Beyond the papery, lined realms of the manifold pages of my
Threefold notebooks.
So to solve the insoluble, and resolve it, what was I to do?
I tasked myself with reaching the putative goal of seventeen,
But how would this devoir I achieve?
Only by the conception and composition of a pair of extra poems,
Thus, to accomplish that total, this poem and the one that preceded it.
So, have I paragraphed this page thus, in the manner most befitting
That of the poem.
And now this emptiest and most filler-like of my poems yet, it be done.
Form:
STOP THE RAIN.
Fiends of forest to stop rain
Tall trees tenanted by spirits
Preparations in the make
For the day to close within
The dusk burdens of stake.
Mysteries of death and life
In useful annals of time
Pertinent flesh gets entangled
Within the motions of stars
For some mournful wrangles.
Phases of moon, changes of season
Visible seen in some celestial places
Emblemed provisions earmarked
For the litanies timed for future.
Set in motions the pungent season
Spring times & the hoary winter
In deeds wilting of frozen tongues
Intricated by markers of universe
Underwritten by wardens of verse.
I’m a unique specimen,
made of mescaline and ketamine.
And the last living resident,
of an intergalactic settlement.
Burnt to the ground,
by time travelling middlemen.
I came with the cannon,
aiming only to try and bury them.
And when I aim for their president,
I will not miss my friend.
Now I’ve done the job,
I will disappear again.
Like the last living remanence,
of a long forgotten culture.
Disappeared too quickly,
picked at by the vultures.
Bones into dust,
Picked up by the wind.
And we never knew the story,
cause we’re never taught a thing.
Meet the psychedelic poet,
trying to live stoic.
He’s earmarked for death,
and he doesn’t even know it.
I’ve met alcoholic authors,
with bongs in their hands.
Staring out of the windows,
cause they’re awfully prang.
I remember nights doing pipes,
but now my mind is sober.
But eternally restless,
seeking some final closure.
The makeshift king,
searching for the evidence.
I am seeking refuge
And my mind needs the medicine.
Form: