Best Exacts Poems
Where will tomorrow take us
Only God alone can tell
A brighter future a cloudless day
Or an earthly living Hell
How much of its our doing
How much is down to me
Is the fate laid out before us
A future meant to be
I know I've tempted fate before
At least a time or two
Risked life and limb and maybe more
I'd risk it all anew
Cos life for me's a wonderland
A journey to behold
A beautiful utopia
For the young and for the old
Til man exacts his dominance
Over everything he can
And mortgages each single soul
Of every living man
A banking led dystopia
Indebtedness their aim
We're caught here in the crossfire
In a costly Rotschild game
The year is sixteen ninety four
And a deal is on the cards
The notes are shilling loudly
From the moneylenders bards
Twelve hundred thousand reasons
Mortgage woman, man and child
The deal's been done, the trap's been sprung
The laughing Joker's wild
The Devil dealt a crooked hand
The rules weren't Heaven sent
The loans they pays a kingly ransome
The bets at eight percent
Inflationary stirms prevail
Nations drowningbin the flood
The odds now stacked in favour
Of a deal they signed in blood
Now money's just a token
The game is truly up
Their sleight of hand's been deftly played
They fill their debtors cup
Human lives collateral
As the game stacks in their favour
No money's needed anymore
The game is theirs to savour
Where will tomorrow take us
Only God alone can tell
The Devil deals in dying folks
His deals a living Hell
The game's a crooked one we know
It's plain for all to see
And the fate laid out before us
Is down to you and me
Sometimes, life can seem unfair
when your heart loses all hope.
And from a pit of despair,
you struggle merely to cope.
Love is an elusive dream,
interlaced with nightmare thoughts.
And anxiety's extreme;
tying your stomach in knots.
You try to rewind life's tape;
and yet, it is stuck on pause.
And there's no way to escape
the suffering or its cause.
Abuse morphs into self-hate;
guiding the blade on its path.
And admonishing your fate,
you let its edge purge your wrath.
Every cut exacts a toll;
unleashing a scarlet flood.
And yet, the pain in your soul
is numbed by the flowing blood.
Crackling, crunchy leaves confetti the ground
as skeleton trees rattle their bare bones.
And gusty winds howl like a soulful hound
while kids mope indoors, glued to their cellphones.
Indistinguishable, they look like clones
and seem as enthusiastic as stones.
Winter's approach gets labeled a bad thing,
covering everything in snow and ice.
And migrating songbirds no longer sing,
they've left before Winter exacts Her price.
But changing seasons is like adding spice,
just think of a snowflake as something nice.
All the mosquitos have frozen to death,
and life gets swathed in a snowy duvet.
Winter entices with a frosty breath,
enjoy Her; don't think of Her as a threat.
Indulge in all the Winter you can get,
there is more to life than the internet.
Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter are real
gifts of Nature, designed to make us feel.
(Urban Sonnet)
10/20/2018
In shiny armor knights of old,
Only quests for the brave and bold,
Famed Holy Grail chalice to hold.
But my heavy chalice isn’t gold,
Mine is night black and filled with cold,
About death is my story told,
A memory covered in mold.
Not expected plain death, you see,
When older age exacts a fee,
Known illness, not surprisingly.
That night was never planned, by me.
Unexpected, this was to be
Black night, black car, walking was she,
Killing her, instantaneously.
Still awake with thoughts of the dead,
My black cup overfilled with dread,
Remembering every word she said
Since shining day when we were wed.
Quest for peace now my daily bread,
Weariness drops my heavy head,
My chalice of the night, from A to Zed.
January 24, 2022
Contest: The Chalice of Night
Sponsor: Chantelle Anne Cooke
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This lockdown has me locked out of your heart
Though closer than a thought, we're miles apart
The shroud of silence settles tightly in
My words die on my lips before they start
Outside a monster howls in constant rage
Inside we beat our hands on walled-in cage
Our dreams illusive, bleed now on the floor
The truth exacts from us an awful wage
The days and nights are dressed in apathy
Deranged, we long to find some normalcy
Yet time looks on and jeers our fearful state
For well it knows we crave some company
Our words, our dreams, our love has all but died
The masks we wore, this quarantine let slide
I look at you and don't know who you are
The loveless look you give can't be denied
And so we bide our time in house arrest
The bygone times remembered as the best
One day we'll leave and face the world outside
With knowledge that our love has failed the test
Eileen Manassian
The Heavy Price Paid To End The Deepest Of Dark Pains
In my night-dreams, flies jargon of oracles wise and profound
words given that break heavy chains by which I was once bound
just a conversation with my dark-muse and her ancient friends
as she promised, they provided a means to making of my amends
tho', they are not angels, and each one exacts a heavy price
one that costs this soul very dearly and I have to pay thrice!
For when I reenter this dark world and walk among the dead
I am commanded to do a ghastly deed, one I so truly dread
kill, on first day of each week, not true villains as a great release
my victims are to be the innocent or else their help will cease
this long forty year vicious cycle only ends when I shall perish
or dare'st to murder that which my heart most fervently so cherish!
Alas! They knew well such great cost I would never ever dare to pay
what do they say, poet's ink is the blood that keeps devils away
yet all of my devils dance gaily within my red-blood splattered ink
and to this day, I sorry at how low my desires caused me to sink
tho' with glee, they told me this also would make it all go away
if I would murder my own beloved wife and use her blood to pay!
Now to commit that unthinkable act, its time has too soon came
I had played with fire, sought the dark gods, played their game
the oracles I told would get their last pay come full moon tonight
this would bring buckets of blood, to their greatest of delights
each one appeared and gave me more useless advice to seal the deal
having no clue, that this old tired poet, himself would thus kill!
All that gloomy day I worked to make sharp the sacrificial knife
to kill the monstrous monster they had made, not its beloved wife
she I had sent very far away, to visit her beloved family in Spain
to spare her this night's bloody sight, never to see her again
now the full moon has risen, that dark, dreaded midnight hour came
I give you my friends, these sad words bereft of a dark poet's name!
signed,
In honor of my hero, Edgar Allan Poe
1-31-2019
Note, this now finished piece was the other poem(4th) that I had
wanted to present when honoring Poe in my ongoing dedication series.
I only just finished it today, early this morn. I hope you may find
it dark, ghastly, and very Poe'esq in somber mood and its darkness..
Follow the winds of the Harpies.
Follow to the sigh of last breath.
Horrid hounds of Zeus beckoning
for you to embrace your dark death.
Follow the heights of Icarus
Follow till the blazes burn out.
Sol, a dragon's igneous mouth
gaping, awaiting chance to spout.
Follow to the depths of Phorcys
Follow till you whiff your last gasp.
Dangers of the depth await you.
Life quickly slipping from your grasp.
Follow clamant drums of Ares.
Follow till your ears hear no more.
War exacts an egregious toll.
Life ends in a sorrowful roar.
I watched the blood flow
poetry dripping
coagulating in pools of misery
How could a genius be so careless?
Shaving away our humanity
filtering it through an inebriated brain
Poems in the thousands
orchestrated in the ordinary
Crushing
Truthful
yet not quite right
Genius exacts a toll
Somewhere beyond mirrored ideology
flashes the broken image of man
the smell of whiskey
loose women
one night lays
Lonely is as lonely does
Sticks poked into blind eyes
bones cracking like porcelain vases
adorning the altar of an enigmatic fool
Are we trapped?
Are we idiots?
Do we drink from the well of insignificance?
He sits alone in an empty room
Thinking
Yes Thinking
Until he thinks us out of existance
Yet somehow
Thankfuly
We are still here
Not so Genius
Brilliant none the less. His story is sad but his poetry is riviting.
I enjoyed this contest, facinating person of whom I was not familiar.
*Image of Clock Time Dove by Pixabay.
Keola: Sonnet
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact, they do," ... Bertrand Russell (Quote hidden within the Sonnet in Italics
Most of the time when I'm under the sun,
ought not to watch nor pass by on people,
befuddled about clock-glued eyes outrun,
a zenith star would climb o'er the steeple.
Sooner all will suspect that life's too brief,
plus, die surrounds confidence merits life.
I've improved rather than grasp my belief,
and think I got the choice result fehl strife.
Confuse not in the consequence head-on,
direct my route, let that star point beyond,
a scale that exacts stealthily who's drawn,
bargain heightened the fact I did respond.
I discovered they who do take time, plans
to firmly coil, so to turn the clock's hands.
*fehl: fault; flaw; failure
2021 December 06
The Killing Field
Bong Son,Viet Nam
Not All Dead, Returned In Body Bags
Written: By Tom Wright
1/21/03
The war in Viet Nam rages no more,
But what say ye of the animate dead?
Can we continue their plight to ignore?
Staring past the crimson flow they shed?
Pages from life were systematically torn,
Eyes beholding things, which they abhorred.
Returning, aged beyond years, and worn,
Spat upon by some, while by others ignored.
The war they fought some saw as failed,
Protests at home left psyches' battered.
Like the "Hippies" they could have bailed,
But doing the right thing, and duty mattered.
To those, whose loved one's stood deployed,
There was no time that prayer was lost.
Praying that life and limb be not destroyed,
While knowing, war exacts a colossal cost.
Dedicated to my Brother
Master Sgt. Joe D. Wright
U. S. Army, (Ret.)
1st Air Cavalry
Location: unknown
Adulthood in Practice
(For Adult Contest)
There came a time when I began to see
That this life was about more than me.
And as that view sharpened in my sight
I saw a line separating wrong from right.
If by choice I placed myself in the wrong,
I knew I could not abide that place long.
I saw my presence there hurting others—
My infinite family of sisters and brothers.
It struck me that each of my selfish acts
The well-being of others a price exacts.
But if I chose the right, hard though it be
I was giving selfless service responsibly.
Being an adult means directing one’s being
To lifting lives and in compassion believing.
Again and ever still it is the time-tried case
Of putting unconditional love in first place.
There are those who believe this is naïve.
To self alone they cleave—and misperceive.
Despite age, they are adults in name only
Numbered of humankind’s lost and lonely.
There has always been an inter-outer over-under tender balance of loveless socio-equations as they super fit the psychosocial sexe-endices in this modern garner of pluses/minuses/bytes and scribbles mostly incommunicado inexperience and parental impreciseness as to, "anything planned", which in tomb leaves us doth a deranged desperate captive of that all inbibed prisoner **** of nun conformist adventurerers and that really, that there are just too many organic integers making for really bad math.intuitations/attributes and all of the familio do's and don'ts that creep bastardy across the years to inculcate, interfere, incase all of the hoped, promised integrity of just 2 people in love? with all that makes it their potential, not all of the hopeless, ne'r do wells, dead driven dud marriages that hoped to promulgate their failures onto the newbies totally unprepared, but willfully negative implicit on that new, and should be uninterrupted, all naked, seeing alter intense emoexplosive journeys to that wait waits, some supposes, everybody entices, everyone enthralls, quired questions, problem perplexes, initiates initiated, complexes complete, duty deforms, eerily exacts a viscous value, on properties promised a forever coexistance, but not at the expense of selfish selfness; can it be to an us award of a faceoff fervent fever, that WE, can coincide an opposite internal presence that allows us to be a universal component undeluded, underived, unpolluted by the natural wonders that are our genetic cohesions, so they can further their total promise to lead a connected life of copious love, desire and plentitudes of us-ness, disavowing all else in a socioinvasive parental wake of them vs us in all things blood/emo crass cursive? Leave them, the future lovers of us alone, let it flow and keep your, non orgasmic, loveless failures to yourself, old/tainted people of relations, lovers of social inhibitions it plays to an ill-at-ease, stubborn Igor-ignocompliance. Yes, we had Summer Love/Woodstock, but then we grew to be livestock, waiting for the senior-socioseniorslaughter pill mill. You must have some small, tinder, macromolecule of what it was to be standing in the bliss of universal underware; a long time ago in a universe far, far, away. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! the neighbors.
Have you never tasted hunger
Tread the alleys with the stealthy
Cried the tears of someone younger
While you dined among the wealthy
Shuffled through the papers
Through the pages of despair
Embittered by the capers
Neglect, hanging in the air
Step with me through the sadness
Let me open up your eyes
Weave, careful past the madness
Past the sorrow and the lies
The chains of bondage tighten
No future's in your sights
Do you wish to be enlightened
To embrace those dizzy heights
Piled high upon the pyre
The lost and the insane
The corpses piling higher
Entombed in the mundane
The root of all that's evil
A meaning to their end
More money than they'll ever need
More wealth than they can spend
The scales of justice tipping
With the deadweight of their sins
The wings of Angels ripping
As the final count begins
The boatman treads the water
As you wade the river Styx
The silver in your pocket
For to score the Devils fix
Lost in this sea of torment
While Hell exacts its toll
Your name is etched, inclement
On His register of souls
Cloaking misty hills and many a deep valley floor:
The empty Moor presents an outlook, stoical and dour.
Seemingly barren, this mute guardian of history,
Emits an air of arcane intrigue and darkest mystery.
Stunted Jack Pines, seen clustered on a distant knoll,
Stolidly defy Nature, though she exacts her toll.
They, as living record of ravages exacted by time,
Struggle to survive the harassment of its harsh clime.
Of other trees that one seeks, there are but few to see;
Except for a solitary Oak, a rugged, ponderous tree,
With deeply gnarled bark and stout branches entwined,
That survives, whilst all others, the Moor has declined!
When storm clouds threaten, and the midday dims,
This land, subject to Nature’s unpredictable whims,
Sends all Moor denizens scurrying, helter skelter
To seek the comfort and safety of familiar shelter.
When evening winds, croon their eerie symphony,
And babbling rills join in, to send haunting melody
Echoing across the ling, it provokes fresh fears,
That warn the Moor is no place to be, when night nears.
When the Moor is lit by a full moon, still there’s deceit,
For deep hazardous shadows, often trick unwary feet,
As bog and tussock, seemingly reach out to ensnare,
The ill fated interloper who chances to stumble there!
For Nature strives to erase all signs of human hand,
Would return the Moor to what befits this native land.
Her awesome control, allows for no compromise,
As those who would challenge her ways, soon realise!
But I enjoy the freedom such visits offer me;
For tis therein, I find peace and serenity.
So when solitude is an urgent need, and my goal,
The Moor brings composure to my tormented Soul.
Rhymer August 20th, 2016
Losing love before love starts;
confusion exacts a toll.
And in freshly broken hearts,
delusion corrupts the soul.
Gathering clouds, sense your mood,
crying misty drops of rain.
And suddenly, a storm's brewed;
as they weep for all your pain.
When the sun won't share its light,
your spirit struggles to cope.
And haunts the shadows of night;
where counterfeit smiles sell hope.
Fear and guilt dominate dreams;
when love is nowhere in sight.
And fueling nightmare screams;
depression turns off the light.
Memories add little weight
to balance the scales of truth.
For a heart broken by fate;
lost the innocence of youth.