Best Illegible Poems
freedom lies with a shattered grace
stumbling toward atomic mythology
where answers have their sins washed
brilliantly bright as suns dyeing skin off-
colors of rumors circulating planets
of the universe pulled headlong into a night
-mare riding tattooed and complaining
about recollections of severed ghosts
(hiding in a ball of fear minds cry)
out of season the earth radiates melting
enraged stupidity the penultimate prize
(summer sunday christmas chimes)
on the edge of sleep falling awake...
ring the festival of blood into session
the birth-fangs grapple with truth no longer will
recessions bring harvests the moon is full
...and the eye is a clogged vessel full of truth
(in relative position the evening twists elaborate
dances like guitars bending the last strings...)
a painting of a brain chips and disintegrates
like words of a schizophrenic seeking the last
wisdom hidden in the bottom of a noise
only tasted...with the throat closing vision narrows...
the fading archetype is the last opiate of inspiration
the last leader is a shill of the lord of matter dissipating
(two raindrops collide) the core of her heart is hot
like earth it is revised toward oblivion...
...follow it it is
...night brighter than calm
...lipids sinking into servitude
...no one will digest this but all
choking dry paranoia on the fringe of town
(a different verb writes in the sky a new eternity)
...we witness the madness of a faceless doctor
scratching scripts illegible to the naked lie...
conscripted as a rat before a snake fighting its shadow
diving into the blind dream we call created angels
to save our skin from weeping generations of blood...
DISAPPEAR
Tremors are the worst,
the full-body shakes
its like my skin is too tight,
my body doesn’t fit,
my life doesn’t fit
the anxiety no one understands
its invisible,
I’m invisible.
“Snap out of it, Shaky”, they say
“You’re just faking it.”
And I want to crawl into a ball and disappear.
Where did my confidence go?
My libido?
So many accomplishments…
I wake up to a new day
but I see the old ways
and no way out.
Can’t write in longhand anymore,
scrawling script is illegible
words fall like a sideways rain
splash all over me
the fears…not good enough
just let me lie here in the dark
and disappear.
Illegible inscription,
dilapidated tombstones
- bleeding black roses
Gray granite,
characterized by melancholy
My words are lost in ink stains
Verses smudged in prints of you
Illegible scribbles soon fill in lines
Once paved with love anew
Now only paperless pain ensues
An unnatural sequence of thoughts
Scribed in distressed hues of blue
Will re-actively release your grip
But the pain it can’t undo
Now only agony grew
My heart hands weep writes of tomorrow
My paper and pen are tempered in sorrow
My emotions bellow wallows
Of a mournful mind
I pray
This too
Shall pass
In time…
I
I am disinfected, sanitised from touch and eyes
Do not hold me. I am Bakelite and you smolder
Sat solid, the wall cold against my spine. A back-rest
To concrete electrocution.
I am distilled from Suburbia and Bohemian at Brandenberg
Rigid and saturnine. Heavy lidded Lichtenstein moons
And ruby lip and cheek.
Dumb-flustered and silent rictus
Nothing changes.
II
She edges closer with ostentatious mute steps. Like a bride
And thrice as white with crimson orb flowing underneath
Her caped wings and paper hat. Tiny dragging movements
As though her legs could snap
This marionette matchstick girl unfurls her bouquet of fingers intertwined
And ruffles from her drapes fragments of paper and a tiny plastic cup
I do not notice her. The bleach sticks heavy to the throat and
She envenoms me to the core stomach
She speaks. It is static heavy and foriegn, black-lipped vowels and dull
Continuations of barely literate sounds.
My words are daggered brutes, any poetry the less of my expectations
Is instantly meaningless, crass, common, nauseous and disgusting
Her flowing prose was illegible on those lips. Sounding almost spat
I could have silenced nine decades to my two and circled her in criticism
She would never understand with her barely-English cold translations of her
Own English mother-tongue.
III
People are fascinating
Occassionally
I find I look at them and linger, I study them and calculate their complex algebras
Undoubtedly we are products of our parents and the less of us by-products
We are strings and apples and figs
The woman with her ghost-white face and dress. Her parents were too strict
You can see it in her face, how if you even turn away her eyes circle with bags
And she feels lost, she could cry a thousand summers and undoubtedly should trade my place.
As of my own parents they probably loved me too much. Sheltered me and then
Stopped abrupt as death and cyanide fizzing
Suddenly trading my lineage into friendship and smiles and no, do silence yourselves
I am a maypole and the strings circle about me
Life and ambition they feed upon me, draining me in complex nervous disorder
I am a living question mark
I can feel it
Eating below my skin.
Crumpled Thoughts
They wait – in hues of vibrating silence -
Like leftover orts of rumpled paper wimples
On creased clandestine journal pages –
Bent scraps of wrinkled inspiration
Smudged moments held in their one moment of time
Musings fading to illegible
Lost chords in treasured memories of radiance,
Sunspots of incomplete illumination,
Or crumpled creativity on paper wings
Snapshots of raw moments in tormented terror
Footprint creased signatures of incensed avenging angels
For abandoned ragged beggars in pencil
Of partial tidings
Wearing incomplete tatters of disturbed serenity
Waiting – lined up – for their turn to speak –
Vying for resuscitation
As actors reading their scripts –
Players auditioning for ideas
Of ice castles throwing off anonymity
Whistling like nonchalant sentimental journeys
In phases of the moon begging for words
Libretti confronting notes wandering in obscurity
Impatient plans in fits of tantrum’s flight
Residue of fantasies for
Gypsy fortuneteller’s phantasmal globes
Rescued by ruminations tender muse
With the gift of time to take them from her
Nurturing womb into full life and maturity –
Blinking in the brightness of real time
Bits and snatches adjust sight from consecrated darkness
To lumens brightness of looming footlights
Now taking bows in postmarks of epilogues -
Snatched from wondrous oblivion -
Profiles sketched in hope’s penumbra.
1-11-21
Contest: Crimpled Thoughts
Sponsor: John Lawless
Supposed that life is not a limitation
Supposed that it stands, strips each and every casement of the mysteries
Penetrate the time limits
Penetrate the gray shutter
An illegible wilderness
A term that created to never stop
Each individual is like running but does not stepping
Is like carried away into the mainstream of nowhere
Restrictions unstoppable
Once in a while we confined and defined
You feel like understand, but more over in guessing
You were trapped in a perception of your virtual world
The elapsed labyrinth was the history by you
Created over the ideas and shapes of you
Say that you've been created by the basis of world's presumptions
Will it be better than stripped by the dimension of infinite freedom?
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”
-William Blake
Yanny Widjanarko
Dec'14, 2013
Relate your poem to one of these Quotes (Old/New) contest
Sponsor Giorgio V.
Mossy vines served as camouflage for a decaying headstone.
The inscription is illegible, but that matters not to me.
At this centuries-old grave I place flowers and moonstone --
As requested by my ethereal savior, friend, lover, devotee.
My first visit to Gravesend was via historical daylight tour.
Another attempted escape from a dreadful loss and daily boredom.
This landmark cemetery predates America by 100 years or more.
Yearning for comfort, I sensed only a dead-strewn auditorium.
Though the feelings persisted, I dared not reveal my plight.
Breaking from the group, I chanced upon a hidden burial mound.
Sitting on a slate stone, a tweeting bird subdued my fright.
Then a silence did ensue -- and a whispering from underground.
A mist ascended in the form of a desirable, raven-haired beauty,
Who ingested my pain and angst, diluting my secrets in oblivion.
Her voice was the sweetness that called my cells to sync-duty.
She smelled of paradise and her kisses raised a dead compulsion.
Meeting clandestinely as the summer turns to fiery autumn-rust.
Medea (her name) asks to be released from her purgatorial strife
By way of dark spells, old magic and a curious blood-crystal dust.
On this Halloween night, I will transmute ghost to fleshy wife!
The ritual begins as most rituals do: serious, focused and grim.
Within the pentagram, Medea fluctuates -- in all her femaleness.
She comes to me warm and steamy. I hear a chorus, a siren hymn.
I'm enfolded in the marvelous lure of a dying-to-eat ... succubus!
August 7, 2016
Camouflage Me A Poem - Poetry Contest
Livid I was when that nincompoop
stained that page of my book
with tomato sauce, while eating
oh! How horrible! How horrible!
It was just a little dot but still;
definitely not easy to tolerate,
since I am a bibliophile,
enamoured with poetry and essays,
being my idols William Topaz McGonagall
and the Irish-speaker Robert Wilson Lynd!
Oh! It was just a little stain which
blurred no text, made nothing illegible,
but still! My anger ceases not
and I call that man a true clown!
Am I the book keeper of my vast mind?
A library holding all my dearest dreams,
Hopes, desires...my sweetest memories
I hold so tender, my beloved shrine.
They run through my mind, a second's pace
Through the endless corridors of a maze.
Books fly everywhere. Pages turning,
Corners folding, pieces tearing - shelves raised.
My precious library, my beloved shrine -
Burning into cinders till only
Ashes remain. I stand there alone with
The mind fractured, broken...cracked.
Am I the book keeper of my vast mind?
The books are illegible, the shelves toppled,
The corridors emptied, no more sweet
Memories left to keep.
My scribbles scrammbled on a tatty bit of paper
I vomit ideas
Before they vapour
They appear inedible mountains of mess
I churn and turn the illegible scribbles to words that truly bless
I am a dyslexic writer - Published Poem in Forgotten Letters
I laughed aloud
To look at the strange
Action of a mad man
Who was standing
At the edge of the road
His expressions
Were changing rapidly
But suddenly
My laugh had a brake
And my heart became grave
Curiously, surprisingly
I saw his face
And on it
An illegible trace
I felt something
In my heart
Laughing at me
It was none but humanity
sometimes i want to write but
my hand cramps up
so i switch hands
now my right hand does not like
my left because he does not know how
to use chopsticks properly.
old lefty does not seem able
to be articulate at first either.
being referred to as the cleft left.
a place where
q's look like r's
c's look like a's
and a's still look like a's
infact the intire alphabet turns
and renders itself to lefty in some
form of ancient sanskrit known
as illegible scribble.
where
strange birds float down on silt
through the pens black ink nile
cursing in aramaic
and chain smoking domestic
cigarettes rolled in the papyrus
of holy books
along the reeds of fingers
they pass like a mosaic law
held together by the thumb.
until one rises along the interstate
to show itself to a man in a
landrover following way to close.
old lefty you beautifully
misunderstood dyslexic genius,
how could i have only used
you for holding the coffee
mug all these years.
Who am I to know
the abstract silence
when you drink the moonlight all alone ?
The black toes of a dying woman
haunt me in a stream
of white shrouds. A night
of shattering perceptions,
defaults and ignorance.
Time bomb was ticking.
It had been troubling me
the betrayals in night
mothering a vegetable past.
A single finger defines
the authority of future.
I traced the proud shadows of a god for,
a useless reference of illegible wisdom,
untold misery of green waves mirrored in sky.
For extracting death
from life at every step
I knew the answer.
Dying was not a private thing.
The truth and the path would die.
How you dreaded the closed doors?
The explicit fear of drowning
in beliefs with brothers of
sorrow and feet of clay.
SATISH VERMA
First letters are undulating, bouncy and loopy
Rest are sort of pretty sloppy and crunched together
With a load of smooth diagonal lines that connect all the way
And a squarish circle degenerated into a quick squiggle
It's a sort of scribble and swirl
Legible in the most illegible sense of the word
Looks like I have been testing the flow of ink
A flamboyant mess and a mysteriously intriguing expression of my mood
It is beautifully hideous and reflects on who I am
If you can read it you are an absolute champion