Best Leached Poems
My words seep onto the page like poetic tears
Drip
Drip
Drip
Words once leached from every inch of my psyche
Now my friends, my time has come
It is time for me to depart
The light in my life is fading
Soon it will be extinguished
I will be gone from your lives forever …
Yet my words will always remain
I have been on a journey of a lifetime
Writing changed my life forever
I’ve shared my hopes and dreams
The good times and the bad
With laughter and tears
If you have one memory of me
Remember how I made you smile
I will never spill a drop of ink again
It’s finally time to say adieu
For it is too late for goodbyes
These are the final words I will ever write …
Until we meet again
For contest
26th August 2015
Categories:
leached, goodbye, poetry,
Form:
Free verse
In this small square room of mental illusion,
I look at my reflection in a state of desolation.
I'm not what I am in this state of confusion,
I'm trampled on the ground by my sense of delusion.
I'm a black-hole in the corner of one of my classes,
absorbing all hatred and negativity that passes.
I see no light, nor a glimmer of hope,
what I haven't learnt is the courage to cope.
I need contraceptives for my mind.
Can't bear this cynicism and broken lies.
My thoughts are sown with verbal abuses,
raised by water like the weeds on turf-grasses.
Solitude was my belief in transient relief.
Its not a permanent cure, but just a relief.
When I snap out of it, I'm in the very same shoes,
I'm leached out of my strength, from out of the blue.
Escape from reality has never been an option.
Blacking out on drugs have never been a solution.
The past three years, I have witnessed huge losses,
instead of the results, now I discern the causes.
It might not just be mine, but your life too,
But what the wise men say, is indeed true -
Your deep sense of hurt, builds up your power,
because what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger...
Categories:
leached, allusion, emotions, imagery, inspiration,
Form:
Rhyme
The rose has been raped of her beauty
Stolen by hordes of dreary lines
And to be leached further still
Until nothing remains of her
But yellowing birthday cards
And sugar-free quotes, in italics
Like a rose is like nothing at all
Categories:
leached, goodbye, rose,
Form:
Free verse
There are people who make up misguiding lies,
use words to hurt, wound and paralyze,
they put up'walls or mountains to the skies,
of unscalable heights and unmeasurable size.
They set us adrift on a windless wave,
to spew out their hate on an innocent's grave,
they slaver and foam like the depraved,
to fill us with doubt and corrupt the brave.
Their thoughts slither like a snake,
coiling around tightly at every slip we make,
their smiles deceive, their platitudes rake,
their contempt disguised with every heart they break.
They judge and convict with mirthless pride,
and condemn us, while acting our guide,
their two-faced grin, takes our own side,
while watching as into quicksand we smoothly slide.
Their pat on the back, their convincing hug,
leaves a slime trail, they're loathsome slugs,
their poisonous tongues, a mind blowing drug,
which alters reality, beware these back-biting dogs.
Back-stabbers, revel in such cruel intent,
puss breaking forth, from the infected utterance they vent,
troubled and weak, our self-esteem is rent,
when leached with glee, from the bearer sent!
©Jane Richer
Mar. 15 2001
Categories:
leached, introspection, satire, drug,
Form:
Rhyme
Charlie. I worked with Charlie for 14 years. He was a little older than me, did the same job. Sure had the "highs and lows" - he must have been manic-depressive or bipolar or something. He'd blow up, but remained a good friend. Charlie was big, had to be 350 lbs. or 160 kg. A very good drummer, he could work magic with just his fingers and thumbs on a table. He said nobody in his family ever lived past age 55. Colon cancer. At first, there was some steely resolve to fight, but it quickly leached most of it out it of him. He was correct about age 55.
Bob was a mechanic, and didn't work "on the road." At that time, it was somewhat like being in the military for most of us - we had our rank, our chain-of-command, and our missions (not to mention our egos). Bob was at peace, competent, relaxed, quiet. He was a little hard to understand - he spoke softly, perhaps slightly muffled, as if with a small speech impediment, but always with good humor and a twinkle in his eye. I'd see him a few times a year, when we were back from a tour of work. Always wore a red bandanna around his head.
He was as purely good-natured as anybody I've ever met. This was in the days before cell phones, and in the repair shop there was a pay phone that was enclosed with sound-dampening material, so you could hear over the din. One time I lost my wallet - that cold, nauseating feeling - I'd left it in the little sound-booth. After searching the grounds for two fruitless hours, I came upon Bob, approaching me with the most honest smile. "Are you missing something?" he said, holding out the wallet. No games, no sarcastic comments, he was just glad to help.
And then one time he wasn't there. "Bob died - he had leukemia." I hadn't known; I don't think he told anybody, maybe a boss right at the end. Oh Bob.
Categories:
leached, death, life, sick, work,
Form:
Prose
The birds of pray are on their way, in every beak the Word
(of ptomaine tomes by gnarly gnomes) whose meaning is obscured;
they roost aloof on every roof, obscene but always herd,
to tell the tale of Jonah’s whale and other rhymes absurd -
with shifty eyes, they’re giving whys for living life deferred.
While jackals lean, hyenas mean, and hungry crocodiles
feast in the lounge and never scrounge, lambs languish in the aisle.
The naive dare to say “Unfair, let’s try to reconcile.
We’ll all relax and weigh the facts, let justice spin the dial.”
With jaundiced monks and minds pre-shrunk, the jury is compiled.
The Rulers meet, First Ladies greet, the Kings appear in style.
Before the Court, their sins are short, they’re swept into a pile;
with diatribes and petty bribes, the jurors are beguiled.
The Herd entreats, the Shepherd bleats the verdict of the trial:
“You have no face. Stay in your place, stay in the Rank and File.
And wait instead, for when you’re dead, for riches afterwhile”;
Aristocrats add caveats while sailing down the Nile:
“If Minds are mugged or simply drugged with philtres in a vial,
then few indeed will fail to feed the Pharaoh’s Crocodile.”
The wordsmiths spin, the bankers grin and politicians smile,
the riff and raff, they never laugh, they mark a martyred mile.
The rituals are finished, all, here comes the Reverent Priest.
He leads the crowds beneath the clouds, and there the flock is fleeced
with crossing signs and bloody wines and consecrated yeast,
“The last are first, the rich are cursed.” (The leached remain the least.)
His step is gay without dismay before his evening feast;
he thanks the Lord for room and board and bows to Eden East;
he doesn’t sigh or wonder why the sins have not decreased.
The sinking sun is now undone, the sky is fading red.
A spider black hides in a crack and spins a silken thread
and babes will soon collapse and swoon, on curbs they call a bed;
with vacant eyes they'll fantasize and dream of gingerbread,
and so be freed, though still in need, from anguish of the dead.
Continued
Categories:
leached, drug, fantasy,
Form:
Rhyme
My thumbs jolt around the bright interactive screen,
little letters appearing with each little poke,
typing way faster than the speed of a bullet.
Then the screen goes dark; i have finally awoke.
The trance of advanced technology is too much;
lives only exist on little screens nowadays.
Twitter, Facebook, and many more distractions
make our long work days quite shorter in a few ways.
The tease of the modern phone is uncanny,
hypnotizing its victims into a stupor.
When one finally comes back to reality,
the intensity of the world is quite super.
The sun shines very bright and burns the blurry eyes,
becoming scared and unaware of surroundings
fear slightly common in those truly addicted.
It feels weird now, as if you have grown horns and wings.
Looking around cautiously many things are seen:
a strange tall thing with green objects on the ends,
a large object with others wandering inside,
just a whole other world un-witnessed by my friends.
Fear rises in me, but it has just been a minute.
Feeling like an hour the phone still hasn't rung;
did i text to someone something i shouldn't have?
"The waiting is chaos in this world," my mind sung.
Then the device rings aloud and relief sets in,
calming my worried mind from the high it just reached.
I peer at the small reply that took forever:
"Hey" appears, my heart thumps like a darkness leached.
My thumbs jolt around the screen as i quickly reply,
little letters appearing with each little poke,
typing way faster than the speed of a bullet.
Then the screen goes dark; i have once again awoke.
Categories:
leached, addiction, change, fear, feelings,
Form:
Ballad
Wasted landscapes without proper tenureship
Evicting the true owners from their habitats
Tensions between the economic and survival
Leached sands, eroded banks of stewardship
Artificial substitutions and the phobia of bats
Nature besieged by ignorance and the political
Denude of forests, wetlands, and pollute the seas
So producers and consumers are soon decease.
Categories:
leached, natural disasters, political,
Form:
Rhyme
Like the lost sounds of evening bells
The voices of children pealing
The last lie of innocence in papyrus away;
Not the baubled brook in joy;
The rinsing screams soliciting crude customs back,
Spreading phonetic fingers of laughter for aid;
Our tone dead heart hears nothing
But self-cloying honey, leached and leaking
From comb-cells flaccid to the bone.
These times have lost more than silver steeples or steel
Bright hope aspiring to the sun;
We poor Daedalus by sight driven lust
Watch in writhing disgust autumn unwinging us
Shearing golden trees of leaves against the brawny breeze;
What architect built the broken oak?
Our Icarus from heaven is shaken. Trust
Falling - all proven traditions past!
The lives of children in an hour glass
Tell, myths were better than this Midas dream
Categories:
leached, caregiving, children, lost, autumn,
Form:
Free verse
The groans of ancient years still echo in my bones. It is a pain
That lodges in the weariness of Africa. Curled in her, the strain
Of old world history. Out of her given darkness triumph shines
The light of all cities, world clamoring, and out of her plundered mines
Glower the bright towers of world economy. We who lost are owed
Much here. My ancestors were used: mediums of exchange;
Stock for slave houses and ships; rich cargoes of commerce;
And cattle to the whip. Toiling night and day and no remorse
Nor recompense for labor, in humanity's disfavor. I am owed
Because all my life I have been on a journey, going nowhere
On my own. I did not this destination set; No man can reach
Another's goal, I am bound to ship 'gainst my will. My soul's leached
Of traditions: language and peace. I pine far from King's dream
So stereotyped, so American, I move in jungles of passion
My captors cannot read. I am overdiagnosed with tensions
Strange to my desire. I must be paid since I did not set here
This destiny I built them; like a moon I move and shine fair
Imprisoned in the power of the sun. My heart groans, and I
Cough up tides amids the white buds of cotton, breaking like a boil
Upon the day. Why? Those owed least get paid still from our toil.
Categories:
leached, black african american, political,
Form:
Verse
Dinosaurs waiting for stone to erode,
their skeletons covered, uncovered again,
iron that's forgotten the blood where it flowed
and phosphorous leached from a primitive brain--
delicate sabers of soft-stepping cats
enshrouded in shimmering oceans of sand,
strata of relative sediment that's
concealing the bones of the earliest man--
visible traces of numerous beasts,
the sum of Earth's creatures forever enshrined--
signs of their passing won't slow in the least
the rivers and runnels of ongoing time.
"We loved the earth, but could not stay" ~ Loren Eiseley~
Categories:
leached, history, nature,
Form:
Lyric
I dream fragments of poetry,
my pen balanced in my hand,
journal opened to that page
already darkened
with blots of frustration,
asterisks for seemingly important ideas,
collections of words and phrases
intended for collage and inspiration,
pleas for clarity.
My poems appear haltingly,
in bits and pieces
written in several colors of ink,
each suited to the nature
of the several ideas that flit
through my paper mind:
vermillion extracted from cinnabar,
thinned with vodka for my good days;
palest sky-blue from the seed of the avocado
bathed in water and lye,
for those times when I know I can fly;
ocean-blue ultramarine
ground from lapis lazuli,
used carefully when I feel a need for absence;
brown leached from oak galls
steeped in acidic water,
yielding ink such that when employed,
dissolves the paper
beneath the words I have written,
leaving a lacework of poetry;
yellow from crushed petals of the marigold,
soaked in tears for when I am confused,
noir-black dipped from the depths
of my melancholy.
The final poems,
the ones I can live with,
come into focus
only after passage through
the fermentation of language
essential for developing notes
of flowers, stones, and juniper.
Only then are they shared.
Categories:
leached, dream, poetry, writing,
Form:
Free verse
I am not a blank slate to score upon again
Yet there is this gap, this hollow place
That wants a name. I search for it in vain
The alien presence of eyes, and of face
Nothing comes back to memory. We are
Strangers now, and the empty space
Yawns akwardly. Thirty years is too far
For memory to recognize what is it I trace
For family and friends like fluids converged
In a nether space that makes glee brief
I feel the joy familiar as sky and sea merged
But the change in people contests my relief
For man have changed many things, but few
As much as himself - and as if to hide before
Familiar eyes. I remain old in a world new
And hesitance now where once I was very sure.
Time drizzled, drizzled, drizzled and terminus
Came piling up the sands of days for the wind.
Exile was my fickle way of escaping detritus
The sand shy had not yet blown but I was blind
And in the darkness where spins now alone
The white leached of soul calcified by snow wet
As unshed tears, under its stigma do so moan
More than the coming home again, the soft death
Of bonds, and the sense of proprietary loss. Who
Is left to stare in my face blank and expressionless?
And say by angle of shoulder: nothing here for you
I see all my labor like butter in the sun, and I am less
Than all the worth of man because the price of me
Is trickled in the sand. They kept the rules the same
But changed the game, and for lost of this efficacy
I am poured out from the chamber, a pot in shame.
For this I fled the foolish notion fawning in my head?
For this I left the better known of friends? The mills
Of stress do spin there still, the uncertainty of bread
And age from time's trembling vessel nervous spills
The unfriendliness to share because of a narrow dread
That tomorrow stalk alone will not suffice the failing
New. I was tired of my self-imposed exile, the shred
Remains I gathered and came home to true trembling.
There is only one familiar landmark, a true friend, this
Alone give my days orientation to praise. My true pole
Is where such a friendship in the sand storm still exist
The lighthouse in the billowy mist, anchor for the soul.
But I have no root here to hold me firm to one spot
Roots adventitious grows away, and then cold excision
The stem alone left in the miry mud to to swell and rot
Coming out of exile finds coping a harder final decision
Categories:
leached, angst, home, home,
Form:
Rhyme
Ganesh in the Deeply Dark (Dawn)
I sit, sullen
in this hot tub,
grown warm.
Here, I sit,
grown cold,
grown old.
The stars seem dim,
though neatly
arranged.
The dead leaves,
having leached their
green, beseeched their
sun-god, having breeched
their tip-top, up top, paraSol-top,
having reached the high holy Pale Blue,
having pleached in greens, having bleached
those same greens, having (perhaps mayhaps perhaps)
over-
reached,
fall silently around me.
Joining my tears in
filling this bath.
The light, warily
illumines the manuscript
sky.
Confronting my dark.
I can’t read these stars.
I can’t know my Way,
my Fate.
They say that if an elephant
could speak, we’d still
not understand her.
Wittgenstein’s lion.
The elephant isn’t.
The elephant is...
mine.
Categories:
leached, autumn, depression, philosophy,
Form:
Free verse
Old man vagabond searching for his home
Is this why you started to roam
Something in which you long ago lost
What was the cost
The price that you have already paid
Might of been easier should you of stayed
Maybe even prayed
Gone is the song
You held out so long.
They wonder why
You silently cry
You may have grown old
But your soul hasnt grown cold
Your fire still burns
For what, do you yearn
Dreams yet reached
Time has leached
The age, but not the dreams
You still search for it, it seems
What have you left behind
Do you think you will ever find
The missing part
A peace of your heart
Lost long ago
Don't you know
This is so
You can't go back
Time loses track
Nothing is ever the same
Is no one to blame
Time goes on before long
Just to began a new song
Haven't you found
That no one stays around
Always on the go
While you move so slow
Life can be kind.
Can't hit rewind
So live it now
Learn how
Before it's to late
And loneliness becomes your fate
Open that gate
That is you blocking your heart
From these chains you must partt
Time to learn to live
Learn to give
Never give in to the pain
Nothing you will ever gain
By giving in
You'll never win
Categories:
leached, family,
Form:
Rhyme