Best Obsolescent Poems
As Pharoah thought
Deep thoughts on Thoth,
He became serious
And thought of Osiris.
What of Seth?
What do Anubis and Horus sayeth?
Of Amun and Mut,
And panoplied Nut?
It may take me forever
Mused the Pharoah -
To invent the Alphabet
To honour me and the rest.
So he hit upon a plan
From the carved likeness of man
In relief on a cliff.
Hey, hello - was born the Hieroglyph!
So excited was the Pharaoh
That row upon row
Of ideograms were made
For then and beyond- never to fade.
Way back in Antiquity
Was the hieroglyph's nativity,
From civilization's start
Great works of art.
After five millennia or more
At a light and sound show
The Hieroglyphs stand out
In splendor and shout:
Look on and wonder
On our days of thunder;
When great kings ruled the land
Where you wonder and stand.
Great things we'd tell you
If only you knew
To read papyrus and stone
Like your own Champollion!
Be that as it may
Setting aside our dismay
We venture to now and here
And our version of the ancient fear -
Athazagoraphobic
Is a form of being sick
Where you fear you'll be forgotten
As your memory gets rotten.
To overcome this fear
Modern science was here.
Came our Dennis Gabor
With the fruit of his labor.
- Hologram-
Now you can see light effects
Both form and the texts
With science of the day
Having had it's great say.
But think all over again-
Isn't it plain
Holograms in chips
Are but chipped hieroglyphs?
That some day in future
A post-apocalyptic preacher
Would try to decipher
The hologrammatic cipher?
A Rosetta Stone of old
A better story told
Than this obsolescent chip
Of a "modern" Athazagoraphobic.
Let me wind up this ditty
Of trying to be witty
Holograms and Hieroglyphs
Are both alliterative scripts!
~11 April 2016~
Contest Judged : 29 May 2016
Existence in Exile
Dispensing realities of parallel dimensions thrown into alternate extensions
Panoptical parasitical pretensions lie the overlords of illegitimate intentions
Chaos encroaches an anomaly serving the omnipresent obsolescent odyssey
Travelers of space-time unconsciously rediscovering the past sacred geometry
Hemispheres of dormant deceptions live deceivers of maleficent conceptions
In the cosmic corridors of corrections and refueling in the abyss of reflections
Within infinite bubbles of the multiverse navigating neglectfully we traverse
A catatonic continuum we immerse as we ride the eternal elliptical in reverse
For now we welcome the wormhole entering worlds of the carcinogenic cabal
Into oleaginous oblivions we crawl with ideological illusions we habitually haul
Within a consciousness condemned and realities severely sacrificially stemmed
Amidst a hellion hyperspace suspend will we arise altruistic aligned and amend?
May.19.2018
In 100 Years
Sponsored by: Brian Davey
Conquered by the circumambient incandescent
We are impuissant to all illumination
Its conflagrant presence remains incessant
The Mother's diurnal course without reincarnation
Purity of white, in its bright obsolescent
Beauty transmogrified to incarceration
Destitute to substance of atramentous
Yearning for just an ounce of clandestiness
Reverse fear of aura that is portentous
The cosmos suffocating, attempting solace
Abyss of chaos, our species remains apprentice
Our essence, Yang without Yin, remains starless
Obsolescent parasites; gathering as dae's whirlwind swirling about: kyklos...
His child's decaying flesh: Insecticide's, repelling incubus bloodlines ? Fa chancre
Paris green tremulous their queue; lassa fever scarab's, 'croix de guerre schizein phren.
Ironed Shadows
Her hands lay smooth
the coveralls worn thin
now wrinkled
once charged with earth
Mended armor from
courageous prices paid
embossed with crosshatched mending
stands raised in triumph
A home plate remembered
by innocence long abandoned
players made humble from
a boy's first slide for life
Vapors rise
from sprinkled droplets of water
beneath handled hot steel
making ready once more
the crusted yet unknowing weave
for kneeling of a different kind
Facing forced submission to other games
a purple-robed relentless hand
feeds rewards from gilded plate
accompanied by quiet silver tongue
Such are the scoring points of yet another kind
Youth's pure white
once starched crisp
ever ready for combat
now labors thread bare
atop the shoulders and arms
riding the reach for caramel-lathered memories
chased down with silver chaliced promises of still further kinds
Where is the love-smooth ironing hand now?
Costumes of rumpled thread
made anew by ironed caresses
now like the ether of memory
drift up past the seeing eyes into untethered emptiness
Tread carefully
lest you become wrinkle-free expediency
sliding voraciously into digital home plates
forever kneeling faithfully before promised obsolescent rewards
delivered smilingly from tarnished silver platters
This is the fairy godmother's dream--
In a world where nothing is what it seems,
A tribute to Martin Luther King,
I do dream of a circling ring,
Of global helping, healing hands,
I dream of Peace in every land,
I dream that guns be obsolescent,
That equitable freedom be made prevalent,
I dream that hunger be obsolescent,
I dream safe water be ever present,
I dream that children grow and play in unity,
I dream none be taught bigotry,
I dream of women free of discrimination,
I dream of no slavery in any nation,
I dream of an infectious smile on every face,
I dream of one global human race,
I dream of one perfect communion of the soul,
I dream that Heaven on Earth be our whole,
Maybe I dream impossible dreams,
In a world where nothing is what it seems.
Ironed Shadows
by Odin Roark
Her hands lay smooth
the coveralls worn thin
now wrinkled
once charged with earth
Mended armor from
courageous prices paid
embossed with crosshatched mending
stands raised in triumph
A home plate remembered
by innocence long abandoned
players made humble from
a boy's first slide for life
Vapors rise
from sprinkled droplets of water
beneath handled hot steel
making ready once more
the crusted wafer-thin reason
for kneeling to a non-questioned answers
Facing coerced submission to other games
a purple-robed relentless hand
feeds rewards from gilded plate
accompanied by whispering silver tongue
Such are the scoring points of yet another kind
Youth's pure white
once starched crisp
ever ready for combat
now labors thread bare
atop shoulders and arms
riding the reach for caramel-lathered memories
chased down with silver chaliced promises from still wider mouths
Where goes the love-smooth ironing hand now?
Costumes of rumpled thread
made anew by hot-pressed caresses
now like the ether of memory
drift up past the seeing eyes into untethered emptiness
Tread carefully
lest you become wrinkle-free expediency
sliding voraciously into digital home plates
forever kneeling faithfully before promised obsolescent rewards
delivered smilingly from reflective platters
tarnishing quickly
The Select Poetry Class
………………………………. the idea is to aver the overt statement
appear somewhere ……… even if it stultifies…
in rarefied realms sophisticate
………………… tuck the image in wayward
by all means deride the rhymer
………………. as the pen buckles under the eye's
squint-eyed callousness
some cribbed unfinished line
……….. a well-named bird say thrush
leaving its claw-prints
…………………………………… clear
……… perspicacious
…………………… on early-sprinkled snow
It matters little
…………………………. in fact
………………………………… not at all
where the thought laid off
nor which the word
………………………………… betrayed the thought
…… matters only ………… the elegant sway of the
print
…………. the spare rustle rice paper feel
then dress the thought the way the club ordains and practises
pressed with care
………………………….. the demure pleats of the skirt
all in assumed array
…………………………………. for no rhymed reason
still the hopping bird about to take flight
the impression must give the feel
……………………………………………………. something must not seem
to be said
………………..'tis enough to let the words
slide along the secluded path
…. rare
……………. bold
………………………… used in its obsolescent sense
No way the Select
……………………………. must condescend to court
the Internet
they only write within behind closed-club sessions
……………………….. the idea is not to have
les foies…
' sa hautaine foi apparaissait en filigrane
……………………………………………………………… dans ses paroles '
NOTES
"avoir les foies" means "to be scared to death" and the rest in French means: his words hardly veiled his haughty creed or (as in this piece) manner of writing.
© T. Wignesan - Paris, July 19, 2018
Now I'm this patient, feeling impatient, and my patience has been deceased like I could
be, through all the time I have wasted, I have to face it that my symptoms haven't been
too basic: I've been weak in the knees, I've been causing to freeze, I keep forgetting my
name like I have amnesia, and I've been sick like I've been in the sea, under the weather
and its been hard to breathe, plus I've checked my thermometer its over 40 degrees C,
Now I'm a little hot, my palms sweaty, nevertheless, I'm ready for that unpleasant
injection of affection that seemed deadly, at first, I'm okay i guess but it could be
worse, I could be invisible to the eye, but I'm glad that our eyes converse and my mouth
has pupils that never disperse, my sickness has become to great to treat, my feet cant
keep up the collapsing corpse-like condition that its came to and my brain isn't
obsolescent and oblivious to the obvious oblivion that the pain has came through,
Now I'm seeing two of you, so I'll give love to each and double my comprehension, thus
multiplying two to give her twice as much of my undivided attention, not to mention, I'm
adding more actions to this equation so that I may become a fraction of her life, maybe
half of her so that she can be the other half of me so I'd have to work twice as hard to
be the man she now sees.
It looks funny
To so many
That, verbs have moods
And attitudes!
On their way out
Some stare wide pout,
Going, not gone,
They linger on.
Obsolescent
As if on Lent,
Not obsolete,
Down in a pit!
In a death bed,
But not yet dead!
______________________
Epigram |07.09.2021| Humour
Poet’s Note: A poet is generally confronted with Muses, very rarely with moods of his poetic diction. This one is a tangential take off from moods of a verb: Indicative, Imperative, and Subjunctive. The third one is now largely obsolescent, if not already obsolete, on its way out, if not gone, in a death bed, if not duly dead.
I've seen Earth's epitaph:
S/He did more than Her share
to heal a broken world
Which sometimes seems to invoke anger
because I can touch what's broken
and other times provoke merely sad
because I can only feel inside
who is also wounded
Earth's living magic,
watered fertile soil,
red-blooded organic
green clean soul
is not broken
like a worn-out clock
or formerly animated toy
or obsolescent urban block
now gone inevitably bad.
EarthTribe is not so much broken
as win/lose perpetually wounded
Paradise Lost
for our lapse
of good-humored Golden Rules
win/win re-found
happy healthy bodhisattva
rebound.
What is already broken
requires outside messianic agency,
too objectively disabled
to self-stimulate healing salvation,
personally feeling better
even in continuing lonely isolation
Emergent internally vital
growing positively viral,
stealing from toxic claustrophobic disarray,
tomorrow's voices redeemed
by choices erupting therapeutic promise
today.
Organic wounds,
unlike mechanical brokenness,
give internal notice
warnings of disenabling trauma
also enable therapeutic opportunity
to pull and push risk,
to massage and stretch ambiguous feelings
touching each Other's sinews
and straps,
moral lapse,
dancing mental songs
and embodied rhythmic rap
Raptures
filling in our anti-social lapse
our monoculturing elapse
of warm
and wet
and wild compassion,
integrity's redemptive fashion.
Brokenness shrouds despair
alone
where wounds invite
our active healthy care
together happiness vocationed
for EarthTribe's ecstatic day
by faithful contenting way
inclusively inviting
inspirational repair
with those who dare
to share Earth's communal difference
to heal this wounded world.