Best Phosphorescent Poems
A sweep of milky waves flood onyx sands
converging under endless summer skies
of northern lights in iridescent bands
Icelandic talismans of tales sublime.
A glassy sea of crystalline degrees
sustain a mass of icebergs in its pews
that lift their icy eyes in melting pleas
to wrest the dying of their waning hues.
Aurora beams reflect unearthly lights
against tall umber cliffs that stand below
the vivid landscape raises to grand heights
a trippy, tie dyed phosphorescent show.
In seldom witnessed, lonely obscure lands
a sweep of milky waves flood onyx sands.
Written on 5/21/2019
oh precious, dulcet diva, ocean-tide
you, of sand and foam and spindrift -
all your moods and meanderings
speak deep my spirit, wistful and wan
musings captured, gist enraptured …
I listen, close ...
on those warm and windy days, your
voice cuts clear, carries with it the joy
of sun sprites alighting on wave tops
hopping crest-to-crest like so many
gold pieces tumbling from pockets, laden …
I listen, rapt ...
becalmed days, the lull of low tide ...
gentle swells reach their arms ashore -
the cold brine washing sand and shell
like breezes sweeping the grasslands
rolling, as imagination rolls in the mind …
I listen, soft ...
whispering in my ear of the secret
dark places in my heart, exquisite
shadowy realms where passion and
reverie hide, pulsing with urge, aphotic
warm, enigmatic feelings flow and ebb …
I listen, true ...
an ocean storm's raging beauty, thus -
somber clouds, splashed Payne's Gray
swirl cruelly as Neptune flits his tresses
sea sirens lament with angry screams as
their backs are broken on reef and rock …
I listen, soft ...
gentle swells lapping brief, the sand
moon rising to the lullaby of a bell buoy
its tender peals coaxing the moonlight to
shore, Luna's beams tiptoeing gently atop
to join the phosphorescent waterline
(not to wake the slumbering breezes) …
I listen, sad ...
the gulls and terns laugh at the folly -
a man strains his ageing ears to the song
of the tides that he loves so completely -
the most divine and elegant aria known
and a voice so immortal and pure, that
it will croon on, long after there is naught ...
left to listen.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Your Choice (9), Any Form, Any Theme" Poetry Contest, Brian Strand, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 3rd Place ~ in the "2019 Poetry Marathon Mile 7" Poetry Contest, Mark Toney, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "New Poems Only" Poetry Contest, Emile Pinet, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 2nd Place ~ in the "Voices" Poetry Contest, Silent One, Judge & Sponsor.
aye …
on such
divine evenings, thus,
are perfect odes not freely spun?
the Perseids, dancing their
jocund jigs -
capricious, evanescent stripes of
golden ire under a tapestry
of wonders …
watching rapt, ever-attentive,
streaking, burning ephemeral, as if the
gods themselves trace their
fingertips gently on
a phosphorescent brine …
but this, yet,
a sea of suns, amaranthine …
I wonder, could it be …
they are fleeting?
the hopes of idle angels, perhaps,
dying bright in the veil of Zion -
plunging to the earth
as if mortal …
perchance, they're pearls of Sol -
strands of liquid morning,
to adorn, pure, the breast of Heaven …
could be …
they're forsaken souls -
lost spirits, given one last chance to
burn their id on the firmament …
or even yet …
the wondrous wishes of children,
sparking to life in the midst of
their deepest dreaming,
and then … gone …
oh, surely,
it must be that,
their bright, momentary glory can
be meant for ONLY such
tender fancies,
the imaginings of youth,
the one fit and worthy vessel for
such runes …
and I, but their ever-willing caretaker …
picking each one from
the fiery vault like precious
gems from a parcel,
and plopping them, sweet,?
into the deep, soft pocket of my joys … thus,
on such divine evenings ...
aye!
~ 2nd Place ~ in the "Shooting Stars" Poetry Contest, Nayda Ivette Negron, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Your Choice (5), Any Form, Any Theme" Poetry Contest, Brian Strand, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "2019 Poetry Marathon Mile One" Poetry Contest, Mark Toney, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Cosmos" Poetry Contest, Thvia Shetley, Judge & Sponsor.
~ 4th Place ~ in the "Spring" Poetry Contest, Craig Cornish, Judge & Sponsor.
~ Poem of the Day ~ on Poetry Soup.com, awarded August 7, 2017.
We grasp shadows flow over magenta light
in the crystal trails of tourmaline
yes, both of us will leave.
to the celestial abeyance of pasty white
neon embers in starburst trim
for now, I'll stoop and write.
Let's have a nap beneath the towering redwoods
we'll watch "forgets" fly with natural hammering
together, let's find out how to solve the mystery
lyrical hues in lustrous iridescence.
We just shrug our shoulders and cheerfully
understand our linked introspection
here, in the peaks, where the sun shines
let's soar with the creative spirit of life.
Blew away the flushed, blushing bliss
on her whispering wings
white fog rolls out onto the calm ocean
which gathers the incoming stillness
a phosphorescent steeple is adorned.
Strolling the fog-covered hills, gazing at the bay
let us sip moonbeams from the blazing lighthouse
sunlight swirled exotic zaffre mist in a ritzy haze
enjoying the warmth and the water shimmer
resting comfortably in a lovely night-line
Damselflies rose to the lush sky's eerie sighs
A hazy veil curves across huge terrains.
sunlight sparkles on the winding river
comfortable, long-drifting
to the whispering rouge
of a nuptial serenade
only time matters.
"There is time," she whispers
There will be plenty of time
Written: December 28, 2022
A Freed Verse Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Brian Strand
Far, far out at sea one day
A Hummingbird so found its way
To roost upon my pulpit rail
And thus decided it would stay
Never through my years at sail
Had I seen a hummer male
So many miles off the coast
Now bound with me into a gale
All day long he kept his post
Thus, to be a decent host
I prepared some nectar, warm
(Tho' he liked my tea the most)
I worried he might come to harm
As we had sailed into a storm
But soon he found his way below
And hid until the winds were calm
When the squall had ceased to blow
And sun had set with afterglow
Up he came to perch and see
The phosphorescent undertow
All those weeks far out at sea
No better friends had we, than we
A steady thrum of wings, I heard
As always, he stayed close to me
Then, nearing harbor it occurred
I hadn't seen my Hummingbird ...
So odd, the ache that raked my soul
Eyes stinging as my vision blurred
'Twas many years, that, now I'm old
How often I've that story, told ...
Yet more, the times I've looked to sky
For hummer wings, so bright and bold
And should I spot that bird a-high
I pray he'll linger, bye-and-bye
For I've not known a better friend
Nor greater need to blot my eye ...
Our souls were kin ... wee bird and I.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Devotion To Ocean" Poetry Contest, Chantelle Anne Cooke, Judge & Sponsor.
(This is a form of Rubaiyat I've been playing with that I call "Echoing Rubaiyat", and it carries the rhyme of line three to the next stanza - AABA, BBCB, CCDC, DDED, etc.).
fo'c·'sle /'fohksel/ noun deriv: forecastle
1. the forward part of a ship below the deck, traditionally used as the crew's living quarters.
2. historical: a raised deck at the front of a ship.
With the equinox illuminating a fortnight of recovery
On pelts spread like Ionian jars left askew,
My flame-keep sparked alight against the doldrums of
Greed. Stagnant and fetid.
My bark beats out a call stretched
Skin-tight over the sea’s virgin core
And sets trust aflame.
Ashes collected into the collated casks and
Corked with animus, Moon Girl pounded on.
Drumming a dirge on the tanner's own flesh.
Pounding the seed of echoing hope.
Pounding the corpus beat of life anew.
Those echoed my own harmony and emptied my ears.
My tunes would now be true and crisp.
My struggle to syncopate the middle eight
Was like on the saltchuck the time before.
Before we crossed the bar,
Breakers chasing, pounding aft of stern.
Now in the glow of the coal oil lamp
Sat The Dane who came to trade.
He mumbled a Chinookian curse and winced.
He sensed my mariner's cred, how I lit my smoke;
Muscle memory and addiction married in my subconscious.
But His eyes would never sense the venomous flow
Of the seabreak distant,
Like hounds baying to the highway of stars
And up to the dunes ran with phosphorescent faces
Fermenting the blackness.
Hell-hounds bounding.
Lungs pounding.
Driving on.
River may lick Disappointment’s shanks
But Drake’s gold remains unfound.
The cavities carved along the capes
Echo an emptied ethos and sapped spirit
Which salal and sage cannot clense.
Walk with me now Sister Ilchee.
Beat your dirge
Along the pock-marked ports of plunder
Laid before the flattened corpse of
Ebbing freedom found.
A firestorm of fleeing grace,
A holy aria from its base,
Its mem'ry will not be erased
From you.
The shifting shards of fate and chance,
The phosphorescent great expanse,
It all together seems to dance
For you.
A dream that stood a hundred years,
That, when it died appeared in tears,
And exiled all your joys and fears
Through you.
And when the dawn shrivels, subsides,
The queen of grievance stays your bride,
Though crying, all the dreaming tides,
They flew.
Augment your misery with gloom,
Let loneliness become your tomb,
Instead of watching flowers bloom
In you.
Now if you think you can and care,
That you will swear, that you will dare,
Then dream and it will take you there,
The mew.
You shall not ever justify,
The reasons we would all deny,
That in your life you'll never fly
It's true.
But love it smiles and beckons you
To strive and smile and linger too,
To bid the shame that flows through you
Adieu.
Who knew
That life could be so...
Sky blue!
I stand solo, aloof in the snow, a precipitation
of words cascading from a nebulous eye
Fathoms wide, forever dripping like wax onto
a punctured paper serving a Sanskrit sky,
and spreading into sibilant sentences swiftly
sliding from syllable sorcery to soulful serenades
so silent in the shunting shout of white. Poetry
fills a churning void where novels cannot wade,
Phrases solidifying into idolisation of emotion
itself, isolation of the isometric individuality that so
Crushes my keeling cavern of thought, ever
careering from caustic career path to another new low,
Which so seems to crumble into crazy paving’s
counterpart. In this first freeze-frame we can all grasp
A fraction of the familiar, oh so fractured by the
fumbling nature of enforced form. Freed by the gasp
Of a photo-opportunity glowing phosphorescent
with firsts, I am no longer framed by the festering
Constraints of non-fiction, and folding my fond
farewells carefully, I hesitantly face a vision pestering
Me, fearing the fiend that would open maw and
gnaw beneath my feet, evoking an avalanche of the
Vernacular, but I am further past this unfed
existence now, loosened from the fickle friendship of a
Winter thaw. Focus not your gaze on the grinding
gauze of the greats, for the pressing pestilence of
Perishable poetry is elsewhere pondering its parallels
in posturing and post-modern pining for forlorn love.
Praise no other; I am poetry.
From deep within the misty heath they come,
To this ancestral home of twisted trees
And granite boulders, dripping verdant moss,
To cant and cackle 'neath a midnight moon.
This place transports into another world,
Unreal, imagined, fantasy,
In which grey mystic wraiths make play
And phosphorescent trails to each reveal
Their unmapped journeys from an unknown place.
Travellers make haste across this windswept moor,
Aware of perils once the sun goes down,
Dire whispered warnings fully understood -
Beware the mysterious Wistman's Wood.
I sit here in my little cyberboat on this monstrous sea
of words and phrases,fed by all the electronic rivers
of the world. I've been here often and fished freely
and not without success. At times, I pulled out diverse
bits of tricky wordplay to express my moods, fears
and longings. I rowed out to a deeper area this evening
determined to set my poles right and send my hooks years,
many years deep, to find those expressions existing
in unmined dark depths that swim in light phosphorescent,
unmatched and of their own making, smart and competent,
all like you my friend, independent, beautiful and intelligent.
I returned to shore without a catch, no brightly relevant
words to express how lovely a few hours and a lunch could be,
how my heart skips at good-byes, how valuable you are to me.
High noon sun would soon turn
Her petite, ruddy face into one freckle
She rubbed the juice from a fresh lime
Across her brow so the bangs might bleach
The white sand brushed the strand
and aquamarine surf that cut a split on the Caye
reflected mint green off the lens of her Wayfarers
Almost lathered in coconut oil
Her cutis emitted the scent of sandalwood
And warm mackeroons
Her smile hinted of a sweet, pitted apricot
Its puckered core with eyes closed
Waiting for that first kiss
That would never come
I met her in the morning last week
On the corner of happy and chirpy
The day she tossed her cookies in the street
And swore off cashew wine and meat pie
Her tummy hadn’t been the same since;
The because of a picnic basket brimming
With plain yogurt and sourdough sticky buns
“Look at that phosphorescent fish” she exclaimed
Spurting seawater that had backed up
in the snorkel tube into my eyes, her mask
catawampus across her cheeks
“I think you mean fluorescent” retorted I
“it is all the same” she beamed
And smacked her face back into the water
I couldn’t help but chuckle
And dove down so she would not notice
Shadows off the palm leaves told me
It was time to head back to the water taxi
With what remained of her chartreuse
Lipstick, she now resembled a fried crustacean
It made me hungry and I longed for croutons
She either talked or sang something like
A muzzled version of Del Shannon’s “Down in the Boondocks”
The entire trip
When we docked her now blond locks
Sheared her rostrum and her
White teeth winked at me
Oh my …. Shall I say goodbye?
brush in hand, he breathes life to paper ...
columns ... bejeweled and sparkling
like blades of shimmering grass
piercing the night as star-flecked stalagmites
fingers of phosphorescent proficiency
flickering with the finest of human accomplishment
and twirling through the ether like fairies
darting and dancing to the throb of frantic grids below
glowing girders and gangling spires, agleam
trembling with the concerns of life
and dressed in the temperate weight of wonder
a thousand stories born each elegant instant
countless dramas and conundrums
spinning to their inexorable ends
numberless breaths gasped and giggled
heart-upon-heart pumping ire and exasperation
thrumming with passions, proved and pondered
or the typic pulse of the prosaic
a glistening garden of "la condition humaine"
a beast born of concrete and light ...
its urbane and provocative heart, beating ...
the canvas has come ... to LIFE!
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Something Bigger Than Myself" Poetry Contest,
Line Gauthier, Judge & Sponsor.
N/A'd in the "Cityscape" Poetry Contest.
There is an echo even now. Awakening
From haunted dreams, late in the night
A memory of a dinghy ride by starlight:
The noise of the motor reverberating
Off the coast, above the rushing waves,
Cold and damp from sea spray and rain:
Phosphorescent glittering streams in
Our passing wake arise from unknown
Depths as we skim their salty matrix:
A shoreline strewn with the debris of
That unending war: A warning to steer
Clear off, but to keep a parallel course:
Dark ragged hills like a rip in the fabric
Of a jet black sky and the ghostly white
Foam of the relentless Solomon Sea:
Speak not of crows for I have seen them
In a mist shrouded morning at Rabaraba
Where they held their nodding congress.
And Champion’s surprise at finding me
There, upon his arrival, was worth a
Hundred voyages into Anuki Country.
Fool's Gold
Show up in my life
So beautiful, wholesome
Like a angelic magician
Turned my cloudiness to lightness
Set my psyche to tenfold
Shaped me to feel unbroken
Cherished my flaws in all
Vertiginous by your tenderness
Sent my guard out the window
Sunlight turned into murkiness
Phosphorescent rotate to duskiness
Laughter looped to despair
Heart became disgusted
Soul tie turned unequally yoke
True colors revealed itself
Narcissistic knock on the door
Almighty dollar was the goal
Emotions was a put on
Undiscerning steered to deception
11/20/2016
Creaking floorboards, kettle sighing
while the world’s asleep and dying
In the darkness that is dawning
grows a weed under the awning
Phosphorescent weed of night
makes the shadows of what might -
have been with more of that or this
More courage or less foolishness
A perfumed spell wafts from its flowers
brings blindness to what’s good of ours
It lines the paths so darkly tempting
to places lost through paths unending
And each new route down which I skitter
l find more weeds my path to litter
Fresh regrets more overgrown
And all from seeds that I have sown