Best Recumbent Poems
THE BULL
His regular emissions
Worthy of politicians
THE ANT
To the anteater
Nothing is sweeter
THE SLOTH
Feel his chagrin
Labelled deadly sin
THE TURKEY
With justified reason
Deplores festive season
THE EEL
Mobile on belly
Recumbent in jelly
THE CAMEL
Far from pretty
Designed by committee
THE HIPPO
A chubby figure
Mouth even bigger
THE RHINO
His muzzle excrescence
Prescribed for tumescence
22 October 2018
Six Word Couplet Series Encore Poetry Contest
Sponsor: Mark Toney
Categories:
recumbent, humor,
Form:
Couplet
Recumbent, crippled: a conscious corpse
Life calling for me to follow
Mentality, it warps
Why does my skull feel hollow?
As I wait for the shadows to fall down, to swallow
Emotions exhaust; they yawn, they sleep
I wonder why I'm awake
Why aren't I comatose counting sheep?
Or swimming in some chocolate lake?
What must I do- for God sake?
The black weighs heavy; unyielding, dense
Two jigsaw pieces left fitting
Hair strands react to such alien sixth sense
Perpendicular; lascivious in their sitting
Buried skin is forsaken; solitary, unwitting
Ladders of monotony, the itch to climb
But I'm yet to grapple a rung
Whispers of breathing chant and chime
Whistling from each glass lung
Will my reality sing unsung?
The dark devours me; surreptitious, slow
My body of waning evanescence
When will this serotonin begin to flow?
My prison of subtle quiescence
Paralysed by every cell of my essence
Like Mephistopheles, only I serve a devil within
Post mortem, my thoughts painstakingly dissected
Wounds of the past are tough like pigskin
Restrained to relive still affected
I wonder if they could be ejected
As the darkness lifts no weight has shifted
The day pours into the night
It's not as though I am God gifted
As I am still one with such bastard blight
How am I supposed to stand up and fight...?
Recumbent, can't move: a conscious corpse
Life now screaming for me to follow
Mentality; it warps
Why does my skull still feel hollow?
As I will for the shadows to fall down, to swallow
Categories:
recumbent, anger, anxiety, depression, mental
Form:
Rhyme
See the recumbent lion,
it yawns, mouth stretched open
a wide silence – he is not tired,
just philosophically bored.
It is a yawp
as much as the startled jaw
of a newborn kitten
is a visible caricature of surprise
for having arrived and survived.
Sparrows yawp in the beaks of raptors,
raptors yawp also in the frozen mandibles
of a relentless winter
but pity the man or woman
that does not yawp
at least once in a lifetime
their lips will become sewn tight
and an innocent horror
locked in forever.
Categories:
recumbent, poetry,
Form:
Free verse
A squirrel that is
recumbent on the road, is
destined to road-kill.
Pace, G
INK-U-SCRIPT
06-05-2012
Categories:
recumbent, life, nature,
Form:
Haiku
Villanelle: No curse worse than the place and name you inherit to hate
No curse worse than the place and name you inherit to hate
There where you first blink your own coffin you have to nail
The exiled wander aimless in the throes of never-relenting fate
Hounded by carnal goals and bound fast by your fate innate
The hammer that pounds the nails in your blood without fail
No curse worse than the place and name you inherit to hate
The long arm of fate can reach you through the friendly state
The Wanderer has no place he calls home but the un-walled jail
The exiled wander aimless in the throes of never-relenting fate
Neither lust nor love can spare the place’s trap or fumigate
The quick flaming grass that traps you on the mountain trail
No curse worse than the place and name you inherit to hate
You may nurse the cow in you be not gruff never joke nor prate
Nor vie with otherland hosts where other unjust ways prevail
The exiled wander aimless in the throes of never-relenting fate
Nor claim the imported god incarnates the only Law in the State
Sack burn pillage and plunder the recumbent host’s Holy Grail
No curse worse than the place and name you inherit to hate
The exiled wander aimless in the throes of never-relenting fate
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014
Categories:
recumbent, home, loss, moving on,
Form:
Villanelle
Death dug deep, satiated by the leave,
Clover leaf fell from its tree of normality,
Not touching it, I cogently allowed it to occupy,
That location it did choose for my morose dirge.
Related to, I gently stretched and bent down,
To feel that smoothness in my empty hand,
Of that four-leafed symmetry symbol, shaking,
Under the ravish of death’s recumbent hook.
Humdrum around, i did continue on with my script,
To undertake that process most universal and true,
Because nature did look upon me to neatly suggest,
That relationship, the assistance I’d given glut fine.
Categories:
recumbent, autumn, bereavement, care, death,
Form:
Blank verse
If you would only look out,
you would see the star-studded sky and a
swooning sickle moon, and down below
a fleet of quiet snails sailing gently over
lawns scented with newly cut grass.
You might glimpse the ugly awkward
gait of a dishevelled fox, trotting across
a road that had lost its cars by midnight
to the garages of suburbia; and perhaps
spot a motionless hedgehog sleeping
soundly beneath its mattress of bristles.
If you would just open up your ears
to the night outside, you might hear
the howling owl in the primary school wood, and
the on-the-hour Swiss cuckoo-clock over
at Number Eight crying out, absurdly, for urgency,
through an opened window.
You would hear cats wauling
and hear the swish of bats in the thick
dark air, hear the wind softly turning the
leaves of trees in search of only the wind
knows what, and perhaps hear the tide,
which sighs through the night from far
away to someone, somewhere.
But you won’t. You are lost in the night
within, that deepest darkness where no
stars shine, no moon lies recumbent,
a birdless night shunned by animals, too,
a night without roads, without lamps,
a nightless night on the edge of death.
Categories:
recumbent, depressionnight, lost, lost, night,
Form:
Free verse
The Frog, Translation of Etiemble’s quintet: La grenouille by T. Wignesan
(This quintet rhymed: ababc might in its propos -
perhaps in its imagery and allusion - be based on some family history involving the tragedy
over a son and the subsequent adoption of a daughter. If I’m wrong I offer my profoundest
apologies in advance.)
Lime-stuck last night by the frozen water of the pond,
frog boxed in glass window fending off thickening waters,
it’s our naked daughter, heart of cold gold, shivering
recumbent statue hardened: withstanding the rigours of
our wars:
stuck the other night by the cold of its/her times.
This’s our hardened son who plays the frog and to
himself lies,
caresses sharks, courts a female cosair
puts trust in spurious air which entices and captures,
flimsy trapped game strangling us by the collar,
frogs petrified by the fright of our times.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014
Categories:
recumbent, sorrow,
Form:
Quintilla
BEFORE THE PETALS FALL
Fragrance beyond perfume
An intoxicating beauteous bloom
Kissable touchable tender lips
Numberless pert petal tips -
As scented wavelets pause
Mid sea and shores -
Bathing in the soft light
So subtle so slight
Till they blush shady-hued.
Never before viewed;
Never look again nor speak
Of this fragile moment unique:
Smoothly silken like the tress
On a young girl’s best dress
Folded and curved, and in the breeze moved.
Peached and heliotroped and mauved,
In recumbent cascading
Layers pressed together and fading,
Edged and fronded in frills pink
Of trembling readiness on the brink
To float down to the shore -
One touch and they are no more.
Categories:
recumbent, beauty,
Form:
Imagism
'...the great tide that treads the shifting shore.'
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sluggishly the waves steal in like guilty
lovers, apologetic,
smothering the shore with gentle kisses
of contrition;
the ocean lies at rest, the surf recumbent,
anorectic.
Suddenly the heavens burst, tides no
longer in remission,
swells that idled now surge into shore
their temper rages,
'sotto voce' once, now they roar like tigers
in their cages!
Categories:
recumbent, nature,
Form:
Verse
He was there recumbent like a log
Cancer has culminated,prevailing over him
Enfeebled all his shielding apparatuses
Yet spurned to frolic prolongation
Eschewed palliative care ministrations
He detected the vital prognosis was engaged
He had instead to plough money into God's certitude
For he realized HE implements nothing fortuitously
Could he yet afford to acquit himself otherwise
Engage in a battle lost right from the dawn ?
Categories:
recumbent, death of a friend,
Form:
Free verse
'...the great tide that treads the shifting shore.'
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sluggishly the waves steal in like guilty
lovers, apologetic,
smothering the shore with gentle kisses
of contrition;
the ocean lies at rest, the surf recumbent,
apoplectic.
Suddenly the heavens burst, tides no
longer in remission,
swells that idled now surge into shore
their temper rages,
'sotto voce' once, now they roar like tigers
in their cages!
Categories:
recumbent, weather,
Form:
Verse
Such as blotting paper
We absorb everything:
Sunrise, darkness,
Roses, thorns,
Bitterness, Basil
Lightning’s, thunders
Ravens, Snakes,
Worms under the bark,
The bark and roots,
We absorb
Bread and salt,
Plague, dust, ash, tar,
Wound and the fire of wound,
And the blood above the wound
We absorb
The death, the bones that a thousand
Thousand years ago
Recumbent motionless
We absorb
The rust and forgetfulness,
The dried roots and rocks,
The roads and intentions,
The milk of our mothers,
And our fingernails,
Which were eroded under dirt,
And dirt, what walked over,
Or what walked beneath.
We absorb everything
But what do we give back?
Written by © Fatima Nusairat
Categories:
recumbent, sorrow,
Form:
Free verse
The shaded lane leads to the estuary
and mud banks sculpted by the constant sea,
expose their drying backs beneath the sun
before once more in ebb and flow are gone.
Over a sty a path leads from the lane
to skirt a manor standing proud and vain,
old tenants are recumbent beneath stone,
asserting grasp one name had on this home.
The granite gravestones incised history,
bare bones of all the truth that there might be
in the far dim lit land which is the past
where that old name ruled all from first to last.
The path threads through these sentries of lost time
to where a Gothic chapel sits aligned
with altar facing east, the rising sun,
built when God rose each day in everyone.
A God of plenty for the wealthy Squire,
a promised land to which the poor aspired,
rejoiced the hymning slave, his master free,
wishing the same in perpetuity.
The divine words in stone were made of sand
that in old times hourglass slow running and
religion that once permeated all
well symbolised within this Chapel’s walls.
Behind the arched oak door there lies a morgue
to gloryfy the power on which its gorged,
white marbled sentiments to hold the lie,
wealth and ambition here are sanctified.
No mention of the poor man in his field
who gave his life in labour for no yield,
whose closeness to his master of great name
would only come with death, for both the same.
For wealths so often blind to poverty,
thinks best to close its eyes so it can’t see,
the Squire set self apart from "lesser" man
as some choose from the drowning Syrian.
The past is to the present linked with sin,
humanity progresses from within,
compassion must be grown from empathy,
know that the poor and drowning we could be.
Categories:
recumbent, destiny, discrimination, eulogy, history,
Form:
Rhyme
I wave vaguely toward a boat in the distance, but
can't think of what I would say if they invited me on board.
"That seems excessive kindness," I say, but a voice laughs in my head,
"Yeah, but they'll never do that!" In its vacuum stare, a seagull
encourages me to think past my confusing options. I laugh pretty hard and
move on to the empty boardwalk overlooking the choppy waters, picking someone's trash as part of my civic duty, thinking "life's better in this barren habitat" and then am glued to a kite spinning wildly in the sky attached to a windsurfer riding the waves, suddenly disappearing and then resurfacing, has trouble unhooking the kite, saying to myself, "that's a good kite he should keep it" and then watch it fly like a free bird before crashing into the ocean. I walk past the sign that reads, "Sally was here today" wondering if she was blonde or brunette. I whisper in my head, "this place must do well in the Summer." Today it's silent, like our interior souls crushed by the disease. "We'll come ahead on this one. What made you look for water snake in this environment?" My father would have encouraged me that I was right, he was always delusional, always carried a small umbrella even in hot Summer days as a precaution. "You need to learn to manage your affairs better," his voice rings in my head. He loved his car and wanted to drive it to his own funeral. I see an old grill gummed up with ashes, wondering how many beachgoers it had pleased and all the stories it had to tell. "There was once a married couple who ate their burgers raw." The boardwalk turns into rocky sand, waiting to torture my bare feet, a seagull is looking purposefully at my predicament, perhaps chuckling,
"these helpless creatures."
Lend me the swiftness of your wings, so I can ride above
the foamy waves and sit on a humpback whale that lies still in
recumbent grace, sniffing you out. I am your maid and it does not take long
to try its patience. I hope you spare me your wet witching. You would have saved a squad of dolphins from their daily doldrum if you were game and
moved in their playful company.
Inaccessible solitude, I venture to conclude at random.
Categories:
recumbent, appreciation,
Form:
Free verse