Best Stenches Poems
I saw him resting his laurels among dust
With dry gin conquering his stenches
A company of skulls screaming
Eerie sounds move through the trees
A hooded noise screaming behind
But I tell the stone to be still
Watching the wind and,
One the ghost came forth
Like a monument I stood among ancients shapes
As the landlord beckon on me, to come forth
I said no, am only but a tenant
He said come live with me without rent
Awoh Kingsley
September 1st, 2012
Dedicated to a cousin who was buried on September 1st, 2012
Just do it.
Whipping lash,
hot, cramped pit.
Odor, stenches
still working.
Cash coins wrenched.
Wealthy, rich
sitting back
pulling stitches.
Dollars drop.
No more wages,
still won't stop.
Sit, knot, knit,
broken wrists,
just do it.
Wonder Wonder
I wonder what we left off
As I sit thinking about the wonders of the world I see that there was one left out
One that shine through the darkness of these Northern Nights
It sails across my eyes with this wonderful glow
Creating this intriguing display of beauty that the world must see
Tough and rough without the back breaking edges of the Canyon walls
As a calm streams flow through its every crack from year of preparation
But when you sit back, you see the beauty that time has created
In the roaring fire of the Paricutin volcano
Curve like the cone that two has watch and grow to a beautiful site for mankind
Warm to the touch with a temper that can run the face and can affect the land that it stands
on
With the calm cool flow of the waters of the Victoria Falls
Downstream through every bit of the being that you are
Then supplies fresh nutriment to everyone below to bring them up
Which has lived in harmony with the thing to its left and its right
That has cause her to created this Great Barrier Reef in its own community
Where everyone can share food water and even the natural sunlight that shines on everyone
With a mind that stenches the highest peak of Mount Everest
At the peak to look over the world to say “I can do more”
Where it has taken more knowledge to tackle this hard and unforgiving world
Then it has brought you to a majestic and mysterious beautiful that hides in a collection of
mountains lines
No matter where you stand or at what part of the world you can see why you cannot take it in
one day
They called this 7 naturally created wonder of the world Harbour of Rio de Janeiro
The 8th nartual wonder of the world that has every bit of the 7 before them
HAS BEEN……
YOU my dear
And I thank God for that creation alone
(In December 1936, English poet John Cornford
was killed in combat near Lopera, during the
Spanish Civil War. It was the day after his
twenty-first birthday. Could this be the poem
he was formulating in his last hours?)
They switched from cubes to cylinders,
those knights of Calatrava,
when cannon chipped the corners off.
We’re still playing at that palaver.
I’m lying in a scratch-mark
(saying “trench” insults true trenches),
about to take Lopera,
mired in medieval stenches.
Sunlight’s livening turrets
on the ochre-amber castle,
and we’re about to murder
its “Fascist-lackey vassals”.
We glided through the olives
like viruses, infesting:
since no-one gave us shovels, we
scraped fox-holes with our mess tins.
Amusing, isn’t it, pondering
exactly what a fight is?
Do I help humanity by
contracting enteritis?
The whole thing seems to hover
between contrary poles:
by killing (or by dying)
do we achieve our goals?
I’d hoped to fire some shots, then go,
but war’s prolonged, extensive.
I can’t defend aggression, though
passivity’s offensive.
Lopera – is it Cordoba,
or is it part of Jaen?
We’re lads with rusty rifles,
but do we count as men?
And am I now a soldier,
or a Marxist doctrinaire?
Five turrets glow down on me,
three round, while two are square.
Calcutta.
Hot and unberable in the searing summer heat
and unberarable for more reasons than the heat.
In a popular tourist cafe an American widow
obsesses on her dead husband: she has a bundle
of photos, letters and other mementos to show as
she tells stories, ad-nauseum, about his now stiff
prowess as a prolific and technically perfect lover.
She moves from table to table with her bundle
of banality disturbing patrons at random with her
loneliness. This happens in the Calcutta stink of Indian
cardamon, paprika, cinnamon, sour sewer and rotted
garbage. All this aromatic decay combines with the
overpowering scent of jasmine. Mother Theresa's
favorite intoxicants.
But other smells and stenches permeate and nasuate your
senses. Certain streets are dedicated to the putrid permanence
of sensory corruption. But only the uninitiated visitor seems
to suffer insult to their olfactory awareness. The indigenous
poor are scattered on the streets and walks in somnambulist
slumber, like fatalistic, hashish soaked, discarded rags.
Children with sunken, obsidian eyes and belly-swell of abandoned
malnourishment reach out toward passing lost-eyed foreigners,
their palms-up; "Rupee please, sir, I am hungry, sir, coins please sir,
I am hungry, sir." The widow from the cafe slaps a child's reaching
hand with her bundle of deceased memories then trips over a sleeping,
legless beggar and splashes face first into the fetid stream of seminal
waste flowing from under his two exposed stumps. No one, including me,
offers to help the child-slapping widow onto her two intact feet.
Calcutta.
The silence of morn makes this place forlorn
in the fields, the hillsides, and trenches.
Over two hundred years since the bloodshed and fear,
yet you can hear the yells, smell the stenches.
The crush of the blue, charging straight and true
at the redcoats behind all their breast-works,
The bayonets clash, and the musket-balls crash,
the cannon’s roar shaking all the Earth.
Two centuries gone by, you can still see the lines,
hear the cries of dying men down in the grass,
to some it’s meadow, but to those in the know
Saratoga is a place of today’s past.
In a Vegas hotel are some relics that tell
of a ship that tangled with an ice-berg.
The trinkets and things of those traveling,
raised up from the ocean and preserved.
From Gilded Age times, these objects passed b
you can imagine in a person’s pocket.
Watches for a vest, tooth-paste and a dress,
dishes, satchels, and a locket.
And there, grey and dull, a big piece of hull
hangs before you just beyond your grasp,
these titanic remains, they make a good claim
for being a place of today’s past.
A theater in D.C, it tells the sad story
of a great man who was cut down too soon.
Sitting in these rows, seeing the play go
until the shock comes from a pistol’s loud boom.
Imagine the sounds when Wilkes-Booth leapt down,
the chaos, the confusion, the frenzy,
a war we had won, then the sound of a gun,
and a chase for a dastard enemy.
That theater this day means more than plays
echoing the sounds of that old blast,
we still feel it now, though we can’t say how,
it’s forever a place of today’s past.
The present goes quick, there’s no stopping it,
and the world it wrenches and spasms.
We forget about time and its endless line,
we pretend that it’s like a great chasm.
But mankind don’t change, we’re much the same
as those past that we pretend we’re beyond.
If we lived back then would we do different,
or would we the same road walk upon?
We find an old space, the present is erased,
and the memories start coming so fast,
we revisit that hell and we see ourselves
when we stand in a place of today’s past.
Beauty tells the story
Of days we were younger
Come join the famine
Lose someone
Beneath the sands
At the Tip of your toes
A touch of the gods
Join the war
And lose someone
Bridges
They mend
The things that god
Cannot touch
Rivers
They separate
The stenches
That man
cannot rid of
Join the war
Lose someone
Among the worst
mercenary’s
Those of us
Who were careless
of wanted whispers
Join the war
And lose someone
Come join the war
Won’t you lose someone
Morning breaks
Come join the war
The warming phase
Alarming as days
Join the war
Lose someone
“The important part is the suffering,
death is just the part that eventually
happens.”
The Ruba’iyat of Créteil Lake – Part Seven
The balding weeping willow by the Prefecture Gate’s railings
There where on drowsy summer’s day gather swan and goslings
To unfurl and let fan the crisp ensconced feathery quills
Litter and scum frothing in a creepy morass of leavings
Yarrow stalk mats faded leaves sticking to twigs and branches
Skewered tins dead fish collapsed beer cans plastic bags bottles
Shredded rags browned-off yesteryear’s papers broken toys turds
All fizzing curdling in unholy pot au feu stenches
There where her knee-cap juts round the firemen’s helicopter pad
Along the shin-wobbling cobbled promenade laid rough shod
Signs of her sick bowels cling to the nostrils and sticky soles
Or is she with baby taken her tummy heavy with pod
Had old Khayyam goosed her during abandoned sleep numbness
Caring less for her image than her breeding will confess
Or did she dream immaculate conception to walk the plank
Even before returning cranes cross over to Loch Ness
Alas! Deep in her longing quest the lone siluroid dreams
More than all the poetasters of Isphahan Khayyam convenes
The sun at four burns sickly upon her breast and collar bones
Woe to the Damsel in distress the Poet forsakens!
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2013
On Vacation With Middle Passage Memories
Out over the alluring expanse
of the Big Water---
where the sky rest upon
the water’s edge---
where undulating ships wait
to fall off the earth---
we saw the lightening
dancing in space
and heard the applause
of the thunder.
Huge nimbus clouds,
dark like the early night,
and filled beyond capacity---
burst opened like over filled water
balloons---releasing great falls of rain
wrestling with ferocious winds;
for control of fleeing waves
rushing to shore---frothing
the sands with quenching gratitude.
Mesmerized and immobilized
by nature’s fury,
the blood flow of memory
released a storm of memories---
detailing vivid descriptions
of Middle Passage crossings.
The only things missing
from this reality of the present scene,
were the times---places---stenches
of the living and dead---echoes
of the moans, groans and rattling chains
from the bowels of the putrid ships
that saved many unfortunate poor souls
from the Big Water’s fury---ironically
landing them safely on the waiting shores
to begin life anew:
shuttled to and from the auction block.
The howling winds, roaring waves,
and whipping rains---all slowly subsided:
we hailed the shuttle bus back to the hotel.
congregate and anticipate please,
eliminate traces of old dirty fleas.
please don't confuse any old thoughts with these.
christmas trees smell better without presents.
pungent, pulpy stenches float up my nose,
duct-taped paper-clips make a nice rose,
miniature villages, cotton-ball snows,
oranges and pine needles smell good.
recycle orange peels which first were caressed,
while cookie crumbs gather underneath an armrest.
the winter holidays detest:
over-commercialized representations of Santa sporting Old Navy vests.
1914-1918 World war 1
Bullets flying over trenches
Can’t see too much for smoke that stenches
Lieutenant makes orders to stand here fast
Don’t be scared chaps we’re having a blast
Feet so cold my boots feel like ice
My mother sent me a letter and some cake that’s nice
Taffy told me of his girlfriend at home
I hope he sees her soon this boy has grown
The food is scarce and the moral even scarcer
We know we are the last battalion between the Germans but God won’t make me a martyr
More troops arrive and we push the Germans back to slaughter
England has won the war and I cry to know I’ll see my bonny daughter
God save the King.
Since they cannot fend for themselves, how they can yawn rest of the night and go into the morning experience no food move in the afternoon any food and in night again no food. However government is up there driving exotic vehicles and living in Royal Palaces using our blood to fuel their cars. Making us slaves on our lands, paying taxes with our sweats to feed their machines in a country we belong.
We have been denied justice; our courts lost the credibility of the masses, because they are manipulated by corrupt elites to cheat. Our lands are our vehicles force, but today we are the beggars seeking for help. Allowing government erects tribal citadel that apocalypse us and killed our shared values, norms and cultures.
They divided us to set us on fire rule us with the barrel of their guns. The country is echoing with poverty, diseases and wicked individuals. My head rumbling with thinking my belly is grumbling, from east to the west and north to south flies are buzzing around mosquitoes are wailing in my ears helping me to the grave.
Corner to corner every morning stenches snap me on my window. Rest of the night I kept dreaming prosperity, I wake up to find rain drawing my thatching roof, and the children crying on the neighborhood weeping in their huts sharing the same galaxy.
Why dies the blue sky red
Hue of a deeper dissolution
Falling from the face
The puzzle of Africa
Stains dry and brittle circle the dust
Where withers a standing grain
taunted eye of barren sticks
To black and lifeless rage
Oil oil oil black and lifless blood
Why die to plant your sickel of sun
In war the blood of children feed
A pile of small hands and feet
The surgeons knife and tyrants belly
Why die civilised world
With your blue sky
That lies above the red machete
Wasting the black hell of stenches
An oil that fills your heart
Merit was always the gold medalist
Then came the shrewd unconcerned capitalist
Who endeared and sold to many the cheap thrill
At jaw-dropping prices reserved only for mastery and skill
And I agree with Solomon that princes could walk on foot
While vagabonds ride horses and busk in great loot
Are there cheap persons with lofty personalities
Are there cheap personalities exuded by lofty entities
Hasn't time and chance robbed us of entitlement
And haven't you more than once taken back sentiments
For the winds of change blow to prove every man wrong
Though once we may seem right but not very long
It's no incentive to shun perfection be it as it may
For it is the beauty when time comes for you to hold sway
Bear you diligence and with it the purity of heart
That time may offer chance for you to play a part
For God judges a heart's motives and intents
And to Him they rise as either stenches or scents
In time and chance a man of skill shall stand before kings
To the houses of nobility shall be his bearings
And their every work shall be the emblem of the age
Remaining as pride and memory kept in tutelage
Descending the honour to children who claim equal citizenship
By that alone even claiming half kinship
K. Muitherero.
It is a Sunday morning in spring the bright sun shines in Bethnal-green,
Wander along a path between the church, the railway towards Whitechapel,
For one day there are beautiful flowering gardens thrown open to anybody
And at their gates there are beautiful plants and flower-roots for sale.
There is every flower imaginable radiant under the English morning sun,
Old flowers to take you back childhood and your grandparents childhood,
There are lads loves, sweet williams, daisies, pinks to warm your heart,
Wallflowers, polyanthuses, thrifts, tufts of sweet-peas, with daisies
Tufts of larkspurs, violets with columbines all for sale at one penny,
For one penny the poor can stock a small plot by a door, or corner tub,
Or it could be a pot in the window, where these poor plants will fade,
Under the admiring eyes of those who are older and fading themselves.
Out of the alleys and courts and unknown streets many people come to see,
And those pale and sickly weavers are streaming along to feast their eyes,
Different from stenches and factory grime, miserable times over the years,
magical, beautiful and delicate, for a moment their grim lives forgotten.