Best Stiffening Poems
October: I'm eighteen, shortcutting home
through an autumn-burnished churchyard -
copper-lustred leaves, moss-skinned stone -
a jaunty swing of skater skirt and arm,
college folder square-sturdy in my hand.
In the moment. In the last pale pulse of sun.
Hey, can you tell me...?
I halt. I turn...
Cold earth. Colder blade dimpling my skin.
My coral cameo earrings scatter,
daisy-dotting the green.
My back is spiked by needles of yews.
Sun skews, sky side-slides
until his face is the firmament.
I'm staring into the tumid blank-bloat of blue;
the ground hardening beneath me,
the death-spike trees stiffening.
Heavy Special Brew breaths.
Grubby, moist fingers
like grubs crawling over my breasts,
and, weirdly, I'm smelling pepper -
horror-spice of pungent lust,
its acrid nose-thrust -
and woodsmoke is drifting from somewhere...
lung-flame, tongue-flames
of searing words - his words -
blazing like the umber tumbling leaves.
Please...Please...I'll...
Fear-forced bargaining, but I'm beyond care.
And I'm aware
of the church steeple rising,
its phallus penetrating sky.
The tilting church could topple
as tears crystal-crush in my eyes.
Fear-faint, already half gone
in a soundless scream, my muted mouth
mouths silent goodbyes
to Sarah, to Mum.
Time slows to a crawl.
I try to call. Nobody comes
but the man who has me ground-pinned.
Bleachy stink of semen
whitening my ripped skater skirt,
but some things don't fade
and there is no clean in this, just dirt,
wet leaf-mulch, shame.
Ineradicable hurt.
Sacred soil is soiled, sullied.
Stunned, I stumble
shoeless, knickerless,
into the trees and heave
into the mud, into the leaves
strings of spittle-sick,
my thoughts strung out,
reality spun out.
From stinking, pulped leaves I retrieve
crushed coral earrings,
ground-grimy knickers,
my white court shoes
that whitely scream the 90s,
the scattered tatters of essays -
white, like fallen feathers, sunk in the sludge,
muddied, the red-inked words bloodied.
I gather them together.
Gather myself.
I go
forward into my future, stained from pain
and tainted touch, the smears of fear, self-disgust.
And oozing slime-soft into my ears
the mire of incongruous apology: I'm sorry
don't tell anyone - I won't.
I don't.
Categories:
stiffening, abuse, violence,
Form:
Free verse
An old Ethiopian veteran of the love wars
once told a newlywed Kenyan kid:
If you want the infant marriage to survive,
make it to the golden years Mt. Kilimanjaro side
You gotta keep the giraffe standing up,
when the ecstasy mountain air gets thin at night
When you’re starting the climb,
don’t early reach
for the apex of a lovemaking climax
You gotta stay rock hard,
climbing the pleasure wall for the long haul —
Or don’t even shorty night come at all
Keep the flagpole reared tall;
because the minute your
testosterone stone levels fall,
you might as well go geld yourself
Premature burial ...
put the family jewels in a coffin box
Don’t bother to take off your pants,
might as well keep on your socks
Prepare to have plenty eunuch days
of abstinent nights
Too many failed erections
gonna get you shovels loads
of opposite sex dissatisfaction
Expect a bedroom eviction notice,
telling you to
get your droopy drawers packing
Frequent impotent performances,
gonna get her eyebrow curtains raised
So many flaccid phallic early encore excuses made
gonna get you tossed out of the bed,
and kicked downstairs onto the couch
Premature ejection is coming,
your woman’s been too long frustrated ...
doubts gon start creeping in:
Where you been,
who you seeing ...
Why you keep coming home
with your love sacs empty?
Those suspicions gon start stiffening:
She’s gonna wanna know
whose arms been keeping your bottom mind bent
You’re gonna wanna know
where in the world did your lost manhood get sent
If you don’t wanna lose access
to her intimate-starved heart,
you better start trying harder on keeping it hard
Learn to get a second wind of stamina,
too much soft effort gon get your love privilege barred
Premature pleasure aborted love
will have your armadillo snout soul dragging
Premature love not long enough
will have your elephant nose spirit sagging
Don’t depend on bottled passion,
pharmaceutical extended sex
Too many early evening elongated failures
gonna get you a premature ex
Categories:
stiffening, allegory, marriage, philosophy, truth,
Form:
Burlesque
2
Bourne loosely through the chill gusts,
Disordered fragments of summer's life go hurried by,
Harried to their last resting places
Into piles of brittle, browning drifts
Scattered on stiffening ground.
A cold sun, coursing ever more briefly
Across these hard, blue-white skies,
Presides above a sleeping landscape steeped in dying hues,
The last fanfare of the greens of life
Draining now into starkness
As nature sheds her flesh and slows
To pose in cold stillness between her cycles
Of life and death,
Waiting, now Winter's uncertain, barren bride.
In the house where the anger rang against the walls
Red thoughts of their minds have burnt away
To leave behind that sour feeling
That sinks to sorrow
Now pride has stepped in to break the bridges
Of charity they might have built back to one another.
Between them those virtues which bind us all together,
The formalities and incidents
The long parade of small things that make up a shared life,
Go on together as always, in smooth procession day to day
The image of harmony exists,
Though not its substance.
They know from this the weight of awkward silences
Falling between them now and again
Dropping like stones into the deepening pools
Of unspoken discontents forming in their hearts;
Ripples of sadness climbing in widening rings
To skim the surfaces of their speech
As breezes blown down through the sapphire sky
Tear the detritus of summer's corpse from its enfeebled moorings;
Fling the bits of yesterday's blazing beauty
Into pell-mell drifts against foundations, sills,
As spark-scattered frosts gather more thickly
With every lengthening night.
Categories:
stiffening, anger, conflict, depression, life,
Form:
Free verse
Eclipse opened up the sea as torch of heavens flare over skies
Symphony of angels heralded the crowning jewels of love
Lovers stood still, stiffening their breaths, bewitched under the sunset.
Categories:
stiffening, emotions,
Form:
Sijo
Winter is on the tips of her fingers.
Winter is silver on her breath as she exhales,
oxygen stamped with her name, forgotten
as either one,
stiffening into smoke like her hair
against the twilight.
Her tears are winter on her face -
winter ice like her eyes when she can
force them open.
Winter is in her poinsettia smile,
wrinkles rising
while she remembers this scarf,
the first time she wore it,
that Christmas when he was there
to kiss her nose and give
her champaine-promise, stomach-flutter
feelings again and again
and see her eyelashes when they filled up
with snow
like pearls on a string.
Winter is turning,
a music-box key
in her throat as she feels her head
bowing of it's own accord from the sky
to the dirty grey slush of the sidewalk.
Winter stops her ears to people passing,
wondering at a very old woman in
a ratty old coat
and one
very red, frayed scrap of knitted cloth
bunched up in her claw fingers
like the blood in her veins,
becoming winter.
Winter hums christmas carols in her
heartbeat while she shudders
and sobs against the cold -
and silent night, the virgin birth
slowing into a winter evening
lit only by streetlamps.
She grasps blindly at the whisper
of pipe-smoke and familiar old
love when his ghost hits her
with a mistle-toe touch on her cheek.
She listens to the ice splinter,
cracking skin.
She wipes her face, trickling down
like the night to the street, hearing
the clock tick, all those
longing little chimes like winter
on her senses.
It's twelve-o-clock now.
She shuffles on.
Categories:
stiffening, christmas, old, winter, christmas,
Form:
Narrative
She had beautiful hands, I remember
Strong and brown and crude under the choking lamplight
that wintry autumn of the potato blight
I saw them cringe and turn over and over
She thought I’d fallen asleep, but no
I watched her silently in the dark, well past midnight.
Her hair was rich and long, I remember
Coarse and uncombed and tangled on sweaty afternoons
One sweltering midsummer before the monsoons
we crouched in the fields and together worried
Masses of hair spidered across her wet cheeks
Sweat or something else, running down those weathered prunes.
She had eyes like the sea, I remember
Stormy and clouded and murmuring of a shipwrecked sorrow
That spring day the wind swept away the morrow
she stood with her back to me and hung her head
I saw her weak frame jolting and stiffening
and my infant heart was splintered by an invisible arrow.
Her voice was a melody through the reeds, I remember
For fifty years her lips could give only sighs
Unbroken silence shivering beneath frozen skies
Her throat rippled when she looked at my blossoming face
Quivered and quivered in a song of muted melancholy
Then one day away she flew, like a flower, without goodbyes.
Categories:
stiffening, childhood, death, motherautumn, day,
Form:
Free verse
London, Translation of Paul Verlaine’s poem : Londres
…a serious and well-behaved Englishman, well-attired, handsome clothes (Victor Hugo)
(In this poem, I didn’t feel adhering strictly to the rhyme scheme would have served a higher purpose. T. Wignesan)
One summer Sunday when everything’s bathed in sunshine
London turns into a real feast for délicate souls tuned in :
Trees strong and rotund from frail lawns sprouting
Tender green, an air far from mists and gases grows fine.
So much so they appear to be planted in pastoral country
Limpid sunshine feathery in the fine sky, though blue-ish
Hardly. One feels as if in a bath where wafts
The perfume of a lingering infusion of tea.
Ten-thirty, the hour of interminable services
Divine. Thousands of melodious bells toll through the air
Sonorous and volatile as though seized by strange caprices,
The psalms of David come snorting through clear fog.
Such silvery tintinnabulation that one hears not in France,
The country of intensely tolling bells of bitter bronze
Strike up a concert that’s most sweet, instilling of hope and joyous
Though perhaps a little too sweet, one must there fear Hell.
Tolling bells again greet the afternoon. Men in queues
Well-dressed women and children glide rather
Than walk, hold to their silence in a selfish manner
With their voices reserved instead for exclaiming amen.
All this people look pleased in their stiffening posture
Clasping, even if mistakenly, to their profession of faith
And their Protestantism being alike rough and spineless
Makes some look even set right above the reach of the law.
Hopes of the true christian, Peter’s ever-widening fish-pond,
Fish ready for the Fisher who may count on catching them ;
Holy-Ghost, God Almighty, let pour Thy light on them
So that Jesus’ worth they might at last come to understand.
Six o’clock. The drinkers find their way to the refreshment room,
The family its «home » and the street’s abandoned to God :
And in the dirty-looking sky a few stars look quite lonesome
Foreshadowing rain over homeless beggars out in the cold.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2013
Categories:
stiffening, culture, places,
Form:
Quatrain
The energy I have created;
A wild hungry beast
Cowering in the shade
of a growling city
Sirens from every light
Pulled me further into
the bushes
Sensitive
I hear the protect me cry
From a bottom basement
I have left
Thinx me away
To finally the
Lines stiffening
Points fading
Mind whirring
To eventual the
Dot Dot on paper
The Universe is expanding
And contracting to write
A morsel of a world
That cannot contain it
So art filled and artless
I am on a worlds shoulder
Somewhere in a bottom basement
And I can't find it
Categories:
stiffening, introspection, me, me, universe,
Form:
Free verse
coming coming coming
to winterize
old jack frost
with sleepy eyes
a draft, a chill, a cold cold breeze
enough to make the strongest sneeze
slowly slowly slowly
they freeze
the rain, water, wind and knee's
stiffening already fallen leaves
brittle they crumble with ease
staying staying staying
for a while
old jack frost till he tires
give the tree's and ground a rest
let them sleep and sleep there best
gone gone gone
our paradise
our summers green into wintery scene
no more swimming but skating the fad
there's still so much fun to be had
Categories:
stiffening, seasonssleep,
Form:
Rhyme
Although a withered tree possesses a charm of its own,
aside from elegance, what should this old man do,
because not even possess a taste of ordinary
but he is the man of base, the incarnation of disgust.
If wrinkled face covered with ugly age spots,
clumsy shaking hands with swollen finger joints,
mucus filled clogged throat with foul breath,
arched stiff body with fetid body odor,
are all for the aged, with what shall we distinguish the means of life.
If the point where the word beauty no longer bears any meaning
to an old man anymore is the place for him to roam
stepping on the rays of the setting sun with remorse,
he should, if not all the truth, at least sustain empty mind
in his stiffening body, rather then spread bad breath in the air,
that may be caused from the curse he made to the world,
piles and piles of bad mouths he made to harm others,
and ill wishes he made from envies toward neighbors with his
small but destructive tongue, rotted and gives off the stinking odor?
The offensive odor from the body
may also be the same as of the foul breath, because it caused
from contaminants polluting the body from taking a bath jumping into any water
if he sees one on the roadside.
If there is an easy way out or shortcut,
did not give any consideration but, instantaneously,
took this easy way.
If he finds an empty space,
not even a moment of thought, rushed to there,
sat, laid and rolled over to enjoy the space of his own.
Since wrong cannot last long
he shouldn’t see, hear or speak anymore
but leave the world without an apprehension of others.
Nevertheless, what shall the old man do!
Because life is a cycle of retribution
and is the reason he is still breathing.
And because he is breathing, he undergoes never-ending torture
suffocated by his own body odor that became an intolerable reek,
groaning for persisting pain twisting stiffened body,
while he continues seeing, hearing and mumbling.
Categories:
stiffening, age, old, pain,
Form:
Prose Poetry
Summer Dies
By Rick Rucker
I used to always curse my Fate,
To live through the two seasons that I hate,
Fall and Winter, my accursed foes,
I am thoroughly frozen, head to toes,
Summer dies, Fall is a-borning,
Here I lie, this September morning,
Shaking, under the covers, in my bed,
Wondering if I will soon be dead,
Will they find me, cold and blue?
Solidly frozen, through and through?
You may have heard about Southern California,
But there is a secret, let me warn ya,
Summer days are bright, and sunny,
But Winter nights are not so funny,
They can be bitterly cold,
Something you may not have been told,
People from other places do not know,
That our temps can get so low,
They think that we are all weak, and lazy,
That we are all crazy,
They do not know that we are tough,
Life out here, can be rough!
I am now fading fast,
Fingers stiffening, I will not long last,
How cold will it get?
This seems the very coldest night yet,
I look at the thermometer, no wonder I am done,
A terrifying reading of SIXTY ONE!
Categories:
stiffening, funny, may,
Form:
Couplet
This is not a country for living souls
Recoiled the heart lives under the enshades
Of vampire ridden nature and all its pards
On beggarly sums amassed by the pauper
Of bleakness and cold hunger and mort
Here existing we burrowing like moles
In drenched country in termite eaten rocks.
Here are no events images or happenings
But over the same the generations waste
Cobwebbed on a bold spot their anger
In rimless cups in pale lipped liquors
Time eaten tales aimed at amusing
Lamenting on their irrecoverable loss
A loss which was never their gain
Forward they go groping in search of substitutes
In hotel rooms where empty pouches hang
Over the pegs of wealth work and pleasure
All have accepted with harried hands
Stiffening nature humbly no measure for measure
Their guts hanging loose from under their stomachs
While vultures of low airs peck their brains
Piece by piece removing the gilded frowzy matter
Leaving the skull festooned and vainly waste.
The ancient cults of sacrifices still existing
Among jeremiad rules of the gushed brain
Each fang beak or tentacle of spidery web
The venom just dents entwines with its embrace
No grief for marshalled loss no pent up for soul remained
The old conscience just sleeps in arms of lap dogs
And each hour becomes just sanctified and sane.
It is not for charter of the world do we create
Burning our brain and the light of our eyes
Each image in our mind creates
A corresponding image in the space
And each line of the verse entombs
In eternity a sightless gong
Which the poet can hear with his subtle mind
In the span of his wretched life and can find
Some solace when everything significant is betrayed
When the weed choked fields of this world can claim
Their foremost place on the altar of the poesy.
Categories:
stiffening, allegory, angstnature, world, loss,
Form:
Lyric
THE DESTINY.
This is not a country for living souls
Recoiled the heart lives under the enshades
Of vampire ridden nature and all its pards
On beggarly sums amassed by the pauper
Of bleakness and cold hunger and mort
Here existing we burrowing like moles
In drenched country in termite eaten rocks.
Here are no events images or happenings
But over the same the generations waste
Cobwebbed on a bold spot their anger
In rimless cups in pale lipped liquors
Time eaten tales aimed at amusing
Lamenting on their irrecoverable loss
A loss which was never their gain
Forward they go groping in search of substitutes
In hotel rooms where empty pouches hang
Over the pegs of wealth work and pleasure
All have accepted with harried hands
Stiffening nature humbly no measure for measure
Their guts hanging loose from under their stomachs
While vultures of low airs peck their brains
Piece by piece removing the gilded frowzy matter
Leaving the skull festooned and vainly waste.
The ancient cults of sacrifices still existing
Among jeremiad rules of the gushed brain
Each fang beak or tentacle of spidery web
The venom just dents entwines with its embrace
No grief for marshalled loss no pent up for soul remained
The old conscience just sleeps in arms of lap dogs
And each hour becomes just sanctified and sane.
It is not for charter of the world do we create
Burning our brain and the light of our eyes
Each image in our mind creates
A corresponding image in the space
And each line of the verse entombs
In eternity a sightless gong
Which the poet can hear with his subtle mind
In the span of his wretched life and can find
Some solace when everything significant is betrayed
When the weed choked fields of this world can claim
Their foremost place on the altar of the poesy.
Categories:
stiffening, feelings, introspection, longing,
Form:
Classicism
The maiden's nipples
swollen, her bosom
flush with excitement,
hailing her goddess as
she slighted very
eloquently, puissant.
The goodness they
shared was of sinful
reproach, a somber
obedience of lovers'
admiration.
The dusk laden sky
flickered with prose,
the sorrows of
Belial's romance of lost
mysteries and his
vengeant domineer,
his bravado, his
masculinity, cascading
like spirals of chaos
and the chimes of
instilled darkness
climaxing to the
sojourn of forbidden
pleasures.
Gently now,
Belial eased this
fair lady to her lover's
demand, her patience
swelling between her
thighs, burning. . .
eternally.
- - - -
I.
Awoken from a dream,
a fair common was she,
her beauty unsurpassed
only by her soulful
demeanor and natural
prelude. Her femininity
and subtle prowess
always the victor,
her passion a hearkening
rose upon a lonely
desolate scorn. Her
feelings a bit feverish,
there now, nothingness
and the harlots of
misery and the massacre
of saintliness. The venom
there pulsing now,
was evermore raspy,
and only to the
delight of our royal
antiquities, vespers
of envy, of anger's delight,
of beckoning glee, a
madman's exuberation to
the deafening hysterias
of mischief's vertigo.
A marriage. . .
arranged, a stiffening
King to his Prince's
triumph over darkness.
Yes, this common peasant
and her divine bounty
was as a peril of Eve
searching for her lost
Eden.
There being no more
reprise, bitter, for her
burden, she was to share.
Somber eyes and
a broom for everyone
to take hold. Yes, the
beauty of a fair maiden
this, so vast and of
such masterful drab,
splendor to all of
the shared treasures
in spirits.
Rage!
A taunting basilisk,
enslaying our vat of
christendom and devotion.
To this day, of prayerful
morn, maiden Geinere,
awoke, scarlet fever.
Categories:
stiffening, loss, lost love, love,
Form:
Epic
Electric pulse between
You, you and me
Like the nectar and honey
Waters to the leaves
Encase between mine
Together slivering
Announcing arrival
Stiffening between time
Lightning speaks, only at speeds
Fastened into my, my beginning
Showering rains, melting sands
Rising in me, accompanied by you
You and I, gone by light
Categories:
stiffening, change, cute love, desire,
Form:
Free verse