Best Unlovely Poems
Looking back, I could not see,
But now my eyes are wide open,
You did not have wealth,
You did not have fame,
As the world sees it.
But what you gave me
Was a gift for all eternity.
You taught me to
Season my words with kindness,
Forgive the unlovely,
Ease the hurts of others,
Be a friend to the friendless,
Value friends and family.
My gift for all eternity!
I look in the mirror of life and I see you,
People say, “you look like your mother”,
I proudly exclaim, “how right you are!”
As long as I live, I will be grateful for you,
You will live forever within me.
My gift for all eternity!
And now I want to be that gift.
A gift to my children and their children,
Thank you, mother, for everything,
For giving me a rich eternal legacy.
My gift for all eternity!
Deborah (22/04/05)
A crisp, cold morning in Hyde Park,
and he is waiting for his date.
As joggers jog and poodles bark,
the girl's unconscionably late.
He paces London's crocused heart,
as traffic booms in Piccadilly:
he's practicing that English art
of seeming calm, while feeling silly.
One final tryst beside the lake,
in front of the Eternal Boy:
a parting kiss, for old times' sake ...
she's stood him up? Or playing coy?
The hotel clerk purrs sympathy
when summoned on the mobile phone.
By now, she'll be in Duty Free.
Well, there it is. This Bird Has Flown.
He tries to feign the jaunty airs
of a striped suit on a sandwich sortie,
but doing drily debonaire's
not easy when you're fat and forty.
He tramps the lonely, flat green mile
to Green Park Tube's unlovely portal,
but perks up with a cheeky smile -
well, for a week he was immortal!
Earth had offered Her eco-centric contract
of love and synergy,
awaiting ego's personal response each day,
each moment,
eager to optimize wealthy health care cooperations
of sacred grace.
Over an apparently inadequate lifetime
ego implied his competitive response:
I grow increasingly excited,
stimulated,
by this co-petitioning challenge
to frame our dissonance,
our operational riddles and puzzles,
games and illogistics
and dark strategies
Measured in statistical decomposition
of the odds for sustaining life
by perfecting hatred and fear
of death's dissociative decay.
I question Earth's right to positive resolution
and harmonic resonance,
as consonant co-governance
of enlightened ego empowering eco
to play win/win,
recreate without sin,
and co-passion nicely together
This co-petition against wasted anxious time
fully exercises my right of conscience,
to re-search 0-sum ego-partisanship
for absolute freedom from eco-dependence.
This co-petition asserts our human natural guild's unlovely preference
for contention over contentment
for sustained longing rather than resilient belonging
for uni-lateral freedom
rather than ego/eco bilateral interdependence.
EarthMother absorbed this richly contentious compost,
this dissembling over cooperative rights of assembly
and competition challenging associative eco-creation
as too inclusive recreation,
divisive of ego's omnipotent present place
in organic space
derived from eco's multisystemic functions
within history's healthiest seasons.
It seems to me,
said She,
Time has unfolded an eco-systemic co-tractive gift,
born of Her binomial grace
in bilaterally felt space,
a belonging response to mutually co-tribute with ego
gratitude for bicameral mutuality
and full freedom of co-scientific consciousness,
to conjoin time's eternal moment
of past personal ego
with future eco recentering life.
Post Scripted: "After all this time and space
repeating inhumane competitions and cooperative contractions,
deductive inducements to balance positive political space
with negative un-ecological economic time,
thank you for remembering why RightBrain felt eco-normics
gave birth to LeftBrain's verbal ego-petitions
in our first through last breathing moment
of win/win eco-operative identity."
Signed: Earth's Polypathic CoOperative Covenant
pioneer esprit de corps front tier brisk.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Open arms and clenched raised fists raise
masquerade diametrically opposed to rodomontade sways
spewing threatening sacred constitution
expounding vaunted values déclassé 1968 degreed phase
Wharton alumni now on warpath to raze
via his bull dozing wreaks havoc on coven daze
ruining complex edifice
usurped storied super power craze
thru humiliation, liquidation of dredging bays
* * * * * * * * * * * *
and justification (viewed thru his warped vision)
scotching inalienable rights reducing to rubble bedrock division
with remainder of flinty stones,
and unlovely bones a wasteland fission
absent without a trace any evidence of Halcyon days,
which abomination, decimation, and gangrenous lesion
joie de vivre, when martial law decree deep incision
heil come rolled up (frightfully with egregious decision.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
the venomous, tenebrous, and rancorous white house
Head honcho viz prez) inside checkered hookahs lighting
one end per slow burn as hoary smoke emanates
in shape of Taj Mahal, then harmless as Mickey mouse
he iz well singed, seared, and scalded like a cook grouse
(yet of course still alive) sent to further douse
him into initiation righting tis basic human coup laid louse.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Acid test whereby he will be sold to Vladimir Putin for bunk
her hilled feather bedding rubles on the dollar, where clunk
key interim held up by cadre of well comb pence dunk
key Kong sated marionettes, which will carry fleshy lunk
dirty deeds done dirt cheap of this unmentionable monk
key villainous uber trumpeter, scabrous, recalcitrant querulous punk!
* * * * * * * * * * * *
keep your finger and toes crossed for the next four years
aware that such laughable ruse and superstitious scares
not one impish bot of fate, but more so gives false cheers.
it would not be so painful
if you didn't claim to be
a follower of the "WAY"
claiming to love
as He loved
It would not be so painful
if you didn't know any better
but you do
you do
and still you do what you do
and say what you say
It would not be so painful
if you were courageous
and owned up to your wrong
showed you're morally strong
ethically brave
eager to save a relationship gone wrong
It would not be so painful
if you practiced what you preach
No, it would not be so painful
but it is...
it is...
expectations are thorns in the flesh
that rip and tear
when they are not met
by those who are supposed to "care"
I guess nominal is Ok
Nominal Christians
who cling to the name
forgetting the shame
of letting him down
by not loving the...."unlovely"
by forgetting what he said:
"And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?" (Matthew 5: 46)
It's Ok...
One day....it will all be Ok....just not today.
Eileen Manassian
trembling t'wards dawn's path today
anorexic pale horizons lay
starved of light, of hope
sans by your leave or come -
I cried, i sighed
'oh.. stay with me
please.. please.. pleas ..
hold my emptiness'
pale yellow sheets became worn grey
presumption rinsed of five o'clock -
an' rain tapped impatient fingers 'pon the glass
of this unlovely lonely world -
frayed, dismayed
ere sun hung kaleidoscopic dun in space
there's a sense of do or die
do we colour thoughts to match
the day.to.day mis-harmony
an' make sweet music in the mind?
methinks there's too much out of focus
out of everything..
'tis all a mystery to me
when praise turns back on favour in the viewer's lens
whilst retribution earns reward
am losing the here and where
and there..
losing the straightest path you've ever drawn
see.. blade sharp it is
unbeautiful though to the nth degree -
'that figures', muses mathematician playing tunes
'pon acoustic ancient abacus -
dementia determined by gnarled digits
ruled by graphics all phrased
by dull already dead modernity
rapt in unsubtle sublimity - smiling..
blind to the tasteless tug of where to leave
before arrival,
day fadea into a pit of anxiety -
a hole in the space of where once lived
a welcome beam to those
destined to crash the rocks
an' finish as I've become
lost in the now and then..
again
should i go out as usual and watch the apathetic passersby though it doesn’t matter whether that passerby is a beautiful woman or unlovely one if i have to encounter at all i wish to bump into beauty rather than unlovely of course or a man at the prime of life strutting along a street with all the world’s problem on his shoulders whether he can solve it or not rather than a shabby old man walking with a cane in his shaking hand and better yet the lively youths who even go on their mischievous way in time because today is so precious to them and therefore has no time to think about tomorrow who knows if the place where i fall shoved and tripped over by the feet of the passersby while wandering on the street is the elysium on the other side of eternity
i've always believed that love lost is unpleasant,
painful as little as a lachrymal biopsy,
and as much as an emotional disembowelment
or lobotomy of the heart.
i am told that a love who walks out or finds love,
initiates a season of mourning and pain.
tears.
fears.
loneliness.
isolation.
abandonment.
uncertainty.
depression.
forsaken.
unlovely.
unwanted.
betrayed.
damn.
but, what if, just what if love lost is wisdom gained?
what if abandonment was the necessary path to faith?
or uncertainty the road to confidence?
should i have regrets about the past?
should i doubt that all things are predestined?
and should i lament providence through pain?
all for a purpose,
i have no regrets.
if i must suffer betrayal, loneliness, and love lost
to vividly and fully taste the rich and textured beauty of life,
and if i must endure betrayed affection,
in order to understand having it,
then may i lose love, time and again;
i choose to frolic and freely swim in the tides of depletion,
i submit to its tornadic and hurricanic winds;
and i yield to its tsunamic waves.
letting go of loss.
the winds carry its despair.
the waves swallow its torment.
to wash and rain cupid upon fertile hearts.
love lost is inoculation for my soul,
it bleeds,
it wounds,
it swells.
but averts phlegmatic infections and rigor mortis de la coeur.
so love lost becomes gain,
and gain loves again.
(Wimpole Street, in the West End of London,
has been the scene of many interesting events,
from the elopement of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
to The Beatles composing "Help!")
The Long, Unlovely Street
It’s such a straight and long, unlovely street,
not quite the retail zone, not quite the mouth
of Regent’s Park. It plumbs a line north-south,
where Mayfair and more middling London meet.
Come walk with me on Wimpole, feast your eye
on blue ceramic plaques, as thick as leaves
that strew the brooks so loved by Freddie Treves,
where tall town houses shoulder out the sky!
Elopements, easements, songs of yesterday,
bereavements, human elephants and more:
we’ll see enchantment pour from every door,
and find a little help along the way.
Where legal precedent meets Mersey Beat,
come tramp the straight and long, unlovely street.
EDGAR CAYCE
True, true, my hands are soft– not overworked,
nor lined by heavy labor-- nor calloused
-- the soft hands of a gentleman, perhaps!
But my manners are rough and countryfied,
my speech slow and southern– hillbilly twang–
Kentucky born and bred-- just barely schooled,
crude-souled, unrefined, a bit of a rube
– more than once I have heard me so described!
And, of course, I’m not well-read– no classics,
knowing but little of this great wide world--
then these trances come-- I must leave myself!
Go swim through the thick soup of life itself!
Here we have the body– for its own use–
(supposedly, for that’s the theory)
– for transport, pleasure, for dream, sentience–
and Death looms large in the imagination,
as it must in them that guess their own end
-- a variety of common ailments--
– disease and injury, cancer, famine,
not to say blindness-- fear of falling–
and, always, small physical pains and aches–
though not so small as to go unnoticed!
Nor should we forget to mention accident
– who habitates far from cause and effect–
propinquity’s most unlovely stepchild!
But beyond all that– who is this person here?
Who is this spirit dressed in mortal clothes?
Where do we find the psyche, the engine,
the driver makes this body move about
in some realm of coexistence with God?
I've visited in both lung and liver,
swam the blood through all the veins– toe to head–
traveled through intestine and out again,
been one with nerve and bone and cartelidge–
I’ve mapped the heart, viewed ventricles, aorta,
looked out through pupil of another’s eye
– experienced both sets of genitals--
even seen the brain while it was at work--
yet still– I can tell you nothing-- nothing!
My Presbyterian soul so hungers for a sign
– the minutest spark of some divine light–
and I must confess– I have not found it!
Only once, whilst dreaming in the pineal,
I glimpsed a long parade of empty carts
that traveled quickly down all the bright years
to be filled by an unknown unseen hand–
(Pierantonio Stiattesi really existed. He was somehow
on the periphery of the Gentileschi social circle. Tassi
really did send him a sonnet entitled, “Change, change,
Stiattesi!” Some years after the trial, Stiattesi married
Artemisia … so in his eyes, at least, she was not
“damaged goods”.)
Pierantonio Stiattesi
I am a painter and from Tuscany,
a good friend of the Gentileschi, and
I know the others – somewhat. I can’t say
what may, or yet may not, have passed between
young Artemisia and that one. All I know,
and I attest to it, is Tassi was
obsessed with her. He wanted to suborn –
it’s proof you want? I don’t know if this serves,
but here’s a sonnet Tassi wrote to me,
and tossed in through my window. In his hand,
he writes as follows. Shall I read it out?
Change, change, Stiattesi! Be a better friend
than you were wont of late, for if you loved
your Agostino, would you not have proved
the same, by helping him towards his end?
Change, change, the dark imperative of life,
that renders human joy impermanent,
compels me. What once flourished, now is spent.
You know I’ve been abandoned by my wife!
No thing is constant. Water wears through stone.
Just as great bibles, chained to abbey shelves,
are gnawed to pulp by worms, so with ourselves:
beneath beguiling flesh, unlovely bone.
Be you like Cosimo – learn to arrange
such comforts as a friend may ask. Change, change!
(no matter extreme global
warming more dire,
then cursing me smoldering
infernal languishing spitfire.)
Shade did adolescent
facade drifts asunder
asper...a major emotional blunder
shielding sensitive myopic eyes
against quashed
then young life, never
ordinarily gathering rose buds,
now I always wonder.
No, never so much
as a feeble arc
unable to issue even a light bark
unresponsive as a
cold bunsen burner,
nor can Clark
Kent marshal superman,
thus vital willpower
bleak and dark
within thine body electric
as mine life
journey doth embark
completing protracted orbit
whar raging self against time
strikes into metaphorical abysmal pit
continuing charade of
existence or quit
before chronological demise
decrees death to be writ
once flickering enthusiastic
willpower to be alive
snuffed livingsocial esprit de corps
elan forcibly crushed,
sans kamikaze nose dive,
when psychological arc
tangentially crossed figurative bee hive
aswarm with countless
invisible poisonous stingers
pierced late mine boyhood
asper razor sharp cutting knives
brandished by figures
shrouded within dark hood
whar bent gnarled fingers
grabbed and wood
not let go stranglehold
of thine curse canst atone
weak prepubescent unlovely skeletal bone
sinister voices still faintly heard,
within me noggin drone
like angry thundering birds
as anorexic starved
flesh didst groan,
now that fragile adolescent
boy within me revisits
haunting this middle aged
married man, whose moan
more nsync with countless
stifled mailer daemons
entombed akin to rigor mortis,
viz complex Oedipus prone
a wander lost young lad,
who left every mouldering stone
unturned - fearing unleashing
def finning tone
even to this very dusky moment
of my damned charade
fresh with painted fore
sight groping blindly
within outer limits
of the twilight zone.
This is Us,
my waist too big,
his check too small,
she's not the fairest
of Them all,
We must confess,
This is Ugly,
we are a mess,
the Earth's ungrounded
greatest pest,
But, This is Us,
our only home
to share it well
before its gone,
extracted
refracted
denuded
and fracted,
deluded
and impacted,
polluted
and red Raped... ...
Sacred
health neglected
and wealth abused,
THIS IS US!
We're all we have
and are,
All we remember
and imagine,
reimagine
our compassion
for Earth's great final passion;
This is Us
Filled with puss,
make it
or bust,
some say
"dust from dust,"
our parts
too often rust,
we smell
of patriarchal musky must,
need everything
right now or bust,
This is Us... ...
Not unlovely Them;
what will we do
when established trump
doesn't rule
our wild and free imaginations
of how I can be,
live true to
my own flawed beauty,
re-connecting
re-ligioning
re-membering
through all our neglected wild cards,
This EarthTribe is Us
We've each made god
in our best imagination
of how united nations
remember recreations
of great and wealthy destinations
from home regeneration
for health to safely hold
future generations
singing this our great examination
of how we are
in this Great Green Transitionalization,
This is Us
When we
most brilliantly choose
to see
This Us is Earth
regiving birth
forgiving death,
our wide democratic
and deeply
existential mess,
This is Us.
Donald Trump Das Fuehrer's Braggadocio
Wrapped up in the Christmas holiday spirit,
I surmise doth allow
nationally collective obliviousness
to steer ship of state
(these United States)
to suffer retaliatory browbeat
ting activates, detonates, generates
je nais sais quois maliciousness
upon North American consciousness
from wickedly vehement uproarious tirades
the "FAKE" president doth crow,
whereby every word uttered
by the misfit mealy mouthed madman
in the Oval Office directly
impacts Lady Liberty, sans dow
wager even when the brash,
defensive, haughty...commander
in chief doth raised by alternately
by one or both colored eyebrow,
which nonverbal hostile
body language triggers
concomitant domino fallout
to devastating effect,
whereby analogous nee
palpable invisible reverberations
trigger thee threat
of global mortal Kombat flow
war moves the dial on
the Doomsday Clock to foreshadow
the stark realization of glow
bull thermonuclear conflict to hoe
var ominously over planet Earth,
which scenario haint Noah Joe
king matter, cuz
more'n juiced *****sapiens know
wingly, would be decimated,
where from Noel fierce
riding hobby horse, could
weather thee irrevocable low
down, once bombs away loosed,
and poised to strike
every fibrous marrow
with an irreversible tendon cee,
yet some hardy
species might narrow
lee escape radioactive fallout,
and blithely usurp meaning overthrow
this most menacing creature,
whose opposable thumb didst pro
pell the nasty, short tempered,
and mean minded
to upset status quo
and shred of a fatalistic,
graphic, and horrific roadshow
no Wizard of Oz (zee us born)
negating, obliterating, and pulverizing
the uninhabitable landscape
with burnt offerings
much more frightful than scarecrow,
which worst case scenario,
could explode today or tomorrow
leaving no trace of unlovely bones
merely mass cremated powder,
hence forsaked salvation
from... say Beto
O'Rourke, whose actively
democratic gumption joisted paradigm
grim fate recklessly
(hypothetically) did veto.
You do not know me
For if you knew me
You would not of
Given me love
So dark and ugly
Inside unlovely
Leave high and live
Below I'll dive