Calcified Poems | Examples

Nothing left in the concrete

My concrete dried beneath regret,
No footprints left just silhouettes.

I scream through porcelain but cracks don't form—
Just echos of a lifetime; body-worn

An engine heart with rusted gears
Still grinding through regretful years

I've calcified to the point where nothing grows;
A statue dried; yet it sank inside an undertow.

He Sees You Not

His beefy heartiness is a cheerful note,
but one that cannot be sustained for too long,
the one he greets
            is pummeled into a certain shape
by his concrete perception.
He squirrels you away behind
             his blindfolded mind.
What he sees as you
is not the person you are,            and so

you are forced to live among the squirrels,
made to peer at his comings and goings
               from a secret dray in your head,

until his blustering hullabaloo
        is quite done for the day.

Then you can playfully throw
invisible nuts
             at his calcified brain.

Barely Sticks To his Routine

And the hearse did rehearse its path,
Though the skeleton held dearly
To his ground, smiling loud.
He was bare - needed a shroud,
With his straight bow, grinned severely.

For it seems, he’ll not move ever.
There’s his calcified stick figure,
Who’s not shamed in the least.
For on earth, his time’s increased.
Seems he’s stuck in mortis-rigor.

Imperfection

Washed adrift, unable to reach the floating shoreline,
Lost in a sea of bitter loneliness.
Saline-soaked clothes stick to weary bones.
You become just a mere mirage under the intensifying sun.
Parched lips quiver,
Yet no tears can escape splintering eyes.
Lungs burn with every stroke of exhausted arms.
How much longer can I keep myself afloat?
I haven’t slept in what feels like eons,
Yet I can’t be sure, as these endless days merge with delusional nights.
No longer can I hold onto the hope that your love will see me,
Save me from drowning in an unforgiving abyss.
Eventually, the suffering will become unbearable,
And my blistered skin will sink,
Whilst my body finds its watery grave within the Twilight Zone.
All because I failed to see that your heart was replaced with calcified sulfur so long ago.

A Hollow Place

(“A Moment of Grace aka The Empty Mirror”, 2024, original encaustic)

A Hollow Place

Sometimes it seems that who I am
Is nothing more than the dripping sediments
At the edges of a hollow cave
All the stalactites and stalagmites
Of a lifetime of experience
Calcified into a personality.
I may fool myself and even others sometime
With the wonders these shapes create
But in truth they are the mere dregs
Of all those formative years.
And what I’m really left with
When all the lights are out
And all the visitors gone 
Is just the hollow place inside.

(11/24/24)

The Magick Of A Misfit Huitain

Candle wax drips calcified tears, 
riptides of dreams burst boundaries;
Drops become circles never squares;
Out of the box locked in a freeze
with rough edges it aims to please;
There’s no hiding their benefit,
claws can rip apart arteries;
That’s the magick of a misfit.

Don't Misunderstand

It's only my heart.
Chipped away, calcified
fragments all over the place.
Coherence that's all.
The blue butterfly
a toy in the hands
of little Catie.
Always fluttering
touch and go
playing tag with spirits.

It's just my heart
a very brief second in passing.

One of my guides
wears chaps, boots and a hat,
riding a stick pony.
How did this happen to me?
He is not there for me, 
He makes little Catie happy.
I'm grateful.

Don't judge a little girl playing
like she never has..

The Relic

It looked like a bleached tongue
pulled from a mouth,
petrified and incapable 
now of letting a word slide over
its calcified silence.
I picked it out of the wet sand
and held it in my hand. 
It had little weight, smooth
on one side and pitted
on the other. A cuttlefish bone.

It was a marvel of engineering.
My fingers followed its shape,
took in its texture, the pleasurable 
feel of its form. I lifted it to my nose 
and smelt its salty, faintly fishy
odor, sea washed to a clean
unsullied smell. It had undergone
a change into something 
beyond life, into an artifact of time.

I kept it cradled in my hands,
held it like a sacred relic.
I have seen them too
shrink wrapped in plastic bags
on the end of supermarket shelves,
a calcium supplement for birds
to be hung on a hook 
inside of a cage. 
They were selling for $2.50
or thereabouts.

Does It Say Itself

What is that central pole
does it hold up a voice like a brazen spine?
          And the many rooms
all of them built to be seen
                        with no modesty nor privacy.
Rooms where the talking clacks
never pausing, never harkening.
                                        There are mouths
in the air free-floating.

This artless architecture, does it say itself
as a poem does?
Or does it clatter and broadcast its presence
                  turning, revolving as a display will.

There are holes in this unstructured edifice,
holes where mice
                          go to eat their own bones.

Look!  It is a brain, it is calcified
                    a rabid ego haunts it.
Can it be covered up, subdued, made to speak
only when spoken to?
Or is it a robotic manikin that will drive your being
while you sleepwalk
                                    through its hollow domain?

Anorexia

The soundless scream of my tortured pain,

The story of which I cannot explain.

Ashamed of my needs, yet I want them met,

Manipulative, deadly, pointless threat.

Blind is the audience, macabre is my dance,

Forced to perform by a body in trance.

 

Those gilded rays that pierce the skies,

Striking gold clouds that light up our eyes,

Lancing their radiance down to earth,

Who am I to ask what life’s worth?

 

Surely, will I in time comprehend

This punishing life that I never penned:

This tree that snakes out endless roots

Invading its prey to leave poisonous fruits?

 

Love and joy calcified in my veins,

Stuck in a rut of regret and pain,

I tear at my flesh to uproot the tree,

I can no longer: the tree is me.

Stone Hinge

And so a darkened sky kidnaps the day
relinquishing its light to roiling cloud
sad tone upon the Druid's bell doth chime
as lengthened night drapes all in mournful shroud

No shadows cast by ancient worship stones
no way to track the fingers of their faith
a skeleton of fallen, faded bones
attended to by nameless, faceless wraith

Hard winds still call in voices now unheard
for doctrine has imprisoned spirits soul
and calcified belief amid cold stone
denying all the joy of living's goal

And yet the stones set minds to pondering
the nature of the ancient's conjuring

John G. Lawless
9/10/2020

Lava

Your scorn and judgment grind deep inside my chest
Evoking a feeling I didn’t then recognize as terror 
Which unhurriedly transforms into cold calcified rage
Lava forming the shape of a life

It is a stone in my shoe to feel our souls touch through bubble-film 
Flustered, I try again and again to resolve it
Unsuccessful, I can only conclude “this is just good” 
Because there truly is beauty in the void
We are still here and are one

This anger is a splinter in my skin, too deep now to remove
Agitated, I try over and over to make peace with you
I have to conclude with a breath of relaxation, knowing it will pass
That you were the vessel of original terror was not your fault

My earliest instincts were to ask what made us separate
To set my mind against the cold
Remembering now to be steady against the unpredictable waves
Of terror, love, betrayal, anger, longing
Waiting for compassion and peace to take us home

May 22, 2020

Melting

Melting
by Michael R. Burch

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave—
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous, so bright, so beautiful ...
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.

Haiku Way 5

Exit noise chaos
Enter calm centre;
Be simply still

~~~~~~~~,


Last footfalls
Silence lingers;
No birds sing

~~~~~~~~~


Park bench solitude
Blank outlook;
Old man stares

~~~~~~~~~


Drowning horizon
Crimson goodbye;
Sunny side down

~~~~~~~~~


Outdoor stroll
Preschool excursion;
Curious eyes spy

~~~~~~~~~


Words on paper
Slices of life;
Calcified moments

~~~~~~~~~


Food centre crowd
Hungry commotion;
Ready-to-eat trysts

~~~~~~~~~


Rapture of stillness
Meditative touch;
Here and Now

~~~~~~~~~


Mantra chant
Voice invocation;
Sojourn within

~~~~~~~~~





Leon Enriquez
02 November 2019
Singapore

Intransigently Intransigent

Why is it the intransigent
find the intransigent
to be pigheaded, willful,
inflexible and pertinacious?
Engaging, as it were,
in an endless “tug-o-war”
neither side allowing
for consideration of 
the fallibility of the inflexibility
of calcified recalcitrance.

Stags, horns locked,
dying on an empty stage
bleach-white bones
rattling in an unfelt wind.


©7/14/2019


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