The pot is melting...
The 'great melting pot'
This elaborately constructed pot holds a motley of colors and flavors
Once strong and pleasing to the eye, bustling with all of its aromatic juices, flavors, and textures
The great pot of RED, WHITE, and BLUE draws so many, and the few
Indigenous peoples and many others from great and small distances assimilate in this great pot
For a while, the cooking and eating were good, I mean pretty good
So good that still more ingredients desire to be added to this melting pot to bolster the flavor even more
But now, this great pot is disintegrating
Too hot now, is this pot
Too hot with deleterious elements that threaten the constitution of this great amalgamation
The pot is melting
The 'great melting pot'...
It is melting
Improperly furnished with words alike the proper onstage guffawed and remarked, slighted and sent ribbons for acts that blanket at dusk with the manuscript rack, heaving against the pages like a concubine the throes of these pages batches of wine, like those that are deleterious these are cursed the same but they struck from their pages, the unequal dim range.
Like veering on the highway, once learnt material creates an erudite maker yet while this holds true, the cessation of the wayward knowledge must also be acknowledged. One cannot rouse a dog prone and toss meat only to regret that the dog feasts instead, the callowness must be abrogated wherein one can avoid the booby trap where momentum from learning creates both an initial wave and a shockwave from that event, with which one would incur deleterious effects that are beyond the scope of the acquisitions and the assignments, like a comet delivering an impact instead of a showy sign in the midnight skies.
I don’t know exactly what the Bible
Has said about these three words
However, I know these are like sharp swords
Which can only be negative and destructible.
They are definitely the obvious opposites of love
Love is sweet, soft, beautiful and refreshing
However, these three pariahs are destroying
Everything on their paths; they are full of loathe.
There should no room for them in the natural verse
They can burn, break, disrespect, divide, hurt and maim
They can contaminate and rot everything. Where they aim
Is unusual and irrelevant; they are deleterious to the universe,
Copyright © October 2025 Hébert Logerie, all rights reserved.
Hébert Logerie is the author of several collections of poetry.
The art of comedy's a sacred thing,
as fresh and precious in its gift of bliss
as when a worshipped one's initial kiss
transports us first. Like Fragonard, we swing
to Lena Horne's delightful rites of spring
on wings of wonder. No analysis
can pull apart a pleasure pure as this.
We humans laugh as nightingales might sing.
We're taught to think creators must be serious,
but humour's both unruly and imperious,
and ridicule's the boy-god's sharpest dart.
We laugh and learn, and don't let worries weary us,
for dreariness is deadly, deleterious:
thanks, heaven, for the comedy of art.
A shining example, when shattering insight becomes deleterious
Mindless, yet finds itself turned out inside; all along mysterious,
I paused, reflecting; seeing past times, versions of delirious,
Roaming across unfrozen ice, I can't take the vision so serious.
Relevant; for it shows pains that resemble being a human Cereus
Overshadowing, my most lonely introspective moment of Sirius
Realizing sadness by finding it powerless; internal happiness is propitious
For so very long
They played an insipid yet beguiling song
A sweet lullaby that wasn't so sweet
Deleterious lyrics and rhythms rocked you into a slumbering sleep
Closed eye in darkness, away from all light
Asleep now, inert and fraught with no means to fight
To fight indeed, but there simply was none
To fight for the born right
Sleep in a sombering slumber with no might
For oh so very long, they played an insipid yet beguiling song
But oh, what a day!
When the sheeple awaken
Awaken to a glorious dawn and reclaim gifts that were taken
Oh, what a day!
When the sheeple awaken
Oh, what a day!
When the sheeple awaken
Listen to me when I say
Oh, what a day!
H•aving it is worth more than gold
E•ating to live and not living to eat invigorates
the body and soul
A•bstaining from deleterious things that are meant to
subtract from life
L•iving naturally and adding while absconding from
strife
T•he more you add to your essence the more robust you
feel
H•onoring self through exercise, nutrition, and meditation is
how you heal
I avoid those floral gangsters,
vainglorious Gladioli,
eugenically forced greenhouse Geraniums
with their large Shar-pei heads.
Garish claustrophobic chromatic mobs,
their heavy menacing over-cultivated smells.
Charles Darwin, thought these latter-day
angiosperms as:
“an abominable mystery.”
They are life-forms born of missing links,
genetically modified to eat oxygen,
perhaps out of our human brains?
Dogs and cows
are immune to their deleterious charms,
but we who are drawn to color and form,
sniff them out, as if they were hard drugs.
O you Peony, overgrown Day Lily,
you seemingly
innocuous bunches of Mums,
I see you, you smug and pretty enticers,
you mesmerizing Rasputin's!
I cringe, hold my breath,
reluctantly
bring those heady eye-catchers home
to my darling,
who waits for yet more perfumed
love letters.
Serious is mysterious to me
I'd rather be delirious
For when you are too serious
you might become imperious
~ and that is deleterious, you see
sweeping ocean floors
deleterious debris ~
sea monkeys sway
A humid day,
mosquito clouds swarm along
a red dirt road to the farm.
There are grimy rows of pig pens,
hazed dark by humming hordes
of black fly.
Bob (an old friend), chuckles.
“Man, you picked the wrong time of year
to come visit.”
The hogs grunt and squeal.
He waves,
“be with you soon.”
It’s slop-time - the air is turgid
with the many notes of a stale miasma,
everywhere there is the splatter
of slime and muck.
He carries smeared green buckets;
a deleterious, partly consumed gunk
that reeks of that semi-solid swill
hogs grow fat upon.
On the low walls
there are slick stains, layers of grime;
a smeared feculence
corrugated into noxious layers.
Even behind the stalls
there are a heaps
of sludge and slurry.
Bob flushes surfaces down
with his long hosepipe.
He bends to his tasks whistling happily
while I explain to my new wife
that he used to work for the C.I.A.
I can see she’s surprised,
maybe impressed.
Long pause…
watching Bob wade knee deep
into his labor of love.
“Yea”, I sighed,
“he got real tired of all that."
```````````````
an edit
My siblings complained I was far too imperious
my folks thought my passion for sports deleterious
Friends thought me mostly mysterious
by 27, I was working in Tiberias*
Sometimes those who are near us
And count themselves most dear (to) us
In directions misdirected would steer us
when all we ask from them is just cheer us
___________________________________________
*Tiberias was/is a 'development' town in Israel, home
in 1978 to a large populace of Jews from Morocco,
poor and illiterate. I wasn't exactly living 'the good
life,' let us say. ~ gw
There are certain deleterious effects
consequential developments and
conditional signs and symptoms
of being called-out, named, accused, or branded
of being, ever so slightly, a poet.
People may assume you live s cloistered, retiring,
purely academic existence, sipping only the rarified air
of your meditative being. Or
they might label you and your ephemeral art
as the drunken babble of an incoherent street poet. And
sometimes this is indeed a fact in all the case scenario's
here-for-to mentioned above, however in actuality,
though you perhaps might wax philosophical
on rare occasions, for instance when you opine
upon the mysterious disappearance of one matching
sock of any given pair of once matching socks,
however, in the main you are just a guy or gal
sitting with a laptop perched precariously on your belly,
trying to sound a whole lot brighter, more whimsical
and interesting than you really are.
The alter ego of Charles Spencer Chaplin
Was a disaster just waiting to happen
The Little Tramp was clearly oblivious
That his presence was deleterious
11 September 2022
Brian Strand Premiere Poetry Contest
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