Littered concrete mountains fall over my little red cheeks.
Where do I find them?
Where do I search?
A fireball from the sky doodled over our fragile happiness.
At the command of selfishness, ego danced upon innocence.
Beneath the rubble, my small heart whispers for a last breath.
Post-its, coat the
Brain I keep controlling
sticking to my skull
Without holding their notice
Maybe I have spiraled out of focus
Leaving all my thoughts to obliterate my homage
It's really you on my mind
Your carving words Into my eyes
Leaving notes on my spine
As I gash into my thighs
It’s really you on my mind
I scribbled nonsense on your veins
You doodled through my tangled mane
As the pages ripped
Between words and skits
Our seats became too distance
Too far to send our visions
Of the present we desired and the past we wished to admire
etched on crumpled stained paper that was soon to be waste
Sprawled across an abandoned place that was meant to house the unworthy and the disgraced
I’ve doodled and dawdled in Delaware,
Piddled in Pennsylvania without care,
I’ve been to New York and Alabama,
Michigan, Missouri and Montana.
I’ve travelled in every state, my friend,
And I can tell you that, in the end,
If you lose your mind - see how it can be -
The very best one is insanity.
You were like the last page of an old notebook
Which I doodled on and scribbled on
Torn off
So that others couldn’t see it
Couldn’t peep in
To the place I displayed my soul on
A chapter better left close
Never read and understood by someone not there
Hear me say it
I wiped you off
But not forgot
What words those lines carried
Never forgot
The sweet smell it was dipped in
Not when I turned it over and over again
And not when I left it in a bin.
** Mother Nature Draws the Dawn **
Already,
Dawn sets off
This longitude’s waking,
Displaying nearby trees
Into their scribbled silhouettes
In shades
Of gray with blasts of black masses —
Points gathered
Fronting the quick brightening over
Yesterday’s leaving darkness,
And bringing forth this day’s white-glazed,
Cloud-faced sky —
Appearing before my sleepy eyes
Without any distinguishable color, and
Simply seen as an unfoldng background —
A lightening
That shows even before the blendings —
With the coming gifts to sight
Of the perception of dimensions
And the aspects of perspective,
To be seen in the expanse beyond my window
In this dawning moment ~
As the world appears quite like
A flattened Earth,
Like a doodled scene
Of blotches and specs — in
Mother Nature’s ink line & wash
Landscape
Created on her personal, unbordered paper.
———————————————————————
(c) sally young eslinger 8/17/2023
(For Jim. Happy 40th)
Slush coated figures
have been drawn on the sidewalk,
dribble people, their disjoined limbs
twisted into guesses to be pecked over
by hammer driven beaks.
After the hard-packed snow
acrobats were doodled flying slipshod
below a trapezing wind.
If the frigid sky were a wall
its graffiti would spray can itself.
Here on the pavement the 20 questions
party game is in full swing.
Prompted by the ice art, we ask:
“Is it a place?”
“Is It an object?”
“Is it real or fictional?”
The answer to all these questions
is “YES.”
Meanwhile the swirling unfurling of meaning
still has legs
until feral pigeon wings sweep
even those last appendages away.
What is left
once meant a fleeting abstract something
but that was before
the concrete forgot how to read itself,
and the sky grew too puzzled
to play anymore.
Higgins was the worst Math teacher,
and that year I was his worse student.
Higgins had loose blubbery lips.
When he taught long division or algebra
his words were full of spit
and phlegm.
Higgins had big feet and he carried a large
thick-soled sneaker
which he threw at slow thinkers
It hurt
especially if hit by it 3 times in one lesson,
especially since we had to pick the damn thing up
and hand it back to him
especially when he loomed over you glaring,
daring you to be a wiseass.
Higgins was really very big
his massive form always intimating
to young minds.
Mostly I just doodled his form
on my school math book.
Happy to flunk any test of his.
Once I drew him naked,
his fat backside bouncing on the back
of a spavined mule.
Underneath this masterpiece I wrote
'It hurts don't it?'
Sadly he had snuck up behind me
too late
I felt his hot breath
drooling down the back of my neck.
Higgins was hit by a bus,
but that was years later.
When I heard
I felt sorry for the bus.
A spider thin calligraphy, a varicose script
upon the shallow sheen of mortality.
Are these the genetics of a divine act
arriving as green stems,
weeds and blooms all in a tangle?
A scratchy nib of doodled ideas?
Behold the dying and the replenishing,
the glory of the shedding.
All this upon a tumbled forest floor
where imagination plods daily.
More marks upon a blank page
developing slow
in the low light of scribbled thoughts.
More night flowerings and late sweepings.
My notebooks were once filled with doodles
Adorning the margins; in class
I doodled when bored at a lecture,
When minutes took hours to pass.
My squiggles and boxes repeated;
They weren’t worth even a glance
But, along with my painstaking scribble,
They filled up the paper’s expanse.
Years later, at times when I’m Zooming,
My thoughts from the topic removed,
I find myself doodling idly,
Those squiggles and such not improved.
She collected her names, family’s names,
friends’ names, strangers’ names,
and everything which had a name.
Her mind was like a basket,
able to compress all the names to threads;
the threads were too many that they doodled
creating knots.
“I can see you are tied up!”
her husband tells her as she tries to untie his tie.
Published on: 16/02/2021
Polly Wolly doodled all the day
'til a fat man stepped into the fray
He said the river meets the shore
like it has always done before
So Polly doesn't do that
anymore
3-6-20
Contest: Inky Dinky Parlay Voo
Sponsor: Caren Krutsinger
Wending her way westward, wafted on whispering wings
Sailing serenely southward, slithering past secluded scenes
Nudging northward, noticing narrow, noctilucent moonbeams
Edging effortlessly eastward, entering ecstasy's eerie baleen...
Grace dillied and dallied, then dithered and doodled and dozed
Could Heaven's Handiwork save her? ~ Neither angels nor seraphs know
Thoughts and ideas are entangled
within and inside doodled concepts
that tie and cross themselves,
in a fashion I cannot comprehend
sometimes.
Often I meditate and reflect,
to get all my thoughts together,
like kinda looking for a needle
in a haystack....
divine destiny
decided before birth
delivered on life’s course
determines life on earth
designates direction
or
doubts after choices
doodled guilt maybes
disturbed self-image
desires need to believe
destiny caused everything
There's a new kid at home,
One nobody sees
But we all know he's there.
His name is Not Me.
He took out all my colors
And doodled on the wall.
You can tell from how high he reached
He isn't very tall.
When my mom asked,
"Whose art work can this be?"
The answer was unanimous.
We all said, "Not Me!"
Not Me is very naughty.
He always makes a mess,
And what he did with Sister's doll
Is anybody's guess!
He ruined Mommy's makeup.
He messed up Daddy's hat.
He even cut my bed sheets.
Now, how bad was that?
And when he takes a bath
He gets water on the floor.
And just last night
He got toothpaste on the door.
He spilled Kool-Aid on the carpet
And broke some dishes in the sink.
He left the milk out on the counter
So now there's none to drink.
When something's going wrong
And Mom's angry as can be,
You can always be sure he did it-
That kid named Not Me.
jsc.2004
This was written when my children were small and yes I read it to them often. Not me lived in my house for many Years and still makes an occasional visit.
Sub Categories
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.