Drunkenly Poems | Examples

Words of My Ancestors

By moonlight when the moon shone with all her majesty, 
My ancestors told us the story of the Tiger,
Which crouched at every rumble of the jungle-thunder,
Either out of fright or from bravery;
Tiger, male and ferocious,
With wicked fangs,
Tiger which breathed fire upon the foliage that shielded
Our village from the rage of the sun,
Which raped lady antelopes with utter contempt,
Which dined lavishly on forest flesh 
And wined drunkenly on hunters’ blood,
Which knew no honesty,
And which turned wild upon them,
My ancestors,
Season after season,
In rain and in harmattan,
Until one fine day
When the forest trembled with the screams of
The beast, beaten on its own tracks,
With roars of terror ending when the moon
Slid between the witnessing clouds.

October Nips

Busty shaped and large of hip
the busy winds of October
buffet my brain
within its whistling cave.

Around the shoulders
of every lumpy molehill
taverns and tankards
bloom in a russet corner of light.

September leaves
leave, shaking their brittle cuffs
and frills,
they fly sideways
riding upon broken rafts
of tangled sticks.

October blusters as it bustles,
its wide-spread mouth warmed-over
by wafts and beery blasts.

Now is the time to flap long coats,
to run ahead of a creaking moon
as it rolls drunkenly
into winters nippy
and thin-lipped ice.

The View of the Sugarbush

Rippling soil sways in ways
In ways a maestro drunkenly
Displays their baton, Earth in
Perfect fluid Earthen motion
It conducts and plays en tandem
The symphony of syrup season
Rings through Vermont’s silken air
Each movement weaves effortless
In majesty.

Hickory smoke leaves the sap house
The chorus of birch bark harkens
Weaving through the chimney’s maw
A mirror of the lone sugarmaker
His jaw a practiced spile, he is
The arch in the evaporator
With a puff of Cuban Affair kush
He admires the beauty of the
sugarbush

She wrote

With a pen she wrote a story,
Stretched across her old notebook.
About a girl who wanted to be noticed,
And a boy who refused to look.
And she wept and wept and wept,
Leaving an inky, tear-sodden page,
But she swept the issue under a rug, 
And brought it all down to their age.

With the same pen she wrote,
This time on a newer, nice notepad.
About her dropping, declining grades,
And how her parents were so mad.
And she tried and tried and tried,
To hold her emotions behind her eyes,
And she realised she would never be good enough.
No matter how hard she tried.

With a drag and a puff of smoke,
And something alcoholic between her lips,
She wrote drunkenly on a piece of paper,
About how her life had come to this. 
And she winced and winced and winced,
At the messy drawings on her am,
How some were faded, how some were fresh.
How she could cause herself such harm.

With her crimson wrists the subject, 
And a piece of broken glass.
She wrote her final story,
Before her body would finally pass.
And she stayed silent, silent, silent.
She was a stature laying in red.
She thought
“What use to words on paper have
When I am already
Truly
Dead.”

The Clatter of Dancing Toes

Let us waltz in the moonlight
where the scatter bugs bleep
there we shall twinkle
and occasionally leap.

For are we not nice.
cheesy as Gruyère,
vim full of chuckles
and devil-may-care,
and if you being dinky
do never not mind
we are thin in the front
and fat behind.

Elastic,
and orgiastic
we will blitz out on cherries
lips so juicy and red.
footing drunkenly sideways,
and so, to bed.

Dancing On

Dancing on the edge of oblivion with you,
Waltzing, whirling drunkenly
Like children intoxicated with motion---
I see your eyes searching mine,
Sparkling with possibility---
As if to ask, "Are we really here?"
If there is an answer,
It's been driven from my mind---
Erased by the icy blast at my back
Every time I swing too near to the abyss.
My face and limbs are warmed by blood,
And you grip my hands
Just a little tighter, laughing nervously. Don't worry.
Let my manic smile reassure you---
I'm not going anywhere without you---
And if you start to fall,
I'll pull you back---
Or failing that, I'll take the long plunge with you,
Holding on for your dear life
As we pirouette into the void.

But let us not consider falling
Tonight,
For Now I am more than happy,
Dancing on the edge of oblivion with you.

Gait

My gait spasmodic
I staggered drunkenly
My inner voice a thousand tongues
Of crazed cacophony

In mumbling incoherence
My muddled mind benumbed
I sought the words I fumbled for
As if I were struck dumb

But sentence was unstructured
And thought was compromised
Were I to even form a word
Complexity – be mine

The Thought took hold – though – 
In shape – and form – and slowly
I expressed in words
What only wise men know –

Untouched By Tempests

A drug crazed world spins on ever faster.
Bodies tumble out of that carousel
never to be seen again.
Once whirling dervishes twirled
now they stagger and fall drunkenly.
Molestation hangs in the air
drooling its perilous lava.
All control is folly,

and yet...

this morning
I sip at a mug of Columbian
one hand to pick up a casino bought fob watch,
I let its fake gold chain run threw my fingers,
feel the weight of the colored glass jewel
set within its case
This simple tactility rests my mind
I am at peace with myself.

if all the lithium cell batteries were to cease
this instant,
I would still have this moment to live within,
the taste of rich coffee and this non-working $10 watch
to treasure.

God Misplaces the Dead

They were accounted for,
they were officially dead,
but the alarming fact was
that large numbers of the dead
had gone missing.

Occasionally, still pinging cellphones
were found in Hades, Purgatory, and
other Bardo states.
Olympus was drunkenly silent,
as were almost all of the seven heavens.

In nirvana,
the footwear of some of the deceased,
had been left in a pile awaiting a divine fire,
footprints were seen
as if waiting for a cooling wash 
in the fountain of everlasting life.

The missing had presumably
transported themselves
to some less boneheaded ideas
of the life after, one not yet imagined
by any dogmatic priesthood.

God was accused of not packaging 
the deceased properly.
However the missing  were never found
having discovered their own way out 
of all that doctrinal,
inconsequential madness.

Ninth

duskfall creature,
tipsy on the blood of the covenant,
tell me, when did you pull the ninth card?
when your fangs grew in
and your eyes grew tired,
what made you build the castle walls?

the sunlight burns, you protest,
every silver-backed mirror a reminder to forget.
close the books, put down your stakes,
because the real world doesn’t work like that, creature of the night.

shame hasn’t cured the illness.
you paint a picture of their stares in the back of your eyelids
etch their whispers into the corners of your mind,
bear the weight of their crosses.

duskfall creature,
drunkenly playing the hermit,
why do you push the wooden stake against your own chest?

Confused Mind

Confused mind

He walked into a kaleidoscope, stunned 
around and threw up colourful vomit.
Carrousels, blinking light, not his scene.
He intended to climb mountains.

For a berg goat, our world looks pathetic
yellow eyes of tipsy cherubs.

Celebration of something in his village  
singing drunkenly, rockets kiss the air.
When the cacophony ends with jubilant
voices, this is not Idlib.

Winters Cold Fist

A tempest night sky presses, my lattice windows shake, 
as if someone’s being thrown against them, or worse yet,
a yeti's breaking in. They lock with little levers that seem far 
too flimsy to keep out the prying fingers of turbulence.

We watched a man plodding outside - obviously a student from Alaska. 
He was talking on his phone, his breath a continuous, cold white cloud. 
He slipped, careering drunkenly but managed to stay upright by 
assuming a surfer-like crouch. 
“Where do you think HE’s going?” Lisa wondered.

Forget fall’s polite, amuse-bouche of chill, we’ve been smacked, 
full frontally assaulted by the gigantic, cold-fist of winter. “Go on,” 
I said, to the weather gods last fall, like an unlucky gambler on a 
losing streak. “hit me!” 

Now I’m searching Amazon for “flannel underwear”.

God Misplaces the Dead

They were accounted for,
officially dead at least,
but the sickening fact was
that large numbers of the dead
had gone missing.

Occasionally, still pinging cellphones
were found in Hades, Purgatory, and
other Bardo states.
Olympus was drunkenly silent,
as were almost all of the seven heavens.
In nirvana,
the footwear of some of the deceased,
had been left in a discarded pile.

The missing had presumably
transported themselves
to some less boneheaded ideas
of the afterlife.

Eventually, God gave up looking.
The missing dead never returned,
having found their own way
out of all that craziness.

Mourning Shadows

Sudden March winds carry high black birds
drunkenly across the blue grey above
the dark line of solemn cars below,
between the bending trees and sullen grass,
between the grey granite and dark marble pass

the subdued in black and grey, and darkest blue.
Each grave face tells of sadness and the loss
of another fallen soul, midst polite exchanges,
we wait our turn and patiently and politely queue,
as we reserved British are well renowned to do.

And when all songs are sung, all eulogies made,
we spill into the light, where long shadows fall
across the scattered wreaths, with love,
across the chill breeze, surprising a twist of white,
ethereal smoke, whispering through the canopy above.

Our mourning shadows fall, as Autumn’s leaves,
filling the dark and silent earth beneath our feet, 
gliding across the sentiments and moss-cloaked stone,
following the worn and ancient path of the spirits
of those who went before us, and are gone.

Open Date On the Calendar

The director 
of the arts center
told me 
he was trying real hard
to sign Bukowski 
for a reading

but Buk
had the audacity
to die
leaving an open date
on the calendar

and shoes
entirely 
too big to fill
were left in the ledger

so it remained
an open date
and a few diehards
drunkenly nosedived
into Black Sparrow titles

spilling cheap wine
and rot gut whiskey
into broken vessels
of humanity

indeed
too sad a spectacle
for me to watch
and yet eyes 
remained riveted

and some cheap beer
and rot gut blackberry brandy
found its way
down my own throat
much to my chagrin

and overwhelming reluctance
to ever admit
to such folly

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