Written: July 30th, 2026, for a contest sponsored by Seth Pina
*********
Your very skeleton
is not spun from cotton and polyester.
No, it is not carved from wood,
nor forged from metal or steel.
Its substance is—nerve endings,
tissue, and blood—
circulatory systems,
bound,
but not from woven fabric.
A lethal lotus languishes,
lamenting in its limbo,
crouched on bended knee.
A curved carcass, prostrate
beneath time’s passing wheel.
Its chalk-white bones
measure the slow decay,
where darkness lingers
in the hollow space within.
Cyborg of a cyber-skeleton.
Coiled with a steel-stitch
sprocket of subjugation.
Its spinal cord, bound in circuitry,
hums with sorrow.
A crestfallen cranium,
a heavy, hollowed
moon-orb weighed down
by the gravity of grief
in synthesized solitude.
Amidst this woeful wheel,
supplications of skinless steel
fuse forgotten fragility and fortitude
into a fatalistic future.
For you were neither tool nor tree,
but a tight-furled tapestry of flesh—
a weeping engine, bound in bone,
where the wild pulse fights the gear,
and slowly fades to rust.
“My soul is a black maelstrom…” ~ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
Molten lava spews from my eyes
My mouth feels dry as the scorching desert sand
Fear like a heavy boulder sits on my chest
My heart is chasing a Chimera
A pit is forming in my stomach,
My head is riding upon a vortex
Conflicting thoughts swirling through my mind
forming a surrealistic whirlpool,
Grim and gloomy feelings shroud my being
permeating a fatalistic suspicion of society at large
dragging me down the road to depression.
A sense of emptiness is mushrooming within me,
like the morning miasma blurring the view,
All hands of hope have been withdrawn
Every moment henceforth
is pregnant with some novel challenges,
Tackling a new task overwhelms me
and despair prevails over my soul undeterred —
Bogged down by fate,
Tethered to my faith,
and mired in a spiritual quagmire
I am unable to claw my way back up
to Mount Calvary.
~Prompt 2: "As I slip into the void of this endless black."
~Contest: Venom and Stardust: A Birthday Prompt
~sponsor: Sara Jama.
Father forgive us for being forlorn and falling
Father forbid us for continuing in our fractured and failing faith
Father forgive us for being on a Pharisaical frequency, our felonistic fealty
Father be firm in fermenting the old form and forming the new form
Father help us from faith to sight, to stand still and from fumbling and flight
Father thaw the frozen chosen, free the former and ford with the free
Forgive us all for forgetting to forgive family, friends and frisky foes
Father fence in the fiendish of all foes, frown at our flash and Flemish giant holes we fancy
Father forgive the frantic and fatalistic fray, pray tell Father don't falter
Freed from our sins by Jesus our Friend, Founder and Forever Fiddly
Father under Your feathers we can fly freely over the frame of Your fields
Father freeze our fleeting feet, flesh out the futility of fake fossil flack
Father fix our philosophies and our philandering, our fantastic fudging of facts
Father finally [and again] forgive us our frequent fallacies of faltering finitude
Wonderful love dreams thrilled young Cali.
She sung of such with good friend, Sally.
Extraordinary and precocious,
her thoughts felt expialidocious.
Expialidocious were heart thumps.
Precocious fantasies raised goosebumps.
Sally thought her love, fragalistic.
Cali said, "joy's not fatalistic."
For Cali, hushed love was great enough.
I’d like to reach into my pocket
And use all those wasted times of past displacements
Stored there for just this momentous occasion
A fatalistic fantasy for immortality. . .
For I know that one day
My time will run out
But for now, I intend to keep on pocketing
And using as I please
I’ll let you know how it’s working
When I’m two hundred and three
Zionist
for Israel, but
I don't invest,
in WAR...
I'm a pacifist...
For Arab
as for any other people
being legalistic
without exclusivist predilection...
for peaceful solution
no arms race
calm conversation
harmonious division
brotherhood in view
without fatal pride, absolutist
sans rejection, unhealthy, fatalistic
sans cruelty, dominist...
Allah understanding God
After all, they are one...!
Divide territory
and live in peace
and respect Both...!
Abolish parabellum !
PP peace, please...!
Luanda 1975
It was a fraught time in Luanda, the rebel army (freedom fighters)
was closing in on Luanda, leaving civilians exposed
to rape, murder and pillage.
The Portuguese army had dastardly skulked away and
General Spinola was in Lisbon playing politics
Colonialism was over, but there was fear of its ending
when hatred had to be sated.
Among the white population, there was a fatalistic mien
drowning their fear like the sinking Titanic, loud music, booze
and dancing, everything to live a little longer.
Then came the Germans (foreign legion) took charge
staved off the incoming, undisciplined riff-raff army
long enough for people to get on ships and planes to get
the hell out; as for the Germans found their way out to
South Africa.
The aftermath:
When hatred of the colonials subsided, the new Angola
found they needed the know-how of the settlers they
were invited back.
Today, thousands of Portuguese live to thrive in harmony
with the black population,
The quintessential of nyctophilia, wrapped in bridal attire, slowly and slowly as in somnambulism there goes the heroine of timeless tragedy to supersede her lovers feigned insanity.
Her beloved father is no more, being killed by her suitor's intrigued tyranny;
ignored to be drowned, to burn in the flame of plotted felony.
Jilted, to be startled by the selcouth performance of her handsome wooer's vile strategy;
there goes the most beautiful heroine ever to be the victim of fated irony,
immersed in senseless lunacy, to vanish from the sight of Hamlet's fatalistic eyes to bid adieu to the agony,
slowly and slowly to be disappeared into melancholic darkness from the dazzling maniac opaque sight;
there goes the Danish heroine of evergreen tragedy.
Be optimistic rather than fatalistic.
Don't squander and be elated hedonistic.
Retain moving; only the obdurate survive.
Hand jives your way to contrive.
Slump or solidity must be omitted.
Wear awe mood when having moved.
Don't be shy in taking elitism.
Self-reliance is a wedge of realism.
Spent
By Sy Roth
Her ears still tremble with the sounds
Shocked into somnolence gasping to make sense.
The giddy bassist a rue of flapping gums missing the flats,
The drummer’s lips moving in asynchronous confusion--
But seem excited
She a carved, lost soul curved by existence.
Puffs of Kool smoke rising in O’s frame the scene
Off camera, and she feels dejected
Her voice a raspy concordance of ills
Of the world she just flagellated.
They stirred the fatalistic mob into a nihilistic frenzy
Tired arms from their robust gyrations
Oily hair whipping their brows
A spent ecstasy of ejaculated postulations
As the air quieted to a dull roar
And they waited for the next round of guttural pronouncements.
She is bent with the effort,
Grainy hair framing an awe-shocked brow
Unsatisfied now
The quiescent instruments and amps no longer giving voice.
Her voice now shuttered---
Bandmates off to share brewskis and medicinal snorts.
Her song long gone.
Spent, she waits for a comforting hand,
None to be found.
A solitary creature waiting in the never-ending waiting room
Spent.
Pairings
Scotch and soda
Rum and coke
A bit of libation for all we folk
Thelma and Louise
Bonnie and Clyde
Renegades on a fatalistic ride
Bacon and eggs
Mac and cheese
Comfort food, thank you please
Black and white
Black and blue
No comment here, that’s for you
Bacharach and David
McCartney and Lennon
Imagine - songs from heaven
Lemon and lime
Salt and pepper
Spice it up - life is better
Bride and groom
Man and wife
For some, not all, a path of life
In and out
Up and down
Makes your head spin around
All these pairings that go together
Just silly words to tickle your pleasure
At this very moment lost in life, predictability
Mind is a mess chaos reigns, steadfastness
Fighting with myself shut out, convertibility
Not through lack of confidence, faithlessness.
Honesty best policy was perfect, vulnerability
Perceived to be bureaucratic, crookedness
Looking into blind darkness is not, gullibility
Rather an inclination to, open-mindedness.
Fatalistic properties impress on, observability
Eternal bliss unlikely basis, straightforwardness
My own admission incurred veto, ineligibility
Life’s knowledge diminishes to backwardness.
Into the abyss keeps tumbling, infallibility
Round and round remorselessness
I’m tired now must keep sleeping, insatiability
In the morning truth is coming, unpreparedness.
Executioner asks any last words, foreseeability
And then comes the answer, breathlessness.
Juxtaposition Poetry Contest
Sponsored by the silent one
20/11/2020
I prefer to live
lost in mine
dreams,
than live this
cruel reality and
fatalistic world ...
I prefer this life
idealized and true,
than the farce we live in:
half truths,
wrap,
and addiction ...
I always prefer
hear silent
stars
than this shrill,
malicious music
that offers us
as a feast ...
I prefer the reverie
healthy poetry,
than the rules don't
fulfilled from
social hypocrisy ...
I prefer to sow
grains of tenderness
and be natural,
than participate
harvest
this singular
progress...
I prefer the bark of
street dogs,
the meows of cats
on the roof, than
dissenting voices
of the lords of
derision and
misery...
I prefer to dream
and continue living
being platonic
and utopian ...
knowing how
i realize ...
'I am not the only one... "
https://youtu.be/L6svOHFSAH8
sugestões song imagine já lennon
Nowadays it’s difficult to live as an uneducated
Un-education is a curse- it’s known to all-wise
Wisdom sometimes unable to show the right path
Path erects many roots where grow puzzling ideals
Ideas of life bring conflicting doctrine in believers
Belief is truth for who believes, not for equal to real
Reality can dig out the past, present to show the true
Truth, though is an undeniable piece of any knowing
Knowledge of certain books garrote the curious learned
Learning on the natural ways is prohibited heritage
Heirs of the ancient lit up fatalistic light everywhere
Where the conscience keeps losing power to followers
Following is not wicked but a blind brain imports nothing
Things of biased acumen can abuse the value of anything
29.08.2020 Chattogram
***Note***
I want to learn everything through new ways
Although for that I have to be uneducated
The knowledge of the old scriptures is not suitable for me
Because I am learning myself with conscience everyday
Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch
by Michael R. Burch
Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh
went to the ovens. Please don’t bother to cry.
You could have saved her, but you were all tied up
complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp.
Scratch that. You were born after World War II.
You had something more important to do:
while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza
with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a
religious tract against homosexual marriage
and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)
Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure
that your intentions were good and ineluctably pure.
After all, what the hell does he care about Palestinians?
Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians.
Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.
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.