A ticket pinned to the thigh reserves it,
the whole cadaver is parceled off - of course.
Legs are a late harvest, these often-indigent parts
carry a visual poverty long after the body is plucked.
Under watchful eyes the young medics
separate muscle groups, filter large blood vessels
from fibrous runnels, hesitant scalpels
seek out fascial planes.
The leg is devolving to scraps,
yet, ingrained in the tissue
I sense residual shades of a former life,
seaside postcards, old photographs,
perhaps campaign ribbons, odd tokens
amongst yellowed newspaper clippings,
all briefly surface as conjectured images
beneath a probing knife.
The gray flesh retains its personal history,
I imagine that behind the knee
there is a wife, children, and a separation
all spectrally etched between femur and tibia.
Much of the ensuing bone-whittling years
are demonstratively scored
across a formaldehyde and jelled narration.
The students suppose they dissect a limb,
while I notion that I turn over bloodless pages,
of an unwritten story,
and now the last few attached ligaments
remain as threads that speak at last
of a long journey’s end.
Flames swallow oxygen,
duplicitous in their deeds,
circumventing steel barriers—
steel barriers doubling over.
Ashen soot cakes the walls;
walls crumble, interlacing with soot.
Pyres of fire lick the night sky;
crimson smoke suffuses the air.
Breathing in microparticles,
microparticles sticking
to fibrous membranes—
breathing collapses.
Lit match—ignition,
cinders glow.
I plant a tree on top of the hill
and there it stood still
I water it with my tears
and it kept blooming throughout the year
and now it is spreading it’s branches everywhere
and its trunks is parachuting into the sky
but its main root is getting dry
cause no more tears are left in my eyes
the hill top tree has a short destiny
its fibrous roots are withering
and the people cannot sing.
meet me at the hill top tree
I have an important message for thee
Gather the team and come
before the mid-night hour is done
The cuts are deep and everyone is
loosing precious sleep for the
tree root runs deep in the ground
and suspicions are swelling around
You have to hold onto democracy
before it dies, get aboard the mid-night train
and your life will never be the same
the heart is were good deeds grow
and from the abundance of the heart
your emotion flows
meet me on top of the hill
I just want to sing.
Fibrous Cord
My fibrous cord who
attach the muscles of
the calf to the
heel bone are
sometimes as sharp as
a sharp knife.
A ticket pinned to the thigh reserves it,
the whole cadaver is parceled off - of course.
Legs are a late harvest, these often-indigent parts
carry a visual poverty long after the body is plucked.
Under watchful eyes the young medics
separate muscle groups, filter large blood vessels
from fibrous runnels, hesitant scalpels
seek out fascial planes.
The leg is devolving to scraps,
yet, ingrained in the tissue
I sense residual shades of a former life,
seaside postcards, old photographs,
perhaps campaign ribbons, odd tokens
amongst yellowed newspaper clippings,
all briefly surface as conjectured images
beneath a probing knife.
The gray flesh retains its personal history,
I imagine that behind the knee
there is a wife, children, and a separation
all spectrally etched between femur and tibia.
Much of the ensuing bone-whittling years
are demonstratively scored
across a formaldehyde and jelled narration.
The students suppose they dissect a limb,
while I notion that I turn over bloodless pages,
of an unwritten story,
and now the last few attached ligaments
remain as threads that speak at last
of a long journey’s end.
"Finally my blood began to coagulate,"
the second stage of hemostasis -- how great!
First I applied pressure to the bleeding spot,
the platelets circulate to stop it (a "clot.")
Coagulation forms a more solid wall,
in other words: a scab (helps after a fall).
That tough thing is just a temporary patch;
could bleed again, like My Girl's "blood brothers" scratch.
The vocab: "hemo" means blood, "stasis"-- stands still;
this natural process shows God's powerful skill:
to keep flowing blood --in, and harmful germs --out,
the fibrous platelet plug closes the vein's spout.
Keep it clean, and with time, the skin looks like new;
(a scar may remind me the pain I went through).
The skin's remodel is "fibrinolysis,"
but what makes it ALL better-- is mother's kiss!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Coagulation Starter Poetry Contest (just started with the first line provided by the contest assignment, and I went from there, putting myself in this situation, which I have manuevered before... scientific reference I drew from: "Hemostasis" -- a Cleveland Clinic article medically reviewed in 2021).
First picked Summertime cherry
Dew glimmer marble blood clot
Taut fruit platter embitters sweating cheese
Liver pate shivers jiggle jelly
Nepenthe Mountbatten hidden chicken
Lays a tablecloth festive
Red checkered rewashed faded
Season with sea swell returns faithfully
Sickle slender silver moon smile harvests
Follicle forests expanding to full
Bright verve verdancy bursting
Peril of temporal balls
Metered to melt before resuming build
Knife blade moonbeam ripens the coming crop
Basket bulge fibrous beckon buyers’ bids
When the ceremony’s over
Feasting has ceased, linen’s off
Pink penned love letters are scrunched up thrown out
Reform engorged nightcap warmed moon omen
Sun demurred eclipse naps, menopause opaque
Unborn bends branches for Mary
Dulia in bloom banquets
Written for Contest: Seven Ten
Sponsor: Emile Pinet
As the fulcrum of awareness shifts, soul don't go adrift
Affirmation: We are more than body & mind connection
Let us leave all attachments behind and vaporize,
like space. Mesh with the sun, recognize that we are One.
Like a caterpillar at the beginning stages of life
the egg, the larva (caterpillar), the pupa (chrysalis or cocoon) and the adult
we are solid matter at birth,
Our souls remain in a cocoon stage until we decide
to explore its fibrous non-matter lignon.
Anima is to our souls what the cocoon is to the chrysalis.
A thick protection goes over our souls and the only way
to get it to be a viable spirit, is to use breath and
MEDITATION as our key life chi.
We may not be butterflies, but we have our very own
pupation pitfalls, we are human having a
human experience, with a spirit that wants to be free
to fly.
When we respect our souls and give them proper nourishment,
time and space, they will embrace the human body as it heals.
We are spiritual souls inside a framework made of flesh and blood.
And only when we teach ourselves how to relax, breathe
and accept all that encompasses us, can we truly find inner peace.
She eyed open like a broken mirror.
Her mother claimed
that her legs were bowed
so that she could catch the moon
between her black knees on moonless nights.
Tiny mandibles chewed her leather tongue
until it was as thin as a razor edged rapier.
it was her beef jerky meditations
that kept her words fibrous and tactile.
I married Ladybug inside a bottle
of sweet yellow Merlot
(we were stuck and sticky
in the last drops of a licking love).
She wore a red spotted dress
and her shoes were pincer bright.
I flagrantly fought her to a standstill
in my usual green camouflage.
Her father chased me for days
for I had stolen her hard shell-like mind;
he never caught me
though he did put a spell inside my head,
a Catholic chain-mailed spell
that bound me to her hard carapace
as if I were an aphid -
a gummy mouthed aphid
that could only hitch a ride
strapped to her ever searching hunger.
lumpy
pear-shaped
bright green
quince
fibrous
sour
needs honey or sugar
jelly is great
contains antioxidants
helps manage pregnancy nausea
loving the sourness
thank you orchard
for putting quince into my path
A scrapbook of soil
knits the land.
Earthworms patchwork
hidden birthing-chambers,
grit and gist abrades
into the leached sap
of leaf and grass.
Rain storms push up
an upholstery of luster,
mossy threads.
above tufted beds.
Frail daisy heads nod,
yet their roots grip and twist
as fibrous as hemp.
The turning lathe of a tireless wind
crumbles iron cities,
towers and arcades
stand emerald cast,
walls chained to creepers,
and a choking ivy.
Topsoil sinks to be
the undercroft of graveyards.
All is begun, all is lost
in the long gestations
of death and recovery.
Tempering's spun
beneath a settling moonlight.
The wood is too seasoned, the grain hoary.
the moppet has grown insane,
its wood now riddled with timeless lies.
A cat in a dark corner will not look at it.
Mice cower under its grim shadow.
In a twilit kitchen an old man mumbles
as he gums a boiled egg
while deranged eyes peer through walls.
Pinocchio is old,
he has been set on a hook.
fibrous sinews dangle
from his notched frame.
knotted veins grind together
inside the oaken cage of his chest.
Made to imitate and deceive
he has become what we dare not look upon:
a hollowness within a dead core.
In the potbellied stove,
logs pray with crackling flames
hope to never become that thing
that hangs and glares,
a wood wormed ruination,
its painted adolescence flaking now
to a crackbrained fantoccini
gone feral.
Last night the Alder so deeply rooted in the hedgerow
was shot through by a bolt of climatic vulnerability.
I heard the smoking gun,
heard the clangorous salvo, the snap and break,
heard the unflexed crook of it pivot and shear,
timber dislocate, break, and crumble.
There was a fibrous unclasping,
then the unfolding thunder of impact.
This morning, thigh deep in its wreckage,
maneuvering through the downed foliage,
the strew of crumbled catkins,
I listen to its death throes
of leafage curling into whorl and lacuna,
the rustling whispers of a dwindling aftershock.
Splinters and twigs tremble, lumber creaks on
as a sotto voce rattle of demise
as if the tree was still collapsing beneath its fall,
as if this murmuring requiem
were a way to explain what the moment did.
I look like a Pope's cap, hence my name
Encased in a fit and firm, fibrous frame
My large hands clap
To the great pump's tap
I keep blood flowing, as that is my aim
A breathing weight pushes flesh
into fabric and wood.
A cellular heat melds, sinks inward.
Fibrous miasmas knit cloth and foam
to a ligamentous persona.
Nightly, less of her
is peeled away to be packed
between sheets.
Her last chair takes upon it
a deeper imprint then her body alone.
It has folded her inward into hollows,
each one a pool of bodily memories.
This evening the chair has the shape of a lover
He has two more legs, but his arms
still thrill in a comforting way.
Together they are both tucked into
one more upholstered dream.
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.