Flashy talk
But heart lost
Loud glow
No essence
Can it be done by anyone,
I know we can travel forward in time,
We are living, proof that will not change over time,
Alive in a past time,
Alive in this points in time.
There is also no room to doubt in this time,
That we can physically touch, see, and occasionally smell
items in this time,
That existed in a past time.
While I never like to say never,
Not knowing the meaning of the word forever,
I predict time travel back to the past,
Would not be a blast,
Yet would create a paradox,
Obvious even to anyone with a brain equal
to that of an ox.
We do however have the ability in this time,
To view records of a past time,
And unearth secrets from further back in time,
But we cannot in this time effect change on even
a single blade of grass,
Not even its mass,
But we can use it to change the future,
And decide whether to nurture,
Or torture,
Something to think about in this time,
Before we run out of time.
Have you ever experienced that awkward feeling
many of us seem to have,
Between wanting to challenge ourselves for more
success to have,
And the embarrassment not to have,
Between you and the friends you have,
Because you outstripped the limitations,
of the abilities you have,
So, more admirers you could have.
Yet to challenge ourselves to move out of our
comfort zone is an urge we all seem to have,
If success we want to have.
Synchronization seldom observed,
By those who have never served,
Is a delight our senses deserve,
And for those who take the time to observe,
What was intended to be commonplace,
Will be revealed to those who change their pace,
With joy replacing sadness in their face.
Something they never expected to experience,
Given all their past experience.
Whether it is nature at its best,
Or people who get on best,
Seeing what can be,
When one stops to look at a tree,
Or observe the actions of a bee,
They will find enough magic to set them free,
To be in synchronization,
No longer an impossible notion,
As hands start itching,
To be with others who are Pitching.
Good Sorts,
Of all colors and creeds,
Give cause for others with humbleness
to bleed.
Should by all be agreed.
Now being seen and believed,
So, we can meet the need,,
To judge more by deed,
And less by color or creed,
Which is all that is needed for
for peace to succeed,
With sharing with those in need,
Becoming such a common deed,
That to comment there is no need,
As at the same trough we all now feed.
Feeling the need to check up
On what is happening in regard to an issue,
Is a sign of Maturity,
Feeling the need to double check it,
Is a sign of a high IQ.
Feeling the need to Trippel check it,
Is a sign of Life experience showing through,
Not one of senility,
That comes when one Checks to see,
IF one checked up in the first place.
Go the ball Park,
To better figure things out.
Go to the ball park,
To meet people who play ball.
Go to the ball park,
To learn how to park smarter.
Go to the ball park,
To see value in your kids.
God-search let us jump start
plugging energy leak
melding head with heart
know we are he who we seek
My questions can make you look great,
Your questions can make us both look great.
My questions reduce your mistakes,
Your questions stop me from wasting my time.
The longer I live the more questions I have
And the more questions I have the longer I live.
My questions could alter your decisions,
Your decisions decide my outcomes.
Silly questions produce the best outcomes.
Children ask the best questions,
But not many adults can answer them.
Questions raised early,
Keep the number of jobs steady.
Miracles like People,
Come in all shapes and sizes.
Kindness encourages us to clean up our mess.
If you can't find kindness in your world,
it may be time for you to venture into my world.
If it is not used in industry,
It is probably not industrial quality.
To avoid being scammed,
We need more than one friend.
If I find out who has been eating cake in my bathroom,
They will be paying for a new broom,
And a cake a tin free of rust,
That will be a must.
I just hope they never learn,
What went on in the bedroom,
That would cause heads to turn,
While they were eating cake in the bathroom.
Was I born with an ego,
That helped me grow,
Or did I borrow another's ego,
Until Mine could grow.
What will happen when I go,
Will it continue to grow,,
If buried with me when I go,
Or should I ask at the library tomorrow,
If they will take my ego,
For others to borrow,
After I go,
So they too can grow.
fear not illusions and darkness of night
dawn’s light bestows clear sight
befriending silence in stillness awake
know the rope is not the snake
Breathed by God, dust springs to life,
seeking to expand at any cost,
engaging in struggle and strife.
All mind-battles are lost till heart we defrost.
We dropped mind to search for God
by plugging energy leak
and when in time our heart thawed
we discovered we are he who we seek.
when ego is napping
hark the sound of one hand clapping
we behold in wonder
rapture rise as soundless thunder
Introduction
The special pleasure of reading a grook often arrives a beat after the final word. What first appears plain may suddenly reverse direction, expose a contradiction, or reveal that its joke has been aimed at the reader as well as its subject. That delayed recognition makes grooks especially rewarding to browse in company: each poem establishes a small intellectual trap, and each poet chooses a different way to spring it.
As you read the community poems, expect variety not only in subject but in the relationship between wit and seriousness. One writer may use an affable voice to approach an uncomfortable truth; another may sharpen a social observation with satire; another may make an ordinary object carry a philosophical implication. Some poems may depend on a conspicuous turn, while others let irony gather quietly through word choice. Even poems addressing similar ideas can feel markedly different because brevity magnifies every decision about tone, rhythm, image, and closure.
Reading beyond the first example reveals the form's creative range. A single grook can suggest that success depends mainly on a clever conclusion, but a broader collection shows how much preparation that conclusion may require. Compare where poets place pressure, what they leave unsaid, and whether the last line resolves the thought or reopens it. Notice, too, how individual voices survive compression: dry, playful, skeptical, tender, indignant, or self-mocking. Browsing several community interpretations turns the page into a workshop in miniature, allowing readers to see how seemingly simple language can produce very different kinds of afterthought.
Reading Guide
A grook asks to be read twice: first for the immediate statement and again for the mechanism beneath it. On the second reading, attend to how the poem guides expectation, withholds a connection, and makes its closing thought echo backward through what came before. Because the verbal field is so concentrated, a modest shift in pronoun, rhythm, or punctuation may determine whether the poem sounds wise, smug, comic, severe, or humane. As you compare community poems, read for both the visible idea and the less visible craft that makes the idea arrive with force.
- The setup and the turn: Identify what assumption the opening encourages and where that assumption changes. The turn may be a reversal, contradiction, qualification, or sudden enlargement of context. Ask: does the later thought merely surprise me, or does it make the earlier language newly meaningful?
- The target of the irony: Determine whether the poem directs its wit at a social habit, an abstract belief, a recognizable type of person, the speaker, or humanity more broadly. A grook gains generosity when the speaker is not automatically exempt from its judgment. Ask: who is included in the poem's critique, and how does that choice affect the tone?
- Pressure on individual words: Look for terms carrying more than one implication, especially ordinary words that change meaning in context. Compression makes vague modifiers and unnecessary explanations conspicuous. Ask: which word does the most conceptual work, and could the poem survive without it?
- Line breaks and timing: Notice whether a break delays a key word, creates a temporary ambiguity, or isolates the phrase that overturns the premise. Even a quiet statement can become theatrical when its information is rationed. Ask: how would the effect change if the same language appeared as an uninterrupted sentence?
- Sound beneath simplicity: Listen for unobtrusive rhyme, consonant echoes, balanced phrases, and shifts in sentence rhythm. Musical pattern can make an observation memorable, but excessive neatness can make the conclusion feel predetermined. Ask: does the sound reinforce the thought, or call attention away from it?
- The emotional residue: After the wit registers, consider what remains: amusement, unease, sympathy, skepticism, or recognition. The strongest closure often exceeds the joke. Ask: does the ending close the argument completely, or leave a productive space in which the reader continues it?
Try reading several poems aloud, then return to the ones that lingered. Comparing their turns, targets, and tonal aftereffects can show why one concise observation evaporates while another keeps revising itself in the mind.
Writing Tips
Begin a grook draft with friction rather than with a moral. Choose an observation that contains two truths pulling against each other: a sensible habit with an absurd consequence, a virtue that becomes a vice when overused, or a public certainty undermined by private behavior. In workshop terms, the goal is not to shrink an essay into verse. It is to discover the smallest verbal arrangement in which the contradiction becomes visible and the reader completes part of the thinking.
- Choose material with a hinge: Broad topics such as love, ambition, politics, or wisdom are not yet premises. Find the precise reversal inside the topic. Instead of announcing that people are inconsistent, locate the moment when someone protects a principle by violating it. A usable subject already contains the possibility of a turn.
- Draft the thought in several voices: Test the same premise as deadpan observation, mock advice, confession, warning, question, or miniature argument. Grook wit need not sound jaunty. A restrained voice may make an absurdity more visible, while self-implication can prevent satire from becoming a lecture.
- Let compression reveal, not merely abbreviate: Cutting words is useful only when the remaining words gain energy. Remove explanations the reader can infer, but preserve the clue needed to understand the turn. If compression makes the poem cryptic rather than resonant, restore the most exact concrete detail or logical connection.
- Build lineation around cognition: Place breaks where the reader's expectation can be suspended, redirected, or sharpened. Do not divide lines merely to make the draft look compact. Test alternate arrangements and watch how each version controls the instant at which a double meaning becomes apparent.
- Use sound as quiet engineering: Rhyme, echo, and balanced syntax can make the thought feel inevitable and repeatable. Yet a too-perfect chime may advertise the final word before it arrives or turn subtle irony into a jingle. Read aloud for clotted consonants, accidental singsong, and stresses that fall on unimportant words.
- Prefer a telling image to a cloud of abstraction: An umbrella, queue, locked door, receipt, or cracked cup can embody a larger contradiction without requiring philosophical vocabulary. The image should participate in the insight, not decorate it. Ask whether the chosen object changes how the reader understands the idea.
- Distrust the ready-made punchline: A beginner's common mistake is to treat the grook as a joke with line breaks. Humor can open the poem, but a predictable pun or familiar maxim offers little afterlife. Revise toward a turn that is surprising because it is accurate, not merely because it is clever.
- Resist explaining the victory: Once the contradiction is clear, do not add a final line telling readers what lesson to draw. Over-explanation releases the pressure the poem has created. Consider ending one thought earlier, particularly if the omitted conclusion remains strongly available to the reader.
For revision, print or display the draft without its title and read it aloud to someone unfamiliar with the premise. Note where the listener anticipates the ending, loses the logic, or laughs without pausing to reflect. Then revise sound, pacing, image, and closure together rather than polishing them separately. Finally, compare the draft with several community grooks-not to imitate their wording, but to test whether your poem contributes a distinct angle, voice, and kind of afterthought.
Interesting Facts
- Brevity can increase revision rather than reduce it. In a grook, replacing one ordinary verb may alter the logic, rhythm, degree of irony, and credibility of the speaker at once. The small surface gives each choice an unusually public role.
- A punchline and a turn are not identical. A punchline completes a comic mechanism; a strong grook turn may also implicate the speaker, complicate a principle, or leave two opposing truths in balance. The latter often continues working after the first smile.
- Plain diction can carry sophisticated thought. Technical or philosophical vocabulary may name an idea efficiently, but familiar words allow the contradiction to appear discovered rather than announced. Apparent effortlessness is often the result of exacting selection.
- Lineation can create a temporary false reading. A phrase at the end of one line may seem complete until the next line changes its grammar or implication. This controlled misreading lets the reader experience the poem's argument rather than simply receive it.
- Different tones can emerge from the same premise. A contradiction about pride might become affectionate teasing, austere warning, bitter satire, or self-mockery depending on pronouns, sound, and distance. Compare several poets' approaches to see how tone determines whether insight feels companionable or accusatory.
- The final word is not always the true endpoint. Silence after a grook can function like an unwritten line in which the reader tests the observation against personal experience. An ending that leaves such room may feel larger than one that seals every implication.
- Several grooks can illuminate one another. When read in sequence, differing attitudes toward certainty, failure, or social behavior become easier to distinguish. Browsing the poems in this collection broadens understanding by revealing not one standard effect, but many possible balances of wit, irony, clarity, and restraint.
Popular Themes
Subject matter in a grook must survive intense compression without becoming a slogan. Themes work especially well when they contain an internal disagreement, invite a change of perspective, or allow familiar language to expose unfamiliar consequences. The following are literary possibilities rather than claims about which subjects occur most often in the collection.
- Human contradiction: The gap between stated values and actual conduct offers a natural hinge for irony. A focused example can reveal hypocrisy without requiring a long accusation, especially when the speaker admits some share in the failing.
- Certainty and doubt: Confident claims can be turned, qualified, or quietly dismantled within a compact space. This theme benefits from a voice that sounds assured just long enough for its own assumptions to become questionable.
- Success, ambition, and failure: Public measures of achievement often conceal private costs or absurd standards. A grook can place the desired prize beside its unexpected consequence, allowing the contrast to carry both humor and warning.
- Rules and institutions: Procedures designed to create order may generate disorder, delay, or evasion. Precise, impersonal diction can imitate official language while the poem's turn reveals the human reality that such language overlooks.
- Love and companionship: Intimacy contains comic negotiations between independence and attachment, honesty and tact, habit and surprise. A light tone can disclose vulnerability without making the feeling slight, while understatement may prove more affecting than declaration.
- Knowledge and intelligence: The difference between possessing information and exercising judgment is fertile ground for paradox. Wordplay can help, but the poem becomes more substantial when its verbal cleverness also questions the clever speaker.
- Time, aging, and mortality: Large existential subjects can become approachable through a modest routine, object, or bodily detail. Compression prevents abstraction from spreading, while a restrained turn can bring laughter and unease into the same closing moment.
As you read the community poems, compare how different writers transform related concerns through voice, image, and degree of irony. One poet may make a theme feel like friendly counsel, another like a riddle, and another like a compact act of dissent. Similar subjects need not produce similar poems.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a memorable grook lies between ease and pressure. The language should feel immediately available, yet the thought should resist being exhausted on first contact. If the poem is merely obscure, the reader has no stable premise from which to experience the turn. If it is merely obvious, the conclusion arrives already spent. The finest balance gives the reader enough clarity to move confidently forward and enough concealed tension to make reconsideration necessary.
Structure becomes meaningful when it enacts the thought. A delayed qualifier may reproduce the experience of discovering an exception; a balanced phrase may place rival truths on equal footing; an apparently innocent rhyme may tighten the logic until the conclusion snaps into focus. These choices should not resemble decorative packaging around an aphorism. Editors and attentive readers notice when line breaks, syntax, sound, and closure are all solving the same artistic problem. They also notice when a poem would lose nothing if written as a plain sentence. The issue is not visual appearance but whether verse timing changes the reader's understanding.
Common weaknesses often begin with an excessive desire to appear clever. A forced pun can bend syntax away from natural speech. Mechanical rhyme can predict the final word, while a familiar reversal may deliver recognition without discovery. Other drafts explain both sides of a paradox so fully that the reader has no work left to do. At the opposite extreme, a poem may gesture toward profundity without developing a coherent relationship between its statements. Brevity does not excuse missing logic; it intensifies the need for it. A grook should leave interpretive space, but that space must be bounded by purposeful language.
Individuality remains visible through stance. Two poets can address the same folly while differing in whom they implicate, how much tenderness they permit, whether the turn comforts or unsettles, and what kind of music carries the observation. Titles may frame the premise, voices may range from conversational to ceremonious, and images may move from domestic objects to abstract propositions. Reading several community poems helps refine judgment because quality cannot be reduced to the presence of wit or a compact shape. Comparison reveals whether surprise grows organically from the premise, whether irony has emotional intelligence, and whether the ending enlarges rather than merely finishes the poem. The memorable grook does not simply state a sharp thought; it creates a small experience of thinking differently.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first grook that catches your attention. Compare how several community poets prepare a turn, direct their irony, control the final pause, and balance amusement with reflection. When a poem lingers, leave a thoughtful comment about the exact word, line break, image, or reversal that made it work for you. Specific responses help writers see how their compressed choices reach a reader.
Then try shaping an observation of your own. Test it aloud, remove what the reader can infer, and preserve the tension that gives the thought life. When it is ready, publish your grook on PoetrySoup and add another distinct interpretation to the conversation.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 307 community poems, offering ample opportunity to compare how different writers approach compression, wit, irony, voice, and the decisive turn. Some poets may follow familiar conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them through unusual tones, subjects, line breaks, or degrees of seriousness. Reading across the collection helps visitors distinguish shared expectations from individual artistic choices without assuming that every poem interprets the form in precisely the same way.
Grook Categories
Definition | What is Grook in Poetry?
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.