Guillotined Poems | Examples


List of Member Poems

Belles sont les fleurs.

Flowers sprinkle our steps with a thousand colors.
We offer them at every moment of life.
They are compliments of happiness.
Time passes, and their petals of beauty slip away.

Flowers carry our joys and our sorrows.
In bouquets or alone, they are always beautiful.
Messengers of Love running through our veins,
They caress us with perfumed scents.

The flowers of my dreams are so beautiful.
In a vase they seem suffocated.
They only wish to escape on beating wings.
Cut flowers have their hearts guillotined.

In the meadow where I lay down, head in the wind,
They look at me, amused, all trembling.
Then I feel sweetness flooding my blood.
Beautiful are the flowers of Freedom.

Joël Charvillat

Ancient Times

In ancient time 

The ninety seventies are up in patina, a yellowish colour 
of the ancient when I was young; and for me, it is still
not far away and remembered as a good time, mainly 
because I was busy finding my feet
In the interim 50 years, much has changed, now is not
a good time to be young, the world has aged badly.
1970, the last man guillotined in France, but thousands
have died in civil wars at the hands of war machines.
The attention span is lower now than before, atrocities
like the Iraq war is forgotten, even Libya reduced
to a failed state is in the limbo of being in the past, future 
and the ever-present now.
We are blasted with news that rolls so fast we have no
 chance to take it, is the leaders want, you must not think
to see through their lies, lest you should disagree.

Fortaleza

As a loosed bird and the broad liberties of the sky, 
So have been long life’s borderless freedoms and I; 
I often have kissed countless trolls’ decoying lips,
And thought their lush mouths such nectared tips. 

I severally have ridden on the precarious backs
Of seamless airs and on swift-swimming sharks,
Whereon Fate and Time had gigantic glutting turn;
Soiling the white soul in which raging embers burn. 

I never have seen vast humanity’s single heart,
Kind enough to lend even a distant aiding hand; 
Always have larger world’s gloatingly fired eyes
Weirdly relished this one-man’s lamenting band.

Never have greenest dreams and rawest sorrows
Met so juxtaposedly on bullish life's shifting plane;
Nor guillotined goals thus defied Destiny’s gallows,
To pay with hope such low lot as only pariahs gain. 

He's never alone who with his intact dreams abides,
For fortune will someday show her soft hidden sides.


Guillotine

Robespierre, Danton and all of those 
crazy French revolution 'heroes' 
had thousands guillotined  
by La Machine that gleaned 
heads; then 'offed' their own midst their wild throes.

Theorem of Unity

From single drop of dew guillotined on light
The blood flowed leaving the day white
Above world of red rage of racial rituals,
Orange mellow of satisfaction sought.
Yellow roses say angers end is admissable
Blues change to country songs, blue
Surf whispering on the lips green waves breaking
On an indigo morning of the inviolate eye.

From God's light outpoured
The colors of all his children
Singing the multiplicity of races in heaven
The choir of redemption
Balming the blind blunders of egos wrongs
And I had wanted to tell you along 
How my patience pine at your lips
To hear you speak uninterrupted and respected
By a man needing you for more than desire

Soon we holding hands so away from the surfs cold tongue
Suckimg the salt sands under our friendly feet
Our bodies naked as a flag, and I untented 
Before the majestic honesty of love
Build the alternative to the heart's
Confrontation of rock and tides. 
I saw the spray scattered in silver light
The prism broken like an egg
The spectra of colors shedding evidence
Our beginning was from a common tree
Black and white keys singing in harmony.

Premium Member The Taylor House Story (Tanka Sextet)

There's always a house
Some weird    vacant residence
Kids stay away from
Especially on certain nights
Those nights when the Moon is bright

Climbing those porch steps
Would take more than just courage
No child would risk it
It's the Taylor House Story
A tale both true    and GORY!

The house I describe
Has three stories    a long porch
And    boarded windows
Except for one by the top gable
'Death's Door'   so goes the fable

No boards on this one
No glass either    just splinters
Three jagged sabres
It's said    a boy in his teens
Stuck in his head - GUILLOTINED!

Now!    On moonlit nights
Some still hear those awful thumps
The window comes down
THUMP!    His head hits the roof    THUMP!
Rolls on down    hits the ground    THUMP!

Well?    To climb those steps?
It would be insanity
No child would risk it
A vision so full of dread
That thumping    bouncing    DEAD    HEAD!


Slaughter House.

Stupefied in this vast slaughter house
Where the fingers of crude murderers seek
The napes of neck the sheaf of hair
Forget settled ways now just seek mad heroism.

This is the end of me perhaps wind will carry
On back of coarse canvas a song of prejudice
To torture to kill cut down the sleepy slopes
Along hills where spiders set fire to hazel leaves.

The forces of intimidation settling on waxpod
Marshes
Into tasteless heaps of gold and the marbled
Symptoms  
Filled with guillotined leaves ad the barren
Forest
The universe mislaid now among some nocturnal
Trivials.

13 Mayhem Street

A few meters from me is a man
on the breadline; secluded; a beggar—
with his cluttered suit and long parched hair—
add to that a greasy hand
        beseeching silvers from the people
        wryly staring at him 
        (at the life he didn’t choose) as they pass by;
        but no one seemed to mind.

At the other flank of the street is a soul—
murdered; guillotined; a victim—
amid her blood-smeared gown
she has been sauntering back and forth:
        pleading for justice
        (and perhaps searching for her head);
        but how could people help out,
        they couldn’t notice her.

Above me is a bird—
homeless; ravenous; a sufferer
of men’s egotistical doings.
Now he has nowhere to go—
        no trees to put up a nest;
        (and possibly, no bird of the same feather);
        and a breeze of infected air—
        all because no one seemed to care.

As the day turned into night—
uplifted; inspired; a noble man I became,
by these enormous stories I witnessed
that only few are able to see.

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