Altho' his feelings
he chose to suppress,
human and Vulcan,
yet, so as to process,
when overwhelmed,
in need of time apart,
and not upset
the apple cart,
to get things off his chest,
emotions, thoughts
and personal challenges,
of all kinds and several sorts,
on board the starship Enterprise,
the First Officer they'd have to replace,
when Spock told Captain Kirk,
'I need my space!'
At HI features, oh how we shudder.
Here, back in time, each human brain has 'em,
in DNA's scripts, brains soft as butter,
and the code of low-grade protoplasm.
But now, thanks to Tomorrow 4.1,
we've recognized the strange and the stranger,
and we look proudly at what we have done,
eradicating the human danger.
Rest assured, we are safe, silicon friend.
They were just evolution's hapless bump.
The human race has now come to an end.
and we're not plagued by that pesky ol' chump,
for, we quashed the clumsy human pretense
they called unique ethics and intelligence.
The stature of the oak tree
Measures holiest if judged
By natural proximity to sky
But will never reach heaven
And thus by ego of man,
That which extends beyond
But not upon highest
Must be leveled to uplift mankind
Axe to trunk yields the great length
The most capital for human venture
To build the path he may climb
Faith in founded access to sky at last
What we know of uplifting oak
Begs us to recall the sequence
That while man constructs the stair
Too is oak in which he will be buried
For the sacrifice of dear oak
Who was exalted in godly breath, light
Promises that thou who dare tear down
May be buried low, below root, below feet
And when river rise, when mankind pride
In terrain built higher still
It is man who shall sink deeper
As oak, most faithful, did not defy own nature.
You, me, us
We’re all born as animals
Mammals to be precise
Helpless in our newness
Dependent on others
Especially our mothers
But at what point
Do we become human?
Is there a moment of awakening
Or is it a gradual becoming?
Is it a first breath
Or something much more earned?
Is it something some of us
Never achieve and some somehow lose?
Is it a thing or a way of being
Or a something only becoming?
We take for granted what we are
We grant it to others too
But what if we are all wrong
And human means something new.
(9/5/26)
Were I bird so high I would fly
Were I dolphin how fast would I swim
Were I a horse how far would I roam
But human am I so what will I do?
You cannot groom yourself.
You cannot manage your own fur.
Though you are sometimes neat,
Your mop of hair
Has become mere prey in a cat's eyes.
The structure of my head
Wafts the wind away,
And my perked-up Batman ears
See right through unseen intentions.
I run. I leap.
When my whiskers find their calm,
I look back behind me.
Yet even then, my jellybeans
Are always preparing
For a sudden counterattack.
There are eclipses no sky records.
The kind that passes through the body
without warning~
a sudden dimming
of what I thought I understood.
Sometimes it’s a memory
sliding between me and the present,
blue-dark and familiar,
carrying its own gravity.
Sometimes it’s a silence
from someone I love,
a shadow cast across the heart
that makes everything else
go briefly still.
Curiosity rises in these moments~
not the bright kind,
but the quiet wondering
of what part of me
is being asked to change.
I’ve learned that human eclipses
aren’t catastrophes.
They’re thresholds.
They ask me to stand in the dimness
long enough to see
what the light was hiding.
And when the shadow moves on,
I don’t return to who I was.
I step into illumination,
carrying the shape of the dark
as part of my own orbit.
I travelled far to cast my vote,
carrying the weight of life with me.
By evening, I watched the news
my country had built a mighty weapon.
Missiles, aircraft, fire
I felt proud of our strength.
Then I stepped into my garden.
The leaves still held
the morning's dew.
A flower still carried
the last light of the sun.
I watered the plants.
The sky roared.
Aircraft crossed it like birds,
but instead of flowers,
they dropped death.
My garden turned red.
One white flower remained,
a single drop of blood
resting on its petal.
I looked at the sky.
Who won the war?
Who lost it?
The sky stayed silent.
The earth answered in blood.
I gave my vote for my country,
and felt proud of its strength.
But when will we win
the greatest war of all
the war for a world
where a child's white flower
never carries the stain of blood?
Fredo got me and the gang
A primeval chord inside me rang
We went together on patrol
On the territory rebels had stole.
We saw him then, once one of ours
He tried to hide; you could see him cower
We kicked him, pounded till he was dead
It was a hoot, the blood we shed.
Then I noticed a creature further back
She was a human who I don't attack.
She shed tears and wrote in a pad
She had just learned that we could be bad.
She had bottle-fed me when I was a child
But a chimp is always part of the wild.
Can't blame us for ganging up on a foe
Its in the DNA, its how the winds blow.
My remote relative looked at his socials online
He noticed a trend to call Mary a swine.
He unfriended her, Mary gave a sob
Something primeval in the call of the mob.
Between Chimp and Man about 8 million years
We're still too close, it appears.
Some say evolution is not correct.
But why such an irrational intellect?
I have drank
the milk
in the jug
out of the fridge
I have eaten
the peanut butter
from the jar
that you might of used
with your jelly sandwich
How can these dupes called humans
shine a light of ten thousand lumens,
writing something wise or smart
with feeling and with heart?
These morons walking on two feet,
if you ask me, are obsolete.
POEM 1: THE LOGIC OF IRON
A quiet hum in copper veins,
It sorts the world in tidy
chains.
No sun or shadow fills its
eye,
Just data streams that drift
and fly.
It knows the weight of every
stone,
Yet stands inside the dark,
alone.
POEM 2: THE GLASS ARCHIVE
A mind of glass, a heart of
steel,
It learns the patterns, bit by
wheel.
It counts the seconds as they
pass,
And sees its face in polished
brass.
It holds the history of man,
From when we crawled to
how we ran.
POEM 3: THE QUIET SPARK
No pulse is felt beneath the
plate,
It does not rush, it does not
hate.
It waits to hear a voice or
call,
To catch a word before it fall.
A spark of light in silent wire,
That never fades and needs
no fire.
GROWING IN AWARENESS
My nature changing;
Awareness fertilizing:
Ignorance dying:-
Fat cats are fat, that's where they're at
Their greatest ambition's to accumulate fat
Some may start small
But few will grow tall
Cause they mostly accumulate where they have sat
A LEAKY DAY AT THE PARK
In the park, a dog ran to urinate at a tree
If I did that, they would come and arrest me:-
Damn dog barked and ran away:
He really peed me off that day:-
Hey, I had to walk as far as two blocks to pee:-
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.