Long Gouged Poems

Long Gouged Poems. Below are the most popular long Gouged by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Gouged poems by poem length and keyword.


Pit Valleys

In parts of Derbyshire and Yorkshire
there are still pit-valleys,
where industry and nature collide,
marry, and have their natural born children.

The earth once gouged, raped and laid desolate,
is landscaped by those who once despoiled.

Time plays its part, plants its seeds,
it up-roots high piled slagheaps,
softens broken mountains of concrete.

I have walked these valleys,
in some I had to stumble over the fractured bones
of abandoned and rusting machinery;
the fire scorched detritus of coal mines.

I have also strolled through resurrected Eden's,
vales recreated out of the unspeakable
into the bright eloquence of beauty.

The hands of men
and the wings of gardening angels
have covered-up all self-made wounds,
have put to bed the deeply trammeled.

The Lord of daisies and daffodils
strolls unmolested once more,
through the worst and the best
that good intentions can do.


Premium Member How Much Vengeance Is Enough?

How much bloody carnage and rubble
is required to atone for sins of a few?
How many eyes must be gouged
to extract desired justice?
If wronged, is exchanging one eye enough?
What about two eyes for one? Or ten for one?
Is twenty enough?
How about a hundred?
Such revenge might feel like justice,
but it fuels hate’s endless cycle.

Can we exit this interlocked sequence
of oppression and reflexive violence?
Can we struggle toward implementing
a radical, restorative, improbable alternative?

Remember what a crucified carpenter taught
about loving enemies and turning cheeks?
Do such ideals seem impossibly wrong
when gushing anger from our wounds?
Yet, as he stretched on splintery beams
no carpenter would willingly build,
he said, while gushing blood for all our sins,
“Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Premium Member Life and Death

Life! Life! Sip wine with red lips.
Sigh with swiveling hips.
Gyration of your generation
With no sign of the cross veneration.

Dusk’s poison does color you sallow.
The first mate gouged off your halo.
The syrupy cabernet sticks in your throat.
Tonight like too many, he’s forgotten his coat.

You’ll play your symphony all over again.
Excitement pumps in your veins - against the grain.
Followup doctor appointment. Good news you’re dying.
Mother’s milk’s been spilled. No sense in crying.

2/5/2020
POLARITIES AND PARADOXES Poetry Contest
Sponsor - Line Gauthier
Form: Rhyme

Premium Member Inner Vocal Quiver

As if a child should understand an  adult’s muddle,
putrid oil slick puddle,
the dreadful pain we foist on wide-eyed offspring.
Robotic elders crush with rigid slabs of Portland censure whatever spark remains in those tiny rosebud cheeks before their prime.
Those innocents should never have to wrap their nascent minds around the wanton desecration of intertidal lakeland wetness gradients,
the callous douse of velvet purple algerita berries,
blighted by the stark timbre cloud forms
that recklessly pour bile on every genus.
The rug rats at our feet  may never know the joys of sap-addicted sugar gliding nocturnal possums, whose acrobatic tree to tree mirror ball exploits mock Isaac Newton,
or the kinkajou of tail grip fame who flaunt their tan glow wooly fur coat in broad daylight,
or the dawn to dusk fennec fox, that doughty eagle owl and jackal dodger whose kissing cousin dens pockmark terracotta forests.                                    But not alone in wider worlds are children being deprived.

 
A heartless milieu also  asks our clutch and clan to dwell in
alloy girder mousetraps, those pale decor rat infested tumble downs gouged out by scrimp and scrape rust bucket caterpillars.
Beyond belief we tolerate the nick and hoist elevator, 
that pressure cooker transit flight abduction of the harried wage slave parent,
those cotton  garment dress code senseless
dragonfly stand-ins that hover in mid air.
There’s every chance we’ll leave our nursling’s ire to future bands of mutant stem cell rockers who are duty bound to sculpture rimshots meshed in suckling chimes,
when validating rawhide rattle chainsaw fret board anthems
at crowd mosher mud fests, 
where rivers of apocalyptic visions burst the bank.
If only grown ups listened to that inner vocal quiver that we
may not yet have cast into plastic resin folly for the  generations weaned in toxic smoke rooms,
we’d pollinate a luscious fairground acorn dotted garden with childhood zest its one and only buzzword.
A sweet treat gift with natural flavour pending,
eternal life for baby planet daisy chains of tender petal linkage,
who‘d finally experience pure clutter free environments,
an eco world that values new born thirst for natural realms

Premium Member Heartbroken

I am taking the bus to you,
   holding a red rose on my lap-
      The sky is blue,
and my deep grief is true . . . 
          Oh, there is a past history,
            where my heart has been so broken.

A jagged piece gouged out of my soul,
   from this strange puzzle that is me-
      One part was stole,
yes, there is a deep hole . . . 
          Oh, my love is no mystery,
            can you hear my sad tears spoken.

The past is the past I am told,
   but no, I just cannot let go- 
      You must be cold,
in this deep tomb so old. . . . 
          Oh, the wind is so blustery,
            as I stand here, Mom-  heartbroken.
_______________________
May 13, 2018


Poetry/Rhyme/Heartbroken
Copyright Protected, ID 18-1021-891-01
All Rights Reserved.  Written Under Pseudonym.
Form: Rhyme


Premium Member Boyhood

Boys carry their snow sleds
         up, up
                  to the highest peak
                               scaling risk

their voices pitched
          chattering noise of expectation
          frozen giddiness on snow packed hills
boys belly flop onto plastic sleighs

bubble-headed jauntiness launches them
           lunging down, down
bewildering "swish" of speed
           smashing white drifts
                              projectiles scattered
boys tossed in snowbanks like pizza dough spinning
                                                 baked together in joy
pushing the balance of extreme

runs repeated
         brash, blunt, bold
                                epic span of freedom
ignoring downfalls from ill timed moves
                                in a lost sense of direction

gleefully tired
                snow flecked
                boys wheeze the icy air
                          make their way home
their talk clotted with bravado
beneath it, the unspoken promise to never tire
                                                                 of boyhood

in twilight, the slopes gleam
                    gouged by sled marks
                    that clear a path for growth
                    targeted direction

and if boys fall from the path
                      are there souls
                                      who'll notice?

when ruts threaten
when sleds teeter
                      in unruly spaces




Poem composed February 2, 2022

Premium Member Ball's Pyramid

Born of fire. 
          Black water.
                  A singular spine—

I learned how to live unkissed, until...

The Tasman bared its teeth,
          A cold, crushing mouth.

The moon is an honest Manipulator,

pulling the tide 
          like a noose.
                 grinding the heavy ocean 
                                against my spine.
White surf choking 
          my basalt throat.

The sky tears open,

it's raining roses and love riots,

soft ruin 
          on wet basalt.

Let the gale howl 
          its wrath.
                Against my ledges.

I filled the night's chalice with knots of desire.

        The tempest cracks 
                    over the peak—

Tie me to your Tongue;

make the storm's voice 
          the only thing
                  holding me above the waves.

A fossil of fire.
          That gouged the dark.

I ask the heavy air:

                                   If time turns, will scars stain the sky?

Premium Member The Anatomy of Disgust

A stoma and a scar 
like the Grand Canyon
form a conspiracy 
against my body. 
The stoma--raw and 
fleshy--looks like a red 
and beefy barnacle on 
my side that constantly 
oozes and drains feces 
and waste like an 
overflowing, backyard 
cesspool. It sickens me.

Near the red and moist 
stoma lies a huge, 
crooked scar on my 
stomach and abdomen. 
It is like the Grand 
Canyon of Arizona--an 
immense displacement 
of the local landscape, 
only instead of earth 
and rock and soil it is 
my skin and muscle 
and tissue that has been 
gouged away. Like my
stoma, it sickens me as
well. Because of them
both, my body now
seems to me like the 
raw anatomy of 
disgust.

A Prisoner Is Shown the Torture Implements

The bricks were sweating, nervous.  Icy slime
   had soaked his coat-sleeve, much to his disgust.
Tall baulks of formless timber seemed to climb
   towards the bulbous shadows.  Guido, trussed
and pinioned, tried to scratch the saline rime
   that nagged his upper lip (for scratch he must),
using his shoulder.  Someone’s hand-held lamp
was scouring crazy patterns on the damp.

As Fisc officials fidgeted and fussed,
   Count Guido, motionless, gouged free of Time,
stared at the torture implements.  Nonplussed,
   unravelled, unaware of glare or grime,  
he saw steel jaws, unsoftened by stale dust.
   The hanging chains, when brushed, gave up a chime
as sinister as that serrated clamp
which dominated all the waiting ramp.

The irony was utterly sublime.
   They’ll “put him to the question”, as discussed.
As fitted the prevailing paradigm,
   They’d tear his vitals, gouge him, drill him, thrust
their white-hot spikes quite through him, till his crime
   was suitably admitted, as was “just”.
Some may withstand the pincers’ chew and champ,
but Guido knew he wasn’t of that stamp.

His eyes had hardly started to adjust.
   Prolonging this perverted pantomime
would only satisfy the sadists’ lust.
   If necessary, he’d recant in rhyme.
His knuckles scraped the carapace of rust
   of some utensil, which this fetid clime
so soon engendered.  Turning to decamp,
he felt no pain beyond necrotic cramp.

18th Brumaire

When Napoleon declared the French parliament defunct,
representatives beat him up. A couple hundred miles away,
Beethoven scribbled over his own dedication to Napoleon,
whom he had supposed to be a champion of liberty.


As climbing the greasy pole goes, 
this wasn't exactly polished. 
He was roughed-up - by politicos! 
Can't blame them: no-one likes being abolished 

(for sure, not these ego-bloated shysters!) 
What else? Oh, in a paroxysm of rage, 
an eccentric Kapellmeister 
gouged a hole in a music page. 

For all his smiling talk of ease and glee 
(tomorrow), his eloquent implorings, 
this moment always comes. 
The pipes get drowned by drums. 
The sleek ship of self-regard, so sleazily, 
drifts free of its decent moorings.
Form: Sonnet

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