Long Prose Poems
Long Prose Poems. Below are the most popular long Prose by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Prose poems by poem length and keyword.
I grew up in a small rural Iowa town
my parents were spawn of farmers
we had “farms” out in the country
we did not live on them but we planted them
our summers were spent hoeing, weeding, raking.
a child I teach stopped me. “There is a hoe in this story?”
Loud laughter. They know about hoes apparently.
I have to explain about the other kind of hoes.
we planted our crops in straight rows made by a tractor
then put a neat wooden cross at the end of each row
telling what we had planted there – radishes, carrots, lettuce,
there is nothing like a homegrown tomato or a homegrown radish
store bought produce cannot hope to compete.
It’s peculiar, how the sky is crying masks.
Odd how the sand drips and it leaves behind the past.
For if names were built in years, set in stones to cast,
a breeze can rise so high, then crash.
Know a forest will grow for years, and tears they know, one breath to ash,
the sight will leave in awe,
for it can flaw, though the thought it blooms to last.
Shadows will often stay, when the sun has come to pass,
and laughter all so loud, when the devil comes to dance.
But know that some things will last you forever,
and blind ones can’t find their way into heaven.
So I cry for all whom masks have come to melt.
The ones who hid behind, are not the ones we held.
So truly, how I felt, was lied to, robbed, a theft.
Too sad for them I feel, it’s all just come to end.
Their loss it was, for all through outer space,
a star will pass just once in place.
For as their masks, now falls so high from grace,
they still now dream of us, a ghost to chase.
"It happens just because we need to want, and to be wanted too, when love is here or gone to lie down in the darkness and... listen to the warm.” -Rod McKuen
~
The night has shaken tarnished-black silver, gilding the bedroom,
where I've been trying to sleep.
There is hardly a thing left uncovered by moonlight.
Alone in the dark I am thinking of you.
Of the nights long past midnight,
when we would wait for the moon to come to the window
like a welcomed old friend who is glad to come in.
Spending wee hours, as the stars bathed our faces.
You would tell me your secrets, then would listen to mine.
You would hold me against you 'til the wee hours slipped in,
while we watched as the sunrise would climb up the walls.
Night sounds would caress us, while we whispered warm nothings,
that fell into each crevice, to last evermore.
Now I lie here awake, and echoes are shallow,
caught in the spaces between now and then.
Swollen with sorrow, but with lasting resistance,
against times that have taken and times that have borrowed
They beg me to listen, and listen again.
Warm words we whispered, have lingered, to never fall through the cracks
of the years of forever.
___________________________________________________________
5/3/16
Contest: "Listen To The Warm"
Sponsor: Laura Loo
When I was younger so much younger than today, I used to go to lots of poetry events. There was something called Red Sky that was every week, people were so very serious about it. Then one day I had an epiphany, "My god. I'm at a poetry event," and stopped going.
Later it all became poetry slams. Went to a few of those, too, in awe of the awfulness. People with neither talent for acting, for reciting, for rapping, and certainly not for writing poems, put all these lack of talents together and had total support from audiences that consisted in the main of people only waiting for their turn.
Once when I'd blessedly escaped from a typical slam, there was a homeless drunk across the street from the noisy venue. He was having his own private poetry slam.
He kicked a telephone pole and screamed "Hello telephone pole!" stomped on the concrete and screamed, "Hello sidewalk!" then peered into a garbage can with "Hello garbage!" and shook the hell out of a newspaper vending machine, "Phuck you news!" It was a better poem than any that was being screamed inside at the slam.
The author hears a collective effort to fulfil his idea, and instantly realises that it is not quite what he had in mind, or even not at all, in some places. But realising the mediator's costs, he may admire it in somewhat contradicting way, just as the average person sometimes wholeheartedly supports the team that beats his idols. Upon a closer look it turns out that the dilemma known as the performer's mishap is not so contradictory even in its extreme incarnation. The author might ask himself whether, on this particular day, his music should really be played in this way, as if inviting his parent to admire his child's independence. I am almost certain that the author will not find an unequivocal answer to his question. From what the hell you've done here to oh well that is even more interesting in terms of dynamics the distance is short - it doesn't seem to me that these opposites can come together, but they don't seem extremely far apart either. What does the listener hears in sum? A moment of his life, or, if you like, a moment of his listening biography. Whether this experience will be remembered, whether it will be distinguishable among thousands of other experiences, seems obscured.
Face book is where you take a look
And read and read, like it is a book
Face book
Is by hook or crook
Like a fish being caught in a hook
Face book
A place where people keep up
With their friends
A place to make new friends through friends
A place where also some have met
Their END
Face book
An addiction for some
An Aphrodisiac it could become
How many friends you have
Can be shown as a total sum
Face book
A way to share your life
With only those who matters most
But everything has a price to pay
Do you give too many secrets away?
Those with eyes that can see right through
Are you satisfied with all who comes to know you?
Are you willing to share your most priceless gift and hit “send?”
To someone you may or not know to “add as your friend”?
Written by MJM 2011 Feb.
The plus one of the world is 'YOU' If no 'YOU', the world is minus one. A world without 'YOU' is incomplete.
Did you know that when a sparrow falls, God takes note? Did you know that God counted your original hair strings? Did you know that we can also get our names written in heaven?
Sometimes we mortals under or overestimate, and sometimes we guess.
You are not the product of 'theoretical guessing' but a result of an 'exacting science'.
Stop and consider what you have done, are doing, and are going to do. Consider that what others do, all 7 billion of us, are are not what you do. Also, consider that life is not about simply what we do as much as who we are, and there is absolutely no one present or future who can be 'you' better that you.
When you arrived, you were given a name, and the place and time of your birth were recorded. Moreover, God knew you before you were formed, and had assigned a purpose unique to you. So that there would be no mistaking of you, your DNA and fingerprints match none but you. And about this, make
no mistake: We all matter, and a world without you is a lesser world.
052620PSCtest, A World Without You, JCB Burl
Or Polar cold downtown Toronto:
In a bourgeois parallel universe,
in a moral vacuum,
it's indeed no matter:
From one place to the other,
and then back again:
In overdrive
escape from Nowhere,
assured,
alive.
New heads already on the
chopping block, waiting for the
inevitable, fatal sword to fall,
nevertheless more terrified the
other, truly lesser shoe will drop.
Chickens home and roosting.
The flies back,
the crowd buzzing.
Up from the bluff,
from the wild, foreboding surf,
the booming breakers,
True religion, True philosophy,
She only rises,
one careful step at a time,
one day at a time.
Last nite my world suddenly tilted
Love was stolen choked wilted
As I live and breathe my heart was cracked
I didn't push the hurt away instead it attacked.
He had awoken those emotions I thought were dead and gone.
I had been numb for so long.
His mind missing never will it return..
His soul forever burns
His crime this time
He broke my heart and took my rhyme
Wilted dead inside forever
Happiness belongs to me never
Crushed desperate to be able to breathe
He was my air all that I need
He played his game and played it well
In ignorance three times I fell.
Each time a little shorter distance before I hit
The last time juices didn't even cool before he split
My soul blackened and charred
My emotions cold brittle and on guard
Love gone, taken, broken in disregard.
Left lying, wasted, weak heart beat signifing the end
Why did he have to pretend
Bitter cold, im left alone once again
Death doesn't come but I will never live within
The sight of this bourgeois, career politician/businessman
(A so-called liberal, no less)
Seated high on the dais at the all candidates meeting,
Looking down on his constituents.
Trying to look as human as possible,
He's wearing his best crocodile smile tonight.
And no matter how hard he tries to look harmless,
He still looks slightly inhuman, perhaps like a
Conspiratorial, world-enslaving E.T., or
Somewhat mad, Byzantine potentate.
Reptilian, his soulless, lifeless eyes momentarily
Slide back and forth in their sockets,
Back and forth across the crowd before him,
As he scrutinizes, with a cold, calculating, alien look,
His sheep-like electoral victims-to-be.
Or maybe what's most disturbing, even truly
Frightening, is that the strange look in his eyes
Actually seems like the look in the eyes of, God forbid,
The 12-year-old sociopath whose photo was in the newspapers:
The unfortunate, little monster who tragically, heartbreakingly,
Willfully murdered a child half his age.
In a truly gentler, kinder world,
Work would not make a person merely enslaved;
Family would not be used as a weapon against one;
And the struggle for liberty would not, in
Effect, make real freedom the domain of only the few.