Long Short stories Poems

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


Chapter Ixv

I had an epiphany
While reading Spring and All.
Why do I make poetry?
Is it a certain call?
A call from my mind that needs release?
A call to improve a skill?
A call to write one good entry
To be famous in the next century?
To have students analyse and criticise
The backbone of my mind
that I could never write into short stories.

I contemplated the pleasure of the hand or the pen.
The latter was chosen 
Socrates would be elated.

A question came to me
One I would ask William Carlos William.
Art holds imagination in captivity?
Imagination doesn't captain the ship of art?
Is art rather full of imagination that it can never escape it?
Would Duchamp agree
Or is this what he means?
Let art not be creative for once but confusing
                                             but plain
                                             but unimaginative 
                                             but charmless
(Is this why Williams always rambles about plagiarism?)

So many questions left unanswered 
for the dead I mentioned.
They will stay hidden in this book
On this page
and washed out of my dirty hair
Down the drain
Into the sewers
and possibly out into the sea
or Wherever the drain leads.


Premium Member Fever Dream

Night rain on the window pane is the night sweat of my fevered life dream. Time bloats like the reflection I try to avoid. Tears on the bedroom floor for however many minutes or hours. I crawled in here, felled like a sick elm, sickly scooped-out, hunger hollowed, word emptied. Hands...hands that feel like they don't belong to me any more. Something moves within them, puppets them: a tingle like lightning.

icicle fingers
too cold to hold a teacup -
wrists are winter twigs

Fingernails mauve-mottled, heart struggling to pump, circulation slow-crawling. Hands are too blue-numb to grip, and I'm watching the teacup slip...

white pottery shards
mosaic of tannin stars -
the carpet is stained

I found an anthology of short stories I first read years ago, before dream winced into nightmare. Opening the book, a slip of paper floats out, white-dazzly as a snowflake. My hospital admission letter, the sudden white shock of it bookmarking a favourite story.

Bedtime stories. Sweating between the sheets with Ray Bradbury, electric singing sentences pressed to my skin. The push and pull of his prose singing my body electric, giving me a word-**** I won't forget.

Ray Bradbury's everywhere, he's in the air, his words rearranging themselves into kaleidoscope patterns; strange lexicon of snowflakes, of stars. But voices are reassuring me It's just a little fever dream.

Strange how the memory sea floods me as the mind becomes ever more disconnected; the past's wisps floating like feathers through the fog. Fever flicker of faces: Sarah's, silver-shimmery through tears, her blonde hair haloed in teardrop light.

Tonight, anorexia's voice is the knife strike in a slasher movie: a killing, shrilling eardrum drilling. It's the chainsaw buzz scything corn, the shadow knife behind the Psycho curtain.

My immune system is failing, body breaking down.

waves of nausea
crashing on my body's shore -
gastroparesis

slow fast slow fast slow
stutter stop start slow stop start -
arrhythmical heart

Sibilant strobe of whispers, voices, the past's echoes, floating through fever fog...We don't think you're looking after yourself...You're a risk to yourself...I'm sectioning you under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act...

The minefield mind-trap closes on a single word: How?

How has it all come to this?
Form: Haibun

Premium Member Charlieku - Recalling 5 By 5

Recalling        Laughing          Reading               Learning       Teaching myself
the flicker of   into night with    all of the             to cook and    how to wear
         fireflies    my sisters   Nancy Drew books   loving to eat     makeup

Rainbows over   Pizza              Troll dolls           Ping pong in     Boyfriends and
    Iowan             Saturdays     Hoppity-Hop     study hall and    drive-in movie
  corn fields   Popcorn Sundays   and my bike      Swing Choir         kisses

Lying in grass  Grandma's house  The movie house  Sleepovers'     Dancing to
   seeing            at the end of    with its starred      chit chat        live music at
shapes in clouds    the lane            ceiling           and girlie games    twilight

Hot days            Lilac bushes      Gaily       Herman's Hermits    Writing
  cooling off         and the big    spinning on    Bread and      short stories -
at Weed Park Pool   ballfield    carnival rides    3-Dog Night    dreaming awake 

Snowy winters  The tangled woods  Endlessly  Clothes bought with      All the
   raspberry        behind our           swinging      babysitting     wonderful things
      summers       first house        up to the sky   money        of my youth

Oct. 17, 2018 for the Charlieku 4-3-2 Poetry Contest of charles messina
Words like choir, etc. checked by HowManySyllables.com
Form: Haiku

Eternity, Watching

open       
spaces
made me brighten with possibility;
always I'd climb toward a further view;
the fence, the apple tree,
the garage and even a church belfry 
or two

I'd read comic-books,
magazines and short-stories;
 ripened fruit of a higher tree;
 raising me up from these low
places where I still wait and see...

as if a writers voice is heard 
from some great place beyond,
voicing a worldly view from up above
these places inside I never knew...

later, weary with looking someone other than,
janus-faced without but within, 
I'd write poems reaching past
my little life of 
constant yearning

burning with voyeuristic words 
watching as stars
loving the breech of night
wishing they were too,
looking from a further place
that sees from a deeper, from a farther
immaterial view; where nothing means anything,
out of sight,
beyond this gravity we're always falling to...

Premium Member My Autobiography

  
	       There’s a ten-year-old in me still
                  hitting a home run to win the game
                    in the bottom of the ninth

               He’s throwing a Hail Mary touchdown
                    to pull off the upset with no time left on the clock

               And he’s drilling a three-pointer from midcourt
                    to force the contest into overtime… 

               There’s a twenty-year-old who refuses to forsake me
                  the one who’s going to write the Great American novel
                    as soon as he gets his collection of short stories published… 

                There’s a fifty-year-old in me somewhere who won’t let go
                   spending every moment of his spare time finishing that novel
                     and then tearing up the last three chapters as soon as he’s done… 

                And now there’s a wistful seventy-five-year-old looking back on it all
                   and wondering when all those versions of himself waved the white flag
                     and agreed to let him finish this poem with a sigh


Premium Member Allhallows

Sometimes I’ll rouse, in darkest night, to a twilit form, bending over me, so closely we’re sharing the same still air. I never startle, I somehow know, even before I’m completely awake, that it’s not mortal.

This malevolent force stalks time worn halls like disease. It thrives on inertia and stress, it drinks in fatigue like a vampire devours blood and slowly chews on fragile-hopes until they’re desiccated and smell like rotten flesh.

This death like thing waits for each of us, in tedium, as danger hides in shadow - growling with sullen impatience to smother us. 

It’s name is failure. Sometimes, I’m so afraid.

.
.
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ps, I write short stories too

Premium Member Before The Ink Runs Dry

Before The Ink Runs Dry 
Am I A Poet? 
I have written #800 poems. 
I thought I was an artist. 
Creative illustrations. 
Creative writings. 
Changes passed the horizon. 
I can’t see everything in front of me. 
A new chapter moving forward. 
We are writers. 
Deep thinkers. 
Until the ink runs dry. 
Always a pen in hand. 
Pondering a new letter. 
Poems are short stories. 
Document your life. 
Written in a journal, be inspired. 
Piano songs in the background. 
Clouds floating all around. 
Maybe one last poem. 
Before the sun goes down. 
Eyes are heavy. 
Candles are burning. 
The love of poetry.
Form: Rhyme

Premium Member An Audience

An audience in the overhanging trees 
glean upon the sight darkening light appease. 
Free spirit blotting out the sun shortly ease; 
dancing image in the shady shadow seize. 

Glean upon the sight darkening light appease;
nesting birds departing and upward release. 
Dancing image in the shady shadow seize. 
with the assist of teasing most fickle breeze. 

 Nesting birds departing and upward release 
 reaching out to touch the outspread wings ~ shall please,
 with the assist of teasing most fickle breeze.
 as they cry breaking the angst silence unease.
 
 Reaching out to touch the outspread wings ~ shall please, 
 free spirit blotting out the sun shortly ease; 
 as they cry breaking the angst silence unease
 an audience in the overhanging trees.


12/19/2019
resubmitted poem on 10/17/2020

A Monorhyme Pantoum

An Audience, was inspired by the birds that are always singing day and night in the tree in front of my bedroom window. It is written in a Pantoum form using  all same sound rhyming words called Monorhyme. 

The name of my  book is called 
Rhapsody of Poems Copyright 2020
 An Audience is found on page 90 in the book.

Front Cover is an oil painting called “Tea Party” painted by me in 2014.
My daughter-in-law modeled for the painting. I dedicated the book to my loving husband that passed on August 29, 2018.

The book contains a variety of short stories and poems, in the forms of Free Verse, Rhyme, Abecedarian, Quatrain, and others.
© Eve Roper  Create an image from this poem.
Form: Pantoum

rule of ten

As one gets older 
One often looks back
At all the things you did
In your life.

The good, the bad, and the ugly
And we all have those moments
Because we are human.

And some things you desired
But never pursued.

For me, it was a dream
Of becoming a famous writer
While I can write poems 
And short stories,

My greatest desire
Was to write 
The Great American Novel.

And sadly it will remain
An unfulfilled desire
As I don’t have the patience or energy .

To edit my six rough draft novels
Turning them into something publishable
And they may die when I die.

And I am in good company.

The rule of ten rule applies
Of one hundred people
Who want to write a novel
Less than ten percent finish it
Of those less than ten percent publish it
Of those less than ten percent make any money
Of those less than ten percent make a living 
At writing their novels.
© Jake Aller  Create an image from this poem.

Ice Skating

At Lake Mission Bell, after the winter scared it solid, kids carve short stories in broken, confused cursive into the ice with pens of sharpened steel. It’s a beautiful  thing to watch geniuses compose their art. The other night, before the winter sun fell back into the earth and before the ice reclaimed its smooth canvas, I caught a glimpse of the beginnings of a child’s magnum opus. I’ll do my best to translate the figure eights and cursive Gs or Ys. I’m not a professional but it read
something like this:

“My cousin put  an Ace of Spades in his bike wheel and it goes thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap (this goes on for a while) and I love the thwaps so much I put the Queen of Hearts in mine and now we thwap all over town and down to the mini-mart to buy Gatorade and Kit-Kat bars. There’s nothing else I’d rather do and there’s no better card than the Queen of Spades except for maybe the Ace of Spades.”

 childhood stories
writ on icy canvases ~
reclaimed by Spring’s thaw
© C.W. Bryan  Create an image from this poem.
Form: Haibun

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