Long Streetlamps Poems
Long Streetlamps Poems. Below are the most popular long Streetlamps by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Streetlamps poems by poem length and keyword.
I hid a firefly,
its wings beating against the low strings
like a secret refusing winter.
Your “I love you”s are no longer words;
they have taken the shape of tiny silver fish
crossing my nights, leaving behind them
a trail of crumpled moonlight.
I gather them in a chipped cup,
near the window where the rain writes
alphabets no one can pronounce.
The last notes never truly die.
They simply change their calling:
some become stardust on sleeves,
others keep watch over the lighthouses of sleeping ships.
I answer with my silences,
those transparent birds nesting in my throat.
They know your name better than my voice does.
When dawn unfolds its nautical charts,
I find your refrain beneath the skin of my fears,
in the hum of weary streetlamps,
in an orange forgotten on the table,
in the tiny heart of ordinary things.
I love you too,
not like a promise,
but like an underground river
that keeps singing far from prying eyes.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
Let's start with the fire trucks for every city.
Let's paint the town bandstand and each dog and kitty.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
Let's paint my mother-in-law's little and big toes.
Let's start at the top now, and slather pink on her nose.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
My underwear is already a vivid hot pink.
Let's paint my refrigerator, and my dull gray kitchen sink.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
Where is my prissy neighbor who tells me how to vote?
I will hold her down, as you paint her and her little nanny goat.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
Let's call a town meeting, and change all the uniforms.
Let's change the high school mascot, and fuchsia all the forms.
Anything I want to be Fuchsia?
I do not care how much it costs. Everything is going to be pink.
The streetlamps, the trees, the stop signs, until we run out of ink.
I will be known as the Fuchsia Queen.
You can grovel and bow. I love fuchsia, as you can probably see.
Come closer, my love, so you can become the same color as me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The pond froze so suddenly that a duck mid-quack
found its bill glued shut, an absurd ice sculpture.
Mrs. Harlow’s terrier, mid-leap, hung suspended in the air
like a fuzzy comma, punctuating nothing.
The streetlamps blinked, then hardened into amber icicles—
even the wind gave up, curling into itself for warmth.
Old Man Greeley, halfway through shaking his fist at a squirrel,
became a monument to irritation, his mittens stiff with frost.
The children, though, were the first to notice:
they pressed their tongues to the icy slide at the park
stealing the cold for themselves.
A stroll down Paris city's wet streets.
So, romantic as the Eiffel Tower comes to view.
Vendors line up selling their wares out of carts.
Some shouting, "one euro, one euro only.
The aroma and vibrant colors of seasonal flowers
In buckets, reds, blues, pinks and orange sherbet.
Colorful umbrellas tower
For shade of passer-buyers
In the youthful sunny hours
And the cool refreshing showers.
Evergreen trees so green and proud.
Other trees, bare limbs, leaves dangle tight,
While others drift from the wind thief,
And crunched beneath passerby feet.
Streetlamps a lite as the moon starts to rise,
Still the city streets are full of busy activity.
The sound of the trotting horses
Pulling carriages up and down the main road.
Dizzying lacework of simplicity of life.
10/11/2022
PS, never have been out of the United States.
My heart of stone quenches its thirst in the bowels of misery.
Since the cradle, I have dragged my coffin through Lucifer's nightmares.
I carry the hunger of a vampire, like those gangsters scarred by the flames of hell.
I bear the pedigree of a fugitive criminal wandering through the garbage heaps of the slaveholding Republic of Enlightenment.
To serve as a house ***** is a curse with murderous consequences.
I am at war, like all those workers who know they are being violated by bloodthirsty predators on the crumbling sidewalks of poverty.
My veins are tattooed with the barbed wire of a century that sells its children by the weight of cemeteries.
I chew fragments of hope like shards of glass lodged in the throat of my soul's streetlamps.
Their palaces stand upon the bent spines of crowds reduced to the hunger-stricken silence born of capitalism's savagery.
My existence resembles a sentence carved into the granite of a sleepless court.
Their flattery carries the scent of flowers laid upon the coffins of the people's truths.
I walk among the ruins of my past with the fury of a survivor condemned to be reborn beneath winter's rubble.
Their traps howl like shrouds above the morbid banquets where merchants of darkness feast.
I exorcise millennial curses upon walls of blasphemy, so that the hatred of my oppressors may become the drug that fuels my determination.
I possess the strength of a traumatized survivor rowing against the current across an ocean of poisoned certainties.
Their moralistic platitudes hand out cardboard halos to executioners disguised as the owners of historical truth.
Their handshakes conceal a contract written in the cold ink of willing chains.
They build cathedrals of numbers upon the bones of the relentlessly exploited innocent.
Their clocks devour time like starving vultures circling above miserable wages.
I have seen children learn resignation before they could even write the wishes of their own destiny.
Their demons recite accursed psalms to broken souls kneeling before the altar of the fleeting.
Their praises are nothing but polished helmets worn smooth by the habit of commanding the silence of cemeteries.
I would rather stand in poverty than feast in the kitchens of voluntary submission.
My conscience sings songs of liberation that the sufferings bound to the color of my skin consecrate with fierce joy.
Under the Violet Light
Under the violet light, the thought makes its nest with ease,
and time runs down my temples, like honey into abysses.
The child in me breathes inside green bells,
the father in me returns with steps of sweet smoke.
Cities with shoulders of glass wander through my iris,
and the moon writes an alphabet of algae on my eyelids.
I hear how silence rocks itself in electric leaves,
and the heart beats in the heavens with drums made of snowfall.
I gather myself in the fluid blue mirror of evening,
like a dream fish caught inside a net of song.
The old man in me becomes an infant of light,
and weeps with stars beneath his tongue, in tears of amber.
On the street made of blood, streetlamps with lavender hair
weave me, melancholy, a house out of steam and sound.
My memories pass through like well-behaved comets,
birds with the taste of noon return into my palms.
And everything is a circle, but the circle is a thin spiral:
I climb and descend through myself, with open eyes.
In my chest I carry a sea of astral teas, bitter,
and with every swallow a name is born.
A bell calls me from the grass with nerves of opal,
a shadow holds me by the hand, velvet, arriving late.
I tell myself: I am a bridge of flesh between two miracles,
and I pass, without hurry, through the world — a smoke that loves.
Under the streetlamps, yellowed leaves
drift in ill-fated pairs,
spiralling through the brittle air-
a slow reluctant dance.
Their shadows, stamped on the Earth,
flutter like startled birds,
seeking a phantom escape
from winter's deadly hands.
They brush against a stranger's coat,
clinging for a heartbeat
before the wind wrenches them away-
a cruel puppeteer
that watches them pirouette and writhe helplessly,
carrying them, one by one
into the cold, dying cradle of the Earth.
There they rest
in the borrowed warmth
of a bonfire's reflection
and the sporadic firework
that sputters too weakly
before collapsing into empty embers.
And when all light fades,
and only the sound remains-
they hear
the ominous, melancholy murmur
of leaves crushed
beneath passing feet.
Seamless Breath
by Odin Roark
At sunrise,
Man-child of his heart,
Reaches past the years,
Washes little sleep down the drain,
Accepts the body once tight,
Combs the few strands still allegiant,
And uniforms the spirit
For today’s insistent strategy.
The street he walks
Presents new calendared thoughts
All in parade dress
Ready to forever advance
An abstract reality,
Where boots in lockstep
Accompany him beneath dim streetlamps
Of his insomnia.
Close by,
That place everyone calls infinity,
His aging self moves forward,
Fingering a few coins
In the playground-pockets of his youth,
Reminding him he can still pay his way,
He can remain part of…
Like so many other such days,
The breeze takes his hand,
Making lighter the books
He carries inside his head,
His secret Trojan Horse,
His means of entrance
To that place of voiceless teachers,
The forever windows without glass,
The blackboards erased clean
Of yesterday’s answers,
Anticipating today’s questions.
Such is the place he dreams each day with a smile,
Where eternity’s anima reveals the seamless breath of vision
Only visible with closed eyes.
It’s a cold December afternoon,
Four-thirty, and already dusk is upon us.
We walk side by side, like since forever,
Up the slight incline that takes us to the top of the road,
Shoes scuffling on the tarmac pavement.
Our voices chatter excitedly about the end of term and Christmas,
Each a sentient echo to the other.
Jokes, debates, and questions whizz around the air,
A zephyr of amity.
The streetlamps turn on suddenly,
Bright orange sodium bulbs of fire—
Fire that advances so slowly,
Like a curtain being drawn closed
At the end of the final scene.
Slowly, things began to change.
I no longer waited in the mornings,
And you, after school.
Oblivious, two pairs of squeaking shoes become one,
And we stopped being each other’s echo.
Looking back, I cannot explain why I didn’t do more,
Why I didn’t say more,
Except maybe I was too selfish.
It’s a cold December night;
The bleak winter darkness seems to have swallowed the world,
With not a crumb left.
I sit here, not because I love long nights,
But because I find it hard to dissolve my loneliness in daylight,
Because no matter how much I write in these pages,
I cannot keep you a moment longer.
Time has passed, and you have gone,
Like a popped balloon whose air returns to the vast world alone,
With no chance to meet again.
So let this poem be just a tribute to us:
Look at the butterfly, how it shakily flies,
Drifting beneath sunlit skies
In this cold season.
Look at the crescent moon,
How it steals the daytime bloom
And hides it in a starry tomb.
Listen to the autumn leaves,
How they whisper mournfully as the wind flees,
A tale of time that painfully grieves.
Listen to the winter snow,
How it comes and it goes,
How it hides the sobbing beneath its glow.
I call out again, but this time,
The only thing that meets my ears
Is my own voice.
Nevertheless I hope somewhere, you will hear me and remember
Us.
Listen up, this is a showcase where words swing as a funky drum beat high on Bop and Swing/
hip talk spoken into a full club room of party goers, high on life drinks and weed/
We talk in half notes and blue notes, cool and defiant, loud and fine, the spoken word giants talkin’ bout Ice rides, and why are Americans bein’ arrested and killed so Trump can have his day/
We be cookin’ up phrases hotter than Tower of Power’s horn section at midnight at the Apollo/
We ride the tempo that never disappoints, tough times tucked into the groove/a melody of grit and glow, where every syllable moves/Monk in the corner, keys glowing like streetlamps on a rainy night/
His zigzag rhythm teaches us to hear the truth just right/
This is a new thing, a blue thing, the shape of jazz to come in the air/a blueprint of sing speak improv words with no fear of corrupt politicians rigging our voter elections/ man, power to the people and down with the evil goons in our politics today/
always speakin’ out was Ornette Coleman, with his avant-garde horn soul to soul playin’ into a new terrain that tore the jazz sky apart/Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp—names that make time cry with their bold jazz manifesto playin’ in blocks of new bar structures, and way out chordal jazz sounds. Man, these cats be flyin’ way high on the new thing that they be puttin’ down/
The universe be jazzin’ with zounds of acid jazz, crashing galaxies in a smile, face to face with the solar wind chorus, where the wild and free harmonies pile high the SUN RA way? And where it’s at—the last-minute rush of the jazz workshop’s glow/ Village Gate, where echoes of Lee Morgan still steal the show, Lee’s horn slicing through smoke and memory, like a red comet in bloom, his Sidewinder’s horn of rhythm and hard bop folds into the night of day/It’s out there, it’s always been out there, a pulse you can hear if you listen/a language that refuses to stay still, always insisting, So hear this: the talk isn’t merely a sound, it’s a living parade, a map drawn in jazzy blue notes, where every street corner is a new jazz note played/Keep your ears ready, your feet on the floor/ dig this, man, jazz’s is a living scripture, and we’re only asking for more."