Long Wastebasket Poems
Long Wastebasket Poems. Below are the most popular long Wastebasket by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Wastebasket poems by poem length and keyword.
The no ending story
I have tried to tell a story of a rat that fell from the ceiling
it landed among drinkers in a café I ran,
never had I seen a café emptying of people in two seconds
flat; the rat escaped too.
I also want to talk about the woman who had been sober
for ten years, a safe hand in soothing drunken men.
I also wanted to talk about the eccentric drinking law
allowing me to sell beer between five and ten o’clock
but the customers had to eat first. usually, a sandwich
after that, they could drink as much as they wanted.
I will tell you about the rat plague when they pull down
The old abattoir, but I will leave it for now since I can’t
get the beginning right, I dislike, rats they are vermin
and I can hear one eating ink in the wastebasket.
endless story
I have tried to tell a story of a rat that fell from the ceiling
It landed among drinkers in a café I ran,
Never had I seen a café emptying of people in two seconds
flat; the rat escaped too.
I also want to talk about the woman who had been sober
for ten years, a safe hand in soothing drunken men.
I also wanted to talk about the eccentric drinking law
allowing me to sell beer between five and ten o’clock
but the customers had to eat first. Usually, a sandwich
After that, they could drink as much as they wanted.
I will tell you about the rat plague when they pull down
The old abattoir, but I will leave it for now since I can’t
get the beginning right, I dislike, rats they are vermin
and I can hear one eating ink in the wastebasket.
The Paying (I wish) Public marvels
at what comes out: those explosive, star-spangled
phrases and melodies (the few times I get it right);
but what of the great-real that went in, the life-struggles,
the tears, the soul-smothering isolation – not to forget
the little left of me, squirming squiggly, imprisoned
with the many nameless, sparsely filled, crumpled-up
white-pulp battlefields in the wastebasket – my inky piles of bones –
clawed-out guts (the years of painful extraction,
likened to going to the dentist, then being told, that I have a serious abscess,
needing an immediate Root Canal, though unfortunately
Covid has prevented our delivery of anesthetic)...
Oh well, here goes again:
Roses are red – so is a poet's blood;
The moon strings silvery, strum-able beams –
myself too busy to play them, running on a
treadmill, going nowhere, in my Write-blocked-nightmare,
ominously pulled from words my stalled mind should be chasing...
So, my Love (Poetry), she does
and she does not – till one
mightily fit for publication:)
Unwritten page
A blank page on the word processor I ought to leave it this way
just look at it and dream what I could have written.
If I delete the words written, it will be a blank page again.
No history on a crumpled-up sheet of paper in a wastebasket.
For now, it is too late, but I might erase the page written
if I so choose.
All poems are if written with passion, great poems
if not by the readers but by the poet, who boarded the wrong bus
as my wife did in Johannesburg many years ago
great was her consternation when stopping an available bus
to find it was for black people.
Being born in Congo by a black mother and a Dutch father
she identified herself as black.
Not so, said the authority she was Portuguese.
Racism and ignorance, now it is the Moslems turn to feel
the surge of hatred.
We want the Moslems to behave like us, but they
insist this is not possible in the name of their religion.
What do I do now? Erase the story?
I ain't normal, not even close
not even as a child, played with dolls
and paper cut-outs but I always decapitated
them (do you remember mother?)
finding the head of my sister's Clarabell
doll floating in the utility sink in the
basement but my tedddy, my teddy how I beat him
until he came into my young child's dreams to
seek revenge and you destroyed him for me mother
you used a kitchen knife to cut him to pieces and
made me watch (do you remember mother?)
it was so sad, so strange watching teddy's
stuffing falling into the wastebasket
He was my only friend and you killed him, MOTHER!!!
At 22 you had me sent to an asylum because I (you said)
threatened to kill you but I couldn't/wouldn't do that
because you killed teddy for me (do you remember mother?)
He was my only friend