The cardboard cylinder begins
to peek,
The prognosis is grim, the
outlook is bleak.
Only three sheets left on this
spinning white wheel,
And I'm starting to think about
how I should feel.
The plush, quilted days of my
youth have all passed,
When I unrolled with abandon
and lived life as fast.
Now the perforations are
marking the clock,
As I desperately downsize my
remaining stock.
Will I go out on glory, a two-ply
embrace?
Or be wiped from existence
with no saving grace?
The roll spins much faster the
closer it gets
To the end of the tube and a pile
of regrets.
I am down to the glue on the
very last square,
Just a ghost of a tissue, a
whisper of air.
So remember me kindly,
unspoiled and undone,
It was a beautiful, two-ply,
magnificent run.
One- Liner
Like the last square of paper
on a spinning brown roll,
we're all just clinging to the
cardboard at the end of the
bowl.
I’ve been disabled a long time.
Tides with trombone sounds.
Whisked around.
Whisking sounds, coming from an implosion.
Disability is not some catastrophe.
It’s just perforations everywhere but nothing is torn ever.
I’ve been a person for a long time.
And when you’re a person, you receive person hands, person feelings.
A few times over, the goop and grime got to me.
I think being disabled is ok, not horrible, like a boat, or a sea creature.
Disability is not some catastrophe, I said.
It’s just like walking on a super nova.
The creaks and splotches.
Make me wonder when.
Like a thought of fuzz.
Combines like chicken claws.
Similar to how January doesn’t like anyone.
Enters my mind like a speck of gratitude.
Or everlasting stuff and weirdness.
Like a thought of fuzz.
Existence is a steering wheel speckled with glazed over feelings.
Enters my mind with patience.
Everywhere like perforations.
I have enough teetering in my pocket.
Lasts all February.
Curling, breathy, bearing weight and nothing more.
Like a thought of fuzz.
Floats for a while.
Drops down everlasting.
Hearts are patched up
stitched tight
yet
small perforations
may
let in
that strange light
that is not light
like God is not God
Love is not a Band Aid
love doesn’t heal
it cocoons self-inflicted
wounds
it maintains the hurt
at acceptable levels
Rubber bullets
in time
wound the shooter
If your heart is big
you're going to need
more bandages
You may occasionally
stub a toe on love
however
you're more likely
to lose the ability
to walk or talk sensibly
No one ought to -
should
blame you
for this predicament
this
situation
...but they will
#The_begining_of_my_end
Listen to the echoes of my heart, something of great magnitudes, swifts by, my grounds are shifting, my spirit tilting, gripping my least to witnessing this phenomenal presence, hook me to the air, as I gasp for my stand, a chance to say I too have witnessed
Her tiny soul dipping eyes, I'm subjected with perforations on my spirit. When I flip to her sight, my whole twist, to bowing if not worshipping her fragmented frame of distance awe, seal my eyes, I have seen enough to last me my eternity. Strap my wings, no sky of earth is worth my hovering beyond this. Chain my legs and throw away the keys, I have walked into my enough, my last lap.
Come closer and witness the overflow in my heart, to its brim, it has been filled. Listen closer, the rumbling sound of jubilation, something is been celebrated in my heart beat, a presence so immeasurable,
Seal my heart, I have shed enough love already. Seal my eyes, I have seen enough already. Weld my ears, I have heard enough already. Block my brains, I have thought enough. Take away my pen, I have written enough poems, this is the beginning of my end
#Poetic_Ink
The Chucko Children
roller derby brains passing into the steel mainspring
if we eat these slivers of veal paradox and watercress
the chucko children will slip beyond the sly pastures
they will forever traverse the bone rub badlands
the golden hard-on matinees, the grinding piano teeth
tearing it up, absorbing the pretenses, the stoney soufflés
the moulin rouge’ side glances dripping from the stars
now it’s clinging to your skin like jellyfish regurgitations
the simplex television people rattle chains during halftime
roller derby brains passing through the perforations
the backwash inseminations from a thousand lost nights
the dusty facades of made-up motel girls smoking fear sticks
hey you, yeah you, i got ten bucks in my pocket all for you
maybe you and me can test the winds and apply the dance
we can slip beyond the sly pastures, the stoney soufflés
the war still rages, even as the comatose night sleeps on
We can hear the chucko children tearing it up grinding it out,
bringing it on, again and again inside the steel mainspring
Ruckuses uproars and turmoil
But that was not all
That our ears perceived
Bloodshed carnage and bloodbath
Of our own bloods
That was what our eyes lived with.
Our bodies were tripped over, tied up, tasered
Spanked, flogged, scourged and savored
By the inhuman communities.
With blood leaking out
From swelled veins
And with lesions and cicatrices
Getting deeper with every perforations
While we sat fragile, worn
Looped lassoed and shackled in silence
Watching shadows and scenes
of assaults, electrocutions, bashing
Decollation and alive burns
Beckoning to deaths
And we are some of the bondage survivors
From a world without peace and enslaved.
~Nayanika Dey
(Baldassare Galuppi was a music composer
in 18th century Venice. Johann Pachelbel
came a little earlier. Maurice Chevalier and
Mistinguette were vaudeville artists and
on-off lovers in Paris in the 1920s.)
Your filigree correctly fret,
those perforations, so correct!
And how I love that dying strain,
suggesting sadness, feigning pain!
A twisted, coloured paper chain,
a love both sacred and profane,
your melody's a silhouette:
imperfect pleasure, sweet regret.
Your sharp and sugared vinaigrette
is like a Pachelbel duet,
a sorbet made with fine champagne,
or raindrops on a window pane,
the fragrant soil of southern Spain,
a grief I still can't ascertain -
Chevalier and Mistinguette?
That wistful chime! I hear it yet!
A thousand midnights tread,
Highwire circus acts
Traversing the lavender Horizon-crease;
I memorize such sudden perforations,
Keep them under my swollen tongue
Only to purge them gracelessly
Back into your fist.
Replace my stumbling almost-words
With vastness:
A self-induced universe freckled by
Cauterized cigarette burn stars
And half empty beer cans.
I fill my lungs with feral smog,
You fill your head with smoke;
My nose trickles blood freely.
And if it was not for such ongoing facades--
Psuedointelect, rabid romances,
My world on unstable axis--
We might have,
By now,
Enshrined our Hearts in plaster molds,
Traded our eyes for seaglass pebbles.
The cherry blossoms have yet to bloom under
This hemisphere of the city:
Bare branches claw against dusk
and, in masochistic frost,
You burn your fingerprints into
My back.
"You Must Set Yourself on Fire"
Jenna-Nichole Conrad
Wordsmith
The two for one price deal read “Open here”
with slick dotted lines and sharp arrows clear.
But false perforations
foiled nails, teeth and patience.
Surrendered, she opted for pop tab beer.
Over the precipice I see the face.
Shrouded, yet alive and breathing.
What are you protecting?
Knowing me in ways I mustn't.
And I ... certainly on the other side,
knowing nothing of the face.
Inward through my perforations,
such a vain attempt to gather my soul.
Face me naked and honest.
Leap boy,
I will catch you.
I am afterall what you seek.
You are, afterall,
the face over the precipice.
The dawn purloined by a shadowed thief,
in the kitchen morning blues were stealing,
across the sprawl of formica grief
with hot buttered daybreak unappealing.
Perforations flooded to slake the thirst,
and down on thermoplastic, kneeling,
a hot Hail Mary brewed and burst
and spiderweb cracked the ceiling.
The chain mail pot spilled a stain of toffee
and dreams died once more with feeling,
rats in the walls tapped a preference for coffee
with the legend: “Move over, Darjeeling.”
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.