The spectrum.
Brilliant.
Millions of pinpoints.
Slamming down.
It’s like everyone is doing jumping jacks at once.
Our ankles hurt.
The spectrum.
Only lasts as long as a million of us bunched up,
tangled, scraped up pieces of globs.
I am unspoken for.
So I pledge my heart to the spectrum.
Of potential and of not.
The pain of remembering
Sunlight filtered through the high oak leaves, where summer stretched out long and bright, we scrambled up the mossy bark and reached until we touched the light. Hand over hand, my sister led, no branch too tall, no sky too wide, with scraped-up knees and breathless laughs, and all the universe inside.
Down in the yard, the cool blue pool waited to catch our cannonballs, a splash that sent the morning free beyond the wooden garden walls. We raced across the surface tension, underwater, eyes open wide, a pod of dolphins bound together by the pull of the shifting tide.
When shadows grew across the grass, the yard became a battleground, for hide-and-seek and Tag you're it, and every secret spot we found. We ran until our lungs were fire, until the porch light flickered on, collecting moments in our hands before the golden day was gone.
Now time moves fast and miles stretch out, but locked inside the heart remains the echo of those summer shouts, the quiet after summer rains. A tangled web of laughing voices, a fortress built of grass and sun— the gentle weight of growing up together, bound as more than one.
We are not that young anymore.
Meet the mad, manic, Mister Murgatroyd
An undynamic blistered humanoid
A curred curmudgeon you don't want to meet
In a bar, back alley, or dead end street
He's a filthy, flagrant, flatulent fart
Sewer rat mind and tarantula heart
Cleaves cuddly kittens, feeds them to guppies
Pet pranks the pet shop, punting the puppies
He's our white whale and our snake in the grass
A demon from hell, one pain in the ass
His black, rotten heart's beyond all belief
We need good karma to offer relief
Slurp burping some soup, soup wouldn't swallow
Burp slurping for breath, death would soon follow
A lone chicken bone was lodged in his throat
His face had changed tone and started to bloat
No one there for the Heimlich maneuver
Cuz no one cared from here to Vancouver
No smelling salts would be administered
No certificate of death was registered
They scrambled his brains to stop his last twitch
Then scraped his remains, dropped him in a ditch
A soulless soul and one sorry old sot
Heavens to Murgatroyd?... Heaven thinks not!
I tried to heal my open wounds
I always seem to feel
They've gone away
But the scars still remain
And the ones on my heart
Will never heal
They wear me down
Tear me apart
I grieve for my old self
When the only pain I felt was a scraped knee
I wish I was okay
But I never will be
So I pretend
And wonder when it will end
But I’ll be fine
I always am
But I keep trying to heal
To feel real
And maybe im not
The artist starved beneath dawn’s cold whisper,
easel tilted, drunk with yesterday's grief.
Paint clung to his fingers like blood,
a palette broken, leaking joyless rainbows.
Each breath was a war he couldn't finish,
lungs collapsing under the weight of color.
Light cracked through the blinds,
half mercy, half mockery,
and the brush trembled in his grip,
a dagger dipped in quiet despair.
Every stroke carved pieces of him away,
his veins screaming for reprieve,
screaming louder than the silence.
Coffee cups gathered dust on the windowsill;
he hadn’t noticed them for weeks.
The room smelled of sweat and turpentine,
raw and sharp as the edge of failure.
Each design stripped him bare,
flesh scraped thin by his own will.
He fought sleep like a boxer with no gloves,
shadows moving faster than his hands.
“Keep creating, keep bleeding,” hissed the echoes,
as if ghosts held the brushes too.
The canvas stared back, white as a corpse,
waiting for its pound of flesh.
He had died seventeen thousand times,
not once with enough left to bury.
Is it real or is it fake
Has the identity been scraped
From a picture that is right
But not theirs
Is it a business or a fraud
Are photo's copied - don't applaud
Or upload/install a software
They recommend
For these appauling lies
Upon which big business thrives
By stealing all your money
Or taking personal info for bad ends
Whatever it's corrupt
So through police/.gov disrupt
So mind your banks indice
And don't let them destroy your peace
We sit together,
all legs and breath and sweat.
Our love is like honey, raw and sticky sweet,
open wound blood from a scraped knee.
I take it pumped into my veins,
pulsing through my arteries,
bite my lip just to taste it.
Sink our teeth into each other like we're tender meat;
juices dripping down my chin.
The blurry light of a heat wave felt
in the aching wind moving waves, hair, and heart.
The humming fan overhead mixes
with the ringing in my ears,
and I know forever cannot stay,
but in the silence, she is here.
EPIPHANY
I awaken most every day grateful not to be in an early grave. It seems it's been chasing me most of my life. I am no longer in one piece, Uncle Sam did a number on me. I wake up alone and greet my smartphone, cause I'm no longer fit for a wife.
I knew what I wanted to be one day, but the world didn't quite see it that way. Murphy's been imposing his laws on my dreams. I rolled with the punches, as they came in bunches, scraped myself off the mat, figured out where I'm at, and went on being the best I could be.
Dad is what I had left to be, and it's challenges unique to me. I learned through my kids a true sense of myself. Those things that I longed to be were titles and labels, not me. What's me is who I am. Chasing ego was a sham, just some dusty old crap on a shelf.
Norman’s snowman decided to hit the road
he was disgusted by his current frosty abode
I am leaving tonight at eight, he told Norm and me.
He said he was heading toward Livestock, Tennessee
I heard later that he melted along the way
His parts were scraped off the sixty-seven highway
We had warned him not to go, begged him to stay
Let that be a lesson to you Norm said to his new snowwoman, Kay
Born with nothing
Always Dreaming
Walked without knowing
Learn to learn
Holding what I could
Stand where I stood
Break without Breaking
A short felt burn
Empty feeling
Refusing to see quiting
Always engulfed
By choices that wasn't
I scraped for needs
I broke deep within
Life new beginning
I slowly woke up
I miss the days when dusk meant bikes..
Bare feet, scraped knees and muddy hikes.
When time moved slow through summer skies..
And dreams still burned in younger eyes.
We chased tomorrow with prize in sight..
With sleepless hearts burning bright.
And growing old seemed nowhere near..
With not a single thought of fear.
The clocks grew louder day by day..
As moments quietly slipped away.
We earned our wage, we paid our dues..
Yet somehow lost the life we’d choose.
Now tired souls sit still at last..
And sift through memories of the past.
Remembering peace we brushed aside..
While racing through this hurried ride.
Perhaps the richest hearts we keep..
Are not the ones that climbed so steep.
But those who learned, though late it seems..
A gentle life outshines all dreams.
At the edge of the Thar desert’s sandy festoon,
the train of the ancient Aravalli hills cascades
with the undulating landscape of antique dunes,
cradles joyous Jaipur, the pink city of Rajasthan.
On carved hill-top mighty forts’ stone walls splay,
wrap the pictorial city portrait with history drape.
Aligned through the sculpted ornate gateways
the orthogonal roads symbolize cubic cityscape .
The archaic forts on the chiseled hill crest
stand like the regiment of outdated sentinels
on the ramparts of the glorious olden times,
embedded in the wind-scraped craggy ridges.
The tinsels of drizzling moonbeam in satin nights
paint murals with stardust on concrete canvas,
framed as silhouette on the smoky desert sky.
I’m charmed by the charisma of this colorful city.
into the cauldron go lizard’s tail with my morning mail
a rusty copper key from the local jail and kite full of hail
schliggety diggety miggity mama dah moo
where is the wasp wing, I just scraped off my left shoe?
I toss in sixteen tears from an antelope’s right eye
We soon should have a handsome house-cleaning guy
I look at you, you look at me.
Are you what I could be,
If all my life I was set free?
Not altogether, you were lost.
It made me stronger, but at what cost?
I lost you in pieces here and there,
In winter frost, in summer glare,
In autumn fall, and spring clear.
I lost you in every season of every year,
Bit by bit, until you eventually disappear.
Little by little, another person was shaped.
Little by little, the old person was scraped.
The shell of a new person around was draped.
And when the shell was blown away,
Your real reflection there still lay.
No arguments would make it untrue.
By losing you, I was losing me too,
Because you were me and I was you.
Definition: The liminal space between boundaries
where nationality is blurred.
I exist at the invisible archipelago
of the West Coast American Dream;
20 minutes from the water,
a short highway trip to the Tijuana border.
I am culturally mixed,
diverse in my chosen origin.
Lemon trees grow in tandem
with scraped knees and broken skateboards.
Names are intertwined with ethnicity,
but chosen instead to fit personality.
I am not just the fifth letter of the alphabet,
in between Escobar and Elena.
Sub Categories
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.