Tectonic Poems | Examples

climate change

    what comes tomorrow
    leaves some elements of doubt
    earths rain wind and fire
    seems to dominate the skies
    save for our eternal light

    arctics melting ice
    overflowing tropic isles
    oceans reclaim land
    earthquakes raise tectonic plates
    tsunamis obliterate

    carbon dioxide
    polluting earths atmosphere
    fossil fuels banned
    net zero global warming
    when will mankind understand

    8 / 15 / 2025

Painted Doll

Earthquakes of bedlam quell
As tectonic plates of emotional instability cease shifting.  
The tears of a discarded clown, suspended in animation—  
Numbness overtakes.  

Masks slip, shattering.  
Shards scrape, lacerating apathetic flesh,  
Revealing the painted doll underneath.  

Remove its colourful costume;  
Discover marionette strings embedded within a fraying back.  
Strip the howling voices from its waking nightmares.  
Feel deadening voids devour any morsel left of a wounded heart,  
Whilst balmy plasma metamorphoses into gelid hemoglobin,  
Hardening undying devotion into frigid detest.  

Titanium walls, reinforced with razor wire, barricade a hollow soul.  
For she was mere amusement for the indoctrinated masses—  
An illusion of happiness, playing day in and day out.  

Listen, as her inviting laugh transmutes into the cackle of hyenas.  
Watch the paint, plastered upon an unwilling face, crack one last time.  
Her eleventh hour has arrived.  
Bear witness to the merciless statuette you birthed.

Before

I am the pause in a planet’s breath,
a glitch in the code between birth and death.
I am the whisper in fungal lace,
routing news through forest space.

I’m tectonic gossip, slow and deep,
a quarrel continents keep in sleep.
I am the thought a comet had—
just once, before it went full mad.

I’m birdpath memory, sky-sketched lines,
migration’s rumour through tangled spines.
I’m the echo inside an ancient bone
that never quite learned how to moan.

I’m data lost in glacier code,
truth cached along a mammoth road.
I am not God. I am not Man.
I’m what existed before a plan.

I am what silence tries to say
before it backs itself away.
I am the itch beneath your name—
the part of you you cannot tame.

Santorini

Santorini, a stand out beauty, a splendor in the sea, a semicircular
Cycladic island in the Southern Aegean Sea with dramatic caldera
landscape so unique, crescent shaped, offering breathtaking views. 
The famous whitewashed homes, structures with some featuring
glowing blue domes, cliffs falling into the blue crystal clear waters
of Aegean Sea, spectacular sunsets of dazzling kaleidoscope of colors.
Sadly, located at a fault zone with tectonic activity causing tremors.

Summer Reruns

    activists lash out

    reactionaries glower

      ~  tectonic plate shift

Beneath The Cover

When the slave of God became the master of his lover,
Their tectonic lovemaking had shook the world all over.
Then they settled gently into an embrace beneath the cover.

PSYCHEDELIC

PSYCHEDELIC

There was a decade, it was the 60’s I’m sure
When everyday things were just a little bit off
As if there were rumblings in the earth’s core
And when scripted lines gave way to improv

There were plans afoot, some quite nefarious
A Hippy time, with weedy substances to share
And was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Minds set free and wearing flowers in the hair

Rainbow colours swirled to the sound of sitars
Free love, at least it may have been for some
And a coming of age of good electric guitars
Whilst others just sat crosslegged acting dumb

Psychedelia was a mind state and the fashion
Radical changes working through the system 
And all things anti-establishment, the passion
Rules got lost and older people missed them

The time when all free expression took a lift
We may look back at it with little veneration
Not only tectonic plates that began to shift
We still hear echoes of that Beat generation

Literature, festive fire, they will never mourn, for a lifeline, to say, ditto again

I committed to river Volga, the longest river in Europe
Here, estuary, they are sounds, subtle, peaceful and eloquence, a hoopoe
In glum and glee, damage controlling,she, still, suffice a pleasant song, 
life long

You and I, came back for the guy, who, burnt the face, the funeral, encased, and Nirvana...ahem...
The river Volga, still existing, meandering and... perhaps a misfit reason, had a tectonic mayhem

And the poet boat boasted there, "I!"
"Did you see me! I took the one, less travelled by!"  

8:34 AM
August 15, 2024

Turning to Become

("July 7 - Hot and Blue", 2024, original encaustic)

Turning to Become

As they say, humans are like onions,
Densely layered and prone to making others cry.
But I think a better metaphor is Earth herself,
After all the Good Book tells us
We are created in God’s image.

At the surface all is sweetness and light,
The abundant fruits of survival’s tricky game,
While just below tectonic plates drift to a darker rhythm
Leading to all sorts of uncontrollable forces,
And at the core, something unknown,
But pure and original nonetheless.

So with us, we show our best at the surface,
While just below swell the barely repressed tides
Of biases and bigotries, passions and poisons.
And at our core the mysterious essence abides,
Pure but powerful,
The clear light of primordial awareness
For lack of a better, poetic term.

Each of us is such a complex world,
The micro expressing the macro,
Each of us challenged with being ourselves
And getting along with others.
From cradle to grave Life is the constant,
While we the change
The world is turning to become.

(7/10/24)

Fissures and Collisions

earthquakes and fissures
routinely affect politics and relationships
as they act on the earth's crust
tectonic plates clash in subduction zones
they separate at divergent boundaries 

a quake strikes 
will I engage or detach?
wisdom will prevail
I will not be smashed or fall between the cracks

The Sleeping Giant

The sleeping giant stirred
Turned over on one side
The world was engulfed 
By an abnormally high tide.

Tectonic plates quivered
The whole world gave a shake
Before finally settling back 
With just a few minor quakes.

Now totally relaxed
The sleeping giant sleeps on
And until he next stirs
The state of peril is gone.

If only

I hated all those lessons and rules 
Playing sports in the cold and the rain
Exams, tests and essays in schools
l won’t need this stuff in my brain
It’s a waste of my time, it's just lame.

I am leaving school in just one week
No more boredom and tectonic plates
A good job, with some training I seek
Will I miss going to school with my mates
I wonder now what my future awaits

An interview can be a terrifying thing
He said, “Why not a single GCSE?”
“To this role, what do you bring?!”
Five years, I had nothing to please
Seven interviews and now, great unease.

Starting work at eight in the morning
Not what I imagined it would be.
Mucking out sheds, won't be that boring
I look back now, and my errors I see
Will my mates have careers, unlike me?

Now I do the same things every day
I miss school, and my mates, I’m sad
In the cold and the rain, I now dismay
and think of the opportunities that I had
To waste all that time… “was I mad?!”

If only I'd concentrated on school
Had fun, but tried when it mattered 
If only I could have followed their rule.
All that knowledge I could have gathered
My dreams and future are they shattered?

Geologist - PS

Geology, the science of the earth,
elucidates the intricacies of 
creation of continents and opening of oceans,
explores the complex framework
of the multilayered deep interior, 
and unravels the enigmatic structure 
of the mighty mountains,
deciphers from the fossils,
the evolutionary trends of life.
The arcane aspects of earth’s ancient architecture, 
imprinted in the petrified rock strata,
enunciate the 4.5 billion year history of the planet.

My expertise as a geologist 
lies in the study of rock structures,
that ascertain the deformation pattern,
consequential to the interplay of tectonic forces,
drifting the evolving continents,
forming the changing montage of mountain chains, 
like the old Caledonia and the young Himalaya,
and creating earthquake-causing seismic faults,
like in the Saint Andreas and in the Anatolia.

A piece of rock is not just 
a chunk of ordinary stale stone to me,
the lattice of the entwined minerals
enumerates the lyrical anecdote
of the eventful eons of the earth,
motivates me with poetic passion,
as I unfold the mysteries of the blue planet.

Relapse

A quake took place
between my shoulder blades
teeth ground to dust behind my face
the scraping of tectonic plates
scared me to my hiding place
bottles and blankets, a child’s space
it cannot withstand the shakes
that are now all too commonplace.

Tectonic Slide

Humming in the air 
the edge of the cliff echoes;
Raised tectonic slide.

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