Turgid Poems | Examples

The Sky Today

I need to write about the sky today
for oft I pen as to my turgid past;
I look towards the heaven, lo, it's gray
the fresh dawn's shining yellow-purple hues
long surpassed by darkening clouds of hate
but is there ever beauty in the news?
Perhaps, but mostly hidden deep of late.
Ominous clouds of thunder threaten storms;
and lightning strikes in peaceful urban spots
while every year our little planet warms.
Today, it's Social Media calls the shots
long gone the sanity of just debate.
I need to write about the sky today
it may prevent me getting too irate
I wish it to be sapphire blue, not gray.

Iambic Pentameter

When it came to iambic pentameter
Alexander Pope was no dumb amateur.
In his strict use of it he achieved a skill
often with a monotonous overkill –
a danger every poet should not commit
unless he likes his thoughts in a straitjacket,
and the flow so turgid and mechanical
the line will cease to sound natural –
more strident, unmellifluous and harsh
like a stomping, goose-stepping march.
Now here’s a fast and easy suggestion
to unclog a line’s bumpy congestion
which Pope and other poets used to great
effect when they deemed it appropriate :
they added an extra syllable or stress 
which opened it and gave it smoothness.
These little extras acted like a breach
and made the line read like spoken speech.
It may not work even with a first try
and take it from me, it’s not a lie. 
In fact, you may require a new line or couplet
to be rewritten with a little extra sweat.
But, hey, think back to when you started writing
how many drafts required no editing?

As False as Smiles

Manners are the party fancy —
Petit goldleaf on the melting pudding,
A sticking cream now on your fingers, 
Immovable for hours. 
Manners like a lady,
Her morning bonnet pinned,
Perching, tilting in the wind.
That flat earth, mountained at the dome,
With feather shores and flower groves,
Shiny plastics, false as those at home. 

Nods and bobs and toothy smiles,
Inflections in their proper place,
But my greetings, lumbersome and cumbering,
Like falling up the carpet staircase.

Admire my racing stripes—
How fast they run my eager thoughts,
Like greyhounds on the track.
Striped in life, strung up in death,
A dripping turkey, limbs akimbo.
My brain is too human for me,
My tongue declares me animal,
Its words condemn me man. 

So I crave the choking baby squeeze,
Until my secrets spill, hurled,
Bile like from the lemon press,
Dribbling, a puddle,
A sour sting to wipe your turgid eyes,
And join the salty swimming race.

Folderol Gallimaufry

At the risk of coming off turgid
I offer this tale esoteric
Hoping it’s not found insipid
Nor causes one to be apoplectic
But rather received with alacrity
Without the need for paroxysm
My word there’ll be no chicanery
And avoidance of anachronism
Far from being sesquipedalian
Nor need for any razzmatazz
The tale of the slubberdegullion
Who thought himself full with pizzazz
Though being so supercilious
His affect stirred only dudgeon
Any good was so very fugacious
From this untoward tatterdemalion
Yet still he persisted a mumpsimus
If you will, and worse a panjandrum
So aggravating and rumbustious
Redeeming qualities not a modicum
An unquestioned snollygoster
Given to being quite vagary
An ill-reputed hugger-mugger
And a voice of such cacophony
But I see that you are insouciant
And consider my warning malarkey
Since you wish to be recalcitrant
My apologies for being persnickety
I end my tale of the rapscallion
Without further ado or rigmarole
Avoiding becoming ultracrepidarian
I have met my supererogatory parole

Undergrowth with Two Figures -Van Gogh

Describe what you see my love, she queries 
A game they often play in the depths of the forest
He replies,  Turgid are the woodlands densely they’ve died back 
creeping  where  no  life  is seen,
between the flowery meadow's cracks
The poplars have shed their leaves leaving violet trunks bare
For it isn’t rare,  sun light  that shan’t filter thru the canopy
Entrapped is the pale old plant ivy green 
However, the white roses striving and yet flutily parade
whilst tolerating the languorous shade
As he describes his innermost inhibitions
without  interference or shame
In the distance, expanding their horizons together
Both aware 'tis a harbinger of the end game

The Poetic Arts

Terminology:

Crystal booths in a nocturnal snow.
significant downpours of shedding stars.

This said, feel free to scatter, scrabble or mash.
Words are fungible,
many still believe that poetics
do indeed belong to the fungi family,
though some have been classified
as many-limbed Triffids
of the squishy kind.

Now throw moondust at the reader's eyes:

Obscurity is essential, however, first create a window
that opens to reflect the thrower.
Rain down upon the moondust until mud takes shape.
There are no words for this process,
so, make some up.

Flourish:

Without a final flourish the poet is left with a turgid puddle
avoid turgidity at all costs, especially puddles.
Sprays of celebratory tinsel
or globs of gore are always effective.
Reaching for the stars with a palsied hand
will jerk tears out of a slab of concrete
eventually.

Swiftly leave the space you are now occupying,
other's will be impatiently waiting to craft their next masterpiece.

Rebirth

Rebirth: 
 
Tragedy has been your favorite genre—
A fount of acts and scenes
of wailing tears and excruciating scars
punctured alive by so-called healers.
 
That oozing wound 
paints the genre that trickles down the plot of your story.
The parched lips, a speaking metaphor of your turgid deals 
In the hands of those wandering away with lots of your heart in their claws.

I know the shivering voice hosted in the tender sheen skin of yours
Is not a language of aging;
a simulacrum of those who promise heaven
but shuffle hell down your throat. 
 
I know your fate in the cruel, crooked hands.
fueling you, of course to make your heart a Jericho. 
And swallow pain to yourself 
only to sing the dirge in love.

I know love never resides here
Neither has its chorus any memories of remembrance. 
I think it died.
If love is dead, let me be the raising prophet.

Let me tender this desert back to Eden,
where nature plume and sing again.

neighborly vernal packtage

.
                 ‘Twuz uh hot
                      Spring
              Mine door’s gong
                     Rapped
           ‘twuz the welcomed
                        the 
                   pretty box
      the surreptitiously delivered
                 All rapped up
                In my favorite
                     Colour
                      ‘glint’
              
                    Such the 
                 turgid sweet
                    package 
                  
          From mine front stoop
                       into
           mine grateful room’s
                    Imagine

                 vernal fever
                      on uh
                    (shhhh)
                  sun burst'n
                     breezy
                      morn


*packtage spelled correctly
         artistic license 
                 ;)

Cabin fever

.

   Without light
      Gold will
         Not
       Glisten

   Without hers
    Turgid  fupa
      ‘Tatched
     Az molded
         Clay
         Unto
    Hern thicks

   did i mention
  ‘Bout the gold
   *Glistening*

 "regard not the
         scop
  the bard iz the 
    punctilious 
     carnivore"

          hm

Derailed

Cups on their hooks rattle
the train rumbles through the town
icebergs crack and fall off the roof,
they crash through two stories of chilled air.

Dad heaves himself off the sofa,
empty plate in hand.
Mother has a new electric carving knife,
the turkey is in meaty ribbons already.

The train is still rolling,
its high-pitched horn
blasting through wallpaper.

We are all a little upset,
for our little terraced home in England
has time-slipped into rural Ohio,
and the only person still alive
sits on a rocking chair
in a post turkey stupor.

Thoughts plow through a turgid brain.
He begins to imagine
that all his poems have been derailed
in a train crash
somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
The incongruity if this vision
does not strike him as at all odd.

Intuitively he understands,
that If the Cloud bursts now,
he will never be existential.

The idea is almost appealing.

The Long Withering

This river is full of bodies,
dead fish, dead fishermen.

This river crumbles its banks,
it invades in trickles,
sluggishly it engulfs.

Once it deeply flowed
then death withered the water.
The bodies,
the dead fish, the fishermen,
all float upon its turgid path.

Where it goes no one knows,
for its long journey is too slow,
too polluted to measure.

Only the dead now catch each other.

For Love Will Sometimes Slumber

For love will sometimes slumber
In the silence of the commonplace
Let down its guard, wipe its brow, relax

As passion naps within a flowered bed
Contented in the comfort of the now
Its glowing ember playing in the breeze

As dreams of scented aura haunt its sleep
Time and distance make old lovers weep
For kisses that teased love’s once turgid skin

Beneath a moon that calls them once again
To dance beneath its ember shadowed glow
And satiate the lust of loving’s need

Let down its guard, wipe its brow, relax
In the silence of the commonplace
For love will sometimes slumber

Aerolithic

(An interview with a skipping stone)

I’ll start at the beginning…I was born oppressed –
The weight o’ th’world upon me…I hardened under stress.
The dust from whence I came…’twas morph-ed into stone –
Then from those depths, upheavals…skyward I was thrown.
By winds and rains beweathered…the Fates, they wrested me
From my mountain aerie…torn down by gravity.
Immersed in turgid waters…sharp edges polished o’er –
Tumbled, tossed and battered…and washed up on the shore.
Petrified, immobile…aeons passed me by –
Until a hand me lifted…and taught me how to fly.

The Pigs

A humid day,
mosquito clouds swarm along
a red dirt road to the farm.
There are grimy rows of pig pens,
hazed dark by humming hordes
of black fly.

Bob (an old friend), chuckles.
“Man, you picked the wrong time of year
to come visit.”
The hogs grunt and squeal.
He waves,
“be with you soon.”

It’s slop-time - the air is turgid
with the many notes of a stale miasma,
everywhere there is the splatter 
of slime and muck.

He carries smeared green buckets;
a deleterious, partly consumed gunk
that reeks of that semi-solid swill
hogs grow fat upon.

On the low walls
there are slick stains, layers of grime;
a smeared feculence
corrugated into noxious layers.

Even behind the stalls
there are a heaps
of sludge and slurry.
Bob flushes surfaces down
with his long hosepipe.

He bends to his tasks whistling happily
while I explain to my new wife
that he used to work for the C.I.A.
I can see she’s surprised,
maybe impressed.

Long pause…
watching Bob wade knee deep
into his labor of love.

“Yea”, I sighed,
“he got real tired of all that."



```````````````

an edit

Scum

Scummy waters slow lap
an ill-defined edge.

Broken Spider-tangles
drift like torn wedding veils.

The surface of the pond
is thick with rot
bracken, slime soaked weeds,
the yellowing seep of decay
smears the turgid water.

Yet now a ray of sun
stabs through the detritus.
I watch as a circle blooms
within the crud
light dancing beneath.

Clear water smiles upward!
The heart of the pond
is still beating bright.

I holler 'Amen' to the sky
and don't ask why.

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