—Insignificancy Crowned—
Morning comes; I raise the vanitascope—
Dust drifts where light refuses instruction.
I lean in; distance folds. Closeness pretends.
Air resists; I accuse.
Shadows gather. I baptize them.
A mark appears; nothing further.
Exactness devours edges.
Attention thickens. Mercy dies.
Sound repeats, stubborn.
I follow. Beyond reason. Beyond care.
Hardness calls itself diligence.
The rose breathes, uncorrected, mocking.
I touch; tyranny rises—
No crown, no empire, only insistence.
Time moves.
Nothing waits. Nothing falters.
Vast persists; I fail to see.
Motes hover. Flaws remain.
Life stretches beyond grasp,
Unobserved, precise, inevitable.
I step aside—not wiser, only absent.
The world endures.
Because my vanitascope observed too much.
Potatoes And Mushrooms
Fries are not only deep-fried sticks to which nothing permanent connects
But also, what happens when a person makes some serious mistakes.
And a way to eat however many potatoes a person wants to in one sitting
Even after a couple of inconvenient but needed fittings
Steaks are better for people than snakes especially at lakes regardless of who bakes but sometimes more fat than meat -although maybe not in sweet old Crete Maybe that doesn't bother a Pete or a Skeeter - however it does bother me even without bees.
The hatred of mushrooms is sometimes based on uncorrected misconceptions but they make poor brooms for bedrooms and awful grooms-not to mention bad brides but they are pretty good stuffed, as are potatoes!
I’m sitting at my keyboard
Just ranting and abusing
Which my long suffering wife
No longer finds amusing.
I’m both dyslexic and dyspraxic
Which is why I swear and curse
Because for a creative person that
Combination couldn’t be worse.
To make matters harder I Have
a keyboard that judy can’t spell
And predictive text just
Can Make my life hell.
I bought a dictation programme,
Money very badly spent.
It just can’t cope with
My East Yorkshire accent.
So if my rambling is at time
More than usually absurd
Full of errors and typos
And the odd little non word
Please be a little forgiving
For what you are getting to see,
With all those helpers switched off
The unaided uncorrected real me.
We fear they may yet be alive.
All the sick-minded dead
all those prone to evil,
their essences not gone
but still in our heads.
We must take the good with the bad.
If we are all the very image of Light
then we are also that dark mirror
that will not look at itself.
In the before and after they reside yet,
all those collective, collected, uncorrected,
phantoms of ourselves.
Fear not, a house can be fumigated,
snakes defanged, swept out of sight,
out of mind.
Their energy converted.
Those poisonous inmates of ours
in time, will eat themselves.
Who am I
My subconscious mind
My subconsciousness towards
reality
Has made the unforeseen truth
Of my unforetold and unfolding
cohesions
To foresee the true identity
To the pivot of the see saw
The uncorrected conflicts
Even though life has been
unkind
Even with life's brutality
Life's constant casualty
Life has become a constant
battle of mystical deformations
It befriends no one
Predomination of mankind
The emancipation of the mind
Have made me who I am
My soul shall burn
To utter the real identity
Life's shattering perceptions
Of whom I should be
I've sinned
I've sinned against myself
Against my soul
Carrying soul triggering
burdens
Defer not for I shall unwrap
The concealed truth
That burns my soul for
I am an equivocator
Who swears in both truths
But shall never equivocate to
heaven.
The Noose is tightening.
The 5’s and 10’s yanked from our hands and aching backs
Are spent on band-aids:
A last stand effort to plug the holes in our hearts
When the price of drowning is only getting higher
So we turn to tiny acts of thievery
Taxes prettied up, cashiers uncorrected,
Stealing at the edges because we’re backed into corners,
Corners
Glittering with promises corners
Dripping with possibility,
With Island resort wallpaper
Sold in bulk at Wal-Mart for
Profit: A trail of crumbs called America-
Which has curdled our souls and we love it!
And hate it and gossip about it and think obsessively about it and then
We find the most expensive friends our looks can afford,
Shopping for substance (50% off)
Staring through the eye of a screen
Light speed in pursuit of heaven on earth (Ignore the plastic)-
Until pop!
We die of ADHD.
Never having had the chance to smell the genetically modified roses.
Never having had the chance to see through this kingdom of ideas
As we served out our sentence to life in cubicle.
Jacob Reinhardt
10/24/2013
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.