I ain't normal, not even close
not even as a child, played with dolls
and paper cut-outs but I always decapitated
them (do you remember mother?)
finding the head of my sister's Clarabell
doll floating in the utility sink in the
basement but my tedddy, my teddy how I beat him
until he came into my young child's dreams to
seek revenge and you destroyed him for me mother
you used a kitchen knife to cut him to pieces and
made me watch (do you remember mother?)
it was so sad, so strange watching teddy's
stuffing falling into the wastebasket
He was my only friend and you killed him, MOTHER!!!
At 22 you had me sent to an asylum because I (you said)
threatened to kill you but I couldn't/wouldn't do that
because you killed teddy for me (do you remember mother?)
He was my only friend
endless story
I have tried to tell a story of a rat that fell from the ceiling
It landed among drinkers in a café I ran,
Never had I seen a café emptying of people in two seconds
flat; the rat escaped too.
I also want to talk about the woman who had been sober
for ten years, a safe hand in soothing drunken men.
I also wanted to talk about the eccentric drinking law
allowing me to sell beer between five and ten o’clock
but the customers had to eat first. Usually, a sandwich
After that, they could drink as much as they wanted.
I will tell you about the rat plague when they pull down
The old abattoir, but I will leave it for now since I can’t
get the beginning right, I dislike, rats they are vermin
and I can hear one eating ink in the wastebasket.
My wastebasket overflows
with aborted attempts,
Lines that I cannot rhyme
and syntax that limps.
Written November 6, 2022
Submitted to "Bite Size No. 55" Poetry Contest
Sponsored by Line Gauthier
There was something wrong with me.
During the meeting,
I felt like going to a square
and swinging.
I tried to concentrate
but I was thinking
if the fact of not having vices
it would no longer be an addiction either.
When everyone left the room,
worried about their laptops and reports,
I still stayed there for quite a while.
Couldn't hit a single clip
in the wastebasket.
There are days I don't know what the problem is.
The no ending story
I have tried to tell a story of a rat that fell from the ceiling
it landed among drinkers in a café I ran,
never had I seen a café emptying of people in two seconds
flat; the rat escaped too.
I also want to talk about the woman who had been sober
for ten years, a safe hand in soothing drunken men.
I also wanted to talk about the eccentric drinking law
allowing me to sell beer between five and ten o’clock
but the customers had to eat first. usually, a sandwich
after that, they could drink as much as they wanted.
I will tell you about the rat plague when they pull down
The old abattoir, but I will leave it for now since I can’t
get the beginning right, I dislike, rats they are vermin
and I can hear one eating ink in the wastebasket.
Unwritten page
A blank page on the word processor I ought to leave it this way
just look at it and dream what I could have written.
If I delete the words written, it will be a blank page again.
No history on a crumpled-up sheet of paper in a wastebasket.
For now, it is too late, but I might erase the page written
if I so choose.
All poems are if written with passion, great poems
if not by the readers but by the poet, who boarded the wrong bus
as my wife did in Johannesburg many years ago
great was her consternation when stopping an available bus
to find it was for black people.
Being born in Congo by a black mother and a Dutch father
she identified herself as black.
Not so, said the authority she was Portuguese.
Racism and ignorance, now it is the Moslems turn to feel
the surge of hatred.
We want the Moslems to behave like us, but they
insist this is not possible in the name of their religion.
What do I do now? Erase the story?
The Paying (I wish) Public marvels
at what comes out: those explosive, star-spangled
phrases and melodies (the few times I get it right);
but what of the great-real that went in, the life-struggles,
the tears, the soul-smothering isolation – not to forget
the little left of me, squirming squiggly, imprisoned
with the many nameless, sparsely filled, crumpled-up
white-pulp battlefields in the wastebasket – my inky piles of bones –
clawed-out guts (the years of painful extraction,
likened to going to the dentist, then being told, that I have a serious abscess,
needing an immediate Root Canal, though unfortunately
Covid has prevented our delivery of anesthetic)...
Oh well, here goes again:
Roses are red – so is a poet's blood;
The moon strings silvery, strum-able beams –
myself too busy to play them, running on a
treadmill, going nowhere, in my Write-blocked-nightmare,
ominously pulled from words my stalled mind should be chasing...
So, my Love (Poetry), she does
and she does not – till one
mightily fit for publication:)
He is coming again. I can always feel when he is on his way because my heart starts to race and I feel the fear.
The fear of soldiers busting in.
People being murdered by clowns
while I dance like the Joker in a
Green man suit.
Fear of the outside world betraying me
With it's reality while my clock stops and laughs at me. I start to shake and he knows I am struggling.
My stomach knots and a wave of sheer terror has an axe in my door.
Music throws confetti at me and the hair on my arm makes me breathe funny.
I think I might get sick.
I reach for the wastebasket but my arm is stuck in the wall.
My emotions escape me except the fear who sits like a parrot on my arm tangled in the hair. Today is tomorrow and yesterday is next week.
Life is grinding to a halt inside a house that is not mine. Someone else lays in my bed and pretends to be me.
It is him and he is wearing Joaquin Phoenixes head.
This has to stop.
It needs to be fixed.
I put on my green man suit and crawl into my arm hair and wait for the end.
It never comes but it's morning and
It starts again.
the wooden pencil between my fingers
the led touches the paper
mind becomes blank
words seem to have no true meaning
piles of crumpled up stationary all over the floor
heaping out of the wastebasket
a dull pencil rolls off the table
on top of it shavings on the hardwood floor...
it too has given up
I place the pencil between both my fists like a rod cracking it into two shanks
the lead between the broken bark exposed
like a fractured bone injecting from the skin
Still usable yet cannot be erased without its other half
Tape...I need tape
FROZEN in the snow,
she was running with nowhere to hide,
Mental illness took its toll,
for there was no one to confide.
A lonely lamb lost in
the universe,
a lion protruding silence in the depths
of her madness-
She took only with her a journal,
writing verse after verse,
searching for something to mitigate
her sadness.
Hospitals and medications,
finding no immediate alleviation-
What was this manic manifestation?
reduced to a nothing…God-given creation.
Searching for answers,
leaving more questions to bear,
forgotten by the world,
while being nailed to a cross-
Treated like a foreigner,
lived a life not fair,
and her sanity has paid
the desolate cost,
stare. stare. stare...
at the windowpane frost.
Thrown like garbage in the
wastebasket-
FROZEN in the snow.
just another closed casket.
30 lines total in this poem
June 7, 2017
Each time I finish a beer, I throw the empty
can at the wastebasket.
They always bounce off and clink about
on the floor, most likely due to the
fact that the trashcan is filled
with trash.
Gargling, a gargoyle’s groan gulps
From the bilingual blackness of TV,
A clockwork advertisement pulps
Knowledge into your worn mind free
Of charge. Nothing but gobbledegook
Everywhere, an insistent humming bee
And you just volunteered for the hook.
You can’t understand it, but still can see
That it’s appealing. Someone wants it.
We now return you to your film with Mr T,
But subtitled. There’s nothing to do but sit,
enjoy – all else is static - and sweatily agree.
Your mind is a sad wastebasket of re-runs;
Rom-coms galore, dubbed films about keys,
Action films with loud explosions and guns.
Poor translation aside, I enjoy foreign Telly.
I really tried to complete the task,
My wastebasket,
Filled with every failed attempt.
The directions seemed so easy,
"Please include this quote"
It was so beautifully uplifting
I tried, to combine our works.
But no matter how I wrote it,
My words refused to blend.
Adam was an
acceptable accountant
And Eve a bubblingly
bright bookkeeper;
Adam loved the
First-In, First-Out
Accounting (FIFO) system,
While Eve preferred
The Last-In, First-Out
Inventory (LIFO) system;
Together they testified that
Inventoried sweet fruit
should neither
Sits and spoil
nor go to the
Garden wastebasket
Wrongfully.
The Love of Mothers
Nerve slicing mercury inhabiting breast milk, slashing
the suckling babe, the one who will not walk until she is four
and endure unexplainable pain. Gold piles up, red tag special
on weapons (no questions asked), palms greased, bribes split by cronies,
Social Darwinism raising it’s 1880’s head, uranium mined at the
edge of the Grand Canyon, poisons spread across the land,
trading crippled and cut-short human lives for corporate profit.
Praise life but launch unnecessary war with unspecified collateral damage, weeping mothers
looking for parts of children, their suffering rooted
deep, deeper than roses, than war, un assuaged by cross or Messiah.
Red, white and blue lies — masses believe
sleazy misinformation, the elephant still invisible,
earth measured by bottom-line profit.
There is a massive disconnect between what
our government proclaims and does.
To be aware of the gap and see it ignored
erodes sanity. W’s pimpish mind is too narrow
for history. 2001-2008 is in the wastebasket.
He has ill-used his opportunity for greatness
and wasted eight years of our lives.
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