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Best Poems Written by Barthwell Farmer

Below are the all-time best Barthwell Farmer poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

One Looks Up

Monochrome winds fantail snowdrifts.
Fleck-churned sparks maw feathery flights
and a howling backdraft
spikes matted fur.
Pawing winds spring traps clenched,
injurious icicled haunches hollowed.
A smothering whiteness whistles

through yellow teeth, a smoldering
witness from snow that isn't snow,
(one homeless person's jaw drops, he looks up,)

I wolf down yogurt that drips off the plastic sides,
whitening the Los Angeles sunshine
where some homeless rest on the reflective sidewalk,
all but one, the nimbus of his mouth quakes.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

It's Not My I Can'T Cry If I Want To

One eye opens quicker than the other, so cute,
but who'll spearhead you home, me or the Neanderthal
host? Party goers head for the exit.
I seem to have sat down on a preset remote;
your laugh echoes the empty house mute.
White rain is a flat-screen,
crystalline-chilled, melting pixels.
Your other eye, I swear, winks at the storm.

A breaker, somewhere, thumbs a ride to the red zone.
Shadowy reflections of his indoor lighting
vanish from his TV
and abandon the glass of his aquarium.
Goldfish swim undisturbed
above the sediment of jagged, tiny stepping stones,
footholds for drunks to surface when bubbly

as with our host, brushing 'gainst you.
He toggles your dress by its fished out price
tag. Not my place to scan,
I blink like a readjusted lens off focus.

He sets us both out on the porch;
he's done with milking you to compliment him.
We're Banner milk bottles, side by side on the stairs.
Rain pelts milk-shiny, glassy sides. You shiver instead of going
numb and bottled up in reflections

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

Happy Cremation Anniversary, Auntie

Home from a chemo session, uncle lights up
a cigarette and collapses
to the slick plastic that covers your chaise
lounge, auntie. He thumps the upholstery
with his legs and elbows for blood
to circulate again. A flake

drifts. Dehydrated lips, uncle
inadvertently kisses ash. Cushions
puff up, deflate. Uncle floats
smoke rings to prove he still has breath.
Your bulbous urn ruptures his rings
on contact where curvature

casts uncle’s warped reflection, all mouth and smoke,
as he would rise to reach your urn on the mantle.
Uncle slouches back, watches his sports channel.
I head out with his hamper

and forget to check pockets before washing clothes,
his soggy receipts - - once grocery lists? - -
and tissues, torn apart, clumped up, fake snow
I have to scoop out of washing machines.

Absent-minded tasks at the laundromat, auntie,
where you’d bend in pain. Lint trays reinstall
fluff. I snap
and snap airborne dryer-flakes off towels.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

Forced Rhymes

A whiff of my kitchen, a medicinal pill,
the side order of rain drools at a windowsill.

An utterance precedes a service; the rumble,
the window slides itself shut. A bumble
bee ricochets off a glass pane
moaning louder than our train

of thought waylaid with bacon sizzling up a storm.
There's an anxiousness trapped inside as warm
as indoors petrichor's marshmallow mood
steamed under nostrils fused above burned food.

A swirl follows itself in a perfect circle
on a smartphone screen. The attentive middle 
of somewhere where I don't know where I am headed
while time and place are forgettably wedded,
O lips lit up, no doubt, by the whitening screen,
words digitize what would otherwise burn green.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

The Halfway Glass

A city block vendor chimes pleasantries prouder
than Muzak or an unseen crow in the background 
elevating alarm clock music in the caws
uncredited and angrily growing louder.

A walkway narrows between the vendor
and a building. I teeter between both
as I pass by her grill
parked beside the vape shop. A blistering warmth

whitens piled pink hotdogs and tickles my ribcage.

A parakeet on her shoulder
is flaking off the sun and feathering the moon.

Steamy sundowns moisten her saucer eyes.
One dog pops sausage through its skin. She fans
the minty menthol. I pay the price
for squinting. I've dropped my glasses. Splitting

off-key shattered glass,
the containment of what used to be
bits of me shows up digits-bloodied.
Long after the initial sweep up,
little jagged cuts still happen.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

My Furtive Muse

The muzzle flash of the moon is infused with clouds
where the brightness tapers off on knees that poke through
the slit in her dress; the hem slips off her crossed legs.

Gunpowder in sieves flecks her irises
when she glimpses through my lunar haze
of daydreams that I'll trigger her to smile.

A Guns N' Roses song flogs silence in the back-
ground of my mind as she stands to shake
hands I synchronously half-rotate to kiss.

Her wedding ring tastes like zinc, or some strange kettle
of moondust while she avers that I look as pale
as mists conspiring to discover our trail.

Though we can't see her butler crack the whip to keep 
a distant carriage in place,
whinnying clouds beam a grin to her face.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

Two Caught in the Draft of a Door Ajar

We're closeted mannequins stuffed in a storage 
 bin. "No-Food" signs ignored by shoppers, their shared orange 

squirts juice. Our mannequin-custodial 
grins bar us from the lips' sweet 'oh'.

I move in anyway till French kisses hang
us in tangy wind chimes breezes tongue.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

Slurring at the Elephant in the Room

How many times have we met? I don't have thick skin
if I were to come under the needle of a vet;

barf would linger on clothes that aren't yet washed
down by the hose of a zoo attendant.

The span of your ears sweeping back the stench
I exude with perspiration, thanks, elephant.

My rumbly gut on your gut, your rotund barrel
takes us over Niagara Falls.

A cold, yet steamy mist can exit rage.
A friendliness plummets over me where I stand

too drunk to squirm and go visit my girl.
I turn and want to unlatch my cage, bar

pressing my nose to what might be in store
not ready to eat hay nor sleep on the floor,

grateful that your prehensile
trunk can reach in the fridge and snag a beer.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

A Radiant Neighbor

Kim commandeers hallway sockets in her high-rise
with a microwave to reduce her electric
bills: frozen dinners cooked outside her apartment.

An icy day clouds the sun seen through a window
of the building. Kim's smile captures the sun
racing across the sky to crack its disc

on her face, her chin and cheeks, a cheese-melted heart.

Details | Barthwell Farmer Poem

A Flower Vase on Top of a Piano

My neighbor's piano swirls around her finger
likened to a keyed car where scrapes linger.

She teases out a tune as we both try to hum
along with swirling keys her fingers drum.

The naturals and the flats whirl around
us as we mount her piano earthbound.

Her slap grooves my cheekbone to her hand. The sting grooves
with a vinyl record hissing. My neighbor moves
between the outlining appearance of a bee
in golden gyrations till her swat smacks the bee.

Her canter thumps a vase. Calm peonies revolve
along its rim as arrangements dissolve.

Between her turntable and windowsill's moth rack,
the bee puts up a fight. It can't get off its back,
an eeriness like a sixth sense that it will cease
to bob six legs. Each tonearm's reach needles a crease

of dead air. Although the buzzing makes the final
cut, the static starts with a vinyl
record, this one's translucence as golden as bees
in the sunlight. The record plays
while the neighbor fusses over a vase of peonies;

I brush her ears with small talk till we're both tongue-tied.
A high pitch taps a cicada to hide
horizons like a mountain-raised shadow
smoothing out summer's every echo.

Dark accidentals cascade into ghost-white keys.
The sun-licked honey floats its naturals
till a petal at the windowsill moats its musk

around the bee's indoor husk. A pesticide breeze
platters the buzz-freeze fellow on its back
warped in sunshine like a vinyl record
with an overheated edge, the record,
in turn, pedaling peonies and pianos