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Best Poems Written by Collin Lam

Below are the all-time best Collin Lam poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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If Shoelaces Sang Little Rich Town Blues

Not in tea leaves, in shoelaces tie existence--their harsh and meshing material
bound, tethered, undone with a gentle pull. 
 
The bunny ears
and clumsy fingers bouncing along the faux-marble
hallways: the future politicians and CEO's and poets
wiping caked mucus on the white-washed brick foundations--
babbling babbling babbling babbling.
A blood-stone bed surge of tidal maturation,
soon to be lost in the variant eddies of life;
the finger-painted puzzle-box open and unsolvable.
Their parents, for they are honorable, as
picket-fences are honorable, as
tracksuits are honorable, as
Zoloft is honorable, sit ajar
on school streets of vibrant myriad cars quietly dilapidating
behind Armor-All dashes. Old ladies waving dutifully
at lifeless lawn ornaments like lifeless lawn ornaments soon themselves in front of homes because
the youth only want something old when it's time to marry,
Googling what the heart feels for the occasion.
 
Smokestack color windows of depreciating souls searching drunken
down the glossy oak
bar through bent light of whiskey glasses and broken values
they blame on Nietzsche and the price of condoms,
finding a sad reflection seated at this world's dampened end to spread
like ashen snow
again and again and again on sweat-stained futons,
after the lurch toward the water, sloppy with kisses
and lace.
Church bells sound off one and two
O! clock tower
marching Heaven to Hell but got lost in Devil's Lake. They do not hear
the beaten shopping cart radio wobbling like a tripodal Dog, 
telling us Jesus stayed inside because White is translucent in the rain.
 
But,
the wander-footed waywards, leaden eyed, tranced in droning hums of small town streetlights--
or red red copper hangers
or lucid jaundice confessions
or gangrenous light-slivered closets--
break half-empty
beer bottles on familial-faced slogans plastered to an under-bellied bridge and sway
like ebbing wind on the unsure-step shore banks, drooping wasp legs
over the ever-rising precipice
to vein-rush Hellgrammite powder
with their one remaining shoelace
and leave their shoes behind.

Details | Collin Lam Poem

--Jesus--

For B.I.
 
It is that feeling
when sleep is to miss
awakening or awake
you believe the heart
Stops
pounding it with angels

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Nothing Personified

I have never thought of death.
Well, that's not true. Everyone
does at a time. A peopled perishing
 
if you will. We constitute it
with sickles or in a carriage
or call him soft names. Man
 
versus death; man conquers
this nothing by attaching arms,
ears, heart so it may feel its indifference
 
resonating like fingernails on fiberglass.
The great human figure, now
cyclical of its mortal fragility.
 
Were our endeavors false,
these simulacra, these apparitions
beset gaily on their creator?
 
Like a cement plant, are we
indebted to the dust made
by our hands, and fills our lungs?
 
All I know is
it's an inconceivable sadness to think
I have never thought of death.

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Soon All Things Will Owe Themselves To Progress

Soon all things will owe themselves to progress
and nature will neither wane nor wax
accosted by bulbs and cog-laden streams.
Children in god-awful Christmas jumpers
gather around the May-pole to watch
the leaves become what they’re deprived of.
We are taught to fear puddles, duty free
purchases, and heroes speak in slant rhyme.
Thermodynamics washes the feet
of tired old gravity, entropic
kisses to keep loved ones close; parody—
if absence does what it does, we should leave
and never return to this place of progress
where bluebells can’t frost and starlings sing falsetto.

Details | Collin Lam Poem

She Steps As Rose

For V.R.S.
 
A bend, a pirouette--a flower's dance
reflects in his shadowed eyes, and in her
thorned steps, the atrophying force rooted and redoubling.
Promise me, he breathes behind a teacup
while she is encapsulated in a globe of fading light.
The briny-dotted atlases sit reverent,
assembled beside the living-
room's songs of foreign heartbreaks, each seeded and
grown rampant ivy on her mind's towers, those unseen
cracks of weathering leaving only dreams
of dreams to recirculate like seasons in a day.
Worn linen florals ebb about her body, settling in her late autumn
and hoary winter languishes beyond the pane
where wind-animate limbs, a veiny applause, galely
 
knock, and her upon the balustrade of
the Palladium,
Hermetic roses beneath her toes.
Were we ever as good as frozen petals?

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Lady London

What trace of shadow, of language long and distempered in memorial
elegy, of abbeys as dismembered dolls lifted from their wrappings, of
hallowed grounds embedded with upturned forks while cigarette
embers chuckle soon sound aslumber in the crooks of pews, of 
fallow convictions interred between dour stones of the Thames,
retracted like a lover's kiss, of security in flightless ebon wings
while its mercurial eye peeps on Marriott's old ladies for 30 quid,
of refuse systems as landmarks to history, dear old old Form(al) 

city.
no cat no cradle in its strings of moving metal carriages in the heavens
and hell,
Shakespeare Shakespeare! What a play you've made of her, our fair
Lady London

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Remember Serbian Fields

The storms are lifting now,
where once the auburn horizons clashed with dark,
where mother led her children to drink,
where father broke the moistened dirt,
where I spoke of the bent little days;
there are no storms that we can touch,
nor the candle beside our bed; there are no monsters
that I am aware, I only know there could have been.

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Natural Language

Fallen Autumn leaves know the babbling water's dialect,
the language of the mute stream, Socratic running of its mouth.
Pretzeled on a stump, I dream what horrors and wonders I've missed.

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I Have Been Sifting Through a Shadow

I have been sifting through a Shadow,
And only found it a shadow indeed--
The black tresses to outline its features,
Like waking at new morning's chime.
 
I greeted it as though my dark and its
Would be a shade indistinct,
And find in each a same-song toil
That needed no words for which to speak.
 
It cast upon my unaccustomed eyes,
And in earnest I rubbed to be sure
The light was not playing tricks on me,
But no light I saw but below my door.
 
The Shadow bemused itself with shadows,
As a bad mother to her youth,
And so much I thought it tender true.
True! The very word is like a mist
 
That hungrily clings to solid ground,
Though it is dark and none can I see.
The light beneath my door is waning,
So I must love the Shadow all the more,
 
But the night is born to bewitch the sense;
Love is an hour that has a minute's way
Where awake or dreaming, I cannot know,
If Shadows have form in the light of day.

Details | Collin Lam Poem

Partition of the Day

The dawn makes fools of us all.
It fills us half full like open barrel drums
left out in the rain. There's no excuse,
except to say: we stand
among crystalline mist, the yawning light
teasing us to immortality. We prune angels
with gravel and future memories in our pockets,
like poltergeist stars. Midday reaks of sweat to us.
Dinner--an inextricable film of causality.
At night our dreams exist as double entendres.
Only in the stretching illumination, the ensemble
of spectral waves and negation, are we
forever beings of suspension, beings of bent light,
constantly unable to know inelasticity, and here is where we live.