Today your weekly dose of culture-building poetry comes from the talented Ben Brizell, a writer, poet and blogger. Check out his other work at: Benbrizwritings
Enjoy!
Further
Looking back through
all these memories;
ticket stubs,
scrawled notes,
stacks of poems,
leaves a painful taste.
All I can do is wonder
If it all really went that well.
I’m a cynic at heart,
which leaves a little room for bias.
Ben Brizell
Happy VerseDay! Beginning next week, I will be featuring some of the amazing stuff that you have been sending in. Until that time, please enjoy this triplicate of Haiku.
The feeble heart stroke
Little beats against her ribs
Sparrow trapped within.
Rush of blood to brain
Thoughts misplaced; edged with remorse
For words said, too late.
The trouble with love
Is the world in which it’s borne.
Death springs from context.
Okay. So this is a weird one.
The picture alone is disturbing. Sometimes in life we stumble across things that are perfectly normal aspects of the natural world, but they affect our human emotions on strange levels. Mother Nature’s everyday can make us feel uneasy and strange. Maybe it’s our too-advanced brain reading depth where there is none. Notions of mortality and empathetic wondering.
In any case, I acknowledge that it’s strange, and a bit unnerving. But then again, so is life.
Evisceration
Yellow stripe teardrop burrows deep into her leafy green belly
Once so full of harvest and good planning.
The seeds to feed the hungry nesters
Spilled across the glass table top,
Like a cornucopia
A feast for jagged takers.
Did she feel much after the first piercing sting?
Was it just all black?
Or did she feel the tugging pull of her insides, turned out?
What if Katydid?
Happy VerseDay.
Today was darker, as some days can be.
Enjoy…or if you can’t enjoy it, sit with its awkwardness for a bit and don’t be afraid of the feelings you may catch. Part of our Beauty lies in those dark and painful corners.
I Belong
I am yours and I am theirs.
I am the scale’s and the mirror’s
I belong to the vogue airbrushing
And the PTO.
I am the tethered hawk,
Forgotten her wings.
Hungry to hunt,
No freedom with which to fly.
I am the man’s and the patriarchy’s
I am the lament of God
And the decent substitute,
When nothing better comes along.
I belong to so many,
Each a share of grief,
Each a pound of flesh
So many hyenas tearing at a picked over carcass
I am wasted and wanting,
Found without
I am the lukewarm spread, the mannequin arms,
The expected response and sweaty spectral.
I am the failure of my skin
The price of privilege
The stain of guilt.
For apples I did not eat.
I am the sunken boat,
long forgotten; a weathered splinter in the reeds,
I am the once useful, fading at dusk.
I belong to you.
And to them.
I am no more myself, than anyone else’s.
But oh the torture of knowing.
How different it could have been.
My darlings…This humble writer took a short break from her blog this week, but I will catch you on the beautiful flip side of life, next week on Wednesday. Also, look forward to a formal submission call for VerseDay, and all the fun rules and regulations that includes.
Until then, Enjoy a little VerseDay with your Thurs….day.
SHE
She came wailing
Screaming into the world on slippery tracks
Destined to set apart the befores from the afters.
She came pink-faced and angry
Perfect petals pouting tirades
Fingers tightly curled into tiny, life-lined palms
She came disgruntled
Protesting the cold and bright,
Raging against the metallic and sterile.
She came to show us, to shake us,
To remind us.
Life twists on, where we least expect.
And where we struggle to control and contain,
She always comes…just the same.
Good morning, Darlings. Here’s a little something to start your day.
Frailty
How precious, the fear,
Of casting your frailty,
Out into the jaws of a desolate world.
How brutally important
To stretch the lines of comfort
Throwing the weakly bonded cells
Into the universe of chaos and rock
The stone that tears,
Branches that bite,
Fire’s searing kiss.
How cherished, the heart-pounding uncertainty,
That drives us to the far away,
Against the pleading of timidity
Begging us to come home.
Safety is not safe,
Until we step into the treacherous.
Good evening! Today is about the terrible habit of looking behind, and being tethered to memory… and I also think I might have a hankering for fall.
Enjoy!
Lie in Weight
Now the days of yielding past
And fallow fields in quiet repose
Beckon down dark geese in flight
The crackle of air settling cold
The dusty birth of Autumn spreads
Waits for coy light to brave horizon.
I am still and lingering.
Patient like the fading light
The callous bite of snows to come
And the bitter taste of wood smoke in lungs
I remember the hush frosted grass beneath feet
Like your breath on the apple of my cheek
Clear as the fading day and vibrant as fog on the moor
How I long to miss the memory
When will it burrow beneath ground
Settle somewhere in the dirt where you hide
Silently waiting.
For my dawdling to cease.
Good morning!
Here’s a little poetic sidetrack for your day.
Remember to send me your stuff and I’ll enter it into the running for The Beautiful Stuff’s poetry anthology due out Fall of 2019.
Not Ours
Count you now,
The minutes and hours of indiscretion against civility.
The innumerable times the heart wandered far into the woods
Captivated by the sounds and sights
Of a universe untouched
Count the ways
You failed to be the raging commercial machine
Felling the bounty of a sphere so generous
Count the ways you threw off the endless hunger
And returned to the beast that made you
The first beast, the wild.
Count it down
The moments we have left her
She fades against the nuclear brilliance of human greed.
Soon to be lost
Only remembered in poems and pictures
Of vagabond souls who understood their own hearts
Count you the ways we miscarried
Crowned champions of the self-destructive species award
Annihilating our gifts as toddlers in a tantrum
Always wanting more
Always seeking to control, to own
That
Which
Is
Not Ours.
It sickens the heart
It drops guilted weight onto the body and cannot be shed
The wrecked and torn pieces left those to come.
Count the beauty lost
The moments yet found
Ephemeral and far between
Fill your heart with them
Spur the fight.
Remember, you upright beast
Rabid and teeth-bearing
Mere genes shy from clamoring in trees
Defend your home.
Today is Verseday!
I’m still accepting submissions to be posted and considered for the anthology due out Fall of 2019, so send me your good stuff, your hard stuff…your beautiful stuff.
Here’s your verse of the day. Enjoy!
Stupid Heart
Beacon in the night, the safety of arms I know around me.
You are the dark expanse to my nebulous cloud.
What primordial gene, residual trait,
Makes my heart blindly ache?
Succumb so wholly to the stardust swirling
Catching me in its current.
This animal heart roams ever closer to yours.
I love you in gnashing ways, unbreakable
Unrequited.
A worsening disease; malignant and wild,
You are the celestial mess embedded in me.
The something deep in cells and will not be ignored.
I want to climb you like an oak and shake your leaves,
Nest in your branches. Feel the wind whipping ’round,
While I hover in your safety.
I want to touch my thoughts to yours
Have you understand how you upend me.
The ways you break me. The need filling its home where the lowest point is.
Where it’s meant to be.
Like water in a gully.
My heart, a nightingale, shooting across the darkening dawn,
Pounding breast with no purpose but to take to your air.
It cannot be explained or dissected.
It just is.
It does
What.
Love.
Does.
Aimless and reckless.
A butterfly tottering into the arms of a hurricane.
Beating paper wings against walls of wind and rock
Orange dust scattered across concrete,
Rendering itself useless through stubborn insistence that,
There’s something about you…
Given no instructions and taking no advice,
It flutters into the burning embers of you,
Happily meeting the char of death.
Stupid Love.
Welcome to the joyride, ya’ll. Today is the the first Verseday of the year and I’ve chosen a simple little thing I’ve dusted off from a few contest entries ago.
Remember to send me your poems, and/or thoughts and comments on what you’re reading here. I’m so excited to begin!
Enjoy!
I watched a robin take the sky today
Bright red breast striking blue cerulean,
a rocket cutting through air
Silent beats
Free.
That must be what it’s like to die.
Wing lifting, pounding rush.
Air swirling behind feather tip.
Untethered
Unbound
from the confines of earth and expectation
Like too-high clouds, out of reach.
A soul lifted.
Sarah Reichert Author 