I seek safety in danger
Sanity in madness
Bring me to the edge
but keep me from falling
Pushing away as I hold on tight
She wanted peace.
She wanted quiet.
She had the wrong words
To make rhyme and meter come out right.
I used to write poetry in my early teens. Here’s a part on one who’s title escapes me. Beware of angst.
the Eternal Serpent spirals downward, forever falling
can you find me in the azure sky? or will you cast your eyes elsewhere?
the Beast cries its’ last lament and still you are not here
I’m all alone now, all eyes are on me, yet still I sit alone
Will you look for me?
I can still remember the day I lost my mind
Can you? Will you?
I’m here if you want me-- waiting upon your bittersweet shores
willing and ready for you
should you chose to destroy me, I wouldn’t care
I’m lost already, trapped in oceans of blue without a voice
WTF was I thinking? I mean, I was only thirteen at the time, but still. :smack:
That reminds me of a limerick I wrote (the first two lines were provided)
(I’m not sure if it was “whitehall”… some other place might scan better.)
There once was a lad from whitehall
Who attended a fancy dress ball
A lass, she danced with him
Alas, she’d no rhythm
Just like the last line of this limerick. It has no rhythm. No rhythm at all.
Interesting thread. I personally write what I call “proto-poety”. This is done by getting your mind into a state where its natural tendency is to think in rhyme (perhaps by closing your eyes and repeating rhyming words and phrases for 15 minutes), then, without thinking at all about topic or phrasing (or really anything at all), pouring a stream of consciousness onto the page. When you do this, you generally end up with semi-random yet surprisingly semi-coherent blurbs that can, if you care to think about it, serve as insights into your subconcious. Or total shit. One of the two. Here are some examples, from the bowels of my own thoughts:
In myself I see a time
Yet in time I see no self
Self becomes a state of mind
Time becomes an empty shelf
On this shelf now rest our thoughts
And our consciousness so dear
Mind and self in time on shelf
…will the time-shelf disappear?
Worlds within a single thought that floats inside my head
Many thoughts within these worlds are come and gone and dead
And in this complex abstract web, what truly can be said
When in my head these thoughts are dead before their truths are bled?
We are us, I am myself, and you and I are we.
If myself and you are us, then what else can we be?
You aren’t me, and I’m not you, that much is plain to see
So what bizarreness is this “us” that forms an entity?
Is it, and are we, the totals of our hearts and minds?
Or is there, too, some common soul we share but cannot find?
Do we keep our sense of selves when thus we are combined?
Or is uniqueness put aside by you and I in kind?
And if within this bond we truly form some brand new “us”
Is our bond akin to friendship? Have we gained a newfound trust?
To honestly say we are “we”, is unity a must?
Or is it just that “we” and “us” are phantoms of the mental dust that swirls up in confusion’s gusts when you and I and both our minds remain combined for some brief time in which we find we cannot bind our consciousnesses thus?
From my most successful poem to date (it’s been read by FIVE people!!), boldly entitled Elegy Written on the Death of a Favourite Sock, a gripping saga of loss and longing, of tragedy and disaster at the hands of a merciless washing machine, cursed be its name!
Where art thou now, O lonely, left-footed friend of mine?
Wandering through Valhalla, some afterlife divine?
Art thou gone to Oblivion, or gone indeed to Hell?
Or reborn as a handkerchief - who among us can tell?
From a poem I wrote in high school:
Biology assignments
take way too long to do.
Let’s throw them in the toilet,
and cover them with poo!
I think, as I sit by the laughing river
Watching the wind making ripples,
How I’d like to take a spoonful of honey
And spread it all over…
(Ode to an attractive blonde co-worker, via IM. An amusingly creative afternoon ensued, and also a slight case of blue balls.)
We eat hot sweet love and fluffy eggs for breakfast,
Milk drunk after the storm,
Juice the bitter crush of life,
We who have felt the void.
Gotta love teenage poetry!
Aw shucks…
One of my favourites, although not mine:
It was real poetry. In the spirit, as I saw it, of the OP it was a couplet out of context. Was I just supposed to make something up? That would be tough since my muse left me.
Part of a poem I wrote called “Banana Skin”
It’s a peeling,
But it’s not appealing.
Okay, so it’s the whole poem. Here’s another called “Discordant Bell”
It’s a’ peeling,
But it’s not appealing.
And another called “Overdue Stripper”
She’s a’ peeling,
But she’s not appealing.
Do you see a trend? I find myself quite the amusing fellow.
A few lines from my putative poems:
for telling me i am not to pierce my ears
because your father had not pierced ears
nor had his father
If you try to slice a pomegranate straight through
the blood of the fruit will shoot out and stain
your fingers, your knife, your counter, your clothes.
when we shattered the glass last time
your skin in the morning was warm
and soft, and your lips were moist.
You killed yourself - they bombed the Taj Mahal,
Removed and melted down the Eiffel Tower …
The love I dissevered
was buried under a date
as precise as a calendar or a scalpel.
but still
it was kind of strange to hear
the Mountie say,
“you can’t go in here,
this is the House of Commons”
I love you much too much for just one gender.
I want to smash my angel’s devil’s face,
reduce the death-shell thing to harmless shards,
and it will be an act of vengeant grace.
and the dead queen is the goddess of spring;
the fruit of death is so heavy with seeds
that they grow facets against each other
and explode at a touch
The haiku’s gnomic pith hath delighted
Generations of esthetes benighted
But the limerick’s shape
Fits the sassy, lewd jape
And it rhymes, which is not to be slighted!
What ho, foul primate,
Stick not your penis there!
(Okay, I just can’t post that without background info…my friends and I wrote a poem called “Ode to the Literary Magazine” way back in high school. The lit mag was just FULL of bad teen angst “poetry,” so we wrote something that mocked all style of it and submitted it to the mag. It was, sadly, rejected.)
The warrant was signed by the Guv’nor with care
To say that Nick Santer must go to the chair.
Here comes a cop.
He’s not looking at me.
I think I will move, anyway.
They always notice if you are still in the same place, later.
Here’s a fairly short poem that’s not too serious. It’s more bizarre in context than out of it:
Come children, let’s play a game that is fun,
cut off your head and spin it on your thumb,
just saw through the bone, it’s easy as sin,
and then pass it on to your next of kin.
Now in your hands is the head of your neighbor,
you can attach it without too much labor,
stick it right on your neck, you might need some glue,
and look in the mirror-- it’s the new you!
Now go home and show your mommies and dads,
they’ll love the change and although they’ll act sad
when they see you they’ll cry and they’ll cry and they’ll moan,
but really all that’s just them playing along!