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MorpheusSandman
07-02-2009, 10:34 PM
Mostly inspired by paperleaves (but not NEARLY as good); hopefully practice will make perfect.

1. Bubbles Floating on Concrete

The congested corridors have spider eyes
And paintings seem to sing
A lullaby
To babies in oblivion’s nursery
In the waxing and waning of stuffed toys
Grown to giant size
And the Blue Bubble Jelly Marine
In Fuchsia coral reefs
Where the salmon swim cross-stream
To criticizing tongues of iris
Gracefully floating, its mushroom head just bobs
And tendrils sting
Did I drift away and forget you were there?
Omnipresent problems perpetually oppress
And I slammed my fingers in a snide car door
And can’t seem to care

2. Oxygen Breathing Into the Ether

The cumulonimbuses swell their cheeks and puff
Whistling a tune to the cyclone sun
Down to the boiling pavement
I saw the aura wave;
This stratosphere, I fear its status
But what’s a Lilliputian rain to one who’s not a witch?
Hail’s craggy drops are welcome
And snow’s blanket means the school sleeps
And so can I under thermal quilts
And wrack my imagination in a reverie’s grandiloquent torture
In summer I’ll seek the vents of man-made generated wind
And cool the body’s weeping
And I’ll drip like the clouds
All over the floor

3. Licking the Nightly Divisions

Divide the Gemini
Part the tripod
Quarter the square
Dismember the pentagon
Decimate the Archimedean spiral
These fragmentalized pieces
Are my heart
Under your precisely surgical scalpel
Targets of your military artillery
Bayoneted and run through
Trampled under stilettos in a pernicious march
Across the plane of this bruised shell
Dice this flesh
My carrot nose and raisin eyes,
My salad hair, cherry lips
Chicken fingers, frog legs
Gently place them in the blender
Making sure to place the tender parts
Closest to the stainless steel cutlery
Just press ‘on’
Add a dash of ‘love’
And serve

4. Winged Glass Landing on the Runway

Hover over the cliff of this frail memory
Where the glow worms in the lighthouse’s beam
Guide the brigs of pain homeward
But dimming, dimmer, dimmed,
A dying unit of light is a luxury
To be found in a graveyard of fireflies
The fading paint peels to reveal the rotted wood
Rush and grab buckets of liquid makeup
Throw it in splashes to patch up the holes
But the drifting tectonic plates shift a bit more
And the waves roar in their plaintive disagreement
But, it’s too late
The rocks crack on the edge
And boulders and pebbles alike
Fall from the limbs of the ground like ripe apples
(If only Newton were here to see it)
To feed the voracious waters
Already plethoric from swallowing my soul
Being freed from confines of a body and time
I watch you try to renovate this dilapidated, crumbling space
Where I once lived
But we both know even Pangaea was separated
Eventually

Delta40
07-02-2009, 10:46 PM
I like 3.

I'm a terrible critic. There is even an element of - is it waspishness to them? without me analysing structure - because I'm crap at that.

You're a beautiful poet. Thank you

MorpheusSandman
07-02-2009, 10:58 PM
Not sure what you mean by 'waspishness', but I'll take it as a compliment anyway. :D Thanks.

Delta40
07-02-2009, 10:59 PM
I'm sure it is when the reader picks up any tone or emotion

qimissung
07-03-2009, 11:35 AM
I think you did well in these. I personally prefer the second and fourth ones; I do like the third one, but I like the first half better. The imagery you create and what you do with it is fine, it's vivid and even a little shocking, it's just such a departure from the first half, which was more clinical-and unusual. In the second half it's hard not to image one of those pieces of food carved up to look like a rabbit, or in this case a tiny man.

AuntShecky
07-03-2009, 02:27 PM
Because the images are concrete, and both the form and content have some correlation to so-called "real life," I'm not sure these are "experimental," but rather well-crafted free verse. Well done.

MorpheusSandman
07-03-2009, 08:04 PM
Thanks to qimissung and Shecky for the comments:

I meant experimental for me, personally, AuntShecky; I'm not used to writing in free verse or structured surrealism of any kind. I still tend to fall into the habit of elaborate metaphors (guess I've been reading too much Shakespeare and Tolstoy) though.

Some more:

5. Universal Unitard

The stalking stars on my Gray Lady’s dress
Ten fathoms deep on stitched cotton
Mend an amend an amputated mind
But don’t mind the splotches
Unwind the spool of twine of my cranium
Made of ignited cilia
Take the grinning razor and measure once
Cut twice
Drape over the flippant crescent moon
To swing amidst a galaxy’s gallery
But thoughts can travel even further
Revolving around three pounds of mass
Full of billions of neurons and synapses
And protoplasmic axons
How does something so small
Ponder something so large?

6. I Fell In Love With a Capricious Doorknob

I wrote this highly structured sonnet all
For you, my dear, but then you had to tear
My heart apart
My lines fell to tatters
And my hand
Would no longer communicate
With the rest of me (except one)
Which told me to rip it up
And embrace my freedom
You were more of a door than a window
I guess you could open either way
And let anyone in
I couldn’t see through you
I had to turn your knobs,
Slap your knockers,
Scream ‘Is anybody home?”
Ring your bell,
Make you go 'ding dong'
Look through your peephole
Just to get any glimpse
Of what was on the other side.

MorpheusSandman
07-05-2009, 07:56 PM
Some more (though I don't know if anyone is still reading):

7. Imperial Death March Over Salient Soil

Headless graves march over the lanes
And trample down the ensiform lawns
The dead are razed again
In a silent symphony of slippery songs
Let the chorus sound the strophe
We’ll turn this car around in protest
And drive right homeward
Through the cacophony I heard a voice
Gruff and grouchy, pang my precocious ear
I’ve plugged them up with apertures and
Opposite of my purpose
I hear it better than ever
Just carve the earth an ear
Our cries will pierce the crust and enter the brain of hell

8. Sophocles Would Laugh

Oh, happy tragedy of these tiny giants!
I believe the stones were read wrong
They killed Goliath when they merely meant to decorate his head
Oh, purpose misguided!
I’d like to crown you king but you lack the parts
And thus must be my queen
In Salo.
Let these perfidious pupils run the school
Wielding their impotent scepters
Playing kingdom
While I abdicate my anthill
Recognize my smallness
It’s a divine comedy, this temporal purgatory
Hung, drawn, and quartered in limbo
Just set the bar high, and maybe I’ll clear it