poetry daily

Too Many Idioms | Earnest Tilling

Life is good.
What if it’s not?
What if you
Have fungus or foot rot?
Make lemons into lemonade.
What if it’s sour?
Or what if you run out
Of lemons and so does the store
And you end up needing
A whole other hour?
What if you see the glass half empty
Instead of half full?
And what if that idiom nonsense
Is a whole lot of bull?
And what if there is no light
At the end of the tunnel
So if you’re a mystic
You have a whole more light to channel?
And what if you’re not a mystic?
Then you have no light at all
What if every cloud
Had a sulfurous lining
Instead of a silver one?
And how can a silver lining
Harness something as free as a cloud?
And what if
You can’t keep your chin up?
What if you had cancer
And your lymph nodes swelled
And you had no choice
But to have your jaw removed?
Knowing that you would die most likely
Anyway?
Then what can you do?

The Reading of Fiction – A Poem by JD DeHart

Updike never sold me a day,
but I can get lost in his descriptions.
Similarly, pages of Faulkner can
bury me in dialogue.
I can coast along the erasure
of a graphic novel about Derrida.
Or I can get lost in Billy Collins’
description of getting lost in a poem.
Or listen to the verse conversation
of James Tate.
Then what race occurs
to construct my own fiction, to view
and understand the fictions others
are creating, even as I walk by them,
even maybe about me.

Persecuting Poets (A Doggerel Poem) | Daniel Klawitter

Athenian: “Now didn’t we hear you saying a few minutes ago
that a legislator ought not to allow the poets to compose
whatever happened to take their fancy? You see, they’d
never know when they were saying something in opposition
to the law and harming the state.”- Plato, Laws IV.

Rebels are red
Violence is true
Verse is subversive
And so are you

More at http://about.me/dklawitter.

White Privilege | Daniel Klawitter

“First of all, you must learn the
constitution of man and the modifications
which it has undergone, for originally
it was different from what it is now.”
Plato, The Symposium.

We all begin
in the skins we’re in,
hurled into the world
like colored comets
as if by chance.

But whiteness
is a brightness
that obliterates
the dance of difference.

And the fact
that you don’t have to
think about this,
is a proof enough
of privilege

More at http://about.me/dklawitter.

Once I Cried | Allison Grayhurst

Once I cried
the conscious death,
reborn in the orb of humiliation,
mopping the slime off floors,
nausea permeating
the base of my spine.
Once I was trapped
in a wavering faith,
shifting like in a restless sleep
from nightmare to being awake.
My skin was caked in lime, scorched by
the unharvested dream.
The sky cracked quick as though
scissors sliced right through,
and the spell of suicidal defeat reshaped
into an era that was past and never to be relived.
The house door opened,
the sore removed,
the picture frame expanded
to encompass more
than I ever knew.
And now with rent unpaid
and time a driving axe,
the grass looks gold
as my dignity blazes
through the flood
like a beloved ship unchained.

More at http://www.allisongrayhurst.com.

That Day | Jamsheed Shafi

That day was beautiful.
There were winds but there was also a calm.
There was an innocent me waiting to see
someone.
Then she came…
The winds were slow but my heart beat fast.
I tried to talk and talk out of my heart.
I waited for an opportunity to come
But there was none…
Then came that time, I was ready to talk.
while I was about to say, she left me in that
way.
I followed her and said ‘you are the one’.
Body shivered, hands trembled and everything
became out of focus.
the only thing I could see was her…
Now was her turn, ‘impossible’ she said.
I am possible I heard.
But with time she faded away.
And I lost her in that way…
I know that’s the past.
But everytime I move forward,
The present has to struggle with the past.
So I remain where I am.
Struggling to move forward.
Struggling to live.
Struggling to exist…

Bear Reports | Carolyn Foote Edelmann

lately, there’ve been reports
of black bear sightings
along many of my daily trails
– regrettably, a day or so
after my eager excursions
at the Pole Farm
I follow very deep
intense
extremely straight tracks
incised through mud
in the dark wood
and o, how I want them
to mean coyote
near Keefe Road,
next to my parked car’s back tire
this stack of very pointy
very glossy
berry-filled
black scat
could very well be
weasel
don’t get me wrong
I’m happy for brown thrashers
green frogs
rare monarchs, sipping
among flowers taller than I
on the bridges trail
where the fox roams
I count twenty paces between
bursts of “eau de terroir”
why then
does it matter
so very much
that these sites
belong to the bears?

More at http://njwildbeauty.wordpress.com.

A Storm | Silent

Restless, eager, loving
The intensity of your desire consumed me
Curious, shy and yearning
The feelings grew despite the sorrow
Have you ever met a soul with so much anger and so much love?
Did you ever want, so badly, to kiss so roughly it became a bite?
Like waves our feelings, a sea of sensations
Reality was much stronger than our dreams
Unfilled, pressing, smitten
The intensity of my desire consumed you
Anxious, mad and sober
The feelings grew despite the romance
Have you ever met two souls with so much anger and so much love?
A storm,
From the beginning to the end,
We were a storm

More at http://loudlysilent.blogspot.com.es/2015/02/a-storm.html.

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