#todayspoem
from I Have a Time Machine by Brenda Shaughnessy:
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
#todayspoem
from Mrs. Simpkins by Stevie Smith:
‘Since I crossed over dear friends’ it said ‘I’m no different to what I was before
Death’s not a separation or alteration or parting it’s just a one-handled door
We spirits can come back to you if your seance is orthodox
But you can’t come over to us till your body’s shut in a box
And this is the great thought I want to leave with you today
You’ve heard it before but in case you forgot death isn’t a passing away
It’s just a carrying on with friends relations and brightness
Only you don’t have to bother with sickness and there’s no financial tightness’
#todayspoem
from The Poet of Ignorance by Anne Sexton:
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston.
have thrown up their hands.
#todayspoem
from “The Caged Parts” by Harrison Cook:
The roar reaves like two cars ready for a street race, a gas pedal of a sound, starting low, growing louder till the boiling over of harsh breath.
…
When a cage is all you’ve known, born into, grew up in, will die in, what options are left but throwing your body toward the opening of any door?
#todayspoem
- from On the Subject of Doctors by James Tate:
-
who gets to see
most sex organs in the world? Not
poets. With the hours they keep
they need drugs more than anyone.
gotta love a funny poem
#todayspoem
syllables ever grasping
like dying tendrils
I don’t understand haiku
#todayspoem
from it’s more than a job, it’s a journey 🚂 by Kelly Mullins:
as a street sweeper slides down The Swindenstraat and I yell, “scabs!!” out the window a 1% merit increase in this economy is wage theft rage theft I swear to god my left eye migraine eucalyptus tea meditation would text my therapist but she ghosted me
it’s like, should I go on a walk
this is my kind of head exploding on the page poem, I recommend reading the whole thing
#todayspoem
from Cantabria by Ben Meyerson:
days are deposited into what they once were.
All water is what it erodes.
#todayspoem
.
— infinite deserts_ψ__ (@infinitedeserts) March 2, 2023
﹏﹏෴﹏෴෴﹏﹏/▒▒▒▒▒▒༽
· · , · ,
#todayspoem
black coffee at sunup
green tea in the afternoon
red wine at sundown
#todayspoem
from Opera Singer by Ross Gay:
I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness
in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise
…
two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch
leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,
staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee
…
let me stop here and tell you I said thank you.
#todayspoem
A New National Anthem by Ada Limón 🔊
#todayspoem
from Even the walls by Rob Manery:
everything falls
even the walls
eventually, sooner
perhaps
#todayspoem
by Kenji Minamigawa:
Of course, plants don’t have eyes, right? And yet they bloom with such colorful flowers. To put it really simply, this is a result of their getting information from butterflies: “Hey, you look sweet!” and things like that. So in a way, plants see the world through butterflies' eyes.
#todayspoem
from Comfort by Lionel Kearns:
Warm honey percolates through empty worm holes in the mind.
#todayspoem
Biopsy by Laura Villareal
A tiny rabbit nested
in the window
my oral surgeon cut open.
He expected an ABC,
aneurysmal bone cyst,
but removed a brown rabbit instead.
They wrap my head and eyes
in a falcon hood
so I can see
my own rattling interior. The long high whistle
heightens. Sea water and blood. Bafflement
textures the air like a chorus as I’m scraped.
During surgery, my doctor finds nothing
except bone
so thin it appears void
& object on the x-ray.
As I’m stitched closed,
I hear: over, under, around, and through
meet Mr. Bunny Rabbit, pull tight and true.
A long thread falls from my mouth
& I pull. A bad habit,
pulling loose strings when I shouldn’t.
I unravel from mouth
down to my feet.
#todayspoem
from Death of a Teacher by Carol Ann Duffy
The big trees outside are into their poker game again,
shuffling and dealing, turning, folding, their leaves
drifting down to the lawn, floating away, ace high,
on a breeze. You died yesterday.
#todayspoem
from scattering sound, not yet audible, I am on pins and needles by Michael Blouin
no poet spoke, and silence crashed
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
early evening
long blue shadows
of snow drifts
dusting off
an old jazz record
#todayspoem
blurred birds as commas
apostrophes on a cloud…
margins of mountains
#todayspoem
Dorothea Lasky talking about a poem
I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that our human experience is very unimportant when taken in the context of the endless magnitude of the universe.
#todayspoem
from The Red Hand Files by Nick Cave
If we do not attend to the work of projecting delight upon the world, what are we actually doing? If we do not look for joy, search for it, reach deep for it, what are we saying about the world? Are we saying that malevolence is the routine stuff of life, that oppression and corruption and degradation is the very matter of the world? That we greet each day with suspicion, bitterness and contempt? It seems to me that to make suffering the focus of our attention, to pay witness only to the malevolence of the world, is to be in service to the devil himself.
…
Joy sings small, bright songs in the dark — these moments, so easily disregarded, so quickly dismissed, are the radiant points of light that pierce the gloom to give validation to the world.
#todayspoem
The Best Thing About A Poem by Max Lavergne
The best thing about a poem is that you can fit the whole thing into the body of an email without needing attachments. The best thing about a travelling salesman is that he can fit everything he needs into his little suitcase and go and go without ever stopping until he has sold everything in there 1000 times over, or even more, and even then he can still go on and on and on. The best thing about a jellyfish is that it wants practically nothing and gets practically nothing. It all works out.
#todayspoem
by Basho via Strange Weather in Tokyo
plum blossoms, fresh shoots, prepared at Mariko’s inn, with grated yam soup
#todayspoem
by Seihaku Irako via Strange Weather in Tokyo
Light filters white across the river
through the willows.
From Ono on the other bank
a flute makes its faint way through the mist,
touching the traveler’s heart.
#todayspoem
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
&
this Michael Robbins quote it inspired:
“Forget about self-expression, kid. Learn to see the monster on the dinner table.”
#todayspoem
from Origin Story: The Father by Diamond Forde
Love didn’t mind. The Father didn’t sell shoes—not really.
This was 1930—before The Father was allowed
to hold Love like a thrasher in his snow-banked
palms. But how he longed to hold her—GOD
this poem made me think of this song:
#todayspoem
For Robert Hogg
i. Tree and Sky
blue
again
against
which
per
sists
today’s
view
ii. Development
blue,
and
bluer
still,
and
bluer,
still
iii. Brighten the Corners
the
green
nudg
ing
in
to view (sounding slowly
spring’s blue
dimensions)
#todayspoem
from Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris
…
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
#todayspoem
…
More important, where is the line between flags and lingerie, anthems and anathemas, God and his creations—the ones who pay taxes and walk on earth?
…
What I can say is that from down here, among the shoes and jackboots, I’ll never know for certain who triumphed over whom.
#todayspoem
haiku by Chris Gordon
lunacy a lost poem about an acetylene torch
a visual semaphore representing the passage of time
#todayspoem
haiku by Jane Wallace Pearson
Sometimes you ignore
what can only be described
as a piano
#todayspoem
Important to remember is that a myth is not something false, rather a myth is something with so much truth that it needs a fantastical container.
#todayspoem
Don’t you think if you were living in a dream you made for yourself you’d have less diarrhea?
#todayspoem
from January by Nancy Schoenberger
in this, this baleful start
to a new beginning,
a new life? You seem to be guarding
something, brothers. One at each door.
Is it the little secret of the new year:
that everything waiting for us up ahead
will be exactly as it was before?
#todayspoem
Ma Goose: The Interrogation by Jane Flanders
Who killed Cock Robin?
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
What’s in the cupboard?
Have you any wool?
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
Where have you been?
Have you any wool?
How many hairs to make a wig?
Where have you been?
How many miles to Babylon?
How many hairs to make a wig?
Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?
How many miles to Babylon?
How many were going to St. Ives?
Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?
Whose dog art thou?
How many were going to St. Ives?
How does your garden grow?
Whose dog art thou?
Are the children in their beds?
How does your garden grow?
What’s in the cupboard?
Are the children in their beds?
Who killed Cock Robin?
a circular series of questions stolen from nursery rhymes? yes please
#todayspoem
from Mourning Problems by Xi Chuan:
a person dies, and some people mourn and some even applaud
a generation dies, and the next generation doesn’t really mourn
a country dies, most of the time just leaving apocrypha
a country that doesn’t leave apocrypha wasn’t a real country
if it wasn’t a real country, when it dies no one mourns
no one mourns, and the wind blows in vain
rivers flow in vain, washing over rocks in vain
glistening in vain, making vain ripples
#todayspoem
from The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried by Amy Hempel:
There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls
#todayspoem
by Sappho
The moon is set. And the
Pleiades.
It’s the middle of the night.
Time passes.
But I sleep alone.
#todayspoem (s)
from night void messages by Edward Smallfield (a chapbook)
from night void message #33:
discolored walls
& French champagne
a bus to somewhere
from night void message #173:
the metal grinds
outside the door
in the sudden night
night void message #177:
mostly the intensity of the red
from night void message #97:
what time is it
on your coast?
human time
#todayspoem
from For Brothers of the Dragon by Terrance Hayes:
Because growing old is like slipping into a new coat without taking the old coat off
#todayspoem
4
To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.
9
Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.
#todayspoem
Fog by Carl Sandburg
#todayspoem
from A Song and the Sultan by Mahmoud Darwish:
and the red sun has become an ember
which the Sultan in vain imprisoned
and suddenly the fire
is a revolution!
#todayspoem
Learning Persian by Solmaz Sharif
deek-teh
deek-tah-tor
behn-zeen
dee-seh-pleen
eh-pe-deh-mi
fahn-te-zi
mu-zik
bahnk
mah-de-mah-zel
sees-tem
vah-nil
vee-la
vee-roos
ahm-pee-ree-ah-lizm
doh-see-eh
oh-toh-ree-te
#todayspoem
from Quantifiable by Dawn Pichón Barron:
IV.
No other in the mammalian world has the uvula dangling in the back of the
Mouth with its precious cargo, packed cavity of nerves and muscle and bone
The uvula would be proof enough, yes, that all humans are the same
Placing to bed, under a spell to never wake, atrocities of other
#todayspoem
A Stone
wrote a book of poems,
seventy-odd pages
and each one empty.
It was called happy to wait,
and its cover was a turtle shell
scoured by weasels,
left abandoned on the beach.
Its sun-bleached husk
was blank as air.
It took years to read,
mostly because the smell
of sunlight and dust
that rose from its pages
was so distracting,
the way it conjured
mountains out of nothing,
the way it made us
drop what we were doing,
stare out the window
and forget who we were —
#todayspoem
The Mind After Everything Has Happened by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Perpetual peace. Perpetual light.
From a distance it all seems graffiti.
Gold on gold. Iridescent, torqued phosphors.
But still graffiti. Someone’s smear on space.
A name. A neighborhood. X. X was Here.
X in the House. A two-handed engine
Of aerosols hissing Thou Shalt Not Pass
On fiery ground. A shot-down Aurora
Borealis. That raised areola
At the tip of the tongue of I or Thou.
Benedict Robinson, text me, if you know:
If Hell is a crater to a crater
To a crater to a crater, what then
Is Heaven, aside from its opposite,
Which was glorious, known and obvious?
#todayspoem
from Daily Kerouac
The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
#todayspoem
A clockwork cathedral appears over Brooklyn. A philosopher knows why it has come.
#todayspoem
haiku by Hayden Carruth
Excellence requires
leaf-rakers to sweep one spot
nine times. Nine, not eight.
#todayspoem
from Impossible Deer by Susan Nguyen
Just this morning looking out
from the deck, I saw the fire
of eight cardinals burning
in our honeysuckle. An omen.
#todayspoem
from Hotbeds in Norfolk, Virginia by Ariana Benson
Today, they flattened the house across the street
into memory—siding panels rotting like rinds
in the yard’s clovers and crabgrass. It’s constant,
the vinyl harvest: red, yellow, pink—all stripped
to the same blanched flesh. To make a space
more enticing, they say. But I was fed
on sweetness sprung up from dirt, and nobody
skins an apple they intend to candy.
#todayspoem
from The Revisionist and the Astropastorals by Douglas Crase
A reductionism that makes the world
complex, a truth that simply nothing
can explain, is how events curled
up in space when seen are scattering.
#todayspoem
To show the fat brain
rotting like stumps of brown teeth
in an old bright throat
is the final clever thrill
of summer lads all dead with love.
So here is mine,
torn and stretched for the sun,
to be used for a drum or a tambourine,
to be scratched with poetry
by Kafka’s machine.
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
Omens by Danusha Laméris
Out here, we read everything as a sign.
The coyote in its scruffed coat,
bending to eat a broken persimmon on the ground.
The mess of crows that fills the apple tree,
makes a racket, lifts off.
In between, quiet.
The winter fog is a blank.
I wish I could make sense
of the child’s empty bed,
the bullet hole through my brother’s heart.
The mailman drops a package
on the front stoop and the neighbor’s dog
won’t stop barking. I tread
down the stairs, lightly.
Because we can’t know
what comes next, we say,
The plum tree is blooming early.
There are buck antlers lying in the grass.
A mountain lion left its footprints by the bridge.
#todayspoem
In the Language of Mammon from Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
specifically the impact this poem (and the other concrete-like poems) had on the reading experience of the book. suddenly all words looked weird, written forwards or backwards. language had to be grappled with more consciously.
#todayspoem
Using a Trot by Vito Hannibal Acconci
He said: “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”
He said that was straight from the horse’s mouth.
He said it straight from the horse’s mouth.
The horse was large, strong, with four legs, solid hoofs, and flowing mane and tail.
(Something like it was what he sat, rode, or was carried on.
There was a frame on legs to support something.)
And something or other was uttered through the mouth, which contained the teeth and the tongue.
There was a wry expression!
There, the water emptied into another body of water.
The body, then, developed by means of food.
He had been mentioned before.
Now, not bent or crooked, he was coming out of the opening.
He was no longer on his high horse.
#todayspoem
haiku by Ciarán Parkes
solar panels
turning rusty
autumn leaves
#todayspoem
haiku from ant ant ant ant ant
you bring your constellation of gnats
#todayspoem
The Park is Full of People by Michael Robbins
It took me an hour to travel
one hour into the future.
It’s terrible here,
…
Someone
misquoted “moon full on the lawn”
as “moon full of the lawn” and now
I long for airless orbiting praries.
…
The future—or as I like to call it,
5:31 p.m.—is finally on.
#todayspoem
{And Here, the Remains of a Field} by Alain Mabanckou
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
And here, the remains of a field
A path withstands the onslaught of ferns
Mushrooms grow
on contorted limbs of a felled rônier palm
Handles of pruning hooks
A large aluminum cooking pot overturned
at the edge of the gulch
its lid lies a bit farther off …
Twigs
Ash
Two blocks of flint
for inventing fire …
#todayspoem
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson
Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.
#todayspoem
NOTES DURING LONG PHONE CONVERSATION WITH MOTHER by Lydia Davis
for summer – she needs
pretty dress – cotton
cotton nottoc
coontt
tcoont
toonct
tocnot tocont
tocton
contot
#todayspoem
from The Thanksgiving Reader
#todayspoem
Elegy from Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen 📚
Do not look for him
In brittle mountain streams:
They are too cold for any god;
And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs.
Of slow green water
And the hovering coloured fish
Kiss his snow-bruised body
And build their secret nests
In his fluttering winding-sheet.
#todayspoem
from Some eel thoughts by Michael Malay
Their voyage thus describes a kind of sinewave, a diurnal dipping followed by a nocturnal surfacing: the arc of their homecoming.
…
They are not returning for themselves but for the future, which makes itself felt as an itch in their bellies.
…
Today, there are more than one million man-made obstructions in rivers and streams across Europe.
The contradiction couldn’t be greater. On one hand, the obduracy of concrete and the flushness of steel, and on the other hand, this sinuous rope of changing life. An eel
…
Everywhere, though, it is being met by borders and walls, borders and walls.
I am always being born, it says, and now – can you hear it? – watch me as I disappear.
#todayspoem
from We’ll Meat Again by Benjamin Myers
Rust smears a sunset
over the quarantine station
as ants map the land grab
of the crumbling colony
down here in the castle of nettles.
#todayspoem
from The Cows of Love Creek by Danusha Laméris
This is not repentance, a gesture to reset the scales-
or is it? How do we love the earth
without getting blood on our hands?
#todayspoem
from Autumn’s Sun by Loren Connors
Oct. I3
I sit here on the toilet thinking, Well, I just have to get this out of the way, don’t I, so I can look at the trees and work.
The kid’s crying and Suzanne says, “C’mon, c’mon.” Last night he knocked over a guitar in Brian Guitars, and I thought we’d have to buy it. Suzanne started shaking and asked me, “Why’d you open the case?” I said, “It was this beautiful blues guitar, like a diamond.” “Like a diamond!” she said, with a smile that was already there.
I have to drive to the marsh today. By the road I see a maple. It’s cold, and the maple seems redder, and this howling at my truck brings it to me even more.
little birch
no leaves, no buds
in dawn’s light
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
haiga by Monica Plant
When feeling doubtful,
Why not consult a council
of trees or of squirrels?
#todayspoem
haiku by Johnny Baranski
Sleepless night&emdash;
moon-cast cell bars’ shadows
lay on the stone cot
#todayspoem
haiku by Jamie Everhart
summer sunset
a snake in the mouth
of a snake
#todayspoem
from Topsy-Turvy World by William Brighty Rands
Ba-ba, black wool,
Have you any sheep?
Yes, sir, a packfull,
Creep, mouse, creep!
Four-and-twenty little maids
Hanging out the pie,
Out jump’d the honey-pot,
Guy Fawkes, Guy!
Cross latch, cross latch,
Sit and spin the fire;
When the pie was open’d,
The bird was on the brier!
#todayspoem
from Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.
The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.
#todayspoem
haiku by Ramesh Anand
sizzling noon
buffalo walks away
with the pond
#todayspoem
A Cottony Fate by Jane Hirshfield
Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.
Now I too am sixty
There was no other life.
#todayspoem
from The Drought by J. G. Ballard
#todayspoem
Halloween Haiku by Jone Rush MacCulloch
scarecrow in the field
wears last winter’s torn raincoat
murder of crows land
#todayspoem
The Blue in Beets by Erica Funkhouser
The blue in beets
comes and goes
sometimes a shadow
of the weeds
where beets grew
or of their towering leaves
other times a suggestion
of what the beets
might have been:
blue birds
blue stones
blue fish
blue whales
blue water.
If blue isn’t here
it’s there
if it’s not there
it’s coming
if you have just seen it
it will be back
if you have never seen it
you will.
#todayspoem
Time by John Wieners
Why is it eternity lasts a moment
a moment eternity?
Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls
at dawn?
I hear voices rustle in the leaves
after they are gone.
New mice burst into life. Small raccoons
bear tiny chains around their wrists.
#todayspoem
from sky hammer by Julian Talamantez Brolaski:
I took my sky hammer &
pounded out a few choice
clouds, cirrus and I don’t know, nimbus
as in a god on earth
moving in space as a great auroral mist
a god who beholds the sparrows
washing in the dusty gravel
of frankford avenue
…
#todayspoem
actually that mountain is clouds #haiku
— ant ant ant ant ant (@ariariariariari) August 27, 2022
#todayspoem
Marble
by Maggie Graber
Love, show me your teeth.
Show me the night settling
like a black pond, moon
a glint in a wolf’s eye. Show me
your eyes of bone-white
and shadow, the bonfires
that stripped off our bark
and your throat full of bees.
Look. The river changes tenses
and I can’t get enough of this
light, the needlework of stars
and the dozen broken hearts
it took to get to this one—
a marble peering through ashes
like moonlight in mist.
#todayspoem
from The Woman Who Couldn’t Describe A Thing If She Could
By Mary Ruefle
a poem that combines my (apparent) love of poems about/with doors and poems that describe things in ways that seem, at first, absurd until you realize that’s exactly what they are
#todayspoem
— Graphic Scores (@GraphicScoreBot) October 27, 2022
#todayspoem
from Look by Franny Choi
#todayspoem
#todayspoem
from Devastation & Hope by J. Drew Lanham:
I climbed up; watched a sharp-shinned hawk recycle some unfortunate songbird and listened to the lucky trees that were left talking in leaf rattle to the river rushing by.
#todayspoem
by Shido Bunan:
Die while you’re alive, and be absolutely dead, Then do what ever you want: it’s all good.
#todayspoem
Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine
#todayspoem
from J. Drew Lanham’s Sparrow Envy
#todayspoem
from A Coast-Nightmare by Christina Rossetti:
…
Only ghosts in flocks and shoals:
Indistinguished hazy ghosts surround there
Meteors whirling on their poles;
Indistinguished hazy ghosts abound there;
…
#todayspoem A Blank White Page by Francisco X. Alarcón:
is a meadow
after a snowfall
that a poem
hopes to cross
#todayspoem
via tinywords
#todayspoem
a haiku by David Oates:
abandoned gas station
paper cups bleaching
in the weeds
#todayspoem
Who are all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me?
— Daily Kerouac (@DailyKerouac) August 27, 2022
#todayspoem
from How to Write by Anne Waldman:
Once, on the Sixth Avenue bus
I got a sudden sensation
I had been alive before
That I was a man at some other time
Traveling
You would think this strange if you were a woman
If I were a man right now I’d be getting out of the draft
but I think I’d want to be a poet too
Which simply means alive, awake and digging everything
Even that which makes me sick and want to die
I don’t really, you know
I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes
because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way
you have to think about yourself a lot
Dull thoughts like what am I doing?
…
A lot of drugs can change you if you want
because you too are made of what drugs are made of
In fact you are just a bundle of drugs
when you come right down to it
I don’t want to go into it
but you’ll see what I mean when you catch on
#todayspoem
a butterfly
— Basho Society (@BashoSociety) September 21, 2022
is also made
of dust
Ogawa
#todayspoem
from Oblivion by Kevin Young:
In the field the cows consider
oblivion, mullingit over. They & their many
stomachs know nothingstays lost forever—that grass, almost
cruel, resurrects again,again. They know even
drought will end
#todayspoem
haiku by Goichi Imase
the place
higher than goose
it is called the sky
#todayspoem
Second Crow by Matthias Göritz, translated by Mary Jo Bang:
…
From the balcony, sliced light
leaves behind an arm.
…
#todayspeom
\lev\ by J. Drew Lanham
this selection is in honor of the thrush whose morning today turned out to be its last, after a window
#todayspoem
from A Year’s Supply of Poetry by Patricia Finney:
So quality is a difficult thing to pin down
And the fault might very likely be with me
And not him and his convoluted effusions.
To Sturgeon’s Principle, I add Finney’s Corollary
Which says that at least 10% of everything
Might be good.
#todays poem
Haibun With Insects by Megan Kim
here’s the haiku portion
~
Lightning bug, firefly
I say grass lit like heaven
Is it a violence?
#todayspoem
What I Believe By Kimberly Blaeser
I believe the weave of cotton
will support my father’s knees,
but no indulgences will change hands.
I believe nothing folds easily,
but that time will crease—
retrain the mind.
I believe in the arrowheads of words
and I believe in silence.
I believe the rattle of birch leaves
can shake sorrow from my bones,
but that we all become bare at our own pace.
I believe the songs of childhood
follow us into the kettles of age,
but the echoes will not disturb the land.
I believe the reach of the kayak paddle
can part the blue corridor of aloneness,
and that eyes we see in water are never our own.
#todayspoem
Visitors by Joan Naviyuk Kane:
Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.
We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp’s wick,
weary of anyone small enough to bar our entry.
#todayspoem
haiku by Jacquie Pearce
a boy swings a branch swings a boy
#todayspoem
The Atom No. 18 by Sarah Mangold
A (Multimedia) Poem I Like: DOWN LAND by Danny Hammond:
A Haiku I Like by Bob Lucky:
summer blues
wisteria high in the branches
of a dying tree
A Haiku I Like by Ann K. Schwader in The Heron’s Nest:
in this uncertain world dandelions
A Poem(?) I Like: Sonic Verbs (68) by Marc Weidenbaum
babble, bawl, bay, blow, bombinate, burble, burr, buzz, cantillate, cheep, chirr, chirrup, churr, clang, coo, crackle, croon, drone, echo, echolocate, fissle, gasp, groan, gurgle, harmonize, hiss, howl, hum, intone, keen, mewl, moan, mumble, murmur, mutter, nasalize, oscillate, psithurate, purr, resound, ring, roar, rumble, rustle, scream, screech, shout, shriek, sibilate, sigh, sign, snore, sough, squall, squeal, susurrate, swish, thrum, thwack, trill, vibrate, wail, whimper, whine, whir, whisper, yell, yelp
A poem I like: A Future Game by Jeffrey Wells-Powers:
I am pleased to announce
Some of the things
That won’t concern me
For the next couple of years:
A poem I like: haiku by Renée Owen:
against the currents black crow wind
A poem I like: haiku by Dustin Hackfeld
A twilight of grackles—
the old gate swings
in the autumn wind
SOME POEMS I LIKE
Let’s start this off with a piece that isn’t a poem. Or is it?
A tragedy is a haunted house with the prison-like spatial constraint removed. You are free to move yet not to escape the event. An equivalent definition is that a tragedy is a haunted cosmos, which is another species of house.
…
A hero dispelling a haunting is the intersection of two tragedies. Most often this isn’t a battle but a hallway between slightly separate rooms.
One reason I love the (Poem-A-Day)[https://poets.org/poem-a-day] series is because the “About This Poem” section can be as rich / interesting as the poem itself. And sometimes more so. saying of il haboul by adelaide crapsey is as interesting to me for its form as its content.
My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.
Tommy Pico is great to read, but even better to listen to. Do both with an excerpt from his book poem Junk.
What can you do with a mythology? Let’s ask ex patria by evie shockley
a person who knows all the answers can only borrow a mythology like i’m king midas or i’m god. a painter can take a mythology and remake it so that it answers a new question
…
autumn is answering the question about gorgeous rotting. just magenta, green, brown, pink, yellow, red, violet flying off the mythological canvas.
Assessment as poem from poetry trapper keeper
I’m always opening parentheses I forget to close
Never Seldom Sometimes Rarely Often Always
talking about talking about clay
The sun also rises, as they say, but what else does?
one day
the neon
will burn outand then what
*
sun rises
like rent
*
sun rises
like a flag
*
sun rises
like the ocean
I have a thing for crow poems.
and why? The crow long gone now, and what marked the line between winter and spring?
A poem I like: Mark Truscott : A DESCRIPTION
A concatenation of enactment
and resemblance of and in
language: a room, silence, sound.
A poem I like: Airsoft by A. Van Jordan:
And toy guns masquerade as lethal guns
in a boy’s dreamland where no one dies,
where they simply lie down and play dead,
but they live to play on.
As mysterious as a cat in a box,
a toy gun in a Black boy’s pocket,
the gun neither dead nor alive,
unless offered a chance to empty
his pocket to solve the paradox
of what a day might hold.
had a hard time narrowing down the excerpt, sorry if it “ruins” “the end”
A poem I like: Foxglove Country by Zaffar Kunial
Alone it becomes a small tangle,
a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell,
elvish door to a door. Xgl
we claim ownership
with lines drawn
in invisible ink
siren song of
a neighborhood emergency
moths to a flame
