Poetry

>*not pretentious wankery over a thesaurus

There is not a poem here yet that is "obscure." I don't know why you think poets can only use the most common words known to man

Minecraft, mine cart, the endless block awaits,
Similar to life it pretends
Maybe in the computer world your life could be arranged,
In symmetry and perfection you can dwell
and give your life to the pixel that awaits
to take over your time and give you back
nothing but megabytes for your emptiness

Pokémon go: oh, my woe!
How I've walked through hardship
To find my Pokémon!
Pokémon go? More like
My Pokémon woe.

Here.
Before this screen.
Hard-wired, neat, clean.
Everything is crystal clear.
Housed by tower.
Plugged for power.
Transmitting inputs through a machine.

Display
Quartz-cut imagery.
Raw and processed reality.
Reckless finesse flung by the thumb.
Mistakes, retakes
Three lives, you've died
Respawn, redrawn, reliving missed time.

Missed phone call,
A voice never heard.
Mumbo-jumbo jargon
Whispered in the ears of the dead.
Informing whomever it may concern
News regarding the fall of their creator.
Whose crash and nosedive has resulted in
A plummet and the meeting of their maker.

Echoing, quieting, stilling,
Setting softly into dead circuitry.
The last remaining updates lay filling
The unwanted and unchecked space that was free.

I can't tell if this is serious or minecraft

Down in the ocean
I drown in the motion
Of moving and soothing emotion.
With sweet caressing pleas
I invoke the siren muses
But they don’t hear my call
With rocks in hand they all
Hurl at me their abuses.

It’s a song of a sort I suppose
But I’m now not sure how it goes.
How it smarts and escapes sighs,
But from whom and which I know not.
Must be a grate to their ear where
In air it flies free,
but in water it
Splits the sea.

Weak start.

this is kinda good

care to elaborate? is the 'invoke the siren muses' bit to corny?

>down in the ocean I drown in the motion
It sounds plastic and it feels like it rhymes just so you could make it rhyme
You're powerful words like invoke are shoved aside, the final bit is a good little piece but what leads to the good stuff feels like nothing more than a warm-up

Dick in her pussy
Pussy realgushy
Put it in her tucci
No fucken bueno
Posted like Noteños
Pull that hair like some handles
Dick dripping like a candle
Yea ima pusher
Killer when I gut her
I don't need no butter
Cuz this ain't last tango
Flipped her house into my bando
Walking round in sandals
Posted on the block
No shoes no socks
No deadlocks

I can see where you're coming from calling the first lines plastic, since they were technically meant to be a part of another poem, but I feel they establish the tone of the poem rather well. The rhyming is meant to be playful while at the same time contrasting the dark plot, that of a man drowning. 'Invoke' is a strong word, but my following lines are meant to sweep away that sort of empowering feeling away. The poem certainly isn't trying to glorifying anything, so i think the progression from the playful beginning to the the second half of the first stanza work well together. Also, the stanzas aren't meant to exactly flow, the setting of the ocean notwithstanding. To put it in colorful terms, the poetry is meant to evoke a literal sinking feeling, especially with the final three lines being the shortest of the bunch.

at eleven o clock
p m on last saturday evening
i received the following
message on my
own private radio set
good evening sir
and how are you
this is mars speaking
i replied at once
whom or who
as the case may be
do i know on mars
everyone here is familiar
with your work
was the answer
and we fell well repaid
for the trouble we have had
in getting in touch
with your planet
thank you i replied
i would rather hear
mars say that
than any other planet
mars has always been
one of my favoriet planets
it is sweet of you
to think that way about us
said mars
and so we continued to pay
each other interstellar
compliments
what is or are
thirty five million miles
between kindred souls

O cry, of the milk morning
Does a cattle matron adorn
The brand of Sadom Roland
Lord in all of pastures more

And in these rolling greens
All about cows squat though fare
Lord Roland calls out for thee
And tastes the dairy air

sunburnt man, on sun strewn sand,
said, to sunborne Anne:
what a day to lie here with you
and plant our toes in grains of silica
and run to and from those ocean tides
and love you until the waves don’t crash
to love you evermore

And sunborne Anne, with voice so grand
said, to sunburnt man:
what a day to lie here to you
and speak of the great untruths
and keep you from the world away
and protect you as best I can
to love you evermore

it's a little short or maybe this is an excerpt but i think this would benefit from being longer

I like your imagery though, it inspires something of a small farm run by husband and wife or husband and a few helpers etc.

the first stanza is almost immeasurably better than the second, particularly "Does a cattle matron adorn/ The brand of Sadom Roland"

cool, but more would be fun

There are a million things I haven’t done
And there are millions more I’d never think to do
but even if I could do them all in a day, in a minute, in a second
in the fleeting, sidelong glance of a subway passenger
I fear it will never be enough; my thirst for this life exceeds
All the time I have, all the time I could have

Death lumbers behind me. Peripheral, pestilent, always present.
Childlike in his simplicity. And childlike, he hangs on my sleeve
and asks when it will be time to go

I fear him as an nothingness. I fear that I will be gone, no pain or bliss,
No rage or sorrow, no joy or love. No mountains or crags or beaches
or sunset skies or oceans or any of the countless other wonders
That I have grown too fond of

I should weep if I were to be damned. for in hell or hells
there is an eternity to simply be, which, in the face of
nothingness, would be the greatest wonder of all

The fragile state
The steady clock
The glass weaver
The dead throughout
All of these things
Ring and cry out
But none sought light
As the mother's love
Entombed in waves are seen
I've witnessed for eight decades
But then, weariness came forth
Cursed me to my slumber
To become one now
The irony of all
Is set in motion
By Lord's gallant call
My response is
One simple breath
Not for life
But to depart

I'm not an expert or anything so hopefully I don't come off as moronic.

I like that you have one being simple with the love for the physical sand and waves, while the other is on a grander scale and focuses on the world around them in a metaphorical sense.

>doesn't like thesaurus wankery every now and then

>Every modernist and imagist constantly uses big words.

ur just a liar

The alliteration is garish. Go ahead and assume that people can pick-up your sonic devices and don't need to be attacked by them.

>sunborne anne

this is a fun little snippet though

>what a day to lie here with you
and plant our toes in grains of silica

if it feels cliche when you write it without embellishment, then the embellishment won't make it work

Ocean/emotion rhymes should be illegal. While working on any poem, keep in mind that rhyme is the easiest thing to fuck up, because its the loudest sonic device you have. Any rhyme issue will blare in the readers ears.

>With rocks in hand they all
>Hurl at me their abuses.

some weird grammar you got there, forcing a rhyme doesn't do you any favors.

>Here.

there is absolutely no good reason for this to be a whole line

>jargon Whispered in the ears of the dead.
like this line though

thats the gist of it, i kinda wanted to set the man up as mentally handicapped and is mistakenly in love with his keeper, whereas the keeper has a sort of
maternal love for him
thank you, I dont think it was moronic

I agree 100% on the alliteration, I was kinda having fun with it. Maybe i'll go back and tone it all down as a whole

Blind without a jaw
Bend backward for the law
An Oedipal exchange
What a drain, shall we
Label these the old ways?

Fatter than the land
Whats the meaning of a man?
Rule what narrow eyes survey
For today, but you
Threw away your gold days

Rough around the edges
Got to trimming up the hedges
How swift Babel crumbles
So you stumble right
Back into your old ways

Demanded her perfection
So instead you show affection
An ideal is a judge
So instead you trudge
Straight into your old ways

Keep this all in mind
Plan your shit ahead of time
But now youre not organic
So you panic as you
Slip into your old ways

Walls closing in
Find no solace from within
All the lights blown out
Zone out as you
Slip into the cold way

Apophantic-Fanatic-Phantogram
Note: Have you heard the good news?! The universe is a fraud! Choose your own poem by rearranging the stanzas however you wish! Follow your ghostly bliss!

Hue have a declination to disintegrate into a dogma,
Inchoate dexterity prolifigating in touches of affect
Deleriously spindled into masturbating prospect,
Fondled kaleidoscopic foams, protagonistic,
Into formal agrarian fields of focused futurity

Splock is the stuff of little deaths between nodes
Of manual detritus smashed of theft and sewed
into delineated phantogramtasms bestowed
by durations of a notional conspiratorial choad.
Potmarked by emotional cacophonous hiatuses

Marking molten moments of mind with magma
Intrinsic flexibility multiplying in flounces of defect
Debilitatingly fixated into libidinal, suspect,
Floating panoptical solids, antagonistic,
Into cantankerous delugian fields of desparity.

Major motion picture movements map
Mantra meanings in super-cortical matches
Marking magisterial spooky juridical hatches
Molding Mumsnet into Skynet, wubba lubba
Dolby set. Daaaaaaaaaaaaang straight!

View think a selection of moments like
Diamonds in the rough of sedimentia
Posing predilection of symptomatic
Fantasia multiplying like colony collapse
Reorder. Massive strokes like Anthony Hopkins
Pulverize each moment like plate techtonics.

September coming slow into my comas
Deepening sunsets into wobbly somas.
Could any relation work these sordid days?
Angels dance a spire-high in Oklahoma
Every simple habit engorgeously betrays.

Dictional conflations of your septic bind
Produce these frayed leafs of total time
Bended and bowed into folds of rhyme
Litigational literacy, still ligature of slime.
Every proposition a proposal to die.

Immediately after posting i noticed that i would
>replace "an oedipal exchange" with "thats the oedipal exchange," right amount of syllables and "the oedipal exchange" conveys what i was trying to get at a lot more clearly
>replace "not organic" with inorganic

no one critiqued my poem in prose last thread so I'll post it again

After the rain, I have climbed on a hill and observed the City in the mountain's end.
I have seen many minarets which I didn't differentiate from factory chimneys. I
watched the never ending connection of earth and sky -- a thick, cobweb-like
miasma similar to mother's tablecloths. I had observed beech and oak; pine and
elderberry becoming ghastly-green -- only have the minarets jutted from trees like
shiny needles from knitting. There exists this pattern -- man's direct pattern of
visible things whose knitwear have we shredded and weaved according to our
fashion; and another patter of purple gases whose silhouette we see at night, to
which the minarets aim to interweave it with ours.

Taking pictures of work instead of just pasting the text - it's kinda nice, actually

>The dead throughout
Somehow I can't read this without changing it to "the deadly thought" which I think works better and kind of rhymes with clock, and "dead throughout" rings a little weird. Also rhyming throughout with out two lines later is... questionable. I like those first four lines though, it's a good encapsulation of life right before death.

After that your syntax gets a little weird because of the enjambment I think. In addition to that, the meaning of the lines from "but none sought light" through "to become one now" becoming muddled even when read straight.
The fact that the center is sandwiched by good stuff is what allows it to make sense, which is better than nothing, but I think you should still revise those lines for clarity, paying close attention to what exactly your verbs are trying to do.
Especially the transition from "I've witnessed for eight decades" - it's very unclear as to what we're supposed to think is being witnessed.

I think you could also take some of the imagery in a different direction than the usual decrepit dustiness, and use the language in the first few lines to set the stage for a more spindly, hollowed old age/near death. Think steampunk but not, i guess? your poem, your rules

tl;dr the first six lines and the last four are okay, but everything else in the middle needs work, with attention to verbs and transitions between lines.

(typo with the picture, hence the deletion)
I dont normally write like this, so please be harsh

that which does no evil shall do no good
and those who sail small ships in small glass bottles
will fight ever on into being against the stagnating current
of time.

I collect them. Small plaster or wood facsimiles
of tradeboats that carry nothing on white crested waves
of air corked tightly and sealed to be stored on a shelf
or box, where they age nicely. I try to buy good vintages.

Currently a set of three collects dust on the desk i write on:
A sloop, and two frigates. I abhor the thought of cleaning them.
Objects recently dusted have the appearances of something
fresh: Recently purchased, recently placed, recently made an item
of novelty from which the only escape is into mediocrity and then into
nothingness; this is as we see it from the outside. But inside, the ship-
inside the ship there are bustling crewmen always attacking the work
the captain sets forth, ever steering over the omnipresent whitecap
action inescapable and always rather than escapable and exceptional
step my foot on the bow and plunge ever on into the forever now
i would rather be a pirate in a bottle than a clerk in the world

Rough draft of something that I like somewhat so far

Protip: if you write poems just to jack yourself off on Veeky Forums you should probably kys

There's not a single poem here that's thesaurus porn

What's up with the influx of pseudo into these threads that don't know any words past the basic vocabulary? Go to slam poetry or something

This is bretty gud user!

I love it user. Thank you for that.
In keeping with 's comment though, maybe a third stanza pointing to his simple views coming from a simple mind would do a better job of clearing that up.

For some reason I keep reading it as "saltwater taffy", maybe adding a bitterness from the beginning?
Other than this it's a nice little piece to say the least, although I'd replace the greater and wiser with adjectives pertaining more to the concrete qualities of what makes a good adventurer (since you're walking the same road as they), and it'd sound more in line with the concrete imagery at the start. Sorry I can't just outright say greater and wiser are too clichéd in such a harsh manner, but I hope you get my point.

Absolute cash is the "my soul is the wet clay that dirties my hands and table, takes its own form borne from the desire to create the unknown" line. Whew.

Underrated. What's censored at the bottom? I guess that was the point but there is a word under there. 9/10

>ocean
>motion

Oh dear. Second stanza was alright though
not my kind of thing but it would probably be published with this whole prose poetry zeitgeist
Good

7/10
"it must be a kind of blood, too pale to shed another way"
That's good
3/10
no
A blade carved two frassy letters;
A bee stared at the runes
And a vine colored the letters
Two letters marked R and P
Of young loves brew,
Now briared and green,
A message long overdue.

Beer beer beer
You make me feel so queer
Beer beer beer
I wish you were near
Beer beer beer
In secret you are my most dear
Beer beer beer
Why can't you just appear

lalalalala

7/10 here
Cut the last line and it's rhyme partner, and you're piece will be stronger

broken spirits

i'm all out of cigarettes
lungs burned up
and filled full of ashes
i'm wet with regrets
wring me dry - hang me
up-chucking and fucking up

if i blaze up will i be reborn
or fade away?

i think the sun is
disappointed in me
(i'm anointed with it's rays
but i'm far from holy)

Picturesque hellscapes from white upper middle class suburbia

The self proclaimed writer

Jerking himself off to exhaustion daily

(Never touched, never connected)

To play roulette with his circadian rhythm

And turn an otherwise docile daytime delinquent

Into a nocturnal creature's fear

All to avoid the cliched train wreck of a family

The alcoholic mother

The never proud father

And the always beyond reach sister

Yes yes, feel the waking nightmare

This insomniac desperately craves sleep

As the titular picturesque life

sobriquet to family cat

Is slowly causing his dormant degeneracy

To blister and boil the brain

And he feels like he is losing his mind

In this otherwise ideal world

This grotesquely pictersque

Fevered upper class dream

>sexual desire can be natural
You fucked up before your poem even started.
Also it has a good rythm and sound, very old-fashioned in form and images.

Sometimes I sleep
Or maybe I'll eat
But one things for sure
I'll jack it to skeet

There surely can be unnatural sexual attractions (feet, gore, etc)

But thanks for the upvote on my sonnet. I wish the sonnet would return, or just classicism in general

The punctures of the bush, bloodied black
Rosy spots pulling life into my surface
While in the deeps the million holes grate
and clash

It's a wound I'd thought long lost inside whispers
Of memories in the nightly clouds
Yet any cynic that dares throw his gaze shall see
the blisters

The shoreline invites my weary eyes inside a spring
Dreams of restful sleep and wholeness in my steps
Yet the bush, ever present, lines all the walls of
the labyrinth

Barely a word or gesture, full of ghostly stares
Leaves swaying the scent of his skin on the breeze
I'm once more filled with the void as confirmation
the new heir

The thorns embrace me as we begin again.

Fuck my shit up fampais

I like it
I'm torn about using 'fucking' in the end of the first stanza. It fits with the first stanza, and I can see it as a nice clash-like transition into the next two stanzas. Maybe lose the parentheses from the last two lines, they run really well with the prior two lines in a way that putting them together seems natural.

I'm wondering if joining the second and third stanzas could possibly work. Conceptually they fit together, but I don't know where you'd add the middle stanza. Also, since the first stanza seems to focus on ash and the sort of crumbling brim imagery, 'blaze up' seems a little inappropriate to use.

pardon but i don't follow. is the ocean/emotion rhyme pretentious? is it bad to rhyme them because of the similar endings? if so then wouldn't motion/emotion be a better example to point out?

it's because it's a super overused. rhymes that are used constantly like:

>ocean/emotion
>fire/desire

are gross and immediately degrade the piece as badly as cliches like 'dead as a door nail'

well speaking of cliches, I suppose that was partially intentional. that poem as well as a couple others in a series i've written follow a sort of playful, kid-like poesy. I was sort of inspired by the imagery in songs of innocence by Blake, at least in the idea of cheery songs cherubs would like. would that excuse the rhyme, or would it still seem inappropriate?

>would that excuse the rhyme

seeing as the cliche wasn't successfully subverted, I'd say no. Think of it this way, putting something like that in your poem should be 10x harder than avoiding entirely.

To focus on Blake's poetics, be sure to be in tetrameter, try to use mostly 1 syllable words, with long, long vowel sound like 'fire' or 'while' to create emphasis.

thank you! it's pretty mixed metaphors, i know, and it's unedited, but i'm glad there's something there. i'll see what i can do to fix it up. if I keep the second stanza (not sure if i should replace it with something better), i think changing "fade away" to "torn apart" would be a better rhyme, but i'm guessing there are better words than that out there.

i appreciate the thoughts! haven't posted any poems here in a while, so it was nice to get feedback even with the phone autocorrect typo

move over rupi

ok, i might have to rethink the beginning then
i appreciate the critique, thanks

no problem! I love playing with Blake, and I hope you do exactly what you're striving to!

>Portland

Please tell me this is a parody. It's too perfect.

...

i mean no offense to this guy but how does this have 620 likes? i'm not going to write cigarette poems anymore b/c i'm second-hand embarrassed now

Holy fuck the edgyness levels are off the charts, mark it as spoiler next time so no one gets hurt.

>that profile
>those "poems"

Holy mother of fuck. People actually like this stuff?

...

I'm the user who posted the poem, and I'm really only replying to tell you your post made me actually laugh out loud, thank you.

Not OP, but I can 100% promise the blocked out word is Ablepsia

>i'm not going to write cigarette poems anymore b/c i'm second-hand embarrassed now

Newfag poster from last thread with the teenage level writing, here.
Since I don't know what I am doing, I decided to try writing in the same scheme as Fistful of Steel.
On one hand,it shouldn't matter what works I use derivatively since I am just a novice and posting anonymously on Veeky Forums... But on the other hand, I feel like using that song in particular kind of becomes ironic given its about not being a conformist.

Maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill and should just shutup and write; focus on my work being good on its own merits.

I like it

I get it's tongue-in-cheek and I like some of your wordplay but it's just too much

Proofread please. Are you sure minaret is the word you want?

Final version, (I think) of the sonnet I wrote for my girlfriend's birthday.

If I could sculpt, then sculpt I would
and shape your form in marble white.
Or as my model, before me you stood.
I'd commit to canvas that glorious sight.
I cannot write, but if I try
I'll write about the little things -
you do that make me want to cry
those tears of happiness you bring.

Yet all this art takes sacrifice
the marble broke, the canvas dyed.
The ink upon the paper dries -
I'd look upon my work with pride.
But your perfection outdoes artistry,
so a waste of work those lies would be.

The third and fourth lines should be reworked, they don't fit the meter. Pretty good though.
Shut up and write more.

The Dandy
"Clothes make the man,"
Spat the man who makes the clothes.
(Idle words had irked him, see.)
And saying thus, he rose.

A rakish suit adorned his frame,
Crisp and freshly pressed,
Velvet loafers, pocketwatch:
Meticulously dressed.

It seemed to me that he was scared.

of something intangible, unspeakable?
of losing-
or finding-
a thing so far within him that no force mortal or immortal could separate the two.
So long ago he'd begun to believe that identity could be altered with as little fuss as a sport coat.
He had unearthed his deepest soul and spun it into thread that loomed over his merest flesh.
Stable, secure, invincible! Cloth became his muse, and Clotho his ideal.
But soon enough he felt the creeping discomfort of spirit bound to earth.
For when one's self is visible to all
Little is left to hold sacred.
And when one wears one's heart on one's sleeve
One may become too quickly hurt.

(So I thought as I watched him leave.)
The moral of his flight:
Be a knight with dullest armor
Over armor with no knight.

Yeah those third and fourth lines need to.cram a lot of information into a fairly small space I've been trying to work on it but ran out of time.

i jam my nuts into the drawer
i slam it quickly closed
the hidden blade cuts off my balls
and they fall onto my toes

what's wrong with minarets anyway

personally it reminds me vasily velichko's poem that was quoted by alexander grin as an epigraph for his short story how a man suffering of megalomania accepted a challenge to walk a rope that was set at a significant altitude, the poem itself was about a muslim guy who climbed a minaret and was watching the world thinking how everything below him looked so small and insignificant:

...
playing children from afar
looked up at him and guessed:
"who is there on the crest,
on the minaret they are?"
so it was the children's word:
"it is but a little bird!"

Describe to me the river, the river
Is dried. Describe to me the skyline red -
Its redness recedes and its clouds wither,
And whatever is below it seems dead
As well. Describe, at least, how lays her hair,
Her hair is a wasted, brittle image.
But describe, -describe what is there or there!
Nothing; stillness of a waxwing's plumage.
I cannot see a thing, you've seen it all.
Describe to me the way a dead man looks.
Chalk without purpose, response without call,
Like an unneeded shelf of unread books.
And is that all there is to what I've missed?
To see life's face, imagine a clenched fist.

I'm just trying to write sonnets for exercise. I know the last line is shit but I'm too tired to try to find something else for it.

...

Stick to posting to cosmoetica you hack

Dan Schneider is the greatest poet who has ever lived, my man.

SOME weird bait, dude

Within the dimensions of this clockwork city,
Nestled amongst the soft glow of neon and silver lights
Is an empty room on a high apartment floor
Here, I write, pen wearily clasped,
My mind suffused with the pollution
Of opium and Dunhill cigarettes,
While your face’s phantasmal image
Haunts the corridors of memory
And I reminisce about warm, wasted days.

Yet as I scour through these chambers of reflection
I recall also a multitude of nocturnal rhapsodies,
And as the memories are pried forcefully open like an apricot tin
I am thrust back into those cobblestone alleys
In which hashish billowed through the air,
And cats slinked silently past, the moonlight glimmering off their backs;
In these evanescent moments beneath purple skies,
Our laughter filled the empty spaces of the night.

TBC

Sorry man but you just can't beat this. You'll never write a poem so good.

Oh delicious poison,

Oh tainted nicotine

Why must I suckle at thee cotton teat

Nothing is wrong with minarets, they're just not a common image for me

oh ho, i got one on the spot titled Marijuana
Oh Marijuana, was prithee say you to greenly speak,
But of your void wrinkles I have fingers sweating bleat,
Rolling into your creases like curved revolution,
And creeping into your wrap as if you did to it elate,
With elaborate partake. Present day may, the first or the eighth,
it is April bounty on the 20th of such a foul man's birth that we celebrate,
Summer's sweet serenade.