It was chilly today/ so I ate some chili/ am I in Chile?

Vashdaman

Za Warudo
.../or is Chili in me!

Whoa! Hold on to your hat, but I've got more of that kind of word play up my sleeve/you better believe!

So yeah, this is actually the poetry thread. A thread where anyone can write anything they want basically. As long as it's poetic that is!!

Let me try and get the ball rolling, it's been a little while since I've done one:

As I close my eyes I feel fear scuttle over all my senses like an army of spiders
I don't want to be unhappy
I hate to be
But it's so easy to allow myself to ease back into it's coldly warming embrace
like I was I slipping into a spider suit
turning my back on the hope of bathing in the sunshine
But this isn't for me anymore
I don't want it
My name ain't Peter Parker
 
Run da streets wid your thugs
blessed by pac man
but still
tongue kissing
god damn was it good
The **** that could keep me motivated
your hand
it didn't turn to sand
am I the man?
Let me know
I'm too sensitive for games
I never played pac man

 
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My heart was saying one thing
my head another
Because we weren't saying much
Well, maybe I was
But then I realized that talk is cheap
and even if it's not, there are other ways to do it
words are bond
but so is a good look
Like Connery in his prime
I don't think my shell of a heart is betraying me this time
When you buried your head in the sands of my chest
I know you found it
took it
and heard more than the ocean

C'mon guys...don't make this my equivalent of AF's thread. Post something!
 
Okay vash, drunk enough to take whatever accusations of angst or pretension anyone might level at it now I think.

-----

Auld Aquaintance

The trees are skeletal now
Their ghostly winter forms
Appearing dead

I walked through the silent wood
Following the moss-covered wall
Crumbling with neglect
To find the place
To find the name

Why return
To pick at old wounds?
To scratch them out?
Damnatio memoriae?
Pretend as though it never was?

I did not know
Although I searched
And thought I knew the the place
There was no sign
No trace of what had been

Had I not made
Enough of an impression?

The tree did not deserve
The wounds which I inflicted
Did I deserve my own?
Perhaps.
Time and age distorts
The memory and the wood

We grow and heal together, now
But still somewhere inside

The name
The wound
The memory
Remains.

When I am gone
When she is gone
It will remain until
One last, brief flame
Extinguishes the final earthly memory

Then nothing.

Life, it carries on
And love
And hope
And fear
And pain
And misery
Belong to folk anew

And she and I
And the tree

Are nothing

As we ever were.
 
Fecking el that's what I call a poem! Still, yous got a ways before you reach the heights of something like my bond/Connery wordplay, but I can't begrudge that.

C'mon the rest of AUKN!

Seriously, that was a magnificent poem ayase. I hope I can write something as moving one day
 
I'm pretty terrible at taking compliments for things I create because I instinctively think they're sh*t and pick them to pieces myself, but thanks. It took a lot of 13% alcohol to share it.
 
No need for alcohol, that was honestly wonderful.

Mortal Rombat

Despite common sense, the desert makes you cold
My heart was frozen solid for so many years
So it was only natural at first I had fears of you shattering it easily
Like a romantic Mortal Kombat (Mortal Rombat?) finisher
The thought of that had my teeth chattering queasily
I do talk too much
I know
I'm a product of this society
But today it came to me
I can deal with heartbreak
Because it couldn't break
The most you could do was bruise it
you've defrosted it to such an extent
When I sit next to you
I'm always in a deck chair
so if I get punch drunk off love and hurt
that seems fair
As long as I don't bruise you
you're just far too tender
So I'll tender you my heart
I can't think why not to
 
My life isn't straight
it's a round shape
but it still has corners
I'm in one
need to get out
but the egg shells are cutting up my heart
but then again part of me doesn't want to follow the line anyway
so used to the harsh corner slice
tastes like brittle stones
or my chipped tooth
chipped truth
corner life
cheeks sagging with bitterness
no rose
I think I need to grow
but right now the only growth is coming from my nose
it's like a jungle
or the weed that tumbles
at every stack of hay I stumble
and say "you know" a lot
I hope they do
and give me a chance to hatch from this egg
finally.
 
oceans on cold days
I thought this tube strike ended at 6
central London always makes me feel more crazy
it's not a place you should go to everyday there's just something wrong about it
Primark playing suitably creepy music for me to creep about in
I'm doing it again
why can't they change the flipping song
Am I just hearing it in my head?
no one else seems bothered by it
people are trying on 14£ jeans that come with belts
I'm staring at myself like I'm trying on my face
I don't look too sure about it
and I'm not
what am I?
an ugly narcissist?
that's the worst kind
I can't circle anymore
I think I'm starting to scare the staff
I'm scaring myself
did I scare her?
did she realise like I realise now
that I look like one of those terrorist mugshots you always see on the evening news
maybe that sounds racist sorry
like big bird then
one of the staff walks past me
I quickly switch my twitchy gaze to a backpack that has the union jack on it
and pretend to examine it with sweaty hands and brow
maybe it would have been more convincing
if I wasn't already wearing the biggest and most expensive red backpack in the world
outside at last
I'm definitely not on the right path
I'm in such a muddle
such a puddle
lost my only chance to escape
that's stupidity not fate
 
I'm the least blithe person in world Zink brother. There's almost no activity I can do without getting upset and troubled over something, especially walking around Central great wen. Do you too go into the central London daily, Zinki? Why do we not meet for Coffee or Pint?
 

I work in Soho! I would certainly be game for a rendezvous! I recall everyone planned something last year, before the website outage saw an end to such discussions.
 
Sweet. I'm always about in central London due to uni and whatnot, but I live in London anyway so I'd be game anyway. Yeah I think I remember us tentatively talking last year. If anyone else in (or out of) the big smoke wants to mingle then that's cool. Just send me a message when you're free or up for it, Zinki.
 
Not a poem but some prose I wrote a while ago. It's a true story unsurprisingly:

Here's to you, slayer of shiny patriarchs!

I knew it was going to be a bad day. As usual, it starts with a coffee. One of my usual cafes had suddenly hiked the price of their flat whites from £2.75 to £2.95. I'm getting poorer by the day while my coffees are rapidly getting more pricey. But it's emblematic of the problem I suffer in all areas of life: I can't keep up, in fact, I'm not just not keeping up, I'm breaking down. My body is breaking down, what vestige of confidence I had is breaking down.

I'm finding it hard to find love, and my face, instead of following some sensible hyper evolutionary logic and tightening up it's etched forehead, repairing the chipped front tooth hanging uncouthly in it's gum, keeping my hair brown. Instead of doing this, my incorrigible face is continuing, no, hastening, it's acquiescence to time's merciless embrace. Time, the faceless, formless, iconoclast dedicated to the desecration of the temple of beauty we worship at. Time, the vandal who scratches new and unsightly lines into my face like some teenage dickhead keying a shiny new car. Time wreaks it's vengeance bitterly on everything that exists, everything that is gorgeous, because time is a man, a cruel and petulant ancient man. And it's an instrument used by men too, to measure their dicks with. Wasn't it the cruel old men who told us what progress was, who told us not to dilly dally.

But I wasn't some sexy stud even before. So it probably makes no difference, that's one consolation I can find in my face's slow chipping away. My only other consolation is that I'm not such a idiot to compensate for my a lack of a divine beauty by becoming a zealous adherent to the other prominent deities of money and power and machismo stupidity. No, if I can't be beautiful then I'll just be godless.

But I evidently do suffer the affliction of Body Dysmorphia. I'm ok with looking normal. It's not so much the lack of beauty that bothers me so much as an excess of manliness I sometimes read into this hairiness, this primitive chipped tooth, this big nose, these bushy eyebrows that when they twitch they flap and could almost take me into the air like Dumbo's ears do. Sometimes I involuntary catch myself in the mirror, and I see in front of me all the dirty, hairy, unrefined, un-rarefied old men who ruined the world for us all. I worry that's what I see, it's petrifies me, it freezes me in front of the mirror, staring as intently as the truest of narcissists at an appearance I can't reconcile with my nature. All I'm thinking is: am I just another one of those beasts? Is it possible to evade the description drawn in my face? Will other people recognise that I'm not a prick? Unfortunately we humans do have a tendency to read a summary of people in their countenance like it was a book synopsis.

Sometimes I think my face had a fighting chance when I younger, a chance to really be my own. But I spent those crucial teenage years, when the body ossifies and petrifies, in the company of brutes so different from me. Maybe my poor unformed face was so impressionable that it mimicked the qualities of theirs'. But actually their faces were often quite fine, so maybe my face crystallised something of their horrid inner essences. Oh God!

The mirror never shows me as the person I see in my head. So is my voice even the voice I hear in my head? Am I at all in any way the person I think I am? And so, in order not to slip into a fugue, I avoid mirrors as fastidiously as if my reflection were an evil shadow twin who might reach out through the glass, choke me to death with his crude patriarchal strength, and then step out into the world replacing me without anyone being the wiser.

This is why I sometimes wear dangly Queen Elizabeth style earrings. I wear them to offset my harsh features, as well the fact that I simply like the way they look, swinging and shimmering from my lobes like grand chandeliers, no matter how incongruent they look next to my face. But I can't wear them all the time, or even most of the time, they're clip-ons and not very comfortable alas.

So I left the cafe feeling hairy and ghastly and disheartened, almost able to feel the innermost hairs of my nearly joining left and right eyebrows skimming the tips of each other like the fingertips of star crossed lovers . I shuffled down Tottenham Court Road in a reverie only to be broken by the startling sight of one those extraordinary eccentrics, the kind that strike fear and awe in the hearts of even other eccentrics.

A very tall (he must be 6 foot 5 at least), very dark man. His midnight skin as wrinkled and soft as a worn out leather armchair. He wore dark sunglasses and his sartorial choice is always a complete boxer's outfit: blue satin robe (nothing on his sinewy torso under it) with matching shorts, and high top boxing trainers. He unsettled me. It was because last summer I used to see him everyday walk past the window of the local North London Costa that I always studied in. It was a bad summer to say the least; some (scary) teenage drug dealers had posted themselves up outside of the tube station that was on my walking route to the Costa, and they would try to harangue any innocent oddballs (since they must be on something, so the dullard thinks) into buying drugs, or would simply heckle them. That summer I had taken to wearing a risque nipple exposing t shirt and other such kooky attire, and very much felt like me and my people were under siege from the aggressive, drug dealing prudes. It was also the summer of Brexit, and reports of increasing gang violence ect,ect. I would sit in the sterile Costa convinced the end of the world was nigh. And this tall, black boxer would stride past my window everyday, completely untouched by the madness of the world and yet clearly in a mad world all of his own. I began to believe he was just a figment of my depressed summertime delirium, and I stopped noticing him after the summer ended.

But now here he was again! This hallucination from last summer, strutting along, his head breaking through the throngs of people as if it was breaking through the clouds. Impervious to the small world below him he is forever on his walk to the ring for a fight he'll never have.

I took it as a bad omen. I don't like boxing or boxers, least of all mad ones! And I was reminded of that unhappy summer. My mind started slipping, spiralling down into yet darker and earlier corridors. I went all the way back to 2001, year 8 of secondary school, I was twelve and I had no friends. One evening I watched the 2000 remake of the film Bedazzled, starring Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser, that my dad had rented from Blockbuster. It's about a lonely guy who sells his soul to a sexy devil for a few wishes. It captured my young imagination and had me wondering if the devil really exists (and is he as pretty as Elizabeth Hurley?). That night, lying in bed, I said in my head, but as if I were talking to Satan, that if he really does exist I'd give up everything if he'd give me some friends at school. I even specified that I'd give up any future hope of love. School seemed so endless and intolerable at the time, as permanent as a stone prison, as vast and arid as a desert. Life at the end seemed like nothing more than a mirage, a lie told to kids by adults in order to keep us going in. But I did get friends eventually, and they were of the type that the devil might give if he existed, they were pretty terrible.

As ridiculous and implausible as being cursed by the devil is, I've never quite managed to forget that night. And since I've had such little experience of romance and love, I tend to look for explanations as to why it seems so unreasonably difficult for me. The explanations I come up with are invariably ludicrous, and on this day I ended up settling on the 'devil cursed me' theory as being true.

It's a scary thing to believe you've really been cursed by Beelzebub himself and that all future happiness was foreclosed from the age of 12. I had worked myself up into such a febrile state of paranoia, I felt like I was on the verge of genuine madness. Would I too be walking down the street dressed as a boxer soon?

So I went to the library, a place that usually calms and reassures me. But I could find no peace there either; no escape from the hopelessness percolating through my pours, from the dread tangled in my hair and tangled in my brain. I couldn't shake the the devil I imagined to be at my shoulder. So I paced up and down the stacks of books restlessly, all the while vengefully and unfairly cursing Brendan Fraser (and he only played the innocent schmo) back, in my mind. 'Damn you Brendan Fraser! Damn you to hell! You ****** actor, did you ever even make a good film!? The Mummy was only ok, and Bedazzled is definitely ****, I got cursed by ****** film!'.

I started worrying my noisy and deranged thoughts of curses and devils and Brendan Fraser might be disturbing the quiet students trying to study, so I left the library and intended to be on my way home. But first I needed to get my bag from my locker on the third floor. I called the lift and stepped inside it. Oh no. I had forgot there are always mirrors in lifts! It was the last thing I needed. I was already on the precipice, on the verge of the abyss of insanity, one wrong move away from becoming a mad boxer. I didn't have any strength left with which to do battle with my reflection and resist it, he would swallow me whole with one twitch of his vile mouth. I couldn't break it's spell; he stared at me with the most emphatic look of revulsion and disgust I have ever seen in my life. Was I really so unpleasant?

So, up and down up and down in the lift I went, having a showdown with my shadow in the looking glass. Only one of us would make it out. It was late and I was hoping nobody else would need to use the lift and interrupt this duel to the death. At one point I was on the fifth floor and I was staring so intently at the hate filled figure in the glass that I forgot to press a floor button and the lift doors closed behind me. The lift just stayed there on the fifth floor, like my own private, creaky, dimly lit dressing room. I stared and stared and stared. I hated the man who stared back at me, and he looked like he hated me even more. My legs started to ache, I'd been standing in that lift, uninterrupted in my circular trance of revulsion, for so long. How long I do not know; that horrible old codger, time, ceases have any substance or tangibility in these kinds of circumstances. But it felt like a very, very, very long time. Sweat was running down my cheeks and off my chin like tears. I felt like I wanted to cry, needed to cry, should be crying. But I couldn't seem to do it. I squeezed my eyes like they were the bitterest of lemons, but not a drop would come out; the patriarch behind the glass simply mocked me cruelly with wrinkled, squinted eyes.

Oh god oh god! Was this how much of a man I had become? Such a man I could no longer cry tears for the pain and torment I felt in my breast! Such a man I could no longer cry tears for the curses and madness in my head? At that moment, a look of the most vicious and ugly and horrid kind swept my face, and I had the misfortune of not only feeling it, but seeing it looking back at me. Every muscle of my face writhed and undulated, and what with all the sweat, it gleamed just like a heaving pale ocean under the sun. And it was under no motor control whatsoever. I was very afraid.

But just then, something made me even more afraid, but nonetheless ripped ripped me out of my nightmare suddenly. It was the sound of the lift doors shuddering and creaking heavily behind me. They were about to open, someone was waiting on the other side! My panicked mind kicked into gear, I slammed a floor button quickly (to give the impression I had a destination, and that I hadn't just been standing in the lift staring at myself for hours) and started composing flimsy explanations for my unexpected presence in this box. My face felt like it had stopped undulating, but it was now drenched in an sea of sweat and my eyes were swimming about in it in every which direction.

The doors opened, and a girl started from my surprise presence. She spoke with a sweet Bulgarian accent
'whoa! I didn't think anyone would be in it'

'Aha...ah yeah, err surprise, ahaha, I just, em, I errr, I was just trying to decide out what floor to go to'

She stepped into lift, pressed the button for the ground floor and we were on our way down. She exuded an air of cheerfulness, but of robustness too. She began to talk to me as if she had known me all my life. The lift stopped on the second floor. She looked at me, and I replied with a twitchy and nervous smile. She asked me if I was getting out here. I said no. Oh wait, I had pressed the button for the second floor in my haste of panic hadn't I! I just laughed nervously and said I'm going to the ground floor after all, yep that was the floor I needed.

We stepped out of the lift, out of that deathly box in which I left behind my insanity and curses. Like a coffin in which I left my evil patriarchal shadow twin to hopefully rot, but I knew I'd have to face him another day. And me and this girl kept on talking. She seemed to understand that I was going through something and that I needed someone to talk to, someone to take me out of my waking nightmare. We became friends. Here's to you, Valya, killer of evil mirror people!

I went home and cried, at long last.
 
I'm not entirely sure it was supposed to be (although I get the feeling it was otherwise you probably wouldn't have posted it) but that was some seriously entertaining and evocative stream of consciousness Vash. Ever read any Hunter S. Thompson? I get the feeling you'd enjoy it.
 
Hey Ayase, thanks man! It was indeed supposed to be entertaining, so I'm glad you enjoyed it:)

One of my main aims in writing is to just to make myself laugh, even if what I'm writing about didn't seem so funny at the time.

No, I've never read Hunter S. Thompson, but I shall definitely add him to my 'to read' list, thanks for recommending him!
 
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