#today's poem

[callmewinged]

Off the Hook Ode

Even if the wine glass can't hold wine, it looks in one piece. Such satisfaction when we think we can fix something. No need to make a long list of fuck-ups and regrets, it'll look like everyone else's. It's not like there's a shortage of explanations. By the fourth day, the roses in the vase are experts at falling apart but they were experts before while they were still connected to the dirt. So were the beatles. Maybe only details matter: What the flames felt like before you knew they were flames, bits of the porous world, the words that made up your intimate code. How have we gotten so snarled? Sometimes thunder promises rain but it's wrong and birds fly the wrong direction so why should you worry you're turning into frost in summer? Even the wind contradicts itself and the one who thinks he has the most to say is the one doing most of the not-talking which isn't necessarily listening while the other goes on in half-asleep defiance so he gets the gist like brushing fingertips on a monument conveys great bulk and weight but look at it the angel seems just alighted to scourge twilight from the mind, let the body fill with stone. Nothing can be fixed.

~ Dean Young

[rococodeco]

Herewith the Prologue:

Aditi Machado

I came along a silk route. I came low like low things. Slow, farcical leaves rimmed the trees. Some chic birds. I came along a long way, bolstered by merchants and prophylactics and an obscure shade that became my practice.               Sometimes I'd stop to confer with magnolias and find the writing on the margin creeping in. Or I'd look up at the archive wandering hysterically like a womb. I'd stop at markets where rank matadors offered me coins.     Magnalia! Magnalia! I heard these bards, I loved those shops, little bourgeois vessels of amnesia and maybe lockets. And sometimes            I'd stop at theatres and watch the facsimile faces twatting by, the customary graffito on a restaurant tile. I'd forget my resistances, small wrists, and gussy up my deadlocked tongue. Nothing to see here, I'd say, but virtuoso shrubs.         Along the silk route upon which I came came the very neat devices of a memoirist or politico. The silkiness of the route was of an old time, colored like old, color photographs, with seepages into the corners of sight.                        Silk either wore me down or bore me out of a series of vacancies in which I scanned beaches. I was 'caught.' Who 'caught' me but a phantom certainty, 'certainty like a quality of gems and cautious doctrines'? This was my distraction and having to tighten my belt and all that. And yet                      I was arriving, words appearing on points of fact. Prickly or vine-like, I proposed this and that. I was told nation or rhapsody or wear simple clothes. I heard those statements as limpid fugues, traumas wandering out of musical bars. I had no purchase on those points.                         For a while it was impossible to wear silk. I'd look up at the ruched sky, I'd consider the Jesuitic races, the long lines of vox sniff-sniffing, the climate refusing to change, the clematis reminding me I was to pursue a sound. I was to steal                  along, i was to barter my socialisms for some mastic or gâteau slaked with rum or a velvet speculum or any sort of very erudite and algebraic, any sort of very telluric sort, a sort of, any sort, a sottise, any sort of sottise. So            I bartered my socialisms for something hierarchic, something hemorragic, hagio-cratic, her-metical, hell, helical, her-heretical, hire, hire, hieroglyphic, had her, hatter, heter- onomous, hire, hair, hairy. It was a hairy time.                      And my bush was a mulberry bush. It occasioned silk. Silk was a duration. I unpacked it. Finally arriving, tender glissade. Lowing in the fields, rennet skies. Up ahead, the emporium, up ahead. All those haptic divinities. All those sounds I came to quell,                       asking, questioning, comment, comment, comment, quel, quelle laine, quel lin, quel coton, quel satin, quel crin, quel chanvre, quel cachemire, quel velours, quel tweed, quelle flanelle, quelle dentelle, quel calicot, quelle mousseline, quel serge, quelle jute, quel jacquard, quel brocard, quel cuir, quelle soie, quel soi, quelque soit, quelque soie, quelle soi

[oof-i-did-it-agaaiiin]

Beautiful from Ordinary Days

[vytriesstories]

Poem-A-Day : Day one

Step

Left foot, on the sidewalk

Step

Right foot, on the sidewalk

Walk, Walk, Walk, Walk,

Pause, to take in the view

View life on street corners

Light reflecting on it all

Sunrise above

Blossoming into day

For a change

Today

You are in awe

Wonder

The beauty of it all

Right where it's always been

Walk,

Walk home,

Hold the beauty in your mind

Today as good

As any day

To start

-Vy

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

a treatise on government (c. 350 bc) - aristotle

"there are some persons who think, eurgh"

[flowerytale]

Mary Oliver, from "Why I Wake Early"

[worldwidewandress]

the audience doesn't come to see you. they come to see themselves

— julienne moore

[panthermouthh]

And I said, “Hello, Satan

I believe it’s time to go.”

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Sometimes it feels that even my clock is lying to me

Id in alt text, click for better quality

[geryone]

I Could Die Today and Live Again, Summer Farah

[todayontumblr]

Tuesday March 21.

World Poetry Day.

Today is a celebration—but perhaps, like all celebrations, just what we are commemorating is something that we must treasure each and every day. Poetry, some might say, is just that: the treasure that artists mine from the sham and drudgery of day-to-day life. For the poet, their art is found not by searching for the exotic, mysterious, glamourous, or seductive, but by what they find before them. What is mundane and routine is as much material to be mined as life's intensities or spectacles. For the poet, the world really is their oyster. And for the rest of us, the work they produce is that very pearl. And every shade of experience, whether joy, grief, banality, intrigue, and beauty, are encapsulated in words, spaces, silence, images, and form. Whether by skill, or by chance, no one really knows, but perhaps the mess and the mystery are one and the same as its profundity. With that in mind, let's celebrate a good thing. And a good thing that is ours each and every day. It's #world poetry day.

With that in mind, we invite you to mark the day here on Tumblr. After all, there is simply no better community of poets and artists who make up this creative sphere, and the evergreen world of all things poetry is, well, your world. 

And when all is said and done, you better get writing x

[callmewinged]

[rococodeco]

View from a Folding Chair

Mónica de la Torre

Never decorative, it embodies a chair’s provisional character.

Utilitarian, never just there, called upon to serve.

Communal, egalitarian, levelling its occupants, gathered for  an occasion.

Rarely will it hold the sitters captive. Its precariousness invites  walkouts, even when secured by an admittance fee.

Repositionable, it favors assorted geometries of attention: the frontal  and single-focussed, the shifting and radial.

Irreverent, whether in an institutional setting or not, signalling  reversible orders.

Possibly carnivalesque, displaying an upside-down world, as in:

    a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit      surrounding an old ice plant in Marfa     requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room;     ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the      planet—     with no Google logo and copyright date camouflaged to      appear like a wisp of a stratus cloud—     is the electrical plant across the street     grids reversed, as is the soundtrack extemporaneously      produced     by the cars and pickup trucks seen fleeting by from east to      west     though by the sound we know they’re going west to east,     and vice versa;

a projection within a projection

these are moving images to experience, but not keep.

Unsung, stacked, piled against a wall, or hidden in closets, folding  chairs will be counted on again since, plastic palace people, they’re  both transience and ritual.

Welcome into the fold. Who cares what the future brings.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

To a friend I never met

I know this might seem like a place of death And maybe it’s true Shelves lined with remnants of a time Not just forgotten, but before memory There is sadness here too Every fossil is a miracle and a tragedy in one But how can this place hold only sadness when you are here with me?

Your form is scattered Tumbled by the tides of the earth I will find its parts

Your hands are bare Stripped of strength and power I will hold them gently

Your bones are brittle Broken by unthinkable age I will make them whole

Your story is hidden Stifled by rock and clay I will make it seen

I could not be there To love you in your time I will love you in mine

[selenepluto]

"How many graves will I need, to bury everything that died inside of me?"

[aboutmercy]

driveway by richard siken.