Love | Josephine Brennand
what is love?
a kiss on my cheek
a hold of your hand
love in my heart
a simple question
on bended knee
poems about love
Inspired | Ken Allan Dronsfield
I think I wrote a poem; the words, it seemed, were right.
I juiced the truth and worked it through, expecting sheer delight.
Questioning the length, I thought, perhaps a bit too long for some.
But the Masters wrote extended lines, so I thought, “That’s really
dumb.”
The subject, one of interest I felt, a truly inspired verse.
But alas the numbers tell the tale, making me retch and curse.
It seems my poetry failed that day, a belly flop into the icy bay.
But never to quit, this love of words, I’ll start another today.
Sitting by the fire, rhyming words under candlelight.
A subject I’ll need, be it lost love or perhaps chaotic fright.
I guide the quill and ink doth flow, petting the cat by the fire’s
glow.
And know in my heart, shorter pieces I’ll pen, and leave the longs to Poe.
Hide Where No One Can Hurt Me | Venessa Lisa Asvat
Sometimes I want to run away
Hide from your words that cut
Words meant to hurt me
Break me
Tear me up inside
Sometimes I want to close my ears, my eyes
Lock up my heart and soul
Where no pain can seep through
To stain my smile with sorrow
Sometimes I wanna curl up
Protect myself, crawl in my world
Where I am safe, alone
Untouchable
Sometimes I want to cry, to shout
I have no tears
Instead I hide, crawl in my shell
Where no one can hurt me
5000 miles | Kristi Ocampo
The physical distance between us is immense,
calculate it and it would show you the distance in thousands.
But this is nothing compared to the monumental distance of our
disposition,
immeasurable as it is made up of myriad apologies and timidities–
Consisting of reasons why we’re not fit for each other,
reasons you have made to conceal the fact that you were just unable to reciprocate.
You want to explore the world,
while all I wanted was to explore you.
You saw me as the girl with ropes and shackles,
while I saw you as the boy with brown eyes and lucent smile.
There are times when I briefly forget,
when the weight of longing is briefly lifted.
But there are also times when I still feel a little bit of pain–
The type of pain that flows through your veins,
distributed from your heart
to all the parts of your body,
responsible for all the functions
and all the restrictions.
The pain that can only be drawn out when a 5-centimeter needle pierces through your skin,
the pain that can only be dampened by more pain.
Sanity and History | Krushna Chandra Mishra
Those born sane and simple to madness and complexities, fell
To wallow in mires of ideologies and faiths that passion has bred,
To create illusions never sustained by reason any time in history,
Since civilization dawned and man groped for light in every tunnel,
At the end of which only a streak was seen till travelling there,
Confirming nothing was found and confounded forever in search and assurances
Into more traps of ideologies and dogmas, they fell to suffer more and to
Think there could still be a way out, and more intense search,
frantically taken,
Should once take them beyond mighty challenges that simplicity in
reasoned ways
Could answer, unravelling mysteries and curing curses that knowledge in covering clarity spent
Created over centuries when papers and ink in billions of tons got
misused to make truth
Take a visage that never used to be its own.
Love and the Speed of Light Squared | Ralph Monday
In trying to find a relationship between love, energy,
mass, and the speed of light squared,
the discovery was made that love is the inverse
property of money, nature, particular seasons.
All an illuminati conspiracy.
Light can never be shed on these
as they are always bouncing through
the dark,
like pool balls on sheets of muddy ice.
—
Ralph Monday has had over 200 poems published in literary journals and online literary sites. A chapbook, All American Girls and Other Poems was recently published, and a book Lost Houses and American Renditions is forthcoming from Hen House Press.
Mum, Why Did You Go? | Claire Mills
Mum, I miss you with all my heart.
Life isn’t fair,
Life took you, we had to part,
I look around and don’t see you through my eyes,
Now it’s just goodbyes.
Mum, why did
We have to say goodbye?
I don’t know.
What is my life now without your insight?
Inside, I begin to fight,
Mum I love you and it is true
Without you what will I do?
Tears drop to the ground,
You were the only mum I found.
December Geese | Ralph Monday
The song of migrating geese spilled from the sky.
Upward they soared under moody December skies,
Flying in a great V as if symbiotically linked by
The vast natural forces that had shaped them over
Millennia, the way that natural law molds and
Forms rock, the geese and the stone in an inconceivable
Distant time elementally birthed in the heart of a savage
Star.
The physics of life pulses through them as through me,
And I felt an ancient shudder pierce my being, timeless,
As their unity joined and patterned an experience split
Open and reformed instantly in my coursing blood, and
Those air travelers prodded on by what mysterious,
Unknown instinct touched me, bound to earth, and I
Envied their freedom while all the while realizing that
Freedom is not in the strident whish of beating wings,
Contained rather in an unencumbered heart that
Instinctively knows both sky and earth, fire and water.
All experience is linked, as the lesson of the flying
Birds taught, and once the heart is set adrift from its
Moors, no compass is sufficient enough to guide it
Back to the original port, and in that epiphany, I
Dreamed, like the geese, of flying to you.
—
Ralph Monday has had over 200 poems published in literary journals and online literary sites. A chapbook, All American Girls and Other Poems was recently published, and a book Lost Houses and American Renditions is forthcoming from Hen House Press.
Taking a Walk | Ananya S. Guha
I walked in my little home town, after Christmas
dwindling streets, people
and houses. A friend shakes hand.
I look the other way forgetting to wish, wanting
to love and say many ecumenical things. But I have just come back from the bar, after downing two and a half gins and burying my dreams into the recesses of winter nights of this town, where I was and am born. My face is reddish, body warm, I take leave of my friend and wish that the trees and the whispering pines will walk across my body, especially in death.
Bed Bugs | Vera Ashton
A nest in her head,
Bags under eyes.
Dreams floating all around,
Eyes open,
Heart lonely.
Scratching her scars,
Reminisce on his smile,
Revive his laughter,
Retain his touch.
The last few months relived
only once the sun rests.