Sunday, February 6, 2022

A Hundred One Line Poems

 1.

Frost scribbles on the window.

2.

The trees do their winter dance.

3.

Wooden fence posts with names painted on them, like a cemetery in single file.

4.

In the spider's cookbook, the pages are all stuck together.

5.

Oh moon, tell me that story again.

6.

Recipe for disaster: add one human.

7.

The laws of physics are immutable. You, sadly, are not.

8.

I erased the note I wrote you, one letter at a time.

9.

The river mispronounces the names of the drowned.

10.

The snail sleeps in its car, in the middle of an empty field.

11.

What does summer furniture do in winter? Black skeletons standing in a white room, looking for somewhere to sit.

12.

If you cut water, it bleeds. If you cut glass, it cries.

13.

An afterthought, filled with music.

14.

Death, and its thousands of practical jokes.

15.

The wind holds its breath. The trees count to ten.

16.

The mayor dropped by to ask how he was doing.

17.

The wind doesn't ask.

18.

The past is past is past.

19.

The future is just a dream the past had of us.

20.

There is no present. Only the future rushing past.

21.

The grass knows what it wants.

22.

The chalk outline of a cloud.

23.

The chipmunks and the squirrels argue for hours.

24.

Nightmares are in black and white. Dreams are in color.

25.

The moon closes its one good eye.

26.

Truth is an addiction.

27.

When the movie ends, the audience is empty but the theater is full.

28.

The sky is a door we cannot walk out of.

29.

Paper butterflies and acetylene flowers. 

30.

The leaves regret the tree. The tree regrets the leaves. The rain hides their tears.

31.

The starfish of memory, the nautilus of dreams.

32.

The mirror sees everyone but itself.

33.

Love on paper is only on paper.

34.

Pretend you don't exist. It will be true soon enough.

35.

Let's get one thing straight: the mind cannot be happy and the heart does not make sense.

36.

The magician's final act:

37.

The sound of glass holding its breath.

38.

The snow's alphabet: stone, stick, fallen icicle...

39.

The stars were once gods, then dreams, now just pinholes of light.

40.

Nightmares are the world telling you what you are afraid of.

41.

Actors crave an audience of thousands. Poets hope for a thousand audiences of one.

42.

The snow has forgotten what it came for. Its pockets are empty, turned inside out.

43.

He has heart-shaped cufflinks to prove he wears them on his sleeve.

44.

Poet. Psychic. Wrestler. Bartender of last resort.

45.

Current Resident of the return address for the Beyond.

46.

The wind creeps up on you and steals your thoughts.

47.

We are an equation that cannot be solved.

48.

Susceptible to other worlds.

49.

All my wounds are self-inflicted.

50.

Sometimes it seems my dreams have dreams of their own, dreams of another dreamer.

51.

You need to learn to write yourself out of hell.

52.

The poem never ends, but the poet fails to notice.

53.

The invention of the imagination.

54.

The bric-a-brac of a thousand yesterdays collecting dust.

55.

There are things you don't realize until it is too late. But too late for what?

56.

The skin of a new day.

57.

Memories are fossils. Another time, another person pretending to be you.

58.

The museum of the soul is closed on Mondays.

59.

No, it is not alright.

60.

Poetry is its own worst enemy.

61.

I  press my face into the hair behind her ear and whisper anything but words.

62.

Language is a distant planet.

63.

It takes a thousand light years for a single word to reach her. 

64.

Someone told me I was kind, but what kind he couldn't tell.

65.

The gods were busy throwing bones into the fire.

66.

Rain: a paint-by-number landscape.

67.

The spider sees only flies.

68.

I left the trees out to dry.

69.

At best, the earth puts up with us.

1 comment:

  1. Rather than separate posts, I will update this post in place, adding new lines sequentially.

    ReplyDelete