Making Merit – 20th May 2025

Remember,
Democracy dies
When blinded
By dollars
To machinations of men
With a big wallet

Promises
Broken with such ease
Both sides hold
Useless hope
No merit to former deeds
That have passed the test

Qualified
A proven record
Words are made
Meaningful
With actions louder than words
Republic ideal

All knowing
Philosopher kings
Guardians
Of kingdoms
No justice with corruption
Merit, not money

A shadorma inspired by many poetic responses to events in the dying empire of the USA.

Mythmakers – 18th May 2025

*Let’s gather our friends and make a storm,
to a circle of dreams, surrendered.
Our silhouettes in firelight perform;
Are the dead glad to be remembered?

We live again in celebration,
barreling through centuries of secrets.
The rites of our reincarnation
will render us forever sleepless.

We are the dragons of the mountains;
we may be sleeping one thousand years,
yet once drunk on youth from the fountains,
we all become willing volunteers.

The dead are glad to be remembered
by those of us creating the storm,
when to all our dreams we surrendered;
so they live on within us; reborn.

*I don’t think I wrote this line but, yet again, I forget where it came from. I often take notes of lines I like and come back to them much later. Sometimes I remember to put the source too. Sometimes not!

This poem was submitted to an AllPoetry assignment and was actually a bit of a struggle to write despite the assignment being based on rhyme, which is what am I most used to writing. Trying to include all the elements learned in the course so far sometimes makes me think too much about it and so I don’t get the flow that I would like.

I haven’t got feedback on this assignment as I write this but I’m guessing that they will respond that it’s not exactly clear what this poem is about, and that’s a fair enough assessment. To be honest, I had the first and fourth lines jotted down and then tried to write rhymes around them and see what came out of that as the subject.

It seems to be about remembrance and celebration of those who came before us. I was imagining tribal dances around fires at night and the myths we make in remembrance of our elders. Hopefully, that came through before you read this section!

The Great Unwinding – 17th May 2024

Shared with No Theme Thursday picture prompt and somewhat inspired after reading Divine Providence by Judy Dykstra Brown. After humanity ceases, the world will still be here.

Time didn’t stop, just the clocks;

the winders wandered off.

Mad monks meditated

buried under a tomb of rocks.

The fat ladies have sung after supper,

“This is the end,
my friend”,

winding down the winder-upper.

That’s about the yin and yang

of it, forever keeps on coming;

trees still fall in the forest,

but all the poets are dead.

She’s A Puzzle – 16th May 2025

Shared with W3 – The Pararhyme Paradox around the theme of incompleteness.

All the pieces scattered across the floor

like the petals picked off the flower;


She loves me, she loves me not, some days

she loves to imagine how she dies;


A search for corners finds one amiss
this may, for a moment, mildly amuse;


She’s incomplete, though nearly whole,
so the hunt continues along for a while;


The missing part may be under wraps
or lying beyond the end of her ropes;
Every day, a new donning of caps
becomes the method by which she copes;


All your playbooks, now ripped and torn,
watching in wonder, awaiting your turn;
Under a bridge or to the manor born,
there’s a fire inside, ready to burn;
So she’s a puzzle, a partial form,
Yet here she stands, resolute and firm.

Maipenrai (ไม่เป็นรัย) – 15th May 2025

Shared with dVerse Poetics: “I Have No Word in English For”. Anyone familiar enough with Thailand will intimately know this phrase. A calm acceptance? There’s nothing to be done? Fuggedaboudit?
I’ve left the phrase ‘nevermind’ like this as Google Translate also maintains it and it obviously references the slacker album from Nirvana.

Nevermind the goings on,
nevermind the things done wrong;
Say it with a smile,
sing it with a sigh;
Nevermind – maipenrai.

Nevermind, not Nirvana
toking on more marijuana;
Swing it up in style
and never question why;
Nevermind – maipenrai.

Nevermind the right or wrong,
the contrarian does not belong;
Sit down for a while,
let the anger pass on by;
Nevermind – maipenrai.

Nevermind the destination,
nevermind your frustration;
Sing your acceptance
so everyone may comply;
Nevermind – maipenrai.

A Flavoured Lexicon – 13th May 2025

Tangy, the aftertaste of unsent ink,
words left like fishhooks in my throat.
Of your preposition that held up my sky,
love became my silent film, soon unreeled.

Not to be unzipped, unbuttoned in the dark,
man’s executioner lurks within his whisper;
Best laid plans are left unsaid at the confessional.
Friends echo fallacious words
tonight, the coin was tossed into the sea.

Tongue tastes, a blind snake in a maze;
twisted sheets after bad dreams
and on the bridge that’s always burning,
tied a noose to the rail.

Tangling telephone wires hum my hymns
over the moon-whispered tides;
Our empty cups, save our salt,
simple as a slip, a dark entry,
joyful as the fire laughs at the forest;
Words become the silence.

Tied (again) but now with notes;
Tongue (again) a rusted hinge
knotting the clocks, doing time.

Over (returns) like a skipped stone’s fate,
poems sank to the lake bed;
Often returning to the teacher’s words
spoken into jars and never sealed.

Tangled in a comb’s teeth;
Tongues – final act – stilled by dawn.

Live and maintain pretence, to write
poems on ghost paper.
With the last match in the box,
friends (again) echo their silhouettes.

All the sand left in the glass;
Tongue (last stand) now a relic,
tangled for a final time in this museum.

Word one, we’ll never say again,
@ – a noose around the moon;
The most dangerous definite article on the
wharf where lost verbs go to drown.

Legendary, the stains became
night, the inkwell we dip our days in;
Of (last breath) the last breath;
Tangy – full circle – a foretaste of new
words for scented letters.

A type of mesostic or maybe a skeleton key poem, I’m not sure exactly what this form is called. The first word of each line is taken from the complete poem ‘word tangle’ by Rog Leach. The last two lines reflect back on the first two.
The words are 95% mine, with some original assistance from AI for the base. I kept the line ‘@ – a noose around the moon’ though, as it appealed to me.

Threads – 12th May 2025

A waltz wave and forced erasure poem. I wrote the original poem (below) for this prompt at W3 Prompt #158:
• Form: Waltz Wave;
* A single, unrhymed stanza of 19 lines;
* Syllabic: 1–2–1–2–3–2–1–2–3–4–3–2–1–2–3–2–1–2–1;
Theme: ‘Strength and vulnerability’


While thinking about formatting, I felt like an erasure poem would be interesting, but how? I made it so with a little help from Deepseek.

steel
soft hands
bend
not breach

iron will
I won’t
break
apart

a diamond
under pressure
still shines through
my tears

flame
fragile
in flicker
enough
heat
left to
burn