Author: shaun tenzenmen
Australasian DIY music specialist and practising poet, amongst other things
When did the heart harden?
Leaving Here – 21st November 2024
Silhouettes
In purpled passion
Freedom calls
Life’s tangle
Left far behind, flown away
Branches now laid bare
Shared with Moonwashed Weekly Prompt – Tangle and Tanka Tuesday – Shadorma
Canon – 20th November 2024
I have the words within my pages
My knowledge forms your future texts
Amassed wisdom sung from many sages
Collected comforts to which all connects
This power I pass for you to share
The lessons lived easily explain
To conquer chaos and choose to care
To shrink in size or grow to gain
Your personal action accumulates
Eyes sparkle like dancing diamonds
Mixing the messes of made mistakes
Form the future from many islands
Shared with What Do You See #263 and submitted to an AllPoetry assignment about alliteration.
It Was Told – 19th November 2024
Time out of mind, the rock of ages
The time of our lives was to be had
Foretold on ageing faded pages
Three heads good, foreheads bad
Sands a-trickle made to measure
Losing track as the dawn is cracking
Always racing towards some leisure
Begged and borrowed to be slacking
It’s up, beyond a blue moon hiding
To weave a future, past and pleasant
Dropped stitches will do their biding
When Nick manifests in the present
Shared with No Theme Thursday picture prompt (above) and Moonwashed Weekly Prompt – Foretelling
Boredom – 18th November 2024
Sat in cafe corners
Quietly going out of their minds
A complete picture of confusion
It’s the illusion that blinds
The last page read
Of Notes From Underground
Dragged down into the illusion
A confusion so profound
Mother Nature ripped them off
Consigned to just a minor part
Boredom won out after all
The fall came before the start
The ‘almost-was’
That in cafe corners hides
Couldn’t pick a side to fall
After all, shot by both sides
Inspired by and paraphrased from Howard Devoto, reading about him in Rip It Up and Start Again
The Disparity – 17th November 2024
People will demand freedom of speech as compensation
For the freedom of their thought that remains in suspension
Disparity between desire for outward expression
And the actual practice of inner contemplation
A little poem based on the Soren Kierkegaard quote “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
One Of The Gang – 16th November 2024
Showed my buds, I’m one of them
When they watched me stick it in
I bring freedom with a gun
And I’m responsible for no one
We three, prod and poking
Watching the sunset paradise
Sipping dry martinis of tears
Laughing at a 12-year-old’s fears
We three, the seventy per cent
Paid us for our duty
A dividing line, a locked gate
Allows us to rob and rape
Watch again as I stick it in
We’re bonding over this flesh
This little girl, powerless in pain
Coerced to let the gang remain
After reading about the 1995 gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by three US soldiers in Okinawa.
Chess With Pigeons – 15th November 2024
Lined up against the wall
Identified with your tribe
Where does the mindset shift
From the rules that you prescribe?
This game isn’t easy
Yet played out every day
All uniquely similar
In deeds and words we say
Incited to live in fear
Lies are told as true
Only some allowed to win
But tell that you can too
A race to become less tolerant
Can be run in any way seen fit
Upend the board and strut around
Covering everything in shit
Inspired by this great post at The Renegade Press
Build Your Brain – 14th November 2024
Million dollar questions
Blind spots abound
Magical machine limitations
Mapping mountains found
Collect complementary artefacts
Elevate our understanding
Synaptic message transference
Magic made mind-expanding
Engaged spatial reasoning
Exempt obedient demands
Onwards and upwards
Internal freedom commands
Everything ever got
Meant diddly squat
…say what!?…
Inspired and paraphrased from a David Elikwu newsletter and shared with dVerse Quadrille #212 – what
A Crack In The World – 13th November 2024
What version of me did I show you?
Was the impression left in your mind
The enigmatic or the sad and sulky?
Which one would you prefer to find?
I was hiding, desperately
Trying to be anything but myself
To slip through a crack in the world
Leaving an image of someone else
I cross each bridge as I burn it
Wait impatiently for the credits to roll
Each day takes a small part of me
Once put together defines the whole
Inspired by a few paraphrased quotes within.
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