Original Poetry about anything and everything.
Love does not sit still
Love is always in motion
Love turns tables
Love will cut your bonds free.
It keeps me warm when
Frost kisses the grass
And keeps me cool when
The grass wilts in summer heat.
Love carves canyons
With its tender restless ease,
Love filled this green book
By pouring from this pen.
– Vagabond Prophet
Big Dipper
One bright and starry night
Just a lad with teary eyes
Lost the bout in the fight
When you pulled back the disguise.
Crashing through partition
I was fully completely, undone
Unraveled my tradition
My top no longer spun.
You broke through all other choices
When you addressed my need
I’d been listening to cunning voices
Devise a cunning deed.
Now that path I have forsaken
Thankful I’ve found another
After all the lies I’d taken
And their attempts to smother.
Now these ideas inverted
With tools forged in heaven
From the river of grave you diverted
To raise me like bread leavened.
All it took was looking up
The big dipper your spoon
Serving the love on which I sup
So much grander than the moon.
How did I ever think
Your grace was not enough
When you fill the sky, fill the rink
To refine this diamond in the rough.
– Vagabond Prophet
– Thanks @josy57 for prompting me with ‘the path I have forsaken.’
One bright and starry night
Just a lad with teary eyes
Lost the bout in the fight
When you pulled back the disguise.
Crashing through partition
I was fully completely, undone
Unraveled my tradition
My top no longer spun.
You broke through all other choices
When you addressed my need
I’d been listening to cunning voices
Devise a cunning deed.
Now that path I have forsaken
Thankful I’ve found another
After all the lies I’d taken
And their attempts to smother.
Now these ideas inverted
With tools forged in heaven
From the river of grace you diverted
To raise me like bread leavened.
All it took was looking up
The big dipper your spoon
Serving the love on which I sup
So much grander than the moon.
How did I ever think
Your grace was not enough
When you fill the sky, fill the rink
To refine this diamond in the rough.
– Vagabond Prophet
– Thanks @josy57 for prompting me with ‘the path I have forsaken.’
I am awake when I should be asleep
I am awake when I should be awake,
I save resting for the space between stanzas.
For I read these thoughts aloud
To a vast and dusty crowd
That claps and cheers me on
From the PM to the AM and back again.
I should close these eyes right now
But with stalwart rhythm this mind churns on
And the quill moves more eloquently
If I keep this blue gaze fixed
On a white page inked black.
Perpetual sleeplessness is my vocation,
Though no references save the coffee vendor
That weighs me out in pounds per week,
You should know I am a professional
And I will not burnout, for this backlog of dreams
Demands vigilance of this exact kind.
– Vagabond Prophet
That time of year where rains come
And will for the next seven months,
The gutters an empty summer trough
With not but a sparse dried leaf
Are now full to overflowing
By the weeping of the sky.
The unused ladder
Squeaks under my weight
Boots that feel buttered
Slip on rusted rungs.
This task like that of Atlas
That never ends so you never begin,
Just like the clogged eaves of this heart.
– Vagabond Prophet
I am the third son of a third son
Of a man with just one eye,
He’d have a hundred years now
Tucked under his belt.
Lessons he taught
From battles he fought.
Not the one across the sea
For his vision compromised
The childhood accident
The tragedy despised.
Running with scissors
And tripping with scissors
Not just a cautionary tale.
His war included no bullets
His attrition risked no shrapnel
Just the simple devotion of a simple man
To put bread upon the table.
Raising cattle in a frigid land
Where even water retains no flexibility
And gives up its crown for a time unchallenged.
Years later raising young by the seaside
His tidepool kingdom crashed down
When the water came in high.
One wife down and one to go
The missing mother divided
An already divided clan.
Trudging onwards to surest of horizons
His compass unflinching in its convictions,
His health faded but his faith did not
And the proof was in a vacant body
Found on two bent knees.
– Vagabond Prophet
@mildreflections I think you may like this, I was inspired by your poem about your grandfather.
You a ferrous metal and I a magnet
Drawn to you by design,
Yet sin degrades all
With it’s terror and it’s squall.
On my worst days
When I listen to the liar
Saying “It’s okay its natural
Like breathing
Or seething.”
Desires denied
Sorrows multiplied.
I shower and feel the skin come off
Everytime hoping the next layer
Will be thicker and less porous
Keeping out the slithering vapours
That slide in so easily.
You told me I’m brand new
But why do I have these phantom pains
From a spine I no longer have?
For you demanded that too…
Tonight don’t let the darkness bite.
Sometimes the prescription for these lenses
Is so strong I can’t even hear you,
My fingers trip over themselves
Can’t ever get the whole story out.
Why are all old men bent over?
Do we all hide our magic?
I am pierced not as though by arrows
But as though by poetry
Run through to the crux of the matter.
The matter of matter
Of what matters,
Do I?
That which upsets me inspires me most
And it’s true tragedy
Brings a man to the surface.
For years now I’ve been far beyond the surface
Can you place me back beneath?
Give me a mermans lungs and let me not choke.
I am both hope and cheer
I am both charm and jeer.
I feel the spectre anticipating
I can hear it berating
And I see it slipping in and out of me
I read the putrid pleasantries
It writes on the corridors of my mind.
Ghost, demon, ghoul whatever name you’ve chosen
Allow me to address you directly this day
Do you not see me?
Look me in the eyes
Hold my gaze I dare you!
I am but the slain wolf
Of greatest hunters
The master taxidermist
Stitching me back together with sterner stuff.
Good or evil a wolf still has teeth
Come now and let us do battle!
I grow tired of dreading the looking glass
Of fleeing the hour where shadows lengthen
Like fear with nightly growth spurts.
That particular kind of weariness
That makes life bleed heavily.
Coffee isn’t enough to hold my hand
To prop open my eyelids
With tent pegs meant for home.
I require victory
I thirst for conquest
Over strongholds in my heart,
Then I may rest.
You have birthed in me a rage
The greatest of the age
You’ve been biding your time
And committing your crime
But I have not been idle
I have known a donor of strength
That will make me victorious.
Come now bring your weapons
See if it does you any good
A man of my word you will soon learn
Light too can bite.
I by might imbued me
Will fight till bones protrude thee.
– Vagabond Prophet
– Thanks @josy57 for prompting me with “Facing your own Ghost,” literal I know but here it is.
They were like rooftop geese
Building homes, raising young
In all the wrong places
In spaces unnatural for their kind.
They were like the hammock
Just waiting for a body to drop
Before the knot betrays its weakness
And plunges to the hard ground.
They had no vacancy
In their hearts for eachother,
The affection atrocious
The quarrels ferocious.
They were diehard tryhards
Attempting something significant
Only down this path at all
For some misplaced expectation.
Sparrows wearing owl beaks
To make folks think them wise.
The crescent waned
And so did the wax
On the long night of
Strained and forced relations
The stale devotion
Began to attract flies.
It died loudly I still hear it in my sleep.
Somehow I still wake with a smile
The puzzle box given me
Not a picture to copy,
So I turn the pieces over
To make something new.
Together we became like seeds
Endlessly turning ourselves inside out
In our attempts to climb the sky.
Now we’ve evolved into compasses
Caring nothing for obstacles
Only convictions and destinations.
Years ago now that I used your tongue
To ask for your hand
We venture together
Into the kingdom broad and tall
That’s casts its borders like fishing nets.
– Vagabond Prophet
Thanks @josy57 for the prompt ‘stale devotion’
Shake hands with worry
Make all courage scurry
Give a nod to fury
Jingling his keys.
Veins pumping vanity
It’s vain it’s insanity
As I travel from solstice of length
To the solstice of brevity.
Trample something damp
To make myself feel strong.
I’m the prophet who having
Seen his own defeat
Only had bravery galvanized
To prove the fates wrong.
I chew on keys
To unlock the words stuck
On the tip of my tongue.
I should have known
How this would end
I had been tonguing
The fatal flaw for months.
And when I brought my
Jaws down to crush that dinner
I should have known
I’d be defeated, fractured into pieces.
– Vagabond Prophet
@josy57 thanks for the prompt “knowing when to lose.” This thing is weird but there it is. Out in the world now.
Strolling through sopping grey
Summers first reprieve
Is a whisper of autumn.
When every blade of grass is slick
From the breath of the night
And all parched land takes flight
Making way for things shadegrown
Before the big sleep.
Vagabond Prophet
Vagabond Prophet 