Tag: spilled poetry

Prompt Day 17

Gazing through polished panes

Longing after things with greatest pains,

Trying on some,

Walking past others.

Through the growth of more eyelids

You never really see at all,

You only see what you aren’t

What you lack, never what you are.

Window shopping can be fun

For the penniless and imaginative,

Don’t take appearances too seriously.

The ones who’ve never window shopped

Have the most to learn.

To have never wanted

To have never repressed your desires,

Never leaving behind something

Wished for on a whim.

What could you know of others?

What could you know of need

Or patience or gratitude

For something earned with sweat?

Whichever you are

Fortunate or less so

This last part is for you

And I’ll deliver with all the subtlety

Of an asteroid.

If you’re window shopping

Is better than your

Mirror gazing

It’s time to make some changes.

– Vagabond Prophet

Bones

My story not too tragic

Not terribly traumatic,

Except for the traumatic bit.

I’ve not known poverty

I’ve not known hunger,

I’m intelligent and able bodied.

Yet I feel as though life

Is harder than it should be

And after all these years

Jason Wade has said it best,

“I need you now

There’s too many miles on my bones

I can’t carry the weight of the world

No, not on my own”

So there it is, that terrible truth.

Nice to know I’m not the only one

Who walks with this weight

So burdensome and heavy.

Yet by the end of song there’s hope,

“No more heartache, no more fighting

No more fears, only flying”

Thanks for spinning fears into verses,

Matching my heartbeat to a drum beat

And singing it out loud

In that low gravelly voice of yours.

– Vagabond Prophet

– Quotes from the song ‘Flight’ by Lifehouse, who Jason Wade is the singer of.

Yes, let’s lament.  Do you know how haltingly,

how begrudgingly, your blood turned back,

when you summoned it from its incomparable circling?

And how bewildered it was to take up again

the body’s trivial circulations; and with what mistrust

and stonishment it entered the placenta,

and then suddenly it was itred from the long journey back.

And you drove it, you shoved it forward,

you dragged it to the site of fire, as

one flails a group of animals to the sacrifice;

and you even wanted it to be happy there.

And at last you compelled it:  and it was happy,

and it ran to you and surrendered itself up.  You thought,

because you were used to another scale,

that it would take but a little while, but

now you were in time, and time is long.

And time passes, and time increases, and time

is like a relapse into an endless illness.

How short your life turned out to be, measured

against those hours when you sat silently

bending the many energies of your multifarious

future back down into this new child-sprout,

which once again was fate.  O painful labor.

O labor beyond all strength.  Day after day

you did it, dragged yourself to it,

extracted the lovely weft from the loom

and used all your threads in another way.

And in the end you even had the spirit to celebrate.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Prompt Day 16

Oh you brilliant bohemian you!

To count the number of times you articulated

For me something shapeless.

Thoughts I’d had for years that evaded endlessly.

Every time I reached for them,

Slipping between fingers like smoke.

Yet you penned it in ink

Plainly for all to see.

Is that how you wrote so much?

Stealing thoughts of others

Transforming them into beauty.

The only kind of theft I’m happy to pardon.

How fitting, how terrible

That you should die, your blood turned to poison.

Your body wracked with pain

And your spirits lacked of wind.

As though life smiled on the grace of words,

And decided you’d had your fill of loveliness.

Thank you for doing it all the same,

You plagiarizer of my mind

You thief of dreams.

– Vagabond Prophet

       – For Rainer Maria Rilke