Broken into a better shape

Random word poem

“This century is pregnant with the stains of war.”

This is a lyric writing method using columns of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Each row forms a line of the poem — you move horizontally across the columns, working the words into each line in the order they appear.

Girl and brief enchanting chords minor
All lark are blind at night’s
Sky is a newborn baby at god’s leisure
A nightmare swallowing you in the night locked
Hesitation is a no trespassing territory
The total points you make in this game equals a swimming pool and diamonds
Where you drown in red and blue; or red or blue; or a pool of
Plastic bubbles the size of pills pink
The church’s eternal letters from god is just hearsay
Every painting imagined is sorrow
A pianissimo smoke coming out of your ears
Somewhere in the lost-and-found lockers
From your teenage years and tears; from wear-and-tears
You can get lost in a name full of hope too, noun that rhymes
With scream, but is much more pleasant gleaming like a faint beacon
Silence is all of the electrons fallen, facedown yet buzzing, orbiting
At the threshold of another dream befallen and abandoned
So elusive as the memories altered every time you think you remember
This century is pregnant with the stains of war
Suicide requires avid terminator quality in
Humans with souls that ran out of space on earth to breathe—
Are they right or wrong to feel too much or too little or anything in
Between? More crescendoes and euphoric lows I need to feel the highs
More than the lies I tell myself
No flatlining in soul-searching;
Open heart: you are up and down and up and living—

The following poem is inspired by the quote “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.” from Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations.

If it is any consolation, I know that this is no consolation.

Fail better.
Sink—

Deeper.
Remember the trampoline.

Higher realms new levels—
Those syllables and words that rhyme together will

Not make your bank account sing but your soul
Will have songs. No one has to hear them like

You do. You will let yourself be misunderstood
For so long you will question what you stand for.

So you play dead, move your fingers on a dark
Typewriter instead of the moving your tongue in your heart,

The filter of the heart, censorship before it leaves the
Gates. So you perish in a war to make your baby live.

Heart beats in no thanks,
No appreciation, no say in a sad decaying

Body she lives in, hopes to die and perish in peace.
If it is any consolation, I know that this is no

Consolation. Learn nothing from the outside voices
For they are noises copied and pasted from the collective;

Echo chambers— pay no mind. You are part
Of the unreality, so many “backdrop”

People. Are you real.
Is this just

Fantasy. These may
Or may

Not be questions. Are they. I remember
The gorgeous stars and the exit wounds of the

Night from all the shooting stars and comets and
One-in-a-life-time incidents, once in a century once

In a millennium shows of the night sky yet we expect
Great great things and carry great great expectations

In open hearts already exhausted from beating; beating
The drums of a soulless body, with a soul fighting for a body,

A machine rejecting the soul, a trip you take with no goal for
Now you have become a nihilist and nothing exists until you

Mend, you fix broken parts:
A burning heart.

But I may be wrong in romanticizing—
For optimism can be lethal and pain is pain.

A dancer within like a flame
In a dark soft night.

Bent and broken; hell-bent
And heart-torn but all in hope revived in a heart beaten to

Become better at beating back punching back to exit the
Punching bag—

Ticking

Wartime is very much alive & ticking
“What makes you tick?”
Can someone give me “the secret” to life
Breathe some sense into life like
Come on just erase unoriginal nonsense
Looping in the mind without shine—
Full of spots and dots
To capture something unique enough
To stand out out out.
“What is your unique selling point?”
Success in the art is being a sellout
Some paper they keep in vaults decide
Your life oh boy—