The Evaporation of Liquid Memories

A warm brain freeze
That smells
The color of
Orange juice
Spreads all over
My mind
In the morning—
Toxic
And sluicing
Inside
My eye sockets,
Purple
Bags pillowing
Where the
Red rings circle,
Pupils
In gradient
Tones, cast
In the piquant
Daylight.

[...] Read more

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Ghost Story

The translucent hand manifests in mine
Under the cover of my paling skin.
Our spiritual essences entwine,
Braiding in the body, knotting within.
A portent of the coming possession
Is the reanimation of my mouth,
A séance conjured type of expression
That cools the air like arctic winds blown south.
Paranormal peripheral vision
Enshrouds the clouded edges of my eyes,
Resurrecting thoughts gone from excision—
Poltergeist thoughts that were left out to die.
This body of mine then becomes a host
For the haunting of an etheric ghost.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Insomnia

I've been letting sleep rest on the backbeat,
Measured in an irregular pattern.
Dreamless, my mind seems to be incomplete,
Receding like a light in a cavern.
My tone is no longer as dynamic,
But my stresses are longer—suspended.
My thoughts are pitch, as if the chromatic
Spectrum of my ideas were blended.
I don't feel my pulse. Has it gone away?
Consciousness accents itself at random.
I've been looping from day to day in a
Syncopated circadian rhythm.
I'm disoriented while time's tempo shifts.
In a senza misura trance, I drift.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Limbic Thievery

My jaw drops and unhinges like a snake's
To swallow the egg, your yolk of wisdom.
What I know seems so obtuse and opaque—
A cracked shell series of stupid theorems.
My ideas—inchoate, incomplete,
Impossible to form, say, or define.
My inner resources swiftly deplete
And the slope of my mood also declines.
My efforts even—a subterfuge.
All thoughts are thin vapors forced to perspire.
Thus, I fe'el the need to find refuge,
For doing so must certainly inspire
My mind to seek past its limitations
By dwelling in your imaginations.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Submerged

I'm submerged, plunging deep into the sea.
I'm pulled by weight of burden and me—
A balloon pressed underneath the current,
A flooding of flotsam and deterrents
Which drown out my more buoyant energies.

I'm shackled to chains made to guarantee
That I cannot become an escapee
To the far shores of freedom emergent.
I'm submerged.

As gravity prevents me ecstasy,
Dropping my down in abysses empty
By the jet-stream of things so divergent,
I must embrace my hopeless internment,
For breathless and heavy I'll always be.
I'm submerged.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Unincorporated Insights XII

In the hysteria of exertion,
We become moribund and bellicose—
Buoyant with undulating derision,
Palliated by a ravelment of woes.
Our muted, quiescent panic twinges,
Cascading over the peace we pretend.
Our intuition tears at its fringes
While we berserk, bicker and condescend.
The lacuna, the bedlam, the terror bursts
Like stampeding, bionic wildebeest.
We receive a chaos that seems rehearsed
Rather than a real entropy released.
As these trappings bellow in the still night,
The grays of thought trail to the blacks and whites.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Mummification

Preserve me in your acts of compassion
As my heart shrinks in one last contraction;
Before my blood clots and clogs deep inside
The vessels of my so-soon-to-be-dried,
Disintegrating internal organs.

When I am lifeless, soulless, and barren;
When I am petrified, dark and ashen,
Permit for me to be indemnified.
Preserve me.

While I lay, looking through my glass coffin;
Resting on a fine, white bed of linen,
Allow my spirit to be purified.
As I am wrapped, embalmed and mummified
In the thick tars of refined bitumen,
Preserve me.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Mandates of Their Empire

Do not let language be used against you.
Refuse the rhetoric of mass control.
The system will not reveal what is true,
For honesty emancipates the soul.
Do not debauch your ideas or words.
If you do, you choose to refute meaning.
Why would one desire to be left unheard,
Relying on others intervening?
Do not wait for the world to become fair
When billionaires plan your daily routine.
Renounce the indoctrination, despair,
And injustice of their content machine.
Do whatever you sincerely desire.
Disregard the mandates of their empire.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Anonymous

Anonymous: there's comfort in numbers,
Safety and security in being
Faceless, nameless, no one who's worth seeing
When the crowd keeps tight knit and together.
Anonymous: it's ok to wash out
Against quickly cascading cavalcades
Rushing, crushing and forcing you to fade
In two doses of self-pity and doubt.
What does it matter if nobody cares
And no one notices the difference
Between you and this sea that surrounds you?
This shallow pool, all around, ev'rywhere
Dictates the tide of your non-confidence
And your anonymous nothingness too.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Hope Sonnet

I write all my songs, all my poetry,
Hoping I may be able to escape
Reality by means of symmetry,
In rhythmic schemes and with metrical shape.
I distort my surroundings in the glass—
Convex and past, covering my iris
Where the amorphous images amass,
Contaminating thoughts like a virus.
My dirtied spectacles, a petri dish,
Hold onto diseased cultures of fancy:
Glowing germs—cell stars made to take a wish
And transpose it where I might blindly see.
Then beautiful things coalesce and transcend
Beyond my imagined world of pretend.

poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!