Conundrum
I am not who I say I am
Who I say I am, is not, who I am
So who am I?
cue.....'Looks intently at the words and trys to read them, backwards! '
minus so...moving question mark back three spaces'
william shakespeare aka? yvette smith
circa march09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Related quotes
In Translation
Arriving with no intepretator
Leaving with signals and signs
On the elevator
In the pressed drudged crowds
Filled by the strangeness of infatuation
Your first arrival
Under the flash of a neon ray
Leaving with the wrong signs
In your back pocket
The price tags and the labels
As if heaven was an eternal shopping mall
And hell was a supermarket checkout queue
Missing the signs and the cues
Leaving in an unfamiliar way
Unexpected
The wisest words are always spoken by children
Before reading and learning
In translation!
yvette m smith march 09
aka yvette m smith
circa march 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Sorrow Of Words
The sorrow of words that rarely tell themselves
They sail like brightly coloured balloons
Lost in their own universe
They spin off the edge of a tongue
kissing air and emptiness
Seldom filling loneliness
Leaving their sound like a symphony
A faint noise hanging in the air
Somewhere in the back of my mind
The radio is playing
A song I used to know
yvette smith oct 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
An apology
If I have grieved you, I am sorry
I didn't see you there
I watched instead
The rubbed out face of a picture
Dissapearing into rain
On the side of the road
A man kneeling
Bent with a broken crayon..as if in prayer
If I didn't see you
I am sorry
I have known the shifting clouds
The moving on
The change of postal code address
The uncertainty of where to belong
I have lost these things,
The fixtures and the 'fittings'
But never the name
If I did not see you
I was lost
In the undone faces
nameless
Certain that I have never known you
I have one question to ask
'do you know me?
Would you take the time?
Named/ nameless
Outside, in
Looking
Unseen
There is a thin fence between us
Only dreams
In the same space
And the same time
On either side
where something is missing
yvette m smith july 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Radio Girl
Every morning she hung her sad same song
On the hum of the radio words
Mimicking
Her coffee mug
microphone under her chin, lip synch
Always late for work
Humming the same sad song
On the bus
Always arriving
As if she were somewhere else
[Visiting another life]
yvette m smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Poetry
These words are not porcelain
Nor are they sculpted from a certain glass
Nor do they shine even after the hour is passed
But they break like flesh and bone
They are a metaphor
For china
For fragile things
And underneath lies the poetry
Beneath the skin
It lives and breathes
Some senses burn hot
Some passion dry cold
But beneath the tempest
Lies the still hour glass
Of all thats told
And these words are the flesh and the bone
The lines in your head
The shadow in the photograph
The stories you have lived
For who can read you, after words?
Who can know the journey you have taken?
Or understand such imprints in the sand?
And yet they the live and leave their sign
In the body of one life
yvette smith feb 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Reading Me
There is a chance I will go unseen
Under the pattern of things
Swimming just beneath
Your distracted gaze
You will read me
At least this far
The space between
Eye to page
But I will go largely unnoticed
The secret is
I always emerge
But as someone else
A fragment
A piece of shining glass
The photograph
Look closely
And you will see every i
Is a particle
Shaped into colour
Shade
Form made sense
Texture as soft as skin
Glossy print
Half felt
You will read me
With distracted eye
But I will remain
hidden
yvette m smith 18.9.08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Tiddly wink
who gives a Tiddlywink, what I think?
If I needed a shrink to read me
Read me? means
Love me means?
Who gives an A-TO Z
Who needs a map to find a clue?
Like a face needs a smokescreen
Like a truth needs disgrace
Neglect needs significant attention
Who needs a shrink
To think what they think?
Hold freud on a bookshell out of view
Who needs religion
Like a cross
And a dusty headed pew?
Who cares must first undress their own indifference
And what is private must be spent in publics view
Who believes in peace
Must first believe in contempt
And who believes in nothing but a holding back,
Must first believe in argument
And if in speaking truth
I concede to all that 's false
Then such marriages are followed by divorce
For who gives a tiddlywink what I write or what I think?
If I wanted to be read, .............I'd see a 'shrink! '
amy pile o crock
aka yvette smith
march 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Fatigue
Tired today
Almost a reed broken
Worded out from speech
Finding a peace
In hung silence
And these are all clouds
No dreams tail
There is nothing to reach for
But this, in this moment
Loved out of love
Tired, yes I am tired of 'I love you'
You, who must listen
You, must you love me?
Unseen I walk beside you
Must you understand?
More than a measure of breath
A day spent with empty hands
Must you know me?
How can you know?
All that is missing in the spaces
Between today and tomorrow, ?
And another year passes unseen,
And the universal parent is waiting,
Yes he is always waiting
To take us home
To take us back
To a time when we were living without want,
Only knowing we were loved,
And that is all,
And that is that!
yvette smith 26.1.09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Submission
I submit myself to these things
The 'small talk' on the sidewalk
The eyes that survey a thousand faces
Without question
The measure of my self and men
The day hangs impatiently outside
Unchanged
I cannot rearrange the sky
Or measure a world in an hourglass
Yet something must give
In all these acts of living
Is this it?
Letting the mask slip
As the light falls to the window
Uncurl words
Unpaint the feelings
Is it possible just to live
Let life in, under the so many illusions made?
Submit to these other things?
That do not ask anything of us
But just let the day in
The world unfold beneath our feet
Shall we begin
Again?
yvette smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
These words
These words will be gone tomorrow
They steal the numbers from the streets
Til every door looks the same
These words like candles will burn out
They steal the light from temporary souls
Soon, too soon
They will bury the love
Under the tongues of yesterdays softness
As if they never were, more
As if they hunger still
There is no promise
No everlasting
And every eternal door
Always looks the same
They look
Tomorrow we will walk away
As if, when these words were gone
We forget, yes we forget
Still, that they ever came
And yet, they carry on!
yvette m smith jan 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Question
I don't have the answer
So why ask me, why?
Why do you ask me a question
When there is no reply?
As though the answer was this?
Did you know all along?
That so much space
Is weighed down in white silence
Who told you these things?
These imagined replies?
To the unanswered question
The question why?
There is no reply
But bad weather
Rough roads
There is no reply
Leave the rain alone
There is no reply
No reply
No answer to why
Leave the question alone
No face in the sky
No key to the door
No there is nothing, but nothing
So leave nothing alone
And turn round and go home
Watch the sea from your window
The waves rise and fall
Nothing but madness
And nothing at all! !
The moon's silver crescent
No time to recall
What is left
What is deaf
What is blind
To ritual?
To sign?
There's no pattern no season
No face in the wall
No reason too reasonable
To make no sense at all!
There is no reply
To pain
Love lost
To prayer
Why ask me these questions?
When there's no answer there?
yvette m smith july 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Winter
In these last days
In which winter has sealed all life in rest
And in these last mad hours blowing through the trees
In which warm lovers have sewn their final ties of happiness
When words iced cold
Break down
Returning to a familiar yearning
In frozen parks
Where empty seats
Mark the turning of a year
We wait in winter
Some cross by the frozen lakes
Where brittle arms of trees are waving
We wait in winter
Growing older
Certain of ourselves in sleep
For this is a time of birth
In learning kindness
In the absence of the flower
In every naked seed
We find our power
In the absence, our completion
In the ending, our returning
Back to the root
That's buried deep within the soil
yvette m smith dec 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Question
The question leaves a road turning
Trees full of green thoughts burning
Gold and brown
They fall in on themselves
At first they make a beautiful collage
A kaliedoscope
Tracings of colours
Leaving unfinished
The questions
Of life and love
And why
Do we?
who will we become/ in becoming?
wherefore from the root?
Seeded randomly?
When where?
Will we go?
do we die?
when we die?
what dreams?
what dreams?
He dreams in waking
wide eyes
spinning his own realities from within
Will the light burn out?
Or burn on?
And the music of the question
Goes on
Unfinished
Unanswered
Forever pursuing
Forever unpursued
In finito
NO ENDING
Yvette m smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Virus
A world rocked
Shaken
Broken
Dissoloution of words
Who washed them all away?
Today I awoke to find
A 'virus in my hardrive'
Is that a metaphor for greed?
That rots the healthy guts
Of every leviathan that sunk its teeth to deep,
Leaving so many poor Jonahs
Outside 'the belly of the whale'? ?
Now hollow
Spitting out a 'last dime'
For the homeless!
yvette m smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Landscape Of Secondary Things
The landscape of secondary things
Is the arrival that comes into place and placing
After the soft lull and the rush and the hum
The shapeless movement without words
Or point of turning
After all that is in primal feeling felt
We return and yet arrive at the landscape
Of secondary things
Some visions visitations in our dreams
yvette smith april 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The man who lost his soul
The man who lost his soul had a hole for a heart,
And so, wherever he went, there was a draught
Until one day he met his 'better half'
And feeling complete
He could thaw his sad frozen feet, at last
At the fire of love
And all loss was a thing of the past!
yvette m smith jan 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
X
She remembers sounds cracked from words shells
Echoes across abandoned parks
Seashores
Somehow frozen in time
She talks out of tempo
A Stuttering shuffling game
But she is not playing
She watches
stopped still
Outside the life
That keeps turning
She remembers nothing
Not even her name.
X marks the spot
Later her bracelet is found in the mud
It carries her DNA
And the blood of a man she once loved
She will not return again
She remembers nothing
yvette m smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The conversation
The tree was bare
The ripe fruits picked
Stored out of sight
The most important sign
Was found in absence
As if you and I were never here
And words had been the buffers
That diminished the silence
Almost to nothing
Not quite there yet
As if clocks had a different face
Turning in away from minutes
And scraped back hair
The table was full of distance
And safety
I imagined walking away
Steeped in white shores
Lost in the sand
Knowing the dots on the horizon
Were as strange as that familiar face
And with time shifting place
I would meet you again here
Always beginning
For the first time
[After conversations ended]
yvette smith
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Poem
This poem is a gift
Free words
Under the stench of a barbed wire world
Flowers that live on
After the flowers have been blown from the graves
In the midst of war
These words are a gift
A balm for the poor hungry mouth
To feed on
After the nightmare of carnage
Of lines written in blood
On broken walls
Where fathers and their families lie
Still and swollen in unmarked plots
These words are a gift
They are free
Washing the wounds
Making speech live on
Even after so much darkness
They are the lightness
Bringing light
yvette smith june 12 2009
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Poor
God is with the poor
But do the poor know God is with them?
As they look out from the crowd
Lost in their 'man made prison'
God is with the poor
But do the poor know God is with them?
As they look up to the proud
Who looks back with derision
And who can tell the poor that God is with them?
He who paints angel wings on ragged backs?
Makes hungry mouths sing for their supper
He who nothing lacks?
Who poorer still can say God is with us?
When homeless turn away from too much fuss
But God is with them
Is he with us?
And poorer still in having more
But never having too much
Who can say then God is with us?
yvette smith
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!