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
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The journey
Word sent
Word weight heavy less
I don' t understand the journey that you take
Only that your arrival is thread bare organic
Flimsy light purposefully driven
Under the skin of the object
You are telling me
That words
Are living
Whose cells unfold and multiply
Some insinuate a 'texture'
Some hybrid and hibernate
Some spring
Some loosen and unbud themselves
From surface forming
Those dark shadowy things
The recesses of what an amnesiac
Has chosen to desensitise
They are the memory box
The shiny button
The torn school name tag
The crumpled first diary
Some secrets
Some return to pure sensation
A first taste of being feeling
outside, of what it is 'to be'
They are alive
Living
After what is written is long gone
yvette smith april 09
poem by Yvette Smith
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Feeling Headaches Occasionally PMS Intense
my PMS is secondary not primary
secondary is collateral range fallout
consequences lapping lunar cycles
birth red rose booms periodic flowers
my PMS is primary not secondary
work intense pressure creation created
back aches legs ache long sitting days
birth labour new life passage tunnel costs
your PMS is primary not secondary
i think sorry yours is bad lots of headaches
some more soon monthly regular pms headaches
post modern syndrome suffer gender regardless
poem by Terence George Craddock
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A tissue's lament
Once a perfect soft white sheet
Now a crumpled smelly rag
Once a song on a serene windchime
Now a broken chord in a backroom bar
Once innocent wrapped up in my pure white bed
And sheets of a hundred others
On which I rested my angelic head
Hopes smashed
Dreams of serviette fame defeated
Now blown away
Under a barrage of vulgar sneezes
No gentle soft lips to tap and pamper after meals
Only rough hands that grab
With old food long congealed
My hope for better things shattered, scattered torn
My dreams of being a 'Hollywood handkerchief flattened
Alas! never born
Only a snotty nostril symphony plays for me
In inharmonious keys
Once used up, scrunched up, and forgotten,
But still I dream of better things,
If only I' been made from cotton!
yvette smith
poem by Yvette Smith
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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
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If I told you
Telling grey clouds
Telling silent birds
Telling tall trees
These things
That have lain waste
This winter soil
That binds its roots around the dead
Telling all who will listen
Who will hear
That it loved once, lived here
Underneath the shape of things
Felt breathed love.
If I had told you
Only you,
Would you still be here?
Still, in love?
yvette m smith nov 2008
poem by Yvette Smith
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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
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Secondary Modern
This must be the place
Second place in the human race
Down in the basement
Now I know what he meant
Secondary modern
But there must be a problem till the girls go home
This is the hand that you never shook
You never gave me the chance that I took
Secondary modern
But there wont be a problem till the girls go home
Is it out of the question
Between you and me
Is it pleasure or business
Or a packet of three?
Nobody makes me sad like you
Now my whole world goes from blue to blue
Secondary modern
But there wont be a problem till the girls go home...
song performed by by Elvis Costello
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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House Of No Return
Tomorrow enter the house of no return
And you will find no memory of what has gone
The leaves blown in the gravel path
Where childish footprints played
The sun rolled out across the clouds
Into another day
Weeds grow now
Where once a soft emerald carpet flowed
And flowers crowned the air with scent
And fires burnt in Autumn evenings end
For what has gone
cannot return my friend
Except in ceasless rivers of eternity
I carry your heart in my mine
And once again you're here with me
yvette m smith nov 2008
poem by Yvette Smith
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Writing
Today I write , not myself,
But what you want to hear
The sun shone
The trees sang
The world was at peace
Today I write not myself
But the carefully woven tunes
You have learnt to hear
That shuts out the cluttered day
The nervous speech,
That gives you a lullaby
To lull you to sleep
These lies we keep
To keep us from harm
We are armed, only with dreams
yvette smith june 09
poem by Yvette Smith
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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
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If
If I did not carry you to me
Gently
weaving my minds imagination upon you
Like a photograph
Or go to hold you in my arms
Or carry this water to the rivers edge
Where you lay
And have always been
If I did not call attention to these things
My sweet imaginings of
That rest upon you
In my gentle kindling
Of birds wings
Somehow nesting
Somewhere
Making calling
Home over rough terrain
This emptiness
Would in these shells made mine
Echo back
To me
The muse
Of my yearnings
Turning
The swiftness of one life
Upon the untouched air
Unreachable
I could not define
You
who have rested here before me
After my dreams
Running wildly away
yvette m smith may 2009
poem by Yvette Smith
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These are the things we cannot possess
These are the things
We cannot possess
The earth in all its 'holiness'
The earth in all its 'bloody defiance'
The earth in all its secret violence
The earth in everchanging times
We cannot possess the earth
Less time
Reckless
Unsolved
Unseen
We can only grieve
And love
And laugh
And live
Letting go of all we thought we had
But never did
Knowing we have felt these things
Beneath are skin
Like a kiss
In a shimmering stream of light
And like a wound
In darkest night
They will flow on and on
With or without us, yet,
We cannot forget them
yvette smith sept 2008
poem by Yvette Smith
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Born
Today I was born,
Like the first ray of bright summer sun breaking,
Turning the day from the darkness
Today I was born,
Like the first bud breaking upon
Knowing it will flower
Leaving its scent in the earth
And all around the sky has opened
A pure white canvas
On which I will paint my love
For today I know
I was born for this
This gift of life!
yvette m smith april 09
poem by Yvette Smith
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Yes
Yes I have lied to you about love and truth
And all those things you hold so dear
Yes I have lyed with you
And in love
And in truth,
And told you every dream within my heart
And in this place I find our love still resting here
yvette m smith dec 08
poem by Yvette Smith
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When You Are Gone
When you are gone I will live on
I will live on
When you are gone
I will not mourn or forget
How love was born
Much stronger still
Though you are gone
You still live on
In birds in clouds
In simple flowers
In bones and flesh
That carry you
Each day, each hour
And this is your power
Though you are gone
Much stronger now
You still live on
In words that echo in the air
In scent of showers
Fallen leaves
In all of these
And feeling sense
You presence, felt in present tense
I will not mourn
Nor wil I grieve
For you live on
Inside of me
yvette m smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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Love In A Time Of Rain
Returning to rush hour again
To the crowd of anonymous faces
To speechless carriages and rustling papers
To time suspended between stops and faltering steps
Returning home under a sky bled dry
To work worn to fading
grey tenements and grand illusions
Dreams watered down
To hello
To goodbye
To love, in a time of rain
by yvette m smith
poem by Yvette Smith
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The Composure
There is nothing new in the composure
You
spend /SPENT
These
Fragments
Of
Line ear
Unserving
The listener
Who seeing
Without
[ inner eyes worlds universal SEPARATED]
Can only think he/ she /it they we you I
understand in understating
The concepts well to be precise?
Badly
My reply to the deaf the dumb and the BLIND
[The distinguished deconstructivist is]
Listen
HEAR
Feel
The air
I will give you MUSIC
This is my composition
Patterning the very air
You breath
My unseen notes curls
Dancing
Without ink blot or.................? ? SIGN
Written DOWN
A variation turning every time
A mystical sound
yvette smith
april 09
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Perfect Lover
My perfect lover was sent to me
By way of a hypnotherapist
On a soft deep couch
It summoned itself
Through soft words
Spoken
Soporific
Like drunk angels
Whose wings too heavy to fly
Rested on the shutters of the eye
Losing track of time
Lost in the hush of a cloakroom
When all have gone home
But one coat remains
Waiting to hang a life on it
Waiting for a love to come
Even after the fifty soft minutes have past
And the light breaks the shade at last
What remains
One single coat
You reach into it and pay
With a fifty pound note
yvette smith sept 08
poem by Yvette Smith
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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