Most Liked Free Verse Poems (29,541)

Drab Monday morning - another next week.
My life? Smart metered by Bingo sponsored
daytime t.v. Chat shows. Dry toast. Black tea.
I need essentials – a trip to Aldi.
A tyre’s punctured – it’s a long wet trek
in sighing rain. I can go tomorrow.
There’s a tin of beans – they’re much better cold.

I am not alone, unloved, neglected,
women have loved me - but no one lately,
not since Aoife. I really blew it there.
I could have, should have, handled it better,
played hard to get. They say women like that,
but I was in love - assumed she loved me,
like a fool rushed in – I assumed wrongly.

I pink-ribboned her cards, her billets-doux.
slid them behind flea market curios
in my wall mounted trophy cabinet .
An obscure treasure. A secret love,
out of sight to curious eyes but mine.
Did she ever love me? Who is to say?
She was expert at ambiguity.

Watching ‘Jeremy Kyle’ (for schadenfreude)
my ennui was tranquillity compared.
A sudden eruption - kitchen bedlam.
The immoveable cabinet, constant,
symbolic perhaps of my devotion
slumped suicidally from its fixings -
two doors unhinged and three glass panes broken.

The fallen cupboard straddled a table
and fortuitously placed Chesterfield.
Porcelain tea pots, Moroccan tagines
(bought from a hawker in Albufeira)
smashed bottles, a vintage perculator
shards of glass, fragments of terracotta
carpeted the quarry tiled kitchen floor.

A paste jar – anchovy, and Knorr Stock Pot
spilled. Defacing a favourite snapshot -
Aoife at lunch, waving, blowing kisses.
I licked a soft cloth to stroke clean the smears
but erased her face, the eyes and the hair.
Aoife faded like a dissolving wraith -
two fingers left and enigmatic smile.

A jag of loneliness washed over me.
“... had an accident that was not your fault?”
from the t.v. brought tears of rage from me.
A cup of tea? Both mugs were smithereens.
My passport lay ‘Lea and Perrins’ dripped wet.
I cuffed off the sauce stain and headed South
by boat and train to buy a new tagine.

I am sitting on a Lisbon terrace,
eating fried anchovies, drinking douro .
Sea gulls swoop. Dancing jasmine scents the breeze.
A trio plays. A woman sings fado.
Her song bleeds duende. The hurt of love.
I don’t know the words but I know... I know.
They sing of my life. They sing of Aoife.

In a single wink one morning becomes intrepid, so common is to be human! That we do not understand that time does not seek to crush your hopes, it is enough to know that we are the fruit of creation, mortality that defines us as an identity full of defects and that we do not know what we may consider according to our understanding.
Our existence simplifies the search but our vital chronometer teaches answers, however the reason "Why we are here" clings us to philosophizing indeterminate questions.
We are not what we speculate, we are distant from clarifying what it takes to procure true. Are we calculating a personalized imagination? Or simply chiseled by a pair of wings from where nobody belongs but which by way of conviction you almost manage to deserve, that precious place that exemplifies the eternal perfection where neither happiness nor love were created feelings have always been. There is no logic that designs these beliefs, escapes from a common sense that highlights the simplicity of our nature.
We are not aware of being, we are absent of having been.

If you should ever find out
If you should ever know
How I wrote of you long ago

Please don't be offended
For in my heart love was surely real
And I wrote what heaven could feel

Waited for the reflection of prayer to fall to earth
If you should ever find out if you should ever know
What my greatest treasures in heaven are worth

When the time went by
I keep asking myself why
I gave my life to you
I should have known
I should have understood
I gave you my heart
but you betrayed me with Bart
my ingenuity followed your fragility
now I know it was not love but just an illusion
you in my life were just confusion
when police asked me why you shot down that woman
when love becomes hate
is a sad thought
to the hell it me brought

I'm pretty sure I'm not faking
I'm pretty sure these words are true
I'm pretty sure my heart is aching
I'm pretty sure I still love you

You have wandered far away
And the years have quickly passed by
Maybe you never think of me but if you do
You know I would never lie

I'm pretty sure you're still pretty
I'm pretty sure your eyes are still blue
And if we ever meet again dear
I'm pretty sure always sure for sure I love you

A Promise


All that is true is found in nature
hence,
we learn from observation,
contemplation, and trust.

Behold the sapling,
once rich in color,
vibrant,
now grayed and dying.

Yet we know upon the seasons morrow,
brilliance again reborn,
the sapling, now stable oak,
strength against the storms ahead.

And the storms themselves,
initiating fear into one's soul,
charged with the very essence,
of the creation of life.

And dawn does rise
offering the lingering scent,
reminders of a storm
quietly fading from memory.

Dare you doubt
that when time has
swept the seasons course
that spring birds will sing in garden anew?

We are but nature's gift,
and if not my bed you warm this night,
hold tears for sorrows that are true,
for it is but a season that again I will return to you

~SAS

Poet to Poet
Sleep evades/
So many questions/
So few answers/

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail. --Walt Whitman

Dearest Poet,
Something out of nothing.
Nothing so wondrous as the poet's making--
requiring so little in the way of raw materials--
and yet so much (dreams, memories, passion).

Do we do it out of love for
that phallic symbol, the pencil?
Is the pencil like a lover's magic wand--
beloved for the enchantment it
creates out of our own substance?

Or is it the simplicity of the tool?
The same tool that makes
children's drawings, telephone doodles,
lists of figures can also make worlds!

The ordinariness of the miracle.
It reminds us that creation
is both commonplace and divine.

~
(pause)

Giving a gift that cannot
but be given away--
a song, a poem, love,
breast-milk to a baby--
enriches the giver above all.

The circle is completed.
The gift comes back.
The daily practice of an
art enriches no one so fully
as it does the practitioner.
It is a thank you to God
for the gift of consciousness.

Out of that,
I have written this.
Out of emptiness
comes fullness.
Out of hunger
comes nourishment.
Out of unrequited
love come songs.

~
The poet, writing,
always spins
a web to join
her emptiness
with the fullness of
remembered love.

Remembered love
from childhood,
remembered love
never requited,
remembered love
perhaps only imagined.

~
Nobody can tell you
how to make the poem.
You must earn it word by word.
Nobody can give it to
you but yourself.
You cannot buy talent,
nor can you extinguish
talent by selling it.

But you can confuse
the bearer of it,
making him or her think
that mortality is not
the common condition.

We pass. Our breath
stains some pages.
We pass the pages
on as proof that we were here.

(pause)

The poem is a self-feeding,
a self-nourishment, a self-love.

To call it "therapy" is to diminish it.
What is the difference
between therapy and self-love?

~
All the difference in the world.

I must close, poet
Write soon!

SAS

Laid back, lazy
resting
T-shirt and panties
sweat-moistened
clinging

The fan oscillates
pushing warm air around
silken caresses stroking my legs
like feathers

While I listen to the sultry
George Michael crooning to
the plucking of cello strings
as he's kissing a fool

Shiraz on my mind
Whilst he sits in the freeze
on chill

The time has come
to BE STILL

© June 29, 2018, L. Karriem

For Daniel

"Why do you
stripes
in you forehead,
Mommy?
Are you
old?"

Not old
But not so
young
that I cannot
see
the world contracting
upon itself
& the circle
closing at the end.

As the furrows
in my brow
deepen,
I can see
myself
sinking back
into that childhood
street
I walked along
with my grandfather,
thinking he was old
at sixty-three
since I was four
to my forty.

Forty years
to take
the road out,
Will another forty
take me
back?

Back to the street
I grew up on,
back to
my mother's breast,
back to the second
world war
of a second
child,
back
to the cradle
endlessly
rocking?

I am young
as you are,
Daniel-
yet with stripes
in my brow;
I earn my youth
as you must earn
your age.

These stripes
are decorations
for my valor-
forty years
of marching
to a war
I could not declare,
nor locate,
yet have somehow won.

Now,
I begin
to unwin,
unravelling
the sleeves
of care
that have kept
me scared,
as I pranced
over the world,
seemingly fearless,
working
without a net,
knowing
if I fell
it would
only be
into that same
childhood street,
where I dreaded
to tread
on the lines-
not knowing
the lines
would someday
tread
on me.

Daniel,
when you are forty,
read this poem
& tell me:
have we won
or lost
the war?

~Mom

Things i did to get over you when you didn't choose me.

Move out from the city. I moved out from the city away from everything that could possibly remind me of you, me and "us".

Look for a carer. I search for jobs that will fill my pocket to have what I want because all I thought that could made me happy. Filled my time working so that I will not have time to think about you, me and "us".

Find something new. I no longer need to hear your voice for good morning and good night. I found pills that replace you in making me sleep and wake me up when its over. I dont need you. Because I cant have you, me, and "us".

Refuse to talk. I refuse to talk about you because it means I remember you, I think of you. And I miss you, me, and "us".

Start writing. Writing the feelings that are hanging. Then eventually I get sick and tired of writing and re reading things only about you, me, and "us".

Knowing and meeting. I came up to the idea and played the scene of knowing, meeting and falling in love again. But I found myself imitating and wanting only like you, me and "us".

STOP CRYING! STOP LONGING! STOP MISSING! you and "us".

Let go! I learn to let go. Fall out of love with the idea of "US". And I found myself happy with it. No more you, me and "us".

Pray and forgive. The best thing I know and the only thing I can for you and me.

Accept. I learn to accept and embrace the fact that what we have has an end. That -
YOU are chosen to serve God.
I was made to be loved.
And "US" will be happy in separate ways.

Rebuild. I start to rebuild myself. I stand with my own shoes stronger and better.

Love. I fall in love with myself until finally someone loved me. Fill the space you empty and made me whole again.