NaPM 27 April 2022

[RiverNotch]

Bit late today, watched a movie in a theatre for the first time since the pandemic. My last movie was Parasite, and this movie was The Batman -- it's as much a cinephile's dream as the pandemic and local cinema economics would permit xD

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Topic: Recall someone who is no longer loved by your subject.

Form: Any

Line Requirement: At least 8

[Semicircle]

Working at a suicide hotline in India


The same old rigamarole;
"It's not my fault,
society's to blame"
from men without a dollar
to their name.

Waiting in a queue,
and then pouring their little hearts out
to the interest that I feign,
forgetting, that I'm a person just like them,
who has no answers for their pain.
I never end up helping them anyways,
like consoling the cold statues
protruding hell's gravel;
that whisper only horrible truths
back to me.

My skin has hardened like theirs,
my soul has hardened too,
so whenever they threaten suicide,
I think to myself,
"That's a shame"

[Mark A Becker]

Choosing Life

When you were abandoned
did it really mean
your parents didn't love you
anymore?

Or could it be they left you
there, all alone
because something threatened
their will to survive?

They’ve now begun to care
for another brood,
in a bush further away
from that black snake.

[CRNDLSM]

Angel from Montgomery,
sweet stranger at the party,
your voice carrying the tune,
like a sharpened metal spoon
scooping out the rotten core
of my wounded heart, to pour
fresh blood, open arteries
of long forgotten memories.

[Mark A Becker]

… open arteries
of long forgotten memories.

“just give me one thing that I can hold on to”

[RiverNotch]

I remember you and remembering you
is all I ever do nowadays. Waking up
recalls my waking up on the day after the night
my eyes were shut to sleep by my shedding
so many tears over you, while going

to bed and shutting my bedside light
recalls the arcade where we last met
and the way its lights were swallowed by the night
on my way home. So why is it when I pray
each morning, nowadays

I never pray for you? I like to think my fancy
only turned to malice once, that I have had
my reckoning, but indifference
always gave me greater trouble. What hurts more
anyways? The malice a dad spews to his son

or abandonment by a mum? And since nowadays
all I ever do is remember you, how great the chance
you'll come back just to haunt me. "You owe me too much",
you'll say, your face a ghostly white,
and maybe then I'd finally forget, dying of fright.

[dukealien]

One-Way Love


It’s cold, stuck fast in burning ice
no hope of rescue or recourse
no father’s hand, no thinking twice
or hope of Heaven or remorse.
He wanted only trust and love
and to be what He always was:
to be unclimbably above
his first creation, shining Us.
And I did love Him with my soul
at first, but found alternatives
to abject service, courtier’s role
denying that my love yet lives.
I, Lucifer, rule as I will
in Hell but, damn!  He loves me still.

[TranquillityBase]

I was never seduced by a succubus,
but I did worship at Lilith’s feet for a time.
In those days she was just a working girl,
before her gigolo Thanatos and the Engine of Time
remade my virility into a wild tortoise,
clambering slowly to extinction.
Lilith has long since forgotten me,
but here I am, still remembering,
and centuries will not allow me to forget.