In Ill-mannered times
Your worth would have been even less
Than anything I can scrape from my boots
Your kindness lost, your soul a mess
Of worm-meal dung and sick
I thank you twice, that’s the trick
Reading about archival insult poetry and taunts. ABCBDD Rhyming Meter.
Jane smashes the bar
Drunks wallowing in her rage
‘Who wants to fight?!’
No one raised a hand now
But they would once she slept
Writing in Tanka form – 5/7/5/7/7 syllables.
The Sun
Throws up
On my face
I feel her
Next to me
Her head on
The floor
The blankets
Suck
The blood
Dry
Explaining what your work is about up front is bullshit. The work stands by itself and if people wanna know more than maybe you tell them – or maybe you tell them to make up their own damn mind.
Rhonda stands
Outside her crib
Her drug dealer
Pulls up
Fast
She still gets in
Slow
Rhonda lives next door to me. She’s always wandering the streets high on something. Bothering my other neighbor for a drive to make her connection. She doesn’t bother me anymore
she wears
a onesie
burns like
a roman
candle
you pay
top $
allusion, suggestion, implication are the bullets in the poetry gun👉
black water
fills the
tub
she pushes
my head
deep under
guess the
honeymoon’s
over
as much as i hate cliches, sometimes they just fit i tried a number of different endings but i liked this one best
outlaw poems
read fast
like angels
slinging fire,
hardcore &
heavyweight
yeah, the FEEL of being a word slinger and owning it and just smashing the words and getting all the words right in a burst of fever writing blowing the page up
eat a bowl
of fuck she
screamed
at me
that day
i took
her sister
Todd Moore came from the school of short and savage poetry. 2 or 3 words per line. Driving the narrative forward. Like Buk, his characters, his observations, his art spoke to the ‘working class’ trials and observations of mankind. No flowery language. No obvious rhyming patterns. It’s this kind of work that is like an ice pick to the eye. Sharp, fast and lethal – the way good poetry should be.
Red shit box van parked aside
Rusted panels well worn
Thrust sticker stuck on the back
Who knows how stories are born?
Inside this blackened truck from Hell
The cargo who can not tell
Of the nights inside born of fear
Teenage hitchhikers all lost
Disappeared at night, so they say
Bodies sold for quite a cost
Inside this blackened truck from Hell
The cargo who can not tell
The cops found it burnt to a husk
Only the handcuffs truly show
Of the sex trade that is no more
And the fates that all know
The cargo who can not tell
Inside this blackened truck from Hell
I wanted to try my hand at a murder ballad. Something that speaks to those shit box trucks throughout Indiana and where I live. So many missing kids and rape vans everywhere.
ABCB Rhyme Meter. 8/6 Syllables alternating.
Outlaw Poetry 