Because a razor cuts across a frame of film,
I wince, squinting my eye,
and because my day needs assembly
to make sense of the scenes anyway,
making a story from some pieces of truth, I go
outside to gather those pieces.
Thousands of moments spooling out
frames of mistakes in my day.
As if anyone’s to blame,
as if anyone could interpret the colliding
images, again and again, dragging
my imagination behind me,
I begin assembling.
I don’t know anything, so I seek
directions, following the path
of ants from your palm, out
the apartment door to
a beach. Is this where I’m
supposed to ask if my hands on you
bend some light around shade? Maybe
I’m not ready for the answer. They say
art imitates what we can sculpt or write
or just see when we turn ourselves
inside out. I can’t turn my eye away
from the sight of failure. The rain pelts rooftops.
I listen to the song, thinking
when the sun comes back,
beating down the door
in my head, I’ll salvage whatever sits
still long enough for me to render,
before anyone knows what really happened.
A few random poems:
- If I To You But Sorry Bring poem – Alfred Austin
- Doomes-Day: The Fifth Houre by William Alexander
- Михаил Кузмин – Зеленая птичка
- Since We Must Die poem – Alfred Austin
- On A View Of Pasadena From The Hills by Yvor Winters
- Олег Григорьев – На собрании
- Владимир Британишский – Снились двое товарищей по Салехарду
- Written In A Quarrel by William Cowper
- Epitaph On Johnson by William Cowper
- An ode to you by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Evenèn Twilight by William Barnes
- Lincoln by Vachel Lindsay
- Lookin’ For Myself by Shel Silverstein
- Infant Joy by William Blake
- Николай Глазков – Была зима
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Snapshots Of A Daughter In Law
- Shattered Head
- Rural Reflections
- Prospective Immigrants Please Note
- Power
- Planetarium
- Paula Becker To Clara Westhoff
- Our Whole Life
- Orion
- On Edges
- November 1968
- My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts
- Moving In Winter
- Miracle Ice Cream
- Living In Sin
- Integrity
- In Those Years
- In The Evening
- In A Classroom
- Implosions
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works

A. Van Jordan, born 1965 in Akron, Ohio, USA, is a contemporary American poet and the author of four important collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton,, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize.