Verbatim found poetry is an intriguing collection of found poems. Poems found in ordinary, and not so ordinary places. Submit yours.
“Eatin’s Cheatin’” echoes around the office on a Friday afternoon.
Women pick over their naked salads and extra extra light low fat
Philly on Ryvita. The preparations for ‘Rosé o’clock’ are well
under way.
They’ll grumble through the afternoon and suppress the urge
to be
‘naughty’ whenever anyone offers a biscuit, sweet or chocolate.
Fun.
From Drunkorexia: A stupid name, but a serious problem. By Rishi Dastidar.
cats
tend to exist in
your peripheral
vision
and after a while
you move around the house
in a manner that
accommodates
the expectation of their
presence,
waiting
to trip you up
on the stairs
or suddenly
emerge
from nowhere
and start slow-walking
in front of you
as you try
to get
from room to
room.
From My Life as a Cat Undertaker. By Ailsa Holland.
I’ve decided that I want a japanese tattoo sleeve
starting at the shoulder
and ending at the wrist.
It will include at least a koi fish,
some kanji, a samurai sword, some nice blue
waves, a pokemon (not sure which yet, but hell maybe I’ll get two),
probably a torii, probably something small
in dedication to yu yu hakusho (not sure what). I don’t have all
the ideas yet but it will at least
be very colorful and with basically no skin color showing. And my back piece
will be dedicated to egyptian mythology;
specifically Horus and Anubis facing each other
and some nice looking egyptian-like images in the background
to bring it all together.
And honestly that’s all the tattoos I want.
A post on the White Morgan Freeman Tumblr, 20 May 2012. By Ezra.
Positioned in the water in an uncomfortable pose,
afflicted with a relatively high mean density,
suffering from substantially high frictional drag,
and unable to raise and lower its neck
and hence unable to adopt a synchronous gait,
we conclude that giraffes would be very poor swimmers,
and that it might be assumed that they would avoid
this activity if at all possible.
Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis.
When you’ve eaten an orange you have to
go back to the shop to buy another.
Paulo Coelho describes the profitability of piracy for artists in My Thoughts on S.O.P.A.
Top of the list is cupcakes. Does anyone
actually eat this sickly over-iced,
pseudo kitsch, toy food except perhaps
a few girly women who think having
a large shoe collection makes them maverick.
Big black pick up trucks as driven by men
whose default fabric is camouflage. These
swollen testosterone substitutes are
the automotive equivalent
of a liquorice flavoured ribbed condom.
PVC banners, those dingy oblongs
of bad computer graphics tied onto
every suburban pub, roundabout, school.
Usually advertising a singles nite
or fundraising fayre long since past, or worse
still, a carvery. Pop up anything.
The vaguely west coast stubbly check shirted
bloke who features in every phone, computer
and small car ad. You know the one
with scruffy hair and a retro t-shirt
probably designs apps that no one asked for
and fewer people need.
From The Pitiable Impossibility of Debt in the Mind of Someone Shopping.
You should not slap
your neighbours without asking
their permission first.
The sauna is dear to me, almost sacred.
My father was born in one,
and his dying wish was to bathe
in a sauna one last time.
Summer is the best time to go.
Strike a match, hear
the crackling of dry birch wood
as it is engulfed by the greedy flames,
then sit down on the steps
to ponder the ways of the world
and wait for the sauna to warm up.
Your body sighs with relief when the first
ladleful of water hits the sizzling stove.
The experience is topped off with a dive
into a pure, clear lake.
What else does a human being need?
Both senryu and main poem are from a piece about saunas by Olli Rehn, European Commissioner in charge of the Eurozone crisis.
We work and we borrow
in order to work and to borrow.
And the jobs we work toward
are the jobs we already have.
Lines from the we want everything blog. By Rishi Dastidar.
We’ve got a different CD player now
and so tonight we are here
listening to the two versions
of this song, which is
about divorce.
If it weren’t so hateful, the song
might almost feel like an attempt
to climb out of the undertow
and get a breath of air:
it’s got recognizable situations,
phrases from real life,
the human touch.
But it sticks its head up
above the self-absorbed,
inward-gazing
morass
only to draw attention
to the immeasurable depth
of it all. This is
a mean thing to do.
An untitled blog post about Radiohead’s ‘Morning Bell’. By Haley Patail.
Things like boiling water, lizard watching,
mosquito nets, thorns in my shoes, wearing
skirts and t-shirts all the time, waking at
five AM, seat feeling sweaty, hearing
spoken Swahili, admiring cornrows,
dirt tracks and colourful markets and snacks
that all seemed so new when I first arrived,
now just feel normal. Glass pop bottles, old
Tsh notes, mud brick houses, chickens on bikes,
Karibu, men at bus stations, heat, dust,
colourful buses and dala-dala
and colourful clothes, rice and beans, insect
repellant, hot showers heated by the sun,
watering the garden morning and night,
African singing, mangos and pawpaw,
taking antimalarials, buying
green vegetables for the girls low in
iron, frogs, owls, feeding chickens … I got
that challenged feeling again today,
of having practical skills to offer.
For those of you
expecting a blog
on South Africa,
well, what can I say?
They did show G.I. Jane
twice in four days.
Sarah’s post from Tanzania, then her husband’s article from Johannesburg.
Verbatim Poetry 
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