# Shorter Poems/Songs

By Peter Howitt, 18 September 2025.
Web page: https://compossible.blog/2025/09/18/shorter-poems-songs/
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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* * *

## Unread Lines

Defeated again   
By a shy  
Unwritten verse

Trapped in the space   
Where hurt vibrates  
And vibrations hurt

Another song  
Abandoned   
A failure of words?

And all those lines  
That might have been read  
Left inside, unsaid

![AI generated image](/images/uploads/2025/11/image-15.png "AI generated image")

* * *

## Shipwreck

Hold fast  
My love  
Else drift would  
Divide us  
On the swell of these seas

Carrying us, calling us  
Back to that first  
Birth beneath the waters  
Each dividing  
Reaching for the light  
In a flowering heartbeat  
Lasting eternity

Yes we can live…

Survivors of  
The beautiful  
Shipwreck  
Of you and me

![AI generated image](/images/uploads/2025/11/image-16.png "AI generated image")

* * *

## Zeitgeist

Hold my hand  
I know this hurts  
The death rattle of a dying age  
Be really here

Don't despair  
Death with love is hope  
New life, the chance for change  
Our deepest care

If we should die  
Before the bright new dawn  
We'll meet where there's no darkness*  
I'll see you there

![Photo taken by the author](/images/uploads/2025/11/image-17.png "Photo taken by the author")

_*this is a line borrowed and repurposed from the end of George Orwell's '1984'_

* * *

## Origami Poetry

place each sign with care, 

take your time and fold along the unseen lines

– be cute, dabble, dive in or 

try a cheeky contronym to clip its wing 

test its t e n s i l e strength 

to find the weight each word can take 

make something beautifully shaped

![](/images/uploads/2025/11/image-18.png)

* * *

## Spider's Web

Each poem is a spider's web

It says the things that can't be said

A whole lifetime compress’d 

* * *

We poets aim to cheat time 

To stem the tide with a new line

And trap the feeling in a rhyme

….

(Though not always!)

![AI generated](/images/uploads/2025/09/1000028124.png "AI generated")

* * *

## solace

(For _Rebecca Loncraine_)

words can bridge so much but can not easily reach 

into the deep dark  place we come from

only silence and music can delve into the abyss 

and return unscathed

yet try we must 

again and again

it is the intention itself

that makes the magical leap 

across the space 

where words must

fall

and fail

![](/images/uploads/2025/03/compossible.jpg)

Freedom - everything outside of the centre-line (AI art)