John Chmura
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johnchmura.bsky.social
John Chmura
@johnchmura.bsky.social
640 followers 490 following 3.9K posts
Pine Barrens Poet
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johnchmura.bsky.social
Unless I am bingeing old videos late at night for nostalgia, I rarely listen to music not released in the current year. Every January, I open a new playlist and add songs that catch my attention as they are released. My 2025 playlist is at 83 songs right now. I play chunks here and there.
November 11, 2025 at 9:10 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #LockedDoors
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
November 7, 2025 at 7:02 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #LockedDoors
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
I will put a reel in the comments, or I won’t.
LOCKED DOORS I’ve learned or been reluctantly convinced to trust the math so if Monty Hall may he rest in peace resurrected his game show host self and showed me Schrödinger’s pussy or a goat behind door number two I would switch my choice but I wouldn’t like it. I want bigger balls to fall faster, I want Columbus to land in India, I want eels born from mud, I want my wife to have less teeth than me, I want ice smaller than water, and I want 77 million Americans to be and to vote smarter, but they ain’t and they’re maybe never gonna.
November 7, 2025 at 7:00 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#haiku #meteor #ufo
meteor flash
little deer startles
mama chews tasty grass

The meteor or ufo is in the upper right corner just before the little one jumps.
November 6, 2025 at 4:47 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
Thank you, Frank. This poem bubbled up from the subconscious and I never really felt in control. Something really struck me when I saw the logo on the boot in the photos on the internet.
October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #Blood
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
October 31, 2025 at 6:01 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #Blood
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
I will put a reading in the comments.
BLOOD Peel away the shirtless blazer. Blood rings on the body left like coffee table stains hidden by wine glass stems in chic hotel rooms booked with stolen identities on cloned cell phones. Worthless spillage. It could have saved the life of a flatliner dead on arrival in the defunded ER’s frantic triage where holely hearts beat faster than hummingbird wings. I don’t care. No excuses no rhymes no muses. The painless pleasure beyond sense and serenity. I am the Everest the green koflach.
October 31, 2025 at 5:58 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
This is a different part of New Jersey…
October 30, 2025 at 4:37 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
Did you see the Trump FAA’s new anti-woke air safety instructions and the guidelines to disable masks for anyone who won’t sign a loyalty pledge?
October 28, 2025 at 6:04 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
October 28, 2025 at 5:57 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
Children’s masks then and now…
October 28, 2025 at 5:04 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #BurnForTheCamera
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
Due to the numbet of quotes, I might consider this a found poem. I will put a link to the video/commentary in the comments.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE PURE LAND BURNING MAN Saigon, June 11, 1963 I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting. And that protected me from the horror of the thing. The only reporter with a camera. Is lucky the best word for that? You don’t have to die in order to go into the Kingdom of God. In fact, you have to be alive to do so. Not by far the only death by fire in that land, but one of few to light their own match. The smell of the burning flesh, the expression of anguish. He never cried out. How many who on orders or impulse incinerated farms and families burned from within and still do? Eventually, of course, he just, he flopped over and twitched a few times and that was it. Fun fact, I was only one. Years later I found the dying monk in an old Life magazine. THIS SORT OF THING HAS GOT TO STOP Dallas, November 22, 1963 The first Catholic President, on seeing the burning Buddhist in the daily paper, blurted, “Jesus Christ!” to the AG, his brother. Hopped up on shots from Dr. Feelgood, most days. The wounds of another war. Would mindful meditation have helped him? You certainly can’t say that the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome. No, you certainly can’t. Whoa, Nellie, if it weren’t so tragic you could read it in Stan and Ollie’s voices. Pubescent boys are doubly aroused by a woman sprawled on a Lincoln gathering fragments of skull. Her pink suit has never been washed. The blood and brains. Regrets wiping her face. I want them to see what they have done.
October 24, 2025 at 6:13 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
Hey Paul, I hope you don’t mind that I posted this to the BookAholic Café group on FB. If so, I can take it down. My shtick on there is to post whatever I am reading and eating…
October 18, 2025 at 4:21 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
I do a lot of composing out loud in the car. All of my writing is done on the phone one letter at a time, just like this reply!
October 17, 2025 at 8:10 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #BreakTheMould
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
October 17, 2025 at 6:23 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #BreakTheMould
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
Depending on what the app allows, I will either put a reel or a link in the comments for the 🎤…
MASTER CLASS Not just the sinister misopedist who said a fib would turn my tongue black but every teacher I ever had lied as if their pull string plastic voice boxes were preloaded with platitudes like no one is above the law and what can you do for your country when they were pried from their molds at the same industrial complex as red lights and stop signs melting pots and voting booth curtains Chatty Cathy’s who whined “I hurt myself” instead of shouting “stop hurting me” and G.I. Joes who yelled “throw the grenade” but left unspoken “at the children.” All, except the sadistic Sister Misery who preferred to have a second grader pee the carpet rather than use the rest room before the end of the pledge of allegiance and then sent her to the office to call home for fresh undies and socks and detained me for crossing an imaginary border on the playground no one ever before judged illegal because she could, and Mr. Myopia the jaded eighth grade geography teacher to use the title lightly who never taught a single fact or feature while clock-watching on his lazy ass as we read the text book on our own and Sharpied a blood red X over three problems I got right on a test but wouldn’t change my grade because he didn’t make mistakes. Knowing what I know now I should have been studying them more than the snowflakes and fakers who softly peddled esoteric aspirations like science and art and fairness and made us cower in the basement lined up on our knees chins tucked to our chests heads against lead painted walls waiting for imaginary incineration from the other side of the earth unaware only forty miles north a slumlord’s son with bone spurs and shoe lifts was being groomed for this moment to liberate the freedoms we freely relinquish.
October 17, 2025 at 6:18 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
October 15, 2025 at 6:44 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
Having just encouraged another poet to double dip and being triggered in a good way by a line in another poem, I’d like to double dip with this short piece I wrote in 2021 after seeing a man with a cane walking a dog with three legs.
OMNE TRIUM PERFECTUM Three-legged man walks three-legged dog; a cane, an absence, and a shared heart. Third wheel in three-legged races, odd in games of evens; spacewalker pounding Cupola windows. Grabbing Gorilla Glue to fix a three-legged stool, putting small stock in the bond.
October 11, 2025 at 3:11 PM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
October 10, 2025 at 6:19 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
I will put a reel in the comments.
IMPERFECT ME On days my son was measured in length rather than height I held him shirtless in one arm while I lathered my face to shave. Leaned on my chest, warm, he plunged an explorer’s hands, decisive, into my foamy cheeks, gaining agency, the intimation of form, and play affirmed in his corporeal birthright. And me, significant, generative, like the god of the psalmist, I could do no wrong. Whiskey it wasn’t that imperfected me in his eyes. I may never know which particular betrayal inspired that loss of grace. But it did boost his swagger to say for the first time fuck you, Dad, and I absorbed the preordained assertion, concussive, cracked like a plastic bucket abandoned on the back porch when water expands into ice.
October 10, 2025 at 6:16 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
RIP, Sister Jean, 1919-2025…
October 10, 2025 at 4:55 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #Mannequin
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
October 3, 2025 at 5:59 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #Mannequin
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
#supportlocalbusiness
I will put a reel in the comments.
DAVID The David is a dickless white guy salvaged from a JCPenny anchor store that shuttered at the mall in Ghost Town during the last pandemic who greets you at the ringing door holds your cap or umbrella and listens to your worst bullshit better than your latest best friend forever over latte and biscotti at Michelangelo’s café and gallery where the roast is local but not provincial the art is organic and the word survival is printed by hand on the bottom of your to go cup but it’s no guarantee because when you leave this oasis you’re on your own in the urban desert.
October 3, 2025 at 5:57 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #NeverAgain
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
I will post either a reel or a link in the comments, in which I will say I don’t want to disparage or discount anyone’s service but I don’t like being in a society in which only those who wear uniforms and carry guns can be heroic.
CHANGING LENSES My Dad didn’t own one pair of jeans and I rarely even saw him in khakis. He did yard work in his army pants because they had extra pockets and they still fit into middle age. Younger me was embarrassed when my uncles and the other kids’ fathers narrated war stories or grimly griped of bodies bearing embedded shrapnel. Theirs was the stuff of family legends. My Dad reminisced about watching Willie Mays hit home runs at Ft. Eustis or feasting on cheap steak and beer at some Gasthaus or other while on leave. From what I gather, he passed a fluency test and spent the Korean War in Germany driving spies and informants around and running the officers’ club, where he had a side gig selling bootleg cigarettes. Once, I asked him, “So you were, what, Radar O’Reilly?” And he said, “I suppose so.” His buddy signed the wrong petition, got dropped from that cushy program, was sent to Korea, and didn’t return home the same man. Dad brought back a Leica camera and 7x35 Zeiss binoculars, which still work great. Once I told him my Uncle John had a pair of 10x50 service binoculars that he traded for with a German in WWII. Dad made a sour face and spat back, “Give me a break. Do you really think the infantry makes trades on the battlefield?” In retrospect, he was certainly no dope, but I’d never call my Dad a hero, especially in the decades when his drinking made our house a war zone of its own. Still, there is some solace in knowing his war souvenirs were bought with greenbacks and marks rather than bullets and blood.
September 26, 2025 at 6:12 AM
johnchmura.bsky.social
I wrote this poem in 2020, before I had ever heard of Charlie Kirk. #poem #resist #freespeech
CRYING FOR DRAGONS People coming in animal form, getting close enough to trick you, but what could never mask is their stink even were they rolled in roses. False prophets so often delusional, but false profits universally and genuinely intentional. Every beast has a sweet spot hidden for heroes. If the truly evil have a softer side it’s probably rhetorical. I’ve pitied dragons and convenient villains. I will never weep over a bad man no matter how dead he may be.
September 21, 2025 at 4:16 PM