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A Lasting Mark
Mozart had his music.
To Socrates wisdom went,
Greatness to Caesar,
And Christ eternal life.
I ask none of these,
To my words immortality only -
In three hundred years hence,
Regarded on some student’s desk.
Stirrings
What are these things
That need freeing -
Dreams, or feelings,
Or demons that no
Words know or speak,
Like bird song caged in bars -
Seeing diamond shards through infinity
But having no arms to reach for them,
Only seeing and searching
For words they might wear.
Facets
Poet youth,
You are a jewel
Fresh from the mine
Of truth,
A diamond in the rough.
Under the proper tool
And polish, you would shine.
You are made of the right stuff.
My Task Master’s Beckoning
With a whisper, I could be free.
I could float mindlessly across my time.
But my resistance is gone.
I stroke to his cadence,
Flailing an impassable sea,
As he commands me, wherever he withers.
He stands over me, merciless master he,
Driving, beating the drumhead,
Motivating the living until dead.
I am his servant.
When his whip snaps,
I jump to the task,
To my task master’s beckoning.
And all that I can ask,
Is to affix my name to the effort.
No Market
Shall I give up verse, Ezra,
Nothing to it but words it seems,
(Like Mussolini’s empty promises)
Dream of an unfinished Mexican cruise
Lowering gloomy as a bell jar round me,
And die, if there’s nothing in it?
– A minor poet from Idaho, like you.
Should I claim total insanity,
Cast pen to fire, and will to oblivion,
Set Shakespeare aside, and turn a dial?
Yet media is an enemy to me.
Treason is not in my blood.
Complacency is a devil,
Mine a cause against a mundane tongue.
I am no ally to the majority roar.
With this defiant banner tied to my
forehead -
Self evisceration before surrender.
The sword is drawn, mighty or not, for war.
Dangling Phrase
Before exploring the desert waste,
Before replenishing the water jar,
Before getting a good taste,
Before journeying very far,
Before thought was denuded,
Our poem was concluded.
Pencil Marks Only
to put pencil to paper
why not an ax or fire
chisel to stone more so
tablets of stone could last
with a holy finger to burn
a thought or ten into them
but
god
in this finger burns no divinity
again pen to parchment
all meaning obscured
in the morning fog of consciousness
no morrow for the sentence
an arrow
gone awry
no apple to split
or village to save from tyranny
only the weak pelvic thrusts
of mind searching
for immaculate conception
driving a point home
in a moment of madness only
only a madman’s itch
a monkey scratching charcoal on bark
a moment passing only
a lunatic’s laughter
appreciated by cockroaches
hours after lock down
a dog vomiting
a drunken rage shouted
staggering home at midnight
marks as fleeting as years
regarded as parakeet shit
down the back of my chair
no more than a painted buffalo
on a cave wall
more a cave than a wall
a gaping chasm
abysmal hole of soul
and mind
defined
by pencil marks on paper
Shy One
For the sake of your sanity,
Say what it is you have to say -
No need to preserve vanity.
Don’t save words for another day.
Just say what you believe is true.
Tell the world how it is you feel.
Don’t fear the crowd will disarm you.
Shout right out what you think is real.
Ventriloquist
Why should I speak with one voice?
It seems an impossible choice.
Is there some indispensable need,
Something irrevocably decreed
In the book of poet’s laws?
I have never found a voice because
I have never lost my voice.
Though, I have lost my mind.
And I tore my heart out long ago.
Yet, my tongue I never had to find.
You ask me for a voice even so.
I speak as I feel.
I voice what I deem real.
I’ve never thought of putting up a fence,
Or taking lessons on how to make sense,
Or voicing catechisms deep in a sacred grotto,
Paying the gods of verse some tithing.
As my soul trembles in violent vibrato,
So my voice changes with the writhing.
Clear Confusion
Oxymoron,
You ingenious fool!
Your truth lies
In yin yang
Solidarity.
Euphemism
Cast your vote for mirrors and smoke,
Artful themes a canary spoke.
Where are the thorns on this rose?
I can’t see the face behind the nose.
Call this spade shady,
Eye shadow on an old lady,
Brahma pirouetting in a china shop.
This fleecy wolf will never stop.
Grammar
Grammar brushes back her gray hair,
And wags her crooked cane,
Directing down a straight and narrow lane
All the ideas that pass,
Herds them into her Sunday school class,
To box their ears, and teach them such fears
As needed to keep them square in their pews.
Shame on that color, you tramp!
Bite down on those words, you scamp!
Straighten that tie, and shine those shoes!
Then she stiffens into her rocking chair,
To give her arthritic knees a rest,
And conjugate some verbs for a while,
Showing her toothless smile,
Knowing that Grammar always knows best.
Doggerel
Doggerel has been chewing at my rhyme,
Dragged my craft to the dog house one more time.
Bad, doggerel, bad! Sit, doggerel, sit!
Will that dog in the manger never quit!
If I kick it, it might just go away.
Believing that every dog has his day,
I shall give my verse one more doggish try.
And doggerel might let sleeping dogs lie.
What Was That Word?
A flower in my window,
A rose, though I’m not sure,
Blown by a soft wind,
Modulating in iambic pentameter,
By any other name is as sweet.
But a name is not so easy
Without any anapest to keep it in,
Like a fine vase or a suitcase,
Or lyric, or a pyrrhic – a bit ironic
That there’s no ionic for it.
Tribrach, amphibrach, bacchius,
Iambus is not what I am.
I have no suggestion beyond
Alcaics, sapphics, and asclepiads.
And avant-garde is out of the question.
A spondee it is not, nor trochee.
And I can’t see it as cretic,
Perhaps a dactyl or minore.
A choriamb might agree.
But I can’t get it in. (I tried before)
There is no meter available,
And not a caesura in sight.
Oh, Mephistopheles,
Offer me a contract,
Ah, stay, thou art so fair -
Far more simple
To appease a demon,
Or simply plant a daisy.
Moon
Make a statement to the moon.
Observe for a while,
With a cheesy smile,
Beneath this lunatic’s noon.
For Whom it Shines
The moon is for the poet,
To know it,
To bestow it,
To crow it.
Compulsive Wisdom
A picture in rhyme
Brings on nine in good time.
Poetic intention,
Is the muse of invention.
A song in the head,
And a meter to hone,
Wear a bard’s fingers
Down to the bone.
A poem a day
The poet must pay,
To keep the demons
On the bay.
On The Tip Of My Tongue
On the tip of my tongue,
I held a delicate phrase.
And now on my ear hung,
The articulation stays.
A Word Of Advice
A word of advice:
Speech is not free.
Thought is the price,
If meaning is to be.
Ah, Shut Your Damn Poetry!
If every bird twitter,
Every cheeping jitter,
Every raucous squawking
Of embittered starling
Were considered good poetry,
We’d have a noisy tree.
Only eagles reach height
As they screech in flight.
We also esteem nightingale song,
And the whooping crane, sad and long,
And the swallow’s trill,
And song of whippoorwill,
But no one wants to hear a common
sparrow.
Please, at least a poison arrow
To end my mundane misery!
Ah, shut your damn poetry!
Originality
I am damned to limitation
By forerunners of thought and speech.
They’ve forced me to imitation,
My claims of invention impeach.
My attempts at precedence fail.
Originality is through.
My words are a thousand years stale.
My quest for substance wholly new
Is just a foolish obsession.
Inception ceased long, long, ago.
There has been no new expression
Since the first caveman stubbed his toe.
Peering Into Ginsberg’s Toilet
2 day I looked in your toilet
bowl at 2 A.M.
gazing methodically at clogged garbage pail
hallucination below
& mind blow
ASS blow
what
if
I
ate
your
feces
and
shat
it
out
all
over
pass gas
out the ass
you go
phosphor alley stink
turned raw side out
and porcelain canned
I can do that now! No cops! No cops!
No one gives a crap
stink…rises…rises…
shrinks to nothing
plop
plop
plop
then I step on your forgotten
(movement)
for the handle to flush
one eye blink to obscurity
swirling~ swirling~
nebulae
no matter
but over 800 pages to wipe with
Perhaps
I’m starting to sound the same,
Whether I laugh or cry -
No will to live or die.
My tongue has gone blind,
My imagination lame,
All numb with pain.
How dumb my mind!
Perhaps I’ve gone insane.
3000 AD
In the year 3000 AD,
Will there still be a tree?
Will there sing a bird or bee?
Will there play a symphony?
Will there be harmony?
Will they remember me?
Student
Student sitting there in the sunshine,
Press these pages beneath your fingertips,
And feel the sensation.
Perfect being, are you achieving
All of this moment upon the grass,
Absorbing freely?
Oh, fair and beautiful mind,
Delightful how you feel the day on your face,
Concentrated so!
Delicate heart, open and hearing,
Measure and weigh, articulate gracefully,
These phrases for you.
A Poet’s Prayer
O my muse, where are you?
I am confused as to what I must do.
Divine the measure of my worth.
Define the purpose of my birth.
Give me the words that I might write
The message of your second sight.
I Am Your Muse
What is your worry, transient fear?
Dear lover of truth,
I am here with you,
With a word of support,
Near, at your ear.
I was an aching heart, too,
A ghost of grass-banked tarns,
And forlorn haunts,
And memories beneath rose arbors,
Come to clear your visions
Otherwise occupied with anxiety.
I am arrived at your supplication,
For a calm noon until twilight.
I am the resolve in your bosom
Fancied above the heart pounding,
A trilling of voice too refined for earthly ears.
I am your muse,
Guardian angel transiently exposed on a sunbeam.
Bard Erratic
He was consistently inconsistent,
Never certain in his song,
Right on rhyme and meter, for an instant,
Then he’d get it all wrong.
He poured forth from his earnest throat,
A verse much out of key.
But when he hit the proper note,
It was as good as song can be.
Lingering
More than the thought
In initial inspiration,
There is wrought
Constant marvel,
Hope of fame
Enduring, an eternal
Love of life, in the abbreviation
Lingering in a name.
As Ye Elizabethans
That hand wherein the deepest thought allays,
Pining of creed and kind therein expends,
Tradition in all forms never betrays.
In this the movement formulates all ends,
And speaks a common tongue all free souls must,
Preserves the sacred flame of will’s desire,
Else molder now beneath a shroud of dust,
And birthright in posterity expire.
Death’s mute and barren edict cannot seal
The depths and heights humanity has known,
While minds still yearn and burning hearts yet feel,
As ye Elizabethan’s have us shown.
This we perceive to make our effort worth,
And derive noble purpose of our birth.
The Words Of My Heart
I write in an empty book.
I paint on an empty page.
I sit in an empty room.
I live in an empty age.
I search for words and colors and ways
To lend meaning, to lavish my days.
I will fulfill, before I depart,
To stand up, and see beyond the wall,
To color the bleakest hues of all,
To record all the words of my heart.
verse in an old man’s notebook
he wrote there on yellowing note
musty and moldering
fresh as a crisp heart
could bite into a subjective fruit
a line of verse I found
meant not surely for a shelf
blanketed dusty what he
poured
from his soul
trembling fingers for the passion
walking among buttercups
and seeing her in yellow reflection
leaving the blossom unblemished
better left thinking to
spare the touch of fingers
for a firm unwithering stem
being overmuch into spring
and she blooming there on the pillow
beside against him
there finalized
the beginning middle of his poem
and surely not meant
to go unspoken
In My Words
When I am tired and feeling cold,
I hide in my words to forget the day.
I dream of the words I want to say.
I repose in the meaning, and there I lay.
When I am torn and have lost my hold,
I hide in my words to forget the day.
I dream of the words I want to say.
I search for meaning, and find my way.
When I am worn, when I am old,
I’ll hide in my words to forget the day.
I’ll dream of the words I want to say.
I’ll close my eyes, and drift away.
Poets
Poet, there is more to my speculation
than I can measure.
More than my whole is this torch taken up involuntarily.
There is more to my meditations than you,
And more to me than yours, but the chorus is ours for eternity,
And the spark ours, and the warmth ours,
And the knowledge ours partially,
And the wisdom what we make of it.
The spark is mine for the moment -
I bear the light, feel the warmth, mine
For a time only then passed on
To another, one of us, another perception,
Perceiving the same with different senses,
Framing it with a different mind, but the spark
Always a constant flame, always, mine, yours, ours.
Poet can you see me?
Find my reflection in a pool of clear water -
I am in you. I possess you.
But no more is my control or less your domination over me.
Poet, we sing as one. We sing together, a song like none.
Eloquent elocutions offered for show are set aside;
Exhibitionism, vain repetition for vanity’s sake.
Our tongues cannot bear manipulation.
Purity we speak, pure even in our vulgarity,
Lifting the lowly to greatness, reining in greatness to a sentence.
We view all things objectively and subjectively -
Our creed detests limitation, demands impunity.
We cannot bear regulation.
Diverse is our singularity, irregular, and diverging,
But always mutual our cause.
Mutually we lift, we seek, we sing.
Search for a rift in our solidarity and there is none.
Our unity is solid.
We can share a salad, and remark simultaneously,
Good gray poet, you are a man of fine taste,
Or make no remark, and know without saying,
Speaking nothing of the significance,
Being one in the same we,
Knowing who we are, but wondering what we mean,
Ever searching for, but ever missing,
The song beneath our boot soles,
Our evocations, souls, and syllables rising superbly
To occasion a moment of our burning, to frame a mind,
Or a fraction anyway.
This we need for survival,
As our blood feeds our limbs and brains.
The price of omission is our very souls.
We are poets,
Sharing verse with a drawer, or an hour, or a universe,
And gaining only our sanity for the effort.
We are poets, living, and dying, and dead.
We are poets – reading or writing.
(I praise all who read or write with us)
What we appreciate, what we esteem above all else,
Of this we sing. Of this we are, this element, this radiation.
Poets living, let me adore you.
Let me love you as I breathe.
Let me see through your eyes if I have become blind.
Lend me your thoughts if mine have gone dry.
Share your life with me if mine is concluded.
Living, I shall not wait for you to meet me,
I will, but shall not.
If we meet, we meet. It is irrelevant.
Maybe I am gone already as you hear my entreaty.
Yet it is done, this gospel I speak.
It will live on through my living colleagues, my brothers in arms,
My saviors and redeemers.
But as I write, I live. As I speak, I breathe. For now, I have life.
There is marrow yet to suck.
Now is my breath, and I will breathe a little
For the living and for the dead.
Pioneers who put flint to steel,
I am here, abiding my time.
While I may, I will bear the spark.
I will rekindle the flame of your yearning,
Until it eclipses the sun with its radiance.
Oh, dead poets, I sense you within me,
Feel the chilling frost in my bones, yet warmth, nay, heat.
I need a word for it. I cannot find it. My idiom is irate,
Like profound exclamations of a crane too meticulous,
Dickering with my tongue for a remark,
Walking a silver path, witless man I am to say how so,
Hand shaking on a pencil shaft to spear a name for the feeling,
A raven gloomy for a right turn of phrase,
By a run of poor craft, oft stinking foully of mediocrity,
More rank than a kippered herring drawn dank from a barrel,
Brought low as ash for my ineptitude.
But, Oh, how the spark burns within, scorching me, scorching me,
Consuming and clarifying, so much more than my sum.
If I were to bend a knee, bow low to another human being,
Living or passed to history, years gone or centuries,
It would not be as a disciple to a god,
To pray for favor, or revere with a blessing in design.
(Not that reverence is beneath me, or humility)
But to bend a knee or two, put stature away for a time,
Set ego aside, ego away, and share the same mind,
As an equal or unequal, inferior or superior,
In comparison and contrast with a shared perception,
One in our purpose,
One body this continuity of spirit, past, and present, and future,
A single vehicle,
This is equal to any prayer or bearer of gifts, surpassing any.
But I need not say what I feel. I have no words for this.
What I feel you feel, my dead and living connections.
You know as well as I, as well as any.
Your soul wears my emotion. We are one.
We need not meet to enjoy intercourse -
We are interconnected, compagnon de voyage.
Inseparable are we, our creed.
Poets living, should you see me in the street, embrace me.
If we pass too late, if fate rules my death before your birth,
Then I am a dead poet and still one of you, immortal through you.
Poets living, when I am dead, I will sing high praise of you.
I will sing always in your song.
Know my ghost will overtake you.
I will stand at your shoulder as you create,
Whisper a word in your ear, if you cannot find a word.
If I have no word for you, I will find it.
Others will answer if it is above me.
The word will be ours, no shame in it.
We all see spirit to spirit.
Ours is yours, and yours ours.
All I have I bequeath to you – all do.
Both a borrower and lender be.
Keep the edge of our husbandry keen.
Husband our possession, our progressing purpose.
To be is the answer.
Not to be is out of the question!
No greater profit to be found!
This table is spread liberally before us.
Will you not feast? Let me feed you just one morsel,
Or more if there is appetite enough.
Poet are you hungry? You must be hungry.
Poet you are angry, enraged, passionate, raving mad,
Or maybe only craving something.
But you are not lonely, not unknown or forgotten.
I am with you. We are with you.
I write your song now and your praise.
My brother, let me succor the pith of your weary heart!
Oh, my sister, my sibling, bear not this burden alone!
I am acquainted with your affliction.
If I could impart a single thought to your inspiration,
My soul would rest untroubled, least for a while.
The lines in your spare notes are more precious to me than fine gold.
I read them with a relish of ambrosia,
From my kingdom above, my cloud, or tomb.
You are not unknown to me, to my reckoning -
I expect you feel the same as we all did in our time.
Cast the lead weight of your doubt aside -
Your words are not lost to posterity.
Trust your instincts. Follow your inclinations.
I appreciate them now as they spring from your hand,
Flowing pure from your soul, undiluted.
I read them from your shoulder.
Can you feel me at your ear,
Feel my lustful breath on your dear neck?
I am near to you my companion.
I will linger here while you hesitate,
Until the word finds you, while you fumble,
While you hold a match to the lamp.
I will abide in darkness with you,
Raise your gaze from mud to stars,
Never forsake you,
Witness the awakening awareness of what burns in you.
Poet, how will you sculpture your words,
and temper them in the heat?
Poet, what body will you give the spark,
A bird, or a planet, or a nova, or a song?
Simply a phrase is fine, or a thought without words -
A perception of a sunrise or sunset.
Even a spark alone is something of divinity.
All are the same in a way.
Singer
Praise him who bides the day
With song on his deeds,
Not sure what to say,
But knowing his tone exceeds
All measure of mortal boundaries -
That his notes shall linger on the morrow,
When forever takes time’s foundries,
And dust has done away with sorrow.
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