Poems

The Triumph Of Virtue

Disregard and calumny -

His gold was in his heart -

Outcast from his family

Whose gold was in a cart -

No not in one, but many -

And they as by a curse

Governed an uncanny

Heartless universe.

He was altruistic,

And as things seemed to be

His kin ruled from a mystic

Meritocracy.

Then gathering his minions,

Virtuous as he,

The Phoenix spread his pinions

And rose above the sea.

Rapt in awe and wonder

His family bemoaned,

Staring, standing under

The son they had disowned.

And he usurped their earth.

The treasure in their carts

Took it's proper worth -

The dross inside their hearts.

They knelt and kept their eyes on,

Defeated as they lay,

Their son in the horizon

As he flew away.

A single stanza makes

This narrative complete.

His family discovered

That virtue can defeat.

8-23-13

 

Everybody

Everybody takes a shower

Probably at 8.

Everybody falls asleep

By the television.

Does someone really like to hear

The music that is playing?
Or hang Kandinsky the wall

Pretending it's a picture?

Does everybody have tattoos

And warmly think of Reagan?

Syria and Egypt are

Destroying half the world.

Does everybody hate the black

And homosexual?

People they have never met

And doubtless never will.

Does everyone like violence

In books and television?

My mother and my father did.

And they are everybody.

8-22-13

Echos

An echo of the verse I read

Continues in my brain.

Remembered in tranquility,

I needn't read the verse again.

Phrases, stanzas, memory

Of the sense I read

Linger but just out of reach -

What the poet said.

8-22-13

 

Upbringing

Teaching the kids to be thieves

So when they're grown they'll be

Wonderful fellows

And ladies and live on the

North side and die

Like the roaches that caper and

Play in their houses.

Nobody cares, not the

Cops who arrest them,

The priests who forgive them,

The parents who screwed.

8-22-13

God made love

God made love

And love made Nermal.

Nermal is a cat.

Big and sleepy.

Sleeps upon you.

Climbs to get there,

Doesn't jump.

I love that big and loving cat.

8-22-13

Rules

Marcel Proust, the greatest writer

The former century produced

Wrote a seven volume novel

Of a solitary sentence,

Lots of commas, semi-colons,

And a single period

At the end – the very end -

Of the seventh book.

I defy an English teacher -

American, degreed, credentialed -

To give Proust a failing grade.

Take heart, ye students of that teacher,

When he throws you out of class

For your run-on sentences,

You're in the best of company.

And Einstein flunked physics,

Though his pedagogue got As.

8-22-13

 

Syria & Egypt & The NRA

It hurt her to be cruel.

She would sit and cry.

It also made her happy.

Does Jesus Christ know why?

Have psychiatrists a notion

Why the chosen few

Wreak such bloody havoc?

Yes. Of course they do.

8-22-13