Gobbledygook

Volume

Aiken, the laurel is taken.

Regardless how thick your book,

Countless sentences don't add up

To genius. You get the hook.

If I have written as many

Spawned by a sexless Keats,

It doesn't make me a genius.

Beneath a sun that heats

The shore beside the ocean

That buries shells in sand,

I lie and hear the water.

And Keats was very grand.

12-4-13

Vocabulary

The river's dry. The well is deep.

There's naught to write about but sleep.

The sea is there. The stars are quick.

The moon is like a candlestick.

If I were English, I would know

Words to make the river flow

Again along its mossy banks.

On a shelf among the cranks

I'll carp about the world I knew

With no idea what to do.

What lexicons the Brits possessed!

Flowers twixt my leaves are pressed.

No poetry upon those leaves.

The ocean on the boulders grieves.

A word of truth I will indite.

Though you sit up all the night,

Be inspired or do not write.

This is what the gifted say.

Me, I scribble anyway.

12-5-13

Gobbledygook

Did it start with Joyce

Or Tristram Shandy?

With Joyce you really need

A glass of brandy.

And Gertrude Stein

Who very frequently

Somehow makes

A little sense to me.

But Merwin following

A brilliant inner call

Really doesn't mean

Anything at all.

12-5-13

Idle

When I don't know the causes of my feelings,

What can I but wonder what I am?

I walk about and wait for inspiration

In my house. Without poetic diction

What is poetry but conversation?

When a verse is finished, cease to write it.

Little thoughts like roaches in my brain

Helter-skelter hurry hither thither

Running out my nose onto the page.

Am I insane? I don't think it matters.

The sort of poesy I want to write

Is lying on this page, and I can see it.

12-5-13