Sad

Favorites

Your favorites in poetry

Are Ginsberg (ALLEN Ginsberg?)

And Dylan – Dylan's cute,

A couple melodies are catchy,

And Thomas who in praise of god

(As all good poets should)

Wrote a stanza with a single line,

Whitman after grocery clerks,

And Shakespeare (what went wrong?
Shakespeare is an incongruity).

And to save the best til last,

A patriotic friend,

A pompous little phony

Who attempts to teach in school

What he cannot write,

And writes his name like e.e. cummings.

And then of course

You like my poems too.

1-20-13

Geeks

Never read a poet

After 1983.

Ignore the aging geek who goes for

Shakespeare, Keats, Millay.

Or leaks that he likes Bach instead of rap.

Vilify the phony with his

Seven dollar words,

Pompous authors, rhythm, meter, rhyme.

He's forgotten.

We will last forever.

Inspiration, beauty and a Muse

Are artsy words that winners never use.

1-20-14

 

Magic

Drop a wad of paper in a bowl,

Pastel tissue paper. Fill the bowl

With water. Watch the paper open up

Into a fish, a clam, a rock, a shell,

Very brightly colored,

And they float around the water.

1-20-14

 

Sad

Platinum and diamonds and gold

Just beneath the surface of the past,

Don't change, although a patina of age

Obscures them from a world that doesn't care.

Back when happiness made people happy,

And wit was joy, and humor was a song,

And sentiment was human, not obscene,

Berlin, Porter, Rodgers, Styne and Kahn,

Loesser, Lerner, Lowe and Hart were charming.

There is nothing charming anymore.

1-19-14

The Child

Let the child continue.

Permit him if you please

His idiosyncratic

Peculiarities.

The bowl with the green rim

And Victorian design

He favors for his cereal,

And totally benign.

When he goes to bed
In infinite release,

Allow him freshly washed

His blanket, yellow fleece.

1-19-14

 

Bennett Cerf

Bennett Cerf. When I was growing up,

I thought he was a very pleasant man,

Equitable, fair. I had a hope

For Random House to publish all my poems.

I read its books, collected them. It was

Olympus in the literary world,

The only world I meant to occupy.

I'm 67. Bennett Cerf is gone.

Random House and everything it meant

Is an echo of the way it was.

1-18-13