Consequences

Pride

Don't look at the ragged man

Sitting in Denny's.

Look at the government

Giving him pennies,

If that, and I doubt it.

He's dirty and strange,

Buying some coffee,

He only has change.

Where does he live?

Is the pavement his bed?

Will somebody – anyone -

Care when he's dead?
I thought him repulsive.

I saw him skulk in.

Who are his relatives?

Where has he been?

I'll never touch

The son of a bitch,

And I wouldn't talk to him

If he were rich.

I live off the Veterans

So I'm alive,

Crazy and jobless since

75.

They brought him some food

And he danced like a loon.

Alone and impoverished

In my cocoon,

One booth behind him -

Madness is grim -

I'm poor and I'm crazy,

But I'm not like him.

2-9-13

 

The Poet

When the brain that manufactured poems

Is in the tomb and verses cease to be,

The style, the phrasing, as it always was

And would except for death continue doing,

Starting after birth, and stopping there,

In a year, another entity

With another way and attitude,

Will commence, but none of it the same

However much it loves its predecessors,

And continue til it too is gone.

2-9-14

 

Isolation

I walked into a prison, and the latch fell.

I'm locked in isolation and I don't

Have a clue what's going on around.

I neither see nor hear, but touch the walls

And feel the concrete, grey that is my home.

I don' know where you are or what you're doing.

That's none of my concern. And time is endless.

You think quickly. And you smell the fear.

Read a book or listen to some music.

Write a poem without inspiration.

5 hours. 6. Then you'll come home again

Tired, and prefer your lesbian.

Intimacy and prevarication.

You will crash. You're doing it yourself.

I cannot pick you up. My money's gone.

And her? She has no home. She has no job.

But many friends. To all of them in debt.

For a week you're sailing on the wind

Together. I hear laughter in the wind.

2-8-14

Isolation's not the most

Isolation's not the most

Intolerable pain

With those who have the greatest

Inclination to complain.

However it exacerbates

The feeling of the rest,

And puts you in a misery

That fails the final test.

Sitting in the loneliness

Of an empty room,

The cats no longer comfort,

Inexorable the doom

You feel is ineluctable.

You try another chair

And feel no one is thinking of you,

Nobody is there.

67 years alone,

Beneath a rock, a pall,

But this is worse, though never

Was there anyone at all.

Sit and suffer with the old,

Alien to youth,

That can't imagine, feel or care,

In its pursuit of truth.

2-9-14

 

Consequences

Oh, the things I'd like to say,

And say when I'm alone.

Others say them anyway,

Even when they're grown.

Consequences! Consequences!

When you're weak and small.

Throwing stones. Wrecking fences.

Some folks do it all.

When they're down, on the crest,

Or lurking in the night,

They triumph over all the rest,

Like god, completely right.

2-9-14

If you like my poems, I have books on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle.  The paperbacks are usually $10 each, and the Kindles are usually $1.  You can see them on Amazon by clicking Books on the drop down, then typing Joseph Hart Poetry in the search bar.