Lines (Just the mad think war's a lovely thing.)

Old Books

I found my books again. And like old friends

After years – and no one's any older -

In a sweet reunion – it was grand.

In the dust – like blue and speckled eggs

In a nest – I picked them up and looked

At the covers – too familiar,

And felt a joy akin to nothing else

Than first love unaged – forgotten years.

Can I go back and bring them out again?

Put them on the shelves and in plain view

Live again, on the verge of death,

Conscious of them both, though music plays?

2-27-14

Lines

Just the mad think war's a lovely thing.

Be wary. They are walking in the streets.

Prepossessing. See how faces change.

I won't go insane and think I'm Keats,

Though now I'm smelling odors long forgotten

On a ward in 1967.

Unable both to live or talk to people,

Deluded that instead I write good verse,

I'm amassing books of poesy.

So much trash when I am in a grave!

I am not Keats. Or Proust. Or Isherwood.

I am Hart. Joseph. Not Lorenz.

Nor did I begin as even that.

The modern world is sterile, chrome and plastic.

You don't say grave or mad or inspiration.

And Muse is in a book about the Greeks,

Read in college, tested and forgotten.

Jesus Christ, a myth that's dead and rotted

And stinks, and causes nothing but destruction,

Bigotry and death, but never beauty,

Has bested all the other deities

In a war, as god declared he would

On the eve when he was fabricated.

Hate restores my mind and sanity,

As gentle, harmless poesy does not.

No. I won't go mad and think I'm Keats,

But live and die as nobody at all.

Little Keats won't fill the vacancy.

2-27-14

 

Reading Keats

Real as rock and beautiful as heaven,

Hyperion is made of spit and paper.

I didn't read it all. I got too bored.

But La Belle Dame like water through my fingers

Was easy reading and a depth of pleasure.

2-27-14