Afghanistan & America

Afghanistan & America

How many million victims bled?

Social customs should be dead.

Not the people who instead

Live as they prefer to.

Dead archaic gods still haunt

Those who marry whom they want.

Patriarchs and bigots vaunt

Myths at those who were to.

Yankees and the Afghans bray

Their prejudice, and preachers pray

That god himself will join the fray.

Love they don't refer to.

3-10-14

What To Remember

Therapists and doctors

Mocked me with contempt.

With people like myself

My feelings were exempt.

Love and sex commingled.

Books and music met

Gently in she darkness

Underneath the net.

Put aside the pain

It seems that I forget.

Unearth the happiness

I've not forgotten yet.

3-9-14

 

Break

I can write confessionals.

I can make them art.

Though they lack the euphony

Of Shakespeare, Keats or Hart.

Lovely! With the metaphors

Of pictures in a glass,

Contented with the summer green

Of lying on the grass.

Anything could happen now.

Nature is a curse!

I could meet a bloody end

While writing happy verse.

Does it make me paranoid

Thinking thoughts like those?

Was I born alone to see

The aphid in the rose?

Damn that hateful epithet!

I hope the shrinks are wrong.

That paranoids will only write

A mediocre song.

3-9-14

 

Patchwork

Shakespeare wasn't simple

Nor were his ideas.

Everything approaching life

Reminds me that I'll die.

If there is no humor,

What is there to feel?

Death is just a rumor.

Life is what is real.

Beggars on the corner,

Workers in a field,

Congressmen and grocers

Do it for the money.

I wrote myself a letter

Remembering the past.

My mind is working better.

Maybe it will last.

Junkets would have been

Shakespeare for a dime.

When Shakespeare's good, none's better.

Bad he's just confusing.

Though callous moneylenders

Readily rebuff,

I think we'll reach tomorrow

With only just enough.

One concatenation

Of catastrophes -

This has been my life.

Let it continue please.

3-9-14

 

Not Conceit

I was born a fool,

A puerile simple ass,

Without any heart,

Without any class.

A verdict shrilly told

By swans with ugly voices,

I'm loved by other ducklings.
This is what my choice is.

My poems when they're good -

The ones I don't destroy -

Are perfect. And to read them,

A consummate joy.

Mommie's little girl

Grew up to be a boy.

That's the way I see

The only seeds I've sown.

It seems that way in Denny's,

Or when I'm alone.

3-9-14

To George & Jill

Now I think I write good verse.

Will this make it go away?

Will my tutelage, a Muse,

Consent to stay?

I wrestled with the god of hell

Debating whether I was bad

Or good. Tonight I read two books,

And I was glad.

I never scored the passages

(Like Keats) in poems I preferred.

I merely took a pen and wrote.

It was absurd.

On the eve of my descent

Back into insanity,

I flunk the acid litmus test

Of vanity.

Poetasters who believe

Their poetry exceeds the great,

And tell the world to look at it

Succumb to fate.

3-10-14

Fate

I used to feel unread

My poesy was bad,

Considered several books

The only good I had.

I felt an awful dread

To have my poems read.

Sequestered in a hole

With rat dung and despair,

No one except me

Ever really there,

Constantly I wrote,

Hopeless like a goat.

Too frightened to believe

That anything was good,

Superstitiously

Thinking that it would

Mean the verse was trash

To think a thought so rash.

Have I overcome

But never understood

This fantasy of fate?

And are the poems good?
Tonight I feel a change,

Familiar but strange.

Or am I deeper in

The crucible of hate,

Drowning like a rock,

Oblivious to fate?
It's all a crazy game.

The poems are the same.

3-10-14