Day Treatment

A Cat Tale

Cats and kittens like to sit in boxes

Peeking over flaps around the edge.

There they sit like little furry Sphinxes

In very small and even giant boxes

Watching everything that's going on.

But if the box is small and barely fits them,

They're even more content to sit and stare.

2-24-14

 

Day Treatment

What's a symbiosis?

I don't know what it means.

She believed I did.

John stole all the scenes.

Begin was a hunk,

Strutted like a king,

Doing therapy,

Didn't know a thing.

Ann was very witty,

Skinny as a bean,

Shooed away the underdog,

Laughing like a queen.

Transactional Analysis,

Always worth a laugh.

The patients sat and stared

In horror at the staff.

4-10-14

 

La guerre

Gays are in a battle

Against blue nosed prigs and bigots

In Congress and the churches and at home.

Who will win the battle?

Homosexuals and people.

But god! How much unhappiness before!

4-10-14

 

A Brief Didactic

When morals supersede intelligence,

You have a bigot. When they supersede

Survival (as it very seldom happens),

You have a martyr, duty-bound to death.

In an age that hasn't any values

But louder music, like the death of god,

Who did no favors for the human race,

Morals are anathema to life.

4-11-14

A Comparison

When I reach down to pet a cat

And come back with a fist of teeth -

So it is to read my poems -

Softness filled with stones,

Which inhibit keeping them

To read again, like Keats.

Except a few, so very few,

To live on shelves forever,

Kept to read again because

They're gentle to the touch -

Soft mental touch.

4-11-14

Lines

I am just a poet, but not

Everybody's music,

And my generation

Murdered music bloodily.

Poetry was ripped to pieces.

Now it mocks itself.

To live alone in caves and shadows

Listening to music,

All of it created long

Before Rachmaninov -

All of it imagined long

Before Millay was born.

4-10-14

 

Ron

Your feelings were a flattery.

Your icy disposition

And permanent regard of sex

The reasons I moved out.

When a soul's in swaddling

And he will not wriggle free,

And tells you to be quiet

Every time you mention love -

I left in seven days and felt

The daggers of your truths,

Which could not be construed as flattery.

I cannot say you kept confined

To your sarcophagus.

You found a better lover when I left,

And so did I.

4-10-14

 

Jill

Perhaps she's an example

Of a mind destroyed by drugs.

Whitman, Dylan Thomas,

Ginsberg, Dylan are the poets

She prefers, and Shakespeare -

Is she kidding?

Also me.

Hard and cold – a clam shell

In the sea – at times protruding

Between the halves

A vulnerable tongue.

Don't touch the tongue.

It goes back very quickly.

Your finger will be pinched between the shells.

The tongue came out less often,

And the halves clamped shut more fiercely,

Ready to devour anything that can't escape.

She almost caught my fingers,

But I tossed her to the sea.

The poets she prefers will make

An imbecile of me.

Hardly Shakespeare. But if I'm

No better than the rest,

That's little promise.

Dragged into the gutter.

4-11-14