"Suddenly Last Summer"

Keats

What people really feel

And people really see -

His poetry is real -

And yet it's poetry.

No surrealistic herds

Trample through his words.

His rhythms are arrayed

Like flowers in a shade.

Kandinsky, Klee and Dali

Are victims of the folly

Of loving things insane,

Which flowers can't explain.

4-16-14

A Tidbit Of Denny's

A crazy little psycho

With tattoos across his face

Haunts the aisles of Denny's

Like he owned the lousy place.

It's early in the evening.

I came just after 9.

Why must they seat the lesbians

In booths adjoining mine?

There goes psycho number 1,

Making his egress,

The first of many. We are pawns

In nature's game of chess.

And I'll make mine.

It's nearly 10.

The place is getting loud.

People who have nothing are

Inestimably proud.

4-16-14

 

Free

When I see the trash that comes to

Denny's dishabille,

Up and down the aisles and in

And out from 4 to 3,

I think about the African

And aborigine

In the doctor's waiting room

In magazines I see,

And wonder where the values lie -

With her – with her – with me.

4-16-14

Armageddon

You loved me once. Perhaps again?

Wake up, my love. Be happy.

When the world is worse than this,

And poetry's extinct,

And music is another weapon

In their armory -

Then I don't know what, my love.

I think that time is here.

4-16-14

The Bay

When I essay a poem I'm

A frigate back in dock,

And the sandy shore becomes

A gate I can unlock.

I exhaust my shallow heart

And try to do my best,

Then sink into my soul and let

The Muses do the rest.

4-16-13

Why do I keep writing?

Why do I keep writing?
I can see my talent's gone.

Why should I be greedy?
I was born to 50 years.

Oftentimes I wrestled with

The editors and love.

The editors took every trick,

Except the poems were mine.

I could write another,

They could not.

There is no fun in writing now.

It occupies the time.

The Muses have abandoned me.

I am a little boy

Standing in the Coliseum

In his uncle's clothes.

4-16-14

“Suddenly Last Summer”

“Suddenly Last Summer” -

The plot was just a frame,

The incident the painting

Drawing all eyes to the man

Being chased by children,

Like a passage out of Keats,

But only just a fantasy,

Reality at bay.

As the love of Sartre said,

We do in fantasy

What would be absurd or painful

In reality.

Safe death, false pain,

An image of

The sea Millay desired.

4-16-14