Denny's At Midnight

Metaphor

A house where everybody stores his stuff.

Stuff is there from many years ago.

No one has so far come back to claim it,

Or simply take it. I am always here.

A poem with a conscious metaphor,

Instead of with a conscious inspiration,

Is no more intelligent than I.

I have no personality but love.

The worst of parents can't take that away.

Upon a horse I'll sit and ride to Yonkers.

That's New York. I won't go there again.

Another window closed. The room is smaller.

Music comes from my unconscious soul.

5-4-14

Denny's At Midnight

Puberty is sweeping into Denny's.

What occasion keeps it out so late?
Daddy spent a fortune for those dresses.

Hairless boys in cummerbunds and ties.

A psycho drinking soda from the table

Next to him whose customers have gone

Fell asleep. And people passing glance

But no one speaks. They don't disturb his slumber.

In a fastened cage a dead canary

Sits upon his perch and doesn't sing.

Lo! There was a chirp. The room is moving.

A falling drunk just bumped against the cage.

A waiter just woke up the sleeping psycho,

Drinking now from someone else's glass.

A girl in scarlet hoisted up her bodice,

Dropped her jaw and laughed. The peacock sings.

The homeless mix with sequins and chiffon.

The psycho nodded off to sleep again.

Ragged cuffs and backpacks after midnight.

Denny's reeks of affluence and dirt.

5-4-14

Elephants

When people won't cooperate,

What am I to do?

When they castigate me

Every time I talk,

How can I say anything?

Find a place to die.

Elephants have areas to die in.

5-3-15

Cats & People

George's cat but my cat too,

And his one time a cat in lieu

Of people. I had run away,

Down the walk, I'd didn't stay.

Gentle, slow, sedate and old,

A loving tabby George can hold.

The cat detected he was sad,

With love the lonesome wish they had.

And Kitty (our first cat) is just like me

And garners the same anger and contempt.

The only animal I ever hated,

I'm the only person he has loved.

5-3-14

Past Poems

Reading through the chaps that I have written -

The poems are ridiculous and wrong -

And crazy looking through a prismed glass.

Maybe someone finds them interesting.

Intimacy – maybe once I had it -

Making quilts from bits of colored cloth -

My poesy expands in all direction -

Who cares if we were intimate, it's over.

A little less didactic would be nice,

Or knowledge such as doctors think they have.

40 years post-doctoral regime

In a sterile office weighing money.

This is not a poem. It's an attempt.

Like my effort to be friends with him.

I thought I was unable. Now I think

He won't.

5-3-14

 

A Scene

Autonomous fantasies

Flick through my brain

Whenever I shut my eyes.

Colorful butterflies

Slip through the rain

That fills the autumn skies.

Birds in trees beneath the drops

Spread their wings and shake the dew.

When precipitation stops,

And half an oval sun comes through

The shadowy leafless branches and a cloud,

A place on earth with fragrance is endowed.

12-7-13

If you like my poems, I have several collections on Amazon.  Both paperbacks and Kindle.  The paperbacks are mostly $10 and the Kindles mostly $1.  To see them, go to Amazon, click Books on the drop down, then type Joseph Hart Poetry on the search bar.