The Sphinx

Triumvirate

Some of the short poems,

None of the long -

That's what I like in Keats.

Ah, but they're beautiful,

Rich with song.

That earth did such magical feats!

How can I separate

Keats from the earth?

Keats is his verse is the dawn.

Burgeoning all,

To each other gave birth.

At his death only Junkets was gone.

5-7-14

Honesty

He gave me permission -

I needed permission -

To say, “I don't like you.

Don't call here again.”

A person I know

Better far than the people

I knew in my youth.

Did they go somewhere else?

We're told to be honest. But

What good is honesty?

Everyone knows what
Is true, so why bother?

Unless he's a person

You're longing to love.

5-7-14

Old

Arthritis, pills and therapy -

I am getting old.

Yankees do not age,

They only die.

A hundred books of poesy -

A couple people liked -

The old, the recent

And the yet to come.

Reading in a book of mine

In Denny's earlier,

I found the poems

Don't make any sense.

Larkin was an Englishman

Who seldom makes much sense.

Which of us is better -

Him or me?

Constantly comparing

Characteristics - good or bad -

Measuring my verse to

International renown.

5-7-14

Names

Everything I hate, my father hated.

Everything I love, I love alone.

I changed my name to rid the loathsome past,

And passed into an anonymity.

I don't know who I'm. This is not rooted,

Only different from all before.

Nothing's sacred to the artisan.

All is raw material.

And just the art is good.

5-6-14

 

Not John

Twenty personalities are burgeoning in me

Like channels on a television set.

I recall the past – some 30 years -

And in it John – rejected and forgotten.

I'd hated him forever since we met.

I lived alone. And then I met a man

Who had an odd peculiarity,

A habit that reminded me of John.

On top of that I fell in love with him.

The power of a similarity.

4-6-14

 

The Sphinx

Life without music

Is death, and the Sphinx

Never tells anyone

What it thinks.

Those with a purpose

They want to conceal

See in the Sphinx

What they don't reveal.

There's nothing to see in the Sphinx

But a face of stone and sand.

4-6-14

The Street Person

Shopping carts, blankets and sacks and cans.

On top of them sits a dog.

Where do they go?
Have they checks to god,

Destiny, death?

Anyone who

Can't alter his destiny lost it.

He gets along without feelings

To enable himself to endure.

4-6-14

Conformity

The world may disagree with you.

That doesn't mean you're wrong.

Look how many thought the world was flat.

Or hang you from an olive tree

Because they disagree.

Galileo nearly lost his head.

5-6-14