Wooden Hearts

Wooden Hearts

The sacrosanctity of friendship,

Difficult to come by,

Gives the unabused another

Chance to be in love.

But those who don't believe there's more to

Love than fallen leaves

Stirred by random passing breezes,

Never fall in love.

Whether they feel love or only

Think it's what they see,

Love's an animated dummy

Back of Macy's window.

5-11-14

 

Fragment

If I were Keats, I'd feel embarrassment -

A little man to take on giant themes,

Awash asleep in many images.

Heir Presumptive! Used to fisticuffs.

And to begin with beauty as a goal.

Take the artist's self-evaluation

And believe it – he himself has said it.

4-24-14

Identicals

The loneliest man in the universe

Stands on Olympus and wishes them well,

Sees that the earth is a tenant of hell,

Chipping its rent from the shards of a shell,

Found on the beach in the wake of a swell.

The loneliest man in the universe

Bathes in the water splashed up from a well,

Drawn from the bottommost oceans of hell.

Life is a carney, a pea and a shell.

Bodies that perish where rivers swell.

10-1-13

Idioms

A poet doesn't use the idioms,

He makes the idioms that people use.

Clever phrases like a child's delight

Pass a generation. Some remain

For another century or two.

Shakespeare made cliches that stitched themselves

So thoroughly into the English cloth

They warm the baby sleeping in his crib,

And thereby fill a mind without a Shakespeare.

4-24-14