A Feeling Of The Past

What's Poetry?

But not to write about caverns,

Oceans, ghosts and sleep -

Or focus on the phantoms

That through the midnight creep -

Instead describing matters

More adequately whole -

Encompassing the body,

Intelligence and soul.

To summarize a matter

There could but isn't me -

Does Millay want drowning

In a vicious sea?

I think I know a little.

I know I don't know much.

What's in imagination

That out of it I touch.

Is there any beauty

Beyond a furtive glimpse

At angels, gods and fairies,

The forest's rustic nymphs?

A Feeling Of The Past

My world must shrink. My world must shrink.

Outside and in my head.

Not let my sister's reminiscence

Lead me to the past.

Memories and purple feelings

Swim into my mind.

“Oh god!” I shriek inside.

“I must get out!” But I don't leave.

I wait until the party's done,

Then decorously go.

Had I gone at once, the gig

Would have blown completely.

 

An Image

A marble statue with a fissure cracked -

My mother gave me everything I lacked.

It will stand until the horseman falls,

And makes an echo down the hospice halls.

Closer, ever closer to the edge,

Above the sea, a precipice, a ledge,

And water splashes, melts the ancient fane,

And wets the tassels on the stony mane.

It wasn't what she did, though very grim.

Rather it was what I did to him.

Like an ocean or the coming dawn,

Someone, someone to depend upon.

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The Poesy

Am I gradually changing?

Did my poesy get good

For a spell, then wither?

God loves a winter rain.

Fifty years of heresy,

Humility and hurt,

The man who would be Shakespeare

Begins to love his verse.

No controversy, diatribe

Or hatred of the earth,

But just a slew of syllables

Together in a phrase.

I'm the captain of my soul.

The man who said that first

Died in an asylum.

And he was a poet too.

 

A Double Bind

Give a villain what he wants

And he'll come back for more.

Decline to give him what he wants,

He'll knock you to the floor.

This situation you would think

Is just what cops are for.

If you like my poems, I have some collections on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle.  In the search bar at Amazon, type Joseph Hart Poetry.