WCW

WCW

When you're crazy your poetry

Is either brilliant or mad.

Providence looks after drunks

And madmen like a dad.

Drunks will sober up.

Madmen don't get glad.

William Carlos Williams.
I read some.  That completes
My tour of modern poetry.

Like a child who eats

Reluctantly his eggplant.

It wasn't reading Keats.

Rhymes

Fancies dominate my brain,

But I am not like Keats,

Neither images of flowers,

Nor music with its sweets,

Endearing constellations,

Stars where Jesus meets

Saints and fools together

Arriving at the door

Of heaven. Dead so recently

They still can hear the roar

Of the sea below them,

Exploding on the shore.

 

Writing

Put a candle in the coffin

And a pen and paper.

Only writing poesy

Gave me any pleasure.

An idea breaks the surface

Of the gloomy sea

And suddenly I'm writing and

I'm happy once again.

Let the angers dissipate.

They're in my stomach now.

Let a happiness inform

The poems I am writing

5-12-13

 

A Book

I like the book I'm finishing -

At least I do a little.

The thing's been beaten, proofed and purged -

If it's no good, I'm lousy.

Several poems, different kinds -

A true kaleidoscope.

Begun in peace

(The poems I like)

And finished on a binge.

And when it's done and put away,

I guess I'll just forget it.

No one wants to read it and

I'm weary of the words.

If I think it's good (I don't),
I'll leave it in the tomb.

Bad News

I will give up poems.

I have been an ass,

Writing in the hallway,

Skipping every class.

Passing out my books

Around the neighborhood,

And getting no reactions.

Was I ever good?

I would be embarrassed

If I had a brain.

She said I wrote like Shakespeare,

And that I was mundane.

He said there was an error

In the punctuation.

And that is all he said.

Hardly an ovation.

Music

Beautiful music makes me cry.

A treasure I can keep.

Beautiful music had to die,

Murdered in its sleep.

I don't weep for the soul of me

Reflected in its strains,

But as stars were to Ptolemy,

And the ocean when it rains.

Though waiting to be crucified,

There was music when

I was born. The blood has dried.

No songs that might have been.

 

A Song

Shakespeare wasn't subtle. Little feelings

Weren't made for an Elizabethan song.

But rich with an emotion in the words,

There's magic in the meaning and the sound.

Now our cat is dying. Does he know it?
Do animals feel dark about such things?
People have a god to end their journeys,

A barker in the carney in the sky.

Like they tell you in the doctor's office

About your feelings, let the phrases come.

That's the only way to write a poem.

Something knows, not crabbed into shape.

Thought

In my head there is a stigma on

The intellect and thinking.

I want my poems beautiful.

Can thought accomplish this?

Keats negated thought,

And made philosophy verboten.

Shelley can be beautiful.

Since Keats until The Oscar

There was nothing beautiful,

Then Brooke, and then Millay,

And after that just gibberish

From people who are wise.

Wisdom doesn't want to write a poem.

 

Debate

Morals or survival? Socrates

Wouldn't sacrifice the truth.

I doubt that he would lie.

And surely wouldn't take the cash

From somebody who loved him,

And therefore let him do it.

But survival is the truth.

Yet morals are eternal,

All living creatures die,

And cloud formations,

Flowers. Trees. The sea.

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