Donizetti

Cool Americans

A heavy beat and loud

With bass show him endowed

With b-lls that make him proud

To be a man.

My freedom and my gun.

I can blast a class and run.

Gun control is un-

American.

 

Donizetti

The funniest comedies -

Really, you laugh -

And tragedies sad as an epitaph -

Genuine voices will

Come and go -

With melodies beautiful -

Richly they flow -

From deep in the past

To eternity's end -

Every millennium

Nature may send

A genius like this

To give mankind a friend -

 

Not Keats

Keats could write of nothing.

I cannot.

I must have a feeling

Or a thought,

Or something I can make into

A plot.

Perhaps one time in centuries

Gone black,

I made sensations. I cannot

Go back.

I do what I can

With what I lack.

Autonomy

Alas I can't control my fellow man,

But only make the best of what he does.

Little children born in Africa

Are swept into god's latest incarnation,

Impressed or killed, they don't go home again.

Selfish people with a dominating

Will, abuse and use and fly, and leave

Anyone who loved them in the dirt,

Stupidly prepared to love again,

Sweetly thinking back to what love was.

Or disgusted with the whole affair.

JH

You're old. And you will always be

Alive in David's mind,

And young as he remembers you.

Even when you're dead.

Someone who controls his feelings,

Rather like a fish,

Air for water, San Francisco,

Rich, refined and read.

On a hill of course,

Near Geary,

Publishing your books

On San Francisco, getting richer,

Buying what you want,

Sending it away when you are done.

12-31-12

 

Jay

He made himself available.

I finally accepted.

Although I didn't like him

Til the day that he was gone.

I hollered at him viciously

And smashed the gifts he gave me.

Neither of us went away,

And every night we screwed.

Though he received the beatings

It was me who went insane.

I left. He wasn't there when I came back.

A noble caring animal

Who merely fell in love,

Alas with a tenacity

I never understood.

8-22-13

Jascha Heifetz & Robert Burns

Jascha Heifetz' attitude

Is mine. I don't consider

Heifetz any better than

The best of them. And Burns

Had a way of writing that is

Mine. How went the breeze

So went the subjects of his poems

While he plowed the field.

However I consider Burns

A sedentary bore.

2-18-13

Jay

They said he was depressive.

With a streak of bravery.

I said I had no friends.

He answered, “You've got me.”

Such a bolt of terror -

The terror of the sea -

Ripped my mind and body

Inexplicably.

I did not understand it,

Nor understand it now.

Forty years a puzzle

Sleeps behind my brow.

Talent

Write a book of poems

Begging to be read.

Every time you read it,

The supplication grows.

Whether it is beauty

By somebody in touch -

A truth that only wise men

Feign to know -

Or the cry articulate

From a dying heart

Coming through the rhythm and the rhyme.

If you like my poems, I have books on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle.  To see them type Joseph Hart Poetry in the space bar on Amazon.