Fortuity

Fortuity

His greatest poems never went to press

Until he was deceased and in a tomb.

I don't mean the odes. I doubt their goodness.

But some sweet lines that ravish all your senses,

And leave you wishing for an aftermath.

They would all be lost except for

Fortuosity.

Einstein was wrong in one belief.

The god that he imagined

Does play dice,

A gamble but on everyone's behalf,

And no one wins.

Successive little footsteps take you

To a darkling sea

With setbacks and successes

On your way toward the ocean,

Where they're all forgotten

Evermore.

Let me be wrong!

Jung

It came to me as I was undergoing

A modulation. Verses that I made

And hate to read are merely more mature

Than their author. How can that make sense?

Yet just now I shifted in my head

Into another mind as I was reading.

I read my songs with frank sincerity

As I wrote them. Junkets was a child.

Is that to say that beauty is for children?
I think it is. And Jung who was a poet.

What he wrote I do not understand

Nor believe. Except a little thought

That's traveled with me since I was a boy.

My intelligence is in my mind's

Unconsciousness. And usually reacts.

A latent intellect. The poems I hate,

I hate them for their intellect and hate.

I'd rather plunge into a sea of flowers

That I can revel in each time I read.

What I thought has scuttled my new plan -

To go through all the books that I have written

And delete the poems I don't like.

Thinking it's a weed, I'll crush a flower -

A flower to mature

And conscious minds.

Is this fiction I don't understand?
Am I deriving fiction from a fact?

Suffice that at the clapping of two hands,

I shall see some beauty in my songs.

Of course I won't. Praise deflowers me.

 

Cathexis

The way that one survives -

Keeps one's sanity -

Is thinking “they are doing this

To help, they do not mean it.”
Double, double, double!

Two sides of the coin,

The identical same coin;

And on the edge is madness.

Gibberish

The stone in the liquid is sinking,

Not alas into its socket.

No devilish feverish thinking

Helps to propel or to dock it.

Alone it drifts slow in the viscous

Liquid that hasn't a form.

Over the bowl a hibiscus

Conceals the incipient storm.

 

A Vision

Alice in Wonderland. Dylan. The pike.

This is a world the courageous all like.

But I didn't like it. There's nothing to hold

While riding the Ferris Wheel reaching for gold.

Laughter and happiness! Nothing inhibits

The joy of the sailors now hanging from gibbets.

Down in the dungeon or deeper than that

Sleeps the remains of a little black cat.

Something blows sinister though unawares.

The noise of the organ still raucously blares.

Up on the battlements angels are fey.

They leap from the castle and fall in the moat.

Due to their sorcery, all of them float.

But some take the air and fly swiftly away.

A clown with a head full of knowledge that charms

Dies. Death's a vision that nothing disarms.

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