Keats Is Better Read

“The Fountainhead”

The greatest novel written -

Fit for any man

Of any generation

Every place on earth -

Is “Fountainhead”. It's brilliant.

And every element

It needs to tell its story

And all opposing thoughts

Are woven very perfectly,

And right there in the book.

The other, “Atlas Shrugged”,
Has gone a little mad.

 

Keats Is Better Read

They threw him on the floor

And gave him medication,

Locked him in a closet

And kept him there a year.

I was merely scorned

And treated like a beggar,

Bullets through the ventricle,

And damn if you were born.

Parents go to seances

To find their missing children.

Castle-homes in England

Are likely to have ghosts.

Recite Romantic poetry

By grates in rocky chambers,

And it may be beautiful,

But Keats is better read.

Algernon

A man who was retarded

Wrote some very simple songs

That made him very happy.

Then an accident occurred.

He started writing poems

That were different and strange.

It seemed they had been written

By someone else entirely.

When he stopped and read them

(Not immediate to touch)

He considered they were pretty.

When he put the book aside,

He hated them completely

And he didn't understand.

He wanted to return and write

As he had writ before.

The Oyster

There's something in my head.

There's something in my shell.

The pain of doubt and ignorance!

I cannot spit it out.

Nothing but facsimiles

Of some little pearls.

I keep writing poems

Debating what I think.

I love my early poems

Writ when there was Keats.

And the latest poems

That I don't love at all -

Until I read them.

 

Prosody

When you sing don't crap it out.

Writing is unconscious,

But think about it while you write.

Write with supervision.

What ridiculous advice!

Too much thought destroys.

Thinking only shapes the dirt

So poems can come through.

The talent that I think I lost

Is merely separation

From the soul that gives me life.

Reliance on the head.

Poems from unfeeling brains

Lack the metaphors,

Images and similes

And beauty of a poem.

And years ago the songs I wrote

Weren't held up to a light

To verify their accuracy,

But judged by how they felt.