The Ones

The Ones

People have their reasons.

They add to your disgrace

Acute humiliation

And slap you in the face.

Then they wander off

As though you are not there

To therapy or churches,

Arrogance and care.

 

The Book In Denny's

When you write fast, you write good

Or else abysmally bad.

In your heart is the only should,

Not down from your mother and dad.

The field where I labored was barren,

Tilled in the depth of my skull.

The book arrived yesterday, only

Nothing provocative. Dull.

This morning I woke up in Denny's

And looked at some pages again.

As good as I wrote in my childhood,

A mad poetaster of 10.

I keep thinking back to my childhood

As though in my life all the truth

I'd ever encounter occurred

Back 60 years in my youth.

The people are noisy in Denny's.

Saturday morning in bars.

No one is thinking of Jesus,

Wars or their vanishing stars.

 

A Desultory Soliloquy

To every man his prosody.

I never thought of any

But rhythm, rhyme and meter,

That make it poesy.

Or else it's just another man's opinion.

And if somebody feels that way,

It doesn't make it truth.

And meter is much easier to

Manage than a rhythm.

And pedants with religious minds

Are boring as a saint.

But if I had the courage

To say the things I think,

My life would be more interesting,

Happier and mine!

But I'm too old to battle now.

I never won a fight.

A hundred million poetasters

(Each of them a modern)

Glut the loser's market now.

And none of them a Keats.

And all convinced completely they are better.

My mind was very crazy.

I am sure this verse is bad.

Although the only PhD

Who ever liked my poems,

Told me even madmen write good songs.

To paraphrase The Prince,

When it's a question of one's worth,

One must side with those who think one has some.

 

Psychology destroys the soul

Psychology destroys the soul,

In no way does help it,

Like knocking down a house of bricks

You can't put back together.

It is the way of the naïve

To trust a social worker

With feelings he had

Best not tell his mother!

In living mediocrity

The lonely tells its doctor

What it feels and who it loves.

Doctors are assassins.

As she said as I went in,

“What's he going to tell you?

But like the misbegotten love

He still feels for his parents,

He never puts the therapists aside.

 

Prosody

No more Keats and flowers.

No more Rupert Brooke.

Only stern and stalwart!

But the phrases – what of those?

As in a cliché there goes

The baby with the bath.

Nothing ever changes.

The early and the late

Are branches of a tree.

And this one is the same.

I never finished Joyce

And I tried several times.

I couldn't understand it.

Reading Proust was heaven.

I read Remembrance twice

And all the rest a single time,

And Jean Santeuil a dozen,

First on a mental ward.

My life was lived in books,

Never much with people,

And the constant ostinato

Of music in the room.

This song is a confession -

Keats' anathema,

And every editor's

From Borneo to Nome.

To me it is confessional.

To a reader it is not.

When someone makes an arbitrary

Ban – it sits on mud,

And with a little weight, it sinks completely.