Composers

Composers

I can't get enough of Verdi.

It's deeper every time.

Puccini again is Puccini again.

And Donizetti's like rhyme.

Sweetly delicious

It leaps out of sight.

But nothing goes deeper than that.

Another composer who

Equals these three?
One never lived, doesn't now.

Nature conducts but the genius is free.

They composed,

But they never said how.

After Watching Eddie Cantor

Eddie Cantor had to grow up.

The hands and the dancing, the songs.

A little old man who's left out of breath.

Such the recovery prolongs.

Eddie Cantor had to get old.

Is nobody going to scream “Why?!”

The face of such a thing is absurd.

Eddie Cantor had to die.

In death with him thus

No one said a word.

 

Yarn

My life is less confused

Since my family is dead.

No more a skein of yarn

Wrapped around my head,

Few places there to peek through.

Now just a single thread.

Infrequently a tangle

Up from where it led.

Serendipity the string

Gets snagged upon the shed.

Once I sharply snapped it

And continued on instead

Of thrashing in a muddle

Where other hearts have bled.

 

Publication

My books are self-published.

This truth will not be masked,

Though it doesn't give the glow

If a publisher had asked.

I imagined being published

Among the vineyards on my turf,

A boy in love with Random House

Liked by Bennett Cerf.

 

Non Sequiturs

A situation guaranteed to kill

By the desecration,

Dissolution of the will -

The steady ocean washes

Away the sandy bar

Until there's nothing left

But the dead light of a star.

Am I loved or wanted?
Is it so or not?
A rocky castle's haunted.

And so decays the plot.

I think I am not welcome

In a room with him.

After this will hell come?

A joke! The truth is grim.

Egos

Barrymore's regret

Was that he couldn't sit

Somewhere in the audience

And watch himself perform.

Heifetz said that playing

Better than the rest

Is to know your playing

Is the best.

Shakespeare would admire

My verse. It's in the cards.

My poems are the

Dust of shattered shards.