Then (A Fantasy)

Inspiration

Many years ago when you

Loved me and the things I did -

Our mutual regard was true -

And gays and mental wards were hid -

You let me love you, talk of Keats.

I ate the kernel, dropped the hull.

Death comes once, but life repeats.

You said, “Write something beautiful.”

I veered away and left you there

Standing by an iron gate

Where you seemed to cease to care,

And wrote of ugly things and hate.

But you're still here and I'm still here.

Will we ever settle in?
Millay for Keats? Another peer?
I'll try beauty once again.

Then (A Fantasy)

If I'd been born in 1910

I would not see light again.

But Cantor, Jolson – I'd have been

Their contemporary then.

Or born in 1895,

Berlin and Larry Hart alive,

I'd leave this hovel, town and dive

And go to old New York and thrive.

I'd know Stein and Rupert Brooke

When a book was still a book,

And Marcel Proust had undertook

Paris in a cork-lined nook.

When people valued someone smart,

Love was sweet and songs had heart,

And the poor would only part

With their dimes for food or art.

Here I'll live alone and die,

Believing no one's reasons why,

Watch a world in rapt decay,

Joy and beauty blown away.

On The Brink

Either I am crazy

Or my poesy is good,

My thoughts and feelings true.

One of the two.

Phases that I want

Come to my mind

When they're needed.

“Seek and ye shall find.”

Was that advice for poets?

Is it heeded?

I've been told I'm brilliant.

Also mediocre.

I'm nothing or I'm everything.

Which? Or either?

The Muse's embers smolder.

A pen and coffee stoke her.

Many years ago

In another world of pain

I wrote poems beautiful,

But impossible to explain.

Then for many years

I lapsed into the mundane

And hateful. Can I go back

To poesy again

And write but now

With meanings that are plain?

Do I know enough?

Must I be insane?

 

Protest

Rise above the fallen man.

See the beauty in a cloud,

Taking any shape it can,

Magic to a mind endowed.

Life was made for everyone -

Innocence, not in the crowd.

Poems gifted, music fun

Now lie underneath a shroud.