Rights Love and teach your children

The Old Days

How very long ago

The ones I used to know,

Gentle, pretty, kind,

Now left so far behind -

Eons from today

In my memory they stay,

Not a caustic word to say,

Simple boys and men,

We'll never meet again.

How many years it's been!

I don't remember when

I had a perfect lover.

My loving days are over.

As I approach December,

Like Proust, I just remember

The songs, the sea, the blur

Of dreams that never were.

 

Not Lost

He has a home with me,

With no where else to go.

He's learning how to lie,

And dying in the snow.

Desperate to find

A group to take him in,

He cast his lot with vagrants

On the side of sin.

Criminals are good.

Sanity is dead.

Anyone who says it

Isn't so is red.

67 years.

Will it ever end?

All he ever wanted

Was solace and a friend.

I didn't like his gods.

I let him slip away.

20 years ago

He used to sit and pray.

12-19-13

 

Not Lost

I'd think I'd be crazy

If not for the few

Very nice fellows

I long ago knew.

All of them gone

Like a whispering sea

That doesn't return.

Where can they be?

Verses

Beautiful poesy! Only the past

Put into happiness that will last.

Beautiful poesy! Gentle and mild,

Cryptic and foreign to a child.

Sitting here next to my poem “On Sleep”,

I'm writing poems for god to keep.

He didn't keep Sappho, lost in the flames,

Or deeper antiquities with out names.

Poems on nothingness now I write.

The final tomorrow is out of sight.

The verses remaining unseen, unread

Will die with my body inside my head.

Never did I think

Never did I think

My intellect was smart.

But once I wrote some lyrics

That rival Larry Hart.

Trapped inside a tomb

Like a felon in a cell,

Even Keats could comfort

The sufferers in hell.

 

A New Impression

My poesy is genius

Not taught in any school.

Not greater tho than Keats.

I'm only half a fool.

My verse was never brilliant.

I do not have the brains.

It is a sleepy fist

Demolishing their fanes.

Inspired by blind Muses

And a flock of cherubim,

It's of the ilk of Keats

Though different from him.

My poesy! The beauty

Imagination paints

Started with my feelings,

And ended in complaints.

But are these early poems

As good as I pretend,

Or seem when I am reading
In a world about to end?

 

Rights

Love and teach your children.

Don't run them round the bend.

The law gives parents rights.

That's where the children end.

Standing on the corner

Naked as a bird

Pissing in the gutter.

This scene is just absurd.

Lunatics have rights

The law cannot impede.

The jealous right of freedom,

But not to what they need.

 

Happy Poems

Something's changed. Today I see -

Not through a lobotomy -

Just the rhythm of my breath

Making pretty poems stay -

And never on the pain of death

Would I approach psychiatry -

Wrestling countless years instead

Of love – life wrestles with the dead -

Some poems that I wrote I read -

Read them just today although

Written 40 years ago.

And they're good. I confess.

Imagination plays,

Little folks like me to bless

For a hundred millions days.

I am little and unknown.

All my friends are gone away.

In my private field I've grown

130 books they say.

On most of them I wish decay.

When I write a happy poem,

I manage to keep death at bay.