Poems

Lost

Something about him made you want

Not to take him seriously,

Though all his advice and ideas were right.

How seriously does anyone take
Someone else's brain?

But like a god,

He died of disbelief.

It's now the 6th day he's been gone.

Everyone's a liar,

Even him.

But no one knows a thing.

Without money, gas for the car,

Crazy, alone on the street,

They'll let you walk, gesticulate,

Chatter, laugh and sing.

But they will not pick you up

And take you to a hospice.

But I believe he's quite nearby,

In somebody's house,

Something yet considered.

I believe he's well.

9-11-13

 

Kitty

It didn't work for Charlie

And it didn't work for Jay.

Or do me good with George.

I just got in the way.

But you, tenacious Kitty,

Loving as can be,

Continued unrelenting

To make a friend of me.

I snarled at you ferociously.

I shoved you to the floor.

A glutton for rejection,

You came back for more.

And now you are my Kitty

Sleeping at my arm,

Chattering incessantly.

We'll keep ourselves from harm.

9-11-13

The Unfeeling Bastard

People kill each other

Inadvertently.

A lonely tattooed loser

At the bus stop talked

Incessantly and so

I stood up and walked away.

When the bus approached

I started walking back.

Ten feet off he started

Chattering again.

Then the bus door opened.

I stepped up to get in.

And he continued talking.

With a graceless snarl

I jerked away and swiped

My pass. Beneath my breath,

I muttered “Jesus Christ!”

I simply could have said,

“I do not want to talk.”

9-11-13

Poems

A Nice Person

Is there anybody

In this mfing world

Who doesn't own a gun,

And is worth a sh-t?

If there is, he's lonely

And probably insane.

Perhaps a pill would cure him

And make him not so nice.

9-11-13

Absurdity

Walking down the sidewalk,

I felt like such a fool,

An absolute absurdity.

I'm waiting for a bus.

I have a little money

Which I shouldn't have,

A military stipend.

I do not have a car.

I constantly write poems

I cannot get in print.

Well, maybe if I tried.

I publish them myself.

I'm waiting for a bus.

15 minutes more.

Thank god for writing poesy!

There's nothing else to do.

Now at last I'm home.

He hasn't yet come back.

Perhaps I'll live alone.

Is there some alternative?

9-11-13

 

Crazy Folk

A creepy, crawly country

Covered with tattoos.

Everyone has something.

Crazy people lose.

So much is more important

Than housing the insane.

There's no profit margin,

No financial gain.

Healthy folks don't need it,

A home, a van, a boat.

Republican's don't give a sh-t.

And madmen rarely vote.

9-11-13

 

A Prayer

Now let's pray for G- -

To the god of the tsunamis,

Infantile paralysis

And senility.

And presto! He'll come home,

Happy, sound and sane.

Perhaps he wasn't crazy,

But he seemed that way to me.

9-11-13

 

The Vagrant

A street person riding a bike

Pulling a couple loads

Reeked of tobacco as he passed.

Oh! So many roads!

And when he topples and dies

Alone on a busy street,

The undertaker or Jesus -

Who's the first he'll meet?

And when he gets to a grave

Or heaven, who'll be there

To recognize or welcome him?

The obvious rhyme is “care”.

Alone in the world and insane,

Not a subject for poetry,

A shave, a shower and a shirt,

He'd look like you and me.

9-11-13

 

M

They'll pray for the bombings in Boston,

Write songs for New York City,

But they will not spend an hour

To take an old man shopping,

Toilet paper and cheese,

And food for his seven cats.

It feels so good to offer

(Just like are regular Christian).

But they will not go or even call

To say they are not coming.

9-11-13

Poems

A Shallow Song

A song doesn't have to be

Heavy and meaty

And come from the depth of the soul.

It can emerge like a

Gentle bird flying,

A flower, a roll of the sea.

Everyone's serious. People are grim.

They cling with a smile to their group,

Many of whom they would happily choke,

I was told by a member who left.

9-9-13

Four Days

Four days. I can remember

The happiness, the hate.

Yet it takes an effort.

How quickly shuts the gate.

Will he come back uninjured?

There's nothing but to wait.

9-9-13

 

Evil

My mind is insane,

Evil and vile.

I don't understand it.

And the smile.

The thoughts I think

I do not think.

I do not want

The things I want.

They told me I'm

A wicked rat.

They crawled from slime

To tell me that.

I mean the patients

And their shrinks.

No one else.

Except the Sphinx.

9-9-13

Phone Call

He telephoned. I recognized his voice.

I said, “George?” He answered, “Who is George?”

Instead of saying, “Somebody I love,”

I made a joke. I thought he meant to play.

And he hung up and never called again,

And didn't answer when I phoned him back.

Since then his cell's been dead. And what an ass!

To think – in my absurdity believe

That totally insane, he meant to play.

And I haven't heard his voice since then.

9-9-13

 

Unrequited Love

To blame someone because he doesn't

Love you is insane,

Even if the bastard is your father.

It's not a thing a person can control,

But just to live in fiction and pretend.

The lover unrequited may

Condemn your soul to hell,

Manipulate, demand, until

The very lies feel guilty,

And the obligation is intense.

And you will die.

And he will lead the way.

Just the very strong survive a lover.

9-9-13

 

A Meadow

I see a summer meadow, sweet with gold

Swaying in a free thalassic breeze

That's salty with the scent of ocean spray.

I see two birds sink slowly in the sky,

And rise again, descend, as of they were

The shadows of two branches in the wind.

To sit upon a stone and see the sky -

A whisper overhead, the sky appears

As happy as a baby's nascent smile,

Without a mist, where random bits of clouds

Like cotton ragged-torn from larger hunks

Without direction wander in the blue.

 

Pococurante, the sea

Pococurante, the sea

Once was the mother of me.

There in the fog and the mist

By the waves and the swells I was kissed.

Nurtured and warm

By a storm on the sand

I was giving my form

By a hand

From the soul of the sea.

 

After he had summoned up

After he had summoned up

A dream out of the sea

And made the universe, - this deity,

What did he then?

He caused himself

Not ever to have been.

 

The Story

The simple matter is

I failed him as a friend,

As did all the rest of them

That took and never gave.

Incapable of love,

I'm not incapable of love.

I gave. I gave too much.

I'm happy giving presents.

Almost from the outset

He scared my love away.

Then find yourself a better friend.

He tried. And they were bastards!

And now he's gone.

His ersatz friends

Are worried and afraid.

At 4 a.m. three days ago,

He left without a sign.

On the verge of tears,

I haven't cried since I heard Hoffman.

I love him.

But I do not want him back.

Unless we lived together,

We'd never speak at all.

Is everything a paradox?
The truth is never simple.

Baffled 67 years

By everything I saw.

He was (another paradox)
A very simple man.

9-8-13

 

People die or disappear

People die or disappear

And no one cares and life goes on.

And if he's dead, everyone

He ever knew that I know

Pulled the trigger.

I didn't give him half the love

He craved. I went to Denny's.

I sat there drinking tea

And making jokes and writing poems.

I wanted to.

And he sat home alone.

He wanted my support.

He was ferocious when I gave it.

He scared me off, goddamnit!

I'm not an evil man,

Although I am unfriendly,

Indifferent at times.

He wanted more than I could give,

Or knew how to give it.

9-8-13

Injustice

You see injustice. And let it pass,

Like ignoring a little gas.

Martinets, bullies and thieves,

What a rich Republican thinks,

A cat on the highway and no one grieves.

Nothing's important! A round of drinks!

Ants who trample each other down

And continue running. A funny clown

Who's mad and dangerous. And a goat

The world eschews. He doesn't vote.

9-9-13

Autonomy

Who knows whether these shrinks are right

Or know anything or not?

Madmen wander the streets at night,

Crying, laughing, gesturing, grimacing.

No one gives a jot.

But let one try to kill himself!

That's the magic number.

He'll be whisked to a mental ward,

And there, at last, he'll slumber.

All the cops and Jacqui Shiff

Know too much to give

A hand to a man who has no feet.

It's his life to live.

To give a hand is “rescuing” -

Which you must avoid,

Say Jacqui Shiff and the local fuzz.

To Berne it's paranoid.

The public always knew this truth,

Though it weeps collectively.

And the earth is flat, the sun goes round it,

Witches float, and Republicans

Are men of god. And the sea

Once again for aye

Will flood the world – all of it needy -

And wash the thing away!

9-9-13

Poems

A Picture


Moments of cruelty pass through my soul
When in the darkness I see like a mole.
The only good person who made it a goal
To be a good person, generous, kind -
Until comes a rupture, a break in his mind.
Just like the girl who was sweet as you'd find,
And when she was bad she was horrid,
Vociferous, cruel and torrid,
Reflective, circuitous, florid.
I love him.  I've never known anyone more.
And yet I don't know him.  Two people make four.
I'm changing the lock and I'm bolting the door.


9-7-13


Abandoned


Abandoned by the ones you loved the most
Who gave you nothing.  Nothing in exchange.
And me.  I gave you love the best I could,
Bested for my inability.
In your quest – advocacy of needs -
Understanding takes the place of sh-t.


9-7-13

Situations


The loved unloving.  Those who simply love
May perhaps sit wishing under stars.
A single world and infinite perceptions.
Janus lives inside a single soul.
Not ambivalence.  No!  Two minds.
Two wholly contradicting attitudes
Derived from antithetic situations.


9-7-13

Sick


The madness in the words that people say
Thought and understanding can't dispel.
And neglect, despair and unrequited
Love and need – and parenting that's hell.


I couldn't take it.  This is not a prison.
And you.  A little money and alone.
Someone again will love you.  I will not
Love again.  Too often mounted, thrown.


And when you weep or cuss or thrill with rage
On being told it's actually the end,
I'll say go.  I'm weary.  Will I do it?
I've seen too much to stand there and pretend.


But I was crazy once.  It didn't matter.
No one cared.  “Just get him out of here.”
I tried to love you, and be halfway normal.
I failed, and then I watched you disappear.


9-7-13

A Tinker's Damn


An old man sitting in a coffee shop
By himself – and very often gets
His coffee gratis.  All the servers know him.
He writes poems.  Always writing poems,
And has since he was nearly 17.
Such relief!  The pressure in his head
Relieved.  The world – forever just as bad -
Diminishes a moment.  Fresh and cool.
Are the poems worth a tinker's damn?
“A tinker's damn.”  The expression makes him cry.
His mother used it summing up her son.
Perhaps that's not the reason he feels sad.
Just a thought – and all associations.
Are poems more than mere associations?
Not magic from the cauldron of the soul,
Yet to be explained or understood?
An old man sitting in a coffee shop
Writing verses – desultory verses -
Without direction – all without command.


9-7-13

Alone


I was born a lonely man
Brought up by the sea.
I gazed into the water,
And saw everything but me.


Inexorably time progressed,
More thought than fantasy,
And delivered me into
The arms of poetry.


Which I wrote obsessively,
An acolyte, his fane,
Until in 1998
The urge began to wane.


The sea receded from the sand.
The lighthouse crumbled, fell.
Then I met an angel,
A demon.  And the spell


Renewed itself.  I've written
Poesy upon
My whole imagination.
And now I wish him gone.


9-7-13

Depending on people


Depending on people,
Relying on people,
Unless it's your way,
Is the way to insanity.
Praying to Jesus,
A mythical chimera,
Takes you to madness.
You've got to come back.
When you believe
That a deity's talking
In lieu of a human
Especially to you,
The core of your mind
Starts to crumble with termites,
And aphids and maggots.
The screwing of friends!
That is the story,
The way of all closeness.
The meaning of strangers
Begins where it ends.


9-9-13

The Other Side


He wanted love.  Who doesn't?
At least someone to talk to.
He gave me shit for tenderness -
The best that I could manage -
And when he was psychotic
I didn't do enough.
He took the car, abandoned
The friends who had betrayed him.
Too loving and too lonely -
Too needy – say exactly
The need that he was missing -
Fidelity and cash.


The government is rancid.
Rand's plutocracy,
Immigrants and homophobes,
Gods and gun control -
Sap its funds and interest.
The sick can just go begging.


I thought that I had killed him,
Failed him in a crisis.
But every month a crisis,
And I was always there.
I'm stupid, but not blind.
I know that I was there.


He took the car and left.
By now he's out of gas.
I know he's out of money.
Lost, alone, insane.
Or just around the corner,
Which the hospital denies.


9-8-13

An Angry Didactic


The sick and disabled,
The mentally ill
Must be conserved
And given enough
Money – yes! Money!
The Christians adore it! -
To live and be happy
As much as they can.
God or their mommies
Made them insane
And left them with nothing.
Man or society!
What are they for?
Building more weapons
And going to war?
Do something good,
You despicable frauds!
Your Jesus!  Your god!
Give them something to love!


9-8-13

Poems

Fate Destroys


Fate destroys the decent and the good
As thoroughly as any man of war.
The vicious and the selfish and the evil
Endure forever.  And they call this love.
The final brick, reduce the gods to one,
Monotheism, then to call it love.
If I could cry, the sea would overflow
The shore, the chosen planet inundated
With salty tears, with brine, both for my soul
And for the hearts and minds of those I love.
The heart is real.  The mind is chemical,
And evaporates.  The endless grave,
A mercy and a blessing to some minds.
Don't let suicide destroy the man.
Find a way.  Look how easily
The Prince of Greece was blown into decay,
The Parthenon.  Destruction we can do.


9-6-13



A Very Small Achievement


Yesterday he told me that my aim
Was to kill god.  This was not my intention,
But to escape the horror of his love,
The love releasing hell upon the hopeless.
Rich men have a reason to love god.
Poor men love him just as much and seem
To feel contented in their poverty,
Compensating money with their love.
The persona!  Image!  Underneath
Is there any other person there?
What are my intentions?  To write verse.
Conflicting motives contradict my mind.
Some thoughts I think my soul would never think.
My head, a bowl of water.  In it fish,
Multi-colored ever swimming fish,
Cohabitate, but don't belong together.
A metaphor!  Doctor Kelly, Freud!
I can hear her saying even now
And once again, sneering with contempt,
“How poetical!”  I wrote a poem.
Let me see a patient that she healed.
A poem is a very small achievement.
But one that even she cannot bring off.


9-6-13

Happiness


Like a dog contented
In a graveyard full of bones,
A little girl upon the sand
With many colored stones,


A lazy sleeper looking
At myriads of stars,
Or prostitutes upon the dock
Welcoming the tars -


So I sit in Denny's
Imagining my books,
Surrounded by their titles,
Like the stash of crooks.


9-6-13

Poems

A Song


Two days it's been,
Two days since when
I summoned up a song
From the cauldron of my mind.
The warlock stirs, but ill-defined.
And everything is wrong.


Sleep, the wage you do not earn!
The kaleidoscope again will turn.
And wakefulness unweary
Will perceive the blue-grey dawn,
And a moon that's nearly gone,
And all the world is bleary.


9-5-13

Generations


So many, many beautiful things
In oblivion -
Tastes expire and values change
And what was good is gone.


Am I so old?  I was born
In 1946.
What is joy to some, to others
Warrants rocks and sticks.


The declension started
When Puccini died.
So little art, but so much money
Keeps them satisfied.


9-5-13


Old Tricks


I had no friends -
Or so I said
To everyone who met me,
Just some tricks who liked to laugh.
And happiness was all.
Rene the hateful said that I
Could not give up an ex!
Well, they're given up today
All sailed in odd directions
On the sea of time.
I know we'll never meet again.
I'll probably forget them.
But I am 67 soon.
So when will I forget?


9-3-13

The Agent


My best poems all were written
In the world with you.
They exist
That were not before.
They are here.
I hold them in my hand.
You matriculate to agent,
Still remaining friend,
And I shall have a publisher
If the verses warrant.
Perhaps the circle is fulfilled,
Muse to recognition.


9-3-13

Poems

A Promise To An Angel


A story that I wrote when I was 10 -
Recrudescent!  The tale comes back again.
A little boy alone and very fat
Was bad at all athletics.  That was that.
He doddered home in tears and bleak despair.
Ironing (are mothers always there?)
His mother told him just behind a door
Was somebody that he was waiting for.
He went in, and there an angel stood.
Angels are essentially quite good.
She said, “I'll make first in every sport,
Providing you do not commit one tort.
You'll be strong and muscular.  But hear!
Never make athletics your career!”
The boy agreed.  He grew and he excelled,
With medals.  He kept growing, and impelled
By urges far too various to name,
He forgot his promise for the game.
He won every race except the last.
As he crossed the finish first, a blast
Of thunder cracked old heaven.  On the spot,
He became a fat a foolish tot.


1956/2013


Just A Spark


A legend or a myth that I wrote when
I was my parents' happy son of 10.
I've remembered two.  But there were four.
I doubt I'll versify a couple more.


An isolated boy
Playing in the wood
Found a firecracker
And thought that it was good.


He lit it with a match
And threw it on the ground.
It didn't move or sputter.
It didn't make a sound.


Thinking it was worthless,
He left it where it lay.
The ensuing conflagration
Blew his world away.


1958/2013

Kittens


No one with a kitten
Needs another person.
With birdlike glance they watch
Everything you do.
They leap onto your stomach
And do a little dance.
Is that love,
A retrospect of nursing,
Or something only nature understands?
Vertical they leap
To catch a fly against the window.
Settle where your arm bends,
In the crook they go to sleep.
And once they love you,
They will never stop.


9-2-13


Suicide


I have two friends who wish I were alive,
And four tame cats who wouldn't see the difference
Til they were locked in shelters, and destroyed.
My poesy, the beacon of my life,
A retroflective beacon, not a guide,
Would be forgotten, like a body gassed
And lying on the ground in Syria.
Those poems may be good.  It doesn't matter.
Words do not sustain longevity,
But whether what they're written on survives.
I won't die.  Unless a gentle nature
Decides to do me in.  And carry on.


9-2-13


The Ward


Coffee and crayons and hospital gowns!
The doctor said, “Tell them you're one of the clowns.”
They sit in the dayroom and stare at the wall,
Pace kicking cigarette butts down the hall.
Once every fortnight the doctor comes in
And doesn't say much.  You don't see him again.
A nurse with a little square table and vials
Takes your blood weekly and chatters and smiles.
There you will stay till your older or dead.
Something is horribly wrong with your head.
You wait for your dinner three times a day.
The older ones hurry.  Don't get in their way.
There's no one to listen and no one to tell
In this prolegomenon, prelude to hell.


9-2-13


Millay


I just read another
Sonnet of lost love
Written with the wing
Of a wounded dove.


Bittersweet romances
Glut her poetry,
Rapt and glorifying
Promiscuity.


9-1-13


Handicap


What I think is crazy.
What I know is wrong.
Do such wry opinions
Make a pretty song?


With a destiny uncharted
Beneath an empty sky,
I continue writing.
Reasons don't apply.


9-2-13


My name is Joseph Hart, and I have books on Amazon and Kindle.  The books on Amazon are $10 or less (I think some thick ones are $12.50), and the books on Kindle are $1, with a few big ones $1.50.  I recommend "Endymion Awake", "Poems Published In Amazon Magazine", "Ten Chaps" "Coleridge, Without Jesus", or "Fallen Idols".