Poems

What shall I write?

I am at a junction -

A wall. What shall I write?

Everything I cared about

Or hated's in a song.

Shall I regress to 21

When I discovered Keats

And amble through the tangled wood

Of his poetry?
Start again an origin -

A clone, a recreation -

A resurrection – but of what?
Shatter poesy?

Create a genre with my name

For promulgating me?

Forgotten form, forgotten beauty -

Help the earth decay -

No, not the earth

(Let Man decide)

But only just the world.

8-20-13

 

Pets

No one owns a cat.

It simply isn't done.

They'll love you til you're born again,

But it's voluntary.

A dog's a different matter.

Canine's play the fool.

They're for the lonely self-indulgent

Man who would be king.

Canaries are another story.

In a cage they sit.

Grannies like to look at them,

And then forget they're there.

8-20-13

 

Justice

How much to beat a dog until

He snarls and tears your throat out?

Then he is a bad dog

And you have to gun him down.

But the man who beat the dog

Has got a check to get to heaven.

And the dog he shot

Will lie unnoticed in the ground.

8-20-13

The Family

He was just a lunatic

Who never wanted children.

She was just a maniac

Mad to murder kids.

He sang to her to marry him

And she held out for children.

He agreed. They had three kids.

Now all of them are crazy.

8-19-13

 

Mediocrity

If the people settle

For mediocrity,

That is what they'll get.

So I have heard it said,

But they don't merely settle

For mediocrity,

They greedily demand it.

And make the carney rich.

8-19-14

 

For The Sake Of Poesy

Poems for the sake of poesy!

Poesy or things that bug me,

Occasionally the sea,

Or the moon behind a bank of clouds.

These are what I write about.

Is there something else?

Art? The things I love? Or the

Expiring sense of music,

Perhaps archaic,

Practically forgotten?

Music once the magi of the arts

Is totally unwanted anymore.

8-19-13

Poems

The Stone

When I was a teen

In the giant house on Crespi

Standing on the porch

I saw a stone,

A beautiful and strange

And multicolored stone.

Staring at the rock I thought

That I could go insane.

Then I thought, “Why bother?

No matter what occurs,

I am going to come back

To things as they are now.”

So I left the stone and went away.

8-19-13

I used to be chaotic

I used to be chaotic

Before I got the money,

Changing jobs like changing lovers.

Then I finished college.

I don't know how I did it.

I just went, and then kept going.

Then my mother breathed her last

And left me where I'm living.

Now I'm sick and old and settled down.

And there's a new upheaval in my life.

I see no way to calm it.

It's not in my control.

Those who do not understand

Assure me that it is.

I think that it will see me out the door.

So long as I have verses,

A place to sit and write them,

Although the place is shrinking,

I'll be lucid when I die.

8-19-13

 

Never go to Denny's

Never go to Denny's after midnight!

The manager goes home. The rock and rap

Suddenly come crashing from the kitchen.

The idiots who barely earn a wage

Playing waiters, yell and whoop and holler.

And if you got a first one, do not think

You'll ever get a second cup of coffee.

Bedlam is on earth. Intelligence,

Civility and decency and any kind of wit

Are underneath the bottom of the scale.

It's deafening. It's deafening in Denny's.

From approximately 2 to 6 a.m.

Some were born to serve and some to play.

If a waiter speaks at all he's rude,

Unless you're mean and covered with tattoos.

8-19-13

 

Johnny

No one played with Johnny.

Johnny was a jerk,

Also a mulatto,

Which I didn't understand.

Johnny was my neighbor

And no one talked to me,

So I talked to Johnny.

I assumed we were the same.

That our values were identical,

Our feelings and ideas,

Scientific, Atheistic,

Neither philistines.

Until I gave some money

To a charity to care

For animals. He scoffed and said,

“The stupid animals!”
Then I knew that we were not alike

In any way.

And I had been mistaken.

Where is Johnny now?

Is there a charity for him?

8-19-13
 

Life

To Syria and Egypt

And the NRA,

What is Man – or any life -

The Lord's Resistance Army?

It is a piece of paper

That I write a poem on

Totally illegible

When I get it home.

I ponder and decipher

And remember more than read.

When I've got it typed, I throw

The paper in the garbage.

No that has decent value.

To the NRA and Egypt,

Syria, The Lord's Resistance Army,

Human life, or any life

Is paper in the john.

That has value too.

Necessity.

That's all the value human life

Has ever had to Man.

Or any life.

The rest don't carry guns.

8-19-13

Old Memories New

Happy memories appear

Uncolored by the present.

All past was hateful just because

It was the past. But now has ceased

To cover me with soot and grime.

No! Soft silt from crystal streams.

I bathe freshly in the water

Of its memories.

And forgotten in a cloister

Is the misery.

8-18-13

 

GWL

From the stomach,

From the head,

From anywhere -

It isn't dead.

A joke spontaneous,

A laugh

Will crumble any epitaph,

Sponge the remnants of your tears,

And draw the bucket from the well.

Happy, sweet and wet appears

Water to extinguish hell.

8-18-13

 

Good Poems

Heavy lidded languishing

In Denny's once again,

What perceptive paradoxes

Will occur to me?
What poignant phrases will unseal

The tombs of some, but not another?

Will I fall asleep again

To wake alert in Denny's?
I just found another book

Among the raft of books I wrote

That's worthy of the sea.

67 years! For 50

Years I've written poems

Culminating in the moment

I believe they're good.

8-18-13

The Centipede

Shrinks and neighbors,

Relatives and

Friends with an agenda -

None who knows – how could he? -

The circumstance you're in -

Willingly will tell you

What to do and how to do it.

And the centipede

Looking at his legs discovers

He is in a ditch,

On his back unable

Now to walk at all.

The nightmare is you

Do not know yourself.

8-19-13

Poems

Contracts

Security and certainty and love!

Freedom is for birds that fly in flocks.

Therapists would tell me I am sick,

But oblique and sly, an implication

That only therapists would understand.

Poetry! The refuge of the lone

Who are not lonely in their poetry.

Poetry is joy. And music too.

As it was. Creation has miscarried.

Everyone composes, no one well.

Their songs are loved. Like violence and god.

For no reason. Just because they're there.

8-18-13

 

Shakespeare

The sea is either tame

Or violent and choppy.

His phrases are a flame,

His meters often sloppy.

8-18-13

 

A Poem For Losers

The arrogant old man

That folk of insight choose

Confidently said

That top dogs always lose.

The top dog is a man

Who's certain what to do

To get the world his way

And other people's too.

And losers sit around,

A coterie of saps

Who look a little baffled,

And frequently collapse.

8-18-12

The Poet On The Internet

He said he read no poems but his own,

And he wrote a poem in a flash.

He then produced a sample.

A single song was ample.

Such blithering and dithering

Conceited balderdash!

8-18-13

 

Two Loves

Two loves had I at Denny's.

They've been gone a while.

One with wit was serious.

The other loved to smile.

And a third – effeminate -

Quite the fagot's style -

Aroused such lustful passion

I could take him in the aisle.

All of this is over

Though I just got a kiss

From a waitress. I'm too old

To think of things like this.

8-17-13

 

To A Muse

Muse, if you have mercy -

Art does not have faith -

Come forth and favor gently

A single working wraith.

I have been in love

Both better and for worse,

However I have never

Really loved my verse.

Will you make it happen?

My poems could be fair.

Reaching back millenia,

Put the feeling there.

8-17-13

Poems

The Nightmare

Never go to Denny's on a weekend

After midnight. Everybody sane,

Nice or decent has already gone.

Nothing changes. Everything gets worse.

Rap and rock that fills the building, coming

From the cook who's unattended now,

Shouting drunks, Republicans and bastards,

The servers all belligerent and strange.

I discovered people are not nice

Unless they have to be, and they resent it.

Arrogance and thieves and vanity,

And all of them forgiven by their gods.

Home again! To recognize four cats.

The need to write is unavoidable,

A panacea. When the world is over,

Only art and science will be left.

Not Ives or Pollock. People nature gave

A talent. Calvin's right. But there's no god.

Eternity must be an endless bore.

8-17-13

 

Post

I wrote a lot of angry verse. I just

Read it. Calm. Like water in a pond

At evening. What happened to the rage?

Or was I in the center of the storm?

8-17-13

Bleak

Following the lights,

Blown along the block,

When a light is green,

That is where you walk.

Sitting in the diner

Where you always sat,

She came in at 2.

How did she know that?

Knowing where you went,

Knowing you were there,

Did they always know?
Malevolence or care?

Then she called the cops.

They answered in a while.

“We heard you're suicidal.

We'd like to help.” A smile.

8-16-13

 

Always

There was always war.

There was always hate.

There were always bigots

Breaking down your gate.

There was always cruelty

In honor of the Jew

Who reigns supreme in fiction.

But there was beauty, too.

8-16-13

Hanslichek

Hanslichek

He nearly called me an ass

For putting “doth” in a poem.

No serious poet since 1920

Had done a thing like that.

He was a college teacher

And ostensibly a poet.

At last I read Millay, but he

Is many years away.

It isn't worth an effort.

It isn't worth a fight.

But a sweet and bitter victory

To know that I was right.

But whether I was wrong

Or ever will be read,

Hanslichek is published

And I will soon be dead.

8-15-13

The Rich Man's Game

Little psychiatric games

Rich folk like to play.

“Feel a bit obsessive.”

What do doctors say?

Seeing their psychiatrists.

A tune-up or a pill.

They played the game as troglodytes,

And they play it still.

They see their shrinks for stress.

They help them to relax.

Moreover it's deductible

From their income tax.

8-16-13

 

MK

Whether she is living

Or old or only dead,

Let this hateful therapist

Hang by what she said.

Instead of an amorphous

Rant of pain and rage,

Let the bitch specifically

Collapse upon the stage.

8-15-13

The Sparrow

When your warmth's rejected, you recoil,

Affection misbegotten. To despoil

An urge to understand and sympathize

Is to kill a sparrow as it flies.

And a sparrow with a broken wing

Lying in the dirt desists to sing

And starts to die, but without understanding,

Relinquishing alone and undemanding.

Everybody dies. It's like a dream.

Yet you never hear the people scream.

Is this what modern music is about?

A single dying turned into a rout?

8-15-13

 

Art

I love to be with him when he is happy.

However he is happier with them.

But when I read a poem I have written,

Unshared, unshown, that pierces like a flame -

Poignant and perfection in a verse -

It doesn't matter whether I'm in love.

Beaten to a ripped and ragged cloth

By the hateful music that I hear

In Denny's or at home – they call it music -

Fair enough – it isn't mashed potatoes -

I crave a quiet and translucent silence

Where only Cziffra, Bach and Chopin play.

Such a place! The ancients called it heaven

Years before Tchaikovsky was a word.

8-15-13

 

Hope?

Will someone with sincerity and sense

Say that what you listen to is music?

Spare me taste and age and generation!

Spare me Pavarotti's malediction!

Screaming like a banshee at the darkness

And banging things won't soothe the savage breast.

Your music is equivalent to Kern

Like Stephen King's a writer next to Proust.

Never mind. You wouldn't understand it,

And less agree. A renaissance? Oh god!

The shit keeps getting deeper every day.

Whence the genius who will dig us out?

8-15-13

Poems

In The Vernacular

“You got a gripe against the poor?”
He asked me with a growl.

I answered, “All my friends were poor

Except one college teacher.

I lived with him a year or two.”
He snarled, “Are you a fagot?”
“That isn't your affair. Are you

A homophobic Christian?”
He said, “I think I'll fuck you up!”

I said, “I'll call a cop.

I'd like to see an unemployed,

Homophobic Christian

In the clink with lots of other men.”

8-14-13

 

“Camelot”

In Long Beach with my mother

When I was very small

I found the album “Camelot”

In a record bin.

Enchantment overtook me -

The many colors, gold,

A cover that would open,

And pictures of the cast.

And on the back in darkened gold,

Blood red, the royal hall

Where Guinevere and Arthur stood

Before their rigid thrones.

Festooned with draperies, the court

In regal colors, costumes -

Excessively the colors

And medieval effigies.

I wanted it. I wanted more

Than anything I owned.

I bought it with my money,

And carefully I held it,

Still unopened, riding home

In my mother's car.

I hoped – dear god I hoped -

I wouldn't die before I got there.

8-14-13

 

Horowitz

I saw Horowitz when he was old -

Scriabin and Scarlatti and his Sousa -

Dusty gold -

Age spots on his visage -

A paucity of hair -

Sitting at the keyboard -

And the young enchantment there -

And still the colored ties -

The little Greek Archaic Smile -

I think I shall be writing

Poesy a while -

8-14-13

 

Catholic Jamie

Jamie said that every week

They ate a bite of Jesus.

And every week when they went back,

Jesus Christ was whole.

I thought this sounded silly

And I laughed. And then exploded

Through the door his mother

Who yelled at me for laughing.

Catholic Jamie, my first sex

Alone or with another,

Told me everything to do.

I loved it. Krakatoa!

8-14-13

 

Contest

When I was 27,

Righteous daddy said to me,

“We heard that night with Tommy

When you were 17.

The house has vents and voices carry.”

I answered, “It was silly.

Surely you did something silly

When you were a boy.”

“Yes,” he said. “Just once. I knocked

Your mother up with you.”
“That is very clever, dad.

I live with Tommy now.

To hell with Proposition 8.

You were not invited.

However I'll admit your shot

Was deadlier than mine.

I wish you in another world.

You wish me in the ground.”

8-14-13

 

The Stray

Living in the country -

Dirt and vines and trees -

I hated it -

Then city isn't better.

In my distant memory

There is a momma cat

And an injured kitten sick

Behind a wire screen.

Helplessly the kitten mewed.

The momma was alerted

Spoke back and lured

The kitten to the screen.

The kitten wasn't hers. A stray

From someone else's vineyard.

The momma with some difficulty

Reached the injured kitten

Whose eyes I think were matted shut.

The momma cat rebelled,

Hissed and drove the kitten off.

And then I don't remember.

8-14-13

 

Analysis

A thoughtless repetitious beat -

Violent concussions -

He pounds the drum -

And several men -

A thing that I was told

Many years ago

Is easily accomplished

By a teenage boy -

Grab the strings of four guitars

And gratify their souls -

And a singer with a voice

That isn't pretty anyway

Yet never learned to sing

Which is quite superfluous

As all he does is scream -

Take the crown from Clooney, Crosby,

Sills and Blossom Dearie.

8-14-13

 

No People

I don't write about the human race.

I can't look any deeper than I see.

I write about some entities from space,

Though neither do I know, or they know me.

Human beings congregate and play.

The youngest of them even understands.

If you are alone, or if you're gay,

The kindest ones just laugh behind their hands.

They think they're right. Oh Jesus! Do they ever!

Proposition 8. The south. And gore.

They laugh and smile. But nothing's very clever.

They have opinions, but they go to war.

8-14-13

 

Repression

He didn't tell the truth.

He never had.

Jeopardy.

Making someone mad.

Startled into terror,

Hiding fears,

He'd been like this for

67 years.

At last he said

(The question was abrupt),

“It bothers me when people interrupt.”
A twitch. A tremor.

He began to shake.

And then collapsed.

A horrible mistake!

Just once he told the truth.

He hadn't lied.

In a spasm suddenly he died.

8-14-13

Poems

Analysis

A thoughtless repetitious beat -

Violent concussions -

He pounds the drum -

And several men -

A thing that I was told

Many years ago

Is easily accomplished

By a teenage boy -

Grab the strings of four guitars

And gratify their souls -

And a singer with a voice

That isn't pretty anyway

Yet never learned to sing

Which is quite superfluous

As all he does is scream -

Take the crown from Clooney, Crosby,

Sills and Blossom Dearie.

8-14-13

 

No People

I don't write about the human race.

I can't look any deeper than I see.

I write about some entities from space,

Though neither do I know, or they know me.

Human beings congregate and play.

The youngest of them even understands.

If you are alone, or if you're gay,

The kindest ones just laugh behind their hands.

They think they're right. Oh Jesus! Do they ever!

Proposition 8. The south. And gore.

They laugh and smile. But nothing's very clever.

They have opinions, but they go to war.

8-14-13

 

Repression

He didn't tell the truth.

He never had.

Jeopardy.

Making someone mad.

Startled into terror,

Hiding fears,

He'd been like this for

67 years.

At last he said

(The question was abrupt),

“It bothers me when people interrupt.”
A twitch. A tremor.

He began to shake.

And then collapsed.

A horrible mistake!

Just once he told the truth.

He hadn't lied.

In a spasm suddenly he died.

8-14-13

 

Elizabethan

Without poetic diction,

Am I Elizabethan?

Careful introverted thought

And wry complexities.

Were Elizabethans mad

And hanging to their lovers?

Waiting to be taken to

The Tower and beheaded.

And did they understand

The people they reflected,

Or sit alone in coffee shops

With frequent apercus?

8-13-13

 

Death

I shall know – quite soon I think -

What's beyond the lifeless brink.

Death will lift the silent pall,

And sightless eyes see naught at all.

My poesy is written now,

Occasionally good in youth,

But all the same. To bathe the sow

In garbage mixed with lines of truth.

Books and poems through the years

Are scattered. As my thinking clears

I lately write – for just a span -

The best I could – or ever can.

They won't dig a hole for me

Because I cannot pay for it.

When nature rings a toll for me,

Pick a rainy day for it.

Humanity is more absurd

Than anything I can conceive.

Death! I loathe to say the word.

They fuck, destroy, believe.

8-13-13

Status

Ugliness makes beauty seem

Unnatural and odd.

America! No colleges

In the land of god.

Philistines who never knew

The beautiful was there,

And weather every crisis

With a pistol and a prayer.

8-13-13

 

A Fragment

People that you're fond of make you happy,

So you're nice. But people you don't like

Make you feel unhappy so you frown.

People that you wish would treat you nicer

Are people who don't want you there at all.

8-13-13