What To Remember

My Three Loves

The farther back I go for love,

The softer it becomes.

Boys my age of mad demeanor

In their infancy.

I was evil, courting her

Because I loved her brother.

And in the military, he

Was crazy, drunk and warm.

Some years later, my last love

Who carried an umbrella,

Took me to the station where

I vanished into life.

Unable now to love at all

Or rarely feel a thing,

Vicarious through poesy

I diagnose myself.

Maybe I have loved more often.

I don't really know.

But kinder men I've never met

Than those whom I remember.

And now the man I'm living with

Who seems to love me some,

Could easily be my fourth love,

Except the tide was wrong.

3-8-14

Syria

In Syria the archeologists,

Enduring the stupidity of war,

Are digging up the remnants of old gods

While the followers of new ones shoot to kill.

Bones that painted pictures on grey stones

Are buried in the rubble of the ground.

They have no longer anything to prove,

And I believe in nothing except death.

3-8-14

Looking Squarely

A verse devoid of anything

Except an ardent wish to sing

Is less than Shakespeare, more than Keats

And with the nightingale competes.

He liked my poems when we met.

I felt excitement brew.

It's just the pain I can't forget.

Time wearies of that too.

Long ago he liked my songs,

But now I think they're bad.

I didn't know so little time

Was all a poet had.

3-8-14

 

What To Remember

Therapists and doctors

Mocked me with contempt.

With people like myself

My feelings were exempt.

Love and sex commingled.

Books and music met

Gently in she darkness

Underneath the net.

Put aside the pain

It seems that I forget.

Unearth the happiness

I've not forgotten yet.

3-9-14

 

Desperate

Mary Kelly, Mary Nell -

Like sticky jelly coating hell!

I've nearly cleansed my mind of you.

What did you attempt to do?

I wrote a poem, paper, ink,

And showed it to another shrink.

He exploded with a laugh.

Must I admit another gaffe?

Damn! The mysteries devolve

Upon me just the wise can solve!

I am not wise, I am not smart.

My soul belongs to god and art.

3-9-14

Break

I can write confessionals.

I can make them art.

Though they lack the euphony

Of Shakespeare, Keats or Hart.

Lovely! With the metaphors

Of pictures in a glass,

Contented with the summer green

Of lying on the grass.

Anything could happen now.

Nature is a curse!

I could meet a bloody end

While writing happy verse.

Does it make me paranoid

Thinking thoughts like those?

Was I born alone to see

The aphid in the rose?

Damn that hateful epithet!

I hope the shrinks are wrong.

That paranoids will only write

A mediocre song.

3-9-14

Lust

I was never proper.

I was not born a prude.

Efforts made to civilise me

Came across as crude.

Exhibitionism,

Kinky sex and bold,

In men's rooms at the railway stations.

Now I'm just too old.

I never was a prig.

What good men eschew

And Romney calls indecency

Is what I used to do.

But constantly monotonous,

A repetitious bore!

There are other pleasures,

And many please me more.

3-9-14

Back

Regressing back to crazy

When the pain was less,

Therapy was fiction,

Manhattan not a mess.

With values of my choosing,

My poesy was nice,

My cranium a cauldron

I could not open twice.

But I would not be crazy,

Only out of pain.

Either, or. And strangers

Regard me with disdain.

Preachers howled from pulpits

On destiny and sin.

Be like other people

And they'll let you in.

I was on the edges,

A shadow person who

Lingered in the rushes,

And all my loves did too.

3-9-14

Metaphors

Hopes

When I was a little boy

My parents went out dining,

Came home and left a present by my bed.

A plastic box for pencils,

Bottom blue, the top was clear.

I woke and found it lying

By the pillow and my head.

Every time thereafter

On the nights that they were gone,

I thought I'd find a toy the coming dawn.

But not another thing except a yawn.

Two millenia ago

He walked among the crowds,

Healing, saving, touching.

Then ascended into clouds.

How sweet the taste and memory!

Pardoned from all sin.

The people thought that he would come again.

3-8-14

Metaphors


Free association makes an artist,
Weaving colored threads that make a cloth,
Surviving til succeeding generations
Supplant it with another.  Time's a moth.


3-8-14
 Home


Do I have a home again
Who had none before?
A box with several people in it,
Windows and a door?


People think that love's a steeple
Pointing at the sky.
Love is children crying but
Unable to say why.


Rather they're the lack of love
They do not know they want.
An effigy of mothers standing
Cold and hoar and gaunt.


3-8-14

Together


Once you wanted closeness.
Now you don't.
Once you tried to love me.
Now you won't.


Separated by a wall of stone,
Grasping warmth leaves
Empty death alone.


Nothing's closer to the wind than me.
Shakespeare, Keats and I can hear the sea.


3-8-14

Camus & Sartre

Camus & Sartre


Total freedom!  To be free.
The obsession of my age.
Even twisting human nature
Only to be free of it.
Total freedom!  Something's broken.
Total freedom:  Anarchy.


3-7-14

Quotes


My world is very small,
Just Junkets, Bach, Millay and Keats.
Junkets' favorite quote:  “I hear the sea.”
Madness coming.  Mine is from Macbeth:
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -”
To the end, a brief and perfect passage -
Perfect words in perfect form with perfect feeling.
As Junkets read the Blackwoods, I could stare
At this stanza's blasphemy of death,
Not hypnotized, but summarize my fate.


3-7-14


“A Fanfare For The Common Man”


In a rocky valley in a
Dirty little town,
The cognizance of art does not
Exceed the commonplace,
And absolutely no one wants it to.
The misery of loneliness
Surrounded by warm flesh,
Reading only Stephen King,
Have only heard of Bach.
Magazines along the aisles
At supermarket checkouts
Tell the story of the human race:
Losing weight.  Buying guns.
And mattress busting sex.


3-7-14

Cryptic

Pardon

Cheats and chiselers everywhere,

Businesses and people.

The office clerk who keeps a list

Of all that he is owed,

Is looser with the money

He owes others.

Are these the sins that Jesus Christ

Was buried to forgive?
Forgiveness is the best of worlds -

Do it and confess.

3-7-14

 

Poetry

Poetry just fell apart

After 1910.

There hasn't been a decent English

Speaking bard since then.

Universal poetry

Falls far outside my ken.

Perhaps there's beauty in a song

Sung by a foreign pen.

Will the planet ever see

A poetry again?

Except Millay who's gentle songs

Are the last there's been.

3-7-14

 

Enigmatic

Dangling from a noose,

Covered with chagrin,

He didn't want to lose,

Just didn't want to win.

Never asked a question

When one was apropos,

With only a suggestion

Suggesting that he knows.

3-7-14

 

Cryptic

To let you in my house, affect my feelings -

No one's there except the ghosts and me.

By the gate in surreptitious dealings,

I can hear the ocean and the sea.

Does this make sense in any way at all?
Perhaps another rise before the fall,

The final fall,

And in the cemetery nothing stirs.

Nothing in the world but god endures.

1-5-13

If you like my poems, I have collections of them on Amazon, both paperback and Kindle.  The paperbacks are usually $10, and the Kindles usually $1.  To see them, go to Amazon, click Books on the drop down, and type Joseph Hart Poetry on the search bar.

Edna Millay

Edna Millay

Millay, the mother of a hill,

And Lancelot lies dying -

Millay is imbecilic still,

Unless the night is lying.

She wants to lie beneath a wave

And let the big fish eat her

When she's dead. Oh splendid, brave!

Will time in time repeat her?

Eons in the future will

Another Edna be?

Juxtaposing genes until

She walks out of the sea?

3-3-14

Millay

I have found a gentle soul mate,

And it isn't Keats or Brooke.

Like a gargoyle's head I fought her

To begin with, in her in a book.

So ridiculous she's perfect,

An enchantress of the soul,

Several threads in repetition

Woven in a single whole.

A misbegotten love for Jesus

Is her fancy. I don't share it.

Bury her far out at sea,

And let me her gift inherit.

3-3-14

 

Millay

I never sought a lover, but

In Keats I thought I'd found one,

A love too alien to me

For years, and not a sound one.

After Keats, a jelly fish

Enveloping my brain,

Jeffers, Byron, Larkin, Brooke,

Like brief replacements came.

And my heart rejected her

More quickly than the rest.

Now I'm sinking in her sea,

The water at my chest.

I think she is ridiculous,

Impossible, sublime,

But I am standing in her sea,

My feet sunk into slime.

I worship heroes, cling to loves,

As steadfast as a star.

You said I can't give up an ex.

How very right you are.

3-3-14

 

Poverty

Gentle person using drugs

Put poverty in verse.

Infectious laugh and happy hugs,

Reality is worse.

She didn't bastardize the pain

Of penury. It hurts.

I'm at Denny's once again

In one of my new shirts,

Still unwashed and yellow, the

First time I've had it on.

I'm a foolish fellow, the

Last dollar will be gone,

Not tomorrow, not next week,

Before the month has ended.

Quit my debts? Or useless seek

The people I befriended?

3-3-14

Difference

If my verse is lost, there is no god.

I don't want to verify this claim.

Are there gods in Syria,

Africa, Ukraine?

Is there poetry? I couldn't read it.

And if I read it, couldn't understand it.

And if I understood it, wouldn't care.

Aren't people universally the same?

Yet every culture has a foreign art.

Even music, language of the soul,

Is alien to every other soul.

A thousand countries, fundamentally

Alike, completely differ from the others.

Another music, and another god.

3-3-14

 

Disgust

Am I too repulsive for a glance?

We bumped each other. I apologized.

So did he, then quickly turned away

With a distant and disgusted look.

Age is a preliminary death.

A soul too nondescript to be remembered,

Passes too unnoticed to forget.

3-3-14

Ending With Roaches

Joe

I need a better name than Joe.

I used to know a Joseph,

Cruel and despicable -

His obligating love.

I also knew another Joe,

When we were boys together.

He was gentle and endearing,

But I answered love with lust,

And shattered it.

The first Joe was a treasure to be loved,

And loving to a positive degree.

But I loved neither.

And reject the second.

The first Joe still resents me.

And we met again as men.

Remembering some 57 years,

I blushed and he looked angry.

The second Joe?
The less of him the better.

3-1-14

Postmortem

At 67, and he's still alive.

So many years elapsed, so few remaining.

Mistakes, faux pas and blunders! People hurt.

For lack of something else, believe in karma,

As inconsistent as another myth.

An inability to go with faith.

Contradictions, mockery and fraud -

Flattery when truth is obvious.

And yes! The verse is good. And repetition

Won't make bad verse better. The deluded

Project self-love upon their poetry,

Just as Freud regarded every love.

Beyond that distant wall there is a joy.

1-3-14

Superior

Superior to me. An air

Superior to me,

Whose father called naïve,

His father's mother with a laugh

An idiot,

Too selfish to perceive.

Under rocks he never saw

The clarity of sunlight -

Fascinated by the moon in clouds,

Content to be alone and as he is.

If not superior

To anyone in anything,

A kind of grandiose humility.

3-1-14

 

Inside

Sitting on the outside looking in

But drawn by tentacles that do not touch

Into the center of the hurricane.

The glass is there. He's taken. Not a soul

Can pull him through. They reach and try again.

To stay upon the road, go in no houses.

The road is dead. Dead cats lie on its shoulder.

Misunderstanding dominates his life.

3-1-14

Autonomy

All the world's a poem -

Every aspect, each idea.

Just feed it to the alchemy

Of imagination,

And if the Muse is willing, it is art.

One who's self-reliant

Is my ticket into freedom.

Needs are met or otherwise

The organism dies.

Another's independence is

My own soul's privacy.

Either way, the poetry is there.

3-1-14

 

Ending With Roaches

Misunderstood. Misunderstanding.

Living life completely wrong.

Bolted door and open window

Curtains, through the glass I see

The people talk. But not a word explicit.

Lots of roaches crawling out the cracks.

3-2-14

 

State Of Affairs

We won't have any extra,

But today we have enough.

The homicides continue.

Were policemen always rough?

They gathered up the sick ones

And took them to the Bay

And left them on the sidewalk.

And then they went away.

Jacqui Schiff is dead.

A blight has been removed.

Tuesday he is coming home.

By someone he is loved.

My verse is like a diary.

It lacks the crystal edge

That would make it poetry.

I'm hanging from the ledge

Still wrenching with an effort

To hoist myself upon it,

As someone told me years ago.

(I cannot write a sonnet.)

9-22-13

State Of Affairs

Kill the fish! Slaughter and blood!

Shoot the birds! They fall with a thud!

Pray to Jesus, Mohammed and stalk

Intelligent pianists playing Bach!

Turn the psychos out on the street

With no where to sleep and nothing to eat!

You're in the twenty-first century now.

Everyone lives, and no one knows how.

Be a beggar and never get took!

Go into practice and write a book!

Violence, bigotry, rap and war.

The world is over. Who wants more?!

3-3-14

Crows

Gestalt

The pieces fit when people cease to lie.

They make a picture, comprehensible.

When they lie, the picture's surrealistic -

A spider in another spider's web.

3-1-14

 

Keats & Millay

Sweet skeleton of flesh and human being,

Good humans, like an infant in his crib

Ere the evil confiscates his soul.

Ribbed feelings take the structure of a man -

In love, in vivo and at large. Alive!

Keats is dead. And was when he was born.

I never castigate a former love,

And Keats though dead still lives inside my soul.

Alive? An effigy in cardboard of the world.

I worshiped him too long not to rebel,

As a mummy bursts his linen rags.

I'll probably be dead for many years

Ere Millay has gone the way of Keats.

3-1-14

 

Crows

My poems can be beautiful.

I frequently forget

The circumstance, their father,

In which they were conceived.

Like swans aloft the night,

A Phoenix rising from its birth – they live

In books that I occasionally read,

And hope I do not open to a crow.

Crows are real. Probably they live

Like Phoenixes and swans, but they do not

In liquid fly or make a fetching sound.

They beat the air with feathered, broken wings.

Unsteadily and awkwardly they rise.

3-1-14

 

Religion

Children don't survive

With too much Jesus in the house,

Fantasy at odds with nature's

Base reality.

Gullible, they swallow it,

Naively, choke and strangle,

Then live in search of

What they can't define,

But only just remember like a dream.

3-1-14

Counseling

All they did in therapy

Was tell me I was wrong.

Then I fled their therapy.

I wasn't there for long.

Now I'm like the centipede,

Lying in a ditch.

I know I have to move a leg,

But I don't know which.

2-27-14