Boring

Boring

Only Keats can I read constantly,

Then Millay. Not even Rupert Brooke.

Every year the Man Who Is In Charge

Passes out awards for poetry

To men who have degrees and don't have talent.

All my verse is good but quickly palls,

Swapping magic for accomplishment.

Where's the joy that children seem to feel?

Therein is both poetry and music.

Children! Beasts who scream in restaurants!

4-15-14

Worlds

There are 40 billion habitable

Earth-size planets

Circling in the massive Milky Way.

This is what the Times disclosed today.

Sagan would be happy,

The middle of his dream,

Countless worlds as more than what they seem.

11-5-13

With no progenitors to trust

With no progenitors to trust

And so enforce beliefs

And prejudice and thoughts

That blind and deafen,

My brain is free unbound to think

Whatever can be thought

By a tiny intellect like mine,

Usually occupied

By dated musicals,

Anecdotes and lyrics I remember.

1-14-13

 

His Mother

She beat him and she screamed at him.

At night when he had dreams,

He called to her.

She sat beside his bed.

Now she's in a grave.

He doesn't care.

7-5-13

 

Parents

The soul of my existence

When I am with you

Is not to be my mother

And do what she would do,

To smile when you are happy,

And when you want to play,

Not to be my father

And say what he would say.

6-3-13

 

Morning

The propulsion against sitting close

Can blow away the castle

And keep the ocean in.

But oceans can leak out

In a hundred different guises,

And any castle can be reassembled.

George is back. The ocean is serene.

The castle crumbled gladly when I saw him

Early in the darkness of the morning.

Things can happen. Trains back on their tracks

Clatter warmly through the rest of night.

I see my poems differently.

I don't know why that happened.

They look good, soundly and securely as

They never did before.

Earth is maladjusting.

Republicans announced

They've taken homosexuals as

People with their rights.

Nevada is a brave and splendid

State – perhaps the only one

To cross the finish line.

4-14-14

Fragment

Beauty and form amid

Chaos and crap -

Whitman began it

While Keats was alive.

Poetry's gibberish.

Music is rap.

Artist's get drunk in a dive.

I'm speaking of art.

It applies to the world.

The Modern World

The Modern World

The modern world is wonderful.

Art at last is free

Of everything that made it beautiful.

The modern world is wonderful.

Makes you want to get

Out of it as fast as possible.

Everyone's at war.

Soon we'll reach our quota

And have as many as we can afford.
Everyone who was

An idiot in high school

Is getting rich in music videos.

Turing made their world

(Computer games and Facebook).

They prosecuted him for being gay.

8-6-13

Death Bed Conversion

Lines

He gradually fell apart -

Didn't clip his nails -

Didn't cut his hair -

Didn't change his clothes -

In his disrepair

Didn't shave or shower -

Didn't even care -

He only had the verse

He wrote but never read -

It couldn't have been worse

Or so his doctor said -

4-11-14

Death Bed Conversion

Fifty years they battered him

With everything they had.

Slow healing wounds did nothing to

Convince him they were bad.

He said when he lay dying,

You were right and I was wrong.

People are disgusting.

So I die and end my song.”

He who doesn't have a home

Will have a soul inside.

He who cannot find a place

Will make a place and hide.

He who gave away his toys

And so has no possessions

Will keep what no one can purloin -

Some curious confessions.

4-11-14

 

Personalities

I don't recall what Uncle Byron said,

But I remember jokes by Oscar Wilde.

The trip into the mountains with my mother

In the photo album in my mind

Melts in memory like mountain snow

On a tree. But clearly I can see

Dearest Mrs. Dobson as Aunt Eller

Hauling out a gun in “Oklahoma!”

And that was over 50 years ago.

I remember Keats, but not my the news.

What Noel Coward said, but not my father.

Forgotten songs from 1934,

Popular before I was alive.

It's my world, but anyone is welcome,

If there's any thing he'd care to add.

4-11-14

 

Treatment Of The Sick

Don't blame a man who's sick,

If you're so inclined.

Forgive his sad propensity

To beat and rob you blind.

There is something missing

Somewhere in his mind.

Try to understand him,

And show him life is kind.

If he takes your car,

Help him learn to drive.

Show him there are reasons

To laugh and be alive.

Open your apartment.

When all his friends arrive,

Let them feel they're wanted

Outside their little dive.

4-12-14

 

Waking Up

Most everyone wakes up

Different (the sea)

As if they had a second

Personality.

In about an hour,

In a little while,

Things will fall in place,

And they'll begin to smile.

But this little taste

Of underworld at dawn

Is something that endures

Until the dream is gone.

4-12-14

Topics

I don't know what to write,

Adhering to the law,

Accurate descriptions

Of life's phenomena.

Not to justify them,

Depict but not explain,

Standing in the garden,

Crying in the rain.

I'm not a man with vision

Born with things to write,

But born with just some empty

Urges to indite.

4-12-14

Day Treatment

A Cat Tale

Cats and kittens like to sit in boxes

Peeking over flaps around the edge.

There they sit like little furry Sphinxes

In very small and even giant boxes

Watching everything that's going on.

But if the box is small and barely fits them,

They're even more content to sit and stare.

2-24-14

 

Day Treatment

What's a symbiosis?

I don't know what it means.

She believed I did.

John stole all the scenes.

Begin was a hunk,

Strutted like a king,

Doing therapy,

Didn't know a thing.

Ann was very witty,

Skinny as a bean,

Shooed away the underdog,

Laughing like a queen.

Transactional Analysis,

Always worth a laugh.

The patients sat and stared

In horror at the staff.

4-10-14

 

La guerre

Gays are in a battle

Against blue nosed prigs and bigots

In Congress and the churches and at home.

Who will win the battle?

Homosexuals and people.

But god! How much unhappiness before!

4-10-14

 

A Brief Didactic

When morals supersede intelligence,

You have a bigot. When they supersede

Survival (as it very seldom happens),

You have a martyr, duty-bound to death.

In an age that hasn't any values

But louder music, like the death of god,

Who did no favors for the human race,

Morals are anathema to life.

4-11-14

A Comparison

When I reach down to pet a cat

And come back with a fist of teeth -

So it is to read my poems -

Softness filled with stones,

Which inhibit keeping them

To read again, like Keats.

Except a few, so very few,

To live on shelves forever,

Kept to read again because

They're gentle to the touch -

Soft mental touch.

4-11-14

Lines

I am just a poet, but not

Everybody's music,

And my generation

Murdered music bloodily.

Poetry was ripped to pieces.

Now it mocks itself.

To live alone in caves and shadows

Listening to music,

All of it created long

Before Rachmaninov -

All of it imagined long

Before Millay was born.

4-10-14

 

Ron

Your feelings were a flattery.

Your icy disposition

And permanent regard of sex

The reasons I moved out.

When a soul's in swaddling

And he will not wriggle free,

And tells you to be quiet

Every time you mention love -

I left in seven days and felt

The daggers of your truths,

Which could not be construed as flattery.

I cannot say you kept confined

To your sarcophagus.

You found a better lover when I left,

And so did I.

4-10-14

 

Jill

Perhaps she's an example

Of a mind destroyed by drugs.

Whitman, Dylan Thomas,

Ginsberg, Dylan are the poets

She prefers, and Shakespeare -

Is she kidding?

Also me.

Hard and cold – a clam shell

In the sea – at times protruding

Between the halves

A vulnerable tongue.

Don't touch the tongue.

It goes back very quickly.

Your finger will be pinched between the shells.

The tongue came out less often,

And the halves clamped shut more fiercely,

Ready to devour anything that can't escape.

She almost caught my fingers,

But I tossed her to the sea.

The poets she prefers will make

An imbecile of me.

Hardly Shakespeare. But if I'm

No better than the rest,

That's little promise.

Dragged into the gutter.

4-11-14

From The Gutter

“God's World”

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

Thy roaches and thy prickly pears!

Thy rattle snakes, thy grizzly bears!

Thy mustard gas, thine homophobes!

Thine AIDS, thy germs, thy rap, the robes

Around thy white supremacists!

World, world! J. Edgar Hoover's lists!

Long have I known the horrors that appall,

But never knew I this:

The deadly nightshade's kiss,

Which sounds like something out of Johnny Keats

Whom critics mock, tuberculosis eats;

My soul – well, I don't have a soul – the fall

Comes just before the winter. That is all.

(with no apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay)

11-24-10

 

Alone Tonight

Ensconced in my seclusion,
How can poesy be fate?

I have music when I want it,

No one at the garden gate,

Stars when it is midnight

And a moon that stops my breath,

Hidden in dark clouds that are

A replica of death.

Far away the ocean

Beats the shore. I cannot hear it

Except in memory. And I have

Never been less near it.

From the dregs of time

The dragon lifted from its throes,

Suddenly in air, and laughed

Like a pink-lipped rose.

Sequestered in my solitude,

No hope and no remorse,

Like the tale of Nietzsche,

I'll run out and kiss a horse.

10-4-12

 

From The Gutter

He hasn't read a book since grammar school,

And didn't like the one that he read then.

He's sitting on a fender like a fool

Jeering at the educated men.

He's made more babies than a dozen bunnies,

None of whom he's able to support.

More pictures on him than the Sunday funnies,

Tomorrow is another day in court.

10-2-12

 

Day Treatment

What's a symbiosis?

I don't know what it means.

She believed I did.

John stole all the scenes.

Begin was a hunk,

Strutted like a king,

Doing therapy,

Didn't know a thing.

Ann was very witty,

Skinny as a bean,

Shooed away the underdog,

Laughing like a queen.

Transactional Analysis,

Always worth a laugh.

The patients sat and stared

In horror at the staff.

4-10-14

Who?

Elected

Leader of the masses,

Icon of the herds,

Not only one, this hero

Is a man of many words.

4-8-14

 

Spare Stanzas

Listen to the music.

Hear the person scream.

Jesus! Let me wake up!

This has to be a dream.

Around the psycho ward

The Prince of Madness walks

Speaking very quietly

Whenever someone talks.

Around the psycho wards

The nurses lurk with hypos.

But the real banshee in

A poet's life is typos.

My verses have been written.

There's nothing left to see.

Just get me out of debt and let
My friend come back to me.

4-8-14

 

Who?

Very materialistic,

I'm not spiritual at all,

Misanthropic,

But a humanist.

A patchwork of the people,

Nearly everyone I've known,

And what they said,

I don't know who I am.

4-9-14

Free For All

Republicans have whined for years

About the First Amendment -

Unchristian and unconstitutional!

However when it suits them they invoke it to the hilt.

Political donations are free speech.

4-9-14

 

A Wise Dad

My father used to say sententiously,

“No one ever won an argument.”

You bet your life he never lost one either.

4-8-14

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

Like Wilde

Sad Rain

Sad rain, wash away the sea.

Leave the night to madness,

Emptiness, loneliness and me.

Two years ago (they're dated)

I did write poetry.

It went to prose and rhythm.

But never was I free.

As I read the verse, I thought that I

Will try to grasp again (the gravid sky)

A melody, a picture and a phrase

To give some value to my latter days,

The fact that I am here, and didn't die.

I honor other poets, but I see

The one that I shall imitate is me.

4-7-14

 

My Aunt Mary

My aunt wrote something.

I don't know

What it was.

And her brother burned it

In the very flame I hope's

Consuming him today.

I cried, “You can't destroy it!”
“It's none of your concern!”
My aunt was very crazy.

She was fond of me.

I was fond of her.

And both of us were crazy.

I went to see her frequently.

I didn't know she wrote.

Her autocratic brother,

Christian homosexual

And homophobic prig,

Made absolutely certain

No one else would know it either.

She's irrevocably dead.

10-25-11

 

Why Beauty?

Why should poems be beautiful?

Keats had said it's so.

I didn't think of beautiful

Some 50 years ago.

Rhythm, rhyme and phrases,

Sensations, feelings too

Stirred gently in a cauldron

Often come out true.

I didn't aim for beauty,

I didn't think of truth

When I tried for poesy

Somewhere in my youth.

But what's the best ambition?
Simply to have fun?

Or crouch atop a building

With a newly purchased gun?

4-7-14

The Purple

Dylan! Sondheim! Born to royalty,

In age reduced to very common men.

Humility will overcome the kings

When they lie in state. Though now they preen.

Bob and Charlie. Masters of the art

Who never left the castles they were born in.

There they dwell with others of their ilk

And pedigrees. They do not sting each other.

4-7-14

 

Reading The News Again

How many of two millions (this is sport,

Playing Democrat) did he deport?

Men without a crime. Another trauma

For the harbor lady standing taller

Than the president without a pallor.

Our Hero. Every speech the people cheer.

Those idiots aren't possibly sincere!

Nothing changes but the Hero's name

And color. Every president's the same.

Some happy dissidence can be expected,

So the First Amendment seems respected.

4-7-14

The Homeless

Everywhere I see them,

Like flies on window glass

In the afternoon.

Hirsute, young and old.

The fall of a civilization

Made by Man for Man?

Stolen grocery carts,

Cans and bags and blankets

Mingle with the crowds.

No one seems to notice,

Much less care.

The death of art and talent?

The mindless seem to like

The violence

And ersatz savoir faire.

4-8-14

 

Like Wilde

Purple patches years ago,

Harbinger of madness -

Here and now, tonight,

Little droplets, bursts of light.

Weary brain beware.

Why be wary now?

Anywhere to go?

No exit anyhow.

4-8-14