contents
Poetry
Maelstrom 2
Maelstrom 2
poetry
Poetry.
Was it meant to be
Obscure ramblings of your showcase mind
Or distant thunder mutterings
Of your brain grown old or senile philosophically young?
We use metaphors
Snatching infinite meaning from circumstance
And we are lucky if people who read us know them
Otherwise we remain obscure
Something for scholars and poetry students to decipher.
Who is poetry for?
Cathartic man or woman
Getting out something
May be a whim?
Or are you talking
To people you can’t see
Reading your lines by a light of their own
What you say is not your own
The words have been spoken a thousand times
Before and after. Agreed.
But are you talking?
Do you intend to wind about
With musty bylanes and grey corridors
Chuckling over anecdotes but you know
Or are desperately trying to express
What cannot or should not.
In your discordant harmony of words
Are you berating, trumping,
Planting your foot on and shoving away
Language? Upchucking your
I suppose rigid education?
Getting the real feel?
Why are we writing?
If for others
Can we as poets afford to be so obscure
In our references to private haunts
Or are we just expressing a perfect metaphor
And leave no footnotes to tell the story?
Why are we writing?
What do we mean?
Was it meant to be
Obscure ramblings of your showcase mind
Or distant thunder mutterings
Of your brain grown old or senile philosophically young?
We use metaphors
Snatching infinite meaning from circumstance
And we are lucky if people who read us know them
Otherwise we remain obscure
Something for scholars and poetry students to decipher.
Who is poetry for?
Cathartic man or woman
Getting out something
May be a whim?
Or are you talking
To people you can’t see
Reading your lines by a light of their own
What you say is not your own
The words have been spoken a thousand times
Before and after. Agreed.
But are you talking?
Do you intend to wind about
With musty bylanes and grey corridors
Chuckling over anecdotes but you know
Or are desperately trying to express
What cannot or should not.
In your discordant harmony of words
Are you berating, trumping,
Planting your foot on and shoving away
Language? Upchucking your
I suppose rigid education?
Getting the real feel?
Why are we writing?
If for others
Can we as poets afford to be so obscure
In our references to private haunts
Or are we just expressing a perfect metaphor
And leave no footnotes to tell the story?
Why are we writing?
What do we mean?
maelstrom 2
A paper tear across the sky
Betrays the ragged edge of summer
In patient stillness unfurls the quiet
shimmer of an evening constellation
pulsing over drooping heads at close of day
ensconced in dreams of sullen warmth
That as a mother to a sleeping child
pulls me to its breast to breathe
a sweaty fever to my brow
Bestilled in tropic dreams of burnished seas;
Raving in a jungle of delirium
Oh, if I were by the lake tonight
The frogs would sing summer carols
Of godlike storks that left
Vees and other letters trailing
Wakes; the vortices spin noiselessly.
Betrays the ragged edge of summer
In patient stillness unfurls the quiet
shimmer of an evening constellation
pulsing over drooping heads at close of day
ensconced in dreams of sullen warmth
That as a mother to a sleeping child
pulls me to its breast to breathe
a sweaty fever to my brow
Bestilled in tropic dreams of burnished seas;
Raving in a jungle of delirium
Oh, if I were by the lake tonight
The frogs would sing summer carols
Of godlike storks that left
Vees and other letters trailing
Wakes; the vortices spin noiselessly.