On Poetry

Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire. He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry.

Metaphor

Metaphor is the mystery. The poetic act is both a participation in and apprehension of that mystery. A poem may affect us by its lyricism and its passion, by its matching sound with sense -- but without metaphor and the mystery it confers, poetry belongs solely to the decorative or rhetorical arts. It is by metaphor that a poem draws us back again and again to trace the lines that lead to the heart of being and to ourselves.

The Meaning of a Poem

The meaning of a poem comes not from the words, but from the transmutation that occurs in the heart of the poet at the time the poem is written. In all poetry that is not simply decorative, there is an elemental activity of consciousness, a sustained golden moment that triumphs over raw experience. The meaning of a poem is that activity of mind, triumphant over the despair that the words of the poem may convey.

The poem that follows has elicited the dreaded no comment except from one good friend who did me the kindness of asking about the word ‘gimble'. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy the poem as if it were written by someone else for whom poetry brings into view such beauty that we but suffer the more for its absence. It is a backward way of praising poetry. That’s what I think antipoetry is doing. Anyway, here is the worthless little bit of a stinker in its final ode-rous form. Hold your nose . . . . .

Poetry Stinks

Poetry gives us just enough of what is real
to make us howl and gimble in the night,
too far from moon and what is our fate
To make it right. It stinks a lot!

At Seventy-Two

As I have grown older, I have plunged into language as though I were one of Melville's Catskill eagles. Poetry has given me a kind of second sight that sustains me in the dark places and makes me invisible in the light. Now, at seventy-two, poetry is leading me into a deeper knowledge: to be truly alive means to experience myself as essentially compounded of earth and wind and all other living things. It all breathes fire. I now want more than words. I seek to understand simile and metaphor as reality itself. Man is as much wolf as wind, as much rain as mind and so I would be. I know that I am approaching the age of oblivion whose plentitude is ALL, an empty mirror that is yet full of life. What I tell my students is that to be truly alive is to strive passionately for one’s own truth. My truth is the poetry of mind and heart and of Being itself.

Two fingers or three

(boy girl, sitting on a bench in lamplight)

There's something else bothering you, isn’t there?

No, I’m fine.

No you’re not.

I tell you I am fine.

I’ll believe that when you can tell me how many fingers I am holding up.

Two.

No, I was holding up three.

No you weren’t.

Yes I was. Try again. How many fingers?

Two!

No, three again. Something's not right.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.

Maybe not, but I know there’s something bothering you.

You’re right! YOU are bothering me.

I knew there was something.

I hate how you always think you know.

Like now?

Exactly! I'm leaving.

Then leave.

I can’t.

Why not?

Because I don’t know where to go.

Home?

No.

Why not?

I can’t tell you.

Well, you can come home with me.

Thank you.

Two fingers or three?

Just drop it.

What?

You got what you wanted, right?

What's that?

Me.

Turn the page

Turn the page and you will find
The emptiness you have been searching for:
A blank page is waiting for you,
Alone now for the last time,
Yearning for all that is not there,
Each word you write so full of life
You'll never want to turn the page again.
The sun will spin and the moon will weave
Itself into the mystery of the night
Where now you find yourself
As you truly are: not really there at all.
Let the land flourish and be whole,
Let the thunder bring you home.

Where no angels reside

You want to know

what is your life

but all you find

are words, zeroes

and ones,

and bread crumbs

in your beard.

Where you ask

is the red iris

that is your heart?

Where the feather

of your breath

or your absence?

You want to become

what you already are

while there is still a you

that cares how light

becomes a face

and looks at you

like you were glass.

There comes a time

when love turns away

and finds itself in dust

where no angels reside,

no one teaches you

how to live, where

no one knows

you are not there.

Leonora's Photography: 11-15

youtu.be/HTRw_rsg9HM
(Marc Mellits- Gravity-)

© Leonora; all rights reserved
Underground

youtu.be/S8JxMvMFL4U
(Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet Nº7-)

© Leonora; all rights reserved
La danse du serpent

youtu.be/KZP3V76UBUE
(Louise Vertigo - La Danse Du Serpent-)

© Leonora; all rights reserved
Les oiseaux ne savent pas quand c'est dimanche.

"(..) je voudrais un moment me transformer en oiseau pour connaître le contentement et la joie qu'ils éprouvent à vivre"
Giacomo Leopardi, poète italien (1798-1837) in"Petites oeuvres morales"

© Leonora; all rights reserved

Chaque rayon de lune est un rayon de miel

youtu.be/Nft7tiy5E-w
(Claude Debussy - Suite Bergamasque - Clair de Lune-)

You can find more of Leonora's superb work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/150410475@N04/

Summer Rain

If it would only rain my words would pour forth like girls and boys too young to know shame O they are bold as I would be the rain falls I am young again dance touch while the music plays so falls the rain O she is here there are tears of joy tears songs of praise for the beauty of the day earth yields up its flowers to her hand turns to gentle thunder her body lifts and holds her laughter makes the night shudder unbinds her hair and falls to me now here now there like summer rain

Leaf Fall

Follow the path
of leaf fall,
the short cut home
twixt sky and dream.

When you're there,
you'll be right here,
safe with me.

“Coréâme” by Camille Schuwer

Coréâme

Because you did not lie on the day you were born,

The seers’ sun, the incandescent light,

delighted you under your eyelids, and the wheel of greenery

turning with your blood, became centrifugal,

splattered stones, was truth.

There were smiling eyes and crying flowers

at the end of the hands cutting the day’s rose,

the buzzing mouth to prophesize,

a black brain to bury oblivion.

At the foot of the towers the soil

was like a place ceded without a fight;

the dead looked like trees,

like their flagging flames.

The soul told the body:

if you like, I’ll take you everywhere without touching your clothes,

without letting you fall out of sleep;

you will go through the walls, the sheets of lead;

your raging thoughts, my star presence,

will redden the patients’ brow,

and steal from the poet his turn to speak;

you see the sun’s noise, the perpetual movement

of the bee that stays in one place

like a pulsating factory;

the same night, the same sun; you understand it all.

And the body answered: I hear less than the deaf,

I am thirsty, I feel dizzy at the edge of my anthill,

they fatten me like a queen, I am losing my seeds

and my blood, in spite of my heart’s rose window;

I scream, I have my own light, I feel hot in the snow;

O Sisyphus! O the ordeal! I fall and get up again;

time is feeding my strength and my fatigue;

please just give me a little foliage before I die.

The soul also said— sounding like Antigone:

who knows the weight of the shadow, a thin column,

O my palm tree head holder,

here is the wind of my mind, without all its glories;

and the heavy light one, supporting supported

wobbled along carrying its tower of light.

Dazzled they sleep in the middle of the darkness,

black, it slumbers, as the mangoes roll out of its hands.

Translator's Note: The paranomastic title is a pun on “Corps et âme“, which sounds exactly the same and means “Body and soul”.The created word means nothing in French. I have left it in French

"Coréâme" was published in Transition, No. 27, 1938: Download Coréâme II

Background: Transition: A Quarterly Review:

"For Peace" (Pour la Paix) by Jacques Baron

For Peace

With time passing, with water flowing, with

the workers leaving the factories,

with the rumours of the stock market,

with the memories, the desires, the wasted moments,

the doors opening and shutting without knowing why

with all that we wanted to say that remained on the edge

of our lips,

with a landscape already seen in a dream,

with the habit of reading newspapers,

we went for that romantic stroll we had promised ourselves

a long time ago.

We took beaten tracks, so beaten that they screamed like beaten dogs,

we wanted to leave them but a sound philosophy would always prevent us from doing so.

We argued with ourselves, we grabbed each other's throats; and tore each other apart

after ferocious insults,

We did not entirely succeed in forgiving ourselves but the heart was in it,

the always obliging heart,

the very bar that grants credit,

until the time when all the paths that you’ve always followed

fall back on you and crush you like four-leaf clovers

pressed between the pages of a book.

Suddenly it is not the same any more,

not exactly the same.

You’ve left you’ve disappeared you are in the air you breathe and you see everything.

You see a woman and you grab her by the waist. She says yes.

She does not really know what she means by this.

But you hear the rustling of wings.

The dairyman’s hello is brighter.

The large drapes of one’s memory solemnly fall down

behind a procession of runaway actors.

But the branches of the pepper trees are stirred

in sweltering countries, where are buried under the sands,

temples dedicated to bloody cults.

Out of one’s nerves a rug is made on which to lie down

and one fears

that all pain might have vanished.

You stop writing to your friends

and you are forgiving about their letters gathered in the dew.

And all that remains slowly warms up.

The horizon becomes blurred

and you congratulate yourself that the good weather will last.

You call on the muses. They pretend not to

understand;

they are camping,

catching centaurs running.

But all that happens is good.

You are as pleased as when you’ve passed the age

of the New Year’s visits.

You slip into the Adriatic Sea near a charming woman

whose eyes are islands peopled with castaways

sensing their hour of deliverance.

She is swimming.

Now is not the time to understand.

"Pour la Paix" was published in Transition, No. 27, 1938: View this photo

Background: Transition: A Quarterly Review

Leonora's Photography: 6-10

Le monde de la carpe koï

Garden with a view

Observatoire sous-marin

Orgues urbaines

Dans l’eau du temps qui coule à petit bruit

You can find more of Leonora's superb work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/150410475@N04/

Hovey Jude Corbin aka Henry David: singer-songwriter: "The lesser I suffer, the lesser I know"

Singer-Songwriter: https://www.hoveyjudecorbin.com

I was the proud teacher of Henry David in English, Latin and Ancient Greek, 2015-2018.

Here is what Henry David wrote for his "This I Believe" statement, the last writing assignment of his senior year.

Hovey Jude Corbin

I think I believe in too much to be whole;
a rose with too many thorns, most would not hold.
They tell me, when grown up, I’ll learn to let go – Yet…
The lesser I suffer, the lesser I know.

I believe in the wand’rer who’s stuck in my soul,
I grit my teeth, bid him to lay down his load.
He’ll make me his home ‘til I fin’ly grow old,
and we’ll riot like schoolboys, and tear up the road.

I believe in the song that I’ve kept in my chest,
and I’ll keep singing on to the day that I rest.
I’ll rot away blissful, greeting Death with a smile,
into torture we’ll go, singing both all the while.

I want to believe in the honey of love,
I’ve felt it before and I house the white dove.
Still it cuts me to pieces, and tears me to shreds,
I lie awake bludgeoned ‘til daybreak instead.

I believe in the heart that will beat my life long,
there the drum and the drum and the drum through the wrong.
It makes me a well, and it fills to the brim,
to be lost in the streets as they slowly go dim.

I believe I’ll be lost ‘til I finally pass,
that I’ll endlessly wrestle myself to the last.
I will toss and return to the fasting, and drought;
I will eat of myself from the in to the out.

I believe that I know how I’m hopelessly not,
that I’m clueless as here, even now, as I’m shot
by my old smoking gun that I light on mine own
as I sit and pretend that I’m carved into stone.

I think I believe in too much to be whole,
that I’ll keep a tight grip on the dreams that I hold,
I know that, still someday, I’ll need to let go. Yet! –
The lesser I suffer, the lesser I know.

~Henry David

Surprise

Suddenly
this morning
I knew the rainbow
to be a bird

of my soul
taking flight
and vanishing
into cloud and sky

as I am bound
to do, shimmering
not with color
but surprise

to be at last
not here.

"Anonyme" by André de Richaud

Anonyme

Les biches de l'amour ont pleuré jusqu'à l'aube
les bêtes de ma vie ont toutes les yeux faux
Et toi — tête de gel qui sanglotte dans la flamme
sans pouvoir redevenir le nuage
visage étonné des étincelles du silence
calciné par l'odeur des cuivres emmêlés
et les chevaux du rire impatients
de mordre la chair des astres ennuyés
et les femmes de verre qui se brisent quand on ne pense plus à elle
et celui qui se décompose en souriant
au fond de la glace miroitante
et sa jambe lépreuse de soleil
et son sexe couvert de rosée
et le ventre de cette femme tout parsemé d'hirondelles évanouies
qui vont et viennent et passent à travers les anneaux de diamant comme
si le diamant ne pouvait se faire comprendre
sans le secours des oiseaux du ciel

- -

Parle nuit plus douce que les amandiers de sa bouche
qui neigent sur ma langue quand l'heure se couche
Parle, fantôme étonné du silence.

* * * * *

Nameless

Until dawn the does of love cried
all animals in my life have phony eyes
And you—frozen head sobbing in the flame
unable to be cloud again
your face baffled by the sparks of silence
charred by the smell of tangled brasses
and the horses of laughter eager to bite
the bored stars’ flesh
and the glass women breaking through oblivion
and the one who is smiling as he rots away
at the bottom of the shimmering ice
and his leg under the dappling sun
and his sex covered in dew
and that woman’s belly dotted all over with unconscious swallows
going in and out of the diamond rings as if
the diamond could not be grasped
without the help of the birds in the sky
_ _

Speak up night, softer than the almond trees in her mouth
falling like snow onto my tongue when the time retires at night
Speak to me, ghost amazed by the silence.

André de Richaud's "Anonyme" originally appeared in Transition: A Quarterly Review, No. 26, 1937.

Background: Transition: A Quarterly Review

Blue hair and all that

For -Bel

In the beginning your hair was blue like fire and you had webbed feet and no knees. You were different and beautiful and strange and somehow despite all the daily crushing normalization, all those pretty pictures of what we are not, despite all the soulless practicalities of life and more and there is so damn much more, especially the cool hypocrisy required just to get along, you are still strange and different and beautiful, blue hair and all.

She: What? Where did you get all that? Was it something I said?

He: You tell me. Where does 'all that' come from?

She: That’s not an answer and you know it.

He: Sometimes I don’t seem to know the difference between a question and an answer.

She: That seems pretty basic to me.

He: The “not knowing”?

She: No, “the difference”. It’s the simplest thing. You can’t keep answering a question with a question. It's annoying.

He: Well, then, let me try again: a question is when you hear the wind calling and an answer is when you stop listening.

She: You’re so strange!

He: I suppose so. Hey, is that blue hair natural?

She: You tell me. What do you think?

He: And your feet, they’re webbed? And you have --

She: I know, I know, I have no knees and all that.

She had had quite enough and told him so, though the air was moving. When she spoke again, she asked almost in a whisper, "Is my hair really blue?" But this time, all she heard was wind.

a dead-wall reverie

Ibidom. Is no thinking thing here but the peepinghouse round it goes is there nothing there from sea to rounda coda no knowing no browbeating to hoedown the adamses and damses looking roundaway the wailing goes awagginawaning about the off wall but there shebares all to what is not there the museymusik makes you trot and drop so rainruns and her lastofall. There!

Oranges

He was determined this time not to cut his fingers as he sliced the oranges. He would focus and keep his fingers well away from the blade. He remembered all too well how previously his blood had flowed onto the oranges and pooled on the plate. He knew it wasn’t just because he was getting old, fading into memory and the lure of the trees and his first kiss. She had been as nervous as he and had closed her eyes. Now all he could think of was feeding her oranges and the taste on her lips. And suddenly, she had bitten his lip, making it bleed. And then, more softly, she was feeding him. She was delicious and he . . . . he was lost in the trees. He put the knife down and wept.

Touch

Your skin like this ground

Upon which all things run

Is scarred and cracked

yet yearns for life

and wordless words

that speak of love.

You lie there

and think of spring.

You are as old as rain

and ever young.

A way of dying

He held her feathers in his hand

But the wind took them for itself.

There was nothing but these words

To write on this dry coarse paper,

Her skin, the red ink she died of

Running off like a mountain stream.

What poets do

A hawk is as little

a darting thought

or glance

As it is a sky-wolf

or windborne voice.

It is a name

for what cannot be

named within ourselves

and would else be lost.

So we stop and die

But would bravely say,

We dive like hawks

and climb the sky.

So deep his eyes

for mickey

There is life and death

and life again, ground

to common cosmic

dust. Here we end

and begin again,

his eyes so deep

we find in death

his life and love

within ourselves.

Ber: Picture of the Day 209 - 213

Blue Iris: Photography by Alec Himwich

https://www.alechimwich.com

On not explaining ourselves away

It is a common response in light of all that neuroscience has told us of our circuitry to ask how a machine, however complicated, could ever exercise free choice and thereby allow individuals to be responsible for their actions, as we in fact experience ourselves to be. If we are machines, then free choice is not possible. We might well ask if there is not some other approach that would resolve the question of personal responsibility, one that does not require any determination regarding free will or the findings of neuroscience. One such possibility is simply to look to our engagement with life and allow our actions to speak for themselves as irreducible facts that are not to be explained away by any manner of ulterior reasoning. Our answers to the questions of value that life inevitably puts to us would be thus plainly stated and speak of the only reality and the only truth we can ever know.

Ber: Picture of the Day 204, 205, 206, 207, 208

To see more of Ber Himwich's photography, go to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/berhimwich/

No, not I / Revision

No, Not I*

I did not do
the thing I did,
nor say aught
that I have said.

Nor will I die
Like other men.
I will decline,
and lie in bed.

*Hamlet, III.i, 96-97; V, gravediggers

* * *

Revision

If only 'lie'
would take a nap,
but like my tale
it likes to wag:

nor did I say
what I have said,

Which I prefer, but
would miss the play.

Most would say, what’s the point?
Such slender threads are all my thought.

“I am not Prince Hamlet nor meant to be” --
Eliot says and does not say,
revels here are ever ended.

Dying well

She wore no more
than her eyes,
She held the ring
and spoke her vow.
Simple as breath,
as wind she died.

We turned now
to hear him speak,
but all we heard,
as he fell, was
the fall of rain
in every word.

We all agreed
they both died well.
We could not hear
each to each
their vows betrayed
in the river's deep.

A Letter from Charles Eaton

I have the great good fortune of having Charles for a friend. Just how fortunate I am you can see if you read his attached letter to me which, though typical of his correspondence, is in no other way customary. He is not just an old school epistolarian. He is a philosopher, whose conversation is as inspirational as his writing. Charles is the husband of Pauline Eaton, whose ecstatic pictures you can find on this site. Pauline is a consummate artist and, if she will forgive me, a determined mystic. What Pauline does with her paints Charles does with language. Though their work may look different, they are drawing from the same well.

Download Poems- Himwich Eaton Stevenson Henley[2]

Reading lesson

(for Peter)

Mom, who is dad talking to? Friends who write.

Where did he meet them? In books.

Is he talking to himself? Yes.

Is he crazy? Yes, a little.

Will I be crazy like dad one day? Just keep reading.

Can I read dad’s books some day? Of course, he is talking to you.

Are you crazy too, Mom? A little. I am talking to you, aren’t I?

But Dad is so quiet when he writes. Yes, he talks and talks.

Like me? Yes, little one, like you.

Moon walk

Walking through days
I have walked through
long ago, same
step and stride, same
heart wanting something

more; yet today
is the only day
I can’t remember you
Walking through the years
to find me standing

here alone, longing
for the moon,
Its light buried
in my heart of hearts:

Be with you soon.

Pauline, Charles and Hugh

Photograph by Ber Himwich

What the eye sees
Is true, though
only a shadow
of the truth.

What remains
Is ours alone
and holds us
All as one.

No one can take
What is not theirs
To give: a heart,
a mind, a simple

soul and what
at last is grace.
Just so are we
For what remains

So simply bound
As friends.

Some

For Emily

It's but a drop of rain -
However slight its sum -
It will dissolve the sky
and swallow up the sun
. . . . .

What can lift the fallen soul
And make it feel its toes?
Don’t hold your breath
That is the key
And be it but the air
You’ll light upon a wayward word
And turning -- dancing there

She

She unraveled
at my feet
like the sea

like the sea
She rose and wept
and called to me

Now I call to you
with a thousand voices
of a thousand seas.

What soft tune

What soft tune
Turns the moon
Through its stations?

No lover's art
Shapes the night
And makes it move

Only the note
Of a dying bird
In its dark nest

Sings it round
The earth
And calls it home.

To be wholly there

If we were wholly open
To earth, tree and flower,
There would be no poems
Only the chattering silence
Of wind, hoofbeat, and rain.
For to be wholly there
Is to die 10.000 times,
Each sight and sound
A thread that binds us close
and makes us whole.

Some More

Sewing

Is it possible to love
and be alone? he asks,
but she, worrying at buttons,
just mutters, Some days,
my love, are better than others.

Nothing but wind

I’ve stopped dying and breathing,
But you, my love, fall upon me like skin,
Like rain that streams through my veins,
And you teach me to breathe again
And how to die again and again
Until I become nothing but wind.

What is not there

Though I am known to God
As Hughlings, my friends call me
Hugh and leave it at that --
Grace takes care of the rest.

Though I do not believe
In anything or have any Jesus,
Yet I retain a kind of genius
For harmless lies.

It is as if during the day
I can still see the stars
Blazing out of the night
And truly see what is

not there. Some say
it is a harmless madness --
My friends though look deep
Into what were once my eyes

And all they see is night.

Getting it up with Shakespeare

Love, friends, is deadly. You may wonder,
Am I suffering from a broken heart
Or has love, freely given,
Not been returned? To which I say,
Yes, O Yes, Yes!
Beat the drums and let the bagpipes play
And I will march ripe into that narrow patch
Of mind and sand and play, She loves me
She loves me not, and haply saw
My soul in two.
I shall send her flowers,
Long purples that prickly boys
Call a grosser name,
But she will say as maidens do,
"How could you be so lame?"

Buttons

Smoke rising burnt orange then down around the edge until the tenderness binding flung into the night curving endlessly, her gift her fire dying in my arms her body rising until nothing but the bloom of sighing herself to sleep tight as the moon and flying.

(untitled)

You will come to the end
of your high story,
your body broken,
your spirit weak and alone,
the goal still distant,
yet on your lips a song
of no regret as you
set out a final time
on a ship unrigged,
your self the wind
and sky and sea.

Signs along the way

NO SPOONING ALLOWED ON CAMPUS

So young folks

have only soup

and are always

hungry.

DON’T TOUCH THE FLOWERS!

They are not for you!

(After all, you are not dead.)

NO HUNTING ALLOWED!

Students Are Out of Season.

Spring cannot be far behind!

Oracle

For far too long
I’ve been hostage
To the fates.
No more.
I will not play.
Do what you will,
I will not obey.

Of course, you will.
So runs the wind.
It's the air you breathe,
the song you sing.
So stirs the day,
You hear it still.
You will obey.

Uncommon Wisdom 1 & 2

If you want to praise acceptably, be very precise. Inattentive praise is almost an insult.

-- Eva Brann, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul, p. 423

I hope whatever you’re doing,

you’re stopping now and then

and

not doing it at all.

--- James Fadiman, quoted in Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, p. 282

Aria One

Aria says

She’s worlds away,
In this one she is lost,
Though some would say
She’s found a home
And can never be
apart. She holds
So still she travels
fast, like love
before it’s asked.

Comments (0)

By lamplight

There is before me in my room
An old lamp that burns
With no bulb screwed in.
It gets its light from years ago
When my father would read to me
Of little mice who ruled the house
And left my room a fearful sight,
My toys and clothes all here and there --
He smiled his smile, as I do mine,
Beneath this lamp and its brief light.

Call Parra Neruda

Call Parra Neruda and see how he likes it

He has a fine wife who does what she pleases

I see

Call Parra Neruda and see how he likes it

Love’s cornered the market on health and disease

I see

Call Parra Neruda and see how he likes it

Piss off at three, we’re shooting the breeze

I see

Call Parra Neruda and see how he likes it

We die so often we forget how to breathe

Either I am half-crazy or I am a non sequitur

(Disclaimer: This ‘poem’ refers
to no one living or dead
or otherwise not breathing
.)

Not sure what this is,
antipoetry or just
bad poetry, if
even that.

That’s what friends are for –
to bang the pot
and make it sound
like all is lost
or time for bed.

Surely, you will like this not!
Or else, I’m doomed,
though Daisy knows
there’s room enough
to brood for two.
(You know the tune.)

A rose is a rose
and nothing else
will do, she says.
A worm would settle
for nothing less. You,

you bitch and moan, then dance,
hand to hoof and hoof to hand,
dressed in nothing more
than you. You beg,
Bring down the moon!

But all I do is cough
and pee in bed
and call stray cats like you
a friend.

. . . . . .

Be well! Or if it is too
late, make the best
of a sorry fate,

Or slam the door
on what is a face
so much like yours

It must be fake.

(Myself? I can’t stop lying.
It means the world to me.)

(What is the sound of a door
already shut? A blue, blue sky
or a wish to die. Or not.)

(What do you know for sure?
Cogito,
ergo cogito.) No more.

Actually, I could go on
but Daisy says it’s time for bed,
time for love is what she means.
You know, hand in hoof or hoof in hand.
Whatever. Love or hate.
We'll not go quiet in the night.
That’s for sure!
In the name of father
mother orphan child,
let it be so.

Poetry Stinks / Antipoem

This poem has elicited the dreaded no comment except from one good friend who did me the kindness of asking about the word ‘gimble'. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy the poem as if it were written by someone else for whom poetry brings into view such beauty that we but suffer the more for its absence. It is a backward way of praising poetry. That’s what I think antipoetry is doing. Anyway, here is the worthless little bit of a stinker in its final ode-rous form. Hold your nose . . . . .

Poetry Stinks

Poetry gives us just enough of what is real

to make us howl and gimble in the night,

too far from moon and what is our fate

To make it right. It stinks a lot!

A shot in the dark

Fault these eyes prying out the pain a bargain this time but next in line a drowning or sketching this day or night like any other point the shortest distance is dying is such a drag who were shot out of the dark and would go on bitching and so here we stand or suffer for what praying is to breathing and sometimes bark and other times bite like fire and god knows where you're bleeding

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