Three Poems (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)
The Momentary Free Verse
free
later in the daze
I grab
millions
of floating tears
from the sky
watching them splatter
on my hands
like arthritic
pains
like algorithms with sharp
peaks
across a dainty street
in late October
when daze is manifest
throughout the coming
holidays
but out of a stupor
comes lines of lead
business
stress
alacrity
of various mobilities
running without poetry
without
the transcended
whiffs
muttering
Lennon's
Imagine
so now I'm 75
and autumn is upon me
and drones of men and women
are at it again
bustling to make deadlines
to tend to reality
but for me
like an ambitious homeless man
smoking a cigar
in the apathetic rain
imagination
for the sake of escape
is all of what is
everything
in a word
verse The Jazz of Old Wine
life is a disposition dipped in mirth divided by two
annulled in blithe and despair
like our first kiss
in the middle of yesterday's November rain
with fresh pine biting with congealed blue notes while
hissing
in the residue of phony lightning storms
I'd love to hold your story
from tears to triumph in my sheet music
as I wait here on the corner of Hope Street
singing a change gone come
for twenty minutes
inside of twenty long years
and though I long for your utterance
I can still stand here
branded by these watery rainbows
near my shoes
these worn leather brown shoes. Treading The Fire
maybe beauty will remain an abstract dirge
a mantra to be ruminated over
like a submerged leek
becoming tender in warm water
as it seems to me
all as vanished
from our worlds
galaxies
and
cliques
much poetry has propelled
into the bellowing mushroom cloud
of noxious gas
Earth has garnished her seedlings
as the trees convulse in 4/5 time
leading scholars to compendious shame
shaking with violence muttering
intellectual gibberish
to the delight of the spittle
forced out with the saying of it
but what about me
the reporter
the documenter of my purview
what do I make of anything now
I say to myself in this pallid skin
in these pallid days
perhaps I should go tell it on the mountain
given the effulgence of effort
not merely in mind
but of the being
directing my reticent walk
out of a crawling crowd