A Sonnet for J

This peasant life, though pleasant be, it sours

Like ripest fruit, which gives so sweet a taste

That from the vine the sated mouth devours

Yet over time decays to naught but waste.

My roots within her earth — she has a hold

On me. I grow in dreams, in fertile lands

Of queens and light and cliffs of glass and gold,
Forsaking stalk and stem and their demands.

My plight and plot: a slow death by ennui,

Light-starv'd in this suburban oubliette,

But in my mind a meadow, light, and She. . .
I dwell within, I wilt without, and yet,

Although my blossom withers here, I know

My heartwood's safe with her. She makes it grow.

Any Appropriate Title Would Be Too Mushy

confessions (Photo credit: dickuhne)

I really was a horrible, romantic, lonely, lovelorn galoot in college. Here's a short poem from 1995:

With beauty all around me,
My mind absorbs the art
Of every face that smiles
And tears my world apart.

April 4, 1968

All the trees in the yard are dead,
Bare brittle branches sway in the wind,
Lifeless on a clear, sunny day.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was taken from the world 46 years ago today. The preceding was a poem I wrote on this date in 1995. Every time I read it, I see a different interpretation. Which, I guess, is why I like it.

New Readings of Old Poems

An old friend has inadvertently inspired me to thumb through old journals going back over two decades, even though I can't possibly be that old. I had already planned on posting a bunch of poems this month -- National Poetry Month -- but now many of those will be poems I wrote long ago, to people I haven't seen in years.

In college, I swung wide arcs from lovelorn to world-weary. Looking back, I really should have been medicated.

Here's one I wrote for Alison that she never saw:

Of
Love --
For me
To be
Much freer
To see her
Without my mask --
No easy task.
I sense the presence
Of my renaissance
In the curls of her hair,
In her deep brown eyes, where
I would dive and die so deep
And leave my heart there to sleep,
And with each beat my love extol --
A buried treasure in her soul.

National Poetry Month 2014

Some people say that poetry is hard,
And they are right. The thought of rhythm, rhyme,
And form, and worse — the shadow of the Bard
Who set the standard high for all of time —

It's all enough to drive the meek away,
To lock their inner poets deep inside.
But April marks a change: It's thirty days
Of celebrating poems nationwide!

So if you've thought of writing, now and then,
From out that part inside that rarely speaks,
The time is now to grab your fav'rite pen
And write a poem in the coming weeks.

And even if your poem coughs and dies,
Success can only come to him who tries.