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Ode To A Poet
Poet, you let your passions get the best of you.
It’s understatement to say you burn too hot.
You give every experience all you got although
it’s not necessary to carry on that way each day.
You do it anyway. You seek to crush the universe
with your fist yet only end up breaking your wrist.
You insist on holding all the emotions in your heart
where they spin around, tearing and ripping it apart.
I Am Water To You
I was a water molecule first, then lived in a cloud
before I fell on you. I remember your tongue found me
all but bursting in a big fat raindrop on your lip.
You licked me in and it was, well, exquisite.
Later I lived frozen in a glacier for a hundred years
before melting into a river that flowed past your house
where you went for a drink one day. (I saw your reflection
in the water’s mirror.) And there I was again -- inside you.
It’s nuts how our hearts keep finding one another
across all time, space and eternity. Because once . . .
---- continue reading in A Pocketful Of Poems, pg 17
We Did Not Die For This
“A house divided against itself cannot
stand.” Abraham Lincoln, 1858.
Matt caught a bullet in his throat while
a mortar shell blew Mike and Jim and Joe
to smithereens inside the boat. I was shot
in the eye and couldn’t see Dick and Jim
trying to stuff their guts back in along
the bloody beach that day at Normandy.
• • •Boys! Come See A Real General!
(Woodbridge Royal Air Force Base, Suffolk County, East Anglia, England, 1960)
There came one night such a clang and a clatter. No,
not Saint Nick, just Mom and Dad home from a party;
specifically a Dining In, a very formal military affair.
From beyond the door Father’s roar fills our ears: “Boys!
Get up! Come see a real general!” My brothers and me
– six, seven and eight – roused out of our beds so late,
stumble into the hallway blinking and rubbing sleepy eyes.
Mother pecks our cheeks, runs a brush through our hair.
We’re in front of military nobility; we need to look fair.
...
The Author I got me a writing machine. It’s lean and mean
and fast and clean. Turns itself on each morning
at four, sits on my desk with a purr, purr, purr
all kitty-cat idling, disguising the fact that it’s a
Wildcat Four-Forty-Five that roars out onto the
writing highway gobbling blank pages up alive.
• • •
Stellarum Nocte
I looked up at the sky tonight and
craziest thing I ever saw. Leo,
rising, raised his paw and roared
scattering a slew of stars across
the universe wheeling overhead.
Pisces with her school of fish swam by.
Virgo slid past, swinging her scythe
and Gemini flew in and out the jewels
of Orion’s belt searching for his twin.
Mercury spun madly on his top dashing in
the thick and thin of Neptune’s foggy
• • •
War Dogs
The war dogs are howling for meat.
More bodies are what they want to eat.
They stay very well fed indeed because
they’re always feasting on our dead.
You can see all the graves in a row.
So many exist, yet more always grow.
And of course we all know the reason
they died was the war dogs had to eat.
• • •
My Cat
Cupid's Apprentice