Tag Archives: poetry

98.6 [Free Verse]

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The secret is...

we're energy machines.

This wild ride we're on is all about
staying 98.6.

The meaning of life
might as well be 98.6.

You work to make rent 
to be sheltered at 98.6.

You go to the store for groceries
to stoke the fires of 98.6.

You put on your coat or slippers
to keep yourself at 98.6.

You go to the beach
to warm to 98.6
&
then sweat to drop
back to 98.6.

You take medicines when you're too
far off the mark of 98.6.

You turn on the AC 
to sleep at 98.6
& 
kick off the covers
&
drag the covers back
& 
adjust the AC...
all to sleep at 98.6.

You may wish to be a flash fire
of a million degrees,
but life leaves you at 98.6.

Some day you'll cool off
and your career as
Thermoregulatory Maintenance
Specialist 
will be at an end
& 
you'll be done with
the trouble of staying 98.6.

Mad Saints & Scientists [Free Verse]

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Mad scientists are terrifying.
Mad artists are reassuring
(par for that particular course.)

Mad mathematicians
seem harmless enough,
as long as he or she
stays in his or her lane:
the one with numbers
and angles
and sets.

Mad Saints are the most hated
& most beloved of lunatics.
They serve as necessary examples --
not there to forcibly deprogram one,
but to show that it's an option.
One has the choice to be free,
whether one has the will or desire to be -
that's an open question. 

But those who sink the red pill
must learn that in those waters
thar be monsters.
(If only those of one's own making --
i.e. Nietzsche's abyss staring back.)
Voids can't gaze.
Only that which one crams 
down its abyss-hole
can do the gazing.

BOOK REVIEW: Puella Mea by e.e. cummings

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Puella MeaPuella Mea by E.E. Cummings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Free online at: Project Gutenberg

This is a single poem, Cummings’s longest, a love poem to his first wife. It’s a longform poem – at least by the standards of poets of the Modern era, though at less than 300 lines it’s far from epic in scale. It’s a beautiful love poem, favorably comparing the wife in question to Helen of Troy, Medea (from “Jason and the Argonauts,”) Guinevere, and other historic beauties.

It’s a highly readable poem; its short lines pack a lot of punch, and while Cummings writes in free verse, he’s not afraid to drop a rhyme or play with the texture of meter to give his lines an appealing sound quality.

The edition I read included art from Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Kurt Roesch. It’s definitely worth checking out this edition, particularly if you enjoy Modern and Surreal art.

I’d highly recommend this for poetry readers.

View all my reviews

Snow Birds [Haiku]

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a snowy park.
chubby birds flit about
in search of seed

Beautiful Scum [Tanka]

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the algae pond -
dappled with leafy fractals,
 patterns shift.
what moves: water or branch?
or, perhaps, just my mind

Soulless Voyager [Free Verse]

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I am the soulless voyager
cut loose from the dock
in a rudderless craft

Kicked this way and that
by angry winds that greet
all flat surfaces, and --
having met a surface --
pushes it away with maximum effort

Where will my ghost ship take to land?

After all,
every voyage must end -- 
be it purposeless or purposeful

A craft can only circle 
(having been caught in the currents)
for so long before it's whipped
off into sand or rock or 
some unlikely port

That's the great mystery,
the mystery by which life
is made worthy of living
 
one never knows whether 
one will be tossed to a port or a rocky shoal,
a shoal whose rocks will rip open the ship,
like a deer dressed by a poor hunter,
being torn at jagged angles
so as to be unworthy
to be called a ship or boat or even 
"thing that floats,"
becoming a rusty structure,
resting at an odd angle
near the shore

but maybe this ghost ship 
will be tossed roughly against 
the rubber bumpers of a dock,
coming to rest 
such that what remains
can be offloaded

The Thoreau Life [Common Meter]

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What a way to live one's life, in
a cabin made of wood;
never to be governed by: "I
have to! I must! I should!"

To set one's sights on the day's needs
as one's only master,
and not be told, "you move too slow,
you must live life faster." 

To start the day by a cue from
rays of the rising sun.
To end the day when the day ends,
not only just've begun.

Lantana [Tanka]

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two flaming umbels
of yellow-orange lantana;
but my eye
moves to the bud cluster
that sits in the background

Wheel of Watching [Haiku]

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watching monkeys 
watch humans, watching monkeys;
ad infinitum

Foul Winds [Free Verse]

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As a boy, I remember reading about 
the horse latitudes.
Those were the places in the ocean
where - at times - the winds didn't blow
for long periods at a time. 

Drifting in the middle of the Atlantic,
sailors would cut loose anything that
wouldn't keep them alive
& which might weigh them down,
that sometimes meant shoving horses
overboard to tread water 'til
they died from exhaustion.

People used to live or die by the winds.
Today, we only die by them.

That's what occurred to me as we sit
closer to nuclear annihilation than we've been
since I was a teenager,
and as I reflect upon
the prevailing winds.