Last week, there were vast patches
of wildflowers
in the understory.
Now, a faint few hangers-on remain.
Next week, they’ll be but a memory–
a residue of consciousness,
a dying homage to the worthy memory
of their existence.
In ten years time, this florid story
will be gone to all.
Nature needs no selfies.
She changes states without concern
for legacy or posterity.
She is–
&
that’s enough.
Like Chuang-tzu,
I didn’t know whether a
butterfly dreamt me.
It wasn’t for lack of absurdity.
No.
Absurdity was in abundance.
Rather,
that block of brain that calls
bullshit
was sleeping.
It’s failed me before.
Edgar Allan Poe
If I was as Mad as Poe,
could I summon the Raven?
If I was as radical as Blake,
could I build myself a tyger?
If I was as shut-in as Dickinson
could I be Nobody, too?
If I was as doomed as Radnóti,
could I pen my elegy on a death march?
William Blake
Emily Dickinson
Miklós Radnóti
rains pummel the soil
soon will raise a tinge of oil
floating its coat of many colors
on my puddle, like all the others
a rainbow slick
a micrometer thick
Seems to me there’s a story in those britches.
Some tears left open, and some with stitches.
Were they scourge or bramble torn?
There’s no doubt they’re world worn.
But there’s a story in those britches.
***
A tale tragic? A tale of woe?
Tell me the way your story flows.
Did you make some great escape?
Or just thieve bottles of the grape?
Did you get caught upon the fence?
Or self-inflict out of penitence?
***
Looking back,
tell me now,
Were you raging when they died?
Your kinsmen in days of fratricide?
Did you know them? Did they hope
you’d dangle down a rescue rope?
And pull them out of the kill box?
Magic carpet over paddy and ox?
***
Field of glory. Field of mud.
Did you call to the Lord above?
Did he hear you? Did words hold sway?
Or do you hate him to this day?
***
Do you wake up with the sweats?
Knowing how many steps he gets
before he falls, calling out your name?
Does the dream always end the same?
Or on some nights is history revised?
The plan proceeds as it was devised?
You chopper back full and grinning?
Then can you sleep to a new day’s beginning?
The pull of the tribe is strong.
Even when the tribe done wrong.
Instead of sayin’ “That ain’t me.”
He says, “We was framed, can’t you see?”
You think you know me by my tribe.
Chanting your way through a diatribe.
But I owe no fealty to throngs gone wrong.
I carry not their banner, sing not their song.
Between the tribe and Socrates,
citizen across seven seas,
if you wed your mind to the tribe
take care the line you circumscribe
doesn’t cleave your soul asunder.
“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”
Socrates quoted in Plutarch’s Of Banishment
a moose and squirrel
loiter around the same tree
I find it suspect
“Nevermore Raven,
You’ve sullied your last bust, Sir!”
[Feathers everywhere]
parrot’s bright green back
head stuck in a bore burrow
take it like a bird
a park: ducks floating,
who wins if there be bloodshed?
Donald or Daffy?
Donkey or robot?
Whose sadness rivals human:
Eeyore or Marvin?
“He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”
5.) Sound Seeking: If anything looks more insane than walking down the street talking to oneself out loud, it’s talking to oneself out loud in rhyme and alliteration in a disjoint fashion while counting off beats on one’s fingers.
4.) Emotion Evocation: If your writing comes across as a cry for help, you may be a deeply troubled individual. Or you may be a poet trying to induce a reader to feel.
3.) Clarity & Codes: Because there may be no literal meaning to your verse, the reader may suspect that you’re writing in code to your imaginary pink bunny rabbit. Faced with the humbling possibility that he or she may “just not get it,” most people prefer the alternative explanation that you’re a rambling lunatic.
2.) Playing the Odds: Let’s be honest, there have been a lot of poets who slipped into the abyss. Poe, Pushkin, Plath, Pound, and several poets whose last names didn’t begin with the letter “P,” were all afflicted by mental illness.
1.) Violent Reactions to being Interrupted: A poem under development is a house of cards that needs only the subtlest gust of wind to be obliterated. Poems in the works are gauzy and fragile. So, as one is trying to wedge words together into a solid construct, one is occasionally interrupted. When this happens, one may instinctively pimp slap the interrupting individual like a Zen master trying to make the point that there is no point.
Source: Wikimedia
One soul said, “Don’t take to flight.”
A vision: landing lights fade from sight.
But those lights never appeared.
Just a figment of all he feared.
The plane never did arrive.
A hundred families mourn & cry.
How, oh how, did they get lost?
Not a moment tempest-tossed.
Madman or mechanical fluke?
An evil genius at once a kook?
Maybe a magician or a black hole?
A flipping of magnetic poles?
The riddle stupefies and confounds.
Why no plane upon the ground?
If never the day comes when we know,
perhaps we’ll have to learn to grow–
outthinking the narrow confines
of our simple 4-D minds.
I ride a dragonesque world line.
Worming through a block of time.
I’m dancing atoms in a roiling pot.
So energetic entropy forgot
to increase, and cobbled together
a self-aware “it” of clever blether.
