Half a loaf haiku
You may capture four seasons
While I have but two
In rainy season
Midnight downpours catch no cat
Out in the open
Butterfly dogfight
Jinking, dipping, and spiraling
Sketching a helix
Circling far above
Big winged hawks banking downward
Snapping up dinner
Source: Wikipedia
[after hours, the circus of the mind]
twisted puppets of an unworldly kind
marionettes have danced into a heap
but for one dancer who takes her leap
beyond the stage, off the ledge
freed of strings by midnight’s edge
bounding over a haunting chasm
the beating heart locked in a spasm
from backstage toy soldiers pour
but ballerina ‘s caught, slipped to floor
while her pursuers smash into shards
sliding wide as a fallen house of cards
and thus ends the dancer’s defection
exiting stage right without detection
viewed by empty seats, row-on-row
and who caught her, and where’d she go?
those are facts we’ll never know
Is there a they?
Or is they us?
On the same old day,
riding a different bus?
Tilting heads at the same places.
Different route, same blank faces.
Electrified through the same lines.
Picking fruit amid the same mines.
Is there a them
amid your dreams
deep in the REM
the field of screams?
No. There you are each shadow monster.
The bright and the dark, indivisibly you.
You may wish to be not the mobster,
but you can’t ever cleave yourself in two.
Maybe “they” are an illusion.
A genetic glitch now passe.
A wanton act of collusion
to create an invisible they.
Source: Wikipedia (Public Domain)
It was a fire-breathing preacher,
a hard-core and ceaseless teacher,
of lessons they said they wanted none.
Yet, it belched them out by the ton.
Spitting fire and dreadful lies
from the freedom of the skies.
And all about, its fires burned.
And people wailed like lovers spurned.
And then one day there came sage.
He found some sad, some in a rage.
“What troubles you folk,” he inquires.
“From far above, it slings these fires!
Can you save us, you wise old man,
from life in this blasted frying pan?”
“Every fire requires a fuel,
And every lie, a willing fool.
Do you feed the beast, or in its fires bask?”
“Neither, of course, and how dare you ask!”
“I can douse the flames, but they’ll flare right back,
if you fuel them with your petty, piddling yak.”
“Just do it, old man, before we all burn!”
“OK, I’ll give you this one chance to learn.”
So, pulling a hose, off the sage marched.
“Mighty dragon, you must be terribly parched?”
“You know, breathing fire IS a thirsty job.”
At a nod, minions spun the spigot knob.
The water caught the grateful dragon in the throat.
Steam rose, ash spewed, and that’s all she wrote.
With no fire to breath, the dragon flew off,
sputtering out its last ashen cough.
The town was saved, or so it appeared.
But it was as the sage had feared.
Soon, some dabbled in volatile mixtures–
at weakest moments, becoming fixtures.
And the fools? Oh, they missed the glow
of the dragon’s garish and tawdry show.
And soon enough, conditions were right
for the dragon’s fire to again alight.
I flicker into sleep
like a bad fluorescent.
Then, the drift, floating down.
Nothing said, nothing meant.
So ends the subway to dreamland.
In the bowels, in the dark,
below the city of my mind,
lurking in a world so stark.
In dreamland, random rules.
Any change can happen here.
A tiny flea bloats big,
the sum of all your fears.
No childhood toy is free
from being terror’s shill.
To dance you into darkness,
little Teddy fits the bill.
But here you can script flip.
If you can keep your sense.
You see the secret that few know,
your mind pays all the rent.
I’m like a Pyongyang refugee.
Detergent, far as the eye can see.
In some Seoul department store,
on the cleaning products floor.
I reject your bolder and your brighter
like a Smurf-smashing gorilla fighter.
It’s the same stuff, different box.
I’ll go beat my britches on the rocks.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8970653
Einstein defined what’s nuts,
clear as day, no ifs or buts.
Doing the same, time and again
and expecting change is insane.
So when you hit a fail,
don’t hammer the bent nail.
Pull it out, start anew,
and don’t let bent nails accrue.
I’m too happy to be crazy,
but the happy makes me lazy
Not lazy, but lacking focus.
Madness is a creative locus.
A sad gravity weighs one down,
as lip corners into a frown,
but in the pit resides a muse.
People pay to hear the blues.
If you could peer inside my mind,
you’d see stacks of rotting rinds.
The rinds pile up and they ferment.
Maybe to a soulful lament?
Or maybe they just start to sour,
becoming fouler by the hour.
Until you can’t believe the stink,
and every word is wasted ink.
I met a man
along the road
who thought he knew
which way to go.
Certain was he;
he knew the path.
He had a map.
He’d done the math.
“Your map won’t help
you now, I fear.
Past the map’s edge
the world turns queer.”
“I’ll find my way,
be sure of that,”
the man dismissed
with words he spat.
When I returned,
an hour ago,
I passed a car-
cass in the snow.
No doubt, twas he,
the certain man–
hit a blizzard
in burning sands.
The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn by Rudolph Amsel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a collection that gathers 14 poems for each of 14 different themes. If you’re a math whiz, you know that means it’s a collection of 196 poems, but they round it out with four bonus poems to make a clean 200. If you’re a poetry reader, many of these poems will be familiar. They’re classic works from master poets from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries (a few earlier.) Still, they are worth revisiting, the collection is inexpensive, and the organization, itself, is thought-provoking.
The fourteen themes that create the organizational schema for the book are: 1.) rapture: words that burn, 2.) a door opens; a door closes, 3.) love, 4.) humor & curiosities, 5.) memory, 6.) nature, 7.) tales & songs, 8.) solitude, 9.) contemplation, 10.) mystery & enigma, 11.) parting & sorrow, 12.) animals, 13.) inspiration, and 14.) cities. Then there are a couple bonus poems each attached to both the introduction and the epilogue.
As mentioned, the poets are mostly household names of English-language poetry, including: Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Hardy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Ben Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Wordsworth, A. E. Housman, Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Frost. There are some names that are less than household names, but none that are obscure to poetry aficionados.
Again, many of the poems are well-known. Some of them are fragments of long poems, but most are stand-alone works. Examples of some of the standards include: “Chicago” by Sandburg, “If” by Kipling, “The Road Not Taken” by Frost, “Let My Country Awake” by Tagore, “The Tiger” by Blake, “The Raven” by Poe, “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge, “The Daffodils” by Wordsworth, “The Jabberwocky” by Carroll, “She Walks in Beauty” by Byron, and “There Is No Frigate Like a Book” by Dickinson.
I should point out that this is the first volume in a multi-volume set. There is also a second volume out, but I don’t know what the plans are beyond that.
I enjoyed this collection. I’d read most of these poems before, but the vast majority deserve re-reading and re-reading again. I’d recommend it for poetry lovers.
