high hopes

Is it right
to hope so high
so high that I
may tie on a tie?

People ask me
why the tie?
A rope to hold
as I fly high,

and pray to alight
in paradise
as blue as agate,
gold as eyes.

Ever the more
am I to be
to move to morrow
hopefully.

The scene has altered
and defies
my lifelong need
to recognize.

And yet through all
remain alive
to see kind friends
anew arrive.

Ah, career women

Busy as sexless worker bees they buzz,
Heads bent, hiding in their cages, rattling
Invisible chains of wage slavery,
Denying meaning to themselves, and love.
An hour to munch the crumbs and read a book,
They spend their sunrise running in the park
In regulation shoes and uniform,
The austere maidens of the master race!

A walk to work would yield them joy, actual
People along the way to talk with, and
The city like a symphony of singing.
Grant you they are bright but bright as sheen
Reflecting from a blacktop after rain
A shallowness of being, devoid of depth,
And merely sky of brooding clouds, and self
Deception, like a narcissist forever
Gazing on her face in disappointment.
So it is eternal beauties die
Alone and unremembered.

and they do this to me:

Does the veri vary in my sweaty palm,
as pencil rides the crest of dimpled meaning
scratching on a page of slight blue lines
my own mundane allotment beating time?
A dose of dousing in the myriad of words
is medicine to make one melancholy,
memory the long boat in a sea
of lonely mist arising out of sapphire
blue as perfect sunrise, bright and cold
like unforgiving iron to searching hands...


Was once a time when I was forced to count syllables but the 5 beat singsong comes so naturally to me now that I consider full abandonment of prose.

unrequited love inspires brief asides

Winter wind is a murder song
Lamenting ever and on,
Driven by love as blind as hate
And ice that grips thereon.

White hot fly the piercing shells,
The blue smile stabs as deep
As arctic eyes that cruelly set
Your own to bend and weep.

Forsaken high to swallowing sky
This one to blight above
Remembers with the crickets gone
The last he saw of his love.

***

I love you
is scald to skin,
Desire delivering
Wages of sin.

I love you:
My stifled sigh
Resounding surrenders
To no reply.

forked meanings hide true intent

When friends tell me they don't know how to read poetry, I feel such retorts point to a dearth if not a death of imagination. These days things either are 'cool' or else they 'suck.' And that's the pinnacle of adjectival description. Truth is, perhaps, the intelligent expect too much of themselves. All you have to do when you read a poem is let your thoughts bound alongside the music, and all of a sudden then this decidedly randy lyric makes perfect sense, I love forked meanings, and this is rife with them, one way of which is to use the rhyme of the word I meant to use and so point to two separate meanings simultaneously:


Stupidly grow? Or groupedly stow
A bear of palsied huevos unadorned
In wrinkled baggage cupped and soothed,
A balm bag for the scorned?

And so forlorn it tickles ye
A mauve o' linnet in the din
Of howling? Oh the cad is kicked...
For arching sluice to hide therein.

He longs in longing thick as beams
Aglitter in the piercing darkness
For the tactile reassurance
Of his briny, shellfish dreams.

His nose gone rich with sunrise
To the treasure under shroud
Of sea-scent crinkling in his knowing
More than modest words allowed.

dee p eed