GARDEN

Tags

bower, envy, Garden, poem, poet laureate, poetry, rivalry, satire, writing

GARDEN

I dug a
garden for
you that

you may well consider
enclosing adjacent land
extending into
full-blown bower

all the better
to poet-laureate yourself
around with your dinky rhymes
jiveless chimes

the lines so
neat and
faultlessly
circumstantial.

DAVID

Tags

identity, King David, poem, poem poetry political moral, Poet, poetry, poets, spiritual, writing

DAVID

what am I?

it does not make any sense to say
“man filled with the spirit”

for if possible to fill
then technically, also, half-full,
needing a top up
and running on empty

similarly, makes no sense
to say, man
delivering poetry

for how, where, deliver?
to whom, by
what means, through
what agency

killing the word itself all
such questions of logistics

and yet with some poems (not
this one, not
this one) there is

a kind of a glow
a lighter-than-air sense of achievement
of belonging, however tenuously to
that great, great tribe
who trace their origin and
path to God through
the shepherd David

PALACE OF SLEEP

Tags

afterlife, Creation, Creativity, death, Dream, Keats, Poe, poem, Poet, poetry, Rebirth, writing

take me to the Palace of Sleep
where the air is hashish-heavy
as thick with dark autumnal cloud
as anything written
by Poe or Keats

sky dragging itself across
as if stuck somewhere
and out to test the winds

but let me
sink into that darkness
night so perfect, it is the null equation,

there
where words are absorbed, lines, phrases
disintegrate, are so carefully dismantled
scattered like leaves
on a river, like momentary
phosphorescence on the ocean

no dream here, at least
none that
is remembered,
only the blending of
currents, change,
reconfiguration

she said that I reminded her of Keats once
this before she got married
but after we
were lovers

perfect sleep in her arms then
no thought of
darkness, any kind of
renewal, rebirth, re-
definition of self

as figure who writes
not figure who loves

the gates to every Palace
secretly open
unbeknownst to me
at that
most lost of lost moments

SHOW ME

Tags

poem, poetry

SHOW ME

let me out
show me
the door

or better,
draw me a window
where I can see
all those things that poems
are supposed to
be full of

Nature like a garden
a garden like Nature

streams whose murmuring
remind you this house
you have entered is
pure sound has
been constructed
out of words,
beautiful
words

a synonym for
these strange,
cryptic squiggles

PASTORAL

I have
a flair
for interior
design (née
decorating)

look — we put
a lake
here, a
few trees there

now you
are already thinking
pastoral. Half
way to
utopia.