Tag: poetry about poetry

on rereading some of my old poems

wow, those were the days.
I wrote some halfway decent
shite. some of them
were dumb but some were
not at all awful. why is it
that when I try to write
a new one, it always seems
to come out wrong?

I’m out of the habit
of looking at the world
as inspiration for poetry
these days. now I think
more of songs and less
of poetry. my muse has changed
her clothes. she hums
in my ear now instead
of whispering. you’d think
they’re pretty similar –
what are songs if not
poems set to music? –
but to me they aren’t at all
the same. Terpsichore
rules my days now
instead of Euterpe.

far away, so close

do you understand that
the reason I don’t write
about you that often is
because you’re right here?
I can just tell you flat out
whatever I want to say.
there’s no need to couch
my thoughts in poesy, or
think of some mildly
clever angle. it’s just direct
communication.

there are others whom
I have complex constellations
of feelings towards, which
sometimes provides me
with a message to put
into this glass bottle.

but if you recall that poem
I wrote – before we were even
an item – in which I said
that there are only two things
that inspire me: rage and
unrequited love, you’ll know
that you don’t want
to be the subject of my poems,
baby. that would mean
we were breaking up.

dusk in the garden of poetry

listening to poets shaping the air
with their words, everything
starts to feel like a poem;
the tall trees listening like spirits,
their foliage, huge green leaves,
waves like elephant ears
or hands silently clapping,
the answer to the famous zen riddle;
the helicopters that zoom
overhead like oversized bees,
passing so often that everyone
cranes their necks to see them
and poets have to pause
to let their loud intrusions
pass; the tiny mysterious
ceramic figurines peeping out
from a niche in the wall
that looks like it should have
once held a fireplace;
a squirrel that runs across
the telephone wires and then
hangs out for a while, watching
these strange humans engaged
in their weird rituals.

Continue reading dusk in the garden of poetry

the Last Poem

every time I write a poem,
I think to myself, what if this
is the last one I ever write?
eventually one poem
will have to be the last.
I could make this one
the last by refusing
to write another one.
I did that twenty years ago
but then I wrote another. but
what if the Last Poem
isn’t any good? what if
the first poem
I ever wrote was my best,
and it’s all been downhill
ever since? these are the things
that keep me up at night
sometimes.

the agony & the ecstasy

well done. with a single stroke
of your pen, you defused
the bomb in my heart. with kindness
you snuffed out the raging bonfire
burning inside my soul
as if it were but
a guttering candle.

see, the furnace that feeds my art
has only two starters:
the pure immolation of love,
or the furious conflagration
of rage. everything else
is just wet kindling, the dank despair
of smoldering coal
that lurks and murks and smudges
up the air with its stench and
nobody wants to read that shit,
myself least of all.

I can set myself on fire
and burn everything down
in the white hot, purest savagery
of protesting every fiber
of the way things are,
or I can let the delicious agony
of love purify me with
its transcendent ecstasy.
if I had the choice
I know which way
I’d rather burn.

the poet’s eye

for a long time I stopped
thinking of myself as a poet,
calling myself a writer,
or trying to look at the world
through a poet’s eye. many years
went by in silence, blindness
and deliberate unknowing.

but lately
I have revived
my old writing bones,
resurrected my dead poet’s
eye, and now I see things
that before I wouldn’t have
noticed: the restaurant
called Caravan of Dreams;
how the purple blooms
of the pansies planted
outside a building in my neighborhood
look like tiny screaming faces;
the record cover reading,
“Can’t We Just Start Over”
or something like that. I didn’t
write this poem quickly enough
so already I’ve forgotten
the exact wording.

let that be
a lesson to me. practice
seeing like a poet, rehearse
being a writer
until it comes as naturally
as breathing, lest the strange
and beautiful sights and sounds
you’re surrounded by
pass you by.

competition

it’s a contest
that is open for anyone,
but no one else I know
is doing it. nobody is keeping score,
it is you competing
against yourself, and
by the way? you’re winning.
seeing you doing so much
makes me want to try
harder, to do more, to pull out
all the stops, to drive myself
to new heights, and coincidentally
to beat you.

this is just one of the
many ways
you make me want
to be better. to think more
of how I can help others,
and less about myself,
to look for ways to be more
creative, to get up and
go outside
once in a while
before night time,
to use my body and my mind
to express a certain
range of motion, to stretch
and strive and challenge myself
to live, damn it, instead of
accepting my slow death,
the one that I can feel coming
from a long way away
like a tsunami, that makes me want
to lie down in its path
and say sayonara
right now. but
I guess I have plenty of time
to sleep when I’m dead,
and to die when that crushing wave
gets quite a bit closer. to quote
Dorothy Parker, “might as well
live.”

99

almost there! I’m so close
I can taste it. that sweet sweet
milestone that I made up
to make myself feel accomplished
that will immediately be replaced
by a new milestone (200!)
as soon as this is posted, because
I had ninety-nine
poems “published” (on Facebook)
this year and this one
will be #100.

(though several
have since been taken off-line
by me
due to embarrassment, feeling like
they’re too mean, or not good enough
or all three. do those
really count?
should I make them visible again
even though I don’t really still
subscribe to their beliefs
or stand by all of their
statements?)

last year I wrote nine, which was
eight more than I wrote
the year before. now, eleven times
that! the symmetry of these
meaningless numbers pleases
me.

the sky’s the limit! that is,
as long as I don’t decide to rest
on my sweet sweet
laurels.

to look at

you wouldn’t think
that we are doing anything
important
to look at. we sit
across from each other but
we’re both on our phones.
we’re not on Facebook
or Twitter
or Instagram
or OkCupid. instead
we’re writing poetry.
we’re ranging far and wide
in our minds, thinking about
the past, the present
and the future, all at once;
we’re communing with the world so subtly that
it’s invisible to the naked
eye and the open
ear. I know
that whatever you’re writing,
I’ll get to read it
eventually. and you know
the same. whether or not
you feel the same way about it
I do not know, but I enjoy
the secret knowledge
that what’s in your head
will come out, and that anyone who thinks
they know what we are doing
is wrong.

on reading this name somewhere with poetry

Marvin Bell – your sonorous name,
ringing and rattling my stiff little heart –
I dash myself against your rock-like unknownness,
I might break again on the pocked reef of your smile.
How can I write and feel this towards you,
when you are so exquisitely alien?
But by the force of your pine-tree, your delicate name
you press upon me all the weight of the brain’s
obscure longings, and sighing I press through the cracks
to meet the imagined you,
bearer of sweet names in a year of cold outcomes.

Tomorrow I will read your poetry and your small biography –
the old birth-year, the colleges my friends might have gone to,
the wife and children to whom I have no connection at all –
I will peer through your window and examine your countenance
like one smudged in a yearbook, that we watch for some small opening,
some hint in the blur to tell why we twitched.
No matter what you say to me in your stanzas,
(for I will take every line as a personal address)
in what power or grace, in what coldness or ecstasy,
I will not know you then as we know the imagined;
I will not love you then as we love the unreal.