Monthly Archives: June 2017
Sestina #1
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #192
Be loyal to mother and father and child
Be loyal to god and to the holy wild
Be loyal to all children, all grands and greats
Abandon all loyalty to king and state
Abandon the store that would abandon us
And fill in the factories with slaves of rust
Abandon all loyalty to priests of the mind
Instead of loyalty — be kind, always kind
For olive trees twist and the vines all falter
And the fig trees ooze sap in the place all bones rattle
Where the roof tops bend and carry no shelter
There is the place where kill comes for cattle
Loyal to only the wind of the stars,
And the shivering Atoms, life, alone, prays
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #191
And Solomon, what’s left of all his glory?
His meticulously described temple is gone
The gold and olive-wood carving is a story
that contains the temple, now. All he has done
as a king, the wars and lovers, all, adrift
like wet books in large oceans, passing
from one wave to another, the slow shift
of rewriting wet pages and back into the tossing
Until the story, itself, only pretends at truth
There was a man, once, who would be king
In his dream, he asked for wisdom from a God
And, when he woke, the babe was brought in
Two women shouting, “It’s mine! The child’s mine!”
And, his mind burning, he held the sword of time
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #190
I used to know how to write a poem
Once upon a time I even knew stories
I see these ideas I built like ruined Rome
I have buried more in my worries
Than I have ever been able to keep
Once I thought I could change everything
Build parapets of paragraphs, war weep
To carry sorrow to joyful ignorance bring
Light to undiscovered continents inside
The soul of dreams. I wake up from this
The dust accumulated, buried streets wide
I stumble to work lost to the fabled kiss
Of forces greater than one little soul
I have forgotten more than will ever be whole
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #189
The castle is no place to be a man,
All that dust and draftiness, narrow stairs
And those tiny slits for windows. Escape plans
And siege equipment, and all those rare
Accumulated things growing mold
or hidden in moldy boxes, and the cracks
in the walls where mice, chewing on old
manuscripts. And there’s all those people hack
coughs in the dust and race around the stairs
No, the castle is no place to be a man
The crown is an unnatural invention made for stares
That weighs the mind down. Will you stand?
I’ve never met a man in a castle – only jesters
Who seem unaware of the jeers of their betters.
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #188
The day I knew I could never go home
Again, never again, was with a cookie
I knew in childhood, a humble cookie
And the memory of the cookie’s grown
a mythology in my desire, a craving
irrational, at best, an addiction to it
Such that I must never permit
the thing to enter the house, and staving
off this desire is a fact I know as truth
If I give in and taste the cookie,
It is not so great in my mouth
As it is as a memory of the cookie
The taste is nothing but a dream
Old rooms in lost houses larger than seem
Filed under Uncategorized
Sonnet #187
We do not know the world is not an egg
Waiting to hatch when it is warm enough
The inner workings of the magma and rough
stone crust are known only by trembling legs
And layers of sediment, volcanic eruptions
We only know what lies smeared upon the edge
The topsoil layer, the distant crane flight’s stretch
and the mumble of the clouds between; excitations
could mean anything. How do we know for sure
Each planet is not a dragon’s egg, remember the serpent?
Remember the old tales, how darkness swallows azure
and the land beneath our feet cracks – inadvertant
to this, we make such plans about new myths, a blur
of heavenly angels that will come, for some important
Filed under Uncategorized