Tag: Poem

The Offense of the Goddess

Before the fault was found

Horae drew her bow

Raised it to his beating lungs

And let fire her flaming salvo.

 

His offense was that he breathed the air

Of the goddess.

For he spake his love in great excesses

His image,

His molten work;

He spoke to her often

About the banner over her

The ensign,

The fleeting glimpse he gave her ivory neck

As it bore nude cream to the sumptuous shoulders.

 

So, she drew forth her iron bow

And shot the crease of his ribs

And penetrated his collapsing lung.

History Flows in Its Direction

“History flows in its direction—

Those who stand in its way

Are artifacts.” — A Postmodernist

 

How many men does history leave behind?

A good and prosperous nation

Which it did its best to break;

Praises the Cur Kairos

Who is allied with the serfs

Who, after having been made free,

Wish to place themselves back in shackles.

In the Hell Built for the Rich

In the hell built for the rich

The idle rich, and the angry rich

Do their dance in the river styx.

 

How I can see it,

But the translator cannot.

In fact, nobody has ever found it before.

 

Probably because a poet knows their poetry.

And we know why it’s written.

 

While Plato lambasted us for not being credible

I found poetry is not our catalog of factoids

But rather the history of our moral knowledge.

I’m not the Smartest Man, but Am Well Read

I have an IQ of 157.

It’s humbling to see

How I don’t even come close

To the top crust of geniuses.

 

The lowest on a list I found was 170.

 

I love poetry…

 

My claim to fame might be

A high reading comprehension and retention.

 

Lol.

 

I can devour Chaucer like it’s

James Paterson.

 

A difficult text to me is

Ezra Pound’s Cantos,

 

But that’s only because I think it

Intentionally tried to talk in gibberish.

I’m still trying to crack that nut,

But I think it’s a Postmodern Work

Meant to draw out the subconscious’ story.

My Sigh

My words are war

Though my heart is peace.

I speak war,

So I may bring peace.

 

I see violence on the battlefields,

I see red fields of sward.

Anger rests in my bosom

As men sweetly reminisce on war

And violence.

 

For me, I speak words of warfare

Speak my foul breath.

Yet, there would be brother against brother.

I will die for him

Rather than this country.

Should I die of starvation

In solitary confinement in the Gulag,

Sent there for shaking hands,

Then I will allow myself to die.

 

I have nothing to fight for in this world.

I have nothing to live for

But to die, there is my gain.

Full Satisfaction

Oddly, I was reading one of my poems

And aggravated by it, filled with angst,

Annoyance, grumbling, distress,

Then, there was a line, “It’s only a poem.”

And, like that it was as if I woke up

From a dream.

I hope it has this effect on everyone who reads it.

 

My fairyland might be nightmares,

But I give the reader the satisfaction of it only being a dream.

 

The Prodigy

His best, after years of toil,

Was mediocre.

 

The prodigy,

At the age of sixteen,

Could write better poems,

Albeit rife with thou and thy

At all the wrong grammatical places.

 

He would spend years,

Rewriting his poems,

Five, ten, fifteen drafts

And no sooner make a poem

Of average quality.

 

The prodigy,

In a matter of three days

Wrote a poem triumphantly

More exquisite, rich and deep

Than any poem he had ever toiled masterfully over

For his seventy-five years of life.

 

He, however,

Was paid to write his mediocre poems.

The prodigy,

Like all great sages in an illiterate age,

Was not. Except to pass down knowledge

To the generations after him.

 

Certainly, both were remembered

For a very long time.

Certainly, both gained their treasure.

 

However, it was unfortunate

That time had displaced the better of the two.