Some Poetry About Life–and some about writing poetry

unadulterated shit (Owned by Donald Smith of St. George, New Brunswick, who loved this poem so much he paid me $25 to buy it in about 2001. MY 1^ST OFFICIAL SALE!

i sat beside a mountain brook
and wrote a book
and when i read what i had written
i was smitten by the
inconsequentiality
of reality

the words did not make sense
and the plot was much too tense
for the mood and for the tone
which had shown the anti-idealism
of surrealism

so i threw it page by page
into the water which did rage
with laughter at each word
till a bird flew by and read it
and shit on it

a poem of silence

silence
noises unheard
not one word
no peep nor cheep
nor footstep creep
nor bleep!

alone
no one home
but me
does anybody be?
i cannot see

to be alone with silence
is to be alone
in the universe
not knowing for sure
if anyone else exists

this could be frightening
and border on insanity
but not necessarily so

silence can be:l,
peace of body
peace of mind
peace of soul

just me
and the universe
in cosmic harmony

be

a ball of words

sometimes i wonder
is it really worth it
to spend my time on rhyme and verse
to curse the world and all its faults
to praise the beauties i can see
and then i answer
it is
to me
even if not to anyone else
for myself it does wonders
to calm a confused mind
and straighten out my head

moments like these
are ever so rare
in our galloping world
that to curl myself up
into a ball of words
is a pleasure
of uncommon delight

the miracle

pictures are worth a thousand words
but poetry is worth a million
so on i write
into the night
cringing in fear
with insanity near
breathing new life
into words as old as death

isn’t it amazing
in all the length of time
humanity has spent upon this earth
someone can still combine
words into lines
that never before have graced
the printed page

miracles

are all around us

if only we had

the presence of mind

to see them

epitaph at birth

please
allow no man
to be my teacher
for he cannot live
mine life for me

therefore
allow me not
to be his teacher
for i cannot live
his life for him

but
let him help me
where he can
and i shall help him
wherever i can

because
we are brothers

let us remain that way

following my desire

like an eagle on the wing
soaring ever higher higher
trying to capture sun and stars
following my desire

like a mole beneath the earth
burrowing blindly through the mire
digging deeper than before
following my desire

like a leaf cast off by tree
like a snowflake softly falling
sliding down then gliding up
seeking rest — yet stalling

so i live my life each day
to opposing goals i do aspire
learning good exploring bad
following my desire

enigma

why do i see
divinity
when everyone i meet
sees mere humanity

is this a cursed blessing
or
is this a blessed curse

like a near completed puzzle with
just one piece to go
but the last piece doesn’t fit
that’s how i feel

i cannot fit myself into
the puzzle of this world
no matter how i stretch and strain
this enigma lies beyond my brain
to remedy

significant language signs

bark
goes bacon in the dead of night
awakening my neighbours
who pound on my door
who pound on bacon
whom i see nevermore

propound a baconism
if you know one
(i don’t
sorry
i didn’t mean to wet your appetite
or rain on your purr-aid)

a pound of bacon
for breakfast
a bunch of bananas
for lunch
and for supper a steak
with roast potatoes
mushrooms
and you

you are my night
if i were a woman
would you be my knight
i mean if you were male
wearing mail
i might add

twenty-two plus twenty
makes forty-two
but even douglas
doesn’t know the question
from adam’s
garden of eve

words
have no meaning
but the meaning i give them
when i write them
down

and if i believe that
you’ve got some prime property
(canada grade a bacon?)
in florida
to sell me
but i have no money so
i can’t buy that

so why do i continue to string signifiers one after the other (as if they were words in a sentence {You’re Guilty!}) in a vain attempt to communicate my thoughts to some imaginary being called ‘reader’ (providing they get past an even more imaginary being called ‘publisher’) whom i cannot be sure exists and who has no conception of me (that was my mother’s job)

i am a person
or
at least i was
until i wrote these words
at which point
i became
a poem

and that me immediately vanished
vanquished
by the ticking of the clock
ripped asunder
by the tickless time bomb
squashed
as under the foot of a flea
who got swept down the gutter
of gravity

imagine the coincidence
the play i saw last night
concerned gutters
kate and annie
maggie and polly and ellen
(they made a lot of offal jokes)

is that what inspired this crap
crepe-paper pancakes
inedible solid liquid
indigestible
barf

a lunar tune

to crash wildly

through jungles

of green

grass

to chase wildly

butterflies

on dewy

days

changing streams

in the middle

of a

horse

changing screws

in the middle

of a

dick

to follow

after none

but those

you don’t know

to fathom

the heights

of green

seas

JUPITER HAS A G-SPOT

jupiter has a g-spot
can you imagine what this means
to all the students of classic myth
the ancients had it all wrong
jupiter was a goddess
not a god

jupiter has a g-spot
and shoemaker-levy 9 touched it
on only his seventh penetrating thrust
into her huge red hole

fancy this if you can
all those thousands of scientists
gathered around their computer screens
and all the astronomers with their telescopes
watching jupiter get it on
with her brand new beau
(why, i think they’re all voyeurs!)

all of them debating
the impact of this event
and not one of them
(i’ll bet not even one of them)
seeing it’s true significance
sex amongst the stars

and the media, can you believe
missing the interview of the millennium
oh the story i could tell them
but i’m telling you instead

jupiter is a goddess

okay so maybe my news isn’t
earthshaking
but admit this if you will
i’ve put a whole new slant
on the astronomical news of the decade
haven’t i

well, maybe i haven’t
but at least it’s worth a small chuckle
i hope
after all how often do you get to witness
a sex-change operation
if that was what we saw

but really what we witnessed
was nothing but a hoax
shoemaker-levy 9 never existed
except as a mathematical formula
inside a computer
like virtual reality
it’s all in somebody’s head

you really don’t think it’s just coincidence
do you
that on the 25th anniversary
of armstrong stepping on the moon
to the very week
to the very day!
when interest in space exploration
has fallen to its nadir
what better way to boost that interest
than to have a cosmic happening
of jovian proportion
and focus the world’s attention
away from all it’s woes

well, it is a thought
even if far-fetched
(all the way to jupiter)
and i could be wrong

what if i’m right

but for the moment let’s consider
that this thing really happened
i reiterate my contention
jupiter has a g-spot
and therefore she’s a goddess
and we have collectively witnessed
the greatest cosmic orgasm
since the original big bang

(and i do hope the heavens
don’t mind that we were watching)

 

Not Yet a Man

man – the baby
crawling down from the trees
toddling upright on two legs
learning to communicate

man – the baby
orphaned at his birth
no one there to love him
he soils the place he sleeps

man – the young child
playing with his blocks
building cities
enjoying their destruction

man – the young child
lives without self-worth
lacking discipline
stepping on spiders

man – prepubescent
growing suddenly tall
playing cops and robbers
bullying his mates

man – prepubescent
enduring hormone change
always irritable
skipping school

man – the teen-ager
frightened by his sex
desire burning in his loins
aggression his only outlet

man – the teen-ager
sex drive now raging
swinging moods
demanding independence

man – not yet a man
in the body of a man
thinking he is grown up
fists solve his problems

man – not yet a man
considering peace
seeing possibilities
no idea how to achieve them

The Pterodactyc Ptarmigan

why the hell can’t you be like other
men
she groused
bring home the bacon
rot in front of the tee vee
fuck me once in a while to keep
me happy
why the hell do you want to talk

she looked at me as if she wished
she had a rolling pin in her hand
i think she would have used it
on me

i sat immobile
cool as a cucumber
contemplating her complaint

what she really wanted
what i could never give her
was simple understanding

i had never been able to understand
her
nor could she ever understand me
it was what we shared in common

sure we were good together
there was no woman in the world i
wanted
more than her
and although she may not say
the same about me
she had few grievances against me
our life was good together
as long as i didn’t try to talk to her

really talk, i mean
not the daily bullshit
how are the kids honey
what’s for dinner dear
did you have a good day at the
office
(neither one of us worked in an office)
we could play those roles without
trying
so we stopped trying

for her that was all she wanted back
then
for me it was far from enough

i wanted to understand
who are we
why are we here
how did we get where we are
what are we supposed to be doing
here
where are we going from here
are we going anywhere from here

so i tried talking to her
sometimes over breakfast
(which we so seldom shared)
sometimes at supper
but usually late at night
after we had made love…

those were the times i thought
when we were closest to each other
when we were closest to her god
(whoever or whatever that god
might be)
there was no better time
for communicating

all she ever wanted to do
was to lie in the afterglow
and glow

that was what she did best
glowing after sex
her body still covered with a soft
sheen of sweat
her skin still alive with the blush of
passion
warmth emanating from her entire
being
joy looking out from the spirit
behind her eyes
she wanted no more than that

this saddened me
i wanted to give her everything i had
inside of me
the essence of me
but i was allowed to give her nothing
for that was all she would take

how can two people exist in such a
marriage
everything was so good
on the surface
but beneath there was no substance
no meat on the marital bones

was i wrong to want more
was she wrong to want less
than me

i divorced her you know
after i had promised to live with her
all the days of my life
i left her
not for someone new
(i don’t know that any woman could
replace her)
i left her for me
because i needed someone to talk to
in the long lonely hours
after midnight

i talk now to myself
sometimes i wish i could still talk to
her

up here in the northlands
where polar bears roam the tundra
and ptarmigan roost
i think back to the leather-winged
pterodactyls
the brontosauri
and the tyrannosauri rex
and i wonder
did thoughts like these
drive those poor fellows to extinction

their brains were the size of peas
we are told
but the size of the brain
does not reflect
the expanse of the mind

if it did i would never have left her
we could have been happy
except for my thoughts
my questions
my unending search for answers

i gaze into the cloudless sky
and i see it there above me
the pterodactyc ptarmigan
so awkwardly graceful
so powerful
yet so weak
it does not belong here

i fear that neither do i

 

The Coming to Fullness

many years i’ve waited now
learning about the life i lead
knowing soon would come the fullness
understanding wisdom’s seed

lives ago i learned the lessons
taught by living all the ‘wheres’
now i grok the end of waiting
i stand atop this flight of stairs

shall i shout it from the rooftops
as did christ so long ago
or shall i teach it in the meadow
where the buddha once did glow

or shall i look with inner vision
at the world around me now
and keep my learning all within me
here i must myself avow

i’ll whisper truth in dankest gutter
leave a trace where few shall look
goad on those i see are hungry
but ne’er shall i a great feast cook

there are those who know the answer
spread across this world so vast
if one teach two we’re thrice as many
patience! till we are the last

A Conversation (that may never have happened)

once while walking here to there
i chanced to stop and rest awhile
upon a bench i’d never seen before

and as i sat many different kinds
of folk i watched pass by
till sat upon the bench near me
a man who said he’d crossed the pond
to see what life was really like
in our great land of canada
where’d he’d heard the streets were  paved
    with gold

i pitied him for traveling all this way
just to find our streets were like his own
then why he asked were we more rich
    than he
to which i turned my pockets inside out
and watched one lonely coin fall to the ground

who tells such stories he demanded
i said i did not know
but stories such as his abound
whenever the world is not at peace

his world he said was not at peace
but filled with bickering politicians
who called each other names like little kids
and promised things impossible to deliver
though still they were believed

i said i too in such a world did live
but since my world was called democracy
and his a soviet socialist state
my people protested louder
and so they thought they were
more free than he
though really the truth was only
a matter of degree

where will it end he agitatedly asked
concerned about his child
whose picture he extracted
from a pocket of his shirt
i looked upon the smiling face
of a girl so sweet and young
her eyes still flashed the innocence
that life would soon corrupt

i pondered then if i should lie
and say a better world would come
    one day
and this young girl could live
free from fear and undisturbed
by events beyond her ability to control

he looked at me
and saw within my eyes
the fear i had
his child and maybe mine
might someday each other face
across a war-torn battlefield
with rifles in their hands
and hatred in their hearts

he gripped my hand to show that if
this ever came to pass
he understood the cause would never be
such men as we

and we sat there holding hands
that bridged the gulf
at least for now
between two worlds so very far apart
and yet so near

and each in silence thought about
the things we both did dread:
and in my mind raged insurrection
and nuclear war
    too terrible to describe
while in his mind did conflagration
and widespread natural disaster
rid the world of millions
upon millions of its inhabitants

until were left the chosen few

then did we leave
and walk both east and west