An Avian Abecedarian


A bird called Dave 
eschewed feathers gray
how idiotic 
jerky kooky 
loopy messed-up 
nutty oafish 
puckish quirky
really silly 
totally unruly
vacuous whacky
xenophobic
yet zany.





Cento Mental        


Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
half a league half a league
half a league onward where

I saw the best minds of my generation 
destroyed by madness, where Alph 
the sacred river ran through caverns 
measureless to man, where on either 

side the river lie long fields of barley 
and of rye, had we but world enough, 
and time to gather rosebuds while ye may
I’d wander lonely as a cloud that floats on
 
high o’er vales and hills, I’d drink to me only 
with thine eyes and take some honey and 
plenty of money and a star to steer me by,
for hope springs eternal in the human breast,

like a Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the 
forests of the night, whose woods they are 
I think I know his house is in the village though,
his luve's like a red red rose so worn with
 
passing through the bars his gaze holds 
nothing any more, for what is this life but 
full of care, we have no time to stand and 
stare, in Flanders field the poppies blow

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . 





What’s the Crime in Rhyme


What’s up with all the free verse 
out there? Is it better or worse than 
stuff that’s converse, that rhymes on 
a dime, that’s fine and sublime?

Am I showing my age 
wanting like sounds on a page? 
Am I a rebel with a cause
desiring congruence and applause? 

Or do I just dig verse 
that is terse, lines with 
designs, words like birds 
and two-thirds. 

If that is true I’m undoubtedly screwed 
‘cause you gotta be mad or real bad 
to buck a fad, have people be glad 
when you’re going quite rad. 

But time’s on my side 
and if history’s a guide 
what today is in style 
will tomorrow be reviled. 

Eschew adieu will come through 
as a Lit point of view, long overdue 
and perhaps out of the blue, but there 
will be a syntactical déjà vu. 

On that bet the ranch with utter 
carte blanche or bet the farm or 
your spouse or anything else 
whose loss you would grouse.





The book of poetry


is a steel-wire cable-stayed suspension bridge 
floating over the East River containing adjectives, 
verbs and nouns that Hart Crane used to connect 
the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan, a name 

derived from the word Manna-hata, a Lenape locution 
meaning island of many hills that was sold by Native 
Americans for twenty-four cucumbers to Peter Minuit who 
called the sellers Indians though they were not from India 

or composers of mystic and symbolic ancient Vedic 
verse that is Greek to me like Plato’s desire to ban 
bards from the Republic which means Ogden Nash 
and E. E. Cummings, two of my favorite poets, would 

not have found favor in Mister P’s perfect state. 
Twenty-two hundred years later Keats dubbed poetry’s 
departure from logic negative capability, an expression 
I sometimes employ when my writing goes south and wish 

I was Walt Whitman, who knew how to celebrate himself, 
Robert Frost, who knew the right road to take, or Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, who knew It’s not the destination, it’s 
the journey. Emerson also opined in a debate on poetic 

structure that one should simply ask the fact for the form, 
an idea I have tried to put into practice but fact has never 
answered me so like many poets these days I have had to 
craft my own ways to tell a tale. 





Wish Me Good Luck


Wish me good luck as I write this damn thing,
A challenging task on a bright sunny day
When a walk in the woods is beckoning me
To leave my desk chair and writer's cares
And amble on paths to contemplate nature
And dream of good work that simply gets done.

But nothing is simple in getting work done,
Though such trickery is a comforting thing,
It seems to be in my basic nature
If I think a chore can be through in a day
I do not fret and add gratuitous cares
That would cause me to whine woe is me, 

Woe is me, woe is me, woe is me.
Repetition in writing is easily done,
It lessens the burden of prosodic cares,
A thing is a thing is a thing is a thing,
Thinging like that just makes my day.
Ah nature, ah nature, ah nature, ah nature.

Did I not mention ah nature, ah nature?
And let me throw in woe is me, woe is me.
Oh, jubilant day, jubilant day,
This sestina is rolling and round the bend done,
Recap and reprise are truly the thing 
To banish and vanish authorial cares.

Authorial cares, authorial cares,
Most natural but not existing in nature
Where symbols are not the primary things. 
But symbols are crucial to people like me,
I use words in my poems, dats how dey get done,
I pray this one over by end of the day,

By end of the day, by end of the day
I hope all my dread cares, yes all my dread cares
Will cease and this job will be finally done.
I’m impelled and incited by my inner nature,
Which seems to be pressing and pushing at me
To do this damn thing, to do this damn thing.

This thing that keeps me from trekking the woods, this thing
That keeps me from trekking the woods, keeps me
From trekking the beautiful woods, pricks my impetuous nature.





What’s a Meta Phor


What’s a meta phor asked Al Legory,
his love not like a red, red rose.

Don’t know or care replied Al Litteration,
an army intelligence officer, forgive the oxymoron.

Wham, bam, flutter, and flap! First-rate onomatopoeia but
Al Lusion was clueless about it and so was that ass O’Nance,

a couplet of guys who don’t know much about poetry
but are bionic men with iron knees abounding.

That’s what Sal Iloquy says and so does Aunty Hero, 
Cousin Flash Back, Art Ballad, and Meister Singer.

Sir Realism has a different take, more open-form.
A prose is a prose is a prose is a prose, I think therefore Iamb.

Mussolini made the quatrains run on time and if the one I’m on
doesn’t have an elision I will get to see Con and Dee Notation who

told me it was a myth take to have written this poem when I 
could have been doing something more inductive.