Poetry is the First Pleasure

What is poetry?
Poetry is a whisper
The quiet voice of dreaming
That can never die

So long as civilization
Makes art, poetry spreads
Poetry is the eyes of things
In the soul of words

She is the ancients
Transcending time itself
Poetry is beauty
Unchanging unlike truth

A rhythm of sentience
On the face of rhyme
She is the admired song
Of the sweetest voice

She is the heaven-rapture
Dancing on the tip of bliss
What is poetry?
Poetry is of the wood

Poetry is the making
Of water and stone
She is the building of
Literacy in a world

Of discrete poems, where
We originate, create, evocatively
The poisis, the first-awakened
A realized feeling expressed

For all our eternities
So imagery, form, rhythm and sound
Might trumpet, flute and come
Alive in the music of our
Deepest lack of inhibitions.

So Long Foreshadowed Days Have Come Around

We grew a hundred years in age
In a few months of love’s highs and lows
We died in our gentleness
And came alive in the silver cracks
Of our passionate connection

Thunderous tidings from your lips
Where I went sobbing home, imploring God
To make you grow fond of me, to utmost chilling
I fell by my Muse’s gaiety and zest
With too much useless art for your pragmatic tastes

I live to mourn and love in verse
Since you came and left, I having nothing now
But a more wicket heart that bears regret
In frozen winds and the itch of spring
Summer’s pageantry will hopefully hasten to admit

That I’m still alive , though I have been dead
I aged in months of crying sleep and tragic songs
Half up the slope of too much feeling
Where lovers do not come, and I must sit alone
As if in the dusty lashes of a lingering solitude.

Chronicle of Comet-Like-Jewel Eyes

I am alive with lucid memories
That are mere moments
Of my future, ribboned sequences
Of the pure enactment of miracles
The little crazy buzz
Of kindness, the gift of giving

The altruism principle, in full bloom
Flowering of big-sky belonging
I am alive with the joy-in-chaos
Of hours stretched to the bottom
Of every corner, every error, deployed
Like sentinels of the state-of-wonder

Fresh like cinnamon roses-buds
Moving colors of wispy vanilla
Chocolate resplendent autumns
I am alive to the best of the world
Where harvests come from strange occurrences
And accidents lead me to love

The old jewel box by the side of the road
Where you smiled at me
And changed me forever.