I Plead Myself with Thee

I have dreamed of death and mine
As if it were ungrateful of me to keep
Living and breathing, although

I have laid the rest of thy divinity
In a place so deep inside of me
That like a pilgrimage I scattered youth

The Autumn innocence that
Empties me of feeling every year
With each passing summer I leave

A part of myself well and beloved behind
And in doing so, I die enough to stalk
The future of my own gifts

That won’t be mine, but in meeting you
Will have unveiled something of the infinite
Where I can live irresponsibly and fine
Not bound by this Earth that won’t keep me lovingly
There’s no shadow’s length I bet
No growing pale as I strive

Who can understand the imperfection?
Of our humilities, that leaves
The orchard of our shared vulnerability
Open and not barren, where thrives
Scanty sunbeams for hidden fruit
Proof that we hung Springs together well.

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

No, I am not happy for its own sake
I’m happy to be generous to the people in my life

Who I care about, who took the time
To nurture me even when I was being difficult

They cheer for my little victories
For they know my tenderness is waning

Like the white moon, turned to blood orange
I’m happy because the sun is out

I always forget what I am meant to say
Except that I’m a poet and I speak

On matters common to the days
The days that spell an end to gold

The days that cannot remember their history
Siblings, or if they should endure

Nights biting at their tails, wagging, lovely
The stars still know their place, distant, aloof

Austere, I am happy because the ocean
Still cares about the continents, even if we

Have changed her, have taunted her bad
No, I’m happy for humanity still has a chance

That we are not extinct yet, show no huge weakness
Only the ignorance of profit, short-term profit
That has no bearing on galactic reality.

Poetry of the Human Psyche

What is this poetry, you keep talking about
This poetry, you keep becoming
Like a neurological stimulation
You can’t give up!?

An imported art for the few
From some peculiar time
When people read and spoke of

Their innermost feelings
Is poetry to be felt as something
Fundamental, then, or a shape produced

Or a fictional narrative
Or a sculpture of nature reproducing
Something or copying something other
An architecture of the human condition?

A caricature then, a blank slate that is
Never truly neutral or objective at all?
Or a failure to integrate into reality?

Some verbal instrument of our subjectivity
A popular language of futility
Like philosophy, or something to be hidden
By teenagers on secret blogs

All appearances do seem fallacious
And we disdain to be ourselves classified
As the formerly neurotic, or spontaneously flawed

But who cares, we trace our own definitions
Right down to the words we choose to affirm
However our psyche breathes, however
Our art can account for our genes

In these environments, this snapshot of history
These ruined cities and corrupted nations
So poetry is not meant to convince or persuade

But to reveal, offering a sense of
The human to the intelligence machine
And offering a sense of the past to the future
A passion of the elementary kind

We wrote our best poems when young
Considered poetry, it’s an elegance of interpretation
Which takes greatest delight in hearing

Our own voice, like a vanity of our griefs
That’s the state of society, measured
In linguistic trends and masquerading as art.