Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Lately my poems have been

Lately my poems have been slipping into the realm of doggerel.  I’m okay with doggerel, but sometimes I like to read a line that’s got more substance to it.  Romy pointed it out to me a few days ago - she said something that Haloscan isn’t sharing anymore to the effect that she usually prefers poems with longer rhymes.  Well I agree, and inspired by this welcome critical appraisal, I emitted this:

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES EAT THE DAISIES

Digitalis dusts my favorite memories with cyan
Leaving me sometimes to wonder if I still recall aright
I refresh my recollection till the parts that I’m implying
Are the parts I hold most precious when I reach out in the night.

It’s a trick of time, a chronologonundrum, a mirage
Now the preciousest of moments have been gilded in my mind
I surround myself with twisted recollections, a bossage
of caricatures, petrified, ideal and purblind.

I have convinced myself of what once was with rude abandon
And hallucinate a happiness unbounded and serene
But waking from a fitful sleep and disabused of phantoms
I meander oleander through a field of broken dreams.

Deluded as I was to think my joys unique and vaunted
I descry my selfish cruelties and my thoughtless callow acts
Unvarnished, what I’ve let be done to have the world I wanted
Sickens me with poison pity and I choke on simple facts.

The dark is not so dark as I imagine in my terror
The light no quite so light as I embellish in my dreams
The poison flowers of the mind proliferate - much rarer
are simple shoots of lucid thought reflected in the stream.