IV

Yours is a beauty of shades deep and dark

Blues, grays and the greens by the silver glade,

Which your tress and hem cause to go and fade

A ripple across a mirror like a mark

That beauty made, as beauty draped a shade

Before your pocks in fractions by the day.

As though ashamed, prudence calls you amiss

Unmasked by shadow, jewelry and dress,

While my candor undoes with each caress

Each lovely gloom and sparkle for a kiss,

As if to undo, if not yet undone,

Your fear with my smile, the light of the sun.

Confidence needs be, if never before,

Wrapped in carnality to its core.

 

III

Someday I’ll find someone from some place

Faraway. But perhaps I will never

Meet anyone from another planet,

Not ever. We’ll never know fruitful truth

Because no one will tell us anything.

Nothing ever changes here amongst you,

Me and the distant tree leaves hanging low.

There are no fragrances crossing these seas,

Nor Ulysses, nor Nicéan platoons

Bearing a weary way-worn wanderer.

In comfort I smell the moist earth and lie

About the grass, searching the misted sky

And the stars turning like a wheel of eyes.

 

II

That cool cool jazz in the hot hot nightlight
And that trumpet sounding home savannah
Have you heard, have you heard that sound rising
Gloriously like a brass monolith
The sheer rain of the drums, the sheer thunder
Of flooding Blue Nile water and sad horns
Up-raising the brick walls heaven-bound
Cigarette smoke grass fire, drum-rolling drink
Seen that gravitas oboe, seen that gravity
Of sound and enormous pale moon cymbal
The bass lying about the sleeping lion
Lying closely, smoothing the red-dirt earth
Missing the cold piano wind, stranger
The keen mirage of viola flower

 

I

Green is the park and brown is the wood fence

About us, encircling us, this cold

Morning. She stands, hands on her hips,

Boots on the firm frosted grass and watching

These wonders of invention: neatly clipped plots

Of lamb’s ear, gently tailored evergreens

And at the fence sides crawling insects;

It is their season. Her season is ire,

Peppered and chilled like factory snowflakes.

It’s not been but three weeks and still she snorts,

Clenches her fist and jaw and swings her weight

Mysteriously. I’m sorry, I say.

Winter came here of its own sullen self.

 

First posts always disappoint me somehow.

This will be my first post. I was convinced to do this for the sake of sharing some of the poems I’ve written, which isn’t much and probably not great. I feel like I’ve always had a secret between me and whatever I was writing, since I never publish, and that has made me dumb to whether it is any good or not. Now is a testing ground, a very laughable, third-millenium type. Only a few people will read this, I figure. Hopefully not too many.

First off, I only write sonnets. What poetry I don’t write in sonnets I later cut or expand into sonnet form. I think constricting myself like that makes what I write better, or at least more disciplined. That makes me a sonneteer, which reminds me of a mouseketeer, which is just too bad.

I hope you enjoy what I have to say–and if you don’t, tell me and why. I’m asking for helpful feedback and honest opinions.