Digest - III
Collected Poems
Red Rover
As the tree in the yard is so busy at dropping its leaves,
I have wandered beneath its long limbs all stretching over
The flat and bespeckled brown grass with faint seams of green,
Thinking to myself, old games of red rover, red rover.
One bare tree stands alone in the yard, and shedding red tears,
For no children have ran under limb, or played round the trunk,
And long stood has this tree through the seasons’ weathering years
With the patter of love’s full bounty cyclically stumped.
The soft sounds of the leaves as they flutter to ground are lovely,
And so too when they gently land into hands of limp clover;
I think of her white fingers extended, her hand so comely,
Red rover, red rover, send my lover right over.
Will the beloved's white hand reach out for autumn's red leaf
To lovingly catch these slow tears which now drop at my feet?Empty Carton You know, When you twirl your hair, I wish I knew for sure, If you had got eggs at the store, I tell myself you have. I do not know if you like eggs, You speak strangely of them, Sometimes they are precious; Sometimes you crack them. (Am I at fault when they break, But not when they are born?) I thought we liked eggs, I thought it was our favorite, But now I’m not so sure, I don’t think you do, Anymore. I wish I’d known before Our final rosy dawn, That the carton was empty, That the carton was gone. In front the fridge, The frosty breeze, I stand athrash, This wine dark sea.
My Gal
My gal...she can’t exactly catch my light,
She doesn’t get my talk of abstract form,
It’s of her nature to use a concrete norm,
She speaks of flowers and I speak of sight,
She sees the babe to come, I see her fright,
I want to play, she wishes for the morn,
She wants to play, but after I’ve been shorn,
We struggle kissing 'neath the covered night.
Like cross-run swine we both just bump our heads,
While rutting, snorting, rolling that porky raunch.
Her hungry lips that beckon to be fed!
The fulsome curves along her ivory haunch!
But if there be a thing to meet our souls,
Let it be more than silence 'tween the lulls.Willy Wopple, Willy Walls, Big Billy Balls, he falls, Dippity-do, let him through, He's bleedin' out his gall. Pinch Penny Pies, See wide eyes, Neener, Neener, Big surprise.
I’ve had a fair number of poems get released in the past several weeks, and some of them not on the substack. I’ve listed them below, should the reader have any interest.
Lithe Lover’s Song was published on Spectra Poets for Valentine’s Day, a cheeky love poem of sorts, in couplets of modest length.
Spectra also published a short poem called Pressboard.
I have a short poem called Girl in the Screen in this issue of miniMAG.
This is a ballad of moderate length, a silly story. Includes both sex and violence! Wow!
Several poems of six-lines on various subjects. More to come.
A short takeoff of Coleridge’s poem On Donne’s Poetry. Also serving as brief statement of what I’ve taken as my own out of Donne (and the Metaphysical method as a whole.) A frivolity in every line!
A short-ish poem about making things and making out things what we want of them. In hexameter quatrains. One of my better poems, I think.
There's something in Empty Carton that's hitting me and I can't quite put my finger on it. I've never read a more devastating poem about eggs, anyway.
I love personification of nature watching tine pass