To the Entrepreneur

I'd like to thank you for the gifts you give
The world, solutions you provide, the wealth
The world enjoys. How many people live
A better life, a longer life, in health?

I'm eating grapes in winter, writing this
On a computer, air-conditioned room
In summer, art is everywhere--this bliss,
This blessing now provided to the tomb.

And yet, the selfish and the greedy want
The tiny bit we bless you with for all
You've done--providing nothing, they now hunt
You down to line you up against the wall.

For all the things you do to change our fate
The world should cherish you and celebrate. 

Sacrifice Your Iphigenia

We're in the doldrums now, and Artemis
Has stopped the winds in punishment
Because we have abandoned poetry.
Postmodern verse was never meant
To strike us all with awe and fear, or bring
The gods to earth with awesome beauty.
We have abandoned all that poetry
Was meant to be and failed our duty,
Offended her, the sacred moon, the light
Of shifting shadows that brings mind
Enlightenment from contemplation.
And now the moon demands a sacrafice
Before she will allow creation
To find its voice in you. You think you have
A voice? Oh, fool who lives in lies,
Pretends the doldrums are swift hurricanes,
And you are simply in their eyes--
You have to sacrifice what you most love.
What's your Iphigenia? Face
The mother of your great creation, kill
Her in the hope of glory's grace,
Risk your poetic life to open life
To poetry and poetry
To life in its complexities, for truth
And beauty come from tragedy.

What Alone

The swans are feigning gentleness--they swell
With white and whisper on the surface, white
Light diamonding the sapphire surface--spell
Now cast, the swans now follow their delight.

The lighter lichens catch the little light,
But otherwise, the forest fills with shade
Attracting your naive soul with its night
That fill the spaces in this little glade.

I know that I can change the world. I know
That I can't change the world. I know that I
Can change myself alone. I have to show
Myself myself and all that I deny.

The forest and the pond both have their pull.
Among the roots the waves lap on a skull. 

Shiva

Out of the seeming chaos came the world--
In Fibonacci spirals it unfurled--
For God's the chaos that makes order be
And Satan is the order that sets free
Disorder and destruction, evil's root.

We can't forget Satan's most beautiful--
A beauty that deceives our souls--now mull
This truth: utopias in mind or made
Are beautiful because they're Satan's shade
And home, though made from skulls, deceit,  and loot.

Creation everywhere precedes destruction--
But from the chaos everything must rise--
From all the rubble will come new construction--
 But never deconstruct what you despise.

The Theater of Hate

With eco-fascists, left and right,
With racists, sexists, socialists,
With science, reason now in flight,
Solutions fought with dripping fists

We can't surrender to the hate
We can't surrender to the mob
When reason's racist, all debate
Devolves and you can only rob

An ethics which you have not earned,
Self-righteousness backed by the gun,
Because there's nothing you have learned
And you're unhappy you have won

I Must

The Muses crawl around inside my brain
And keep my neurons always lit--I must
Make poetry--I'm living with this trust
I cannot leave behind--I can't refrain
From making art--production keeps me sane--
Neglect will only drive me to the brink,
To where I can no longer breath nor think--
And yet, I think this is a gift, a gain.

I have to live up on the mountaintop,
Out in the sun, the dancing star, the air
So crisp and cool, the water crystaline.
I'm forced to always harvest my mind's crop
Before it withers in the heat--the fair
Wind, weather will not last. I must begin. 

An Invitation

The gods have fled? They haven't been invited!
A century has passed opposing beauty
And now we stand depressed, dismayed, indicted
As artists for our failure at our duty.

Our art, our poetry--none beautiful
Enough to bring the gods to Earth--
None terrible enough to bravely cull
Us of the evil spirits we give birth.

We ought to bravely, boldly mark our blaze--
Instead, we set all art ablaze and kill
The soul. The avant garde's designed to raze
 Instead of raise us--empty, never fill.

We wander lonely, stripped of flesh and soul--
We've been abandoned--art has lost its goal.

Aphorisms on Life, Death, and Meaning

"You cannot know about death before you know about life." -- Kung Fu Tzu

Creation must precede destruction.

Birth and life and sex come before death.

Avoiding death means you're avoiding life.

To have no peace, you must avoid all strife.

To create chaos, impose order.

True anarchy's the architect of complex order.

Imposing meaning means there is no meaning being made.

Birthing Pains

Oh sun, send forth your silent rays
On all our melancholy days,
On me and those who follow me,
To raise an ancient reverie.

I've seen the paintings on these walls
So many times I see their flaws--
My feet, my hips in searing pain
Like van Gogh I might go insane.

He who asks questions knows far more
Than he who asks you nothing. War
With those who hide from lunar light,
Rejecting poetry's delight.

The music rises, rises, falls
Reminding us of ancient calls--
The searing pain, the sudden joy
The strings, the woodwinds, drums deploy.

The sun of truth, the moon of verse
Together lift the ancient curse,
Together paint a brand new art,
Where music never can depart.

Usurious Theorists

The poets all complain of usury--
The Canterbury Tales, the Cantos tell
Us of its evils--yet we cannot flee
The debt on which professors' wallets swell.
The money flows from government and debt
To literary theorists who all dine
On the youth's scarlet blood and salty sweat
And drink the money, flowing sweet as wine.

The fault is in the markets--that's the false,
Self-serving Marxist narrative we hear
In English classes fed by falsely low
Interest rates decimating English halls
Once the bubble burst, burst what once was dear
And from their negligence have naught to show.

(Un)breakable

I cannot violate the rules--the rules
I did not make, the grammar, syntax, soul
Of rhetoric, the nature-given tools
That make us more of who we are. The goal
That can't be reached is what will beautify--
The path that can't be trod will take us there--
Resentment, envy we must all defy--
Find love in trade, but only if we dare.

I violate the rules to make a space
For newer games and truer games to grace
My kitchen table of the rarest wood
The forest filled, the farmer felled--I face
The fact that breaking rules is often good
And beauty's hidden and exposed by lace.

From Love

When time emasculated the broad sky
And churned the sea into a frothy foam,
Then love emerged, most feminine, to lie
With war to make male love and harmony,
And unrequited love (the poets' choice)
And fear, most foul revenge, and dread and lust.
She'd lie with unrestrained consumption, birth
A masculinity unrestrained, burst
In rampant plowing of the fertile earth.
She'd lie with commerce, balancing the home,
The masculine and feminine, the voice
Of mutuality and harmony.
In fields of colorful anemones
That grew up from her sorrow in the breeze
From the death sent by war and the chaste moon
Arose a daughter destined for the sea.
War's death in lust, the moon in virginal
Revenge brought love and death poetic life
That always comes from living sacred strife.

Naivete

We think we’re on fire

And preach to the choir

Give in to desire

But there’s none we inspire

And none who would hire

A liar denier

They’re stuck in the mire

And light every pyre

Cause they believe every liar

And that’s why I tire

Of trying to sire

A world where my life

Is nevermore rife

With anger and strife

I’ll cut with a knife

The ones that my wife

Say stand on her neck

The scum and the dreck

Who think that their beck

And call is a check

To pay for the wreck

They made of society

They don’t see reality

The weight of the gravity

Built by depravity

Made by the hand we

Love to be petted by

As we try to deny

The leash that holds us all by

The neck so we cannot fly

We’re merely just getting by

No matter how hard we try

But we will not dare defy

Our masters who will reply

With guns and then we will cry

As we and our children die

Warrior Poets

In tiger stripes and leopard spots the wind
Spreads out the light among the branches, leaves
And pull me, drunken with the wine of life
Into the threads imagination weaves.

God grants the gift to wake the world with words--
He woke the world with words, then gave the gift
To poets so that we could make the world
One logos at a time. With it we shift

Horizons, then launch all our silver ships.
Come, goddesses who wing the warrior up
From death into the heavens where the cup
Of victory shall always touch her lips.

The poet is the master of the word,
The warrior who flies with the heavens' bird.

Eros' Arrows

How can I think agape thoughts
When your wet lips are pink, agape,
Inviting me to bare my chest
To Eros' arrows. I would feel your shape
And I would surely bear the wait,
The time it takes to shed your petals
And swell to ripest, reddest fruit
To fill the bowls and pots and pans and kettles
With such sweet juice I would preserve
Until we both run out of time. I trust
The constancy I find in you
When you cannot control with me your lust
For all I say, for all I do,
My intellect, the way I stroke your breast,
The way I love but you alone--
I gaze upon you, know that I am blessed.

To Lie

"I want your honesty"--the greatest lie
We tell each other--you just want my lie.

Resentment, lashing out, and anger--light
Of truth brings these--you're happy in the lie.

The upright stance--you push and pull and lure
Me down so that beside you I will lie.

Can love or hate, desire or disgust
Survive a single day without the lie?

What kind of love, what kind of friendship lives
By swimming in pacific seas of lies?

Are you upset because I speak the truth?
I do not show I love you when I lie.

When I am honest, I show my support--
I show my disrespect when every lie.

It does not mean I do not care for you
If I don't feed you a comforting lie.

The truth that I express in poetry--
How I, Troy Camplin, falsify the lie.

When They Won't Listen

Here's one of life's neglected rules:
Don't waste your time with drunks and fools.

The Tree of Life

The worm that wriggles in my hand
Is at the top of life's dense tree--
And though he wriggles and I stand,
He's at the top, the same as me.

Man never came from chimpanzees--
We have a common ancestry
That brachiated through the trees--
From them is how we came to be.

No species now remains unchanged
From Coelecanth to biting flea--
All DNA has been arranged
For chaos makes order for free.

We came from love, we came from strife--
Such strange attractions made all life.

How to Make an Atheist

The Flood drove all the dinosaurs extinct--
You little knew that mankind's sins were linked
To those great creatures' sad and sudden deaths?
Dimetrodons could never hold their breaths
So long that they'd survive. Ichthyosaurs,
Or other things that don't go on all fours?
Why would the winged beasts be gone when flight
Above the clouds could keep them at a height
No mountain-drowning flood could ever reach?
What could this death of dinosaurs then teach
Us of the wages of our sins? Perhaps
The trilobites all drowned or we'd relapse
To decadence and unbelief. It's odd
So many want to think these things of God.

I Don't Need You Around

Why do you speak of need I have no need
Of any individual--not you,
My love, nor anyone. You true
And always love--I want to always feed
Out of your dish--You fill me up--indeed,
I'll give you all the love that you are due.
Why speak of need? Out of my well you drew
True water--there's no need to make me bleed.

It's only out of want you get desire--
It's only out of want where you get wealth--
It's only out of wanting extra heat
That anyone was taming fatal fire.
I do not need-- I much prefer the health
Of wanting you so love will not retreat.