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