Preface:
Even old poets can forget new tricks,
So when toe stubbed and ah ha benedicted,
Causes you to remember what you once knew,
It feels even better, like being crazy
Once in awhile,
Or wearing an untrimmed chest Jason smile.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eons ago converted to a new religion,
The Church of Free Verse.
If life be variable,
Usually unrhymed
A pencil sketch of crisscrossed lines,
No fixed metrical pattern assigned,
Than even more so, my poetry.
Once I regretted that the children,
Crack addicted to rhyming,^
Used nickel bags and ******* lines
At the starting gate where all
Our associative poetry journey begins.
Perhaps, a tad arrogant, that diktat,
Nonetheless, unashamedly, nothing to recant.
Words have utility creative, souls innovative,
Free them guised as global explorers,
Make them up, then unleash them
Upon us, yourself, as detectives investigative.
Unchained myself like Houdini,
From water chambers and locks constraini.
What care I for poetic rules and regulations,^^
Got so many points, they tried to suspend
My government-issued poetic license.
Had myself forgot,
That a poem needs a
Frame of jungle gym sounds,
An aural aura resonance unbound.
Purposed to make the heart lift
Your ears say:
Say what!
It needs a tune,
An internal music,
It needs a lilt!
A cadence, that both
Marches and swings,
Even when'd urgent dirge
grief pours forth.
Yes my darling young ones,
Your writ of screams, like Bob Dylan's occasional schemes,
Celebrations of agonized lives of the criminally-pained,
Songs and cants of victims, love-cancer stained,
Require a whining, singsong beat.
{Poems so rad-sad that it makes this Jew
Genuflect and crisscross himself,
That he was blessed with a few good happy years,
In his reincarnated life of
A few centuries long.}
Learn 'em to sing their cries,
Harmonize the internality of love,
Or, even the infernal loss and lack thereof,
For it is the lilt
That makes, transforms a cry into a
Poem.
Even I on death's last stairway step,
When was called by the name of
Nate Hale,
My dying poem lilted, lifted and metered
"I only regret,
that I have
but one life,
to lose,
for my country."
Now you're thinking he is lost it all,
But you would be incorrect for sure.
He found it.
The lilt of life that makes him rise
And greet each morn,
Even some sorry starless nights
With a First Poem of the Day.
I lilt you, one and all.
If you think this mis-wrote,
My auto correct mentally broke,
Meant to type I love you,
You'd be
Right but wrong,
I just lilt you.
^ "People, Stop Rhyming..."
^^The Rubiyat is not where I'm at,
The Acrostic, amusing, but let it be
Someone else's cross to bear.
That the Cinquain rhymes with pain,
No accident, and Tritina is but half of a Sestina,
But twice as hard, you could look it up.
The Quatorzain another French device inane.
Shakespeare's sonnets, nonpareil,
But, refrained, quatrained, by Iambic pentameter.
Ok! Maybe the meter makes the poem lilt sweeter!
This poem Lilt of Life, I commenced, on June 10th, when K Balachandran, Poet Extraordinaire
Wrote me about another poem: Three poems were walking down the street."
"I dig the title, not only the lilt, it sounds esoteric..something more hidden in it,unintentionally!"
I put the word Lilt in a Poem title file, wrote a line or two, then it aged till July 11th, when it just wrote itself. So today Bala corresponded as follows:
"creative instinct, particularly poetic surge has roots in imbalance (though i really don't believe) of the mind. Yes, during the moments poetic urge becomes a sort of agitation,
this may seem true, how can one deny it.."
This agitatation of which he writes, we are all familiar with, I am sure. We emote, we wrote. Guilty as anyone. But it took a month of silent, back room, hidden from me,
cogitation,
to complete the poem, when it emerged from gestation period in a few minutes. I share this with you as a public reminder/chastisement to myself that writing is both push and pull, agitation and reflection, a process,. By way of humor, I wrote Po-hymn, in 20 minutes, threw it out here instantaneously, and then did minor tinkering. Why? I wrote it with tears in my eyes, agitated, and the only way to stop the emotive upheaval, was share it with the people here ASAP! So it goes both ways, but net net, write it, then let it age a day or mores, then let it go, give it up, after some:
cogitation
— noun
concerted thought or reflection; meditation; contemplation: After hours of cogitation he came up with a new proposal.
Rambling the point of which is to properly thank him in view of all for reminding me
all poems, must possess some kind of lilt and being the inspiration for this baby.
7/11/2013