you have to wonder often why you are here
and then you realise why

its so personal you will not reveal

the fact of the need

and many will say, as much as they can

but a poem, of sorts
can and will

change the course of the World

Poetry comes from the heart and soul
At times it is revealing
Laying bare inner most secrets
Others, it is concealing
Misleading the reader
To the truth of what is deep within
Poetry
It is truth
It is deceit
A mystery
Or just plain spoken
Poetry
Is whatever you want it to be
A song you hope captures the moment

Kelly Rose
© September 16, 2017

this always happens:
sitting at tombstone
desk—blood clots from hours in this twobuck
torture-chair;
4AM? can barely read
my own thoughts,
neatly arranged,
painstakingly painted a
cross ether
glare of the computer screen.
Seven stanzas devolved
from the act
ual epiphany
of the p o e m;
chest tight,stomach churning acid from
cheap *** cheap cigarettes and cheap
grass rolled up in
99 cent Dutchmaster cigars—
Forgot to eat, forgot to hydrate, forgot to remember
the truth i was trying to forget
—forgot the point i was struggling to articulate;
Did i have a point?
I’m beginning to note tiny
Beings of Light
out’ve the corner of buzzing eyes,
all too familiar friends
friends of fiends, vampire junkies,
raving mad x-politicians,
and nocturnal suicide poets—
who after failing to get laid
in college bars
and drinking too much, too many boring conversations
with dull goons;
Get home, pour another glass,
cigarette      to dry lip     in perpetuum; beatiful Miles,
Porgy and Bess, sit down to
computer and write p o e t r y
not prose,
not prose—Man’s revelation of
histories to come, histories manifest.
not prose which brings Man’s higher-self
        into the great
        Universe-at-Large
but p o e t r y, pretentious,
narcissistic, self-important,
which alienates man from his tools of realities;
enemy of machine—but Man is machine;
no poetry is Man!
no poetry is animal,
primal, instinctive;

Well, **** me, half
way thru another cigar,
“maybe i’m not learned enough
to write a story, a **** good one at that…a novel
i’d say
-good luck you simple sloth…How
could you? just a regular self-loathing chimp
who writes — p o e t r y.”
really pondering
hard; thinking: i can’t be [that] dumb,
i'll admit what i don’t know,
(but Hell, least i’m smarter than the next guy, the
       next guy, the next guy…til the next guy makes
me a **** fool; time to relocate and read some books.)

return my eyes to the computer screen,
re read what,
an hour ago,
i was, prematurely awarding myself the pulitzer prize for
as i see it now: pure
*******.
Devil’s attorney
slinking on slouched and grim drunken shoulder,
“hmm…and you say this is your forte?…
I wouldn’t kid yourself…kid.”



Warnings
in grave visions
of a desperate worm of a man
hunched at resin-stained desktop, scribbling away
His fancifull abstractions, broken man— Mad
and scared; shriveled,
scarred by regret—
Thought he was a talker;
witty, true like Bukowski,
        or Heron;
Fresh,
inventive as cummings
        or essential as Pound.
Simple
and brilliantly smooth
        as W.C.A  or W.C.W.
elegant, smart
and far-reaching as Eliot,
        or the Old Romantics;
could have sworn his musings
Rapturous! no Thoreau, he,
        nor as damaged as Poe be
under the Impression
He could stitch his Soul
into the seams of American Divine, direct such
spirits into p o e t r y as ***** ol Ginsberg did
so bravely, beautifully
as
Wherefore art
thou loving father? in Heavens is Walt
Whitman—
He
sure was;
He
was sure,
******* sure he
possessed a nugget of gold, mined
          from inside each of these masterful
Mountains. panned entire sunsoaked cordillera;
yet
each night
would ‘finish’ a
p o e m,
clock out, tho
always would feel, incomplete,
nevermind how many p o e m s he wrote
hundreds, maybe thousands of
bottomless wells
        of words;
Great Idea! Necessary Idea,
take action, he, in prose,
a form of action the action of wit,
to give human
body to formless, ex-humed soul—
Give soul to formless body of philosophy by god!

alas,
the schmuck
never
witty never
potent enough to pen a real
mother-****** of a story,
certainly
never could imbue a plot
with significance, endow with subtext
or builda character out of his p o e t r y,
        Then give it the legs to run for two-
         hundred pages—
He had the ****, just
not the ***** of it-all…
toiled, silly
in his nebulous, castrated,
dimlit room—swelling
whiskey or gin
cigarette glued to his dry lips, attempting
to romance the grey gods so
that thay mey spit mustard-seed
onto humbled holy head—
pray that it may grow, Flower
to full Bloom
even without
ever learning
his Biology.
…never
realizing what he had there—right
in front of him. Poor *******.
-Dumb. he was.
Cursed to be a P O E T.
and doomed to fail as one.




I hate the sound of the Sunrise
when i’ve been up, writing all night; it’s
an alarm like bones in a blender
thru an endless
waking dreamscape;
Sitting, thinking loosely,
wildly, loose-
change two-cent thoughts—
This
this is when regulatory bodies
are disabled, de
funded; radioactive runoff (operational hazards)
contaminates
pure streams;
...random billboard pop
t-r-a-s-h drift in
and out of mind(probably from
        the endless drone of those same 3 chords in
any store or restaurant you enter. How about some Classical?
        Math: the food ain’t rot ‘em enough, let’s assault
   their other senses of taste. Quick. while
        we’ve got them swine trapped!)
politcal memes, halftruths and
newsday buzzwords flash, bright and
silly then recede into obscurity;
only to discover, the next morning,
their greasy finger-prints
given gimcrack shine to deeppurple dawn
Gibberish. trife piffle. bunkum and balderdash,
gobbledygook, mumbojumbo jackshit slangspit
hogwash, ** lotta raspyutintutyncomman nonsensses hoosis mut nowago sayawahhesay too dum for dada…
My
yawns
are now childish giggling;
My concentrated writings. none of it makes any sense to me.
Searching for a distraction
To regain my focus, composure…
biting
nails, tapping Art Blakey grooves on tired desk,
inspecting burning cigarette, forensically.
Oh—
look around for my cat, come here, co
me here kitty. (ah yea, comforted
by familiar purring, a hum from under the bed;

-Close my eyes,
to centralize
to meditate
to ***** out
inanimate,moving parts
to put finger
to pulse of programmed nub;
to create value
for a dying currency of language;
to whisper sweet nothings
in the ears of tender muses
and meaty hookers.
-At this juncture:
reconciled
where the finish line is
strung,
how it appears to me…only snag:
by the time i get here—none
of these
nothing have no meaning
writing,this,that? what? be
low my paygrade *******;
Let stew; sleepy,
delirious, suicidal, anxious, sorta
*****, deadly confident;
Let stew...
…then it hit me like a Point of Intoxication!
brilliantly constructed
Words,
words hanging,
hanging
like a,
Renaissance-style portrait
above a fireplace in an enlightened *****-den,
    -for a moment, seen clearly thru parting
    of deadeye yellowsmoke sea.
Maladroit,
hallucinatory, went to type,
thought better,
no doubt would ****** such
sudden genius,
fumbled for recorder, gotcha
click:
closed my eyes oncemore
to review this epiphany, to record it.
relayed, recited
like a prayer;
perfectly—this must be what the body
of Christ feels like…
when done, i, exhausted,
smiled like a son a *****
how fine
that P O E M is gonna look,
when written
down all nice and neatly.
it was close(but i knew i'd pull
something revelatory out’ve
my ***.)
satisfied,
if my pants weren’t dry
i'd swear i came.

...the following afternoon,
Upon waking, coffee, cigarette, news
in the background,
grab the recorder to listen to this opus;
well,



**** ME!
if
i didn’t make sure there was any space left
on the ****** thing!
bye bye my petty kubla khan
Smart Boy.

ah well...
it’s just
P O E T R Y ya know.

She lived along the Atlantic coast
and had a collection of lobster pots
by the porch
and her lawn was trimmed for croquet
smelled of clams at low tide
the house was set near barnacle rocks
just beyond a stand of trees.

I found her by looking in a phonebook
next to her name it said, "Poetry Journals,"
so I called the number, and said I was on my way.
"Is that ok?" I added hesitantly.

“Well, yes,” she laughed, “You can come buy one.”
I passed the sign for fresh eggs
and arrived at a black wrought iron gate that said,
"Poetry Journals - 2 for $5.00."

“You’re the first one
who’s ever made it all the way to the house for a journal…”
“In four dozen years,"
she said.
Then she asked,
“What’s your name?”

“I don’t really have a name," I said.
She nodded and understood.
She'd heard from Byron
that the Banshee drags souls out to sea
but sometimes the nameless
manage to float back looking for poetry
these lost ones are like driftwood
bringing a sense of chilly dusk
a retrospective on the sea
in a seashell
appearing by happenstance
at low tide
"yes, I hear a distant mumble of waves,"
she might have said of me
I was one of the lost
turning her porch into a quay of despair
the first one in almost 50 years
who had made it so far
to latch on
until high tide
when the rush of sea returned
washed me out again clinging for dear life
to a raft of poetry

I drift off but can't fall of
Broken heart and an empty soul
As I digest the wise old profound poetry
Feed to the hopeless and cold  at heart
That we dwell in an absurd global village

Coined thoughts to lure the weak
******* them to the last pint

Literature and poetry are my algorithms
Trying to yield a difficult sum for the slums
Everyone for himself but a poet for everyone
Trying to create a conducive ecosystem
The hiatus is narrowed  between the rich and the peasants

The poetry trumpet is slowly dying away
But still giving the essence of necessity
Poetry is life,poetry is love
Long live poetry