The first thinkers were poets
Naming Mother Earth
Beginning symbolic thinking
Of nature, death and birth

Though themes are often repeated
Love, Beauty and God
Poetry in the guise of Religion
A prophet or a fraud

The poet resurrects the Primitive
Through allegory and similes
Disarming the unknown like explorers
Sublime Prophets and Visionaries

They must lay bare those treasured images
That must be expressed
Unraveling and revealing the sounds
At each soul’s behest

Encompassing the entire Cosmos
So lyrical the beat
The poet’s excitement flows outward
Laid at the Reader’s feet

So original, individual
She won’t examine or explain
Letting go the festering feelings
Disturbances in her brain

He exposes his dark, wounded psyche
Just to release and express
Such capacity to see and compare
Hyperbole at its best

I love, I hate, I suffer
A special dance in rhythm and rhyme
The poet as a buffer
Lessening the pain and sting of time

Laden with symbol and feelings
She gives you sweet relief
From something urgent, revealing
Confusion to belief

Through a cinematic kind of seeing
The poet purges to transform
By leaping through Alice’s looking glass
She never was one to conform

Quite intolerant of convention
Just like The Mad Hatter
His passions immune to all logic
In syncopated patter

Jamming up the poet’s mind
Struggling for expression
Seeking order out of chaos
An infantile regression

Cleaving to his imaginary world
The poet breaks out into words
Creating sound paintings to be unfurled
So his own agony is blurred

She succumbs to storms of passion
With instinctive techniques
Rhymes and rhythm still in fashion
Out of hand flows mystique

The poet mines from his unconscious
The Reader is not blind
For every single line and symbol
Means something to the mind

Causing an inner liberation
Enlightenment or flight
It is a matter of life and death
When darkness turns to light.

I've read that
The opposite of two
Is "a lonely me, a lonely you."

I'm freezing cold,
Bundled in blankets that can't keep me warm
The way you do.

And I'm not sure
If I'm fire
Or if I'm ice,

All I know is that
Being in your arms
Is really nice.

I'm not entirely sure
If I'm lost
Or if I'm found,

But flying with you
Is so much better
Than being on the ground.

Have you ever been madly in love?

The old man broke my reverie.

On the long faded green bench white with bird droppings
he was peering at me through his silver grey beard
looking oddly out of place in that college squire park
where only the dreamers at the prime of youth
would sit between classes to exchange love notes
and steal a kiss when the passion couldn't be reined in.

Have you ever been madly in love? he repeated,
and then as if growing impatient by my silence
mumbled, pausing between words,
like they stung him like thorns
it extracts a price been paying all my life
living with a void no other woman could fill
a commitment that breeds only pain
yet makes me insanely boastful
of being madly in love.

It was recess hour and the benches were being filled up.

How many, I wondered, would still hold hands
when the classes are over.

Huddled in the lantern light
they sing of life and death
of love long lost but living
in the ashes of time
a yearning for home
walking the long roads sunburnt
in blistered feet
in the knowledge
healing of pain
is only a rain away
and life is too short
but never too short
to bathe in the power of god
that makes a pauper
be a king
under the canopy of stars.

In my shining spotlight the rabbit scampers
Across the fields, its bright white eyes, and stops
Crouching in the dewy grass of a foggy night
In the pale-faced cold wind of winter

In the light of the supermoon
In the light rain fog of November
And what is fog?
In the darkness
Something that I remember

The glowing leaves pile up in my pockets
Yellow ones burn like lemon flames, green like pears
They all find their way someday between the pages
Of my stained petal books

And I always find my way
Into the Moon's light,
Where blue sea laps softly on smooth stones
Of the shore
Of the skin
And the silence
Of the night