find less than arresting: stilted musings gem-set

in ardent verbiage.

recherché semantics, florid phrases facing a withering sun

or policing of metaphor –

until handcuffed: Italic jewel thief caught on surveillance

Sudden bewildering

                                        spaces with odd punctuation;  ?  &

inward dithering semi-confessions in serpentine

verse.  Badder (or worse)  annoying line

           breaks /

cloying internal half – rhymes,

overwrought.     Over-edited;

over-thought until  you want to see

what’s on TV instead.        As if

the poet’s every random musing was so

essential.  Reverential semi-precious mythos

(Siren’s distant waves echo, shipwrecked rocks: Ossifer,  ossifer –

it’s only boring poetry…

                        I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it)

again.

New York! –
The poets you have bred are few,
And how to rhyme they’ve not a clue –
Oh, fork!
(I know that word should sound like ‘muck’,
But that would make this effort ****);
Well, talk –
Why do the poems in your style
So often form, of crap, a pile?
We balk
At ‘crack’ as drug, or woman’s part,
With dreams of giving life to art,
You dork!
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ – oh, please!
That ****-free quote is as is cheese
To chalk
Compared with Danny, who’s ‘oh … Kaye’,
And Allen, in a ‘Would he’ way.

To walk
Fifth Avenue, where storm clouds ****
The countryside with ticker-tape …
Pop cork?
‘Bronx hill new moan here’ was the cause;
But Central Park is where to pause
For torque
As that’s the place you would unwind
To wrench from vagrants, that you find
May stalk;
But, anyway, your poets stink –
Their barrel, they do need, I think,
To caulk:
Your school of poets, meter log,
Like what you get in synagogue
Of pork!

This would
have
many self-styled poets
who believe that
taking
an ordinary sentence and splitting it
into random segments
is poetry
up in arms!

I want to eat peaches and cream off your thighs,
Have I ever told you that?
Well, that’s what I want to do.
On a lazy Sunday afternoon,
When we are watching something weird
Before the Channel 5 news
Cruises through, like a liner,
And disturbs the World’s Worst Hurricanes.

I want dribble the cream down
To the tops of your knees
And watch each droplet coat,
Like a new skin,
Milky and new and thick.
Then I’ll reach for my tin opener,
Peach slices, neat, from the nearest Co-Operative
Arranged like humps of a lizard
Once believed to exist.

You'll let me, won't you?
You with your hair,
And your nails
And your laugh.
I want to eat peaches and cream off your thighs,
Have I ever told you that?

☺♥☺♥☺♥☺♥

The worst will be found toward the end of the book
When you’re scanning the lines of a weighty anthology.
Centuries have shaken what works can be shook,
and what’s old is refined – and I make no apology.

Angst-ridden ramblings, so fashionably bleak
Start appearing somewhere past the middle, I fear
With those modernist psyches, whose raggedly weak
and depressing confessions sling mud in the ear.

Like the scribblers of Suicide, brimming with bile
or the autodestructive self-pitying ******,
whose quaint observations enshrining the vile
are a crime against life – and an art for the loser.

You ideologues, with your axes to grind,
propagandizing causes in militant styles
ought to  stay in the hills, where the struggle is defined,
and spare us the old dialectical wiles.

The Feminist scribe, with her *** for a mouth,
Ever pressing her case, for fallopian reasons
Grows saggingly sterile. Her muses fly south
with the passing of harvests and goddessless seasons.

Absurdists, surrealists, and nihilist mystics
whose hymns to destruction make glory of chaos
should leave the black humor to God and ballistics.
Your poems, like Judas, are bound to betray us.

The Freudian flirt (whose neuroses abound),
And the Jungian shamans (their animas, too),
ought to rest on their couches. Why should they be found
By the wellsprings of Spirit, whose guidance is true.

The art-lover’s lines gild a frame around Knowledge.
Their poems are like an art history course.
As they flit past the idols they studied in college
their name-dropping odes are a grand tour-de–force.

Sixties drug-revelers, love beads a-jingle
And brothers dashiki-clad, howling at Nixon
no longer strike chords in my soul. Not a single sitar lick
nor visions of hippie-chick *****.

You rhymers and rappers of rhythms in sample
Whose words like a kick-drum send shock through old Whitey
Now cease from your chanting. The genre is ample.
Your gangstering paeans are too fly-by-nighty.

Revived Roman legions, who relish things Latin;
Your martial convictions inspire the hero.
But while you are looking for cities to flatten,
remember – old Julius was nobler than Nero.

The theme of World Peace –  this crops up near the ending:
a desperate hope for New-Agers and liberals,
who cherish a dream of reality-bending
Through networking, magic, and energized crystals…

But what can be shaken shall perish, forgotten.
Anthologies show us that truth is enduring.
All praises and laurels shall prove misbegotten.
The Word become flesh is the most reassuring.

So I leave the anthology, closing its cover.
Three-quarters at least seemed like nonsense to me.
Yet still, I admit, I’m a poetry lover.
Let time do its work and in future – we’ll see…

☺☻☺☻

When painters who paint about painting
meet writers who write about writing,
self-conscious redundancy
bordering lunacy
ends in esthetic in-fighting.

These modernists, right about nothing
(mostly nihilists mad about something)
are so lost in the process
they vent all their excess
in metacognition: dull writing.

You poets who muse about musing –
unaware you are reader-abusing,
provide a terrific
verbose soporific,
yet not of the hearer’s own choosing…

I long for some righteous verbosity –
but I’m stifled by all the pomposity.
This dull erudition,
“sub-metacognition”,
is but an artistic atrocity.

You thinkers who think about thinking
drag my spirit far lower than sinking.
What we want is a Word
which we haven’t yet heard –
so till then I’ll just drink about drinking.

♠  ♣  ♥  ♦

Here’s to avant-cryptic stanzas
Nihil-angst extravaganzas,
Ghazal, Pantoum, endless Haiku…
such may cause the Muse to strike you.
Dada, Tanka, cinquains, Centos
existential verse  mementos –
yes, they’re mildly amusing forms
but finally fail to transcend norms
of poetry-induced despair
(a common modern-day affair)
brought on by formless abstract lines
of current verse. The warning signs:
eye-rolling, growling, throwing books
yelling at websites, ***** looks
at writers with advanced degrees,
a raging sense of vague unease
with life and letters. **** what’s new…
one wonders what we’re coming to.

When meaning is replaced by style
and editors extol the vile
you know that doom is on its way.
The poets don’t know what to say
but fool around, devoid of rhythm
(that’s why no one wants to hear them
let alone READ them). What a lark;
like rain-soaked matches in the dark.
Poetic dullness thus delays
to kindle light or spark a blaze.
Sad vocation: analyzing
wordy scribbles. Agonizing
over esoteric twaddle
(makes one want to hit the bottle –
or the poet). Was it ever
this way? Will the next endeavor
lift us toward the lyric splendor
or return us back to sender…

Rebellion – for too long the status quo,
is, in our day, a predictable show.
Antichrist irony, absurdity
shockingly daring incongruity
no longer shock the bourgeois, you know…

Alone in the temple of glass with a rock,
you’re out of traditional symbols to mock.
Surrealists did it much better than you –
and it meant a lot more in ’32.

You chew your cud on the cattle-wagon
overused shock-tactics (moo ! ) now draggin’
(or herding) aboard the iconoclast train
(b)lowing through boxcars your bovine refrain:
“to, um –  make people think…”  Oh Lord, how uncouth.
Nihilist narcissus – tell me, what’s Truth?
Must creative always be subversive?
I discern, in your frenzied discursive,
a dull and predictable lack of life.
While you brandish that plastic butter knife
I  seem to note, in your constant ******,
dearth of artistic ability.  Must
bohemian acolytes (some yawning)
ever be deer in the headlights, fawning
before the ironic gesture? It’s sad;
the bitter is sweet but the art is bad…

They circle hors d’oeuvres on opening night
like moths around white wine in candlelight,
cerebrating in a modernist void:
contemporary aesthetes, overjoyed
to know once more that life has no meaning;
the planet is doomed; that kings are queening;
that chic just arrived, escorting philosophy
(Forgive us, Duchamp, for all this monstrosity).

I long for Hudson River School sunsets
Old Dutch Masters, religious art, portraits,
Red, green, or black propaganda-art?  NO !
The view does not merit the price of the show.
I’m dada-ed to death, beyond the surreal.
Conceptual gimmicks have failed to conceal
your want of ability, values, and faith
In the book you despise it is written: “thus saith
the fool in his heart: that there is no God…”

You: Postmodern Art – **to the firing squad!

I went down stairs this morning,
Looking for something to do.
Stared at a picture of you,
Why do I feel so blue?

birds migrate
they fly from one place to another
but always come back
to the original

during that time
you and i met
so lets migrate
like the birds
to the land of joy

birds migrate
they fly from the new place to the old
rest in their true homes
while you and i slept