"boswell" poems
I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.
And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.
Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savour Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.
Chekov is caviare to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.
I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read.
3k
I've a sinking friendship,
Torpedoed by the ********
And listing.
The first mate mutinied.
Once a blood brother,
Like no other;
An intimate
At an imminent end,
An alter-ego
More than a friend.
I've been too patient,
Veered off course
With understanding.
I'm quite sure
This Pythias
Would run and leave me
Hanging.
I'm on a cliff
And won't hang on
To a blade of trust,
A fawning pawn.
He had my back,
I turn,
He's gone.
This partisan
Must part
A homeless homeboy,
A dissembling fraud.
No longer a mainstay,
He's insecure,
His equivocations
Make lines blur,
I don't believe
Him anymore.
He really needs a soul-mate,
Classmate, playmate,
But he's become a reprobate,
Lying prostrate,
Lying up straight.
I'll drown my Boswell
In my inkwell;
No longer
An advocate.
The laughs have left,
Yes,
I'm bereft,
But I'll catch the wind.
My course is true.
This friendship
Can't be salvaged.
It's scuttled,
And I won't
Sink with you.
Sep 2, 2014
Sep 2, 2014 at 11:42 AM UTC
Whiles I peruse the archives of the past,
Occurs a mental transformation fast—
As thru accounts I search, and journals read,
A bold mid-cent'ry impulse seizes me.
The words I write, in structured meters fit;
Infinitives begin to slowly split.
I have at last attain'd a style so grand,
It captures an Augustan poet's hand.
O what great writers we might have today,
If Dictionary Johnson had his way.
Jan 17, 2019
Jan 17, 2019 at 12:26 PM UTC