writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
I don’t want to write bestsellers,
Or be president of this great land.
I don’t want to paint like Picasso,
Or sing in a rock and roll band.
I don’t want to star in the movies,
Or do anything that brings wealth or fame.
I don’t want to be an overpaid athlete
Of any professional game.
What I do want you might think is silly.
In fact, it might even make you giggle.
There’s only one thing in life I want. . .
And that’s to learn how to make my ears wiggle.
~~~~
From Poem Man.
Come hither all ye children
And gather round,
For the Poem Man cometh
To your quaint town.
He’s bringing the most magical, beautiful,
Spectacular sounds…
Sounds that you may have never heard before.
He has the sounds of pinks and yellows
And midnight blues.
You’ll hear rainbows and gumdrops
And morning dew.
Come hither sweet children,
Bring your parents too,
To hear the oceans converse with the shores.
Look, yonder cometh he
From the valley below.
Can you see on his shoulder
His talking, orange crow?
Make haste sweet children.
Get ready for the show,
For the time is drawing near.
He carries his poems
In a large, burlap sack.
Doesn’t it look heavy
Upon his broad back?
In it, not a rhyme is missing—
Not a riddle does it lack.
Be still now sweet children for the Poem Man is here.
~~~~
Well, since the poem Butter was reasonably well-received a day or two ago, it inspired me to create a Poem Man page where I’ve included scans of the original book cover and introduction, as well as a Table of Contents listing all the poems and links to the ones that I’ve already shared online. You can find the new page under the BOOKS heading at the top of the page, or you can just click here.
Enjoy!
But, in all honesty…
I’m a little scared…
I am afraid that when I tell you about that which lays so heavily on my heart…
You will immediately lose all respect for me…
And end our friendship…
But it’s really something I have to do…
Something I have been yearning to do for some time now…
But society says it’s bad…
That good boys and girls should never, ever do this…
That it’s against “the law”…
The “law”…
Who makes these “laws” anyway…
The pious…
The pedant…
You know, those kind…
The beautiful ones…
The ones oh so righteous
And the ones oh so true…
Just tell me…
Why do these hypocrites have the right to tell me how I should direct my love…
Every single one of them…
Hypocrites…
They, themselves, are constantly doing exactly that which they so fervently condemn…
They don’t think I see them wallowing in their hypocrisy…
But I do…
They, in all their self-righteousness, are no better than me…
Or you…
And yet they think they can, with the stroke of their red pen…
Or with the stinging criticism of their lashing tongue…
Keep us perfectly in our place…
Directly in their control…
Like the little lambs that we are…
The lemmings…
And for so long, they have done just that…
Because I have let them…
I have let them have power over me…
I have suppressed all that I so strongly desired just so I could abide their “laws”…
And reap their favor…
And their praise…
How I longed to not love that which I have loved for so long…
That which was strictly forbidden to me…
But tonight…
Right now…
I revoke their power…
And assume it for myself…
Tonight, right now, I have the power…
And with that power I will openly declare my love for that which they forbid…
That which for centuries has been considered evil and taboo…
Literally, to them, a mortal sin…
But tonight I shall rise up…
Tonight I shall break the conventions of normalcy…
Tonight I shall shed the chaffing shackles of oppression and humiliation…
Tonight I shall boldly and unabashedly declare my love and my devotion…
My all and my everything…
To the alluring, the sexy…
The more than a little naughty…
The compulsively and completely addictive…
The one thing that I am happily head over heals for…
And desperately in love with…
The sadly shunned…
The fatuously forsaken…
The miserably misunderstood…
Boy, I want you to butter the bread.
And remember, I like it buttery.
But Dad, it’s too hard for me to spread the lard.
Can’t Sister do it instead?
Boy, it’s up to you to butter the toast.
Cuz the only way for you to learn
To do the things that you can’t do
Is to do those things the most.
So every time there is bread to butter
I want you to spread the cream.
And soon you’ll be the best bread butterer
That the world has ever seen.
~~~~
Butter is from Poem Man, a children’s book of poetry that my family and I put together, – literally put together: the poeming, drawing, covering, printing, stapling, etc. – back at the turn of the century.
I must admit, that when my children were young I had aspirations of being the next Shel Silverstein, my favorite poet of all time. While that didn’t quite work out for me, it sure was a lot of fun fooling around with children’s poetry back then when the kids, and the internet, were still young.
It’s hard to believe the original Poem Man website, circa early 2000s, is still out there. Check it out if you’re in the need of a good chuckle.
Guess I was doing Indie before Indie was cool…
Almost forgot that I’ve already exploited Poem Man some time ago, tying in a poem, or at least attempting to, called Petey Peter the Garlic Eater with my review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage.
Yeah, I know… but what the heck, right?
Oh, how I love the internet and how it single-handily shrunk the globe.
Because of this magic, I recently was able to make the virtual acquaintance of an artist, a visionary artist, a German Artist!
How cool is that?
To some dude sitting in a lazy chair in a house on top of a windy and rolling hill in southern Pennsylvania, it’s pretty frikkin cool.
But the best part about all of this is not so much the magic of the internet (let’s face it, that’s old news), the best part is the all the new Art that I now am aware of and have access to.
And now I would like to share some of that magic and awareness and access with you.
The artist’s name is H SHLAGEN and he is currently working on a style of artwork that he has encompassed under the title of MY BLAKEAN YEAR, which was inspired by the Patti Smith song of the same title.
SHLAGEN’s work from My Blakean Year is evocative, to say the least. Many of the pieces evoke from me dark, haunting, beautiful images similar to what TS ELIOT’s masterpiece The Waste Land evokes.
I shared his piece entitle KABUKI for two reasons: The first being its indelible beauty, and the second being that we both share a deep love for Japan.
So celebrate and enjoy with me my new friendship with German artist H SHLAGEN and his wonderful MY BLAKEAN YEAR artwork by visiting both his personal website, where you can while away the time in mesmerizing fascination, as well as the online gallery where is work is exhibited and available for purchase.
http://hschlagen.com/
www.saatchiart.com
Peace
Seriously
#notetoself
#lifesabitchandthenyouwrite
#lifequotesbestleftunquoted
If it is employed, then one must suppose that it is being supposed, as it has been for over a thousand years, that it is known to what it refers.
Or it should be known.
Or it will be known.
If I was were a less sensitive grammarian, then I would care less whether my grammar were was more or less correct. However, if it was were true that I were was a less sensitive grammarian, would it then mean that I were was a less caring person?
POETIC LICENSE
Thank God for the passionate poet
Who trumpets the sun’s morning rise
And who writes lovely, pretty sad songs
Of young lovers’s heartbreaking goodbyes
Thank God for the passionate poet
Who reaches right into the heart
To stroke it, to tease it, to please it
And sometimes to tear it apart
#NATIONALPOETRYDAY2014
~~~~
From my poetry collection Poems from the River
