Well, I have to be honest. Apparently, my regular readers are not too keen on reading revised poems. Generally, each blog post gets between 15 and 20 individual views. Only four people looked at the last two sets of revisions. Sooooo...I have to ask. Would you rather not see the revised poems until I have them all together as a book? Please let me know. It is much faster for me to revise if I am not posting the revisions.
I also asked about finding someone who might "illustrate" the book. I have some ideas about the sketches that I would like to see. I will post a couple below that are what I am looking for to accompany the poem Nature Boy:
As a sketcher/drawer, first of all, I am not very good, but I do tend to lean strongly toward surrealism/impressionism. My poems are all modern romantic style, but I do not "see" the same things in words as what I produce when I let my mind go on a page with a pencil to create an image--Oh! and I get tired of creating the stuff in the background. It always begins looking more and more like lines than anything else.
Anyhow, until some reader tell me that they do not want to read revised poems, here are a couple more that I finished last week. As always, ENJOY!
Look at me! Do not dare turn your eyes away!
This is the crumbling shell in which we live,
It prickles with stiff hairs of white and gray
And wracks with rigid pains that won’t forgive.
I know this face’s features. I’ve seen those eyes
Teeming with joie de vie and boyish twinkles.
All green and gold, the colors of surprise,
Beneath a brow free of senescent wrinkles.
I recall those pliant lips, the easy smile
That crinkled in each cheek a handsome dimple,
A hairless chin when whiskers weren’t in style
And razoring the silky skin was simple.
I remember how I paused at every mirror
Because what I saw there I loved the most.
I blamed it on the glass as flaws got clearer,
And I saw my body failing as a host.
Do we still love me, Narcissus, or no?
Your silence begs the questions cast from mine?
What time we’ve wasted talking, let it go
And read this wordless meeting as a sign.
If I’m to live life well, then I must pass
Each surface that reveals us in its glass
And set my gaze on future, wiser ends
Where ego, truth, and time are still my friends.
The wind races over a stone-strewn hill,
Chasing shadows beneath swaying pines,
Kicking up whispers in crackly brown leaves,
And whistling across the prickly pears’ tines.
The green-needled cedar bobs in the breeze,
The leafless oak clatters and clacks.
A beam of piercing sunlight shines,
Dispersing the shade’s stubborn blacks.
Ghostly mist rises wraith-like and dissolves
On the faces of gray sandstone cliffs.
A chipmunk wonders what gambols about,
Pops up from her burrow, and snorts a few sniffs.
In this windswept forest, stippled and striped,
Infused with the sun’s resurrection,
Only I and the stones seem to stand still
Or to move without any direction.