A Variety of Themes This Sunday Morning

Image Created by Copilot, Prompted by Michael B. Thomas

Revising is going pretty well. I am blessed this summer semester to have only 20 students in two online classes. That means lots of time at the computer but much of it is idle time. Hooray! I have revised three poems this week and composed almost 50 pages of the rough draft of the next Dewey Lynn saga. If you haven't read the first three Dewey Lynn books, better get on it. This one promises to be a doozy, but you have to know the contents of the first three to know what is going on in Dewey Lynn's head in this one.

Anyway, the three poems this morning are rather diverse. The first is about the many times that I feel disconnected from nature. You know me, I am a nature boy. I love to be in the woods and fields and streams and just...out there! I love my domestic flowers, wild flowers that I have domesticated, and those neat little places I find where some flowers grow that I cannot replicate. I love the sun, I love the rain, and I love the wind (so long as it's not blowing painfully in my ears), but every so often I feel disconnected from it all because we are just not "vibing." Lately, with the drought and all that we have suffered here in North Arkansas from climate change, I feel disconnected from nature a lot more often--or is it disconnecting from me.

The second short poem is a heavily revised version of a poem that I have always enjoyed writing, reading, and revising. It is inspired by the initial relationship that I had with the love of my life, but as that relationship changed--and continues to change--I look back with different lenses on the whole situation (You know hindsight is 20/20!) and I simply felt I wanted to change the poem significantly this time as the past is fantasized. I hope the poem is better. Who knows? It may not be.

The third short poem harkens back to the old days of William Joy Bragi when I thought it was my duty...and the obligation of my alter ego...to attack postmodern and contemporary ideas of poetry that are essentially erasing poetry from the social conscience. (By the way, I don't think I can do anything to change the course of poetry anymore. Criticizing is literally beating a dead horse.) Yes! It is all but gone away now thanks to all the free verse prosetry, social and political identity themes, and the incestuous, circle-jerking so-called poets of today, sitting in the ivory towers of academia proclaiming their authority over---well NOTHING. Folks, since Robert Frost, no poet has captured the imagination of this nation with any sort of authority. Maya Angelou had a brief run, but her appeal was more as a dramatic, poetic character than her poetry. Now, only about a dozen people can tell you one of America's poet laureates over the last thirty years. Yeah, you can Google it and get an answer, but you won't know any of them--or a single work--let me extend that to fifty years. What poets were writing in the 1970's? Name one. Poetry is dead, my friends, and the Postmodern poet killed her.

Hmmm...what a glum ending there! As always, ENJOY!

To Nature

I remember those moments when we loved,

When moon and stars and tides and time,

My raw emotions moved.

I braced those motions in my mind

When dust and mud and dew and drop,

Two kindred wills did bind.

Now, weeds scream green

And songbirds cry,

Trees weep, creeks roar, rocks groan;

And I…And I,

No longer care

To mingle in the chaos there.

The myth of science broke our bonds apart

So wind and rain and sand and sun,

No longer warm my heart.

What principles conceive I cannot touch

While snow and storm and frost and flood,

Show me you stir too much.

Spring lilacs brown,

May lilies dry,

Roses crisp, and daisies burn;

And I…and I

Refuse your will

And seek more empty space to fill.

An Unrequited Love Song

We had only kissed,

But if we didn’t,

What we had missed

Was not forbidden.

Or how do I suppose

That our attraction grows

When all I really know’s

A pleasing need arose.

A rose is like a kiss,

A remnant of the sun,

And little more than this

Now that its chance is done.

But somehow, I confuse

Its ever-changing hues

And do my best to lose

These blooming lovesick blues.

The facts get hazy

On the sweeter parts.

Memory is crazy

Regarding broken hearts

And driven even madder

When the last becomes the latter

And that one time I had her

Was a fantastic matter.

“Had her” as in “we kissed,”

A brushing of the lips,

But our lips missed,

And our love slips

Into a notional mist

Of endless blisses

And being kissed

A thousand perfect kisses.

A Postmodern Poet’s Complaint

You are the worst to cry the muse is gone

As any rhymer I have ever seen,

Yet this week you have tossed off nine

Examples of mediocre verse.

None of it is Wordsworth-worthy, of course,

But in any monthly rag you’ll find much worse.

While it’s true you do owe much to copy,

Your parodies are seldom sloppy

And more like Byron than his Bobby.

But listening to your groans is tough

When I have lost the muse myself.

I guess that’s why you piss me off.

Oh, boy! You know your beans from Burns,

A lesson I have never learned,

(Who cares?)

So that, when stumped, my mind is perned.

(Check out Yeats, you moron!)

Get thee behind me, you pedantic hack,

Blackguard, scoundrel, bibliophiliac!

You’ve stolen my muse; I want her back!

Stop your reading! Burn those damned works!

Curse your Shelley and all his atheistic quirks!

Poets with learning are nothing but jerks!