Imagine

 

“Language of Stone” by M F Husain

 
imagine a million
angry hurt poets
avengers with brickbats
blunt weapons of words
raining down artful blows
upon philistine brows
raising consciousness
striking again and again
against biased indifference
to stanza and verse

patience fairly exhausted
with readers consumed
by that barbarous prose
overweening and rude
semi-literate wits
disinclined to appreciate
nights-on-end struggles
to pull from the muse
just a single apt phrase
in conveyance of mood

imagine a million
angry hurt poets
a virtual army
enlisted by passion
in liege to Apollo
their salvos of song
drowning dissonance
vanquishing language
complacent and lazily
scribbled by boors

would the world then
be better for metaphors
intercourse carried by
fluent rhetorical tropes
allegorical truth in the
place of the prosaic lie
while the poem is a challenge
the poet is honest
minds better informed
by the heart than the spleen

Androgyny

“Red Abstract Mystical Figure” by Jennie O’Connor

doubt creeps from the pen

leaves its tracks on the page

a form of ambiguous grammar

possibly poetry possibly prose

no one readily knows

and yet all may take license

interpreting whether it’s

stanza or paragraph held in

their hands whether lyrics

or lexes are given writ voice

either neither or both

in the end does it matter

androgynous artforms

are nonetheless art or at

least they appear to be so

all depending of course

on the ambient light and the

predispositions of readers

Meta-Geometry

 

in living our curve

as humans must do

asymmetrically

poetry functions

as tangent

touching some point

of emotion

along hypersensitive

bends of our soul

while prose

plays the secant

tying two disparate

thoughts into one

utile statement

of rational mind

Mystery of the Priesthood

“The Priest as Cactus Lover”
Painting by Karl Schuch
From mary-cassatt.org

 

what arcana does the poet conceal

beneath wordsmithing ritual robes

what mystic IQ guides his hand

across altars of meter where ink

transubstantiates taking on voice

that incants phonaesthetics

to strains of a metaphor harp

 
 

it all comes revealed

by the wide open secret

that poetry thrives on the truth

 
 

truth to the self as it lives

breathes and thinks

truth to the self in emotion

and all it imagines

but most of all

truth keeping faith

with the poet’s beliefs

 
 

fiction is blaspheming art

accursing the poet

with sacrilege

collapsing his poetry

down into dull

profane prose