Earlier poetry: https://howardcasner.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/poetry/
With more than a nod to Emily Dickinson
- There are many ways to write a poem,
A film, a play, a book.
The variations never stop,
With each their separate hook.
But life, the acts are all the same,
And everyone gets three.
We’re born, we live, we die, and then,
There’s nothing left to see.
- Though diamonds seem a simple jewel
When cut and then refined,
Their lives began as carbon base,
In time before mankind.
All great ideas are simple, too,
And just as simply gained.
With years and years to flush the pipes
Until the shit has drained.
- I write a line and then one more,
Pure artifice I know.
But if I labor long enough,
It gains a natural flow.
I try the same to lead my life
And give it shapes and forms.
But unlike art, the more I toil,
The more that nature storms.
- All writers are bulimious,
They vomit their first draft.
Is this the nature of the beast,
The way to learn one’s craft?
Digesting words, then throwing up,
Ingesting them again.
A psychologic malady
That’s only known to men.
- I board a bus, but where I’m bound
I rarely find I care.
I do it more to fill my time,
And cheap I find the fare.
But this is how I spend my days,
In truth and metaphor,
Waiting for the day I dread,
When I come home no more.
- The larks in exaltation soar.
Bold butterflies take flight.
Apes are shrewd, while jellyfish brood,
And bats decamp at night.
But what then is poor humankind?
What collective can they claim?
Perhaps a lack is there because
Crows already bear our name.
- Cautionary tales some say
Appear mere mockery.
They do no good when they are told,
But in post summary.
Yet still, perhaps, a fate far worse
Is suffering for your choice,
And someone says, I told you so,
In blissful, mirthful voice.
- His fashion is not fashionable,
In taste he’s quite antique.
As are his friends who wait with him,
An ever narrowing clique.
The younger ones who notice him
Just jeer and make their art.
They think that they’ll escape the curse.
But time, it has no heart.
- My pen is very petulant,
It does despair of ink.
It stops, it starts, it spurts, it halts,
All with a smirking wink.
Yet what I cannot comprehend
Is how it always knows
To die, not when my mind’s quite blank,
But when an idea flows.
- The world is warring with itself.
So man has write act three,
An apoplectic apocalypse
Our tour de force to see.
The universe indifferent waits
The curtain to ring down.
But when the stage is seen again,
There’s no one left to bow.
