Poet’s Last Word

Oh, where in the world can your poet run
When the words fall flat, and the rhymes won’t come?
Oh, what hard trials arise to squash younglet poetry,
Like a weeded up, oak-wilt, unlovely and broken tree?
No thesaurus, no dictionary, nor dog-paged Bartlett’s
Can save a poor rhymester when the scansion he forgets.
Arched over his blank page, a pen rusting in his hand,
He remembers clever phrasing that once lofted grand.
But today, too many hours passed, when imagery faded away:
No paragraphs soar to shine, no dark truths for a heart to sway.
Just letters on a keyboard accompany the page gleaming white—
Is it old age, or a brain cancer, or Alzheimer’s that’s blanked his inner sight?
Swirling leaves, the pelting rain; no, just tears to wet another empty page.
Crashing thunder, volcanic explosions; no, just writer’s blocked impotent rage.
Was all this alleged talent just Life’s joke on the unwittingly absurd?
What do you say to the one who cannot find the poet’s last word?

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Sapere Aude (After Roseburg)

Now Roseburg.
And we again despair;
All point their fingers
And again getting nowhere.
Find the crux of the matter;
The gun is not to blame:
Babe Ruth was the mighty batter—
But it’s not the bat that goes in the Hall of Fame.
‘That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force…
In you must go. ‘
Broken minds untethered
When will we ever know?
The Mind: an ugly, evanescent thing:
Thoughts! Feelings! Emotions! Cognitions!
Better to leave alone;
O, leave me with my superstitions.
Until we get past this stupid fear,
That leads to anger and such undying pain,
To bring mental illness out of the shadows,
It’ll be Columbine, Sandy Hook, Roseburg, again and again and again and…

A Better Way Out

I want to write something sweet,
I want to write tumbly around fun,
Regale through a truism,
And flourish the end in a pun.
But far I’m too angry
And hurt down to my core:
Kayla Jean Mueller is dead—
How can we bear any more?
ISIL rages in the Levant,
Slums flourish in Mumbai,
All that wasted energy,
And the Rage burning through the why:
“Love thy neighbor.”
“You don’t know my pain.”
The loss, the hurt, the Empty:
Unfulfilled, again and again and again.
Kayla Jean had a slant,
A take on a better way out,
But her candle has found the wind;
And we, now diminished and in doubt,
Try to tamp down lusting revenge;
Praying to grasp a higher view:
What did Kayla know?
What are we going to do?