The International Times and the  editor/publisher of one of my books (William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts), Rupert Loydell, chose to publish three of my poems: one piece of selected doggerel (or, as I call it, “dogmarel) and a couple of others, one new piece (Note and Photon) and an old piece that didn’t make it into my book of selected poems, (Once it’s all Lost). For a long time I quit writing poetry, and then forgot I ever wrote it, then I was reminded, and again reminded, and again… and now I’m starting to write poetry again. Beginning from the beginning. It’s a wonderful process, really; one never, I suspect, feels one’s self to be a master of it since each poem is a completely different entity requiring a beginner’s mind to finish it.

3 Poems

Note and Photon

At last I, too, will leap through that black hole—

or maybe limp or crawl

or be carried

or led by some unseen hand,

but finally will fall

through that pinhole

where even light is bent

and twisted into coils

that wind around night.

There deep darkness

nestles a gleaming universe

with all the brightness of a mind,

a single Life, endlessly

weaving its awe inspired tapestry

of light and music, warp and weft.

And I?

A single note of music,

or the last photon of light

that winks where I once was.

Contra-Dogmarel

Neither fish nor fowl, it’s dished out

in doctrines and trite truisms

without music or rhythm,

or else it’s straight-up dogma

in doggerel wrapped in rap,

rant or raving, but called “poetry.”

You’ll hear it at every venue

where chic revolutionaries hold services

without having seen a revolution

except on two-week tours through Cuba

where their minders served as blinders

as they viewed the circles of hell

they’ve come to call “heaven.”

When they return, their verses

serve as hymns to the victory

of socialism, battle cries for wars

they’ll never witness.

Cheap words like ads

for last year’s fashions,

doctrines drawn from the leader’s

speeches, interviews and texts,

then barked and growled

in North Beach readings,

waterfalls of rhetoric

oceans without waves,

storms without rain,

sermons without salvation,

but at least inspiring enough

to make me write some

of my own.

Once It’s All Lost

Once it’s all lost, everything,

down to the last button and crumb

all tumbling back to earth,

remember the earth.

We were never the gods we thought ourselves to be,

one step beneath the winged angels,

we, always just another creature

recently risen from the wild sea

or the muck or dust.

May that wisdom lost in all our knowledge

then be recalled when all is lost;

may we save the wisdom

that saves us as we fall:

this earth hungrily embraces

even its wayward children,

we who had forgotten

and thought we were lost.