I thought I may as well get some feedback on a few poems I’ve been working on. They’re none of them finished but several of them seem promising. Please tell me what you think.
Widow of the Street
I was running, rushing, playing into this life
With a gasp, a cry;
But a young widow stopped me in the street;
She said, “Hush”
But I didn’t.
This widow on the street, I ask her,
“Why don’t you get out?”
She pauses, gaping open-mouthed up at my questioning.
“I can’t,” she said, and fled.
And I want to thank you
For all those screams.
Engaging, enraging existential blather
That always left me in tears.
But I want to hate you,
you widow of the street.
Bereaved and betrayed,
Making circles out of highways.
Running. Running. Running.
An Agent in the Corner
The FBI agent called on me again today;
The look that asks me if I’m game.
I’m gay and I know who he is, what he does.
Stifling in the backrooms of parlors, I know his face;
I’ve seen it a hundred times before, in different ways.
The fuzzy blue haze of cigarette smoke shields my lover and I (he’s such a treat at 21).
But he sees us.
I know this, but we are not detained.
With no delay for satisfaction, I’m off with this young man;
We’re off to commit sex acts before dawn.
But I imagine, as I’m leaving, that this FBI agent looks up at us - longingly.
In Search of Thebes
It started with books,
Searching them out in the library, always keeping an eye out
For something.
I didn’t know it then but I was looking for people like
Me, not knowing why but still in search of something
A something that would tell me I wasn’t alone
The Sacred Band of Thebes, their struggles,
Subsumed by blind historians
Deformed into a pleasant band of friends,
Your passion so diluted I didn’t know what to make of you,
The books spoke of timeless love but love without consummation.
Was unrequited, platonic love all you were?
I’ve spent my life searching for you,
A way to recapture the magic I felt looking on Greek vistas,
Imagining the brute call of men to arms,
Charging their enemies, each man with his lover,
I’ve been looking for you as long as I can remember.
A nation not once again,
But once for all
A way for us to stand together and not cringe at what we are.
The ancient books were always indirect,
Coded language that I spent years deciphering
They talked of comrades and companionship
Of ancient soldiers’ bonds and the strength of them
I didn’t know they meant the kind of strength you feel
With the full flushed pride of a man astride you
Or the strength of his hips pressing into your own.
I didn’t know, and so forgot the books.
The next time it was poetry.
Bullish assignments for poetry readings,
Summers spent in verse long dead,
I finally found something that spoke to me.
I was in the back of the library searching out poetry,
Courtesy of the public school system I had little choice,
But found something else entirely.
I don’t know who ordered it,
What daring librarian imported such a work,
But staring at me in the back of a musty library were the works of Walt Whitman.
O rhyme less verse, rhyme without measure, rhyme not concerned with your iambs!
You truly were my first love.
Your graying hair and wild beard intrigued me,
And your verse,
I fell in love with your verse.
For a little while, I fell in love with everything.
The crass, crass grandeur of your poetry,
Your expansiveness,
Your wording,
Your anaphora,
Your ceaseless endless celebration of love and life and infinity,
Yes, Walt Whitman, I am more in your meditations than I first supposed.
I’m in search of Thebes,
A way to recapture that magic I once felt.
A sense that everything is at it was,
But not.
Please leave some comments!