We had no bed to lie in, so we drove —
The night was downpour-dark, the back roads mud
Below a bed of gravel — tempted by
A drive with old machines covered in crud,
We slipped in, stopped, “It’s too much Texas Chain
Saw Massacre,” you said, so out…
It is the modern day, and so we met
Before we met — we each of us came in
The network, joined a common node, and set
A trap for someone we would like to win.
But that’s not love.
So we agreed to meet — a restaurant —…
Line breaks do not a poem make,
But line breaks there must be —
Three second lines make up their time,
And meaning makes each tree.
The pattern is the father, lines
That speak the poem’s scales —
The rhythm is the mother, rhyme
A rule that rarely fails.
And…
Dark pines on low, rolling hills,
hiding those hills so slightly.
What life hides beneath their boughs,
springing up between pine needles?
Little life in such acid soils
produced by pines and oaks and magnolias.
These seem sufficient for the beauty
of these hills, a different beauty from the hills
I’m used to — towering hills spotted…
The place I find myself in is a net
Of works, of words, of poets which converge
On me, on every poet singing yet
More sounds to make reality emerge
Out of the Cantor dust of words and dew
Of nothingness that promises to be.
I mold the mud and make it act. A new
Man made, a poet made, much more than me.
And he will feel the flow, and he will grow
The poetry, a branch to grow, divide
And show, discovering new knowledge, so
The net can live. He wrote; the night, it died.
Day broke across the poet’s face, the lace
Of curtain scattered it. He wrote: “The place . . . “
Originally published at http://troycamplinpoetry.blogspot.com.
Oh, William Shakespeare, don’t you know that you
Are not as wise or relevant because
You are a dead white male — so what you’re due
Is less no matter what your writing does
To raise the soul, no matter who you are.
Perhaps the critics’ brain cells have been…
I am the author of “Diaphysics” and the novel “Hear the Screams of the Butterfly.” I am a consultant, poet, playwright, novelist, and interdisciplinary scholar.
