“To a Flower”
Garden rose
My perfumed lover
Porcelain daughter of the summer
Your blossom is my red maiden
My blushing poet
Speak to me of love
Your fair beauty clouds my translucent dreams
Dazzle me with your scented magic
Drip away into the river of my heart
Ecstatic flower of the blue moon
I dance in your delight
And long to love you
“Words”
Words get in the way of telling you of my love
So whisper not
But let me just hold you
The beating of my heart will tell you
All you need to know
My caress will tell you
All you want to hear
Love speaks
Not in words
But in silence
And you may find that
A kiss is a whisper consummated
So whatever you do, dont say a word
Lest the spell be broken
By words spoken
“The Jazz DJ”
For James Stapleton
Sauntering into the city twilight
After a night of peddling smoky,
Sultry fantasies to abstract-laden minds
The jazz DJ casts his shadows on the rainy
Streets, like silver coins in a pond
He slips into the still night air as an arm slips into a sleeve
Head down, shoulders bent
Carrying the weight of non-conformity
Only the streetlights to pat him on the back for another job well done
Making Mondays pleasant
The hopeless harmonic junkies know where to go
For their next major-seventh fix
Those steely blue harmonies
Holding their aural capacities captive
Come midnight, the dealer of latenight jazz
Is plying his trade once again
Enlivening the air with fulfillment
Of this addiction
Bass and brass, and sass in
Expression to the masses
4:00 AM
The musical abusers
Return to neutral want of satisfaction
Evicted by the clock
He evanesces via the soon-to-rise sun
Back into the grey concreteness of
The civic circulatory system
Away with the night
As the saxophone breathes its last . . .
“D.A.L.I”
A poet is here
Thrilling words
Like an ecstatic lover
Every smile
Tear
And dream
Of humanity
In his voice
Sardonic and thin, he has such unique
Gifted bents
He can go from
Calmness in one mad moment
To madness in the next, then return again
without notice.
They are found, listening
And looking so carefully
Minds intertwined in
Prepositional mayhem
Tension stretched
Wrestling synonyms
Measuring as he rotates on his mind
A perfect word
In an imperfect world
Poetry dances across
Every color of his mind
Conversations dismantled
Leaving only dust,
Where no words lay.
And therein, I see
That by thinking
The heart sings free
“Inner Sanctum”
The governor reposes
Beneath
The Banyan trees
Eating papaya and
Apples
Delicious silence
Speaks its opinion to him
Effortlessly slipping
Dripping
Into Ecstacy
As true Protection
Against an external world which is
Shameless in its uniformity
This adherent of Minimalism and Separateness
Retreats into his mellow world
Civilization all around, yet not to be found
Overlooked as he notes
The small lightness of leaves
“Reward Enough”
His love is like a window
Wakening reflection
So majestic— outside of all words
He presented infinite conversation
When I needed a word to think by
Voice of intuition that speaks
Sweet, direct poetry
We would sit
And talk hours away
“Understanding
Cannot be rewarded enough,” he said
He liked my song
I liked his words
And the world I became
By his windowpane
