Current

Terrible Twos

Lucky are babies enslaved by a parental love
that holds them forever helpless in airy beds
of fine goose down, forever fed and bathed,
and snuggled near to breathlessness.

Then, mother succumbs to the tug of the tether
her paymaster has attached, and father has flown
down into the mine, or back up to the office.

Now, toddler meets the new crew, those who play
for pay the roles that moms and dads play for love.
“Oh no,” cry terrified two-year-olds, “into the
consumer economy, we’ve been thrown.”

Dave Read

Not These Hollow Pols

Neither sad old Don nor MT Greene,
neither McConnell, Boebert, Christie, nor Cruz,

Not Rubio, DeSantis, Stafanik, nor Barr,
Hawley, Haley, Jordan, Pompeo…

None of that ilk, no errant product of
the Nixon-Reagan-Bubba-Bush school

Merits our fear. But, what breaks our hearts
is the many millions they too easily fool.

Dave Read

Profess This!

What turned torrents of American poetry
into forked tongues of cupidity?

I think I know.*

Just as coach teaches neither height nor speed,
professors can’t tell poets which lessons to heed.

Dave Read

*Since The Famous Writers School was bankrupted out of the marketplace in 1970, the teaching of writing has become a growth industry for colleges. Educate yourself: Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers

Real Weather

Because it reigns over the soul,
poetry, like thunder, shakes us awake –
chases nightmare and daydream over the horizon.

Like thunder, poetry awakens wonder.

Dave Read

Primary Binary

Natural – Artificial
Person – Device
Sex – Gender
Equality – Equity
Knowledge – Data
Wisdom – Algorithm
Honest – Valid
Style – Fashion
God – Dollar

Dave Read

If it’s Bad for Metaphor, it’s Bad for Politics

Artificial Intelligence would’ve made Marianne Moore
leave home; wooda reduced Tea Ess Eliot to tears.

Plutarch said a stupid and ungrateful forgetfulness breaks
the unity of life because it separates yesterday from today,
as if it were something different, and separates tomorrow, too.

The unity of life, he said, comes from the weaving of the past
into the present. Unless today carries enough of yesterday,
we’ll be unable to bear the weight of sorrowful tomorrows.

Because politics has no memory, it makes empty promises of tomorrows
that never arrive, because it feeds on private dollars, not common sense.

Dave Read

Alphabet Soup for the Soul

American cheese compliments macaroni best
Broccoli spears never hurt anybody.
Cabbage patch kids are dumb, but cuddly.
Denatured alcohol is not for urban drinking.
Eggplant parm is saucy, but has no emoji.
French fries are fickle: they’ll go on either side.
Grilled cheese sandwich – ’nuff said.
Haute cuisine is un-American.
Ice cream.
Jelly is one thing, jam a whole damn ‘nuther.
Ketchup is to vegetable as Ronald Reagan is to philosophy.
Lettuce pray.
Marmalade adds considerable substance to toast.
Noodles work even if all you have to add is butter.
Onions reveal so much they’re worth the tears.
Pomme de terre.
Quick-cook steel-cut oats.
Raspberry tart.
Strawberry jam.
Tunafish sandwich.
Uncle Sam packed meats.
Vegetables keep you regular.
Waffles are maple syrup delivery devices.
X-tra cheese, please.
Yoghurt will add culture to your life.
Zucchini keeps eggplant honest, or vice versa.

Dave Read

Giddy Up

Neither in pools of snowmelt,
nor in schools of orderly ideas,
do poems collect;you’ll find

them on the free range of the
imagination, where hell is a corral,
and you’re a feisty mustang’s rider.

Dave Read

Wintertime Blues

Likely a bluejay made the swoop
from roof eave to spruce bough,
and etched a lazy ‘u’ over the field beyond the window.

But the window pane, and the gazer,
are beclouded enough for this artist
of a January thaw to be recorded as a bluebird.

Next winter, the scene becomes a blue balm.

Dave Read

The Next Homer

When poets focus their gaze on
the plight of the poor, benighted poet,
mired in this madding era of mass media,
then, poets ingratiate themselves

To kings, dukes, deans, doges, czars,
popes, imams, emirs, satraps, muftis,
oligarchs, mob bosses, ward healers,
sheriffs, brown nosers, et alia,

And thus abdicate the ancient office
of poet, realm of the next Homer –
self-refreshing heralds of generations.

Dave Read

Our M.O.

Poems start as inklings
on the perpetual scrolls
of poets’ consciousness.

Restless souls, poets’ impatience
with the status quo ignites the
inklings and makes the poems.

Dave Read

white chickens

the slick vinyl blanket
of screens

stifles as it saddens
until

the idea of a free
press

seems only a
dream.

Dave Read

Free Poets Free Poetry

Neither Caesar, nor the Pope, nor the King,
nor Congress (and its librarian), has title

To one of Whitman’s trampled blades,

To a leaf of Dickinson’s silent sheaf,

To a pile of Frost’s war-worn grass,

To one hectare of Stevens’s measured lawn,

To a slip of Williams’s Queen Anne’s lace…

In the new world, free poets make it new.

Here and now, our tongue’s dead, in their old world tombs,
have our fond remembrance, not our obeisance.

Dave Read

Dressing Tennyson

No dressing-down would
Wordsworth bequeath his heir,

Who, unsubtlely, put on the
dead man’s gown, then took

A knee, ‘fore the Queen, who prizes
such submission – it’s good for the show.

Dave Read

Look Up

Raptors, above the trees,
screw themselves over the valley.

Sometimes, a zephyr will impede
or hurl them towards a far darkness.

Eagles needn’t scream to be heard,
nor struggle to make such good time.

Dave Read

Resolution

First, let us consider how
near uniformed America is
to uninformed America.

Now, let us resolve to make
up our own minds – what to
wear, and where to aim.

Dave Read

this just in

either M or S or another M
keeps me posted keeps my eyes
glued to the screens those thin
flat things that mediate my life
back to me
those thin flat
things excite the right cells
and make my imagination do
somersaults at the shapes of
their imagined selfs, off-screen.

Dave Read

Modern American Poetry

In the beginning is the word, and the
Word is with god, and the word is god.

In the 2020s, the word is inert, the word
Is a wad of dough,polished, painted,

Punctured, strung up with a dozen
More to make a faux pearl necklace.

Read a poem, to ease the pain –
Ordain a poet, and make it rain.

Dave Read

Memorial Day

But for tulips or daffodils perhaps,
leave the stone etched with the name of your dead
alone to cast shadows over grass day after day –

And keep a little flag handy to wave at the parade,
or to poke in the eye of politicians who spill blood
as if they only were spending money.

Dave Read

Judging April

April is graded in the northeast by her work
toward the detonation of forsythia, which
converts neighborhood street corners and

Highway interstices into explosions of
sunshine for two weeks, max – and while that
shrub returns to ordinary and ungainly, a good

April hands the baton to May, who gets all the glory!

Dave Read