JIGSAW HEART

My heart's a jigsaw Eschered with small hearts:

Poets: Donne, Arnold, Hopkins, Eliot, Cole – 

Ancestors: captured, wed while on parole –

Family: formed from wandering in wild parts –

Bits of my heart. A house, view of the sea –

Rain-lilies, poincianas, jasmine scent –

Azaleas, goldfish, owls, field grass rain-bent –

Cafe on loud street – quiet library –

My jigsaw's nearly done, a work of heart!

But where’s that long-lost girl-shaped piece…

Lost, it prevents the whole, prevents my peace…

I circle endlessly for that lost part,

The missing statue for the purposed plinth,

That girl lost in some Escher labyrinth.

Published: The Lyric, USA, January 2016

DIATRIBE AGAINST UNVERSED POETS

Ignoring clockwork towns and fertile farms
Tied to the sun-swing as the seas to moon,
They searched for verse in deserts without rhyme,
Lifted erratic rocks nonrhythmically
In search of poetry, then through the slough
Of their emotions hunted for a trail:

“The scent is cold. Its Spirit must have fled;
The body of its work, though dead,
Has been translated to some higher plane.
Look how the world’s translated verse
Comes to us plain—why can’t we emulate?
Then if the words themselves are unimportant,
If poetry in essence is idea,
And song is wrong,
Rhyme a superfluous flamboyance
(Like colour to Van Gogh),
Rhythm a distraction to the memoring mind,
Then we determine poetry’s true form is mime!”

While in the air the deafening blare
Confounds their silence everywhere:
Before our hearts began to beat
We were conceived in rhythmic heat;
So, billions strong, we sing along
For all the time, in time, our time, the song
Goes rocking on in rhythmic rhyme. Rock on!

Published online: Snakeskin, UK, September 2009

POETS

We are the natterers,
We are the masters of arts polyglot;
The patterners,
Marks on the paths that you plot;
The batterers,
Iron-headed rams that you fear;
The chatterers,
Sons of the sins that you bear;
The flatterers,
Down on our knees to the tall;
The smatterers,
Dangerous knowledge and small;
The shatterers,
Haters of forces above;
But, most, we are the clatterers,
We are the hooves of the horses we love.

Published in Metverse Muse (India), Spring 2007