My name is Joseph Larkin. I’m a published poet who is tired of playing the “publish me” game. I don’t want to waste any more of my time sendiong poems out to journals and waiting for months for them to be published or rejected. I’d rather spend my time writing. I want my work to be read by as many people as possible, so I’ll be posting poems here for all to read. But please respect my copyright
So here are a few poems for your enjoyment.
Old Man to Young Friend
Please take me in hand,
show me how to read
your new world:
where to go,
what to eat,
when to sleep.
You say, you’ll sleep
when you’re dead.
I thought so too,
I now say, why rush things?
I walk in circles
like Thelonious Monk
seeking lost chords,
bemused.
There is so little time.
Decisions appear so fast,
make toast,
play with dog,
read paper,
do crossword,
cross to the mailbox,
swim upstream,
cautiously.
And the worth that I see in you
is unworthy of my expression.
While you fly on vaunted wings,
I sit here in my indolence
with only wisdom to impart,
farting like an old man
enjoying the stink of years
lived so fast.
Analyzing My Friends
It’s all those college psych courses I took
Because I just couldn’t stand to look
At myself in the mirror too much
Crazy as I am and perhaps out of touch.
Now I use that knowledge on others
Friends who might better be treated as brothers
Are subjected to my psycho-analysis
I see some as no more than limp phalluses.
Others are sociopaths of the highest order
It’s them I catch crossing the decorum border
Patting backs, smiling in faces
Insinuating themselves into personal spaces.
The argumentative ones are the worse
Every sentence spiced with a curse
I know one who must have been conceived
Over his mama’s protests, his daddy unsheathed.
Then there are those who are bigger than life
Wreaking havoc, causing strife
Everywhere they go heads are turned
Watch out for them, you might get burned.
But me, I’m the picture of sanity
Stable am I without a hint of vanity
I look in the mirror and what do I see
Someone oh so much better than thee.
The Innocents
Ours is the power and the glory forever and ever.
Crusading children manifest magic.
Computers conduct them – superheroes who cannot be defeated.
Surgical strikes, smart bombs, laser-guided missiles erupt.
Far away, buildings disappear in tiny puffs of smoke.
Our children smile and show thumbs up.
GI Joes and Janes save the world – blow unseen bodies
to abstract bloody bits. Impersonal.
Yes, Jesus loves us.
Theirs is the glory and the power forever and ever.
Saintly children of Allah, strap homemade bombs
to bodies, blow off arms and legs and heads.
Good fighters slit throats, drag men through the streets
to hear their gutturing screams, strip flesh from broken bones.
Koranic messengers send screensful of horror
from behind the veil, shove it in the face.
Throat to throat, severed heads for blasted homes,
bloody bits to hold up by the hair.
Subhan Allah wa bihamdih
How perfect and glorified Allah is. All praise to him.
Yes, God loves his little lambs, every one.
The Dead Poet
(for my friend Chuck Thomas)
When last I saw you, all those years ago,
you drank and smoked too much and ranted into the night
and bet your life against the odds that you would go insane
walled up in an office like those you’d raged against.
I left you at your desk, puffing your pipe,
distracted, lost in a private canyon of despair,
hair in studied disarray, Whitman beard atangle,
the smell of last night’s whiskey
an oppressive memory hanging in the air.
Were you composing covert tirades in your head,
railing at injustices – the loss of truth and beauty and right,
telling off the state and president, protesting everything?
No, that was youth’s ideal — your youth had yielded
to perks and privileges behind an editor’s desk.
It’s fifteen years now
since they found you in that motel room,
hanging, blue and bloated,
a thing, a hulk of putrid flesh,
not the young friend
whose words forked lightning
through the shroud of Frisco bay,
who rousted rats from their sewers,
whose raw thunder still resounds
through my gray years.
Posted in Poetry | 1 Comment »
