My name is Joe 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 sending 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.

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 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.

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