Gary
Allen
1. Rispetto:
Handiwork
If chess provided all it's said to furnish
Then would I follow its mazes decoyed
And let its forking paths my brain to burnish
Just as the potter his treadle deploys.
My mind set upright, filed to flawless rondure,
Can then with whirling words completely conjure
Something to set on the mantelpiece proudly,
Proof that my nature has fully endowed me.
2. Ottava Rima:
Mad Trumpery
Legacies are all that remain to cherish
Our future has been poisoned by hatred
The powerful do nothing but embarrass
And honest folk are left to hold for sacred
Those storm-surviving things which did not perish
Beneath the boots of puritans embittered
By changing times, evolving mores, science--
These things which must defeat their blind defiance.
3. Acrostic:
Athena's Crown
Seventy times have I put my pen to paper
Angled to catch the best of morning light
Before my mind begins to lose its bright
Intelligence, my back begins to pepper
Neurons with pain, my thoughts soon turned to vapor
And all that's left is imprint of my insight.
Let her lead minds from utter incoherence,
Externalize inchoate drifts of mind,
Teach weaving words with token interference
And lash the thatches until well designed.
Now's the result of all her kind forbearance
Grown tall, and with the maker's pride is signed.
4. Nonet:
A Friendly Sneak
What's the reason I'm feeling chilly?
The fog has come and done its worst.
The bed I share with my dog
Has its warm blue duvet,
Which I now can tell
Has been stolen
By that old
Crafty
Pooch.
Abiogenesis
The distant stars push forth metallic light
Burning their planets hugged too close for life
But lending to our skies in darkest night
A ghostly glow, signs of organic strife.
From those few elements come compounds rife
With urge to bond, to build, transform new shapes
With torque to make new life emerge from fire
And twist its way through time to thinking apes,
Whose patience at their labors leads to new cloudscapes.
Excuses
I'm sure I saw you getting off the train
At Castro Station, turnstile traffic blocking
Me from you, trying to refrain
From calling out your name, accused of stalking
The man I want to be, with hurried walking
Against oblivious drones, the closing doors that hissed
Behind me, the creaking escalator mocking
As rain obscured the face that I last kissed--
I'm sure it was--your haunting face lost in the mist.
6. Pantoum:
Nocturne
The evening tree broke through the liquid night
As though the weight of perfume were too much
For graceful branches rustling out of sight
Uncertain whether to receive a gentle touch.
As though the weight of perfume were too much,
The murmurs drifted downward to the river.
Uncertain whether to receive a gentle touch,
The cosmos met the soul in slow shiver.
The murmurs drifted downward to the river.
While eye met eye in youthful indecision,
The cosmos met the soul in slow shiver,
And tangled fingers sought to build a prison.
While eye met eye in youthful indecision
As graceful branches rustled far fro. sight
Our tangled fingers sought to live imprisoned
Like twining trees concealed by liquid night.
7. Villanelle:
In heat of the summer I wandered alone.
The fresh-scented foliage is withering away.
The boy in the field is no longer there.
He lifted the hay bales with muscles like stone.
The long rows of bales left him no time to play.
In heat of the summer I wandered alone.
I longed to go swimming with him in the noon,
For I knew that he knew that we were both gay.
The boy in the field is no longer there.
The times that we wrestled in gym class are gone,
Our dripping sweat mingled in reckless display.
In heat of the summer I wandered alone.
Behind the stage curtain of faded maroon,
We traded our handoffs on many a day.
The boy in the field is no longer there.
He seems to have vanished to places unknown.
Though aching, I will not have respite today.
In heat of the summer I wandered alone.
The boy in the field is no longer there.
8. Horatian Ode:
The days of childhood that seemed so bare
Now seem to be those endless riches:
Books and books, both common and rare,
Where each book teaches.
Reading above my age, they said,
And handed me anthologies.
So Dickens, Stevenson and Poe I read
And was well pleased.
In afternoons returned from school
I sat outside in natural light
Reading two/three books a day
Till it was night.
Then Shakespeare came when I was eight
And tested me with language thick.
I learned the way to sublimate:
I learned Will's trick.
One eye on text and one on notes,
Absorbed the thee's and thou's wherefore
The bawdy puns became my quotes
And I learned more.
Encyclopedias endowed on me,
A dictionary, "Decline and Fall",
Read day and night, my brain then free
To learn it all.
Then came the time, close by to Freud,
Unwelcome realization palled:
My mind, however much employed,
Could not keep all.
Selective must my learning be;
The chaff must fall, ephemera
Let loose. My savings treasured
Congeners are.
Of literature, astronomy,
The ancient, DNA, futurics,
Development of human minds,
And all empirics.
Etc.
9. Non-humorous Limerick:
Showtime by Nature (Geology's S.)
In Iceland volcanoes are stirring
And grass-covered meadows interring
The tourists come fast
To gawk at the blast
While vistas once pristine are blurring.
Footprints
A dog rescued and given a secure home feels gratitude and joy deeper than most.
Malibu
Jogger, dog and beach
Lines cut in surf-pounded sands
That way happiness
Archeologists have been able to remove built up layers from tidal flats in east England to reveal human footprints pressed into the mud seven thousand years ago.
North Sea
Swept clear by long waves
Ancient footprints Yorkshire strand
Now seen one last time
Footprints of First Americans have been uncovered in New Mexico which have been dated to 23,000 years ago--about 8,000 years before the previously known first immigrants.
White Sands, New Mexico
Stone footprints mingle
Youths once crossed muddy lakeshore
No one's ancestors
11. A Senryu:
Entrée
Plated orange roughy
Small fish torn from sea bottom
Hundred years wasted
12. Naani:
Enduring
The rain is pouring tears
Down the window glass
Biting cold seeps through the pane
Turning my breath to mist
13. Tanka:
Tombstones
Morning mists reveal
Tombs of my ancestors
Lettering most worn off.
Rain begins to fall on stone
Washing letters clean away
My father's birthday--
Were he still alive, I'd feel
Autumn's soothing touch
Distant stone in rocky fields
A graveyard of uselessness
Corner of a field
Once plowed for corn rows, cotton
Planted with failure
Broken lines of ancestors
Aging back into the dust
Every month its crop--
Babies that didn't survive
Or were not picked up
In country life, growing things
Must flourish or be weeded
14. Cinquains
Mahler: Tenth Symphony: Adagio
Plucked strings:
The night begins.
Suffering for an hour,
The music speaks, the end of life
Unfolds
His heart
Feels the sudden
Pain of its near fissure
Coming into maturity
Cut short
Violas
Must speak that which
The sorrowing heart feels
Vistas across Alpine valleys
Put dark
Woodwinds
Cry into night
Suppressed loving laments
That which Alma will never hear
Trails off
That chord
A-flat minor
Breaks into a scream
Diminished by its inward pain
And dies
15. Triolet: Sex in the Age of "MeToo"
Do I dare to touch her breast?
She sleeps voluptuously beside me.
Her body that I've full caressed.
Do I dare to touch her breast?
Past all our passions deeply pressed,
All my desires, naught denied me.
Do I dare to touch her breast?
She sleeps voluptuously beside me.
