Write better poetry

I have been reading a lot of Ezra Pound of late, comparing him with Rumi and T.S. Eliot. (The latter being obvious.) Then I got lost in a daydream while walking home from my office and wrote this about my partner from my days afield. It was good to see her last month. Just strange to see her in a wedding dress instead of her dusty khakis. It made me miss the old days for just a moment when we were drinking smuggled wine from coffee cups in an abandoned bunker somewhere.

Three Weeks After Your Wedding, A Hemisphere Away.

Brittle brown leaves clinging to
        the oak in snowy January 
                  remind me
             that cheating destiny with you was worth it
                       even if it was 
                                  just for 
                                        a little while
                                                       longer.

Ah…today.

I was in a mood. I was reading Socrates. Under a beech tree that was rapidly losing it’s leaves. For whatever reason I thought I’d write a bad free verse poem all about it. Ordinarily I’d burn such a thing and never speak of it again, but I thought today I’d make an exception, as sometimes even bad poetry is better than no poetry at all…

The Last Day of September.

Although the hopeful heartwood of this beech
stood dying not long after it was born,
even the emptiest of beings sometimes
speak subtle volumes from silence about
an endless sprawling quest to touch the sky.

When the pretense of sun-fed vanity has taken leave
and the wrinkled remains cling

naked. shuddering. exposed.

in cacophonic colors of copper and ochre,
a bitter breeze blows by and many are reduced to one…

Then none.

The tangible memory of September,
skips across the cracked sidewalks,
the red rooftops,
and the rusting downspouts.

Tickling the ear with an incorporeal whisper,
the sound of a spirit in flight reminds us all
that the sky will still be out of our rooted reach tomorrow,

and that a soul can reside comfortably
somewhere other than just in the middle.