The Cursing Poet

Sonnet I

March 9th, 2023

Someday you will ask, How did I get here?

Someday you will think, who is this person

I am bound to? How has our shared season

Passed? To memory’s hand, it still seems near.

Someday you will wonder if memory’s

Tale spoke truth while knowing it cannot

Except like an old photograph’s frozen

Moment upon which you built your story.

Someday you will admit your story’s false,

Gaps stutter white, like an old film reel

Badly spliced, blankly transmitting what’s lost:

An evening, irregular waves pulse,

Beach fire, standing in an uneven wheel–

Friends’ former faces bead the dark mind’s vault.
Sonnet H

February 21st, 2023

Spring jumped the gun, but I’m stuck in the past,

My alternative to this fast-forward

Meltdown. Down the hall my kid clicks toward

His next target as incoming shells blast

A pocky, pixelated landscape, last

Century’s nightmare now live-action chessboard

For first-person shooters, life by the sword

Recast: shot dead, he respawns. Contrast

To those white eggs we found after a round

Of false-promise spring warmth, then a snap frost

Recast the pond in ice, stilled the life bound

In those two orbs, pushed from the nest to crown

Our wall, fractured monument to what could

Have been, the world now strange, the seasons lost.
Sonnet F

February 2nd, 2023

Did I choose, to be a necessary cog?

Was I missed, after I was up, and gone?

Were they heard, my sophist monologues?

Did they sink roots, or were they scattered straw?

Heard, were they more than just a catalog

Of half-remembrance, all meaning foregone,

Learned like earning chits, striver’s lexicon,

As means of exchange, the sine qua non-

Laddering a half-understanding, from eclogue

To epic, forms to essence, a pantheon

Transubstantiated, exchanged upon

Our appointed days, to fill-in blanks, fog

Of things half-mastered before time was up,

The cogs turned–and we were all gone?
Sonnet E

January 13th, 2023

Yes, given a chance it would all come back–

Needing only us to leave it alone,

That scab of wildfire, that dead and burned zone,

Let the wind breath seeds across ashen wrack;

Let the clouds drag their skirts beyond the track

of pavement, over the mountains’ backbones;

Let the sun’s yeasty power wake what was thrown

Down to ruin: cone-seeded, rising plaque

Of mossy green would film the riven slopes.

In time-lapse minutes, a mere human life’s

Run, emerald promise, renewal’s hope.

But what myth do we turn to now to cope

When rain melts hills like fire burns away wax,

Or no rain, nor gods turning their backs?
Sonnet D

January 7th, 2023

Plato mis-took ambiguity for

Meaninglessness, but I have to admit

That cave he painted in words is the spit

Image of our digital megastore

The omnireality at the core

Of the desire machine, the pit

Never filled, the mass deforming orbits

Dutiful electrons promising more

Innocent of purpose, channeled to feed

The fire casting shadows through our screens,

Those wells of light, an artesian rush pours

Into our eyes from cupped hands, supersedes

The mere day spinning by all around us,

Dimly passing , then gone, superfluous.
Sonnet C

December 15th, 2022

Time to go topical, though tropical

Would be nicer on a minus-3 day

(That’s Celsius I add)-now on to the fray–

Our topic d’jour: the crash most optical

Of those Crypto funds quite illusional

Pipered by that fellow Sam Bankman-Fried

Whose fiction-ish name perfect-rhymes with Greed;

A character the more delusional

For all of his smartest-guy-in-the-room

Stanford-bred, math-camp raised, post-M.I.T.

Pedigree; he proved to be most Blighty

Grew an industry of mirrors via Zoom–

Riding the digital nothingness trend

A man with an empty bag, in the end.

(15 December 2022)
Sonnet B

December 14th, 2022

My sporadic habit perennial–

To tap out fourteen lines chasing a rhyme,

Laddering phrases as a net for time;

An understudy of the eternal

I tussle with words for ephemeral

Moments that rattle pebbles off my mind:

Like a Madman seeking the final prime,

My lunatic desire to make formal

The day’s shards, the nebula that remains

Of impressions uncountable, a river surging through a straw

Rearranging the debris in my brain,

Fashioning a monstrance of words arcane,

But my puzzle-matched turns can only yaw

At best my lines master a blind refrain.
Sonnet A

January 5th, 2021

Welcome to the turn of the page, New Year’s,

And to the lyrical crown, the Sonnet;

Since we won’t really behind our old fears

Til at least July (these times bubonic)

And with that pox, our elections chronic

(Fevers preparatory to war civil)

What use talk of plans and worthy logic,

Pennyboy of desire, spouting drivel

To please master id, pistol ready

To spout gibberish or leaden slugs?

Better lift a squat pen, scribe words steady

Fourteen lines–against seven centuries’ floods,

Wars, famines, decay, lies, corruption, strife,

Cut Archaic rhyme, beauty’s cup, truth’s knife.