I Let My Dog Write This Poem
MMMM-woof!
Smell that? Definitely Cat poop.
I love that smell.
And what’s that smell over there?
I mean right there!
Quit pulling on my leash! I have to smell it!
Ahh! Bird poop from a pigeon with a fatal disease.
And over there! Yes, stop holding me back!
Oh! A dead bird! Yum! Icky dead things taste great!
But it was a pigeon.
MMM-woof? Can dogs get pigeon diseases?
Why on Earth Did I Turn into a Nudist?
It is so embarrassing to admit it
I have no clothes to fit it
That feel as good as going bare
And wearing not even underwear
And the wind and the sun on my naked skin
Open my heart and let the sunshine in
I’ve never really felt so alive
As I feel while talking the naturist jive
And living life as a naked man
And doing the things that Adam can
How can it be such a stupid thing?
That makes my heart to dance and sing?
Thar Be Pirates, Yaaar!
The Pirates o’ Bank o’ Merricka has stabbed me wallet
And make thar monies by stealin’
And whooda thunk it? But the Pirates be many blokes
Who sells insurance or credick-card akkounts
And compounds the fie!-nance charges
At twelvety-hunnert thousing per cent
And makes thar monies the ol’ fashioned way
By hooks and by crooks but mosty by stealin’
And so… There you have it. Three poems about things that recently made sanity a bit harder to define when looking in the old mirror. I am not saying I have gone insane, but I do think I may be on the right road to go over the hill and around a couple curves to find the place where you have to go to find it.
Get Up and Do!
It is daunting when bad fortune comes in waves, drowning us in debt, suffering, disabling illness, financial reversals, and so many more things I have been through this last year personally, so that we want to lie down and never get up.
But, I am not dead yet… and there is poetry to be lived.
I say that as one of the world’s fifty worst poets who ever lived. (In my defense, I am a humorist, and I write bad poetry on purpose.) My inspiration for the living of poetry comes from reading and living good poetry. I live because there is poetry by Walt Whitman. Of course, also Shakespeare… whoever he really was. And I understand that much of what I have learned in my brief and stupidly-lived 61 years comes from the poetry of the visionary poet I pictured above. Do you know him? If you have never read his poetry, you haven’t truly lived the poetry you need to live.
This poet taught me that “Being, not doing, is my first love.” Of course, if I am satisfied with just sitting on my bed and “being” through most of my day, I will starve to death and not “be” anymore. But he has taught me that what is essential is already within me. There is wisdom and power in Uncle Ted’s poetry. (Yes, I know I am not really related to him, but that’s only physical and overlooks the spiritual.) I must partake of it to live.
If you are bored by poetry about plants in a greenhouse under bright lights, or you can never understand what the poet means when he says, “My father was a fish”, then you need to practice reading poetry more. You don’t truly understand what poetry is, and what it is for… yet.
And I am sure you have probably concluded from all of this that I am a fool and a bad poet and I have no right to try to tell you who and what a truly great poet is. But, fool that I am, I know it when I see it. It is there in the verse, the hideous and horrible… the beautiful and the true. And if I know anything at all worth telling about the subject, it is this; Ted Roethke is a great American poet. And he writes poetry that you need to read… and not only read but live.
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Filed under artists I admire, commentary, insight, inspiration, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as living poetry, poetry, Theodore Roethke