PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I.  On Mary Shelley

A poem is like a monster

I have cobbled together

in my awkward, clumsy image.

The poem and I believe that we

defy parental expectations

regardless of what neighbors think

(most of their neighbors cannot think).

The poem has never murdered anyone;

but often, it requests (and sometimes demands)

a mate after its own kind.

II.  On John Milton

An old man like you has obscure words

to say to an adolescent poet

like me (or like I hoped to be).

Adam and Eve, in Genesis,

are like adolescents---in experience,

common sense, and poor decisions.

Your poem removes most of that,

immolating that in most of those speeches.

III. On T. S. Eliot

Adolescents or Monsters?

My parents thought them the same---

awkwardly unprepared and

nervously misinformed:

wasters of time and opportunities,

wasters wherever they land in life;

waterless clouds that thunder too loud.

My parents, forecasting, declared

"Children should be seen and not heard,"

and "You are just the little boy around here."

IV.  On Wallace Stevens

Who does not like Ariel, glad for the poems he wrote?

They have become a local cross-section

of your corner of the universe.

The poems are honored parts of that world,

the world that God so loved, to send His Son

with life, and that right abundantly.

Starward