I don't know why the poems come out this way

I don't know why the poems come out this way.
I don't know why I write them out at all,
When many times I've learned they win me nothing,
They bring no solace to my troubled heart.

I don't know why I trouble with the work
Of turning verses or encoding ethics,
Of sharing lust and greed and want. Just what,
Pray tell, am I alive with music for?

For fame? Renown? Prestige? Or public office?
Will words win me the currency I need
To give what a man should to his family?

Will verse win me the woman that I've dreamt
Was lounged atop the green upright piano
Thumbing through a volume of Tagore?

O love! I wake without a tinge of hate

O love! I wake without a tinge of hate
For you or her or anybody else;
I wait without a singe of poverty,
But the majestic depth of spiritual wealth.

Gloat not in this rough maze of material
Extending in the geometric distance;
Hold fast to those things we can't hold at all
Because possession is a brutal myth.

I lost my self, my things, my mind, my me,
My nose, my ears, my sense, my sovereignty
When I surrendered to an ideal god.

I hope and pray beyond a personal "I"
That all may find a peace beyond these trials
And rest in the sublimity of love.

The jangle of keys, the caustic scars

The jangle of keys, the caustic scars
She left on my incorporeal body
Were signifiers of limitedness,
Or reminders of sin and prior failure.

I never really did quite understand
The meaning of the meanness or the way
She seemed to gloat at her insensitive
Parade of violence, argument and hate.

Never before! I am the little boy
That sticks his curious nose into the grass
And hums a melody that don't make sense.

O see the fault you have in all of this!
Let's not pretend we both don't hold the guilt
For the inglorious conflict that's transpired.

O you who parse this lousy PDF

O you who parse this lousy PDF
That glitters on an artificial screen,
Trying its best to represent a self—
In you I hope to find simple forgiveness.

For any reader with a love of books,
Both brown and yellow, tattered or preserved,
I hope my vanity and sufferings
Inspire a wealth of humble sympathy.

O sympathy! The viola resounds
With the rich, lower tones of the cello
To sing an old, unwritten melody.

The words we leave in letters on a page
Cannot contain ourselves, yet still we toil
In these absurdities of poetry.

A sharp philosophical system, a harsh critique

A sharp philosophical system, a harsh critique
Of modernism; classicism bent
Toward the program of a patriarchy
That pulls a veil over the light within.

The argument, the logic of a Sartre
Is not devoid of art nor ear nor care,
But has me sad and quiet in a room
And wandering the media unpublished.

I sang for her and didn't make no sense.
I made a choice and knew that it was wrong,
Quite like the God we build a scripture for;

Although the wrong itself is fruit of right,
Like darkness and a nothing birthed the light
That illumines a soft, beautiful you.

A handful of white pulverized sand; O you

A handful of white pulverized sand; O you
The coarse remains of brittle, tender shells,
Or little cells that once were of the coral
Providing a safe enclave for a school.

I see myself the terse and winding river
That finds its start up near the mountain top
And weaves to ocean through successive valleys
Etching a narrative across the earth.

See not the changing face of this fair world
But what is constant lying underneath,
Disclosed to those of pure, impoverished hearts.

The nonsense of the verse absolves myself
Of only some of the tart guilt I feel
For singing vainly of my plain desire.

A taste in my teeth, acidic rubber dissolved

A taste in my teeth, acidic rubber dissolved
In the yellowed alcohol of the Listerine
Burning the recesses of neglected gums,
Or clouding you and I's stressful relation.

The stars are images upon the sky;
I paint an archer here, a grapheme there
And calculate the whirling spectacle
Until it seems a useless, dull nonsense.

Enough I haven't been or haven't done
That haunts me in a moment, then the next
I make of it a gaudy celebration.

O love me here and now! I won't forget
The smell and dirt, the underside of this
So brief yet so intoxicating love.

A floral night shirt, the way she coughed

A floral night shirt, the way she coughed
Into her fist, the oscillating fan
That pushed the air across a sweating mattress,
Or just the sound of her there fast asleep.

I won't remember all the abstract ways
The light that snuck between the bending blinds
Had seemed to dance with the dust of the room
And slide a subtle square across the wall.

It's jumbled in my memory. She had dreamt
About a turtle or another girl
While I slept soundly in the awful grammar

Of a world refusing to make sense;
A caustic parade of obnoxious suffering
That's punctuated by delicate bliss.