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Rain in late April.
The bearded young man robed and robbed in poverty,
paces the puddled driveway,
under a foreboding, grey sky.
I am garret-bound, dry, while he is soaked
from early Spring-chilled mud.
I am listening to Mendelssohn’s second Quartet,
as wind drives rain into his face, but it
does not mean that I have not walked that grey driveway,
wandered country roads, hungry and cold,
or will not in the future.
Poetry is my poverty.
Poverty is my mistress.
His young loins will find a wife’s warmth,
and support his legacy of labour
by offering him the wealth of offspring.
Poverty is my poetry.
Poetry is my mistress.
My mind knows a poem’s warmth,
which supports my legacy of labour
By offering me the wealth of offspring.
I have books and music,
and Memory-chilled rain.
-Robert Milby
May 6,
2009
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Floodplain
Roil, growl, groan, rain swollen creek—
Winter refuses to leave.
In summer drought a gasping trickle; a
mosquito
Nursery.
Yet now in April, a Nor’Easters’ rage at
geriatric
Winter’s slow retreat, hikes through
cloud meadows by deep anguish,
Whose masterpiece snow flowers, melted
petals and wilted ice leaves,
Descend as mad rain, in a grey tumult of
flood and fear.
Crows walk the perimeter. Robins wait in
damp boughs,
Raindrops dripping from their pale,
yellow beaks.
They sing through this storm, aware that
warm days will emerge from
A floodplain of Springtide passion.
Tunnels and warrens will be lost forever.
Mysterious graves will be uncovered.
The creek uses mud and silt paints on a
canvas of glazed winter grasses,
before such delicate blossoms and moist
buds suggest a vernal dominion
of hue fragrance and green children.
The meadow haberdasher will fit fern
flowers in moss vests.
Late Spring will seek her bold consort
and floodplain will sleep under July blaze,
Until Autumn’s forlorn storms sing Oak
leaf dirges and cold water.
-Robert Milby
May 2, 2007
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Spring Light
Daffodils and Tulips caught bolts of Sun,
To weave late April silks of light.
Gossamer, grey wind kissed their young
lips with raindrops.
Robins recited love poems, and told of
listening parties
on lawns, greening in grass brushes and
quills—
an impressionist canvas of milkmaid’s
violets.
Yearning Maples, proffered buds from thin
fingers,
Sculpting clouds on wheels of wind.
Rain tincture;
rivulets on consternation’s flood plain—
Soil monarchs tomb exhumed by cloud jewel
professors—
amidst new blossoms and meadow clover,
Transforming hillscape,
Under a cover crop of fog.
-Robert Milby
April 25, 2007
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At the Coffeehouse
Impassioned, her back to the busy street;
she recites.
Washingtonville does not care about
culture.
Thus, poets have claimed their pungent
café,
once a carriage house, for a new omnibus.
Her story is original, and powerful.
There is youthful mania in her pen,
ancestral wisdom in her green, magick eyes.
Her lithe body is smooth; alabaster
naiad.
She is olde Europe and mad America.
Poet!
Open the vein of Night.
Let grey wind pour into nascent Spring,
to write prayers in a pagan grove.
Her breath rustles a trembling page in
her radical hand.
Her paper wings defy the circus and the
sand.
Irish beer breeds golems from lust and
apathy’s servants,
in the pub—west of her recitation.
My undulant mistress of enigma,
I raise my pen and coffee to her
in vain solidarity
as sirens cry (of) fire
in a late Winter night.
-Robert Milby
March 28, 2006
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Camp Casey:
Ode To Cindy Sheehan
In Europe, during the age of monarchies,
peasants camped in huts and squatter hovels outside castles, and
monasteries.
Mothers had no voice when sons were shipped
home dead from the Crusades, if they were not fed to sovereign
sands, or sharks, or condemned with the undead, to a forgotten
abyss.
In America, during the age of monarchy, a
mother is camped outside Castle Crawford.
She and the King have August off.
The king is off and rides expensive high
horses—in his odious Stetson crown, and image pickup, drives
property lines of Castle Crawford, espousing the madness of his
estate.
The mother is off for the rest of her life,
since her son’s death in 2004.
A Monarch lies to his suggested subjects.
The mother from California, mourns her son and
her nation, critically wounded by courtiers to the crude King.
Veterans of the jungle crusade in Southeast
Asia,
gathered with the mother to subvert the crude
King’s prepared and stammered lies.
The King’s black caravan, sped past protestors
in a screen of Texas dust as the bold mother from California asked
her question; sung her insurrection to a robber baron’s skull and
bones.
She dared! Dared as many of her fellow
taxpayers across the country, remained entranced by an
administration’s justification for war.
Justification for destruction. Occupation by
imperial soldiers, as Jerusalem was by foreign fighters—searching
for a grail.
Her son’s death was…noble.
Roadside bombs, bunker busters, block-by-block,
house-by-house firefights leaving tattered bodies of mothers and
children are…
Noble.
Her son’s life was…expendable.
The King and Queen’s princesses are noble.
In the mists of drunken frat parties, debutante
balls, ivy league affiliations,
The king’s daughters have not signed up for the
honor of depleted uranium,
Abu Graib or a massacre in Fallujah.
Prayer vigils held throughout the kingdom, by
candlelight, may not redress grievances, or influence oil
shareholders and defense contractors, yet
Cindy Sheehan was at first a single candle, who
did not need to curse the darkness, but defy it!
-Robert Milby
August 19, 2005
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Pieces of
Descartes
(on the anniversary of his birth: March 31,
1596)
Your philosophy did not prove that you’d
existed.
Flesh relics from Sweden to France did.
You were mathematically dissembled.
It figures that the menacing hands were
Catholics.
Sunrise lectures at the behest of the Queen of
Sweden…
Isn’t it just like the Elites to first want to
control, then to possess,
only to destroy the human mind and spirit, for
their own selfish,
juvenile treasures?
Great mathematician, the Aries fire burned out—
and another rich person contributed to your
demise.
They wanted a piece of you, whether the spying
Jesuits,
pretentious Hobbes, or the maniacal monarchy,
in the end,
common masses brought you to their level…
carving relics from your tired coat, your
withered flesh; dried resolve.
What great retribution Death enacts, for daring
to be born!
We construct great treatises, towers, palaces,
and paintings…
but cannot build more than a shrine or tomb in
honor of our final deposition.
Your condemnation by the brainless did not
dampen your faith,
as did harsh opinions of the northern weather.
It is good that when the imbecile Church
prohibited you in 1663,
all that remained, was your skeleton in rapture
with the science of rot.
Now, as paradigm schism rises above the fearful
people,
warfare is enhanced to cover the Lie, I fasten
my view to hyperbolic doubt.
What fragments I derive of your genius are
meaningless to our children,
indoctrinated by the gun. What scholarship and
learning grew,
when these global citizens were free to think!
Civilization—as we have inherited, is poised on
the threshold
of collapse. Cogito ergo sum, is irrelevant
when there are children starving
beneath the Sun.
Isolated thinking men, have failed…and when
this third world war is over…
what will the Elites have won? Ah, Descartes…
Thinking men have failed to deliver societies
from the worship of the gun.
-Robert
Milby
March 31, 2004
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Purification By Time
“I measure time by how a body sways.”
-Roethke
Poetry is lost to madness.
Madness is the cost of poetry.
Madness devours poetry.
Writing…is a useless attempt at abrogating
guilt.
Time will bruise the feeling flesh of the
writer.
Age will carry the condemned by Inquisitor’s
cart—hay, and twigs of history dropping along the brambled, muddy
coachway to eternity.
The weather of lunacy, smothers verses in
asphyxiating romantic winds,
Frigid, mistral, misted trials of love,
recollected fondly throughout one’s verse,
until Death’s gift, but for most—arrival at
warm corridors of assisted living or a geriatric Bastille where
reeks their own visceral prose of last breath, medication, last
breath, wheelchair sores, and hours of memory torture under the
despicable eye of spiteful nursing assistants, whose breasts—tight
and yearning, proudly defy the withered dugs of time.
Poetry becomes lost to Madness when the
preoccupied scribe
is distracted by swaying Woman,
by caverns of lost thought—
yet who is responsible for imposition of harsh
sanctions against inspiration?
How can the afflicted claim literary kinship to
spiritual grandparents—
who labored by day to escape escapades of
madness,
but struggled in the bleak night to capture it?
Lost in throes of candlelight desperation,
the poet journeys away
from the rational prisons of modern men.
Poetry is lost to madness.
The poet is Time’s carpetbagger.
What use is there but to recount?
Recollection is the highest toll on the swaying
bridge over gray Lethe.
The cart…has weak spokes.
Torches planted on distant riverbanks
Were lit by society’s highwaymen.
-Robert Milby
November 18, 2005
All Poems © 2009 - Robert Milby |
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