I Hate Poetry

The Dead

How often has it been said
Of the dead,
They would not have the dearly undeparted
Suffer undue grief.

They would have us renewed with joy,
After an appropriate mourning,
Reaffirming the gift of our daily existence
With fond reminiscences.

Will the dead never let us go?

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Little Sheep

I am a little sheep
With headlights and a beep,
A horn and a job,
I am corn on the cob.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

A Small Dog In France

There is a time for every whatever,
For even ignorance shall have revenge
And the stupid shall be lucky,
Confirming their faith in false gods
While criminals go unpunished
Yet still repent and so be saved.

Much of what we know shall be wrong
Though we will prosper from our illusions
And die happy,
Blissfully free from insight and revelation.

We shall be overcharged for groceries
Again and again
And our overcharges will go undetected
While lazy, good-for-nothing brothers-in-law
Live to their nineties,
Free from disability and disease,
Complaining.

Foolish teenagers shall be hypnotized
With dull employments,
Falling in love with the eternal charm of mediocrity,
Getting married and procreating astronauts.

A small dog in France will speak by accident.
Drinking from a backyard swimming pool
On a sultry summer night,
He will turn quickly to see a skinny orange cat
Slink across the fence top.
His mouth full of unswallowed water,
He will bark: “Bonjour!”
But no one will hear him except the cat,
Who,
Knowing the small fuzzy canine cannot reach him,
Will not care.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Money Train

Every mornin’
Climb on board,
You climb on board
That money train.

You be rich
Or you be poor
But you climb on board
That money train.

Hear that whistle,
Hear it blow,
Train’s a’ comin’,
You gotta go.

You be rich
Or you be poor
But you climb on board
And they shut the door.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

How To Write Poetry

O figure and reckon
Seeing they do write,
And how,
That is,
Out selected words
Ordering re-arrange in re:
Deforming tensed suffix
Ending original sin tax entendre?

uncap enjambers lifting geese as when simile even
meta-4 flying flight skyward soaring ethereal epiphany
yet safe nodding knowing wistful wink . . .

L'émotion artistique cesse où l'analyse et la pensée interviennent

get me to the

occasional

on timeward’s back contradicting the deliberately

unintentional.

Be clever by omission to hide what is not there
with literary frosting and pungent classical allusion such as
Perpetually Popular Persephone
(despite not even being an ex-planet).

By the way, a certain offhand familiarity with foreign locale,
making sophisticated world citizen manifesteringly manifest,
i.e. the halting walk of chilly winter pigeons just before dawn
along the Piazza Unità d'Italia in Trieste . . .

Now add an immigrant ancestor,
(A cobbler eating moldy cheese in steerage?)
(A cheesemaker eating moldy cobbler in steerage?)
Or two,
And always,
Always,
The scarcely hidden “Hell with you.”

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

The Idea

He would win the Nobel Prize

For his contributions to the origin of the universe,

But first,

His wife needs him to fix a leaky faucet.

He has to go to the hardware store.

So frustrating,

So many interruptions,

Right when his calculations begin to coalesce,

When they begin to speak.

But first,

His wife needs him to remove his laundry

From the washer

To make room for her clothing.

Then the cat barfs on the rug in his den,

Which makes him jurisdictionally responsible

For the cleanup.

Now his coffee is cold,

And his stomach is rumbling because he forgot to eat,

Being seized by an idea,

The idea,

Perhaps the missing piece of the cosmological puzzle.

But first,

His chatty neighbor is ringing the doorbell.

She’s brought a bag of homegrown tomatoes

And quickly engages his wife in inane conversation,

Focused on her observations

Of the meaningless exploits of the neighbors.

She rambles on in exhausting detail.

He retreats to his den,

Having second thoughts about working from home.

Since he does not require a laboratory for his work,

It seemed like a good idea,

At first.

Now, back to his theorem,

The missing piece,

It seemed like such an obvious idea,

Once it broke through the maze of spurious speculations.

O yes, the missing piece,

The solution.

“Oh God,” he cries out,

Suddenly realizing he forgot to write it down.

His deep despair suddenly startled

By the frantic ringing of the landline.

His wife will not answer the phone.

She never answers the phone,

Even though it’s usually someone for her.

She’s busy playing the piano,

Reproducing classical pieces in fits and starts,

Repeating difficult passages over and over.

He answers the phone.

The sunlight begins to dim.

His intellectual energy begins to wane.

Perhaps it would be best to close his notebooks,

Wait until tomorrow and get an early start.

With a good night’s sleep

Perhaps the idea will once again reveal itself.

And besides,

It’s nearly time to walk the dog.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Our Stories ~ They Will Not Burn

We lost everything in the fire,

Every thing,

All our mementoes,

Our objects,

Each one containing a memory.

So now,

In a dingy room in a dingy motel,

We put the pieces of our lives back together.

We don’t need objects to prompt our memories.

All our memories are ready to be awakened.

And so,

We sit in the dark,

Telling stories,

So many stories.

We could spend the rest of our lives

Telling our stories.

We've already begun.

Clocks

I don’t like early mornings
When I am still asleep.
I don’t like early bedtimes,
Alone and counting sheep.

Why should I pay attention
To all those clocks I see?
I listen to them ticking.
They listen not to me.

~ Russ Allison Loar
~ Writing The Child.com
© All Rights Reserved

We've Got Some Chairs

We’ve got some chairs,

Some beautiful chairs no one can sit on,

Right over there,

In the room no one can enter,

Unless it’s a special occasion,

Like somebody’s birthday,

Or Christmas.

We call it our living room.

Devolution

He was bored,
So bored with routine,
Every morning,
Brushing his teeth,
Making coffee,
Slogging off to work,
To predictable employments.

Then,
Weekend chores,
Social obligations,
So encumbered by family, friends and finance.

The half-slumbering supplicant,
Longing for escape,
His earnest entreaties
Finally heard,
Heard and granted.

Now,
As the first light warms the earth
He drags himself out from under a stone,
Eager to feel the sun against his scales,
The taste of yesterday’s grasshopper still lingering on the tongue.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

What Do You Really Think?

What do you really think?

No,
Not what you’ve heard,
Those predigested generalizations
Tailored to specific constituencies,
Foot soldiers amassing in the unity of certainty.

What do you think that’s genuinely yours,
Uniquely yours,
The product of your own ingredients,
Of your own mental exercise,
Unaltered by expectations of approval
Or disapproval,
Stripped of cliché,
Of second-hand observations . . .

Summon the truest voice within and tell me,
What do you really think?

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Know Now

(With hillbilly banjo accompaniment)

If I didn’t know what I know now
I wouldn’t know what I know now.

If I didn’t know what I know now
I wouldn’t know what I know now.

If I didn’t know what,
I know now,

I wouldn’t know what,
I know now but,

I know now what,
I didn’t know when,
I didn’t know what I know now.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

I Am Dog

Whither

Cheese from a rat is like soap for a hog,
You can’t write your mother by using a log.
A nose is indifferent to all that is art,
The opera’s a good place to rip loose a fart.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Reality

For a while,
It looked like it might be dark
All day,
So few actually taking the time
To believe in the sun anymore.

But familiarity breeds belief,
So the sun again appeared
And filled the sky with light.

It is a lesson to be relearned each morning,
That we must never,
Ever,
Take reality for granted,
As if it would continue on its own,
In a vacuum.

Reality depends on us all.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Ready To Fly

They say,
Never give up on your dreams,
They say,
You only fail if you quit trying,
They say,
Failures are the stepping stones to success,
They say,
Believe in yourself and all things are possible.

Everywhere I turn I am encouraged
By celebrities and self-help gurus,
Inspiring me to believe in my dreams,
To visualize my dreams,
To act on my dreams
And be bold in my actions,
Persistent in the face of failure,
To endure,
And most important of all,
Never, ever give up.

So once again I am here,
Standing on the edge of the roof,
Wearing the wings I have constructed
From rice paper and cotton balls,
Ready to fly.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

But Then

After all the years of trial and error
My memories are stained with embarrassment.
Even the most exquisite chapters of my life
Contain paragraphs that can still make me wince.

And so this morning I am resolved,
Resolved to fast from the feast of self-absorption.

But then,
There are these words.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Balzac In Paris

This pretentious, unbridled egotism,
Bridled by academic sycophancy,
Shackled by erudite nonconformity,
Eruditely enforced by the last living literati
Hanging onto the endangered species list
By his and/or her precarious pedicured pedigrees.

This turgid landscape bleeds sour
For want of a coat of arms
Worthy of such shame,
Such intrepid debasement,
Oh yes,
Here in de basement
I goo goo too,
This awful-god game,
La comédie humaine.

Some call it poetry.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Freedom From Want

Freedom from want means
Freedom from thinking about what you want
Cause,
After all,
You’ve already got what you wanted,
So now,
You can spend your time being so incredibly bored,
Trying to think of something else you want.

Soon,
You will go shopping.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Thumbs

There will never be a shortage of self-anointed critics,
Self-appointed judges of all manner of things,
Of people and events,
Large and small,
Those who educate,
Those who obfuscate,
Those with knowledge,
Those without,
Those who somehow believe it is their mission,
Their responsibility,
Their calling to point a thumb up or down.

We are blanketed with critics whose only qualification is ego,
Whose pronouncements are so soon forgotten
After scholars and historians

Assemble research and knowledge,
Honest intellectual inquiry,
To illuminate the past.

Do our media-created, ill-informed, knee-jerk commentators
Believe they are changing hearts and minds,
Guiding the course of a nation,
By unveiling the certain, unquestionable truth?

We are cooperative.

These pontificators give voice to our a priori conclusions,
Assuring us that even the most complex issues of our time
Can be measured by the masquerade of mass hysteria,
By the illusion of popular opinion,
That all we really need do is vote,
One way or another,
Thumbs up or thumbs down.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved