Proof of Poetry

BY TOM SLEIGH

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter
and in my twenties I almost ended up there—

and then as an alternative to vodka, to live

alone like a hermit philosopher and court
the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—

and then there were the years in which

I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,
years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,

and that was the worst, the very worst—

you could say that always my life
was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—

my life like scraps stitched together in a dream

in which animals and people,
plants, chimeras, stars,

even minerals were in a preordained harmony—

a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,
but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically

found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike

or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—
and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.

I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,

the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony,
there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.

IN THE COUNSELOR’S WAITING ROOM

- Bettie Sellers

​The terra cotta girl
​with big flat farm feet
​traces furrows in the rug
with her toes,
​reads an existentialist paperback
from psychology class,
finds no ease there
from the guilt of loving
the quiet girl down the hall.
Their home soil has seen to this visit,
their Baptist mothers,
who weep for the waste of sturdy hips
ripe for grandchildren.

"The only safe thing is to take a chance" Elaine May

"Who is the happier man: He who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed? Hunter Thompson

"In America, any boy can become President, and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.......Adlai Stevenson

"Some talk to you in their free time, and some free their time to talk to you."
-Unknown-

“The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.”
― Anthony De Sa, Barnacle Love

In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem...... George Carlin

Reflections
 

Growth...
 

The Forest...
 

"To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend a lifetime trying to learn and understand."

--Sylvia Plath

Learn yourself...