The Muse Awakens

I have always wondered what would happen if the poet who lives so deeply inside of me fought his way back to the surface. In the late sixties, I wrote poetry which was published, edited a university literary journal, and lived very close to the edge of sanity and propriety. Thirty years ago, I was young and wild, excited about all that I could find and assimilate. No experience was a bad experience. Love was free and accesible.

The eighties changed all of that. The economy was weak, films were being made about disco dancers and divorces, the social order was changed, again, and for the worse. There were no more digger stores, no more love-ins, not even the hootenannies survived. I traded my beard and my guitar for a tie and a typewriter and began a new life as a technical writer in a munitions plant, the same one I had picketed after the first moratorium against the war in Viet Nam. I kept the poet and his muse alive for awhile, even gave a reading at the Wine Cellar (a now defunct bar in Scranton, Pennsylvania) and had critical and public success. Life caught up with me, and work became a passion rather than a chore. I began thinking about process improvement and cultural breakthrough to the exclusion of all of my other interests. I gave up playing my guitar, my womanizing, and to an extent, public drunkeness.

There were short spurts of words meant only to amuse or impress, words surrounded by philosophy and mysticism, but they were only excercise, a tonic for the brain, to keep it functioning during overloads caused by bad business practices, obnoxious leadership, and the greed and cultural stupidity which was so often the practice in American business during the '70s and '80s.

The Muse is awake. She has slept inside of me for almost twenty years, knowing I would not die before she had her chance to shape me once again into a voice singing the praises of freedom and self-awareness. She is awake, and well, and urging me to write, for you.

Liebestraum

I had always thought this only a waltz
only a beautiful waltz
yet, today, it is a nocturne
a symphony
a memory I cannot explain

Tell me of time
Tell me of space
Explain them to me
for I do not understand them

How can I be here
and there
and then
and now
when I am nowhere and never?

How can this eternity be so short
when my memory of it is eternal?

The muse, fully awakened, pushes me
past the limits of my humanity
into a vast field
of dreams and fantasies
I realize but cannot rationalize

There was a yellow house
on the shore of a lake
or the bank of a river
which never was
nor ever will be
save in the eye of the poet
of the painter
or the sculptor
who lived within it

and a wall and a mountain
and a priest and a soldier
marching together
against a tide of madness
forcing it to ebb