"Sailing"

Will going West deliver me?

Will Grey Havens departure save me?

Or am I an upstart Sam Gamgee,

Hoping for unearned redemption?

 

(Tolkien’s refusal to allow Frodo and Sam’s

Friendship to be unbroken is so English.

Sam should have gone West too,

But he was not loveless as Frodo was.)

 

Unless-Frodo had a love, which he did!

Courtesy of English Major Deconstruction,

Frodo loved an Elf, who loved him back..

Whom I will not divulge, study the story grasshopper!

 

(She bore the Red Book of Westmarch West)

 

We are the West. As such California Is the Westest!

Who dares look at his destiny in the face?

I do, and I am prepared for the horror or the bliss!

There is no fate but what we make.

 

No waybread, no Elven cloak,

Nor even the comfort of Sting.

I journey West, naked in the sun.

With faith in the Valor to see me not undone.

 

The Hill now mourns the absence of Mr. Underhill.

"Roads"

Some roads we travel for pleasure,

Others from practical need.

Sometimes just for awareness,

Now & then for greed.

 

The old rough road has been home,

While “our sign” is long since gone.

Getting lost in Atlanta is one thing,

In pursuit of beloved song.

 

Now I follow a forkless path,

Bereft of motherly guide.

All I can hope & imagine,

Is longing her advice to abide.

 

Following these highways, byways-

Like veins & arteries on skin of Earth.

I pause to wonder what you saw,

In the days & years since my birth.

 

Walking alone is less than zero,

In the equation of happy life,

Belief in the golden destination,

Is where faith can reward my strife.

 

Decision roads are one way,

No Thermopylae Spartan came back-

Lest on his shield & spiritless.

Honor-freed of a warrior pact.

 

I doubt that there are easy roads,

Just illusions which we choose.

Treasure maps, routes to Elysium-

Mere masquerades in a lifetime ruse.

“A Brief Essay on the Death of Romance”

Trampling oyster shells on the floor,

Dueling with a windmill,

Dear Romance,

You died a homeless death

Before you were even born,

 

Love worn like an albatross,

Forms a bond like non-dairy creamer.

Dear Romance,

You were traded for vitriol,

Cast into the sacred river Alph.

 

Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Byron & Shelley-

Is not a law firm or Wall Street trading company.

Dear Romance,

Just ask anyone! Well perhaps not a good idea.

Pallbearers all were they at your funeral.

 

Revel society in your hollow modernisms!

Soulless people, food and aps.

Dear Romance,

We sing "Auld Lang Syne" scarcely aware of Burns.

And tear-up not for the lost year but our lost selves.

 

Pity that your poetry doesn’t show up on Coke cans,

Or at the very least a Super Bowl ad.

Dear Romance,

When we stared into the abyss and you didn’t stare back,

Was when we knew that we were dead too.

“Can I Be a Cowboy?”

The fever of getting a parking space,

Watching insolent children misbehave,

Seeing the broken people strive to abide…

I have to believe in my heart and soul,

That being a cowboy was meant for me.

 

Oh to ride the open spaces,

Unbound to machine, or foreign places.

To see sky unlined by man’s devices,

Riding the range at an unmeasured pace.

Enjoying membership in the human race.

 

What is lost cannot be regained.

Sometimes it cannot even be remembered.

I remember, and it saddens me outright…

It is the reason we all like Clint Eastwood,

The reason that sunsets still trigger our heartstrings.

 

Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tom Mix, and all the cowboy poets,

I salute you!