True Dear

When walking home to not see you be there
I sing a melody to reassure
My tired soul that, though life is unfair,
There someday, at last, will be a cure,
For one day, though not now I must admit,
You will be there to greet my coming home,
And all the lights that ever have been lit
Will still be darker, when I cease to roam
Than that adoring smile which will spread
Across my face at seeing you and knowing
Wherever I may go, what I may do
You are with me and you will not be going
Unless of course I go along with you.
So darling know although you are away
I'm comforted by hopes of you someday.

Catchetism

Where are the words I need?
Where is the eloquence?
My thoughts have gone to seed
My spirit flies from hence.
Why is my thought so dull?
Why have I naught to say?
I am but husk and hull
I am but grass and hay.
How can I seek for grace?
How can I be redeemed?
What will my pain erase?
What was it that I dreamed?
The sight of you will cure
The terrors I endure.

Fortune Cookie

There is a piece of paper which I do not wish to read;
It tells me of my fate in ways I think are best not known.
I fear that even reading it, my eyes might tear and bleed,
And even if they did not my mind would be overthrown.
The secrets it contains are not the ordinary ones
Of who ate what for breakfast or what goods there are to sell,
But rather larger, in my mind, so much that my heart shuns
The danger of embracing it, and flees to its own hell
Of doubt and desperation rather than investigate
The writing on the paper. Oh, I hardly dare to mention
The contents - even though you know I do not know their state -
For fear that speaking of them will negate a good intention
For on that paper, written large, I asked a while ago
If you thought you could love me: and it said check yes or no.

Zombies

Watch the people entering the train:
Do they clump up, or string themselves apart?
Their faces: do they show the numbing strain
Of hours spent discouraging your heart
From wanting more? And when they stand, do they
Almost despite themselves, slump down
Their shoulders rounded forward as they fray
Invisibly before you? Does a frown,
Nearly suppressed, but just there, at the corners,
Pass slowly through their mouths? Or do they smile
The half-grin grimace of exhausted mourners
Who know they'll still be grieving for a while?
Watch sympathetically, and watch with care:
There's always something human left in there.

Ghost Town

So many empty stations on the El
Forgotten and grown over by the years,
Imbued with a distinctive musty smell,
Of ancient blood and oil, sweat and tears
Spent to establish what is now a waste,
A monument to days no longer known,
To times whose memory has been erased,
And hopes now like the stations overgrown.
They crumble statelily and wash away
Until their concrete melts into the dust,
A dying emblem of a yesterday
Borne out of sight by every little gust
Of famous wind. Each day we pass them by
And do not watch them wither, crack, and die.

At Sea

And if you were not here, where would I be?
A floating wreck upon an endless sea
Without a mast, a rudder, or a spar
To hang a sail from, with no destination,
Simply enduring for unknown duration
The world around me, with no guiding star
To show me north left in the empty sky,
Unmoved by trade winds as they shuttle by,
Becalmed and desperate. You guide my wheel,
Your presence is the wind that fills my sails,
Your love the sails themselves, which no great gales
Will ever tear, your kiss the unsplit keel
Which cuts the water and allows me to
Sail past my fears and anchor close by you.

Late As In?

If, once again, I am a little late
What does it matter? Whose priorities
Am I to follow? Must I never wait
For what I want, myself, and always seize
The undesired opportunities
That others send me? Is my will my own?
Or does it bend to others by degrees
Insensible to how my wants have grown,
So I may never reap the seeds I've sown,
But only harvest others' fruit? Am I
Myself? Or are these worries overblown,
A pointless and infuriating cry
Of privilege? For after all, who cares
But me how fast I hurry down the stairs?

On Stretching Meanings

Poetry has some flexibility with the language, naturally, in the service of art. Just how much can be a question though, obviously. For example, if you look one post before this, the sonnet there rhymes "ruth" with "truth." This in itself is not objectionable: they rhyme. But is "ruth" really the emotion demanded by, or even an emotion permitted by, the rest of the poem? Ruth means pity, compassion, sorrow, grief, the emotions felt by Ruth the Moabite towards her mother-in-law Naomi in the Biblical Book of Ruth after their mutual widowhood. The poem is about romantic love. How far can one stretch "ruth," with all its sorrowful, pitying connotations (and even direct definitions!) to fit that mold?

The first cast in that direction is grammatical: "ruth" is joined with "And tenderness" in the following line, which means that we must take a form of ruth that can join with tenderness. But all of the definitions I've placed above can do so: grief and tenderness may be the furthest apart, but they are by no means absurd when joined. Rather, the absurdity in all these cases arises from the sense that the poem wants "ruth" to mean something like a synonym for tenderness, not just a complement. So this move does not help, although in other contexts it might.

Building on that, though, we can ask if there is a fringe definition - archaic, obsolete, historical-linguistic - that is allowable but unintuitive and might make sense of "ruth." This is for instance how one most often deals with John Milton's excessive Latinism: go back to his Latin roots and define the parts until you see how it works beyond ordinary English usage. Here we are on firmer ground: if we take "ruth" in its formative sense as related to the sympathetic and self-effacing love Ruth felt for Naomi, we could make that work.

This, however, brings us close to the borderline of complete redefinition: taking the word Humpty-Dumpty-style and making it mean what you say it means. This should generally be avoided except when coining the word for the first time, and even then it ought to be a meaning suggested by the sound or component parts of the word. It is a real stretch, which can easily break a poem, to go too far out on the redefinition limb.

As for "ruth," you tell me: did it go too far? I am personally just barely satisfied with it: the difficulty of that rhyme compensates somewhat for the effort needed to define it (if the rhyme were something ending in an -ee sound, there would be no excuse since there are so many rhymes), and the root meaning is there, if somewhat faintly. Ruth's love for Naomi is the central motivator of the word, and it is that sort of overwhelming, non-self-oriented love - which sometimes seems like pity and can in fact be called compassion in one sense of that word - that the poem wanted and needed from the word. But I am not the arbiter of my own poetry: the reader is. So what do you think?

Lifevest

I think I bother you a bit with how I say
Incessantly, and each and every day,
I love you. But I mean it every time,
And it's so overwhelming in its truth
I cannot help express it. Waves of ruth
And tenderness wash over me, and climb
Above my head, and as I surface, I
By instinct, sans interrogation why,
Blurt out the fact I love you, as if that
Alone could save me: and I think it can,
For since our now requited love began,
I've surfaced, when before I floated flat
Facedown. So love, I pray you now forgive
My repetitions - for they let me live.

The Symptoms

It seems it must be anticlimax now
To see you when we've been so long apart.
I cannot fantasize the fates allow
Such happiness to one still-human heart
As I anticipate when seeing you:
And so it must be somehow disappointing
If just because my hopefulness outgrew
All possibility of fate anointing
My wishes with fulfillment. How could it?
Such joy and wonder, such unbroken peace
As I expect to have could never sit
Within one heart while it was in one piece.
Yet we are two, and have two hearts to bear
This happiness: perhaps, then, we can share.