poetry

POETRY

NOTE: All poetry by James M. Truxell.
If used or cited, please give appropriate reference. Thank you.

The links below will take you to some of my reflections on either the news shared by the media with all of us, or some personal event in my own life, heretofore shared only with a few . . . and now with you.

I'm a firm believer in the notion that all poems are "incomplete" . . . for each awaits what you make of their meanings.

What I'm trying to do in these poems is what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti talks about in the poem below.

I hope you'll find them useful and, sometimes even, entertaining.

~ James M. Truxell

CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY (#15)
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

~ from A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1958).