I am not a poet. However, I get a lot of recommendations from Medium from “writing coaches.” A minority of these do offer good advice, but most of them are vultures and con artists who market themselves as “insiders” to the “writing industry.” Promising careers, job opportunities, employments and various clickbait nonsense like that.
And I encountered one headline with the extraordinarily snobby notion that “serious poets” don’t publish poetry online. That you need to reserve yourself to journals and magazines for some reason.
And I found that to be offensive. If you’re a serious poet, then I expect you to be romantic, and if you’re romantic, then you’re supposed to suffer for your art. A serious poet should be impoverished by their poetry. No poet would sully their works with professionalism like some dirty painter.
As such, in rebellion, I am going to publish a selection of poetry online:
The Dusk Of The Gallow’s Eye
Within the twilight, there rests a finality. A brazen sky of growing darkness. A silent, morose and quiet contemplation, produced like thunder by great abruption. A weathering cascade of blowing winds, as confession is rendered unto the backs of the condemned. A brutal, bitter and unwavering ambition withers into ashes as the lantern is cast upon the doorstep. From the canter of the hooves, to the ring of the sabre, each one falls like wheat upon the scythe.
And yet, for what wheat nourishes a famine? What law begets murder? As there be dragons upon the marble hall, a strange knight emerges. Clad in iron as strong as his will, he stands before the volleys, his posture unrelenting. His legend echoes like a requiem bell, and yet it is merely the sound of ricochets. For the humblest men instill the greatest fear, as they shall inherit the Earth.
May God save all who harries and holds, should once more Ned Kelly walk the land.
A verse of woeful spirits
A single drop of a thousand souls, a single drop, that demands one more. The tragedy of revels, the eternity of night, the robber of ambition, the desperate delight.
A wakeful presence in every church, a rueful absence of honest work. A deathly tempest, trapped in a chalice, an untapped potential of blackened malice.
It strangles you when you grab its neck, it troubles you when you leave its wake.
It makes hands into fists, and friends into foes, it hides the daylight as the nights will grow.
When you hear its ring, your laughter ends, when you feel its warmth, it’s your only friend.
So take my heed, a word of advice, shun the bottle, lest you pay the price.
To All That Could Happen
And so we gather in memory, to all the things which could have been. The laughter, the songs, the rights, the wrongs. To the squabbles, the arguments, the petty ignorance. To the triumphs, the advances, the joyous extravagance. To the artisanal passions, and the many attractions. To the swearing, the spitting, the smoking, the vice. To the beggars, the vagrants, the rats and the mice. To the dripping pipes and the laundry lines. To the madness, the age, the loneliness and decline. To the crooked landlords, to the kindly strangers. To the idiots and laggards, to the overdue payments. To the anxiety, the tranquility, to the terrible commutes to the work in the city. To the noise, to the music, to the countless abuses. To the smokestacks, the dust, the filth and the musk. To the sewers and the parks, to the graffiti on the walls. To the short, and the tall, the big and the small. To the many neighborhoods that we gave up for war.
