POETRY MADNESS CONTINUES BEATNIKING MY HEAD

Another poem has found a home just in time for Christmas vacation. It won't like young Mr. Scrooge be forced to stay at school over the holiday. This time a haiku that I think very highly of has found its way onto the internet pages of Haikuniverse:

quantum effects—
an electron
lost in space

After so much end of year success with poetry, what will happen to my bucket list? I don't know. Recently I recalled when a friend some long time ago told me that I was a natural poet. It's been on my mind to get busy on the rewrite of Ghoul World, but I'm having so much fun messing around with poetry.

BEATNIKING MY WAY BACK TO POETRY

I'm sorry. Twenty days plus since my last entry. Here's why. I've done little to no work towards either of the entries on my bucket list. I've been working on old poetry and a few new poems that represent my style since my lyric days are past, the poetry of my past that came alive from dreams and intuition. I plod nowadays but am rewriting and reworking old poetry. My next goal is to enter into contests a book of poetry that I wrote 25 years ago in a certain pedestrian style that was inspired by the poetry of Hanshan as translated by Gary Snyder. Here's one of them:

DREAM OF FAME

Twenty-five summers since I wrote these poems, Han-shan,

Inspired by the pedestrian style that shunned the forms and fashions

Of the Tang Dynasty you were living in, abandoned on rocks,

On cliff faces that you passed by in your wanderings. Unlike you,

I must admit that all these years I’ve craved fame and found none.

Now the lyric flights that rose from my dreams have flown away. I’m left

Barren, abandoned, old master, limping along with unanswered questions.

Did you dream of fame as I did, and why did your thoughts turn to stone?

The reference to stone comes from the fact that no one knows who Hanshan was and by the fact that "his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home." Quotation from Wikipedia.