Inspired poems

Inspired poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.

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Dave Bonta

Citizen

town is a hole I stepped in with my voice full of hard use jostled and crowded fallen I get up again I will live sparingly

Dave Bonta

Retirement

A sun for myself— pie of a life I never tasted. I am captain. I set sail for the farewell chance.

Dave Bonta

Day after day the lizards dance on the sand. When the sun climbs high the mountains won’t sit still. Even the tortoise toiling as little as he can moves in time with the maguey’s sharp-tongued shadow. Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky. The will to circle in the wind. To walk like Lucifer up & down in the earth or lope like Coyote, always one meal from the end. Let the fullness without break the drought within–

Dave Bonta

How to Live

A quaint command: think of kindness, thank for kindness. After supper, good music and bed. Strew the streets with herbs for joy of going. Never pray for happiness as long as the sun and moon endure.

Dave Bonta

Skylark

in the customs of larks joy is all the rage they pierce the heart afire with a news in which I hardly believe

Dave Bonta

Singing bottles

bottles of raw wine the old soldiers sit on the street singing through wind and cold

Dave Bonta

Finished

A hat to the office here, I end my contract, making an abstract home of the night.

Dave Bonta

Rimbaud, 1880

I have borrowed some quiet— the first in my life—and am resolved to go. I settle my accounts with myself and fear in hand, furnish my mind with a tent.

Dave Bonta

Buckles to my shoes

I sat with duty and guilt and shame, a brother to the poor. This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes.

Dave Bonta

Grace

buzzing on the autumn mountain an amber alert a child gone missing in the middle of my daydream railroad workers 400 feet below pause and look at their phones every morning now it’s a different landscape i go home and cut my hair the missing girl is found two notes from a wren get lodged in my inner ear

Dave Bonta

Unsettler: An Affirmation

i am prey i am mammal pure fear fires my pistons my eyebrows can pupate i have outgrown my own hair earth-bound descended from the trees i drink from the gray breasts of clouds on hind legs i hone myself to the thinness of a blade of grass

Dave Bonta

Carpe Noctem

full moonlight at half strength due to rain a slow and seemingly deliberate tapping on the roof one of the last warm end-of-summer nights katydids singing this is it this is it this is it this night with its singular pelage will never come again let sleep go on without you like a zombie apocalypse flying squirrels open the dark sails of their bodies a spring peeper calls three times in defiance of the season

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