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Best Poems From
LAURENCE OVERMIRE
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245.
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Haiku Triptych
You don't have to be
a poet to write poetry
you just have to live
Live is a big word
requires a little effort
not just eat sleep drink
Time tells a tale
are you quick enough to hear
see the rain in drops
Laurence Overmire
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246.
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Hamlet at Wittenberg
Arrant knave that I am
What should such fellows as I do
Crawling beneath heaven and earth
Unable to pen the verse
The quivering pedant demands
Strict to the form, alas
Poor Yorick, they do not know him.
How stand I then
My truth beholden to the mirror
Which at the first and now
Was and is
To hold as twere, nature accountable.
Am I man or beast
The chief good and market of my time
But to sleep and feed?
No more.
Let me not think ont.
Here be the stops.
Though I may be fretted
I will not be played upon.
Should all occasions inform against me
The rest shall not be silence.
(Previously published in Some Words: A Place for Poetry, Aug 2004)
Laurence Overmire
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247.
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Hang It, Dang It
Art is intentionally
Open to ambiguity
Like truth itself
Impossible to nail
On a per-particular wall
Without someone or something
Knocking it crooked
More than a little
Way off the mark.
(Previously published in The Short North Gazette, Jan 2002)
Laurence Overmire
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248.
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Hanging With The Devil
I hung out with the Devil on Manhattan's
Lower East Side
Had a toke of poverty
long, slow, heavenly inhale
The hobos burning dreams
'round a trash can full of fear
Anesthetizing homelessness
'neath a cold, dark scrapered sky
Pimps and whores were ticking business
like Wall Street whackers on the Stock Exchange
Longing Johns laid with riches seeded
in the backs of black-glassed shiny white limos
The tenements lurched in the chains of their indignity
shutters cracking in the wind
Babies crying, dogs barking
unheeded or unheard
And when I asked the Devil what tunes he'd like to hear
boom-boxing with the fumes of brake-dancing automobiles
He smiled in his ghoulish way
with a glint of fire in his eye and said
'Gospel.'
(Previously published in MiPo Magazine, Winter 2004)
Laurence Overmire
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