These two poems are the first of the several we received from Jack Harvey.
They have a particularly whimsical, yet serious nature which threatens to bubble out from beneath their seams at any moment. More to come. Enjoy!
___
Mannheim
Mannheim went mad
one morning, before
they brought his coffee
and bun
staring out
across his desk
his eyes popped wider
than portholes;
the universe
skipped a beat,
Mannheim jumped
like a bug on a leaf.
Mannheim’s unknown errand
was done;
the great unseen walls
dissolved in a giggle.
Carefully, he doffed
his coat, unzipped
his fly;
out it popped
like a baby chick
and drooling and leaping,
crowing, creeping,
writhing like a boa,
he made his way down
to the divine
diluvial mother,
more mud than woman.
Like the old serpent,
Adam and seaman alike,
he breaches
goddess and mortal,
garden and portal,
ransacks creation
to find
the plain flower of love.
An iron irate bee, he
buzzes like blazes
in the dim and smoky air;
blind as a bat,
what he cannot see
he pursues,
relentless and desperate
to possess.
But life and death,
God’s passionate eyes,
the Devil’s spiky tongue
all forgot in the old branches
of that olive tree,
sweet and enduring giantess;
bedrock and bed where
Adam and madman,
burgher and sailor alike,
sleep to be awakened
and then sleep again.
Sleep Mannheim!
The chariots roll on
without you;
Lethe rolls on
beyond the world
of tilled fields,
forgotten miracles.
Waters of the sea of Vigo,
you will see my amigo;
waters of the ocean waste
you will taste his sea-blanched
carcass, outward bound.
On the shore of another land
you will be his bride,
O daughter.
~~~
Musgord by Jack D. Harvey
Musgord the Meretricious,
sometime king of
a faraway country,
sailed skating
down dawn seas.
Broken in defeat
he plugged west
across splendid
red suns setting,
green and blue
seascapes;
he pushed west.
The stars pinked
out, one by one,
before dawn and
Musgord turned his
lovely wishful face
back east,
back home;
all lost,
yet ahead the bell of
a strange new sea,
beautiful with beckoning;
new countries,
new lions in his palace,
new gold
in his treasury!
Onward! Onward!
The past’s but
a shard,
lying on abandoned ground.
Musgord the Meretricious
goes west;
abandoned by no one.
___
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.