By: Paul Dickey

Greed and Hate

(Apology to Robert Frost)

Some say that Trump will end in greed;
Some say in hate.
From what we’ve tasted his ego’s need
I hold with those who favor greed.
But if he runs again a candidate,
I think we know enough of lust
To know what for destruction hate
It is aptly just
And would be adequate. 

A Contemporary Form Invented by a Free Verse Poem

If I wrote such a poem, would you recognize
there is a form?
I will give you a secret, a way to know
a methodology,
through your own eyes

while you prefer to go free or stay blind.
Take home from these lines something to show,
an epistemology.
Speak boldly of a poetic norm
that might occupy the most serious mind.

Without form, something is lost,
studied by seismology,
something warm,
deeply inside the ground below.
Let others measure if any cost.

Poets, you must be free to flaunt words,
so don’t dismiss this underground storm
and its mighty rushing flow.
Write your poems is a technology
from the belly of earth that can direct the flight of birds.

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Paul Dickey lives in Omaha, NE but he wrote poetry in Wichita, Kansas in the 1970’s. He published then in Kansas Quarterly, Mikrokomos, Nimrod, Karamu, and Quartet. Now in 2024 after many years, Dickey has now published for his early poems with a new book, I Forget I Live Alone.