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Tag: free verse

Anti-Social Media: free verse

Published on July 25, 2025

They tell you to engage your audience,
to offer readers ways to interact
that draw them in. And offer helpful bits,
like simple rules or things to take and do.

But honestly, who needs one more “how to”,
another great life hack, or useful trick,
especially condensed down to a quick
and easily digested amuse-bouche?

Don’t get too deep, they warn you, or you’ll lose
the interest of the left-swiping crowd.
Be sure to keep it light, above the fold,
or you’ll have no bestseller on your hands.

But honestly, who needs such vapid fans,
so easily discouraged by a thought
that they flee in mortal fear from what you say,
like roaches when you flip the switch at night?

They say to keep it light. Don’t make demands,
if you would keep a growing, loyal base.
It’s all about the numbers, anyway.
No one expects an influencer to care.

But honestly, why bother in that case,
if what you want is followers and “friends”?
If all of this is pointless talk and show,
shut up and try to change the world instead.

25 JUL 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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Nothing Matters: free verse

Published on May 31, 2025

If nothing is a thing at all
then nothing comes from something;
that’s logic if you presuppose
that something there is that doesn’t
love the void:
that a thing that is cannot become
if there’s no seed or spark or speck
from which it comes to being.
It could be some eternal mind,
a divine will, or cosmic dust;
the truth is, it is just unseen
by those who claim to know the truth,
or lack enough creative juice
to see beyond what they can see.

The sages from the east propose
that it’s all in the mind.
Perhaps, that’s well enough to pass some tests
but has its own illusions.

A thing that can escape the mind?
How could we even guess it’s there?
The way things work, and intertwine,
the madness in the universe
in which we see some super-mind,
where do such notions grow and thrive,
except in our imaginations?

If a thing is nothing much,
then what is something after all?
There’s so much chaos, anyway,
unless you’re looking at the whole;
then the observer and observed
become just one united field.

If you and I could see the truth,
what good is that, if you and I
cannot imagine something else
that might contain us both?

31 MAY 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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Quite Different Chains: free verse

Published on March 21, 2017

I’m not sure
I can even write
“free verse”
anymore.

Ever since I started
using specific
poetic forms,
I find
myself
writing poems
to be read aloud;
their purpose,
if they are to be effective
when spoken,
dictates employing some kind of
cadence,
at least the semblance of some
rhythm.

You see, even there, a sense of
time
emerges from what might
at first glance or gloss
appear to be just a bit
of prose.

It’s poetry, they say,
if it provides
a distillation of a thought,
an image meant to show not tell,
a conscious fight against just
words for words sake.

To agree,
or disagree,
with such a notion
is to put yourself
in one of two
opposing camps.

Myself?

I’d rather set up tent
out in
the land between.

21 MAR 2017

© 2017, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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The Squirrels: free verse

Published on April 16, 2004

The squirrels
have gone on strike;
I can hear them
chattering,
each one voicing their dislike.

The gist
is not flattering.

Yesterday we had the trees removed
planted too close to the house,
against the back fence,
that blocked the sun
and housed the squirrels.

The trees had to go;
they were damaging roofs
and fences and walls.

But try explaining that
to a squirrel.

16 APR 2004

© 2004 – 2013, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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For Allen Ginsberg

Published on July 30, 2003

I can hear you breathing, America
Will you catch up with me
Dangling your embittered and jealous umbilicus
Asking
Who among you when your child asks for bread
Will hand him a grenade?
It’s not some dark sin that hides you
That tangles itself between your hunchback slouch
Taking the offense
And turning it to saccharine misgiving,
Writing manifesto after manifesto
In depressed Republican villages,
Burning books
(besides, who reads?)
That betray the lies:
The absence of a common enemy
A booming peacetime economy
Unprecedented availability of information.
No one wins this anti-trust action,
America,
I can hear you breathing,
Sweating,
Cursing your unseen enemies
In the absence of the rear view mirror
I was young, once,
But you were born to bed pans and liquid food,
To hearing aids and walking sticks,
To constipation and incontinence.
Can you hear me, America?

2001

© 2003 – 2017, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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