Poetic License: No great thanks to you, Cavafy
(From Sanibel Joe’s Songbook)
I’m a lonely new lyric
Looking for a tune,
For a piano or guitar man
To pick me out soon.
I’m very much aware
It’s often reverse,
The lyric comes last,
The melody first.
I’m a lonely new lyric
Left out on my own,
No Blackberry to text
Or call on the phone.
I don’t want a stage
Like pop songs that preach,
Rock ballads reliving
Every day on a beach.
They come and they go
Like the waves and tide,
But their tunes don’t show
What I feel inside.
The tune that I’m seeking
Should be catchy but pure,
Will take up my words,
And make them endure,
Roll round my rhymes,
Real easy to hum,
Make you remember
Whose words they were from.
I’m a lonely new lyric
Looking for a tune –
Piano or guitar man,
Please pick me out soon.
Poetic License: No great thanks to you, Cavafy
Inside their worn, tattered bodies
sit the souls of old men.
Constantine P. Cavafy
No great thanks to you, Cavafy,
for telling me
the souls of old men
sit inside their wrinkled bodies
unhappy about everything
except being alive
to be unhappy.
As I sit outside
on my screened lanai
reading you, Constantine,
don’t you think I would cast aside
this shabby winter coat of body
if I thought the silver inner bird of me
could last fifteen minutes
in the cold wild outside the cage?
Byzantine Fairy,
I sailed your book to find Ithaca
but instead washed up on a metaphor
of old men’s souls sitting inside
their wrinkled outsides.
With metaphor mongers like you,
who needs enemies?