free verse | David Fekete

MUSINGS ON MUSIC

05 May 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: Beethoven, cultivation, culture, free verse, language, muse, music, recording, singing, soul, symphony, synapses

Music isn’t just pretty sounds, a pulse

Rock isn’t just a distorted guitar

Blues isn’t just a 12-bar form

Music should strike fire from the heart, so said Beethoven,

Music is poetry of the soul, heart and soul

Soul music, the existence of the soul

Touched by fire, music is a living thing

Life-giving, live or recorded, alive through ages

Living with individuals through life, through aging,

In youth or age, youth and age

Peasant and king hear the same music, so say the Chinese

Pounding through the heart, hearing, heard with soul

Existence of the soul, sounds’ salve, alive

Conducted through electricity in the brain

Singing through synapses in the soul

Symphony of the senses sent from on high

Humans sang before they spoke,

The lilt of language’s inflections

Performances perfecting the human condition

Culture, cultivation, culmination of the muse’s calling

Meaning so much more than pretty sounds, a pulse

A LITANY

04 May 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: art, Blake, Eliot, F. Scott, fame, free verse, Hemingway, litany, obscurity, poem, Sheyyey, wealth

The Keepers of intellectual trends hold apparent power

And to make it, some are slaves to the Keepers’ fashion

I am a free man to my own muse

I am a priest who intones the litany:

Blake was a free genius, self-published,

And died in literary obscurity

Until T. S. Eliot gave him a name

Shelley knew, “Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure”

Whom all English students now study

Though F. Scott knew fame and wealth,

Gatsby didn’t even sell out its first printing

And F. Scott never knew the book as all high school students do

They suppressed Hemingway’s Pulitzer

They fiercely debated whether Frost were a poet, Wyeth a painter

The Impressionists showed in the Exhibition of Rejects

And Moreau, in the National Paris Salon

Pollock had his 10 years, before his suicide

Mozart died unknown, unsung

We can’t give our contentment to the Keepers

It rests in the beauty of our art manifesting,

In the pen of the writer alone with paper or laptop screen,

And a happy finished project

In the living-room, study, or dorm room

With, or without, the blessing of the Keepers

GETTING TO ME

07 Apr 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: COVID-19, cruel, free verse, incompetence, partisanship, poem, poetry, president, rage, self-serving, statesmanship, Wisconsin

I’ve never been so mad and spiteful in all my life

I watch the death toll rise daily without abatement

At home alone, practicing shelter-in-place to help the initiative

I get mad easily these days

I choke in my rage at what looks like incompetence and self-serving

By the president, what seems cruel partisanship of Wisconsin’s legislature

Putting lives at risk by disallowing an election’s delay during the pandemic

I crave statesmanship

I’m ashamed at the ill-will I feel, what I wish would happen . . .

While safe at home, COVID-19 is still getting to me

IT NEVER USED TO BE

28 Mar 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: apathy, bipolar disorder, fear, free verse, music, onstage, perform, poem, poetry, psychotic episode

Mike noticed me shaking

Playing at an open stage

The way we had in clubs years ago

The legacy of my psychotic episode years ago,

The effects persisting in my involuntary shakes, fear, and incompetence

Brett noticed me shaking

Almost convulsing onstage at the keyboard

It never used to be like that

The ease, the drive I had to perform

Then the caving fear onstage

The lingering apathy that stole

My passion to play hour upon hour at home

Getting better hour upon hour enthralled

Or onstage before crowds

Eager, excited, up

Darryl tried to jam with me last spring

Remembering my former ability

Thinking me as capable as it used to be

It was sad, the attempt, his generosity

One player quenched by bipolar disorder

Likely doesn’t mean much

But it does to me

GLAMOR AND BEAUTY

25 Mar 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: beauty, exfoliator, fashion, free verse, innocence, makeup, poem, poetry, spiritual

Skin and hair and fingernails and toenails

And eyebrows and eyelashes and eyeshadow

And lips and lipstick and Botox

Lashes and polish and foundation

Makeup and moisturizer and exfoliator

Glamor and allure and sophistication

Good nature and simplicity, even innocence

And sincerity and faithfulness and trust

And honesty and emotional honesty and spontaneity

And genuine and caring and kind

And real and unaffected and straightforward

And loving and spiritual and beautiful

SITUATIONAL ETHOS: SCRIPT AND CAST

23 Mar 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: cast, determinism, free verse, friends, personality, poem, poetry, scrips, self, social structure

Self is poured into the social structure

In which one is situated

Options of connection are dependent

On the system in which one is

One is as an actor pouring self into a role

But self is not a role, though he or she act

One is situated

Friends are determined

Whom one receives into one’s life

Casting from the script written by the social structure

In which one is situated

Much as my television dictates

The terms of my engagement

(So, tonight I resigned myself to Karate-Kid II)

But I did not choose it

Personality improvises

Within the plot structure scripted

By social structures in which

One is situated

Self persists, improvising, developing, and accumulating

Experiences, motivations that persist

As the moon under undulating waves

In the play in which

One is situated

EARLY COVID-19

20 Mar 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: COVID-19, free verse, isolation, loneliness, love, meaning, poem, poetry, unemployment

My distance and loneliness

In a poisoned world

My amusements and study

Grow vapid and I wonder

What to do in all this

In my state of shock, my enervated will

I can’t bring myself to do anything

Struggle with the clock that doesn’t seem to move time

Distancing, social isolation, and loneliness

How strange commercials from the old days seem

Tight social groups at cafes, parties, mobs at pop concerts

And New York city streets like a ghost-town

I try to wrap my mind around it all

What it all means, what it will mean

The economy, unemployment, isolation

How long? What it all means

Shops shut down, restaurants, businesses

And all those workers unemployed now

The number of incidents rises, the death toll

They say weeks, probably months of this

Then we will emerge—but to what?

The scar COVID-19 will leave on the world we used to know

For now, the greatest love means isolation

SO SAY THE BUDDHISTS

18 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: Africa, beloved, Buddhists, bullets, China, enemy, exploding star, free verse, iron, New York, Oneness, poem, poetry, rage

The Buddhists say we are all connected

The coffee plantation in Africa and breakfast in New York

My coffee cup and a Chinese factory worker

The rice paddy that gave her supper

The exploding star that formed the iron of which the plow is made

The exploding star that made the iron for the bullets in my enemy’s gun

My enemy who would shoot those bullets at me

The iron in my body’s blood

The iron in the blood of the other political party, who stands under my flag

We are all connected, all one

My enemy as my beloved are all one with me

Everything is mine, is me

And I am one with everything

Makes me think twice about rage, about hate

About causing anyone harm, anything

ONE NIGHT STAND

09 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: age, enjoyment, free verse, friends, happiness, impermanence, pleasure, poem, poetry, truth

A realization has been clarifying

Surfacing amid currents of incubation

From which my truths and convictions

Emerge, fix, and enlighten my ways

Living feels increasingly like

The experience of a one-night stand

So many—perhaps all—of my enjoyments

Lack permanence, will depart; will leave me bereft

Five years adjusting—enjoying—a life in a new city

Friendships I made, vocational commitments

Departing to another new city

Making friends, vocational commitments

And even persisting in one place a long time

Businesses grow, downsize, lay off

Long-established establishments adjust

To the market’s demands, aging demographics

When a person is young, time feels long

One year is like an eternity

And few things change in one year

So it looks like things will always be

But with the perspective of many years

And the witness of businesses, clubs, and restaurants that close

Friends who move away, get terminally sick

One sees that happiness is subject to fortune

And so one takes the pleasure that the moment affords

Knowing that it may end precipitously

And that enjoyment may be over

Yet one partakes in full, aware that it is fleeting

Awake to its transitory nature

Courageously enjoying, not denying

What happiness a given situation affords

COMING TO TERMS

25 Nov 2019 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: bipolar disorder, competence, free verse, pills, poem, poetry, recovery, side effects

It’s dawning on me that I will not be able

To reclaim 27 years lost,

The development I could have experienced,

When pills and depression

Robbed me

Of a competence I once had,

Which could have flourished into greater form

No, I can’t reclaim those years

Nor the increased competence I would have gained in those 27 years

I must accept the limitations on

My ability

Sad, or philosophical

I cannot reclaim those years

I may never recover even what I once was

Let alone what I could have become

With 27 years of practice, application, learning

Tragic, the waste, those lost 27 years

Coming to terms with what I am, where I am

The competences I do have, not

Those I don’t have, I could have had