A Tiny Gift for Yourself

Poets.org will send you a poem a day to celebrate National Poetry Month. I am sure that a poem a day will soften hard edges and sweeten addled minds. It might even inspire you to greatness, or niceness, or peace.

No, Love Is Not Dead


by Robert Desnos

No, love is not dead in this heart these eyes and this mouth
that announced the start of its own funeral.
Listen, I've had enough of the picturesque, the colorful
and the charming.
I love love, its tenderness and cruelty.

My love has only one name, one form.
Everything disappears. All mouths cling to that one.
My love has just one name, one form.
And if someday you remember

O you, form and name of my love,
One day on the ocean between America and Europe,
At the hour when the last ray of light sparkles
on the undulating surface of the waves, or else a stormy night
beneath a tree in the countryside or in a speeding car,

A spring morning on the boulevard Malesherbes,
A rainy day,
Just before going to bed at dawn,
Tell yourself-I order your familiar spirit-that
I alone loved you more and it's a shame
you didn't know it.

Tell yourself there's no need to regret: Ronsard
and Baudelaire before me sang the sorrows
of women old or dead who scorned the purest love.

When you are dead
You will still be lovely and desirable.
I'll be dead already, completely enclosed in your immortal body,
in your astounding image forever there among the endless marvels
of life and eternity, but if I'm alive,
The sound of your voice, your radiant looks,
Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things
will live on inside me.

In me and I'm not Ronsard or Baudelaire
I'm Robert Desnos who, because I knew
and loved you,
Is as good as they are.

I'm Robert Desnos who wants to be remembered

On this vile earth for nothing but his love of you.

A la mysterieuse

This Time Will Be Different

Rodrigo y Gabriela

This time will be different.

This time I will not quit when it gets hard.

This time I will pay attention.

This time I will work and work and work until I get it right.

This time, I will get good enough so that I don't have to try. So that I can translate what is happening in my head and my heart to the world. So that I can tell you I love you in lyric and melody without actually saying "I love you."

This time, I will learn guitar. From a real teacher.

There are 100 songs I want to be able to sing and play. I want to put provocative and too-clever poems to music, ala Ani di Franco. I want to mourn for sweetness gone like Nanci Griffith. I want to rock like Rod and Gab, John and Paul, Sinead, k.d., Prince.

At least 90 percent of my past beaus have been all guitar, all the time. True talents. But you know what? You can't learn guitar by osmosis, no matter how many bodily fluids you swap. And it's taken me until 40licious to understand this.

When I get my throwdown song, hopefully by the end of the year, I am nominating myself for the 40licious Hall o' Fame.

Hippie Mom Purse

Every now and then, because I am 40licious and because it's my site, I will spend a little time on a pedantic retrospective of my career. But I will only load up things I really like. Like this one.

Hippie Mom Purse

My mother, Colleen Bennett-McGrady, walks me outside our apartment building circa 1969.