spacer image Home | My Websites | My Poetry Previous | Next      

Dog Grrl!
by
Thomas James Allen

  1. What Once Was Easy
  2. Moss Upon the Brick 1
  3. The Alchemist
  4. My Personal Ecology
  5. Stopping in the Evening by a Snowy Woods
  6. Moss Upon the Brick 2
  7. The Magic Forest
  8. The Poet's Prayer
  9. A Christmas Visitor
  10. Daddy Longlegs
  11. The Philosopher's Lament
  12. Moss Upon the Brick 3
  13. Ol' Sin Nombre
  14. The Alchemist's Shop
  15. Ol' Gran'mama's Stew
  16. The TA's Lament
  17. Transylvania Square
  18. Tremble
  19. Christmas Miracles
  20. Going Home to Mechanicsville
  21. Moss Upon the Brick 4

My other poetry books:
Poems People...
Still Minor

What Once Was Easy

I once was a poet, rhyming lines,
Tying stanzas, hinting signs,
Finding words for all my dreams
Fitting into metered schemes.

But now the work's become too hard,
And I'm no longer quite the bard;
My wrestled words that stop or stall,
Sometimes they won't come out at all.

I wander through iambic feet
And hope my heart won't lose the beat,
But when my length of line is done,
Arrhythmia has just begun.

I struggle now for every rhyme,
My poetry takes too much time;
Or is it I that wants to quit,
Who cannot find the time for it?







Notes:
Written 06-19-1987, revised 1988, 1991, 2001.


spacer image Home | My Websites | My Poetry Previous | Next