NEW AND OLD GEMS

 Surprise! Fiorella is back in business!

       In golden shoes my fee are tiny

       In golden net my hair is long

       In golden book my words are shiny

       My poems become a golden song 

  Quiet as the grave that holds me fast

When death has dumbed the drumbeat of my blood

Beneath the soundless soil, still at last

I'll sink in silence toward the muffling mud--

   But unto then I'll clatter through your walls

And shout hello to friends and wail goodby--

I'll laugh aloud within your stately walls 

And shriek my anger to the sombre sky-- 

  The dead are no notorious for their noise

And I will lie a longtime quietly

So unto then I"ll use my loudest voice

And make the whimpering world resound of me--

    So when at last I'm muted by the all absorbing  ground

    My unaccustomed silence then will deafen you with sound

 

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Priorities

The screen door is still unmended

So I have shut the door

The laundry lies untended 

In piles upon the floor--

I'm busy learning how to sing

Or working on a play

Or teaching someone else something

That I learned yesterday 

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                     Depression

I pull it round me like a cloak of null,

This numbing void, this fine despair of mine,

A somber blanket folded thrice to dull

The knife-sharp edges of my dark decline--

     I need a nothingness, a time of naught--

A comfort place, an anesthetic buffer

To suffocate my senses, my every thought

For if I do not feel, I cannot suffer,

      And if I cannot try, I cannot fail

 And if I do not care, I'll have no pain

 And if I do not trust, then no betrayal

   Can pierce my unprotected heart again

      And if I do not hope, then no defeat

      Can mortify me in my sweet retreat

 

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