L.R. Harvey Poetry

Word Searching "Expression is all we want." - Emerson  An empty Moleskine in hand, elbows on knees I sit on the weathered wooden bench and stare out across the evening summer frolics of Coolidge Park,                   a one-man band’s saxophonic wail wafting across the nearby bridge to drench me in the sort of thoughts nostalgics are known to think at the end of every season. A simple reason brings me to this place of self-reflection, this space and time where fading sunlight, child’s laughter, and the smell of browning leaves combine to form the frame of mind ideal for poetic creation:       The  need to write. I am a cup that’s overfull, a thread that’s over-taut, a top-heavy pod of dandelion seeds that only needs the slightest breeze of inspiration to then release to the world the multitudinous thoughts that desperately call for the emancipation of written expression.                               

I Represent the System               I. Based solely upon my genitalia and skin I represent the system, A fact that often seems to serves To gag my distinctive voice And label me instead another ignorant corporate cog within The corpus of corruption.                                         "I'm with them" My whiteness seems to cry, muffling for me my choice Of what to support and what to believe.         II. On hearing a certain view I shared, A woman quickly informed me yesterday That "of course you think that way, You're white and male."                                      And there I heard and personally professed The cry of minorities, of women, of all the oppressed Who clamor to be given a voice That's more than just a color or a chromosome.

On Smoking a Pipe It tastes of leather books with yellowed pages and white-haired men who have led reflective lives on front-porch swings. The smoke that crawls in silky spires from out the wooden bowl like newly shifted silt from ocean footprints (smoke that is sent to scent the summer night with burnt vanilla and raisins) distinctly smells of father figures, of stuff that was built to work, of poems and poems and poems and fireflies and conversations late at night.