gershon hepner Poems

Soft and satin furred like llamas,
licking with a silent sound,
women turn men’s dreams to dramas,
searching for a common ground.
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Genius is a solitary
business. To whom can you liken
artists, craving our idolatry,
every one a godlike icon?
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“If God had not existed” ––hypothetical––
“it’s clear he would have had to be invented.”
If Mozart hadn’t–– this is quite heretical––
could God have made him, keeping me contented.
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We're sometimes laughing up our sleeve,
said Swift, when really we should grieve,
and shed cruel alligator tears
when snot and sniffles hide our sneers.
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When I feel that I am close
to empty while I’m running I
abandon what I’m writing, prose,
and if the Muse is not quite dry
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When the female praying mantis sees
a male who wants to mate with her she often bites
his head off, not one of my fantasies,
I must admit to those who troll poetic sites
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As rain darkens a mountain
one mistakes a mule for a horse,
and water that flows from a fountain
is altered from that at the source.
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The gap between great art and life
we fill with our extravaganzas
that with some luck, plus a good wife,
may take us far away from Kansas
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The oil age is the one in which
we live. Unfortunately oil
makes kleptocrats extremely rich,
and leaves the poor who have to toil
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For three score years and ten I’ve tried
to paint a beautiful self-portrait;
with words I bricks-and-mortar it,
but it has not been quite what I’d
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