Paul C. Maybury Jr.

Words put away like wine,
ferment not in the bottle but in the mind.
Seething soundless in the dark,
unseen bubbles leave no mark.
...

I am tired of people who quote the gods
And spoil their children with their rods.
Sweet little innocents threatened with flame.
Surrounded by elders all taught the same.
...

They sit in quiet rows upon folded linen sheets,
They gaze with quiet eyes upon the empty streets.
No movement stirs their breast, no strong heart beats,
The rows of quiet old ones, on padded seats.
...

I remember the fate filled day,
I opened that old tome.
Serendipity is the way,
We find our true heart's home.
...

There are some birds outside
I've fed for many years.
Generations have gone by
You'd think they'd lose their fears.
...

The Gasteracanth for Ogden Nash
Wherein the Title is Much, Much Longer Than the Poem Itself
...

From ocean's depths to mountain’s heights,
Ignoble lie stromatolites.
In a silent stony cry,
They in noteless ruins lie.
...

We go today up Peter's hill,
my dog and I up pine trail walk.
We reach the top, a kind of sill
I set my old bones on a rock.
...

When I read modern poetry,
I feel I’m lost in time.
Its meanings and its flow I see,
But where is beat and rhyme?
...

A life without death is not ended
Its story can never be told.
Not all whom it knew and befriended
Not all it had learned growing old.
...

The winter is coming, I sense it.
Not by the trees, though they color and thin.
Not by the leaves piled where oak logs fence it.
But by the cold in the tuck of my chin.
...

Quiet dawn and creeping moon
Dark lost birds and nestlings croon.
Shuffling sound of fuzz winged shapes
Blind eyes craned neck angled gapes.
...

Mother's Day comes once a year
It rolls around each May.
It's not a holiday to fear
No trees, no lights, its just a day.
...

Last week there came a knock on my front door.
I sighed and squirmed, hunched down and closed my eyes.
But it came again, that sound we can’t ignore,
Could say that I’m too busy, indisposed, or other lies.
...

If a god held the world in the palm of its hand,
And the world filled its hand as an orange fills ours,
A thin film of wetness the oceans would seem,
The forests a light green stain in its fingerprint's whorls.
...

Like the man who perpetually misses the train,
From searching the sock drawer again and again.
The kind who forgets to come out of the rain,
The kindly and amiable…scatterbrain.
...

When every thing was new,
fresh and bright,
colors and sound,
smells sweet and sour,
...

Until the universe is still and dead,
If ever it lived as it is said,
The nested movements among the curls,
Smaller than the eye reveals,
...

No season more storied than Spring is
Or sung about either in youth painéd song.
Its just that with me, the thing is
Those pains, and that youth, are long gone.
...

What is it that dogs are so worried about?
What causes their doggie anxiety?
What secrets have they that they don’t want found out?
Some fault in their canine piety?
...