One of our writing colleagues has been after me to write this prose version of my unbelievable story.

Now that some of my poetry is being distributed to a wider audience, his position, narrowed down to a single point, “Yer never gonna earn anything writing poetry, especially YOUR poetry, which doesn’t even rhyme! But you got Medium’s attention now, so now’s the time to tell your story.”

I take his point, but counter with, “I write what I want to write, just as I always have.”

He re-buts, “Yeah but you made it as a novelist and that’s the story…

Epic Poetry

An Epic Poem of Love and Loss

I.

1.

Lindy felt the early tugs,
Her, womb becoming
tidal and loud,
the fetus, turning, crying out
a tiny beast. A braying sigh.

He calls to her.
He calls to her.

And his voice moves against her flesh,
an undulation,
his kick a caress.
His moment moaning,
a lover’s groan of touching,
trying to find that home, that light, he swims his
lament to be.

2.

From the hospital room
in January,
I watch the ice,
the city in ice
sinking below us,
and I watch the strangers
in rubber gloves
slip their hands inside Lindy,
slip their fists and…

Setting The Bar

And the raising
And lowering thereof
Is an interesting metaphor
In how one approaches
One’s work and life.

By raising the bar
We feel we are aiming
For higher goals,
Bigger achievements-
Perhaps grand patriotic messages,
Maybe profound
Insights into the depth and condition
Of our very souls.

A lowered bar
Allows us to comment
Upon the meal we just ate
Or the sparrow on the fence rail
Staring back at us just out our window.

A lowered bar is for
The small stuff, I suppose,
And the higher bar
For the great leaps.

Unless it turns…

There is a beast in me,

That I hope exists
In all men
Or at least in enough others
To lend me
Some kind of forgiveness
For my many
Beastly acts.

I have apologized
At various levels
Of sincerity,
Hypocrisy
And thinly masked
Disdain,
Often thinking
Silently
In those moments of
Faux humility
And false contrition,

“What did you think would happen
When you chose to be with a beast?”

All the while neglecting
In such moments to
Accept or admit
That my beast was always
Well-hidden
And full of stealth;
Standing
In a dark corner
On a foggy night
Not thinking about
Your demise
As much as simply waiting
For the…

I used to try to write poems about winter light

or pretty little birds in trees

and other

tiny poetic things.

In other words,

I used to write what I’m sure were

and are

shitty little poems about nothing;

which this poem may be too,

but if I’m amused by it

at least it has that going for it.

More to the point,

and, TBH,

in so many ways

I miss those days

when nothing bad enough had happened

in my life for me to write about.

*********************************

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Trueman

http://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/trueman-terry-1947

Also visit: Terry Trueman (@ttrueman1215) • Instagram…

But you can bet yer ass that . . .

. . . unlike Prufrock,

this mo-fo would dare to eat a peach.

Say whatever else

you must about him

and it’s not like I’m

suggesting

I could

BE him,

but by god

sometimes

I wish I could be.

Or,

for that matter,

like her:

So pleased that you liked this one Diana. xo