There’s as great a description of poetry as I’ve ever heard in Lena Dunham’s movie Tiny Furniture. It goes:

Poetry is a very stupid thing to be good at. Poems are basically like dreams –something that everybody likes to tell other people but nobody actually cares about when it’s not their own. Which is why poetry is a failure of the intellectual community.

I write poems. I share poems. I will continue to do so. That doesn’t make the above quote any less accurate.

Note: I wrote this for my Grandfather (Bampa) for Christmas to go with a photo of our growing family.

I never had much use for math.
Numbers tell you one thing today
That’s entirely different tomorrow.

I used to believe one minus one equaled zero
But then we lost someone dear to us
And here we are,

at minus one.

When my wife and I met,
It was as two halves of the same whole
And together we became one

Following that math, adding one more
Should have made us two, or maybe three
but it didn’t.

It made us infinite.

Time marches past us, individually
But no matter how fast the hands run,
They can never out lap us as a unit.

Forever is in the palm
Of her tiny outstretched hands
As she reaches for stars

that are already hers.

Allow me to sum up my feelings upon beholding my new born daughter, Maya Ariel, in the hospital.

Bioillogical Wonder

It was biological
And yet, bioillogical.
Enough mountain dew to fill a pool
And blindness tempted three times daily
Should have killed any chance I had
To behold her eyes
And within them, that infinite Milky Way.
What a curious thing she was and is, and am
All yawning, skinny and small.
Covered in hair, still a chimpanzee
On the wrong side of evolution
But in the cradle an angel,
And in my arms my saving grace
When she raises that voice
And severs my ties to a life gone by
I let it fall away into the pages
To be pressed, preserved and savored
On holidays and birthdays
Because one day, when my heart skips out on the beat
Hers will play lead, and everyone will dance
To the biorhythm,
To the biohymn.

By: Brian Stewart, June 2011

The boar got fat on the richness of the land,
until his girth was too much for his frame to hold
and he returned drowsily to his mother
with the hope for milk from teats long sucked dry
At his back every minute of every day
the shadow of the tiger uncaged.
no longer was he nimble, and he couldn’t turn his head
to see his passing fancies double back upon him
revenge in their heart and daggers in their hands
the tracks that lead him deeper still into the jungle
may have been his own, but still he fret
the shadow of the tiger uncaged
“There’s nothing to fear,” He told himself twice over breakfast
“All of this running will only leave me weaker,
for when the real striped menace appears, I should rest.”
but his restlessness was too much a habit,
thinner still his fearful body grew in
the shadow of the tiger uncaged
Then one day
the boar
stopped.
Eating.
Drinking.
Running.
He stopped all but the living.
And there before him came a great and powerful Tiger who said,
“Why did you run away from me, pig?”
to which the boar replied,
“Why were you chasing me?”
to which the Tiger replied,
“I wasn’t.”
The pig closed his eyes
and there he lie within
the shadow of the tiger uncaged

Happy New Year to all my inu-tachi. The future is what we make of it!

(based on a painting by Steve Purcell)

horrible clown
a happy-go-lucky smile
paints over a frowny face
those sagging canvas lines
that framing once held straight
the myth of folly took its toll
until the mirth, it mirthed no more
swept comically into the void
where once a glimmer gleamed its glow
laughter with whom he once was close,
she looks the other way.

fat squirrel
come down, chat with me
pound back a red bull
we’ll talk as equals
fat squirrel
what’s got you so scared?
unwitting witness
to winter’s striptease?
fat squirrell
with round: white belly
but also purpose
you will decorate,
such straight minded trees
with serious leaves
bowing to your weight.