Perhaps we should be named, Homo Trashus instead of Homo Sapiens, the trash man instead of the wise man.

However, I find myself still drawn to that other April of renown in literature and art. The one that Chaucer writes about in those beautiful Old English lines:

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;

How pedestrian that stanza sounds when you translate it into modern English, basically relating that watering the plants produces the flowers which begin blossoming so profusely this month.

Like the old comic book hero, Mandrake, April always gestures hypnotically to me, and every April, even as I mire deeper and deeper into what sometimes seems the mediocrity of middle age, the muse still manages to get its hands around my girth and pluck with her supple, infinite fingers my humble poetic strings.

May I suggest writing poetry as a technique for caring for the soul? Though the topic has been archived, Kara L.C. Jones Poetry Therapy offers some excellent advice and techniques for using poetry as an aid for depression and other numbing conditions of mind or for writing poems just for the pure enjoyment of refining and crystallizing one's experience of life.

Writing poetry is probably the ultimate experience for me, as I seem to pass out of my small mind into the larger consciousness of the whole, feeling as if all time and thought are focused on the writing. I first became aware of this in my teen years, and it has been an important part of my psyche ever since. For me, it is like what some basketball players refer to as being in "The Zone."

For me, poetry has to come through this lens of the creative consciousness. Otherwise, I feel that my poems do not work because I have thought about them too much rather than letting them just come to me as light to the eyes or sound to the ear.

I can always tell when I have been thinking about a poem too much, intellectualizing rather than expressing that true experience through the heart and soul. Such poems stumble and fall, helpless as a centipede trying to figure out which of his hundred legs to use for the next step rather than just taking it. That’s just me, though, and the way I experience poems and the process of writing poetry.

So, for better or worse here is a small handful of poems conceived during this enchanted April and written in my own idiom. I suppose it smacks of "Free Verse."

1
Falling
. . .one enchanted April
falling puddleward
into earth and sky,
in glorious, more-ious mud time,
falling;

Trailing lilac tendrils
and wrapped in violets
In early light by dawn time,
I follow Faerie footprints.
Up so far into the Spring Time
Where children’s voices sing
And laughter in the bowers ring;
 

Falling
. . .deeper into Faery time,
Bright dream time;
 

Christened in the pure delight
Puddle-icious and brilliant
Priested of faeries by meadowlight
 

Fallling and falling
. . .puddleward into light.
 

2
Rising
. . .where all the waters still,
blue with love and desired of the Easterlies,
Rising
wafted on cloud breath
silvering my soul in another twilight,
Rising
above names and faces
rising
held aloft on eye-beams of pure delight,
delightfully lost,
and leavened
risen in the wind
beyond events and horizons
Rising
Over the moon and dizzy with stars,
Still,
rising. . .
 

3
In tulips live I,
A little tulip man;
Opening
A cup of stars at dawn,
Drawing
down the sun at dusk;
 

In tulips live I,
A little tulip man;
Immortal as a drunken butterfly,
On nectar and dew befuddled;
 

In tulips live I,
A little tulip man;
Indelible and senseless
Un-busy as a bee full
Of honey.
 

Maniacal and magisterial
Elemental and eleemosynary
Lyrical and lascivious
A little tulip man am I.