Douglas Valentine

Great poetry is something that you can never tire of reading; some mysterious quality enters your eyes and ears; there's something that you never want to stop looking at, like if you had a Gaugin painting on the wall of your tenement room. Great poetry puts you in a trance, even when it describes complete horror, like in some of Neruda, you are dazzled by the beauty of the language.

"A Crow's Dream" is great poetry-- any lover of language and its music just knows it when they see it. Here, listen:

faces in the stream
among passing clouds
have never been so near
or so far:

the look in their eyes is lost
in the time it takes
to give a name.

I could say that over and over again forever. I could learn everything there is to know about life with those few words. There is a great range of feeling and emotion in this collection of poems: vast spiritual meditations like "faces in the stream" to a child's instinctive disgust at false, boring adult rituals and empty beliefs, like "Memorial Day." I will take these poems with me wherever I go.

I like writing four-line poems I call quatrains. Below is a sampling:



Dancing Flames

Dancing flames curl the paper edges of sky
Silver and turquoise tinsel sketch the air
Like scars upon the universal eye
From viewing beauty everywhere.



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Dream Feelings


Dream feelings vague at the city gate
Cloaked in alien garb absurdly congregate
And with incoherent shouts in costumes leap
Upon the amorphous landscapes of sleep.



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As Never Before

We step, we hope, in harmony
Across a moonlit checkered floor
Beneath red lanterns on a string
In love again, as never before.



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Ephemeral Glow

Your ephemeral glow
Your refined sense of reserve
Your shimmers in the darkness
Get on my last nerve.



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The Shape I’m In


Sometimes I feel fat
Sometimes thin -
It’s a comment about
The shape I’m in.



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Palestinian Pop

tactical nuclear Israeli rock
that's the beat he walk
terrorized round the clock, like a bomb, tick tock
that's the rap he talk.




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Chinese Take Out

The colonialists had it right
Mao is graffiti on the Great Wall
Greed and the Internet will shatter China
Into a thousand tinkling Tibets.



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Cuban Cigars and Russian Caviar

Cuban cigars and Russian caviar:
The foundations of capitalism.
Napoleon brandy, a guillotine handy:
The tools of radical revision.



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More or Less

More or less having is only half;
Often one must stifle a laugh.
The charm is of this sense and type,
Working only when the time is right.



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Wash and Dry


You always say that fair is fair:
You’re gonna wash, I’m gonna dry.
So how come I make you laugh,
And you make me cry and cry?



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Phases of the Moon

The getting done of this thing
Is planting a garden in spring:
Learning the words to the sparrow’s tune,
Following the phases of the moon.



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Presenting Things

Presenting things we knew, but forgot,
Fishing now in a shallow stream,
The speckled trout slip through my net –
And for once the image is free.