Poems for People

I found out recently I have to move again by this summer. Dammit.  I've had 18 roommates and lived in eleven houses since going to college.  I reckon I've met a lot of people.  Here are a few poems I've given as possibly unwelcome gifts.
  
1. a composition student at HSU
2. jack of all trades at NC State
3. My stepmother



Second sonnet for Justino:
Even for his love of the tritone, he
Just wants some peace. Must you ask
Questions about theory or some finale task
Impersonating impressionism when you can see
He’s editing an oboe sonata and is otherwise busy
Being an irreproachable paragon of compositional excellence. Alas,
Justino accomplishes the above and more. With his past
In consideration, it’s with remarkable grace, this industry.
The future for Justino is still not clear.
Choices of marriage and career, weighing the virtues of sorrow
And joy for how each contributes to his art.
Will he have as many children as Bach to hold dear
And bear such a legacy? Bury yourself in work and tomorrow
Perhaps breach the truly difficult subjects.




I imagine that when I’m eighty,
I will be more like Chris Cioffi:
 
So resigned to my competence that I will not need a filter.
(What I will say will always right, or by consensus quickly become so.)
I’ll be obstreperous with my sagacity,
so that it ricochets through every room
in every house in the neighborhood!
-(By necessity, lest the young ones forget I’m there.)

But Chris Cioffi, you are so far from old!
Flashing eyes; lithe! And fussy.
-If for once you wanted to fail, try being forgotten.




Sorayasus complicates the definition of true love.
"Fairly boring," she says, "and subtle."
and proceeds to clarify through demonstration,
as if the whole evening recovering forks from a toddler,
bookended by sticky hugs,
was unfolding to affirm her words, again, as true.

I don't feel deflated by an answer for my asking
but I've got to start remembering I can't handle her wisdom.

You grow up and go on and realize you don't have to be who or where you came from -
until three years later or so (a pattern)
when by my own less graceful means I figure out the same thing.
- that boisterously and in spite of myself, I am.