Happy Hiram Is poetry real or is it just dexterous exercise?

In the Poet's magic kingdom
Readers read their works
And a hush falls on the battle field
the stanzas are just like church,

In the Rhymer's fantasy lands
Every response is praise
They write about their navel lint
Watch muses as they graze.

The Poets room is a basement sublet
And his job is toilet cleaning
He thinks about white puffy clouds
And leaves the bathrooms gleaming.

The Rhymer's reality is
That he is quite unknown
And writes about great birds of prey
But he has never flown.

Cinder Claws (They turn everything to ashes)

They bleep you when your guilty
They bleep you when your pure
They know when you've been very good
and they bleep you even more....

O you better watch out
you'd better not cry
better not pout (I'm telling you why...)
Cinder Claws reported your Q

That curly haired doll
that bobbles and coos
seems like its chat
so REPORT -- there goes you
Cinder Claws reported your Q.

(Poems about:)
Elephants, boats
and Kiddie cars too.
Aren't all about
poetry. soooo...
Cinder Claws reported your Q.

The kids in Yahoo Poetry
Will have a jubilee.
Their gonna make a wax figure
and burn Claws in effigy!

O you better watch out
Don't claim innocent
At Claws do not shout (can't help it, he's bent)
Cinder Claws reported your Q

Marred With Chilblains

What is it that draws me to the inane characters
That makes me feel they are real and sure
I watched the final episode of Married With Children
on Youtube and now I wanted more.

So I flipped right back to episode one
and I started to watch it again
when the actors were still so stiff in their roles
My reaction is hard to explain

It was as is Al and Kelly and Peg
were they, but not fully formed
and the solace I took in their reality
was chilled when I wanted it warmed.

If Bud and Peggy are not real
then a little piece of me is fake too
the show falls apart and my universe dies
though its hard to describe to you.

Standing on the edge of a precipice
where imagination leaves sanity
searching through YouTube episodes
trying to respark my humanity.

Try as I might, when I went to sleep
all my sugar plums were sclerotic
my sky and my stars were on cardboard
and my psyche was nearly psychotic.

Dawn arrived in the usual way
as I stared at the walls in my room
suddenly something appeared to me
out of the early gloom

It was the box of a DVD set
with a picture of Al's puerile grimace
reminding me of the feelings that it inspired
and that THAT reality is in us.

So I shook off the coil of solipsism
and stared at the rising sun.
Married with Children is long gone
but my love for its just begun.

A blast from the Past

Sycamore Days

I've spent a whole lifetime

in the branches of trees

looking down on the world

with the memory of an elephant.

Trees take the long view

change is all about water

the seasons are a haircut

future – a long adolescence.

My mother was young, my dad old.

Planes flew over every 3 minutes.

The farms were shrinking

and the strip malls growing.

A boy looks like a speck

hidden by the camo-skin

of a fifty foot sycamore

in the green, green youth of spring.