I am trying to get back into disciplined poetry writing

Muse 1

Poems are secrets, that we speak aloud
and are not understood. Only in part
do readers hearers get to know our heart.
Our muses may be present in the crowd

and think a poem does not speak their name
or that it does, and either might be wrong,
or be half-right. Each poem is a song
whose notes are true, whose morals one might blame

but which cannot be held in evidence.
I never lie in verse. Lying in bed
I can't remember half the things I've said
I meant them all, but in some special sense.

I loved you all – my sonnets in the night
console me that we lost moments' delight.

National Poetry Day

Muse2

I don't know muses when I see them first -
peck cheeks in passing maybe, sometimes smile
at dazzling eyes, lush hair or witty bile
against shared enemies. There is a thirst

for more of them that grows, sometimes takes years.
I do not know them yet, yet elegance
of thought attaches to them when by chance
I think of them again. Their face appears

in dreams and I awake with half a line
that grows and changes. Words fresh on my lips
I did not put there. These relationships
bring genius to me that is not mine

Nor theirs. Lust that alchemically sublimes
to love perhaps, or friendship – always rhymes.