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Best Poems Written by Gary Baldwin

Below are the all-time best Gary Baldwin poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

The Prismatic Self

I say the word and feign a Freudian slip
From between its legs duplicities drip
Often doubling as a quip and tasting chalky, just a bit
History will record the troubling truth
that I never existed if I don’t submit

I’ll submit this thing as if it’s a soliloquy
while being transparent with reverse psychology
When transparency is brutal it packs a voice
and reverse psychology, feudal and conundrous
remains my voodoo doll of sadistic choice

I’ll submit to this contest and play my part
of being a number somewhere south of the winners art
Once again I’ll suck up to the system                   
and once again with all its heart the system will suck me down 
without even a gesture of orbiter dictum

A social mirror once said, “we love you, submit to me”
I used to show it what I wish I could really be
but it cared more for its own scripted ego
and tried to love me like a gas-lighting lover
so I gave it the finger more than ten years ago

I’ve been told that only the cream earns Summa Cum Laude
I graduated Some Come Later from the hallows of a Christian god
So how should I wear the facade upon this stage?
I shouldn’t  use “dude”, nor cliched kitsch like I just did
But I’ll not to be sullied by a tired script from a mirror’s page

Yet for the scripted glory this poet pines
He rolls his eyes at the rules, and colors colors outside the lines
Prismatic angles he declines and spanks his colors with twisted sticks
With blinding tinnitus in his transient sight he thus surrenders
and submits (to) his magniloquentesque amateur parlor tricks  

Earth to novice poet... Dude, submitting is not as painful as it seems
Novice poet to Earth… No Dude, you know when falls the silent tree
I hear poetic voices but my poetic choices have disqualified me, so
this is my last reverse transmission into my pathetic poetic pipe dreams
Thank you kindly. No offense but I should just go

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Eulogy for a Bonsai

I have to come clean as I return to see 
your ashen corpse and dried leaves  
My survival became more important than yours 
but now I feel badly.

Humans choose to love their own selves 
More than anyone they choose to love
Don’t believe what they say in their poems

I loved you because you would tempt me
to hear the silent moment
I will never forget your beautiful nebari
Funny, I learned that word when I met you

I put you under the cruel sun and fed you
It worked as long as we were together
We were both once green and authentic

We come from the same mother
I wish she had given you feet and legs 
Then like me, you might still be alive
She put us in a tea cup of naive cruelty

Well-meant intentions cannot sustain life.
Maybe my departure made you wish to be dead
I once wished for that too

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

People and Things

WHAT I LOVE - First Rispetto
    Upon a perusal of things that I  love
    An  elemental truth I have come upon
    There’s nothing beautiful, below or above
    Not connected in some way to a person
    Life is about people, whether gent or femme
    The scent of my love or a poetic gem
    Even nature means nothing if you can’t share
    The beauty with somebody for whom you care

WHAT I HATE - Second Rispetto
    Upon introspection of that which I hate
    Another splinter has been lodged in my mind 
    There is nothing that I loathe, early or late
    That exists outside the scope of all mankind
    All is connected to a broad or a bloke
    Pounding music from a car, second-hand smoke
    The ticking clock because it’s a reminder
    I’ll soon be a thing, not someone to hold her

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

When it Happens

Her eyes were not made
To speak ambiguously
They linger from here hence
Like raspberry and lavender
On my phrenic palate

My head was not made
To be prepared for this moment
The songster prophesied
That I will never be with her
But I'm agnostic

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Fruit Jar Fireflies

I see words, and they see me 
It’s true they are sentient, quite
But they will never see the light 
of my world through my loins

They keep floating by, ever speaking 
never ceasing like tinnitus in my transcendent sight
Like orphans from somewhere never

Their little fingers grope as they look at me squarely 
Speaking barely, “bring me into your light” 
just before they are gone forever
 
So much needless loss
I kill my darlings before they become darlings
Their lot is to die in the vacuum 
of my fickle muse

If only I could catch them like you do fireflies in a fruit jar

How pretty they would be to see in chaotic containment 
and how witty they could be for those with the sight
But alas, my heart cannot hold all the incandescence ink 
required for such a noble and beautiful task
 
So I shall be satisfied to smile when I catch one or two

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Amphibian

If I ever find my mind in a smog from heaven
Or ever blind as a frog in an earthen oven
I’d hop my hump back down to earth   
And finally fix my ass, for what it's worth

Real heaven can exist in the commotion of a threshold 
Reckon if you can and resist the devotion to what you’ve been sold
Through faith we create those things which brings us to believe
True faith will negate the strings on our wings we can’t perceive  

I like the crazy notion that every day is nowadays today
I live this lazy devotion that times are eternally now this way

Push my timid tush up to the threatening door
Mourn the twitching toad on the rainy road  
who cannot embrace the face of the killing floor.

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Aesthetic - A Romantic Allusion to JW Waterhouse

You turned on to your left side
There painted before me was your contour,
the resplendent lines of an hourglass

The rule of thirds composing the view
Your thick raven hair against the 
pale linens in the morning twilight. 
Strong movement from the back of your arm 
Flowing, going down to the palm 
and climaxing at the finger tips
With an aura of delicate benevolence 

There was a single spaghetti strap laying lazily, 
aimlessly over your olive skin, pretending to support 
one of your breasts, Invisible to me
I wanted to run my finger along it but did not

The whole scene fittingly arranged
As if a great work was about to be born
A pose struck like a Waterhouse goddess
I wish I was he lying in this bed

This view has been within the artist scope 
since the dawn of aesthetic sight
Yet it is to this beholder of beauty
as belonging to the one to whom I retreat
that becomes this morning's single tear

Let my feelings for you in this moment 
be rendered upon this canvas
in the pensive hues and lines of my love 
Let it be duly hung In the Museum of Reverie
from this day until there are no more lovers

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

My Dream Within a Dream

Dammit all, I need my laptop
before Beta hazes the flow
Goddam glasses, where are they

During the Second Layer
     A guy is fixing the bed
     But It still squeaks for some reason 
     In adult dreams I needn’t
     Explain why the bed squeaks
     When I built the thing I installed
     Hook-eyes to keep you spread 
     and use zip ties because 
     the Asian way is to resist
     We two like it this way
     I don’t know why all this
     Is related. It all made
     sense a minute ago

During the First Layer
     That woman from your work 
     was here with those Siamese eyes
     Headlights as hard as this bed
     She works her hips and heels 
     And looks at me when you can’t see
     But now I’m awake enough
     To watch the handyman
     Trying to fix the squeak

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Overcast Day on the River

If the Rainman would concur, I would take all my days cloudy and
all my moments as this sodden one, but to my chagrin he does not.

Things come upon me near the moistened river. The water in the air
takes me back to a Styrofoam cup of juicy minnow bait on a drizzly day.

Countless coconuts swirl down this smelly tributary. They don’t  
about each other or about why the tide takes them there it pleases.

You can’t tell me that they do not think like us, or maybe they don’t.
Either way they cannot know the sacredness of watching a ballet
of synchronized raindrops from beneath the water’s surface.

Submitted by Gary Baldwin (Jan 21, 2026)
for the Let it Rain Poetry Contest

Details | Gary Baldwin Poem

Trout Creek Montana

It feels right to listen to Lord Huron and think of Montana 

When reality feeds itself on one’s own myopic inertia

To be there again, a hungering and herculean agenda



To do this one life away from her, self serving and simply

I swam to this timid paradise but it drowned me nearly

The silence here is bold, it reminds me often and clearly



When you brood upon things you misunderstand they still hatch

Nevermore in Trout Creek the cold clay through my toes I’ll pinch

The silence there was warm, like chicken soup she made from scratch

Best Poems Written by Gary Baldwin

The Prismatic Self

Eulogy for a Bonsai

People and Things

When it Happens

Fruit Jar Fireflies

Amphibian

Aesthetic - A Romantic Allusion to JW Waterhouse

My Dream Within a Dream

Overcast Day on the River

Trout Creek Montana

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