Cheap
Life is cheap,
My lifetime taught
At first I cared
I even fought
I railed against
The powers that be
And tugged my chain
Of liberty
The word is out:
We all succumb
The wise, the great
The deaf and dumb
We’re in for it
That final swing
You miss the ball
There goes your fling
The papers keep
The numbers stacked
The file is deep
No turning back
The ticker on
The TV reads,
“Here are the dead;
There go their deeds.”
Statistic-lives
Blips on a graph
The Shepherd tends
The dying class
The romance gone
In system rigged
Close up, we never
Looked all that big
You catch the scene
Down in your pew
So glad it’s them this time,
Not you
The body’s waked
The eulogy –
“He was a friend
To you and me –
“A fine, fine father,
A husband true
He woulda done
Anything for you.”
The speeches end –
Off to the bar
And Sunday football –
We’ll take my car
Thirty-plus years
One company
In fifteen minutes –
No memory
And all your hurts
And all your shocks
Condensed in one
Mahogany box
Then down you go
Into the swamp
Where toads and worms
Do nightly romp
And on it goes
Around the clock
The loss and gain
Like Wall St. stock
No faces rear
Up from the dead
Identities
Extricated –
Yet one more loss
Yet one more stiff
You feel the steel
Of culture’s grip
And now the plague
A ship of fools
Where captains keep
Rewriting rules
We’ll never sail
To perfect port
Our journey long past
Did abort
The squall of doubt –
The berg of pain –
In arctic waves,
Truth is disdain
We’ll never know
That beacon’s beam
And maybe life
Was just a dream
A cry unheard
And none redeemed
And maybe life
Was just to dream
Copyright © Keith Dovoric | Year Posted 2022
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