Threat of Extinction
Words hanging from parched branches confused and betrayed
Under a canopy of shadows in the recess of belittled thoughts
A prison of speechlessness bereft of expression and meaning
Letters motionless in disarray fighting lost battles lonely at heart
Starved streams of consciousness as a willow weeps in the wind
Seedless dispersion of illiterate drought at the edge of the tree
Reason and feeling disunited under a regime of torturous silence
Not even black ink on charcoal where fire should liberate passion
A scrabble of incongruence submerged under ashes of emptiness
What if there was no poetry and the writer was shackled and numb
Dead inside an alphabet of syllables refused collaboration and script
Naked to a helpless core of scorched earth void and festering agony
A scribe in handcuffs and the hangman tightening a noose of contempt
For the chorus of voices unable to shout from roof tops and watchtowers
While a tongue tied writer awaits his sentence for the crime of free speech
Drowned in his ink pot like a convicted witch at society’s illegitimate court
Or frying at the stake of burnt books at a show trial of unlettered verdicts
Misunderstood misspelt hung and quartered to the applause of division
A ballade-monger sings his swan song before the apocalypse rules out
The appeal to common sense for an elegist prepared for a final encore
As the final curtain is stuffed in between lips and amphora of metaphors
No one can say that they have not been forewarned of overt perpetration
Were merely following orders to suppress revolutions of evident trespass
That they deemed degenerate what disagreed with a deep currency of fear
And yet if one rhyme survived a single epilog remained on a grave stone
Just one cemetery of unmarked burial sites lived on etched into history
Poetry could not be killed for freedom is much stronger than censure
20th January 2020
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