Killing fields are shaken from boots.
Old men tremble in the chill library
of their minds.
The war over the sea
and the terror
beneath every creaking sky
are the same as ever.
The sunflowers turn this way and that,
for the sun is a nomad caught in
a hamster wheel of space.
Most people eat in a home,
that will never be their own.
Blood drizzles inside drywalls
where none see it.
O fox, where do you sleep?
A mild winter turns to rivers of mud.
The dead children have grown large,
larger than the living,
they dwell in shelters and tunnels,
emerge only to throw stones
at the ramparts
of those that only whisper their rage.
Categories:
drywalls, poetry,
Form: Free verse
The sparrows and cardinals
squabble -
hedgerow turf wars.
Sudden low evening rain.
Do the trees weep, or does the sky?
Anger seeps into drywalls
fills eyes with a restless acrimony.
Yesterday the sun was a brightness
on the wrists of small boys.
They played out a violent video game,
a shrill virtual savagery;
strife is merrily cast into the consonant air.
Garden blooms seem to badger each other
for a nook of sky.
Tonight I hope the owls keep blinking.
I hope tomorrow,
the Dalai Lama, or a politician
will actually say something wise.
Perhaps, a news anchor
will tire of his daily sneers?
Will owls stop questioning?
Wait! Is this a fresh morning breeze?
Are there hand-washing angels, do they rise
now within us to scatter and flay,
lather all into amity;
dissolve the moth bones, the spiked wings,
of that darkly spawning fray?
Categories:
drywalls, poetry,
Form: Blank verse
Stone did not give up on us,
we just made stone socially conscious.
Many hotels and banks are still stone clad,
the rich still use stone,
but most of us
are in the throw-away aisles of the future.
This is not a class warfare poem, that war is over –
we lost.
Soon the poor will have no stone history,
our less than epoch making lives
will not outlast the crumbling era’s.
Our trinkets and practical artifacts
will wash away in tsunamis of time.
We will leave no blue-collar archeology
that can be excavated, and raised above the
swallowing earth once more.
Plastic and aluminum,
composite drywalls, and pine struts, go
to the landfill at best.
In the end, rot, termites
and fire are our bequeathing.
In some distant past
I am looking through a camera
taking pictures of a far tomorrow.
“Look”, I hear someone say,
“there’s a nobody,
he who has no stone for his grave
or fame.”
I agree,
even this celluloid photo of me
in my prime,
strutting along a Jersey boardwalk,
a beautiful woman on my arm;
this image will also burst into flames;
no doubt within,
some impressive, abiding fireplace -
one built of stone.
Categories:
drywalls, poverty,
Form: Blank verse