These days of changing values can be hard:
What once was just, today's considered wrong.
Some things encouraged now at one time jarred,
Abandoned now are values once held long.
Unquestioned rules and customs are eschewed,
And standards jettisoned yet not replaced.
What once was fixed has now become unglued,
While words which all revered are now erased.
But while injustices should be redressed,
Iconoclasm can exceed all sense—
When free expression finds itself suppressed,
Then tolerance becomes a sad pretense.
For though things change, some things stay valid still:
Light is not dark, nor yet is good now ill.
This sonnet has received an Honorable Mention in the Society of Classical Poets 8th Annual Poetry Competition.
Among artists, she is something of an anomaly—
Traditional and avant-garde, austere and baroque,
Yet a bona fide artist nonetheless.
Amid the cacophony of modernism,
Where iconoclasm gives Carte-blanche
To jettison all rules and form and coherence—
A kind of fauvist deja-vu in distorted echoes—
She, neither dilettante nor polemicist,
Has genuine elan, and force, and passion--
In contrast to pandemic, jaded ennui.
If you thought
You understood why
Religions have their purpose
In the scheme of things
Think again
Symbolism
Religious or otherwise
Impresses deep
Into your psyche
Nothing but
What you think you
Know and believe
May be true
Or real.
And lies change perception
when given a platform
But perception speaks vague
when change slithers inside
Without force framing imagination
sight in a circular motion freezes
As the sun glints off the view
my third eye gazing upon
Her lie remains steady
to lay in a maimed mold
With damaged phrases half formed
Then pause, then clap in sequence
Let the congregation say...
Amen but let the praise mute...
Twelve swells shaped with a faith unknown
But the splash spasms look forced
A petulant echo
a craving laced unkempt
With a name and style her own
with a sermon posh yet green
Because she believes in
the disease she's believing
Her hollering twirls screaming
All what I once trusted
And none of what I need
She is twelve waves unfolded
She is Babylon changed speeds.
Creationist scientists who dig
with astro-paleontologists
As they seek the bones
Of australepithecus
Foretold in the Book of Leviticus
& the Dead Sea Scrolls
Sounded by the deadly tolls
From the bells
Harbored in the Vatican,
Those who mistake the accidents
For the sake of unholy laxatives
To be forced in controlling the pacifists
10% of your income,
& then some
The cross holds one
For ransom
It doesn't matter if your
Beautiful or handsome
Since, the endless chasms
Flood like restless cytoplasm
Induced by the
Phantom's iconoclasm
As the masses reduce
To being merely a bantam
Docile & trite,
This isn't right
What's done in the dark,
Must be brought to the light
Stand up, & fight
For the right,
Rise with all our might
& working through the nights
New World Order plights
Will never bring a fright
Fear no evil,
See no evil,
Speak no evil
They're all just weasels
Being painted on the easel
With the colors of greed & lust
Nobody to trust
But, yourself
As one must
In order to be just
With one & all
& all in one