Down Below

Off high porches of indifference, seen
Down below the stairs of insouciance,
People passing on windswept streets;
Needful nation of lost souls walking by.


For them, a bending cross of compassion
Shan't bow, for they're the already dead.


From verandas of our nothingness we spy
Those, strung-in-line, stranded, shrunken,
Statues of the street, gaunt-thin, shuffling;
Mouths gasping open, grimaces of oblivion.


Nature, both adamant and free, imposes
On her subjects symmetry and economy.


From our lofty balconies, dead as they below
We'll be, dead which'll be watching the dead;
For we are but marching memories, mirrored
In minds of those soon joining death's parade.

Critics

Screeching jays blaring against trees,
Screen of tall conifers and short elms;
Baleful blast, strident abuse so angry;
Animosity dressing in adversity blues:
Critics.

Lost Loves

That which was in anger parted
Cannot be joined by an apology.
Words lack all indemnity in spite.
Once said, they are forever lost;
Not to be returned and redeemed.


Furious sounding bells, fulsome of desire,
Circle clappers formed for despondency
Designed to ring out at every snippet
Of simple satire and at small-spirited
Wit, and no remorse prevents a crack.

Sunk Hearts

Those who question the agony
Of love know nothing of desire.
The moon that melts the nights
Of summer is full in circle phase.

Its shuddering beam spilling seasons
Of yellow on limbs of standing trees;
On oaks, on yews; its seas of silver
Imprinting dimpled veins on leaves.


Quieter and quieter a mind sinks away;
Slipping into the somnolent senescence
Of senility; shrinking size in every hour,
For what a terror is lost memory in age.


The black robe of heaven hems a sacral place.
Moon-bright; its lines of beauty softly drawn
In amber, an ocher of delight, paints perfect
Shadows on walls and floors: blues and golds.


Sunk hearts, drowning in the rivers of time,
Sucked down in smothering seas of regret,
Are drawn upwards into the saffron night
By a saving strand of memory of beauty.

Deflation

And so they fall away, fall away:
The people.  For this fetid nation
Has forsaken them.  Has lost fair
Value, as well all enterprise; has
Lost sacred honor; squandered
Dignity.  Has become a burden;
A dead weight upon the World. 


We be but pawns to others' kings;
Owing debtors to greedy creditors.
Birch and cedar hide seas of iron
Under Siberia.  Power shifts north
To tundra regions, while peoples
Of the south steam in complacency.
America dies, a desert of indecency.

Bald Bankers

Bald bankers:


Savage still, this busy buzz of business
Has taken from you thuggery of youth.
No longer young, within your skulls pool
Awful spaces flooded in arcane symbols;
Seductive charts; algorithms of finance.


Bald bankers:


You've killed dreams of freedom dead,
Bald bankers; sucking sordid numbers
Quantified; bald bankers, blue screens
Blinking, blinding, stealing souls away.
Blood's been marked on heads today, 


Bald bankers.

Cuckoo

With every bow of a covered head,
With every muttered prayer, Man
Is marching on to his own oblivion.


Snow covered them and the cold.
In cliffs, in caves, formed in many
Ages past, are stored stone skulls;
Faces from the long-lost dead; fossils
Of forgotten ancestors:  before-men;
The predecessors of our new species.


Each skull portrays the hair-line cracks
Of limb-delivered violence; these blows
Delivered on them by their fellow men.


Evolution has not carried us so very far;
For blighted brood-parasitism of religions
Has cracked the consciences of far more
Than did flailing limbs of angry ancestors.
Bad beliefs have shouldered Compassion
And Reason outside reaches of the heart. 


Doctrine and rubric are the twin cancers
Consuming; tainted rivals and devourers,
Crowding chivalry's nest upon limb of life.