Promise

In keeping it, it was destroyed and lost;
For any promise worth the performing 
Is also worthy of the breaking.  An end
Then to all these oaths.  Only contracts
Of the heart have validity.  Those made
To the state and to society have none.


What we would keep are the promises
Made sacred to ourselves when young:
To fulfill our destinies despite authority.
No freedoms survive absent rebellions.

Guitar

Fast fingering, that sudden chord jumps out,
Bites the air, and shatters it in a dissonance;
A dying disturbance of sharp squiggle notes. 


Straining strings sing stinging stroke of doubt,
An end and stop.  The question hovers there, 
Stays, slows, dissolves into sepia satin tones;


Forgiven, forgotten in downward final strum!

Backwards

With each half-turning of the head,
New worlds swinging large to view,
Old worlds gradually making small;
While riding backwards on trains.


Frontwards people see a coming
Fastness, rushing upon to strike;
Overtaking them in sudden now.


Backwards people see a leaving
Sadness, receding in a slowness;
Pulling them to motionless away.


Which are you? 

Trust

Fear in their faces and dread in their heads,
One headlight bright and the other broken,
Canes and cudgels may splinter the bones
Of promises.  Not so wrong we're after all
When driving down on lonesome highways,
Relying on a single lamp playing on a road,
With yellow divider and a white center line;
For deception is signalling us at every turn.

Birthdays

A shame and a sorrow and a bereavement of days;
Desperate stutter for some consciousness to come:
Birth-Daze.

Hail!

Crystal rains of snow crashing from gray clouds;
Pale, baleful, bone white, grinding down ground. 


For all of those who can act in the quantum way,
Connected to dimensions and rooted to no place,
Worlds await.  Remainder are already replaced;
Made obsolete by newer and far better species.


The coming wars are the catastrophes of religions.
Hear: hail of clans commanded by cleric chieftains.

Beam of the Sun

Our tainted nature's solitary boast:
Refusal to be subject to anything;
Even to the authority of mortality,
To Death; to gravity of the grave.


Light, lensed through inspiration,
Fills our skulls with a limitless fire;
Flames, eternal and unquenchable,
Beam of the Sun, glow of the Moon.

Gold

The silks and satins of indolence
Smothers action with addiction.


Eyes that see but this world
Are born blind to true sight.


Hammer out that tin of timidity.
Meek gain but dirt of the grave.
Only the brave deserve the fair.


The saddest epitaph of any man:
He made money.  For no shroud
Has pocket nor holds a sporran.

Constitution

Breached parapet of patriots;
Parchment stabbed by thieves;
Knifed by rapiers and daggers
Of bankers and bureaucrats;
Shredded by lawyers' frauds;
Stormed by mendacious greed;


The Contract engine of the U.S. State revs.
Then stalls over.  It's lost its spark to start.

Soft Step September

Shoving summer's heat aside come stride September days
To sweeten yesterdays' hot memories with sugared sighs.
Nostalgia for seasons gone is crimson tinged, tainted with
Saccharine hue; with rose-red textures, on time's tongue. 


In her lost smile does blossom of past brightness dim.
Soft-step September on embers of passion's remains.

Ambition

Splash the seas of time and make a universe.
Caution against tomorrow was the hesitation
Of doubt.  An awareness comes, which when
It's slapped awake, engenders Art.  No need
No more to question fate, or seek an answer
From some faith. Now is time to go. Create!

Moon-Struck Prayer

Boats be small; seas be big.
O fierce shield of imagining,
Golden emblem of The Art,
Proudest of gibbous hours,
Wide pregnant of the Sun;
Spare us in times of peril!

Politicians

Black horns of mouths, slash spiting spite;
Those politicians, who do so trumpet fear.


Such is a spectral horror of alien intransigence,
A self's severed separation from nature's song;
That we've allowed these soft strident thieves,
Bereft of any harmony and absent of all honor,
To steal our sacred voices and let speak for us.


How, having given to them abject dominion,
Can we secure our rights without rebellion?

Cycles and Crutches

What made us rich has made us poor again,
A barren people in a broken, blighted land.


Dry leaves crackled by worn thin soled feet,
Cold, wrinkled, hardened, crevices of flesh.


No longer can legs support trunk to stand,
Decayed to a state of cycles and crutches.


Fat giant, leaning, swaying, tottering to fall:
America.