Tag Archives: destruction

The World Remains: rondelet

The world remains,
despite our self-indulgent, hateful ways;
the world remains
through our brief, but continued growing pains,
when most would find a reason not to stay.
Despite our morbid and destructive play,
the world remains.

10 MAY 2017

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None Will Come Clean: double dactyl

Higgledy-piggledy,
President Blunderbuss
spoke through the microphone
into the night,
his senseless sentences
building a fantasy
woven from bullshit and
wrapped nice and tight.

Higgledy-piggledy,
our fawning senators
there in the gallery
gave their applause,
praising his policy
without much exception:
a bent for destruction,
simply because.

Higgledy-piggledy,
those in the gallery
looked on in wonderment
at this mad scene.
In this great travesty
we all have have dirty hands,
pointless to disinfect.
None will come clean.

01 MAR 2017

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Our Sum: clogyrnach

What a world this one’s become:
to have begun both deaf and dumb,
then learn of singing,
the art of bringing
love winging;
see it come!

Who needs make-believe, I wonder,
when there’s rain, lightning and thunder
that illuminates,
feeds our dreams and fates,
tears our states
asunder.

What a world both past and now:
the evidence that we, somehow,
will someday arrive,
and may yet survive;
we’re a live,
precious bough.

Who would destroy the great balance
that gave to us this fighting chance
to mature and grow,
to be sure and know?
Such death slows
all life’s dance.

What a world this one’s become:
we trade love songs for battle drums,
spend our lives dying,
no longer trying;
denying
our parts’ sum.

10 FEB 2017

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A Million Years

Just like we’ve done for a million years,
we strike out blindly in the dark in fear.
Some use rocks or bombs, that’s their choice;
me, I use music, my words, my voice.

We each know nothing, but take on faith
that truth comes from an honest face;
and when that message becomes a lie,
we use our darkness to hide disgrace.

Just like we were living in those caves:
we fear and worship the ones’ who’re brave
enough to venture out in the mist,
who tell us monsters just don’t exist.

But we know better; it couldn’t be
that we alone keep us from being free.
So there be monsters, alive and well;
on one side, Heaven, the other, Hell.

Just like we started. Doesn’t it seem
a million years, a million dreams
would make some difference, help us to grow
beyond our fear of “I don’t know.”?

The truth is simple: there’s nothing more
than what we make it, and that’s for sure.
What work we’re given is to survive
Another million, ’til we arrive.

03 AUG 2006

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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez

Beneath the rust and the gray toxic dust
left behind when the water went down
past the edge of the Quarter’s bright lights and disorder
there’s nothing much left to this town

Maybe the Crescent City was never too pretty
for more than three blocks in a row,
but it made our lives fuller, regardless of color,
and now it’s someplace no one else can know.

You may know what it means to miss New Orleans
from a Mardi Gras record or two
but what’s gone’s gone forever; rebuilding will never
bring back Nawlins rhythm or blues.

‘Cause the heart of this city is broken in two
where the levees burst that afternoon;
and the warm welcome mat that asked “Hey, where ya’t?”
won’t be back again any time soon.

All the grand old traditions, corrupt politicians,
the trash tourists leave every year,
they’re all gone, or in trouble, buried in the rubble
that may take a lifetime to clear.

What they bring back will not be
New Orleans, not to me;
the places they’ve saved just are not
more than pretty postcards
of wrought iron and front yards:
ghosts of the town that care forgot.

08 DEC 2005

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Kali and Shiva

A single shelf sits untouched by the rubble,
its contents unmolested by the storm;
while mold grows from the walls like razor stubble,
and walls and ceilings crumble beyond form.

Below, the room is nothing but destruction,
appliances and desks upturned and smashed,
displaced and wretched by the flood water’s suction,
strewn through the house and turned to worthless trash.

kalishivaaltar.jpg

Along the ceiling molding where it crested,
a gray mud line demarks the surge’s path;
yet that shelf seems pristine, and calm and rested,
quite unaffected by Katrina’s bath.

On that shelf? Kali and Shiva, destroyers,
look out into the chaos of the foyer.

08 OCT 2005

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Volume is no substitute

Volume is no substitute for power;
It’s not the loudest shouts that prove most true.
These sounds that shake foundations may undo
in minutes what took builders countless hours,
but mere feats of destruction can’t compete
with the small, quiet moments of creation,
wherein the world, envisioned as complete,
becomes reality. And the frustration
of those whose gift consists of only noise,
whose talents lie in laying waste, in spoil,
is that they cannot know the simple joy
of water when it is not brought to boil.

03 JUL 2005

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