Tag Archives: fairness

Out into the Rain

Standing at the window, staring out into the rain,
past the point of caring who or what may be the blame.
Innocent and guilty sometimes are one and the same;
we don’t make the rules, and yet we still must play the game.

Standing on the corner waiting for the downtown bus
sometime after midnight, by the frequency of trucks.
The hour makes no difference when the minutes turn to rust;
no one’s left the light on or is waiting up for us.

Standing at the streetlight for the green light to come on,
each moment takes us by surprise and then is too soon gone.
You start out as a knight or queen, but end up just a pawn,
a jockey left out in the dark on someone else’s lawn.

Standing in the doorway, with so many words unsaid,
each one an ultimatum or a summons to the dead.
In print they seem so black and white, aloud they turn to red,
lines intended to inspire that fade to gray instead.

Standing at the window staring out into the night,
past the point of knowing between what is wrong and right.
Doesn’t really matter which side of the cause you fight,
justice isn’t really blind, she’s just hidden from sight.

11 FEB 2007

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The Right Question

An animal in a cage does not spend its time
rehashing how it got to be in that sad place,
reliving the moments from its glorious prime;
but often a puzzled look is upon its face.

Unlike man, it does not spend its time in dreams,
spinning its wheels in wasted thoughts of liberty;
it does not look upon the world and say it seems
a cursed existence, no more than a travesty.

And yet, a question stirs, a mad recurring thought,
that occupies its pacing up and down its cage;
and like its human fellow prisoners, now caught,
it looks out at the world in misery and rage.

The query that it forms is not to wonder how,
nor think about the birds that float free in the sky;
it does not ponder much beyond the here and now,
but slowly, just repeats over and over – “Why?”

22 FEB 2003

Inspired by a section of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael

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