ISMS’ END: THE PROMISE OF PROGENY

We are all here, nerves and graves,

we, the todays and yesterdays.

The path of song runs through everyone. 

The Olympic pool doubles the sun

while the winter moon halves it.

Humanity lives in its huts

with its gods and with its isms

(and every belief system is an ism–

but why are there no isms of innocence?).

Humanity divides its world with walls and fences.

How permanent! yet how delicate!

are these stews in our kettles’ bellies!

Today’s chefs, prepare your tools and kitchens,

lay out your dynastic friction.

Those urns, those ferns, those burns

— those tomorrows—those blurs–

they still await their turn.

And they hope to mature.

And they hope to endure.

But we hope they can sing us to better futures.

Lacking the doneness of death,

living has a possibility yet.

ST. GEORGE’S DILEMMA

I am a knight,

a man in tin

upon a mission.

I have a dragon

Inside,

and there’s a maiden

Within,

and I must decide

which I should save

and which must slay.

SHEET MUSIC

When we concerto alone

you hum pianissimo

until my baton is down.

ANGELS’ ALLIES

Chicago exorcists of the curse of Hue,

the children’s choice seemed so simple and so clear: 

To purge and burn the stench of their parents’ sins

as voyeurs in Johnson/Nixon’s daisy chain.

Even as torrents of TV blood and horror

entombed the country’s slumbering shame and guilt

beneath accumulations of mud and silt,

they nurtured the nations’ worst hotel murders.

“So, whose side are you on?” A binary pick —

The side of the assassins or the martyrs.

And which will you be, the muck or the water?

Heedless moral passion or cowardly check?

Dump the Hump! Make Love Not War! Get Clean For Gene!

 Tune In, Drop Out! Trust No One Over 30!

New! Improved! Eliminate Parental Dirt!

Alas. We knew not the problem’s in our genes.

I ASK US

At which When did we become our parents,

self-convinced once more of our own invincibility’s

blood, bones, and blues?

There’s a border, we thought, between those anxious 

actions of the bulls on the street

and the bulls of the freight;

so at what Then did the line get crossed?

On some cryptic boiling point

our former arrogant innocence transmuted to ignorant inerrancy.

And, unappalled, we applaud our Light’s sad

transformation into Lightning Bolts.

So to Fate’s position we default.

But, in our prescient prehistoric youth, were’nt we

Already angels’ allies?