What can we do that’s any good?
What’s the poetry that halts this evil?
What’s the song that mirrors them to themselves
In time

Lest they sin against God and man
As they must if cast they do their votes for crime
Praying beseeching the God of violence
To pulverize their estranged brothers and sisters
Into a soft and mealy pulp with no bounce to oppose block or dodge
their righteous fists

What perfect essay
What surgically precise and spiritually explosive
Advertisement for the gentler wiser way
Might we perform
To save them from themselves

Lest they
bow Cain to jeer piddle shit upon poor Able
Supposed to be their brother
Supposed to be cosigner and joint administrator and heir
Of the fertile meadows, deep forests, sprawling homestead, meandering river, silverware and crockery

If they so continue
Their immortal souls will surely suffer

If they so waltz on
They’ll join the fools the rabid dogs they spittle-spilling hyenas
They’ll quaking shake at the gates of Hell
To learn
From God always mild as a summer breeze
how they were
what they did
how they cut
the bellies of their brothers sisters and own howling selves
how they
Exulted in fantasies, bunching scrunching mutilating and otherwise forcing Reality
(so infinite clear true and kind)
to fit their wildest conspiracy theories (doggedly contemptuous of truth, reason, clarity, and the gentle Truth that guides these careful, soul-respecting arts)
Not content with a reality of madcap lies
They needed to knead the soul of things
up into their bundle of desperate perversions —
false, hollow, cruelly proud, and maniacally certain tales
of God, self, other,
and all the gears and levers
connecting us to our little times and larger timelesses.

Where is the miracle?
A poetry so pure
So fair and just
To gently their souls stir
‘Til catch they must
Themselves in the act
Of hacking the cords
That keep the monsters back
The boring old demon hoards
Of might makes right
Of “true” and “false” as weapons
Of power held through fright
A government incompetent
For governing’s not really the goal
When rulers break the people’s hold
On their shared nation

How to show them themselves?
Sharing’s become such a pain
They’ll trade a momentary spell
of pushing our faces in the mud
for their future and their children’s too
Anything, anything to tell us screw you screw you fuck you you losers you

I’m out of breath
I’m out of ideas
I’m out my depth
My mind’s a freeze
Of too much root beer float
Gulped in a mindless rush
As crinkle-crisp leaves wrote
Scathing symphonies so lush
Rich in imagery, those limpid tunes
Full of counterpoint and musical irony
Leaves scratching invisible sound-wounds
Upon cement road’s rough conformity

I’m panting and feeling dumb
Around the climbing tree I swung
For minutes out of time I flung
My fool self around the hallowed trunk
To think to feel to move past this clunk
This empty sordid boring hatful junk
I wanted to help
In a way that wasn’t mean
I hear them as they yelp
Roving in packs to strip clean
Our bones and our dreams
Which they say are but schemes
And perverse acts child sacrifice
Drunken orgies to the gods of vice

What went wrong?
It got stressful.
We stopped talking it out
The myths grew on and on
And the truth got lost in shouts
About who sullied the song
We used to share
Who first it was that quit the love
Who first no longer cares
And who has failed our God above
And what rules God commands
And what rules are just the other side’s demands

Now what?
Tired
Too tired
Can’t think
No ideas
Out of my depths
Drowning in this riddle
That my time and place have posed
Like a drunk face down in his own spittle
He was trying to go beyond the boasts
That clinking glasses drew from boisterous youth
But now he wakens to a nauseous earthy hollow disappointing truth

Author: BW/AW
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: Andy Watson