Wasted

Nothing that this pen sets down

can even begin to describe

the story told by a picture worth ten thousand words

no meaning can it ascribe

when inhumanely shut doors

wash up a three-year-old body -

A hapless, blameless victim of wars

in a shameless political battle of custody.

The ink will only blur these pages

in writing of his last painful breath

too young yet even to dream or hope

the only truth he knew was death.

What if he had grown up to become

a peace-maker with a touch to heal

or if he had a future writ of altruistic zeal?

Who had the goddamned right to steal?

And who will stand up and be counted

amongst those who slammed their doors?

Did the white man's back break with its burden

after centuries of raping our shores?

Will this picture worth a million words

speak to cruel humanity, or be wasted

as one did decades ago of another child,

crawling, soon by a vulture to be tasted?

Perhaps this was not a wasted life

but one spared the indignity of seeking refuge

in cold lands, from chilled hands

whose tight-fisted treasuries are huge -

from bellies distended with surplus resources

but hearts as small as mice

spared the agony of watching his family drown

as the wealthy watch with eyes as cold as ice.

What power on earth or sky will judge

Such a vicious sodomy of childhood -

those that can only write vitriolic verse

and no longer distinguish evil from good?

Sweet Insomnia

After T. S. Eliot and Driftwood Ashore

Peopled with shadows falling, scattering, muttering unintelligibly

Sweet insomnia is preferable to such disturbing wandering sleep

And Prufrock's blumbering, fumbling, clumsy fingers

Unable to keep trysts, piling broken promises in a heap.

To unwritten books left hanging, blank, on shelves

"sorry" becomes a meaningless word mumbled or uttered

to blank canvases on nails, backcloths and settings for absence

to a song never sung nor strung, only fitfully stuttered.

Faithless now and etherized as the dawn and dusk

The fourteen lines stretch and strain but fail to rhyme

The question unasked that fails to thaw refrigerated hearts

The tide that leaves no shiny shells on the sands of time…

Through such discordant nights then best to stay awake

Nothing is now, no longer, any more at stake.

Pages

The burning stench of rubber soles

that once stood on a burning bridge

abandoned by feet walking away

from smoke clouds on a distant horizon

thickening the line between possible endings

and impossible longing

clogs up the nose with memories of

hapless waiting; the thunder of silence

belts out against choking eardrums

obliterates the will, the wish, the want,

the dream, the desire, the dawn

as the gibbous moon shines down on

neon-lit trees gently ruffled

by an impotent Zephirus that fails

to impregnate a jaded August.

And somewhere in the lamplit darkness

fingertips turn rough edges of an old chapter

to touch with careful, gentle grace

the smooth, unlined blank face

of a fresh clean page, waiting,

for the kiss of the pen.