Swingset (A Fight with a Friend)

Backlit boys in wooden shoes
In the schoolyard move
As pendulums and epistles,
From yesterday to the living instant
Like braying bells and shrieking whistles.

Untied shoelaces swaying and splaying
Beneath pairs of tiny backlit feet,
And now in place of that vacant space:
Icarus and Daedalus conversing
On the wisdom of aerial traversing
A lifetime of cratered rubble,
Beneath the swings a sea of pebbles
Still spitting ripples of newborn trouble.

Backlit boys with scarecrow hair
As playful prayers for a starling tomorrow,
As the swingset lurches the bird perches,
Warbling a song of startling sorrow.
The chances foregone are moving on
To places where we may not follow.

Swingset news.  Tragedy is pageantry
With no stage in the playground scene.
The chains complain in groans and squeaks
Of the toil and grind of heartbroke weeks
‘Tween the pregnant pauses of frightened ends
That tie together mournful friends.

In between these broken rhymes
Are the broken things the breaking find:
Backlit boys in the grit and grime
That spend their days inventing time.
The rusted chains for them will sing
The praises of a schoolyard swing.

In Lieu of the Truth
August 5th, 2007

It is the supplicant claiming innocence the loudest that the teeming throng deems most guilty.  Even so, circumstance has a way of shedding fickle shades of undulating truth at inopportune moments, even while the stage crew holds veils of scrim over the events that best illuminate the dichotomy.  So where are we now, really, but at the hottest part of the crucible, cherry-red and with an aortic stem?  Agent saboteurs exchanging hats for hats, but the fact remains–that piece always fits, and you still can’t see the eyes.

What different brand of misery might a sweeter form of misinformation created?  I rode a red herring to a green pasture, only to reach that satin swain to find a slumbering lion now stretching his maliciously screaming muscles.  The pride clambers now for a fresh kill, one coursing with the sour blood of the unknowing held culpable for his ignorance by that which kept him ignorant.  The fools line the gibbets for inspection by those who made them foolish, all the while that communiques flood the gullible town with sworn secrets unreplying.  Sympathy is honeyed sustenence to those who want it and slow death to those who need it.  Ourselves divide to find their line, scrawled in sour blood across the scuffed tiles of indifferent time, checkered white and black and shadowy forms that turn their back. 

Demand the truth that you keep to yourself.  Feed the starving with white lies that mature to something dark as night.  It rots away into the veins, undermining health and heaping up funeral pyres of infection.  Spread the lie to the village, spread that filthy fucking lie amongst the populace, so I may know that one whom I love smelled the gasoline but lit the match anway.  On accident, surely, but that fire burns just as hot.

This wretched world denies us the ability to read minds, and for that, blame the first conflicted schmuck you can find. 

The Apologist
September 18th, 2007

Believe it or not, I am not always wrong.  To forego argument, to appease the tired gods of tireless frustration, I will capitulate to culpability.  But I’m not always wrong.  In fact, it becomes a depressing fact of our vicissitudinal lives that we, for the most part, are usually wrong.  Not to say that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, or that there remains anything to be done about it.  Time often tells tales best left to deaf ears and sightless eyes.

And isn’t it the truth that life’s best rejoinders brew so far from the tongue, waiting patiently for the moment to pass?  I hate to type my innocence into just there syllables, but…intensions.  If a man’s worth was measured by the altruism inherent to the intention, well…I’m wallowing, now, I think. Sometimes…just sometimes, mind you…I just need an ear to listen, a body to hug, tears to mix with mine.  I need to know that kindness is not pity, nor charity, nor wasted when heaped on my doorstep.  Have I not tipped the delivery man enough?  Did I not spend many an hour in the driving rain, crumpled actions in hand but haloed by the hallowed intension?  I did much, I guess, but even now, my apparent offence disproves my errant claims of altruism.  I apologize and move on.

Apologize and move.  It seems to be the motto of my existence, the creed by which I live.  I no longer wish for the mantle of the apologist.  How much, really, have I done wrong?  Check your tongue at the door, then.  Spy it in the mirror; Does it resemble a dog’s tail?  No?  Do not presume to wag it in my direction, for the hurts of the tongue can wound the soul.