25 October 2008

Lines Across Our Eyes


Terrorizing times stretched across our lives,

Times when one should see, feel and learn.

 

“We see those lines across our eyes,

The very lines that kill’d our lies and dreams.”

 

We were made to slide across steel,

To feel the smoothness of gravity’s pull;

All until we were impaled at the foot

Of the glistening face of reality.

 

Promises, made to make a change,

(That) won the votes and won the war.

They did all things just like the waves,

They simply forgot to keep their charges safe.

 

We were marched into the silent cells,

With cloth balled up into our mouths

And tape pasted across our lips.

They locked the pins inside our nails

And watched our bodies writhe like dolls.

 

“The pain lasts just as long as you’re alive,

They showed us that death is the only escape.”

 

We speak and shout against them, hoping to defer;

We weren’t wrong, they were right all along.

They surround us at a lonely hour

And escort us off our very porch.

 

They race past the Freedom statue,

They throw us into the prisons of Libertad.

 

And when finished, they chopped us neat

And dropped the bodies (weighted) into the sea.

Sometimes a hand washed ashore,

Sometimes the others raised a finger –

Only to disappear without the sign of a fight.

 

The ones who chose not to fight

Lived a life of futile oblivion.

Eyes saw the coup, the terror and the torture;

They sealed their lips – everything was just fine.

 

The time they fell, with the cultured brains,

They had the merest of words to say –

“As to what he did and what she had to pay,

We know not his fate, our hands are cleaned by the rains.”

 

*******

 

The sun rises in another land,

A boy wonders if he’ll see a million minutes of peace.

He turns to see the blades of a windmill slice

Through a passing dove in perfect silence.

12 October 2008

Baked Till We Were Dry



Defeat, frustration, anger, rage –

A burning sensation from the pits;

Teeth clenched, with fingers itching

To crush bone and tear every sinew.


Tyranny and totality throughout the year 1984,

From Orville to Orwell, a flight to death.

Revenge existent but in a tight chamber,

Empty spaces created where birds died on their own.


A new order for containing chaos,

To cut the crimes at their root;

To feed a greater hydra than Hydra,

It was back to being lost in the deathly drums.


Politics was mixed with life to hope for peace,

Crime and drugs gave you a high,

They suggested death for disobedience,

They said we’d live safe and long.


People rotted by the thousands,

Carrion was strewn, corpse over corpse.

The vultures circling miles above

Screeched a signal to stop the fuss

Over dressing and burying the dead.


The parties in power tried to isolate

Fury from feeling and anger from agony.

They evaporated emotion from our eyes,

They convinced us of our crimes.


They cut our bonds, they let us free

To run around and feel ourselves.

They cut us free from the world,

We wandered off to the realms beyond.


The death of chaos in an orderly world

Is like a wave frozen in motion.

The carrier of peace is the hated anarchy

That prevails and outlives our kind.


Those minds failed to see

That the constant fight between good and evil

Is but a ceaseless motion to run the world.