Kids with match heads, rubber bands, bubble gum and sling shots bring down a jet liner
We play together, drink together, make love to one another
And we remain innocent in spite of our killing,
How can we keep killing each other?
Why do innocents have to die?
Faith, religion, belief still and numb our minds
Forestall thought, and the killing goes on.
A moth
beating the glass,
sad but constant poet,
starv’d for light, longing for freedom,
can’t stop.
The day is a pantomime, a puppet show,
posturing, false smiles and words with no meaning.
Please, let us crawl beneath the covers of the night
where we can love, hate, hurt and sing.
We do not live here in perfection,
our circles are square not round,
these sins are our lives, our loves, our futures,
our sweethearts, our parents and children.
The Princess Hotel
The Princess Hotel, the biggest hotel around.
I looked up at the grand sign high over the parking lot,
admiring her, expecting to smile and to think, as I always did,
“it is as it always was.”
But it was not as it always was, it seemed smaller, sadder and
I realized it had probably never been as it always was.
Each day passed with change, the birds’ nests abandoned and dried in the trees,
the squirrel and that cat, the weather, the sun that baked,
The rain that soaked and eroded and would eventually take the building,
and in this life of coming and going, the people that came and went.
How long did I have to live at The Princess Hotel before I would realize
how long I had lived at The Princess Hotel?
In my early days, the Princess Hotel meant high rise success with spas and salons,
my middle days, it was merely an occasional stop in a busy life that would never quit,
and my later days, it meant refuge and a life by myself.
But until today, I had not noticed this coming and going of change.
My life was a book of poems, each word.
Days, people, loved ones arrayed like pages I was given to read
but in my coming and going, I only skimmed
the words shielded by half closed eyes anxious to know the end
before I had even begun.
Now, I try to recall these things, the words, the days, the people that
my eyes touched so briefly, but they are all gone.
How was it I expected them all to live on,
grow and color and blossom,
spread around me and warm me?
In my coming and going, they have all disappeared.