20201031.0430

On this day
Precisely equal to
The subject of another one of your false wars
As the Good Doctor put it once
Will you
Still
Say that masks are folly
When you are all too apt to
Cover your own faces in
White draperies
And hide behind a thin line
That must not be very strong if
It needs so much support
Or to hide yourselves among
The feigned emblems and images of those
Whose deaths and dislocations
Have not been enough to satisfy your greed?
Will you still say
It's just a joke
It's just good fun
And will you laugh when
Your own martyrs are lampooned
Bruited about as bunting
More on one day
But not only on the one?

20201030.0430

Boasting not the best of bardcraft,
Still I seek to stories tell,
Long for laurels and laud and honor,
Yearn for youths of years to come
To know my name, not forget it
When the grave gapes and gathers me in,
Sleep-space in common. So I write,
Pushing a pen or the pixels fixing
That show on the screen, seen, hopefully,
Maybe by many; I must act so.

20201029.0430

Sometimes the ore is plentiful,
Ready to the pick and easy to refine;
Sometimes there's a struggle to bring it to light,
A challenge to get it up out of the mine.
Sometimes, though, the lode appears to run out,
And the digging must turn another way;
Sometimes the poor miner must leave off the work
And return back to it on another day.

20201028.0430

Who ruined the depths called out from the pastures,
And from near a rally came the reply
Done in, somewhat fishy, some time in the future,
A sequence attended, as none can deny.
What Oread comes from Cithaeron these days
To follow the flower-face all writers are,
Or is it only in god-cursed times
That any would think to travel so far?

20201027.0430

When night falls for me alone
The daylight spent and gone away
And darkness shrouds my sight
The stars that twinkle shift and sway
The firmament not firm at all
That holds them and me in its grip
Nor black, but dimly coruscating
Along fractal patterns' trip

20201026.0430

Too many seek to be the jester in
The court where Stupid God rewards the sin
Not of not knowing but of turning again
Away from knowing when knowledge is plain
To find, as now, and none have to refrain
From drinking deep at its well. No, the stain
Upon their souls is in refusing gifts
Of such sort as each of us uplifts,
Preferring instead to maintain the rifts
That hinder them and keep them from their ease,
That keep them riven with the foul disease
By which the Stupid God alone is pleased.
They can cavort, of course, as they desire--
But we must pay who did not give them hire.

20201025.0430

A chicken pecking after grain
Takes up more than the refrain
A songsmith writes, sometimes with pain,
And often to far greater gain
Than pecking done upon the keys
Upon a board approached with ease,
Though neither case will often cease
Until each finds desired release.

20201024.0430

The finish on the keys is worn away
Unevenly
Leaving a polished shine behind
Backspace gleaming brightest

20201023.0430

Sitting here
In my preferred parking spot
Hidden by trees and back from the street
I feel I should do some more scurrilous thing
Than compose short bits of verse
But then I remember
It is an addictive, insidious drug
And I think I ought to charge more for it
Knowing the day may well soon come
That I am a criminal for making it

20201022.0430

They have no need for ghosts
Whom memories haunt
No rattling chain and screaming siren voice scares more
Than things done badly and recalled in full detail
At odder intervals than a tritone
No apparition's touch more chilling than
Knowing what ought to have been done
And did not happen
And no spectre is more real than those