The Greatness of Empire

Singularly inappropriate perhaps for a Monday morning, when we are all ready to attach a new week of work and challenges.  The sun is shining, I am feeling pretty chipper on the whole, but there is always a part of me that responds anxiously to world news…

 

Once the spleen is vented out

When the ghosts are bed to rest

If the sorrow finds its match –

we shall desist.

 

With the seas sucked dry of ripples

Where secret forests live, unfold,

As each phrase falls on waxen ears –

We slacken, curled.

 

An attempt, a jealous grope this,

To woo the caverns of our mind.

Remote echo, no light to blind

The smouldering ruins of our bliss.

The Remains

Like little birds startled by crumbs we scatter

for cover when the big words come,

the ones stripped of any art, the ones that singe,

mostly avoided, successfully dodged those lumps of dry bread.

 

Keep truth abay with a light swathe, a gauzy cloak of

half-heard, half-uttered little drones of

nothingness, conventional riffs of jazz, too polite to improvise.

A necklace of platitudes we spin for each other:

barbs disguised in vanilla puddings

to be uncovered by the archaeologists of

our dead love.