Two Poems for Sunday Afternoon

1. Her Tongue Left Her Mouth, But No One Believed Her



Moments of insanity

Go unnoticed

When the daybreaks

And the tidepools

Are shallow, calm

And unremorseful



Evenings of violence

Are forgotten

On mornings when

The children are fed

The bruises have healed

And the victim cannot find her tongue



The dog that once snarled

And threatened children

Now has sad, gummy eyes

They have taken the lightening

Out of the sky

And the stones once stacked



Over the soft, vulnerable fields

Have crumbled like salt

Into a margarita's dream

Of a neverending line

Of pacified drunks

Waiting for chasers



That cannot kill the burn

Mailboxes rest empty

On every weekly holy day

But the postmaster

And the pastor

Toast each other at midnight



Decades of glory

Never achieved

Leave desperate men with

One answer-

We are the same as we've always been

The generations of silence



And forbidden honesty

Haunt and plague us as well

We pretend to overcome

Our forefather's treachery

But it is in our strands of D.N.A.

Like our hair color



Our language

Our tendencies good and evil

To only obey the common will

And hope the tides and winds

Keep the storms and weathered docks

Safe from our arms of removal



It is getting hot again today

And tomorrow it will grow just a little cooler

But it will never freeze and thaw

The way it used to

The way we want it to



The way we believe it is meant to be



2. Zen Master Decides I'm Not So Bad After All



I walked into the great hall of books

No one ever reads anymore

And interrupted the Zen Master Book Librarian

From his beer and his depressed meditation

On repetition and how it always fails to cure

Itself



He shouted me down

He kicked me out



"I'm just tired,"

He said, almost angrily

But mostly just in a tired way



He looked how I felt, actually

So I couldn't hold it against him

When he asked me to leave without accepting

Another book I had brought to him

That no one will ever read



In the end, he came out to make ammends

I took his rejection of me, it seemed,

Exactly like he wanted me to



I was tired, also, of the false promises

Of currupt lawmakers, of dust that has long settled

On various editions of common sense

And common decency



Our debates on how to better the world

Have become table tennis matches-

The trite comparison

Of how wrong we all are all the time

Is sent back and forth by our own solutions

Endlessly, never coming to rest, never able to be

At ease; the audiences eager eyes transfixed

Hypnotized on the insults, the accusations,

The wrong doings as they rebound back and forth

Over that thin line, that delicate net that never,

If hardly, stops any conclusion from coming to rest



I had gotten my book in the library

The old fashioned way- by allowing myself

To be ridiculed and being a good spirit about it



But it just makes that librarian even more exhausted

When he accepts my edition of dust and has to toss it

Up onto the shelf with all the other books barely read

And mostly never sold