Tag: inspiration

Do you know the game you’re playing?
Do you know the rules?
Are you bumbling in the dark?

Do you feel like a fool?
Do you know which way is up?
Which way is down?

Keeping calm is near impossible
When orientation can’t be found.

Were you left spinning?
Are you alone?
Can you call out?
Reach your phone?

Can they find you, if you don’t know where you are?
Do they know you well enough,
To catch your falling star?

If you are lost forever,
Your surface out of reach.
Then speed up or slow down
Whatever is your peach.

Do the things you want to do,
Now that you are alone.
If no one can find you,
You sit on your own throne.

Dark and full of purpose
Black and winding through the grass
Approach is solemn and somber

Echoes of gunfire and blood
and Song
Ricochet along the naming wall

More people than I have ever know
More hands than I could shake
On and on the names keep coming

How could we do this?
How could we drag them from their homes?
To do this to them?
Our own sons and neighbor boys.

My dad tried to enlist a few years before I was born.
Genetics sabotaged his efforts
He three weeks later came home in uniform

He went back to work and let others
Find their Glory.
Because of that twist of fate,
I can tell this story.

As the war raged
He met my mom
As the war ended
I was born,

30 years later I took my kids to see the wall
With Grandpa’s name not on it.

My father was not a sacrifice,
Neither will be my son.
Governmental blood can find someone else.

Human sacrifice is DONE.

My mother was a mermaid
She lived in the warm water springs
She held court on a bubble throne

Sequestered in a world made to suit her perfectly.
Protected by a door with a lock

She didn’t love the ocean
She didn’t love the lake
Chlorine pools did not excite her
Nor streams, nor ponds or puddles

My mother was a mermaid even so
The water soothed her like nothing else could

The watery ways she taught me
By the soothing of her mind
The sharp and swollen edges
Of a past she couldn’t leave behind

The wondrous things I could have learned
If her stories had been her own.

Now long dead and mostly forgotten
My mother mermaid mine
Your story never told

You were here,
You loved me in your fashion
Before you were lost to time.

I know you’ve heard what you think is my story.
I hear the voices on the winds,
the echoes of fear in your voice.

That’s not my story.
That’s his.

Not that you have no reason to fear, not that I do not wield a power that may destroy you.

He would come to my house without invitation.
Against all advice.
Escape and name me the villain.

My power is not to turn people into pigs.
It is to reveal their true form.
It’s not my fault that is who they are.

So if you choose to invade my territory.
Dominate me in my own space.
You have been warned.

I am a practical creature and pork is a sweet meat.

Realizing we finally found the eye of the storm.
Safety, peace, pleasantness even
all collected in this shared life

learning each other’s languages
supporting each other’s dreams
setting up healthy boundaries

Setting up life as cooperative separates
rather than a multiheaded beast

We can acknowledge the storm
The apocalypse really
raging outside
We don’t have to invite it in.

We deserve this safety
We deserve this peace

Security will have to wait until the storm passes
We will face the thick of it again
Go out in the storm
but not yet

And when we go, it will be with a new confidence
we found peace for ourselves
in the eye of the storm

Here there be dragons
When there is nothing left to lose,
the dragons come and burn it all down

Dragons are change
Bringers of the apocalypse
Harbingers of the changing of the cosmic guard

The dragons come and the fires burn
Hubris burns so bright
The empowered in their haughty towers
Look down on us no more.

The humble in their steady way
Hear the noise and wonder
What new horror will replace the old

Those close to the ground
Will toil and suffer as they always have
The seeded ash will sprout anew
The ambitious will scramble
New towers will be built

Things will go as they always have
And the dragons will come again.