Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I knew that I had nothing left to lose,
when on the screen I saw utopia
with all improbable elements
patiently explained by smiling scientists,
and reflected on my experience
of broken promises and glass,
of clockwise twisting screws
sinking into splintering particle board,
of ignorance without sufficient adjective,
and found it my considered opinion
that demanding nothing less
was all my heart could stand.

_____

When beauty walks in dignity
across the street, its steps are watched
with silent madness — eyes that peel
the layered garments from the skin,
fingers squeezed intangibly
until their bones are broken, all
the memories of days before
the quality of dignity
was opened to democracy
lamented bitterly, the old
desire to cordon beauty, freedom,
truth and justice, education,
pleasure, property, and leisure
off into their own enclosures,
access regulated well
by hands that claim that special right
inflamed anew, an impotence
regretted — but the Earth has turned
and now the streets belong to all,
the fences are for painting, walls
for bearing roofs and doors and windows,
and hands that want to claim and nothing
else can go pound sand.

_____

Living, as we do, in days of revolutionary
stasis, reaching feebly for solutions,
grasping only plastic cushions for flotation
as our plane approaches an approximation
of a wounded eagle bobbing on the ocean
like a duck, we’re understandably emotional
today, but we are open to suggestions
and we’ll only ask the necessary questions.