Let me adorn you with finery, and let me set you on a pedestal. Let me adore your beauty and your loving ways. Let me humbly be your servant and forever enthralled with you. Let me give you honors above all others, she who bore my children. Let your name be called blessed and let my hands be to your service. You are my lover, my friend, my children's mother, you are forever my queen.

The Grey walls of this place will not define me, the prison that put me in will not hold me. On my body I have the memorial of my brothers that fell in the street. Each name tattooed for eternity, with much respect and love rest in peace. All of my home boys were soldiers until the end. Now I sit here each night, watching the faint shimmer of the distant city lights. I hear the haunted voices in my head, I am reminded of the unholy dead. The bodies that were left to bleed, the families that were torn apart by our deeds. Each day is the same thing routine again and again. To make it out I must be strong, I have people who want me home. So I tear at the walls one brick at a time, block by block I am bring this fortress down. I will not rest until I have beaten this place. I will make it back out of the gate. So now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to my God my soul to keep. Let me not die before I wake, please don't let this tomb be my fate. Forgive me mother for what I did to you, if I live this I promise to you. No matter what it takes, I will open the door to my freedom, block by block this will not be my final fate.

We see each other every morning, but you only smile and pass me by. The scent of you takes my breath away, I cannot find the words to just say hi. I want you to see me, but you look right through me. I try to look nice when I know that I will see you, but you don't seem to notice me at all. No matter what I see to do, I must accept that I am invisible to you.

is a familiar phrase
we like to flaunt
    especially
when we would like to utter a complaint
    about contemporary grievances
    god and the world & cetera

in doing so
we keep good company
from Socrates to Livius
    to Shakespeare, Goethe, Emerson,
    Whitman, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Vonnegut,
     Morrison, Angelou, Nabokov, etc.

I guess this is because
the times like these
are always those
in which we live

listening to the news
one really gets the blues

in all their great meetings
    after cordial greetings
world leaders disagree
    for one reason or other

seems they don’t really bother
‘bout what should be their goals

    not to save their own souls
    but the folks in our world

the children all curled
    with pain in their belly
civilians burned dead
    with gasoline jelly

the women attacked for
    (a lack of) their clothing
as if there were nothing
more important than keeping
some men from their peeping

but what really matters
are the people in tatters
who flee from bombed homes
in despair and have come
    to realize
that their possible demise
does not affect those
who’d rather smell a rose
than seriously bother
about the fate of an other

tragedy unfolds every day
yet it holds little sway
in the news of the powers
that makes sure that ours
is different from theirs

until that dream sours
we need to write some
more encouraging verse

pain caused
by love
    and also death
not ever goes away