Inspired by As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening under the blanket of dark blue sky
Thinking about the week to come
Will the days be remembered, or rather wasted and forgotten?
Each tired child thinks the same thought.

Sunday nights slip into Monday mornings
Mondays slowly become Tuesdays;
Yet somehow the days become one
Each tired child unable to differentiate each day from the last

Wake up, brush teeth, brush hair, repeat.
Math, English, read, write, factor, and repeat.
Return home, work, eat, sleep and then repeat.
Each tired child thinks, “Is this really living?”

Stuck in a labyrinth of concrete
Routine forces every move
Taunted by the warm blanket left behind, only to leave a blanket of papers
Each tired child stares at the ticking clock.

Thoughts interrupted by bells at the same time
Routine consumes every thought
Each indistinguishable day
Where each child struggles to lift heavy eyelids.  

Same faces seen every day
Same places seen every day
Weeks blur into months, which in turn disappear in the minds
Each tired child fights every robotic move.

Closing doors and opening books
The teachers scream and roll their eyes
Where thoughts aren’t thoughts unless they are in Times New Roman
Each tired child strives to be heard.

As I walked out one evening under the blanket of dark blue sky
Thinking about the years to come
Routine is inescapable while spontaneity is a distant myth dreamt up in the minds
Of each tired adult who forgets what it’s like to be a child.

The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of ***** clothes,
the tongues poverty, tears like ****.
The surf pushes their cries back.
Listen.
They are bewitched.
They are writing down their life
on the wings of an elf
who then dissolves.
They are writing down their life
on a century fallen to ruin.
They are writing down their life
on the bomb of an alien God.
I am too.
We must get help.
The children are dying in their pens.
Their bodies are crumbling.
Their tongues are twisting backwards.
There is a certain ritual to it.
There is a dance they do in their pens.
Their mouths are immense.
They are swallowing monster hearts.
So is my mouth.

Listen.
We must all stop dying in the little ways,
in the craters of hate,
in the potholes of indifference--
a ****** in the temple.
The place I live in
is a maze
and I keep seeking
the exit or the home.
Yet if I could listen
to the bulldog courage of those children
and turn inward into the plague of my soul
with more eyes than the stars
I could melt the darkness--
as suddenly as that time
when an awful headache goes away
or someone puts out the fire--
and stop the darkness and its amputations
and find the real McCoy
in the private holiness
of my hands.

August started out like all the other months, there had been so many
The highs and lows of many seasons
saw my pockets spent of just a penny
Saw my recollections stacked to amount to rubble,  just prized as memories
And pieces of puzzles, ill fitted together, produced gaps within my psyche
Crossroads bring me to a full stop
I'm haunted by the ghosts that linger
Pointing this way and that way, back the way I came, demanding I stand

right here

But I've been down this road before

It's littered with the pieces of me that died, and became just carrion
But like a Phenix, burning deep inside
I flicked off the ash and moved on

Singing my Swan Song

and     I       cry

Your drugs don't let me sleep at night
Your love just leaves me cold
The road I took, just last lifetime
Left me broken and bitter old

Better luck I find, on an old but familiar road, I may have walked it all before
*But I left the story untold

It is a cold hearted world we live in filled with lying and deceit,
where hypocrisy is the mean of utter good conceit
Everything we do is mainly by statistic,
when will we wake up and realize democracy is realistic
Corruption is the main seize of power,
and we will only realize the truth in the final hour.