Monterey

A smug—“I’ve got mine”—is the chant
as their houses slowly settle down
around their ears.
Tiny smiles of complacent madness
mask dingy yards
and rotting woodpiles, new paint façade,
heart of heartless spirits.

These Righteous People
“Go in peace—but go”
A city-wide library shushes me and
gone am I as I go in my way—sight choked with
visions of Paradise that only I can see.

This lost mine of fade gems,
Oak tree love ghetto, laughs
when confronted with its broken ones.
These fire-pointed people falling in wars
of human inhumanity.
Crying and dying in
brilliant despair,
they seek the solace of forgetting.

Shuttered windows like eyes that will not see.

Only the sea holds back the sprawl that embarks upon
this littered shore. Can it be that such beauty
as is here can only be seen by those who
don’t belong here?

Yes, the Emperor has no clothes.

Down by lawyered angry men—we helpless prey upon
those more helpless still. Pointless in full anticipation
we call for Jubilee to free our debted selves. But now
in heartless city,
by the heartlessness we feel,

our only end is that which we vision
and fall upon much too soon.

~ Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner ~