[Kay Syrah]

The Air Is Full Of Noise

At both ends of the world philosophers
must practice concision lest their tongues freeze
on the pump handle of their own wordiness.
Above the ice fields their teeth click in cold fear
of all-you-can-eat poverty. Paid by the word
they blow grasshoppers into their sleeves, positive
the poles will shift soon with negative consequences,
for all but themselves.

On magnetic fields lawyers’ filings
arrange themselves to reveal escape clauses.
Like grasshopper clouds they make brief
work of justice, according to laws never
written by the disinterested, but applied neutrally
to intended victims. Pronouncements of the dark
shouldered philosophers of the bench read like poverty
is just one letter away from poetry. Less than wealth
and more than subsistence is left to be gleaned
from dissenting opinions, upon which we all sit
getting the last laugh.

In the littoral the sawgrass greens, scissors
like grasshoppers jawing the legs of those who stumble
on the verge. Philosophers, lawyers, judges fall
upon the mercy of the fallow. No one is released early
from interesting times, just for good behaviour.
The sun drags overexposed tongues to dry silence
in fields unforced to yield. Ordinary voices
are paroled in the quiet, affirm,
poverty is a virtue wasted on words.

[Kay Syrah]

Lagos

La lil’akis al blastiqia

"No more plastic bags"

“That is how I remember the day, Bush’s victory” anon "poet"

You hold nothing but your own shape
floating in the sky on the winds and dust
just before the rainy season begins. In a third world
capitol I once smiled, called you the national bird.

On September 11, the little Eichmanns ascended
to a sky of perfect blue. Were all of them nothing more than flies
who failed to understand their wings had been pulled
by the inheritance of our sins? And when the bell rang on the street

the dark angels got their wings and flew to heaven,
detouring thru two towers. Fire inside sizzled-hesitated long
enough for some to call home say “I love you,” then wave
unfeathered arms, and leap into updrafts of outraged history,

not strong enough to lift them from the gravity
of a stolen election. You know the heart of it: we are us
so we started it But still, I grow weary of plastic
draping our sky with scabrous fabric, flapping

then roosting noisome in a murder of words You snap
in one voice indestructible and un-recycled persistent
trash. You cannot nuance your message that will be waving
on a branch long after the despised flag has failed.

Poets (not) against the war(against us)
call out the belligerent but do not exhort our
enemies to the same restraint, tell us hard truth but hear
us none. Perhaps I might find you as natural as brown paper

if you mourned our own lost in remembrance of that
day instead of lamenting that it was the event
that made Bush’s poll numbers soar to obscene heights.
When you have no lines to remember those who fell,

I will, and poorly, but now I must turn away
and know I am now in America , where I can look to the sky call
you poet, high on hot rising winds,. appearing to fly.
But only because you contain nothing and say it very well.

I wrote this for my poetry group. Most of them are in line with the anonymous poet I quoted. Guess I'll read it. But really if they get it they'll be too pissed to benefit and if they don't get it, I'd be sad. Oh well.