It's hard living in a world where no one cares
While your smothered and shallowed by despair
Sitting here wondering why I was born into this place
Not wanting to be part of this human race
Where money is the great and powerful Oz
It doesn't matter what's the cause
I look and see their hearts have grown cold and calloused
Everything is so off balanced
There is no more unconditional love
No help from up above
We have been abandoned
The trumpets have sounded
Humanity has been stripped of it's compassion
Empathy is in short ration
Gone are the ways of old
To these values we no longer hold
Now it's I'll do for you if you can do for me
That's not the way it's supposed to be
But everyone's eyes have been closed
Their souls have become thorny and cold
We are no longer judged on our thoughts and actions
But by how much money we have for the coming attractions
For if we don't have enough to pay
We become part of the play
We are condemned to be the *****
Then feed into the machines of war

©Pauline Russell

-a prayer for Jan 24th, Day of Shame. From the year 2217,
from the service book of a future denomination

It is time for repentance,
the annual pilgrimage.
To the doors of heaven
and the odours of hell.

     Let us visit your creation,
     the blessed pipe that bleeds.

Let us cross the barbedwire,
let us enter the tunnel.
Let us hear the trickling stream,
let us smell your ineffable breath.

     Let us visit our souls,
     our inner vagrant selves.

Let us look down into the black current
and watch your great flowing face.
And through it, in it, while we watch,
we sinners recognize ourselves.

     Let us visit your revelation,
     our tested veins that bleed.

From the deserts of the great plains
to the drowned cities of the coasts...
Your whip on our spines
confirms the evil that we host.

Girl, we have one another
That is the way it should be
To comfort, soothe, and cherish
What a pleasant sight to see
Together, we are two hearts
That beat as one
Sharing and caring for one another
And having loads of fun

As above...


...Your sky-dial feline mind, unzips
Bold rose-hip teems of fervour, kept
On ice, throughout the needle of
the duty-bound laborious.

You have geared the slug of
greased machines have
waited tables overseas,
have moved your shoes
to rythms of inconsequence.

So below...

Call talons from your lava skin,
in tracings of a milky way, step
ladders through the cotton fields
to set aside a broken string.

Float, leaf, about your symetries
to crook your spine in Gothic arches.
Sovereign , deep in quicksand warmth
through paths of least resistance.

Dissolve in waves of ageless truth
dashesd amber over Roman tiles.
In wild writhes of curling fern,

Your body shines obsidian.

When the torque of speech is such
that stapled teeth would seem a wiser lot.
When thought is but a hemlocked lash
of passionate disdain..


..then to the water I return...

A sack of cats for Naiads, hatched
about the reedy bridge, I’ll give
my all to them.
To cross their palms with lighter steps
I call to them from oily depths of
worn illumination.


Here, patience sees them come..

In winter cools of briny shift
to press their vagues upon the lips
of tinkers, by the flotsam slum..

..As Canton sirens pilot tension
through the gentian-violet haze,
so distant trains commemorate

  a quiet absolution.

Have you forgotten how this works
We get off in one big ****

You can not put me off for later
By then I will have become a fable

You must write when I command
On this fact I squarely stand

Even when sleep tries to steal you away
In your brain I still romp and play

I will make your tired body get up and write
For your brain is not that tight

The words will leak right out
You know that fact without a doubt

I know how important I am to you
So what I say, you will do

You will always do as I choose
For you can't live with out your muse