Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort
You cheated
You contrived
You lied
You spied

All the money you hoard
You hide

The law did it's job
Indictments came down
Smug and sneering
Your lawyers all talked

Now's not the time
for inequality to cry

But while you await your court date
a trial a settlement
will come.

Where would we wait
Would you say?
I think county jail has our name

While Paul Manafort sits
in his mansion house
Waited on by his indentured slaves
Serving him Whole Foods organic eggs
Ambian sleep in satin sheets

The hearings
The trials
Years later.

Inequality in the face of "nobility"
Sings the blues.

Paul Manafort,
he sings in the shower.

Absence is a period with a period.

Visible, not visible, and repeat,
the mighty feat
the enduring human spirit
in the faith of subsidence of pain
that the book on the table
will be picked up and read again.

It keeps us going
the strength in the sense
too real is the presence.

Then a day
the book is taken away
the loved pens an ode
of absence definite
without a period.

I lie not awake
Yet unasleep
In those moments
Caught between
I think I see
But you see not
The Life that could
Have been.

The moon eclipsed
The flag half mast
The wick not
Yet aglow
All the beauty
At but half full
Accepted as enough.

It must be true
That one accept
The half as near
The whole.
For it does not help
To seek the truth,
It undoes
The beauty known.

Thus die the dreams untold.