Can we live beside Evil,
Can't we just get along?
Can't we turn it a little
Using Music and Song?

Must we face it and name it,
Call it wrong to its face?
Must we risk our own comfort?
Can't we stay in our place?

It must be dark
out here in the cold penumbra,
where mile after mile
no one smiles,

dots and loops,
dots and loops,
a kind of blissful nullity,
beautiful and pointless,

wearing at the edges
it almost stings,
seclusion unraveling
at the underground in us all,

aubade aberrations abound,
challenging the orthodoxy
of the troublesome
morning road,

but should this near-life experience
hydroplane toward
another mineshaft, it helps to know
less is less, not more.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                      While Clenching Their Fisties

Old men do not now argue politics
At the coffee table in the grocery store
Old men, like some university students
Simply say what they are ordered to say

By voices bellowing from Orwellian telescreens

While clenching their Trumpy-grumpy fisties

One must go on working
And one must have patience
Let it sit for years
Box ticks open

I like City of Ember
Sent a copy to Susan
Long live Lina and Doon!
Theology is broken

Plato still persists
Socratic conversation
I had a career in education
But now I just wash dishes

Satellite High School
James Madison University
Susan Darlene Meek
Wishes.

I sleep with the window open
so in the night
hope might float in