Never underestimate the power of hate
in the mind of a man with a gun.
The signs were all there, and all were ignored,
Until his planned evil was done.

A proud gay black man took a gun in his hand,
and authored his own revelation.
His anger and rage writ in blood on the street
with shell casings as the punctuation.

Two young lives destroyed; another in pain.
They were somebody’s daughter and son.
The cowardly killer then swallowed the barrel
and it ended as it had begun

Gather the ones you love in your arms
For each day may well prove your last one.
For hate, like a hunter, is stalking the land;
Only Fools think this is done.

Half obscured by powder smoke, the long Grey line comes on.
“Double canister and hard shot, pour it on them boys!”
They dress the line and still they come, inexorably, like fate.
We are in need of some support, but will it come too late?
A high wood fence disrupts their charge, like clotting blood they mass.
As many a dying Virginian boy wishes for his cup to pass.
“For Fredericksburg!” “For Fredericksburg!” Alonzo Cushing cried.
We worked our guns and gave them hell for all our friends who’d died.
Our blood is up and still they come, over the parapet.
We are all determined this is as far as they will get.
A breath of air, a cooling drink, a lover’s soft embrace;
Strange things crowd into your mind when in a hellish place.
A company of New Yorkers, coming on the double quick,
Have piled into the Rebel mass where the fighting was most thick.
Back you go, proud Virginians, back over the low stone wall.
Not so many as started out, no longer proud and tall.
A rebel of some prominence sits, dying, near my gun.
He asks for General Hancock, strange to hear that name upon his tongue.
My friend, Alonzo Cushing, lies beside the caisson where
He bleeds profusely from his wounds. He is too far gone to care.
He will not live to see the Sun rise in the East again,
Or live to hear a nation’s thanks for what he did for them.

This was once a Jew’s apartment, here on the Konig Platz.
It must have been magnificent, before we were attacked.
I squat in an apartment whose glories are all past.
The artwork was seized off these walls and the former owner gassed.
Now the copper mansard roof leaks nearly every time it rains;
It’s my only source of water so I’m not one to complain.
My sleep is poor and fitful, as the foe controls the sky.
How long can we endure this siege? How many more must die?
The noise is indescribable; so many allied planes.
We cannot quench the fires; bombs have burst the water mains.
Food is hard to come by, that’s been true ever since spring,
And it’s gotten worse since Russian troops started tightening the ring.
I see old men and boys march out in their tattered Wehrmacht Grey.
They are poorly armed, with just Panzerfausts to keep the Reds at bay.
In a broken shard of mirror, I glimpse what I’ve become;
a scarecrow of a woman; full of fear, no longer young.
To the Russians that won’t matter;My flesh still warm to hold.
They would take their turns at ****** me while I curse and **** their souls.
My husband died at Normandy and I’ve lost our only son.
Now all I need to join them is one bullet and a gun.

Those lovely folks at N.S.A.  love reading your e-mails.
They parse each line in search of crime; the devil’s in the details.
Those Patriots at A T & T are equal to the task
of providing them with access; they’ll do anything they’re asked.
They spy upon the great and small, the poets and the dreamers,
to catch a whiff of nasty plots now being hatched by schemers.
They’ve spied upon Sarkozy and they’ve eavesdropped in on Merkel.
They tapped lines in the U.N. and other diplomatic circles.
Their corporation cronies provide them with full access for no fee;
This makes our spies the envy of the Russian KGB
So when you reach out and touch someone, don’t assume you are alone.
I’m pretty sure big brother is there listening on the phone.

The ugly scar straight down my chest has begun to heal, and the pain is less.
Each week I walk a little more at least back and forth to the corner store.
On hot days I get short of breath and I must be careful to take my rest.
Still, I lucky and can’t complain about a scar and a little pain.
I’m back at home with the ones I love best

All thanks to a gift from a dead man’s chest.

An empty bottle of Mateus couldn’t help me drown my sorrow.
It cannot bring you back to me, and I’ll pay for this tomorrow.
All it has done is render me numb to your parting words and kiss;
a kiss goodbye, no public scene, no angry emphasis.
I had lost at Love before, yet something about today.
I think the finality of it all, drove me to this plebeian rose’.


When the love of your life has walked out of your life
What remains then to do or to say?
I will live work and sleep, pay my debts, keep my peace,
And still love you when I’m old and grey.

It is bounded by the gyre, this sea without a shore.
It once was but a sea of weeds but now there is much more.
Here are plastic bags and cups discarded thoughtlessly.
Refuse from our teeming shores comes here eventually.

In another time and place these waters were deep blue
crystal clean and beautiful as when first Columbus viewed.
Dappled sunshine lit these waves in this sea without a shore
but now it is a garbage dump ( as if we needed more.)

The plastic and the Styrofoam are scarcely changed by time.
they'll still be drifting in the sea when breath is no longer mine.
The salt sting of my bootless tears I've add to the sea,
for all the creatures great and small who drown in Man's debris.