To learn to
Live to find
Happiness where
There once was
Misery and to
See when once was blind

To hate to love through
The thick and thin of
It all and to breath the
Same air as thine enemy

To trample of angelic
Dirt, touching the soft
Face of a child who was
Born to die in a world
Where sadness is a by-product
Of legislative necessity

To break minds and hearts in
Spite of all the civil wars and
Civil liberties movements, songs
Played and lost in crumpled
Sheet music of time

Pressing a hand onto
Prison glass while there
Are only nightmares behind
The frozen steel bars of the imagination

Our sons and our daughters
Linger on the brink of
Insanities leash and
I am one of them

The glass shatters as
Mismatched celebrity lovers
Entertain us with their
Mundane lives and their
Soft core ***** re-enactments
Of the human condition

I pass by the lepers
Of television, swearing that
The good times were the best
Times in the past, yet I see only
The burning history books
Upon their shelves, weeping
As they comb their hair for the last time

Smelling the sulfur upon
My fingernails
Rotting to the core of it
Trickling cool blood in the
The devil's dandruff
A former president smiling
Making up for all the wrong
By doing now, all the right

We are in constant remorse
This American land
We were born on a graveyard
Of the gentle and peaceful

Our dreams will
Stir and writhe with
The ghosts of the past

Our children will forget
About the beauty of the ocean
And the serene simplicity
Of mother wind

Tossed in the grotto of anonymity
We will lose our names
We will lose our faces
We will lose our throne of thievery
Justifying all that we have done
On the basis of Darwin

The clock will turn
The loser becomes the winner

And the winner
Melts like

Wet ashes
At a

Deserted
               Campfire