The news is not good news today--
Hide from the wind and run from rain,
A boat on fire, gut sick gun play.
All told, a litany of pain,
And I, perhaps I should feel worse,
Should give anxiety its due,
The medications being cursed.
And yet the sky outside is blue.
I claim no sense of innocence,
While holed up here--a sonneteer,
With lit incense and cupiscence
For that woke fear this craft can't queer,
This horrorshow, this pixeled glow--
Trade winds that blow where words won't go.

Supreme Court ****, supremacy.
Recession.  Constitutional
Embarrassment and lunacy,
A beast whose belly's never full.
Broke minds have given up on love,
Our bodies scarcely understand,
Wish something, somewhere--up above?
Could mastermind a better plan.
This oldschool wordplay broken down
Can't dance in darkness, or hot sun,
While bullets tear through white and brown.
We've overdosed, the children run.
And what can any human do?
Socratic poet asking you...

I think we know the way it goes,
Stray bullets in the moonlit night--
Football East Louis, Illinois--
Take life from good girl only eight.
A pawnshop gun, a deal gone bad,
Unanswered prayers, unfinished life,
Uncertain hopelessness gets fed
To those who somehow just survive.
Which way is this, untouchable?
Defender of the sacrosanct,
Red blood of Jesus, god man child
Spilled out on grass beside white paint.
Our sport is shooting children now.
Swing low, sweet chariot, swing low.

Only we raised crosses,
Gallows poles, ever spiked
The heads of enemies
Along the road to Rome,
Quartered our
Kind--horses being driven
Without understanding--
Ever made slaves a stock-in-trade,
Built cages for refugees
From places worse than here
In class distinction,
Worse leaders--imagine--
Than our own.
Breathe deeply and continue,
While in the place incomprehensible
Another slaughter,
Then another,
And who would give himself that
Name?  Reaper?  Personification
Of the inhumane, political.
A sleepless nation, terrorized
By lies and accusations,
Fear of swarthy siblings,
Ishmael, El Paso.
Pens and pencils, paper, crayons.
New shoes.  Notebooks.  Erasers
Left on the tile battlefield.

To love so well is rarely known--
Incomprehensible but true,
This thing that you and I have grown,
That everyday comes out for view.
Surviving while the others fell,
This linkage has the strength of steel,
And when there's nothing left to tell,
Still how we lived was oddly real--
No grand illusion in the sky,
No better place than by your side,
No understanding by and by,
No chariot or train to ride.
Yes, you comprise my paradise--
Let heaven weigh the sacrifice.

It's academic, as they say,
These evocations lingering,
As I and I remold the clay,
A bold offensive, stolen ring
Of Adam, Eve and human vice,
Exposed in rhythm on the grass.
Cascading willows, wind and spice,
The reaper makes his steady pass.
Cassandra sang, Ophelia too--
Good words are always hard to find,
Yet somewhere must remain a clue,
A still, small voice that says be kind.
Our final words go etched in stone,
And in the end we sing alone.