And then they came from the north,
Emboldened guns in their hands;
They came to take control of their dreams.
Salacious plunder, life henceforth,
Greedy devastation expands
Such young eyes to witness their schemes.
You lived with rubble and in dirt,
Forgotten refugee left behind
In a world that no longer seems to care.
You see, we don’t want to be curt
But with our own problems combined
We let you starve, and then die, in despair.




https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/world/middleeast/yemen-starvation-amal-hussain.html

Disney




Did you draw your life; or did life draw you?
Born in Chicago, in winter’s snow.
Was childhood cold, full of misery?
In Missouri, where you go on to grow.
West coast lights call, on the move again;
That lucky rabbit paths your way.
You put away your fear, Mickey comes alive,
Your destiny set, ‘toons start to allay
That innate fear inside from child until now
And beyond all you ever attain
All began with fear, but quelled with a smile,
Unless mice return to haunt you again.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney

I was there, I saw it, Beaufort, North Caroline
A hamlet of sorts, ocean hugged, just sublime,
There’s a house near the water, on its front a sign seared
“Beware all who enter. This was the home of Blackbeard.”
Born 1680, England’s Bristol, Teach or Tack by name,
Fictitious personas, it’s the pirate’s game.
He sailed for the Caribbean as a ****** of the time;
From home port of Jamaica, fighting Annie’s war before turning crime.
Two captains by his side, they plundered merchant ships,
Cargo seized, often vessels, on their pirating trips.
A man with a thick beard, braided black in pigtails;
The ominous harbinger; full wind in his sails.
No captives were harmed, yet many vessels met their graves;
His ferocious reputation could be viewed with some praise.
In 1718, now a commodore, at the height of power,
He blocked the port of Charles Town, no guard ships, no search tower.
For a week; nine vessels stripped, the Crowley’s plutocrats were held,
Passengers questioned, then locked below, then an exchange, unparalleled.
The lives of men for medication, and maybe some trinkets on the sly,
They set sail for home port, run aground, problems intensify.
Once home, Blackbeard was offered a Royal Pardon from the British court
And that’s why the seared sign is on a home in Beaufort.

Weakness is there to be exploited.
You learned fast, you saw the siege grow.
Abandoned, alone, countries disembowelled;
You scheme on which way to go.
Once home you rise as the shadow that can –
Fierce loyalty has benefits to come.
Quietly, the wolf, in your sheepskin coat
Plans to undo all that’s been done.
Leningrad’s voice became Yeltsin’s debt
Their safe passage guaranteed your gain.
Control reaches out - your life long advent -
As you tighten that belt from Baskov Lane.

Weaknesses are to be taken advantage of.
You learned fast, you saw the siege grow.
Abandoned, alone, countries disembowelled;
You scheme on which way to go.
Once home you rise as the shadow that can –
Fierce loyalty has benefits to come.
Quietly, the wolf, in your sheepskin coat
You plan to undo all that’s been done.
Leningrad’s voice became Yeltsin’s debt
Their safe passage guaranteed your gain.
Control reaches out - your life long lament -
As you tighten that belt from Baskov Lane


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

Whispers resonate the mind
Touches fell from another dream.
Story-ends you never find
Wants are not what they may seem.
No escape, enveloping mists;
Images once stark are now opaque.
You stir as your body twists,
Eyes open.  You are awake.

I wish it was so,
How you want it to go,
How you wanted everything to be.
But we now realize,
Under the guard of our guise,
That would be foolish for us to see.
Time has its place
As we search to displace;
Past fears haunt present reality.
We heal, we repair
Because we both care
Beyond all immortality.

I am left here to amaze your sardonic devise
As you head thoughtless down a path of your choice.
The lack of concern in your vain compromise
Lends a falter to the strength of your voice.
You map your new world, new ideas for your change
Without care for your floundering past;
Your blind quest for a cause to help re-arrange
The stigma that ghosts shroudly cast.
In your furor of mind, your struggle to survive
Haunting’s voice from the past, cold and stark;
Your demeaning attempts only force you to deprive
Hearing cries from your children in the dark.

Through a cacophony of colour
Let your inner thoughts dissolve;
In the spirals of dimensioned time
Allowing mind’s concepts to evolve
To see the light we’ve seeked to find
For years ‘cross life’s gaped plain;
The striving for the euphoric dream
Remains grasped, it’s just a game.
A plot, a ruse, or maybe just fate
But a chance that all may come true;
An example of challenge – and one I’ll take –
To prove my love for you.
But not a love that co-exists
With the innuendos of life today;
One that’s deeper, where minds can share
And expand whilst others decay.
A stage where instincts are never void,
Where beliefs are attuned to the time;
Not a compromise, but a gathered scope
In our mystical place, sublime.
Where sapid logic guides the stream
To river the aura’s view –
There I will be, in the sunset light,
In a dream I’ll be looking at you.

When you stare at yourself
In that grand hall of mirrors
Whose reflection do you really see?
Are all those squint eyes
The same colour I remember
And why do they all look at me?
The right is now left
Altered perceptions belie
And can sometimes be difficult to see.
So what do you want?
A thousand eyes look on;
What is it that you want with me?

The reasons should be obvious
I feel the hurt well in her eyes.
Oblivious, I look for obvious –
Some hint beyond the disguise
Of classifying that category;
Unfamiliar with those ways and means;
Left out to muse and ponder on
All those maybes and in-betweens
We use to narrow life’s horizon view –
Sunsets we can miss at sunrise.
Perhaps too weathered by past harsh storms,
I re-cloak, I hypothesize
At the very chance of what could have been,
Those wondrous dreams now lie bereft.
My way is to just keep on loving you
Until there are no more sunsets left.

Lives change somehow, often by chance,
And we return to old times gone by.
Paths chosen, sometimes by compromise,
Fun times, sad times, old memories intensify:
Was it all really all worth it, what did we learn?
Were there other lessons we missed along the way?
Did we change or were we true to ourselves
And are we still true to ourselves to this day?
Different paths, chosen roads, curiosities arise,
We take pause, we need time to reflect.
Almost sacred, we get to honour that space
Between what’s no longer and what is not yet…

On the crest of a wave winged gulls take flight
In search of warmer lands;
Direction course set, measured charts in sight,
Their erudite journey is planned.
In the blink of an eye, a snap catch of the beak,
Their formation, their logistics are pure;
They ride high on the thermals, winged speed as they seek
The most perfect view of their tour.
From above to below horizons change on the fly,
Something’s different, a deference profound;
While we see our land flat as we head on by
They know that their world is round.

…And then tomorrow never came:
I paused to rethink, contemplation-wise.
Why does it always remain the same –
Each play repeats; it all applies
To the never ending turbulence.
We are roistered in this affair
By our very own ambivalence
Of whether yesterday was ever there…

Trajectories arc, the shooting star,
From where and to whom, who knows.
Imagination burst; a reality check,
And from there our story grows.
We walk the line; we strive our share,
We tend well to seeds we’ve sown.
And while sometimes our need – we just want to be held,
More often, we walk alone…

As the war ended, the world charter ratified,
Mass confusion abound, those who lived, those who died.
The Trümmerfrau organize, tons of rubble in their way;
Captors held by captives receive penance, war time ballet;
The fourth *****,  just an embryo, now in barren lands,
Regurgitated lost ideals, lost ways, their lost plans;
And while Nuremburg defined the reality of genocide,
The atomic age was born and we continued to divide.

We’ve nowhere to hide.

“You cannot fight evil with evil”
With grace and serenity, she softly spoke,
“Our past was not well thought-out –
We allowed crude hate to convoke
And seep on through, an attempt to replicate
All that’s wrong in our lives, all the damage and hate
That tries to consume love’s yearning for light –
Instead of an out-held hand and a pathway from the plight.”

And as freethinkers disappear, David Kelly for one,
We look back and see all we’ve done is still undone.

Sometimes at night I like to think
Ideas flow like a rippled stream;
Some thoughts arise while others sink,
Memories flood back in to the dream
Of other times, of another world;
Different actors within the same play;
Other countries, my loyalties unfurled,
Another story, take me back to the day…
Ahhh, I remember it all so well,
Tide gone, we ran on the sand,
It was in France, it was Mont St. Michel,
We had so much fun, nothing was planned.
So where are you now, my blond haired friend;
Do you see me and where I have been;
Are we connected, do our thoughts still transcend;
In my life do you now supervene?
I can be your vicarious choice -
Please play me like never before;
I hear you, I remember the sound of your voice;
You are back and we are ready for more.
But old memories fade and the moment is gone,
What we held we must now give away.
An attention jolt, it’s my life’s edge song
And that is why I write poetry…

Her name was Maddy, a young logger by trade;
Her face still on old plasticized signs;
Please step forward. Welcome to the Highway of Tears,
B.C.’s picking ground of violent crimes.
Girls come, women go, never to be seen;
People fear what they don’t understand.
Isolation lingers near the edge of the road
While moments pause, the unanswered demand:
“We need to know where you went in the woods,
We know you set up camp by the lakeside;
Others arrived and soon a large party began,
Then you disappeared, now others hide”.
Fifty years of spirits watch from high above
The vast expanse of the wilderness highway.
Unanswered questions still linger and remain
With only hints at answers to this day.
“Please talk to us Maddy, are you now safe”?
As our minds wander this miasmal mist;
You will always be loved, our search will never end
Until you come home, are tightly held and kissed.
But her eyes look on from the old plasticized sign,
No hidden hiding place has been found so far.
The mystery continues, our thoughts still focused
On finding you, wherever you are.


http://madisonscott.ca/

Distant echoes come cross the valley floor;
Remind me of when I was young.
Puddles splash, rain chills, right to the core
But no matter, we were just having fun.
As we grew life’s path took a serious edge,
We schooled, we learned a new way;
Armed now with a plethora of life’s knowledge
We became adults, more work and less play.
As life and time meters on as we cope,
We take stock, we treasure our good friends,
And then there is you, the knot at the end of my rope,
You tie all my beginnings to their ends.