LET HILLSBOROUGH

Tags

Britain, British, football, Hillsborough, Justice, Law, Liverpool, poem, poetry, Shakespeare

LET HILLSBOROUGH

let Hillsborough
teach Shakespeare
about the quality
of justice

for here we
see things
strangled

more than
strained

a system that
plods and plops and
crawls on its belly

determined to keep
what must be kept from blame

PIXEL

Tags

Censorship, dissident, freedom of expression, human rights, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, Torture

PIXEL

they took him
to the place of torture
which, as you have guessed,
was deep downstairs

there
they broke him like bread
with none
of the religious symbolism

or rather, they broke him
like a twig,
or rather,
they broke him in a way
for which we have no comparison
(no simple simile here
doing it poetic justice)

just scrambled his picture
at a whim, as is
laid down in the law

irony being, this all just a show
a display of power
power of
the artist
(this their deep bond, this
their deep affinity)

power to
change the world
redraw the landscape
pixel by pixel

WAKE UP CALL

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

WAKE UP CALL

he woke
with his head full
of alien landscapes

felt detached from
all mortal, terrestrial love

that is so
dull, self-reflective, pitifully sublunary

yet keeps the jewel-blue planet
from sinking into a morass
of human engineering

so much of who we are
still sub judice (the great
religions remind us)

still in that cosmic window of
under advisement

GOOD TO KNOW

it’s good to know
we are fashioned
in God’s image

and thus
suicide
is a
mortal sin

but then
we come to the issue
of machine guns,
flamethrowers and
nuclear weapons

when wondering
why Heaven is
so huge but

they let
no one in

THE PROFESSION OF BEAUTY

RECKONING

in the end
there will be a reckoning

us called to account for
the green, blue paradise
left a sorry wreck

though in mitigation
we might attest

to
thicker smoke
in our tribute

taller, more
heavenly chimneys