Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Daimon Dust

The poetic urge in me
is no pleasing felicity,
nor choice, but necessity.

It is not something
I willingly choose,
rather it is a voice
that within me moves.

No Koranic reciter I,
nor prophetic seer,
just a feckless illiterati,
with a low-grade veneer.

No Keatsian ode sayer,
nor Dickinsonian heart pray-er;
rather a hapless word rhymer,
a greater poet's boot shiner.

Driven to by the daimon
that whispers vanity and hope,
I pump out words like a
gibbering monkey high on dope,
all the while wondering if even one poem
will survive my journey back to the
dust from whence I came.

© Francisco G. Rodriquez, 2012

Monday, November 28, 2011

The Flag Wavers

Paragons of virtue, they.
Upstanding models of morality.
They subvert justice and law
with their money and their maw,
and then judge the disenfranchised
and impoverished as having character flaws.

The flag wavers.

They give full-throated cry,
as they spit in the occupier's eye.
"How dare you question my riches?
How dare you? You sons-of-bitches!"


With their politician friends,
who all wear little-flag lapel-pins,
class warfare they declaim
as they expertly practice same,
and then have the audacity to claim
their good names are defamed,
when anyone suggests they share.

The flag wavers are happy to go to war,
send our soldiers to far-flung foreign shores,
in fights to protect the wealth they often inherit,
but which they then claim they earned on merit.

They call "heroic" the men and women who bleed
for a cause the flag wavers name "liberty's seed,"
a war that often only serves their need
to distract the masses from their naked greed.

Now back at home, the veterans suffer,
as the benefits they hoped would buffer
life's challenges, feed their children supper,
are now in doubt as flag wavers get tougher
on spending re-classified as "entitled"
by their politician friends-nee-puppets.

The flag wavers.

They point the finger of blame
for the current economic disaster
at any who would dare to shame
them in their decadent halls of alabaster,
claiming they are just too big to fail,
"job-creators," too important to go to jail.

And now, the flag wavers,
the very foundation, the nation's strength,
crumbles underneath our very feet,
and perverted justice has its sway,
as selfish greed is heartily praised
by flag wavers in pulpits highly raised,
and in Mammon completely steeped.

The flag wavers, it comes close to falling,
as corporate lobbyists continue calling
in the favors they bought and paid
for, using money they lied and laid
for with black-hearted and galling
men who blink opaque eyes of jade
at revolution erupting in the street.

© Francisco G. Rodriquez, 2012

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Paper Gods

Nothing but paper gods.

Money, fame,
the love of many,
glory before
the entire world;
it all looks good
on paper,
but it's all just
paper gods.

The gods of
the sacred texts,
the gods that create
minor sects,
the gods who ask
your life and money,
the gods who promise
milk and honey;
all just paper gods.

There are those
who disbelieve,
and those who
feel much aggrieved
that god won't kill
the ones they hate.

There are those who live in fear
of god's wrath and demons near,
and religious psychopaths
claiming to do god's work,
all passionately oblivious
that they are serving
paper gods.

Religious mystics claim to know
that the river of god forever flows
through the universe of eternal being.
Perennially creating and destroying,
always devouring and deploying
the effulgence of god cannot be
apprehended with the papered
over eyes of this human condition.

So we invent our passionate delusions,
we worship and praise with great effusion,
hoping our efforts will please the
distant and mysterious something we call god.

We hope and pray in dramatic profusion,
and deny and ignore our internal confusion
about the silence and absence we perceive
from the paper gods we serve.

Living and breathing,
our hearts ever beating,
we are the reality of
god's kingdom come.
No future, better version,
no paradise, or promise of virgins,
we are the leaves of grass
sown by god's green thumb.

Wad up and smash them,
rip up and trash them,
those paper gods we
cherish and hold.

Understand and embrace them,
uplift and replace them,
our brothers and sisters,
the faces of god's soul.

© Francisco G. Rodriquez, 2012

Monday, November 07, 2011

Broken Home for the Holidays

Two kids
caught between
two homes,
two families,
two holidays.

With you this year,
with me next,
now one about to
leave the nest,
and we each wonder
about the following time
he visits this
broken home
for the holidays.

The fiction is
that children live
just fine between
two homes.

The reality says
that kids instead
are better when
two parents make
a whole.

Life is life, though,
and we grew apart,
we went to court,
I lost your heart.

Now our kids
adjust the best
they can.
They run their lives
through familial
quick sand
as they navigate
these broken homes
for the holidays.

© Francisco G. Rodriquez, 2012