FOR THESE TIMES

ECHOING MARKHAM

To you who do the bidding of the billionaires
I have concerns.
I wonder where it will all lead to.
I wonder what kind of world will emerge
When every utterance of truth is falsified,
When there is no place solid to stand,
When power and aggression rule,
When dollars corrupt every human thought,
When all integrity succumbs to profit?

Let us no longer fool ourselves
Believing in Democracy’s idyllic slogan
Of the People. By the People. For the People.
Such words no longer have an inalienable force backing them.
No longer do they ring true in the rhetorical climate of our times.
And if they no longer motivate our leaders to be upright
Then why should We the People
Be any less cynical than the cynics who control and lead us?

You who do the bidding of the billionaires
Who have become collaborators
Who have crushed the compass of justice
Who steer the ship of state toward chaos
Be ready, for when rebellion has no choice
But to shake all shores, when the floods
And storms of the tribal populace,
Erupt and overflow the landscape
Demanding and extracting retribution
From the corporate rulers of the world
Avenging the perfidious wrongs and immedicable woes
This last century of greed inflicted upon them.
    
                   Copyright Marc Kelly Smith 2021

THERE AGAIN

Bald man about to blow a stop sign
Brakes hard, scrunches, puts his hand up
“So sorry!”

To a sleepy-eyed woman
Tugging at her dog’s leash
Smiling back,
“It’s okay. Been there.”

“Hey, what’s the rush?” Muses the tuck pointer
Taking his time climbing the scaffold
Eye drinking the garden path below.
“Alotta work went into making
    that patch of gravel looks so pretty.”

“Huh?” says the carpenter down the block
Cutting planks to fill in the porch steps
At the corner where two cops parked illegally
Balance a box of Dunkin Donuts on their knees
As a bus squeals to stop
To let down the mechanical platform
For a grandma burdened with a shopping cart.
“Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

Bicycles fly by.
Troops of young workers
File toward the train station
Cell phones in their faces
Clutching lattes from the Perfect Cup
Where High, the filmmaker, plots his next script
And Janis, the real estate agent, barks too loud
And Barney, the retired accountant, perches
On the outside edge of the storefront bench
Under the cigar dangling catalpa tree.

Morning in this world.
Everything the same. Everything different.
If you slow down and look close
Maybe you’ll see yourself
With no tweets to interrupt the peace.

                Copyright Marc Kelly Smith  2021

Power and Peace

Is it peace or power you desire?
Does your cause bank on the enemy
Being decimated by your justified assaults?
Is your righteousness more right
Than the rights you point your finger at?
Is the acquisition of control the catalyst
That mobilizes your outrage?

The voice that cries out in opposition to your own
Echoes off the stone wall of your convictions.
The angle from which you view the world
Sharpens its teeth on uncompromising convictions.

Have you lived a thousand lifetimes and dreamed a million dreams?
Have you suffered a million sorrows and sown a million joys?
Are you a divine creature seeking refuge
Or a beast stampeding virtue into oblivion?

The politicos of all positions rewrite the history of their crimes.
These times are no different from any other. They reek of
Power to be wrangled for. Power to be stolen.
Power to be extracted from the waning elite by the new.

And where is Peace abiding in this?
The peace of turning a cheek. The peace of loving a foe.
The peace that holds its forgiving hand out
To the victims and perpetrators of all power seeking causes.


                       Copyright Marc Kelly Smith 2021

FOR THE LONELY ONES
This is for the lonely ones,
The older ones,
Passed on now
Silenced by speeding time
Less significant than once before
Beleaguered by the goals they did not    achieve.
Consumed by the failures haunting their final hours,
The disappointments, the miscues, the wrongheadedness,
The attachment to what never was or ever would be.

This is for average folk manipulated by desires
Sold to them from the first cry of birth— the innocence of youth
Conditioned by institutions, religions, governments,
Commerce, and misguided leaders of the same.

This is for the heroic middle maintaining as best it can.
Sometimes far too far to the right attacking differences
Perceived as threats to the lifestyles
They have spent lifetimes building.

Sometimes far too far to the left ruthlessly unhinging tradition
Propagandizing an absolute view of a “should be” humanity,
Condemning the injustice of powers not aligned with their own.

This for the middle ground, the point of perspective
That sees error on both sides, that notes the hypocrisy
Of all rhetorical bombast and bias.

For those who can and do befriend an enemy
For attributes found befriend-able.

For those who decline to accept
Left or right puritanical thinking.

For those who seek and grant repentance,
Who forgive.

For scientific, observable truths
Collaborated by honest investigating minds.
 
For consensus beyond percentage point democracy.

For ideals that may be beyond mortal grasp,
For hopes that may be no more than mirage,

For virtues sung, painted, acted,
Cast, forged, danced, preached, doodled,
Belabored, bellowed, whispered,
Passed down in secrecy, etched on prison walls,
Voiced through the choking loop of a gallows’ rope,
Prayed for, toiled for, wept over,
And perserved.

For the possibility that existence
Is more than the cynical pursuit of material wealth.
For those who might some day give up their miserly ways
And spend freely their billions on the betterment of the earth.

For those of the far left and the far right
That might return to the golden mean
Compromising differences for the benefit of all.

For a self expanding revolution evolving
Into a million million individual souls
Enlightened to the prospect that all life can live together as One.

For those at risk of being silenced by speeding time
Standing and pronouncing  and singing and dancing
And drawing from the depths of history and knowledge
The dreams the older ones, the lonely ones, the silenced ones
Died for.
                            Copyright Marc Kelly Smith 2018

Pass Me the Purple Jelly

If purple for purple and only purple
Is deplorable,
How can blue for blue and only blue
Be laudable? Applaudible?
A standard met with silence
By a duality of gagged mouths
Squirming under the surface
Of festering prejudice boiling
Into blisters of unchecked discrimination.

And when the bulging protuberance bursts
And the cancer is released
What will remedy the warring masses
And subdue the ethnocentric bigotries?

What systematic retribution
Will pay back hit for hit,
Eye for eye, the atrocities
Brought on by the repression of words?

           Copyright Marc Kelly Smith  2021