Category: Poetry

Living with the riff-raff

Sometimes I think
It would be nice
To have a many-headed serpent
Guarding my front door
Barring the riff-raff and chaff

I plunked myself down
On the well-travelled way
Which served me so well
For many a day

I didn’t notice
Until almost too late
That the times were a-changing
At a very fast rate

Eventually
Every wall falls
Or is breached
Or otherwise defeated

Time crumbles their mortar
Context shifts their efficacy
Or a new technology
Renders them impotent

Night fell
On the last ride
At the end of the trail
On those uprooted
Murdered
Stripped of identity

An image a white man made
Which earned white man’s awards
In a museum of white man ways
A monument to a way that was

I am a being of the night
My energy rises when
Illuminated
By moonlight
And starshine

Two Dickensian urchins
Out on the streets
All smile and curiosity
In a land without Dickens

There are beauties and ugliness
In this world
Beyond my ken; beyond my perception
As if protected by an impenetrable wall

There are thousands of miles of beach
Where no parasols are erected
To shade blankets
Coolers
And the sunburned

I want to be washed pure
The way a rocky shoreline
Chases all the blue from the ocean
Leaving a roiling, effervescent whiteness

Curiosity
May well have
Killed the cat

But it made
A man
Of the boy