I try to keep my cynic in a cage
I guild each bar so she stays
her mouth is foaming with the lies
fed by silver spoons gleaming like war planes
in the sky
Sometimes her mind is buzzing
like multitudes of preachers and popes on Sunday morning
muttering and shouting and searching
like a distant click clack of a train car
humming like a motor, a truck, or powerlines
Other times it is quiet and dark
as black as the inside of a coffin
of a small child killed by an American bomb.
Sometimes she lays there not knowing what to do
sometimes the sadness is so heavy
it's not the weight of the world
but the difference between worlds
that has her down.
Then she awakes in the morning like a bird
but doesn't sing.
She's mad but it's not the mad hatter mad
from being stoned on the lead of American boredom.
It's a sinking mad, feeling the weight
of the darkness of the caves in Afghanistan.
She rattles the cage. If she wasn't in the cage,
we might not hear her at all.
She trembles the bars
reverberating to the heart of those who have lost
too much.
Hangs in the air like the stare of a young child looking
at the space where his arm used to be,
grunting to do daily tasks,
always thinking of land mines
in the back of his mind.
Even in this one grunt I hear
a whole coughing dissonant symphony of
foreign policy. Foreign...policy?
Kink the hose of infinity.