The Phalanx of Boys

The phalanx of boys

Broken on the battlefield

Like shards of stained glass.

The Farmer

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Won all their hearts with his ingenious plan,

To take the power of the few,

To remove status and order anew,

To restore riches to the destitute,

To ensure each man equally renew

Disregarded principles of his clan,

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man.

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

With a bellowing voice and outstretched hand,

Gave clever pamphlets by the ream,

Arguing merits of his scheme.

With citizens enraptured in his dream,

The public held in great esteem

He, who upon a noble platform ran,

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man.

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Was the next steward elect of the land,

Enforcing each promise with tender might,

Changing the lax laws nearly overnight,

Gone were each voter’s public plights

As dissipating clouds in airy flight,

Their praises abundant as grains of sand,

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man.

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Ruled in office a lengthy span,

But the citizens’ plights again returned

In other forms, with solutions unlearned,

And their frothy minds continued to churn.

His savior portrayal they came to spurn,

“For who was in charge when the plights began?”

—Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man.

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Addressing the scrutiny of his clan:

“From self-review I have not shied,

A moral compass I have not denied,

From past shackles this country I untied

I will keep my judgment until I die.”
Murdered by millions of misguided hands:

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man

Was made a martyr for his values grand.

From gloried tomes of philosophy sound,

His words like a fruitful harvest abound.

His body was planted in fertile ground,

Within the soil of a humble mound,

A seed upon which a gray tombstone stands,

Hamilton the Revolution’ry Man.

Clear Skies

Soaring satellite

Another radiant notch

In Orion’s Belt

On the West Side

On the West Side

Strewn between jagged brick outcroppings—those riparian adornments: 

Kraft Foods, Nestle Purina, Nichol’s Aluminum—are the houses of the evicted.

We are on pace to gut them all

Amidst the on-looking of motley congregations of the deprived and their gawky children.

We build a hill of scrap metal on the lawn.

The next morning it is a piecemeal pile,

Like an unsecured garbage bin

After the plundering of starving raccoons.

To the Creationist

The summertime front-door caroler

Tells of a spectacle of ropes and pulleys

Behind the human mind, the grandest galaxy,

The unexplainable labyrinth to eternal relief

Inferred from a book proven by personal belief.

Yours is a bi-millennial song with one ritual cadence.

The nonspiritual world has practiced scales

Religiously in the past two thousand years.

Fresh music sounds sweeter to our dulling ears.

After all, all are after

Power and control with divine teleologies.

Power and control with divine eschatologies.

You say the Creator has left his mark

And I say you are connecting invisible dots,

Yet you repeat:
             The Creator has left his mark.

Humored, I repeat:

At bright midday meticulous creationist,

Squint, see amorphous clouds bear my initials.