Skip to main content

AT THE FOOT OF


We continue,
despite the failure
of our long-standing
human system that money carved from out of our will. Our freedom bows at the foot of an injured history and our ignorance has nothing but contempt for the truth. So, why do we continue doing the same thing over and over, as if the echo returning to us now has a yellow brick road to joyfully frolic upon?

~

---"WIZARD: As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart! You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. I could have been a world figure, a power among men, a - a successful wizard, had I not been obstructed by a heart.
TIN MAN: But I still want one.
WIZARD: Yes. Back where I come from there are men who do nothing all day but good deeds. They are called phil...er -- er -- phil -- er, yes...good-deed-doers. And their hearts are no bigger than yours. But! They have one thing you haven't got! A testimonial! Therefore, in consideration of your kindness, I take pleasure at this time in presenting you with a small token of our esteem and affection. And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved..."----

© 2017 Mark Richard Prime


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

sdrawkcaB nruT (Turn Backwards)

I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason to carry death there. Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just the sons of Abraham? O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to their stiff-limbed sleep as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet, children dying there. I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow of the patriarch, asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and leave our flesh to time? © 2008 mrp/thepoetryman
32 comments
read the poem

Waiting for It

Why do they stay there, between war and peace? Sky’s tapestry doles out guns, bombs and rocks while flesh and bone swim away from the ache yet live on as the food for the murder of peace. Why do we hide from the truth as if it were an ogre while death makes a home inside their living and war dispatches a raven to their door, smirking with the teeth of empire? Why do we wait, stooped for another wink? The sky’s drapery has tossed down ample clues, peace is breathing in harmony with war. (Road-maps are useless to blind leaders.) Why do they hold there, hunched in the gloom? Hatred’s bird cackling with bereavement needs end. Are we not rightly dishonored when we fill its trough with blood? © 2007 mrp/thepoetryman
12 comments
read the poem

Laughter's Grip

They asked me to wait. To wait for God to come laughing, wait on His voice to destroy the golden temples of man, hold my tongue until His powerful breath was upon me, and from His loving casualties I’d at last know the Savior. They asked me to wait. To wait for God to come laughing, wait for His followers to die away their persuasive babble and the murder of Islam to breach the walls of the earth as the many damned souls drowned under holy laughter. “O! The Lord God is looming! On his way with God’s wrath! We are to take up swords and send evil howling back to die their well deserved and slow death! Their faces popped and spattered these words as they fell back, caught in His fiery presence, twisting their tongues into drivel and thrashing their minds in the glory of an Eden unlike any other. And then the snake planted his venom through the laughter of their gyrating madness. Tears emptied their pockets, spirits came crashing , and the anointed rapture of their making grew tire...
23 comments
read the poem