CONFESSION ZERO

Of every city, every town, every village hunger scrapes its dry stone from corner to corner like a pipe organ to dangle its howling from, the ugliest song ever composed. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

The people who are without food are like a bare night sky. Their faces move across the landscape, each one a fading star. Their delicate frames move unnoticed, unexplained travelers. The people who are without food wish for nothing more. They smile at angry visitors who pass by their dwellings and scoff at their bones. The people who are without food see ghosts next to them. They have loved, given of themselves, and they have wept. Like jutting shadows they pass without notice. The people who are without food are like a bare night sky. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

We see them through our collective lens, behind the mirage of everlasting riches, on the frame of our simulated empathy, our shared eyeglass compressing the world. Their faces then made beautiful and satisfied when we look upon them with a vivid shame just away from the hushed cries, just beyond where the silent do their weeping. In this song, hope is gathering around to witness the pluck of death from the distended tummy. A song for the world, not just our eyeless span, for all of mankind, a song made from the meat of escape. I have heard many other songs in yesterday’s mist shatter truth down like bones upon the ground; a noiseless breaking, ears masked in private pain; our own howling, our own wish, our own rescue. Heed the song of absence within and without, elevate your joy to an infinite tallness, lift them beyond the tapering gaze, their bones lay gently down, near enough to cuddle them. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

Let them in. They are knocking. Greet them smiling. Open the door. Offer them food, shelter, water, truth. The collectors of the ripe morsels, the architects of delusion and transporters of despair, have reaped from your wide eyes already steeped in filth, flooded your hearts that have ceased to clang. Obedient tyrants are holding stained flags with equally stained hands, streaking ugliness across your flooded soil, washing away all proof that anyone actually loved there. Tell them that the history books will be thinner for their starvation, remembrance, nothing more than a cackling emptiness, scripture and prayer devoid of conscience, ripened of spiritless gods. Let them in. They are knocking. Greet them smiling. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

The call of hunger punctures this, our center, as scoundrels polish the machinery of coldness splashed over every beautiful and birth-riddled thing. Again and again it calls to us with a sirens’ whisper. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

Something reaches us. Within arms length, something waits on our hearts. This, our diluted resolve, has weakened our senses of what breathes so near. Why can’t we wake to it? Why do we move closer? A lighthouse stretches before us yet we sail toward the rocks like droning machines. Something moves nearer with abandonment, stepping mightily over alleyways of waste, our generous arms, tick tock, heavy stones. O! What grips our hearts, weights our hands? Something reaches us. We have questions of it, is it Monstrous? Is it hungry? Is it human? Is it death? Is it God? Is it us? © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

The drama begins innocently enough, in a corner of privacy, a shadowy crook, a charade of grief in the heart of America. Three children rehearse. One child plays the casket filled with starvation, another a pile of unwashed laundry that stands for the grieving mother, and the third swoops about the room, the ravenous vulture. The casket poses, “What’re you doing?” The laundry huffs, “You’re the dead kid!” The vulture shrieks, “It’s not my turn!” The drama begins innocently enough, in a corner of privacy, a shadowy crook, a charade of grief in the heart of America. © 2009 mrp/thepoetryman