Thus I Wrote

Two lovers sit on a concrete floor
She is distraught
He is concerned
Love is in the air
Will they make it?
…My coffee grows cold

A husband and wife waltz slowly
With one hand she takes the money
With the other she slaps his face
Tells him “not good enough”
Too much head
Not enough heart
…My coffee grows cold

His emotions churn from white to black
From love to hate
From compassion to anger
He has been rejected
He feels dejected
…My coffee grows cold

68% of divorces filed by women
Its the norm
In this day and age
Too busy to pay enough attention
Ignoring all the bumps on the road
Death by a thousand small cuts
…My coffee grows cold

I see ghosts
The haunting of familiar faces
In familiar places
The pricking of past emotion
Of daughters and son
Of past lovers and losses
Of victories and failures
Of sister and brothers
Of father and mother
As I approach
The focus gets sharper
The love is sifted
And turned over
…My coffee grows cold

I am truly free when I’m alone.
To be with someone
Requires I give to someone
Requires rules to interact with someone
I can be truly free but also truly alone

A relationship includes constant negotiation of the rules of engagement
Divorce recognises the end of such negotiation
The point in time when you decide to give no more of yourself

For as long as I live
I’m a port in the storm
A shelter from the cold
To keep you warm
In understanding you
I’m in way over my head
But I’ll always be there
To love you instead

Here are my thoughts about the afterlife..
In my catholic childhood imagery was rife
Hell was a deep dark pit with fire
Heaven was a blue sky with clouds up higher
Purgatory was somewhere in between
And Limbo was for babies dying unclean

Lucifer the devil lived in fiery Hell
Heaven was God’s choice to dwell
No exit from Limbo, Heaven or Hell
But Purgatory was a temporary rehab hotel

I believe now in no Afterlife
But we create enough pleasure and strife
To create a Heaven and Hell on earth to show
That we reap what we sow

Heaven, I see, is valued and included
And Hell is lonely and excluded
Heaven sees reward for craft and graft
Hell is a wasted life distraught

He took a risk for his creation
His reward the riches of nations
He has talent and tenacity
But I don’t trust his veracity
He acts the eagle but he’s a vulture
Living off the bones of our culture

With his power he endowed
On his life a secret shroud
Over how he nurtures
His company’s culture
So that the end it seems
Justifies his grubby means

His people are guided
By the culture he decided
By the clearly given rewards
Approved by the board
So why does our society fail
To throw him in jail?

This is a clear defect.
If he has such an effect
If he is king of all he surveys
And all value only he purveys
Why is systemic wrongdoing
Somehow not his doing?

He created the culture
To lead his vultures
To achieve the first mover advantage
He gave his soul to manage
From criminal activity
He got market exclusivity….

Now he’s untouchable in his tower
Of political and media power

Unassailable in his tower
Of financial and political power
He will still die
Just like you and I
Slowly or quickly
He will become sickly
He has not the pace
To win this race

He rages and works
Against the future that lurks
Against the decay
Coming closer every day
He wants some meaning
Why is death intervening?
But he’s a small pawn
To a life that goes on
He held a baton a while
While he ran his mile

We are born and we die
Against our will, so we try
To exert some control
To create a role
In the end there’s no doubt
There’s no easy way out
Before we leave we check in
Every last thing
We fall into the unknown
As we were born….alone

The truth of beauty
Is in the underlying duty
Form is the birth of function
Removing faults at every junction

Do we need God as referee
When we now have CCTV?
Do we not need religion because
We now have so many laws?

We are so pragmatic
But we’ve lost some magic
Old people die alone
Such a hidden misery grown

We have yet to count the cost
Of the love we have lost