Perfect Design

Nothing has been made that does not need

Upkeep and maintenance as time goes by.

Time will corrode the mountains high,

Silt up the river, set the field to seed

(Exhaust the crop and then exalt the weed),

Tear buildings down, and make their walls a sty

(Or bury them so they can't see the sky).

Time does all this not from disdain or greed

But by its nature. And so we must fight;

We must push back the power of decay

With constant work, unthankful and unceasing.

And since the shit is constantly increasing

The need for this will never go away:

But many hands can make the hard work light.

Mortality Rates

I sit and read the poems of the dead

Who wrote as dead men do about their sons

Who likewise died. They were before I read,

Before they wrote the poems. This line runs

Through almost every poet. Everyone's

Constantly in mourning for a child

They lost; sometimes a wife. There are tons

And tons of these, emotions running wild 

(As it should be, for who is calm and mild

When fathers bury sons?). I read and read

My own emotion tenderly beguiled

And feel the anger that the poems feed:

Children don't die the same way now, but will

We have vaccines. To end them is to kill.

Fish

Here in America, between the coasts

Christianity is like the sea

Invisible, and salty as can be.

Haunted as we are by undead ghosts

(The genocides we've done, in all their hosts)

We cannot exorcise them properly

Until we recognize that to be free

Is nothing like our vain and feeble boasts.

The irony that rises above all

Is that true Christlike care could make us so

But when I hear of Christ, it does not call

For good for all, but gold for those we know

And so we all remain in total thrall

To impulse--which true freedom must forego.

Of July

I had a country once, and I had faith

That what it strived for, if not did, was good.

That surety is dead; an empty wraith 

That only shrieks in tones of could and should.

I hoped my nation would do what it would

To help the sick, to free those under bond:

That what it had of burning cross and hood 

Was banished to the past. But that was fond.

It all remains. Not banished to beyond

But living, breathing in my hopes' dead shell

As if the hope itself had somehow spawned

Its revenant, and born it out of hell.

Yet looking at the thing that I abhor

It is the same as what it was before.

Gather Us In

The song that we sing will tell God to gather

The people together, and make them God's own;

But I have an inkling that God would much rather

We gather ourselves; not like seeds to be sown

But livestock to pasture, or people to freedom

More self-motivated, more ready to go

Aware of our hungers and eager to feed 'em

Not crops that the sower must gather and sow.

For God can most certainly sow as God wishes

(And make things spring up that were never before

Like the insects, the water, the land, and the fishes,

The light and the darkness, and so many more)

But the point of our lives is not passive obeying

But living the life that itself is our praying.

Nightscape

There's people here, out on the streets at night.

That is enough itself to make me glad.

They glow themselves, without the aid of light

And loosen what I hadn't noticed had

Grown tense. I'd almost say it's sad

How quickly everything falls into place:

I'm standing taller. I feel like a cad,

Cheating on the city I'd replace

That doesn't run this kind of nighttime race. 

It's not it's fault. But there are people here 

Refusing to cede night the public space:

No emptiness. No darkness. And no fear.

Even here they sleep sometimes, of course,

But by free choice, and not by night's brute force.

rara y familiar

The bones are still the same. Only the bones;

The flesh is strange and new, and stretched too wide 

But underneath the skin, still something owns

Its past, and while I cannot say "with pride"

It doesn't seem embarrassed. It is changed:

I constantly encounter something new

In my perusal, and I feel deranged

Each time I rearrange what once I knew.

Some things are subtle; some hit in the face.

And I of course have changed as well, though I

Do not believe the bones have noticed. Chase

The past, and you will only live to die.

The bones are still the same. It's a relief 

If they changed too, I might just drown in grief.

weight

Do not be shocked as I grow fat; 

Be only shocked that I was thin; 

Now being fat is not a sin 

But people will, for all of that, 

Treat weight as if it stood in pat

For health and goodness. They'll begin 

To think you worse when pounds come in

And better when they're out. A flat

Stomach is the beaux ideal; 

But why should I prefer to be

Some other body than I am?

I live the way I want to feel

And if that means obesity

I'm healthy, so who gives a damn?