Awkwardness

Sometimes I do not know what I should say;

And yet I'm sure that I speak anyway.

It's often words I do not quite believe 

Or that some social script suggests to me;

The way you speak to those who need to grieve,

Or those who wish impossibility;

How you converse with people you don't know 

And have no urge or need to meet again

But whose approval you still need, and so

You have to be polite to them, just then.

All sorts of conversations must exist

To make this world keep spinning round and round.

I have to have them. I'll just make a list,

And hope to get through each one safe and sound.

Juneteenth Views

The sky is bluer than the flag below it;

The corn is greener than the cash it brings;

The clouds are decoration, and they know it;

The trees a fringe that to the edges clings.

The vision knit together is a wonder:

A countryside unequalled anywhere.

Let nothing that may come rend it asunder;

Let it remain forever whole and fair.

Yet mankind, who has set forth field and tree,

Will also threaten what has been created;

The corn a battlefield may sometime be,

If violence uncaged be not abated,

And bodies may be buried in the soil 

That once spoke to the beauty of our toil.

Amtrak

I really, really want to take the train.

I can't convey through text how desperately:

It scratches certain itches in my brain

To travel distance locomotively.

I have, in other countries, been transported

Across two hundred miles in two hours;

It was a case of see it, say it, sorted:

Yet here it seems forever past our powers.

We would bemoan the distances we cross

And claim it impossible to better;

Yet history reveals such claims are dross:

Our past did not experience this fetter.

I ask a simple question in this rhyme:

Can we not run a goddamn train on time?

Lilacs

No matter where I am or how I feel

No matter if the day was good or bad;

No matter what experience I had,

Or if the world around me seems unreal;

No matter if the sunlight seems to peel

The surface off my eyelids 'til I'm mad;

Or I conceive myself an undergrad

With hair unwhitened and a spine of steel;

No matter how I age or I decay,

No matter how I joy in my delights;

No matter if I struggle every day

Or wander wondering past wondrous sights,

The smell of lilacs, no matter how mild

Will bring me back to when I was a child.