Truth, poor truth

There's no reward in the unadorned truth.
It stuns the nerves, levels pillars,
and suffers manipulations.

Truth, poor truth.
-the unfortunate recompense of the aesthete.
-a bane to cozy pleasantries.

Point your light plain truth, 
toward the fog of human folly.
Be the agent of our salvation.

Hearty hammer

Stripped bare before life's gentle cadence,
sucked dry and laid limp in deference to silent rigor
lives a shell of a man;
a hearty hammer brought to heel.
Once pronouncing distant dreams,
folly's seeker floats unencumbered swiftly
to a sleep.
The proving ground of plenty
and giving ground to those who purchase pardon.
These battles having spent themselves
upon the concourse of the day,
a man may rest
delightful in his stunning vulnerability.

The funny dread

The beast, it takes its fill.
Mother frowns and shakes her till.

And...

there the mites are a'mourning.
Trembling few,
ensconced in warning.

The funny dread of complicit rage
be the muted distress 
of every age.

And we,
you and me all the while
bear benefit and burden
with lacquered smile.

As for those who fight
we may wonder on their lives:
if their struggle be a light?
Or but a flippant lie?

Deliberate mind

Up from broken bearing
does spring settled
the wide-berth of
deliberate mind.
In swells, off course
a song of sweat
set sailing to this
tiny track in time.
So small are rivulets,
the frayed ends 
frightened to resolve
a salient form.
Through life, a son
erects a favored will
representing all passion
long since born.

The human remains

Forget child?
The human remains.

In all those ways
that feel disturbed 
and incongruous. 
In all those moments
of triumph and
resounding delight.
The human remains
and silences
the murmurs of
elevation
living in the great
sea of collective
intensity.

Humanity

Humanity;
oh, macrocosm of the human.
Say, please, that it is not so.
Be not an association,
but the hope of something finer.

So shall the settled

And so shall the settled
remain affected.
Caught unaware in the
blister of the street.
Summer time,
winter time,
that holly holy,
slim lined fleet...
Oh, the settled shall
decompose
amid the bones of
those with nothing
but the
rancor.