Iron-On Wisdom

-
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period."

It's not like I believed you anyway,
but when you asked,
I gave you my heart willingly.

Things changed, though,
didn't they?

You didn't get any better
at honesty,
and I never grew
out of my
childlike wonder,
sipping down my gullibility.
I prefer(red) to be
found guilty
of naivety,
serving my time for that
and not for blindness.

But that old familiar bile
kept riding up throat-wise,
strung to a balloon,
sticking to my tongue,
making it infinitely
harder to speak on your behalf.

There are only so many times,
like my mom told me,
I can be a bridge
on fire,
each board turning
to ash.
Well...
ash floats just the same.

-JR Simmang

So many times are we bamboozled by eloquence. My dear readers, try to see through the snake oil. God bless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creativity, and the Pursuit of Happiness

-
I don't know when the change happened. Seriously. It used to be that people would work, and they would do so without constant carping or waging war on their bosses. People would travel miles underground in soot and filth, emerge completely covered in charcoal, go home and sleep, and wake up the next day to do it all over again. Were they happy? Sure. But, was this happiness a result of comfortable complacency, or did people truly, honestly love their livelihood? It seems to me that people in those old, iconic photographs are smiling most often when they are engaged in their lives. They laugh when they have been completely and utterly submerged in the company of creativity. Sorry for the alliteration. Creativity is a sticky wicket. We have a tendency to look at solutions to major problems and say, "my that was a creative solution. Howsoever did you concoct such a unique answer?" We also will look at a painting and say to ourselves (because it's bad form to speak ...
Read more

Th' Opressor's Wrong

-
Image
Once that sun sets, the stars come out, and the Englishmen get quiet. The wind makes the sails swell a gentle cascading rhythm with the waves. During the night, I am well. I am free. "Up, apes," the monstrosity of a man shouts from the top of the stairs. I have not revealed that I speak and understand English. English was mandatory in my home. "No, son," my father would correct. "It is pronounced Free-dum. Write it out, f-r-e-e-d-o-m." He would smile at me while his gentle hands guided my clumsy fingers. "We will leave our home, Chichi," he would whisper. "We will leave, and - make sure your 'o' closes at the top - and you will see the land of plenty. There will be grain and milk, and you will be full." The last light of dawn fell to the contours of his face and made laurels of his greying temples. "I will be there with you, Chichi. Now, pronounce it like Dr. Wellesly." We would sit in the dark corn...
Read more

A short poem dedicated to my daughter in the womb

-
TIDAL WAVE They say, in March, my life will be a tidal wave. But, I don’t know if they know how tidal waves behave. The water recedes from the shoreline, laying bare the ghost of its silence, showing us the upset coral of thousands of stranded souls who never quite made it. Then, off in the distance, the penitent potentiality rises up to the sky in prayer, and hurtles itself, with all abandon, against the rocks and muck and grime as if shouting will never work the same way it had in the past. Its hammer-fist renders the cliffs to melting metronomes, the beach becomes an avalanche. Floundering, staccato becomes the life, and the line between earth and salt and water is erased by the hands of an angry toddler, who, incidentally, is crying to be held only to be shushed by a spinning, lighted mobile (the one with the soothing sound effects that could never replace, nor should ever replace, the beauty in the lullaby). If there were people, there aren’t now,...
Read more