If I could talk about beauty today
I’d talk about whirligig seedpods spiraling down from maple trees
Whose leaves lie yellowed and rusted
Beneath the green canopy that has begun its fatal turn
Anticipating the fall
Or the smell of the forest moments after a rainshower
Evoking distant memories
Walking along the trail
My feet play an arpeggio of crunches
But I’m not listening to that song
My mood is as gray and ponderous as the clouds
Massing like warships off the coast
There is little room for beauty
When the ugliness of war is imminent
When the ugliness of violence is prevalent
And the mean spirits of the convinced
Crush any non-conformist view
With the finality of the fallen
Yet even though I ache with empathy
For the lost and beaten
For long lost spirits vanished in genocidal flames
That is not my truth today
My truth is my own pain
The dull ache of bone regenerating
A scabrous tug of congealed tissues beneath a zippered line
Of reddened welts
Ascending my chest like angry punctuation marks
My truth is stolen by my self-absorption
I isolate chaotic messages of a disrupted nervous system
Comprehending metallic intrusions
Listening to the mechanical insistence of the new valve
Then, drained and enervated I fade
Into somnolence
Unable to maintain the illusion of reality
I slumber unconcernedly
Aware of nothing beyond my next breath
Finding a solitary truth
David Trudel © 2013
Chores
Today is a day for small chores
Bringing water like some forgotten sky god
For my green prisoners
Next, I vacuum
Stirring the dust and detritus
Harvesting peanut shells and dust bunnies
For memories and lost thoughts
My routines are commonplace
Comforting in their normalcy
Giving me the illusion of some fragile permanence
That might stand against the intransigence of power
Forgetting that state control is as prevalent here
As it ever was in war zones and dictatorships
Where terror slams like bullets into unarmed crowds
And poetry is bloodwritten on pockmarked concrete
By the dying
Who no longer water houseplants
But bleed out their innocence on city streets
David Trudel © 2013
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Tagged as blank verse, civil war, creative writing, creativity, free verse, metaphor, peace, poetry, social activism, social commentary, universal peace, violence, war