HARD LESSONS

CAUTIONARY TALES I

Exploding in my head are four thousand three hundred and thirty eight thoughts I thought were gone; dead, proven wrong. Rushing back in to flood my comfortable well-worn ways of getting along with them I put up with just because that seems given to me to be the only way left to live. Go along, get along, never speak out against that which is wrong and then remember four thousand three hundred and thirty eight thoughts I thought were gone. There is little goodness left in life’s time, grandma doesn’t bake cookies anymore and father isn’t around to boot me in the ass reminding me not to be stupid as I walk out the door. I never really knew how alone I was until I aged away from caring about working to be a better man, one who only wanted to help. I still leave tracks for the weight upon me has not lightened, my aging step only made it slower. I have met so many men who said “follow me, follow me and I will lead you to the land of you will see” but I have only met one who I have never laid an eye upon who told me only fools follow and there are places no man yet living should ever see. Now where am I? My feet have done what my mind could not but in the doing of it I lost sight of any good that may be left in the whole of humanity and yes that sounds like whine not made from water but tears. I could use the knife and draw its blade upon my skin curled in a dark corner in the fetal position and it would only prove that I can yet bleed. Something I still know needs not be proven again. I’d like life, I know that feeling but it has been so long now since those days have come and gone. All I can desire is freedom but the closer the end comes the further it falls from me. So I stay isolated in my mind, no longer trying to find that which has so long eluded me—a single, one word thought, maybe the number is wrong it should be four thousand three hundred and thirty nine thoughts of amity, I have forgotten, left behind me.

© M Durfee

5/26/13

CAUTIONARY TALES II

Yes it’s true

I hear the ghosts

of eighty thousand abandoned homes

murmuring in the night,

not in whispers

but muted conversations

about the days of used to be.

Louder are the sirens

chasing the red light runners.

Cops safely blinded

never seeing the prostitutes

and other people of the street,

the homeless and the gang bangers

standing on corners claimed,

loosing their death sold in dime bags

in those places

that once were gathering spots for people

who only wanted to get to

the market on the other side of the street.

I have come to see

I am living in the future of man.

I am living the end results of plans

made a century ago when the innovators

and machinery creators

had amassed such great amounts of liquid capital

they, in their dollar backed power,

decided what would maximize profit for them

with no future thought of how the children of those

whose backs birthed their net worth would live

when all was let go, stripped bare, abandoned.

We all climb through the days as if

we were actually getting somewhere.

But the night, it is the night now

where progress is made.

Upward growth for them

who are building a net worth

and deciding the fate of them

in whose veins their products flow.

We live at night,

that is when the good times grow capital.

For it is then they think no one sees or knows

what it is I hear when the ghosts

of eighty thousand abandoned homes

murmur of how things used to be.

© M Durfee

5/26/13