I TRIED

THE SHELTER OF FREEDOM

I sat to write a poem

of beauty and love

try as might

I could find nothing within me

In my memory the flower filled fields

mountain steams clean and clear

that I once knew; dear and untilled.

I would shelter myself

from the darkest thoughts of my mind

and isolate a little less the creature that is me

if I had not the feeling that we have thrown

aside near ever creator given blessing.

So few try ever so hard to impose a killing will

upon the structure of society

with the strength of paper bond and bills

they believe gives them deity

they hand the fear filled a credit debt owed plate

and order them to eat the shit upon it completely.

This is but one form of 21^st century slavery!

What business is it of anyone to legislate

if I decide I can do this or that with no harm

to him or her and call that my earthly function?

Who the fuck is another man with his own plan

to dictate to me who or what I can see or be?

The truth of the matter is in isolation

someone can cart all I own away

steal from me every

breath of fresh air that is headed my way,

I can shrug all of those heinous actions away

simply say to myself

“it means nothing why bother to fight it anymore?”  

Even busted, broken sitting in the cave

laid aside for the poor

I know I am not a whore.

I know that once I am stripped

naked of everything I once was or ever owned

I can count myself crowned better in beauty than anything,

be it food or flower, garden grown.

For it is truth, there is a certain thing that few will see,

it is called poverty the worthwhile cost of being free.

© M Durfee

7/1/13

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 THE FAILURES

Utopian dreams of amity conquering calamity and leisure being our pleasure as we allow machines to labor for us while we sit upon a calming shore reading learning simply gaining knowledge for the sake of knowing have come reality crashing down upon us. The eight million charged bravely into the mass of eight billion and valiantly tried to make as many of them blind from the day they were born to the day they died and all the while the eight million who lead this mass drink Dom Perignon while the vast mass of them who they war upon drink polluted or no water at all. Disaster will be felt by all slave and master when the final Champagne grape crops, like all other harvests fail. 

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We seeded and planted fields to grow that our brothers and sister in need could feed from the fruits born upon them. Now that our sun has become a death star spurring the climate to tear our habitats apart what is it we think we can do to stop the hungry from seeing those golden grain fields and not make war over it? 

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We have come so far. We have left ghosts in every room of this house that we’ve built upon, so many that there is no way for the room not to foundation crumble and tilt. Ghosts do not al’ays arise through death or disaster but the mere act of our have passed through a newly added room to now. Each specter wears the sheet of the evolved trials, triumphs and failures of an evolved species bent on self-destruction. There is no exorcism of our collective past simply the ignored knowledge of it. From cave to mansion the ghost’s weight has set our foot to nowhere but the grave where a moment after the final end there will be no one to send flowers for the deceased only the mass of ghosts we have released to sit upon it. Beg not for more time our problems to resolve there is too much money involved for us to want the need of them corrected. You cannot take you lucre with you when there is none left to bury you in it that is done while we yet live. What price are we willing to pay to live, what portion of our mindset are we willing to change, our societies to rearrange, in order to stop the haunts of our present from entering the line of ghosts from a past that follows us moment by building moment to our end?