1

You leave god mostly out
Of your poems
while every line
dances like a
dervish
through a land
He abandoned

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2

At the Prague Castle
May 5, 2021

The balloons of a fallen empire
The only coffee chain to survive
A Holocaust
A memorial to assimilation
It’s roots in the old land
Of freedom

Spring is here and with it
A world awakened
To it’s lonely path
Around the Sun

Our joy has never been so
Silent
And the silence never
So far flung

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3

The world just wasn’t ready
for religion
let us believe that the sun
is hauled up, trailing behind
a golden chariot
if that’s what our dreams
leave us with
in the morning

But if the next morning
they leave us with the
feeling that it’s maybe just
a celestial habit learned
before time could count
Itself
so let that be the mood
of the day

And let us pray to the East
of our inner eye
until there arrives a god
who will rebuild the tower
of Babel
and untie the world’s million
tongues without fear
of our loving
one another

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4

America in the Rusty Age

These scenes of beauty
Have assimilated
To the way we see
We don’t often see beauty
But rather houses of
The averagely privileged
Which could use a paint
Job
And less gaud

We see pride in the things
We have –
Earned with a lot of strength
And money which
We don’t

So when our Ford
Truck begins to hiccup
And rust
We lose sleep, we polish
It up as if washing our
Own faces, looking closely
In the mirror
To estimate the damage

America in the Rusty Age

We’ve fashioned ourselves
Out of metal
And drawn down the
Gods’ rage
Innocence is forgiven
But be damned
The naive

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5

This life has dealt us
Such a hand
The cards make a hopeless
Stand
In the wind
While every singer dreams
Of another band
And every hopeless dream
Finds its endless night
In the end

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