War Poem

He takes the clock in his fist.
Sirens cover the laughter
on the other side of the river.
The air limps over the field.
Squadrons loom through the marsh fog
and search beams strip the sky
of long remnants of light.
His other hand  cuts out the springs,
and time scatters, like pennies
from a child's piggy bank,
the coins dark as scabs.
The grunts rush across the meadows.
If only it were a question of burying
the numb memory of the fever,
but not quite. On the contrary.
It is the command of the monarch,
the chrysalis in the congress of iron,
failed drugs, mutant diseases,
minds picking souls from the gardens like daffodils,
and the curling slab of a history book
burning in a bowl on the ice
in the winter twilight.
History is peculiar. It seems unbearable,
and is all we are sure to leave behind.
Here are the words you left.
They burn under history like a pair of hands.

Horse

They ripple like velvet on the ocean's skin,
their eyes sorrows no one knows are questions;
they look right through you. "What is my nobility
to me?" A flick of the tail undoes the paddock.
The little fellow lifts his butt sky high,
and Lightning, Hot Mama, Candyland and Grace
charge across the mud.
I know nothing. Particles and chance
work like a hand to bring your prize to me.

People Should Not

People shouldn't die. It's a disgrace,
obscene to wreck what you create like toys.
Tell the bastard when you meet him, face to face.

It's mud and savagery of little boys
outside the celestial bullpen where we race
to see who wins the prize for who destroys

with a swifter whelp from end to end of space,
like refined mosquitoes, an irritant that annoys
the back of Phlegethon burned under ice,

music of a silence spiced with outraged noise:
they should not die, once born - that is the disgrace:
an artist stabbing his canvas, writer bilking his cries,

musician drowning his instrument, beauty shattering her face,
breaking a world under a welkin open as joy.
It is not right. It is in bad taste.

Say it is not. Repeat it: it is not. It is lies.
People should not die. It is His disgrace.
Tell the bastard when you meet him, face to face.