Washington’s Second Alarm

Sometime around nautical dawn
Blackbirds and Cardinals
sing and respond
before the rest of us
sleeping civil servants can see.
An unknown audience
hearing unwritten songs
While we lie back in our beds
small gods
fly over our neighborhoods
and land wherever they like.

But at exactly Six AM
Delta’s New York Shuttle
makes its final approach
sounding like a dull tornado
rolling down on the banks of the Potomac
Everyone aboard has stowed tray tables
in upright and locked positions
with no knowledge
the slumbering government workforce
will tell time by their descent
to runway nineteen.  

In a Dark Country

We lost the bet
on our stone-age dignity
So we bred new ones
to strike dream poses
and dress up in adult clothes
then taught them to write
from inside the eye of the storm
and if they weren’t scared enough
we surrounded them
with lunatic conspiracies and gore
and sent them traveling overland
past the village of broken bells
where there will be no promised safe house
only a forbidden machine
in a landscape of original sin
while predators come down
from the mountains
to taste
the hearts of the innocent.