Ellyn Maybe

SCREWED RULES (HAIKU) 

 

Landmark decisions.

Democracy stay or go.

Our lifetimes are fraught.

Someday Our Peace Will Come

 

one day poetry dropped from the sky

and the animals grew iambic pentameter tails

and the people breathed in stars

 

one day music dropped from the sky

and the architecture turned symphonic

and the people breathed in harmony

 

one day memory dropped from the sky

and the past present and future sifted like flour

and the people breathed in wonder

 

smoke and ash

as distant as two sides of the same coin

 

                          

Originally written and published for S.A. Griffin’s project, The Poetry Bomb

2016: The Year The 20th Century Finally Died

 

The year so many musicians died and the year

Freedom seemed to be moving underground

Caskets filled the air.

We live in times of turmoil, clocks beating quicker and quicker.

Middle age seems old.

Seniors seem timeless.

 

There’s a lethargy in the way people move.

There’s a liturgy on the tip of our tongues.

There’s something in the morning cereal.

It looks like newsprint.

There’s something in the evening news.

It seems like farce.

 

As though this couldn’t be real.

This over-the-top peek into tragedy’s eyelid.

This shiver that lives in our psyche like snow.

We ski into another winter.

The world is on a ski lift.

Cocoa is leaving its face around a cup.

We stir and it’s January.

We stir and it’s the 20^th Century.

We stir and it looks like it’s black and white newsreels.

History tries to repeat itself as the people in power like sequels.

People wear the hero mask, the death mask, the face, and the heart.

People make choices.  The stores sell everything.

 

One of the strongest songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein,

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,

Prejudging is the name of the game so many households play.

Play rummi kub instead.

Play solitaire, don’t be influenced by peers.

One minute to midnight but people don’t know if the year

 will leave us dangling from some threshold.

History said, look at me with your eyes aflame.

Burn my pain in your memory.

Walk into the libraries and kiss all the spines.

 

The Earth is spinning whether people stay on it or not.

What if Earth falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it.

The last person on Earth will carry a pencil.

That is why Earth has survived this long.