One Last Poem for 2007

Ghost of Hope

The wind before the wire rolls
in a high cicada hiss,
Graceful lines bore through night,
with a murderous look.
Into the coffin went the truth
and threw out the corpse.
Many widowed are still many—
no alternative but helpless.
The law rewards the last resort.
A million visions
drifting away thousands of miles
to focal paranoia.
Debt into sand.

The kingpins of tin-poisoned arrogance
anxiously worship the game.
Contemplate domination,
seek maps for the right disaster.
Profit exists in chaos—
in waste after overthrow.
And noise.
Soldiers given crowns without swords,
warfare without battle,
bare, carbon nobility.
Left as hanging meat for the desert.
Pain is its own end
when compassionate rape is law.

But to the river a voice, into a dragon.
Chaos spent for sake of change.
To opened minds the echo,
to human, to frail sanity.
To hear is to know the whole.
To choose, the road.
To resolve—
not as things, not as postmortem,
not to more power,
not even to see,
but to put on the sound of hope
and dance the dawn.
Listen.