Armistice

We aren’t afraid of a fast barreling train
Of steel and steam coming down the line
Yet fear the fear of things make believe
Like the “or else…” if you decline to ride

The railroad gauge is a shoulders length apart
Just ask all the dead and Chinese immigrants
Their ballasts of fleshy canvas tanned dreams
Stretched into a harness and bitter leather bit

An arranged treatise between the plowshare
The farmer and the whinnying horse between
The art of the deal signed amidst circling lions
Whipped to terms and brokered by ye cat o’ nines

It’s an absurd comic skit straight from vaudeville
Culminating in a black and white Christmas scene
The villain with the 500 dollar tie, the carrot stick
The damsel, the distress, and hero fashionably late

Most things are done way too much like working
And the way old people’s faces grow into frowns
Versus things that aren’t done enough like hugs
And the way a sprout knows only to reach for sun

I can tell when somebody never worked a long day
They avert my gaze like I’m Medusa giving them head
They stand frozen like a stone statue or paper weight
In offices with degrees and pictures of fish once caught

Proud proof over storm, claw, PDD, divorce and college
Sweet victory Perseus! You reeled in the mighty Cetus!
From backs of beast, yacht and lines off hookers cracks
Come ye magpies feast upon entrails off laborers’ backs

Jobs are just a nervous glance, and a .357 under the desk
And the wafting smoke snaking out from bosses’ mouths
Memorialize this armistice between slave and charioteer
The rich few riding and the billions broken and run down

The Insane

I saw Jesus singing today
His salvation shivering
In the cold and the chill
His tent propped across
A shiny shopping cart
I feel his hypnotizing eyes
Like a charmed cobra
Daring me to look his way

He was sitting in full lotus
Playing a Tibetan brass bowl
Soaking wet in the chanting rain
Reminding me of the Buddha
It’s a circus sideshow everyday
As I ride by hazy Scobert Park
The drug addled and starving
Mixing with the mentally ill

Man can live just fine here
On bread, grass, and needles
Somedays overzealous cops
Harass him and his followers
You don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here
The officer says with a smirk
Knowing that here is his place

It’s a crime not having a roof
Yet the ones that take them
Go unpunished and praised
Some days he smiles at me
As I bike past riding to my job
He reminds me of Diogenes
The Alexander the Great in me
Knows I’d be him if I wasn’t me

“At least they know their crazy”
I think to myself as I go to work,
With the rest of the insane


Words and Photo by Cara Feral