The Diaphanous Library / new poems 2011

They Assassinate Themselves

They assassinate themselves, or so it seems from this distance,
this balloon ride above a circus, shuttered tight beneath a tent,
where I see the land suffering, silently as a million thousands
bloom silently in rapacious colors, and wilt before a pair of eyes
has inhaled their essence, as painters and poets once sought
to secret away to canvas, parchment, and so, preservation,
flying in the face of, oh the, humanity, of spirits barely breathing
as they wander en masse their air-conditioned convictions
chasing spurious visions of futures weighted down by days
teeming with dreams of the dull, cold calculus of commerce,
all the while, lost in visions of excess, assassinating themselves,
though I am witness from afar, lost in thought above an open field
where poetry and painting place pen and brush, in place of a gun.