To Expose Ones Skin To The Wind
Silence
One could say
Says nothing
And yet it speaks
One may whisper a name
Atop sacred peaks
To go some months with barely a poem
Is a sign of weakness
The gallery be knowin
A silence exposed
Is a vulnerability ones rival knows
At the end of a torrent of verses
Silence invites critical curses
Can one hear this?
Can one stand the hiss?
All around the action continues
The pot of History goes on and stews
One is letting ones moment pass
To star in front of the mass
And...
Breathe...
This perhaps is The Climax of Emptiness
Or at least The Alienation Effect
In its very most verfremdungness
Or perhaps the art of The No Sell
Or the act of spitting
On The Liberty Bell
Or of freeing a single soul from Hell
Silence speaks well against sharpened tongues
Rendering them tuneless as broken gongs
Slander will be silenced
If we do not gratify it with injured retorts
As Wilhelm
And The Old Masters
All have taughts
Let us not wriggle for forced rhymes
To excuse Trotsky of his war crimes
Let us instead sit and be lucid
That morality and ethics
Are not as easy as Euclid
All around us war rages
While the lower working classes
Feel the pinch in their wages
When the children of respectable workers
Don't get enough to eat
The system that rules them is close to defeat
Silence can be torture
When we wish to scream the name
Of the man who harmed our daughter
And we battle our desire to strike him
Knowing what Jesus said we oughta
Silence can be a 30 volume memoir
Written like a Film Noir
We play our cards close to our chest
And hope to avoid the worst
And hope against hope for the best
Silence can be to expose ones skin to the wind
Death lies in silence
Rebirth too
Silence is the bulk of the bond
Between me and you
Povey 2016