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