As if this prose would disappear
like acid rain, last week’s paycheque,
or the Ford Pinto.
   I will undoubtedly forget or move on 
to a new concern, overlooking recurring 
supermarket mass shootings, a fentanyl 
crisis, or cautionary tales as society 
remains as calm as it is corrupt.
   We seem to reliably take advice from
televangelists with Brylcreem-slick
schemes or deleterious demagogues, 
   while ignoring the poet 
         who speaks ostensibly 
        not of spring,
               but of the dread instead.
   The patina of the words dull in
perpetuity and still they attempt to 
sum up happenstance emotions 
caught within disarming actualities.
   They, poets or society itself, cannot 
      know any better when speaking
         of so much worse.

04/30/2024                                                                                       j.g.l.

April is Poetry Month
it happens every year