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
