Kurt Philip Behm

The Incarcerated Word (+3)

What was created to expose,

  now a fortress meant to hide

 

Bastions of higher learning,

  masking havens safe for lies

 

Where discourse once was treasured,

  the ivy droops and sighs

 

With comfort their true measure,

  the dilettantes all cry

 

Plato is disgusted,

  John Locke is more than riled

 

As a millennium of learning

  is mocked in false denial

 

Students weak and wounded,

  from those lessons never learned

 

Their tomorrow’s but a doomsday,

  their futures sure to burn

 

Those words were there to save them,

  both the hated and revered

 

All truth in dialectics

   —left abandoned by their fear

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2016)

 

 

 

Cancer

 

It takes from your body,

  as it steals from your spirit

 

Hope its main victim

  —promised future unseen

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: April, 2016)

 

 

Literary Nuptial

 

Poetry…

the marriage of raw emotion

 —and unbridled thought

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: May, 2016)

 

 

That Last Final Moment

 

Who declared politics

 a zero-sum sport

 

Where stadium’s freeze

 and statesmen abort

 

That last final moment

 in a sudden death game

 

With truth as the loser

 —forever in shame

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2019)