The Incarcerated Word (+2)

What was created to expose

  is now a fortress just to hide

 

A bastion of higher learning

  within a haven safe for lies

 

Where discourse once was treasured

  the ivy droops and sighs

 

With comfort their true measure,

  the dilettantes still cry

 

Plato is disgusted,

  John Locke is more than riled

 

As a millennia 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

  —now abandoned by their fear

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2016)

 

 

Between Two Lies

 

The past doesn’t pass away quickly enough

 with the future on the run

 

The present now an echo between two lies

 —as the moment never comes

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: June, 2018)

 

 

Eighty Years Undone

 

I was not alive in 1910

 yet things were pretty good

 

No sleepless nights or stomach aches

 always understood

 

In the quiet calm a promise lay

 a portent yet to come

 

And born I was despite myself

 —now eighty years undone

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: January, 1991)