scintillate

kindred spirits
recognized as eyes
light up like fireflies
when conversation
scintillates as shy
reticence abates

gloaming

beyond the firelight
shadows lengthen
as the gloaming sets in
the crickets begin
chirrupping to fiddle
their end of summer serenade
campfire smoke billows
infiltrates your hair and clothes
to remind you tomorrow
of tonight

peripeteia

a slow groove channel dug
by water trickling
till twenty years have passed
lost in routine and daydream
from the bottom of a canyon
waiting for a delusive deus ex machina
to catalyze a peripeteia
to catapult above the ledge
of omnipresent twilight
in your self made shade

the choice
now to climb
to see the sun
or be resigned
to the comfort
of your known dark

intestine (adjective)

when the people running a thing
are set on ruining a thing
to prove that there's no value to be found

in the thing they've spent their lives
and fortunes and husbands and wives
to get to run into the ground

when intestine altercations
tear apart a party from inside
when all good men and women
look for a safe place to hide

when those brow beaten every day
who by all rights should hide away
instead stand in front of the rushing train

when whether cause false or true
we all are exhorted to
the equivalent of "remember the Maine"

when the unjust are entrusted with justice
who will stand up for the rest of us

weltschmerz

oh, the sturm and drang of adolescence
when everything full of importance
in doldrums of middle age the war we wage
most oft against ourself and not the world
and finds us filled with weltschmerz
for a time when we raged instead of disengaged

cloister

how you all
don't succumb
to the temptation
to cloister
your children
and hide them
from the wicked world
I will never comprehend
but I am glad
that you do not
for they must learn
what it is
to remake it

manifesto

the temptation grows
to retreat
to cabin or cave
and scribble
a million manifestos
wherein I rant and rave
and bemoan
what the world's become
hidden away
from everyone