The Lie
by James Coburn
Red clashes.
Silence ignores menace.
Blood spatters
Running down canvas
About to fall flat.
Dark angel sanctifies vainglorious
Cause primed by humans.
Portraits fall.
Parasites swarm innocence.
The last blink of an eye
Gazes into madness.
Children pelted by bullets
Have no time to swallow.
Hate proclaims itself a liberator.
Terrorist.
Cling to ideology of fear.
Hide amid your laughter.
Hide among smiles at the cafe.
Hide behind a worship service.
Blend in the house of prayer.
Take your sabers.
Nullify. Follow the horror
Promising you heaven
But encased in a lie.
You call this a life.
You are dust of straw men,
Smoldering in light.
Summer Sets
by James Coburn
In the paleness of my den
ere I fix to light, muted on bricks
and dusty curtains, a window
faces upward bound, yet nothing
in its recess but a cold absence,
skeletal leaves of summer.
She left me.
So I turn away to nothing
but stairs leading to bent door
from some foundation swing
until a jam never to open again.
Her scent lingers.
Trapped am I without a word spoken
for my reprieve from darkness
where I sleep. So I claw and hammer
vibrations across an acreage of grass.
No one to hear. Only wind makes pass.
Trunks with papers, a 1920s bottle of wine
suspended in time. I cannot touch.
Only the living turn to rust.
She is my last memory of dust.
Into to a Black Hole
by James Coburn
He is the son of a poet
lost in his room afraid of the air.
He munched on a banana
nothing else
Little was left of the peeling
left slippery for the fall.
No one came when the siren blared.
The ground broke loose of atoms
vaporized in a mist pulled by the creator
of life into a dark universe
as if to reverse birth imploding with time.
