Member-only story
Locked Up North
Poetry
Third tier anesthesia
In a locked up north,
We keep the life we’re given,
Our store of words ain’t fled,
Belief? Empty as a music box
Providing housing for the dead;
The bridge twixt give and taking
Has crumpled into dust
And for the cowering people — wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties -
Survival is a must.
We struggle to talk as free folk,
We no longer dream of the new Jerusalem
We try to stand tall,
But fear appears blinking on the brink of it all.
Will you follow orders without question? Or will you slink over the brink? Dream your heart through a lingering death? Or begin again to think?
We live with colors, music and risk our words and laughter too
This will-o’-the-wisp of skin and bone circulates in free air, not in a human zoo
Some are shielding in glimmering-bone-white-light,
Some, like me, just stutter along….
singing a song that flits from the merest echo of pitch
into the fully-fledged minor chord song of these residents of a ditch
in time saves nine.
