Foolish Words

Why, they ask me

are all your songs so sad?

 

Why do your words melt

like brilliant snow

into metaphors that are neither

warm nor cold,

nor whistle with every bounce of perfect day.

Instead, they pour like jagged seasons

into the mouths of lives

that were never supposed

to amend –

minds that were never supposed

to know better.

 

They speak of a sadness

that fill me with genocide sir,

but you are not made of such tempests

no, you are from the affection of smiling mothers

and the comfort of all that gets held to a dream.

 

So why do your words

feel like horse hair

when we read them?

 

Why can’t you write of the love

that comes to poets

when they spend an evening

with a star lit window and an eternity

of sun sets made from harps?

 

I can’t understand why the piano in your

verse always sounds like its biting down

on the final note of a distant tragedy

 

Yet maybe it’s true,

maybe the sadness in your songs

is not that of yours but that of ours

 

maybe the world is filled with volcanoes

that burst and spill an anguish

over all that we refuse to acknowledge

 

maybe you just let your words

fill us with something that emanates

from the last unscathed quarter of the human

spirit;

 

yes, maybe you just won’t let words fool us anymore.