End of the tether

The first round of voting takes place tomorrow, and the Oracle knows how worried I am about the outcome. I hope she’s right, that there’s always a chance that we can pick up the pieces and make things better.

End of the tether

1.
Sometimes, it takes courage
to let the tongue release the words,
to make them raw, cutting, not dripping with honey,
to be the cat’s tongue, rough and uncompromising,
combing through tangles spitting out the burrs.

2.
There’s a lake where the moon swims
beneath overhanging boughs, where the dark is still.
You say it makes you feel romantic,
as if the world has slipped away, leaving us alone.
I hear the rustle of animals afraid to come to drink.

3.
What he really wants is a drudge,
who sometimes wears red and high heels and does her hair.
He wants to be a god, to make and break.
What he doesn’t want is to strip away
the flower’s petals and find a rock.

4.
Red is the hole in the sky, ripped out
by the sun to spill its venom on the green.
I long for cloudy nights when I won’t see
the pin-points of stitches glittering sadly in the silent dark,
dreading the morning and another pounding.

5.
We don’t know how we got here,
how many times the path forked before we strayed.
But the trees are kindly, their shadows gentle,
and if we want, we can find the way back,
and hope we remember how the birds were singing.