A Call to Quills

Our existence is rusting - bright, silver-chrome hot air balloons and mind control microchips.

Let the borrowed columns crumble and crash. Watch the flaking lead paint within burn - ashes singed and singing, dancing through inverted, city-skyline poisoned air.

Who will cry - or laugh - when it happens?

There are many within these baby-girl imaginary lines that will drink to defeat and a second chance. 300 years is catching up with us. The cotton-strewn, tobacco-smoked road has run out of earth to trample and pave.

Design conforms to function. Ego, jingoism and blind aesthetic – red, white and blue.

The kaleidoscope of plurality is only novelty. Pretty colors dancing in a child’s eye – distracting those that blindly believe in only this one brand of freedom from truly being.

Who has the courage to tear this tower down and build again? Only smaller, striped raw with history and the taste of corporate tyranny.

I call to you! My fresh-watered brethren. It is time for our farsighted big brother to remember us - but not as his complacent purse strings.

I don’t believe in the eagle glides ascending, never descending.

All of their white-wigged, wooden-toothed words are stale but pretty in our ears, only we have forgotten how they were written – with a quill.

I want to believe in that which bred me, but I’d rather believe in those who reared me: you few, lake centric – turn your head, feel the wind, know which way is which by the feeling of deep, cold waters.

We were born clean and bloody, most dirty and smelly, and told to believe that therapeutic, green-papery blankets would comfort and protect our steel-wool scraped bodies.

But let our skin tan, and our wounds heal in the cold lake breeze - free of diseased, gifted blankets.

Waving high, with eyes arrogantly peering into the setting sun. A band-aid rotting on a half healed wound.

We can build with our uncallused hands again. Soul into our souls.

Grow roses, too.

And dance and sing. But not over skulls and broken beds, and blood and blood – over weather-warped junior high school gym floors, holding hands and sober. Close minded and single purposed - gleefully ignorant of the darkness beyond the emergency doors.

And we’ll sing a song of free waters. Clean and true.