James Bell
Paradox
The doff the cap and
what you say goes
Guy world is dead
and Yeats’s terrible
beauty is born and
the feared rough beast
is already slouching
over the benefits counter
with claim and counter
claim that this just
can’t go on with a
tough kind of polemic
an endemic need to boot
the epidemic of need
of compulsion
of frustration
of system all wrong
of making inarticulate
of making inappropriate
responses to what created
fear does not understand.
And I ask now
where is your refuge
and your strength
as chaos in a
seeming warped reality
rolls down its sleeves
to reign.
And somehow some
only see turbulence
while others only see
an intractable calm
and others often see anger
wanting something perhaps
to impose their own order
on an illusory calm.
And meanwhile
the servants to gentility
develop their ability
to ignore the many created
servants to malice
as they grow and bleed
outward upon the land.
Page(s) 85
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