Dark and Ancient Truths

Dark and ancient truths
Which still burgeon in the world today.
American soldiers slaughter children.
Iraqi soldiers violate women.
War still gets fought by civilized countries.

Were you offended by Cyrus?
Yet our modern wars are fought just the same.
Children die in bombings,
Women are violated
Men slaughter one another.

What justifies war?
What justifies the crimes attributed to war?
War is the supreme evil.

What justifies it?
When is it justified to commit all atrocious evils?

Surely there is a time,
But now is not it.

Cyrus Conquers Babylon

Sing, oh wary ship traveler.
Cyrus sees your weary eyes
As the watch prowls the street
Asking for bribes, and stirring the 
Little townsfolk into their homes.

Prosperous was the land you fled to.
Prosperous, and kind
Until Sin's dark shadow grew over the basin
Of the gorges.
O! If you only knew our freedoms
If you only knew.

Cyrus, stir the Medes
Stir the Medes
Stir the Medes.

Cyrus spoke,
"I would cut them to pieces
"And rip out their throats.
"I would ravish the town squares
"And purge the evil of this land.
"I shall not spare their children.
"I shall not spare the rod.
"For I destroy even the Babes
"When I go to war."

O! Babylon! Prepare for war
For the peoples desire the law of Yah
And scorn the laws of Sin.
From the East, from the North
From the South, comes the armies
Of Persia and Media.

Sing o strong ones
For freedom is meted 
And the war shall be fierce.
Weapons shall unsheathe their naked steel
And in one night the battle shall be lost
For thee, o Babylon.

For the barren ones in the East
And the Barren ones in the South
And the Barren ones in the North
Are ashamed of you.

Cyrus Conquers Babylon

Sing, oh wary ship traveler.
Cyrus sees your weary eyes
As the watch prowls the street
Asking for bribes, and stirring the 
Little townsfolk into their homes.

Prosperous was the land you fled to.
Prosperous, and kind
Until Sin's dark shadow grew over the basin
Of the gorges.
O! If you only knew our freedoms
If you only knew.

Cyrus, stir the Medes
Stir the Medes
Stir the Medes.

Cyrus spoke,
"I would cut them to pieces
"And rip out their throats.
"I would ravish the town squares
"And purge the evil of this land.
"I shall not spare their children.
"I shall not spare the rod.
"For I destroy even the Babes
"When I go to war."

O! Babylon! Prepare for war
For the peoples desire the law of Yah
And scorn the laws of Sin.
From the East, from the North
From the South, comes the armies
Of Persia and Media.

Sing o strong ones
For freedom is meted 
And the war shall be fierce.
Weapons shall unsheathe their naked steel
And in one night the battle shall be lost
For thee, o Babylon.

For the barren ones in the East
And the Barren ones in the South
And the Barren ones in the North
Are ashamed of you.

Odes of Strangers XI; Revised

Trivia, riddle odes
And weave webs of lies.
Every word you speak is
Invented from the world,
You make yourself more ancient than Hecate
Who stands with her torch.

You occupy yourself with every fact that contradicts
Strange, ancient wisdom.
The Love of the Two Peaches
Is constructed, born a twelvemonth ago.
Yet, it is born as ancient wisdom.
Trivia, your weave a web
Of factoids.

Wisdom can still be purchased
So the ancient accents are known.
Paul Revere did ride a midnight ride
Yet, Trivia, you make Boston's Massacre 
Riot control---
It was a massacre.

Auld Lang Syne replaces "You're A Grand Ol' Flag"
And Trivia, Mnemosyne is silently demented
So all acquaintance is forgot.
Good men are turned into Joseph,
Yet all his mourners are comforted
For great lies are being spun by Trivia.
It soon becomes apparent
The Love of the Two Peaches
Isn't ancient.
Neither was the City of Sodom one which stood ancient.

For there is truth:
And it is hidden
By you Trivia.

Odes of Strangers XI

Trivia, you riddle your odes
And weave the web with lies.
Every word you speak is
Invented from the world,
Making yourself more ancient than Hecate
Who stands with her torch.

You are enthralled by every fact that contradicts
Strange, ancient wisdom.
The Love of the Two Peaches
Is constructed, and is born seven months ago.
Yet, it is created to be ancient wisdom.
Trivia, you weave a web
Of factoids.

Wisdom can still be purchased
And the ancient accents are understood.
Paul Revere did ride his midnight ride
With another.
Yet, Trivia makes Boston's Massacre 
Riot control---
It was a massacre.

Auld Lang Syne replaces "You're A Grand Ol' Flag"
And Trivia, Mnemosyne is silently demented
So the song loses all acquaintance.
For the world's history
Was written where good men
Are turned into Josephs,
Yet all his mourners are comforted
That great lies are being spun by Trivia.
So it soon becomes apparent
The Love of the Two Peaches
Isn't ancient.
Neither is the City of Sodom one which stands ancient.

For there is truth:
And the truth has been hidden
By thou, Trivia.

What’s Ancient Can Fill a Few Paragraphs

What's ancient can fill a few paragraphs
Of generations.
One hundred lifetimes
Spans the whole of human history.
The ancient hymns I love
Were once youthful
And it was not that long ago.

The entirety of human history
Fills A paragraph in Luke.
It was only for five generations
That the common man could hear music.
How illusion makes things seem so royal
And it makes things seem ancient.
That ancientness makes them seem more important.

To an eighteen year old man
The fall of the Berlin Wall
Is far away.
About as far away as Vietnam 
Was to me.

And certainly they can't know
The salubrious nature
Which was our freedom.
No... because ten years
After communism fell
The towers fell.
And that same eighteen year old
Will never remember that,
Either.

God of Our Youth

What the devil wants are happy monkeys
Silent, with no knowledge of future's past.
Dancing with the strobes lit, and faces pale.
Exerted with all fun and copulate 
With the familiar sting of sexual touch.
Children to be raised by their bonobos
To grow up without knowing what love is.
Silent, with no knowledge, no speech, no thought
Language simplified to terse chords of
A ten thousand word vocabulary.
No one works, no one has their property
Starved; feeding on the remaining surplus
Of past generation's stores of green corn.
Breaking down the windows of good people
To steal from them their hard earned silver coins.
At the end, hell's the deserted cities
Its deserts the overgrown farmer's fields
Its dried up river beds the State's drained stores.
This is Socialism, God of our Youth.

Lie of the Land

He's a zealot, with a cause which he wishes
To bring to the nations. He wishes to persuade.
The federal agents were called,
And they came.

They scientifically looked into his life
They turned over every leaf.
They knew, they had a hunch
He was the one who they were looking for.

After finding no evidence,
Save a lengthy confession
They turned over more leafs.
They turned his family against him
They became their lovers, their friends
Their family too.

The man was a zealot
They thought,
And obviously a wicked fool.
It must be that he was bad
So they infiltrated his family
And then they found nothing.

After expending resources on it for so long
Egos were at stake.
For they knew he was the culprit...
The culprit of a thousand lies.
A thousand rants.
He spoke so often
And his speech was his crime.
So they investigated him
And began to censure speech.

It soon became that they closed down the portals
Of free communication.
And nobody but their preferred brand was heard.
So, it was heard, and everyone followed it.
They danced in their euro-discos
And they took their benevolent drugs.
They partied till the night was dawn.

And the man they investigated
Found it lacking.
For speech was his greatest ally.
Yet, they had broken it
For it was to them illegal use of speech
Therefore, they prosecuted him on crimes against humanity
For speaking an erring word.
Every word was weighed in the balance
And they pored over all the conversations he had
Finding that he had too much curiosity.
And that they needed to stifle
For he stumbled upon some ancient things
Which they wanted to keep secret.

Then came the world where alligators were our comforters
And men were tried for their speech.
The errant man was happy
But the man who valued the sacred right to exercise his tongue
It was found that he was guilty of the most heinous crime,
Not believing in the lie of the land.

To Succeed at Anything

To succeed at anything
 It takes an intimate knowledge
 Of the fundamentals.
 Before you can be called a professional
 You must know inside and out
 The most basic things. 
 
 In writing, those fundamentals  
 Are Prefixes and Suffixes
 Knowledge of Clause and Phrase
 Knowledge of Parts of Speech
 Knowing Punctuation
 Knowledge of Composition---
 Plot for Narrative
 Thesis for Essay---
 Knowledge of Literary Device
 Knowledge of Justice
 A mastery of words
 An ability to read the most difficult language
 An ability to understand another man perfectly
 And a childlike joy learning all of it.
   
 At any craft, at any profession
 This analogy must apply.
 
 

I Saw Truth with Her Lover

I saw Truth with her lover
In the dark;
I took my raiment, and galloped far away
To where I slew a knight in combat
And took his woman from him.
I had then found a tree
Of which I wished to make her a garland from
Yet the tree bled and spoke.
He told me of a wicked sorceress
Who made he and his lover into those trees.
I had found, also, that the knight I slew
Had two brothers.
I found too many enemies
Yet was I angry with the Truth
For her adultery;
For why would she be in another's bed
And not mine, when I was her betrothed?
I had not seen t'wasn't her
In that bed, but rather the apparition of Morpheus.
For Truth, she seemed, slept nude with Hecate
Yet it was only a magical spell
Which made Truth seem a whore.