Beauty of Duty

Alistair T.S.E. Allen

Saints and sinners haven’t heard our truths

That will light their subliminal fuse

Humanity’s relay race won’t be won

Unless artists also pass on baton

 

Ideals and principles grow in the heart

While wheeling and dealing in all the arts

Leaders too need practice in empathy

Cathexes produced by artists’ harmony

 

Things won’t change merely with cold policy

Brain’s reason is subject to fallacy

Nurture the humane with acts of good will

Beauty of duty artists must instill

 

Materialism is easy to nurture

But agape love is so hard to lure

Into battles for survival of fittest

When who’s left standing is the litmus test

 

Pessimists assume things will never change

Recidivists who won’t expand life’s range

Cooped up in rotten box growing more mange

Till evil’s swill no longer tastes so strange

 

Whether preacher or mystic storyteller

Teacher or deep divine inner dweller

Inculcate Creator’s spirituality

Eradicate hate’s bestiality

 

All the -isms need a minority

To push the buttons for the majority

If love isn’t in hearts of those on top

All grandiose goals will come to a stop

 

So start with your soul for ripple effect

To cure the world of its ancient defect

Free your circle from hate-filled prison

Share your eyes’ light through Love’s prism

Through love’s prism

Through love’s prism

 

20/1/2012

 

 

Mysteriously we meander in maze, 

as usual, this continent has a cult of enforced 

secrecy and inculcated toughness, in disorder to 

survive its bald eagle swooping to clutch our 

naive nestlings flapping in our flammable 

straw houses

 

Corrugated tin roof of monsoon drumbeats

is the only sonar oppression, instead

of ghetto gunshots, on my island home 

blowing salty Caribbean freedom

 

But when I get close enough, within inches,

I read their eyes, as that’s the only polite way to 

divine others’ continuum of cerebral comets,

starry statuses shining without stammering 

confessions, ethereal

earthquakes, psychic 

disruptions, nor

tooth-pulling truths forcibly extracting false cliches of calamity…

 

Words after all are empty shells of

ammo already spent, shot beforehand irl

 

They all seem superficially fine for now 

till I get in their face for soul voyeurism 

leaping adroitly onto their eyes’ light-waves,

drowning in turbulent troughs, gasping

atop bubbling crests for bright airy relief

 

Ah, hidden human nature: men over here 

don’t really drop our macho shields

 

No tearful heartfelt confessions yet

Only Covid esquire knows how we’re coping…

keeping bee-busy, not indwelling… 

writing eulogies for twentieth century

 

delaying military ceremonial defunding

of civil war cannon fodder drinking

moonshine in Mississippi riverboats with

no clue how Union’s really doing either

 

Everyone is close-lipped and telepathic, 

but we wouldn’t speak presumptuously,

without black crows bursting forth

from parched larynx caw-cawing “Fore!”

hopping on trumped up golf balls galore

dancing and dodging bocce balls 

thrown by angels and demons singing

Jimi’s Bar Mangled Tanner tunelessly

past graveyard of american dreams 

and 

Revelations picks clean the literary bones 

of the corpus delecti of Daniel and Isaiah

 

26/8/2020