Candle for the Silent

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills again with fools.
Let the ghettos have the geniuses,
O blessings on poor Greenwich,
O white light for Darien,
for they who live without hope.
O the minds there, how they're wasted,
doctors paid not to think but to prescribe,
lawyers compensated to evade the true,
businessmen incented to act stupid,
all trained to make the moves that close as traps,
taught in the finest schools how to disregard the real,
to never think of who and where and why and whether they are
or who and what and when and how they serve.
Their empty souls fill time with trifling puzzles
that never will be solved: the statutes, the charts.
O the blue jay cries across the suburbs
as a man wakes up at three in the morning
to think of nothing: the value of his house.

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills again with heathens.
Let the fallow farms be overvalued
and the barns that turn gold into straw crumble.
Awash in superstition, they wear stones
from the Earth's insides for protection.
Their lives are turned to paper and then burned.
O have mercy for they have no other idols
but the comfortable, they who've learned to look
away from the blackened windows
of those who know an honest pain,
who rely on the invisible
to see them through.
For them there is no other world
beyond the trees,
where live no dwarves, elves or trolls.

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills with more ennui.
Let love stay within the prisons,
for fear that those inside
will do the things they do to children here
to make them be like they are:
that sword of disappointment
o'er families and marriages.
O leaves that fall and die
and the realization
as the last breath nears
that they never pushed the kids enough
or said enough times "no" to their spouse,
for in the end they didn't spend
enough time at the office
to get done what needed to get done,
to keep the demons out.