Crawfish Holes of Muddy Silence

I feel like the world is screaming at me to be silent,

“Quit making everything so difficult!”

The layers are caking on with the years in a lexicon of short-temper

Run burned as engine oil fuming on the side of the road

Of an abandoned vehicle, no hitch-hiking entertained

Only vagabond walk-a-thon of a man rambling alongside the highway

Like Woody Guthrie knowing no one is listening but the universe

The ant hills kicked and the interstate signs reading miles to go

The trees reach like hope in the darkness to see morning’s light

Swaying southern pines for promises that the hurricane’s sway

Will not snap trunks like twigs knowing promises are

Like toilet paper stock issued by corporate salesmen

Spend all these hours evaluating truth finding numerical lubrication

To how the trading houses make their bank before the numbers are even blessed

The world turns over the idea in rummaged luggage ten thousand times

Predestined on the sentiment of up or down, never is enough ever enough

Or enough ever matter, just the direction of a man’s energy up or down

Rising or falling, faster or slower, kill him before he becomes a nuisance

A drain upon the ledger, cancerous tumor to the cache of the beautiful

Traded a million in a second based on an algorithm of what is thought to be

Rather than is and I see how my words are burning in a feckless pyre

None of it matters, soul asleep and bodies incinerated for CAFO grease

I see the traffic accidents and the carcass metal ramming into one after the other

Never knowing why the one up front slammed the breaks or punched the accelerator

As if the men at the front of the line are just toying with all those behind

Compressing and expanding the space of what it means to make ends meet

Or have the luxury to breathe or drink or sleep under a roof with one’s children

I ponder it all and the words never leave me alone

Stalking me like wolves at all that I am unable to do or say or know or dismiss

As something no man should ever pray to a sky and I, and I

Am left dumbfounded in a ditch of mosquitos and crawfish burrowing in mud turrets

With a machine gun of lyrics I probably will just keep to myself

Set the ammunition on fire in the deteriorating time of my youth

Dying inside that I had to choose, between expressing a flawed concept that had some kernel

Of truth, but was wary of what others would think, would say, would make me turn around

And betray the voice inside that said, “Do not hide.  Do not fear. Love enough that there might be something here worth saving, worth saying, worth sharing, worth the daring to be a man in full and not another pedestrian gawking and saying nil.  Be the other.”

Today, today the fear is high.  The silence is berating me to expire.

The armor is thin and I am so tired.  Give up the militant defiance for a peaceful acquiescence

To the will of the machine and I will be the dirtiest version of clean.