(x = space)

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2 poems

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Fake Peace

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We negotiate in air

While the real war goes on

The numbers we’ve collected

Make for

Phantom outrage

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We’ve learned to gather narratives

To help

Though hardness of head and heart

Like Pharoah’s

Or the safe distance of the Czar

The junta in a bunker

Technical commanders at the switches

For computers

Will not help

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Stop it

We want to say

Though justification

Rationale

To go on while we’re winning

Think we are

Further compels us

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There are sides

There are protests

There are groans

From hurt

And even dying people

More explosions

Inside walls

Bursting through

That might have been

Our homes

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And now collateral

More numbers

Say we’re winning

Why negotiate

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Come home sometime

What will there be

Rubble in defeat

(there’s rubble on the winning

side as well)

Enough to say

For losing

(and for winning)

We are done

With so much of our spirit

Surrendered over to

Waiting

For even a surer end

Damn the legations

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Everything

Is over

Negotiate the absence

Of our families

(both sides)

Release the pain

And fill in all the losses

Like a journey through

Bomb craters

And we have no shoes

Only garments rent

From running

And now mourning

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And you

Winners

Want negotiation

Naming the terms

If you can

Through all this

Forget it

I need food

And walls

And separation

From everything

And all of you

Even my own

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And this is war

Universally

With tense peace

After

And new hopelessness

To feel every day

Upon waking

Sensing

And recalling

So much blasted

So much gone

So many

Even those we argued with

Now gone

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Gone people

Name locations

Redraw

The lines

We do not care

The dead

And now

The living victims

Anyway

In war

And after war

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Truth Waits

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And what is true

Knowing that Pilate

Doesn’t wait

For an answer

But consigns the one

He asks

To a rabid crowd

Festered

And fettered

By the empires

And wasted doctrine

Rituals

That do not work

Make nothing better

But a promise

That the next world

Will be better

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Ready to

Tear the one apart

And is consigned to this

By the one

Who asks for truth

And doesn’t wait

For an answer

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The rhetorical question

But for a moment

Left unsaid

By further one

And then the other

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Truth

Suspended in the air

Wafting uselessly

Too far above the crowd

And a governor’s

Own house

And how we govern

Waiting longer

For an answer

Not from Rome

But re-released

From above

Where Pilate’s truth

Was captured

And let go

Refined

And can be received

By him

Had waited

And the crowd

Had it been stilled

Like the truth

Over the storm

In Galilee

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John 18:38

John 4:24

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C L Couch

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Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

(THIS IS WHO I AM)

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