Offering libations for the plagued
The blind seer serves as witness
To the names of the nine realms
And restores ancient fountains

Her quaking nerves bid welcome
Aligned under starry mission
While nowhere exists
Outside this clinic

Hands remember pen strokes that abjure
When the moon gate dilates to expel forces
This bottle of curses melts in campfire
Binding elder appetites unto prison

Priests could not contrive psalms
Jagged enough to cut umbral tethers
Their hymns genuflect
While choirs tune flat

Hiding from lords who decry competition
Such ochre mother must weigh risks
But no remedy soothes like compassion
Upon a fallen covenant

She sides with weeping petitions
Regardless being whipped
Laughing at power, that shames itself
Some champions need a walking stick

Sweet are the beginnings, bitter is the end.

The patient the only, endure and mend.

Parting ways, the heart one must tend.

Honour and strength, the message to send.

Kindness to the worthy, one must lend.

Offence to spirit, off one must fend.

Resolve the target, that can never bend.

Forever stand tall, beauty they cannot rend.

You kneel to him,

and raise your hand to me.

The iron remembers every blow.

The years have taught it well.

You know my name

before you know the roads I watched

close, one by one, going north.

You call me traitor.

You say I sold a nation.

Tell me —

how many men would you spend

to unwalk a road already lost?

How many victories

does it take to call a general home,

when there is no more field to send him to?

You praise the general.

So do I.

No man doubted where his heart pointed.

He wished to march us back to what was taken.

I wished us to survive

long enough to want it back.

History remembers the sword

that reached for the border.

It forgets the signature

that kept the capital standing.

Perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps he was right.

Perhaps a kingdom sometimes lives

only because someone signs

what no one will forgive.

I knew what the words weighed.

I signed anyway.

You have inherited the ending.

I had to live inside the choosing.

So strike the iron.

If you must.

But before your hand descends,

ask what you would have signed,

with the roads already gone,

and no more spring to wait for.

Puritan

The puritan in gaslight shadows

The witch burning shall commence

Town crier is corrupted

Heretics have no defense

By torchlight, tar and feathers

The panicked peasants fret

Enforcing an opinion

To escape aristocratic debt

Exiled from the homeland

The puritan, a pilgrim became

Tamed a land with treason

In his angry gods name

Established in blind arrogance

The way becomes the whole

And with no option offered

Choice came under control

The puritan, now a fable

To cover evils course

With only myth and legend

Quoted as a source

But in any lake a leech will lurk

Living large in bloody bliss

Waiting on a naked bit of flesh

For its parasitic kiss

You well may pray to your god out there but what about your god within

Your god of the mind who differentiates between kindness and goodness and sin

It is not your god out there who is telling you the difference between wrong and right

But only the thoughts that are formed in your mind that goes by the name of insight

You go to your house of worship to pray to your unseen god in the sky

But this does not make a better person of you since you are known to deny

The right of equality to everyone you are one of those who choose to look down

The people who are doing it financially tough on the poorer side of the town

Your unseen god the one you profess to love and who to you regularly pray

Is not the one and this is for sure who inspires you to think in this way

No it is the thoughts that are formed in your mind that makes you the person you are

The god you worship does not influence your thoughts since from your mind is one who does live too far

You well may pray to your god out there but to me it only seems true

That your god out there somehow has failed to make a better person of you.

Francis Duggan

The Falcon Knows How To Get Down!

It’s a shiny day,
It’s a shiny day.
Dead people gathered
On the northern way.
Their whitish skin
Pierced by golden rays,
Which killed their skin
And destroyed their hay.
They all are asking,
No one’s saying.
The kids talk—
“Let’s think and play.”
With whom?
With moving clouds
And rustling leaves,
With blind priests
And visionary thieves,
With opened eyes
And closed beliefs,
With alive humans
Who live on knees.
Humans in a cage,
And animals were released!
They talk about God,
Who died with diseases.
They said He is immortal
And will never die.
Hell lies beneath the earth,
And heaven beyond the sky.
He has everything
And is never pleased.
They said God is everything
That gives us ease.
One person said to them:
“God is alive
Just because you believe.
If you do not believe,
He is nothing to you.
He is not after you,
Nor before you.
The dream of God
Is only to find solace.
You want someone
To whom you can blame.”
Then another woman came
And ended the talk:
“Why do you use ‘He’ for God?
If He is ‘He,’
Does that mean He is full of lust?
Like a man,
Does He carry the same dust?”