Listen Quietly And Get Blasted

Relax into the waking of the morning birds

Listen to the riffs of that little creek going by

Maybe notice how the rippling breeze makes the aspens sigh

Realize that our vapid yammering is all that we do and simply who we are

Listen carefully as one thunderclap moves slowly around the horizon

Hear the million tiny raindrops softly brushing that metal roof

Listen to the snowflakes fall ever so lightly on your cap

Now opened up, take in that semi and see what noise really means

Listen to her heartbeat and the sounds of her breathing

Pay attention for a moment to just one single echo

Stop up your thoughts, close your eyes and flow off with it

Witness as some asshole stray mega-bass truck violates your home and brain

Get filled with the black and silver silence of a peaceful two in the morning

Understand what he says and ignore the media hype and the office trappings

Listen to the words apart from their cloaking feel-good music and children’s images

Consider the mental vacuum required to delightedly create gas-powered noise

Take a little bit of comfort when the bulldozer finally stops

Hear the pines singing but not seeking your attention

Note how the waterfall drowns out the woods

Keep trying to believe that loud and random noises don’t really affect you

Take heart that all our thoughtless bedlam is blessed by god and country

Hear each footfall on the trail as you head out into the wilderness

Attend to the frogs if you have luck enough to be near them

Know that all their proudly belligerent and ignorant braying ends only in eternal silence

Dissolve into the soft rhythms as she carefully licks clean her puppies

Hear only that dozing calico cat purring peacefully on your lap

Concentrate for a moment on the silent syllables between the sounds

As some doctors hobby plane freely shatters perfectly good silence for miles around

Compare and contrast the quiet to the noise and make your own simple judgment

Notice how the lowly animals instinctively know to simply just shut the fuck up

Measure changes in your heartbeat and breathing from shattering Harley staccato

Answer their witless crap with a well-deserved and measured response of empty silence

Sit quietly listening to a small fire crackle in good darkness

At least once hear as raindrops strike a calm lake - from underwater

Ask them by what right they violate the ancient wisdom of simple peace and quiet

Just listen if you will, being quiet if you can, to our fool cacophony of toxic audio emissions

Doors closing, potentials shrinking, daylight fading

Doors closing, potentials shrinking, daylight fading, time wasting, excuses multiplying

Systems failing, cadavers stiffening, stores boarding, hopes dashing, futures constricting

Viruses spreading, costs increasing, wages reducing, species disappearing

Baby girl smiling up from food stamp shopping cart

Arms spending, rain dirtying, litter decaying, wounds infecting, fugitives harboring

Advertisers braying, cutbacks rippling, healthcare delaying, emissions ignoring

Beer refreshing, credit shrinking, rivers festering, literacy declining, frogs mutating

Santa Maria in a long skirt, pedaling slowly to hospice

Evil lurking, politicians smirking, bankers grasping, soils disintegrating, blogs croaking

Germs resisting, suburbs vivisecting, dream recurring, heaven awaiting

Studies denying, particulates hanging, entertainment stupefying, executives whining

Mountain trout darting in tiny, steep stream

Faults slipping, choices narrowing, paradigms shifting, bulldozers eviscerating

Cash hemorrhaging, hopes dashing, factories idling, teeth yellowing, ears ringing

Production contracting, jobs outsourcing, homes foreclosing, skies darkening

Apple tree blossoming in empty parking lot

Cattle slaughtering, cancers spreading, cosmetics hiding, results faking, meadows raping

Paint flaking, milk coagulating, lawyers siphoning, lobbyists bribing, budget trimming

Pupils dilating, scandal enveloping, profit taking, depression developing

Blackbirds gathering noisily in trees pushing out leaves

Analysts proclaiming, researchers probing, veils pulling, drapes drawing, curtains lowering

Scenes shifting, mud tracking, hidden seeking, riddles speaking, death cheating

Fairytales smashing, fish flashing, markets crashing, eyes casting, breaks taking

Old meth queen seeking toothless truck stop redemption

Breaths gasping, mines stripping, tails wagging, children begging, feet dragging

Souls losing, bills piling, credit drying, military muscling, signals mixing, whores enticing

Peasants liberating, senses straining, liberal bashing, tranquility trashing, shells raining

Safe reading in small warm light on rainy evening

Rejections automating, pilgrims seeking, preachers groping, nerds networking

Deficits mounting, hopes glimmering, research denigrating, soil eroding, pigs torturing

Music drifting, benefits cutting, retirement postponing, education rejecting, odor cloying

Small box turtle trying to cross busy road, all alone

Sunset amazing, thunder rippling, rainbow shimmering, distinction blurring, years hazing

Quiet shattering, knowledge smattering, reason fleeing, minds making, trouble brewing

Glimpses fleeting, shadows playing, echoes fading, memories remaining, life saving

Abandoned door creaking, opening and closing, only from wind

Gone Off in Empty Silence With So Much Unsaid

You had always lived like the time to sagely compose your real message was still to come

But actually you’ve gone off quite silently now, and it seems likely, into eternal emptiness

You felt you waited patiently, still ready to make your statement or to take some real action

Now, it’s hard for others to really know if you were the silent type, or just another empty shell

Gone off in silence but not without leaving a wide trail of random noise and messy litter

As far as we can tell, the space you leave behind still unsullied by any conscious reflection

Your blurry recollections, sloppily stored, simply evaporate, unsorted and un-distilled

That is, finished but not summarized, finalized but not completed, gone but not packed up

Went away unprepared, unwilling and unable to form even a short and sensible goodbye

Borne off, you thought, before your time, with yet so much you had never even started

Carried off of the couch to the hospital, then to the cemetery without even a decent interval

You raised your hand far too late, buried without even having thought out a real question

Gone beyond our limited communications even should you find your true voice at last

We will label it a so-called mute testimony and say it was really all you planned on leaving

Caught off-guard and carried away in silence, or did you actually have nothing at all to say?

Hey! Nobody could ever read the beautiful thoughts that may have existed, but only in your head

You have departed, having tacitly accepted things as they were going, and are going further still

Now you have left it to us impute your beliefs merely from your mundane habits

We can’t know your brilliance and grand emotions from your so very ordinary life

Though your soul may have been filled to bursting, it has all evaporated, without any residue

Your wondrous family surrounds you now, but you call each one by a different name

With the drugs, you cannot realize that they know you’ve already gone off in silence

The past is closing in around you because you can no longer process the present

Though your greatest works still await you, there is only a future that you will not experience

Yet, there still are those many things you would have, could have, and, likely, should have done

In your mind, you kept reserved the future for those special tasks that you were born to do

But the short time you paused was confused by a drugged pain, in impersonal surroundings

The last thing you read was another bill and the last thing you wrote was a check

You did not plan on your self-numbing repetitions halting without some decent interlude

There was only time to cap off your life with a short period of deliriously painful suffering

Torn away so quickly and completely with barely time for the briefest of regrets

Gone off in a silence that we can only try to differentiate from a simple & mindless emptiness