New poem (draft — just getting it out there; it’s been in progress for a while.)
The saints of our household shrines are banding together to form a political party.
Throngs of our beloved dead memorialized in table altars in gently shabby homes and clean-swept humble cubbyholes are massing to stand against officially canonized hypocrisy regarding who we should honor with supplication and offerings.
They refuse our tithes, saying we’ve paid enough in loss and pain to fund any campaign.
The platform?
Chase down and face down the Founding Fathers, the missionaries of genocide, the greed-slurping apologists for bad acts that make a profit, the prophets of compartments, the sky-godmothers of assimilation, the go along get-alongs.
The slogans?
“Behold the dead to understand the living.
“Behold the living who come to make you understand,
but know we do not need you to understand
before you stand aside.”
The saints of our household shrines march before us carrying no signs, wearing no buttons, adorned only in scraps of family photos, funeral cards, locks of treasured hair, newspaper clippings, the stains of generations of tears.
We will not lose. We cannot lose.
We, and they, have nothing to lose.
Dark Matter 
March 5th, 2015 at 1:23 pm
My read on this lends itself to a longer line length more like that of DA Powell, Ashbury or Ginsburg’s Howl. It sounds like a ranting or boomerang poem. Just a thought if the poem’s still not locking into place. . . .
March 5th, 2015 at 1:25 pm
Good call. I actually had it at longer lines before this iteration and changed it. Stubborn little beast.
March 5th, 2015 at 1:27 pm
LOL. Sometimes, they do as they do.
March 5th, 2015 at 3:49 pm
Try the new version. I just went straight up prose poem on this thing.