You Can’t Fight City Hall

What is the problem,
what are the rules,
who gets to decide?

Open doors in civic buildings:
dark rectangles with false promises
inscribed above. No light in there.

Parchment overwritten and amended
in secret alphabets that say one thing
and demolish everything else.

What time sunrise,
what time sunset,
who names the hours in between?

Stars no sky ever held.
Stripes as stark as wounds.
Snapping in time to bone music below:

a flag well-suited to become
a tourniquet, a shroud,
a tablecloth for some elite meal

at a table where clumsy speeches
mingle with the sound of chewing, swallowing,
spitting out gristle.

Where is the barricade? 
Where are the guards?
Who is the gatekeeper? 

What tools do we need?
What will it cost us?
When do we begin?

About Tony Brown

A poet with a history in slam, lots of publications; my personal poetry and a little bit of daily life and opinions. Read the page called "About..." for the details. View all posts by Tony Brown

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: