Sam Silva

Valuing the Soul

A few green bills
to pay for cigarettes and pills

and sandwiches and soda pops
and all of this marginal kingdom which
the lonely travel without cars
transcends by draining all of the bars

....for we are the world's pedestrians,
we dwarves who sightfully succeed
or blindly screams that huge cyclops

...such wars of cunning we have lost
as dwarves and giants always do
in spiritual things that money bought
and lacking that we pay the cost
of being less than human too

just like those animals of greed
ascending the sky on wings of blue!

The Music of the Lost

Composers of the great Romantic symphonies
made dreams which always sweep the universal heart

so that pure of pulse I sit
near sounds
of sweet and reasoned passion

and light a cigarette
near manured fields of tobacco
and inhale a deep regret
where an air conditioned shack
hooks up the Internet.

A hundred some odd years of Nietzsche
and such a God is surely dead by now

who moved the fountains and cathedrals,
the cities and their art.

Westward went the star
toward an old Las Vegas bar

whereas the soul has traveled south
to that strange chaotic mouth

waiting for the dryness
waiting for the floods
of jerky and of milk
come from a cow.

Sam Silva © 2016