Jacqui Watts
Go The Way of Democracy
It is time to go
to the people
to the polls
the way of democracy
Time to make a mark
speak our say
There is a window opening out onto the world
and we can pass
if we want
if we choose
into a brave new day
Choices opening wide
Men debating their truths
within the illuminated window
Only men
half our people have lost their voice
without opening our mouths.
Let us go
the way of democracy
the way of Uncle Sam
because it works so well over there
God bless the sound bite
the chad
Mr. Personality God himself
Let us make free choices based
on the empty words of men
on the flickering of icons
in depthless windows
on backlit surfaces
on the skin of thought
More voices lost
whose surfaces are not the shade
of men framed in the open window.
So many going without a whimper
through doors and chimneys
behind the light
illuminating our world
Maybe the wick in midnight’s glass
draws us forward
to hear the whisper of the people
the way of us I am
go
to hell in a hand made basket
the way of the world
the way of democracy.
Jacqui Watts © 2010
Ellipsis
Moon light flows stiff like iced rain
I am bathing in the clarity of the circular moon
but where does it flow too
where does the flow end and the story begin
assuming there is a story
Is it about the moon in her icy stiffness
Is it just words in the blood singing without benefit
of tune
Are the words living or just from life cut
a little piece, a slice, a molecule
Is it misguided to search for too much meaning
in all this untidiness
Is it so wrong to seek a sense of life
in the meaning of words as they flow
haltingly from their clarity
its complete, complacent roundness
We think fit to translate the man
to banality, cutting him free for simplicity’s sake
but applaud without slightest irony the obtuse
empty complex of an emperor’s latest threads
Pull them through, along, thawed round and round
Where does it take you into
the maze where a fat moon shines brightly
bathing its own crystalline clearness full circle
like empty starlight in the channelled wake
of a thought
thin and hollowed in the iced rain
Jacqui Watts © 2010