Fill their Faces

"Fill their Faces"

(“Fill their faces with shame, and let them seek Thy name, O Lord.” Psalm 83:16)

Those who have filled the ditches with their opinions,
making the jobless into jokers begging;
Those who have filled the minds
with mythology
that the poor are riddled with lazy bathtub rings;

Those who have taken lives not belonging to them,
planted doubt in the corners where one once believed
and rose with the morning to conquer with joy,
and concur with mates who loved it like the sun,

Beaten with words that bestowed question marks where
exclamations once broke the dawn;
Those who spoke them
into the corners never noticed the
shivers that began, the tremors of their hands,
once the synapse was rewired to make them
prisoners of their intentions,
(kidnappers of their impressions)
and left them to lie upon the dictations of
black versus white typed upon vellum; narrow columns
of distrust. Dusty spellings, and tears smearing the
letters and colors others had impounded.

Fill their faces with red, (not from dread, like they
filled the faces before), but from personal shame,
let them take the paintings out of the frames,
run their fingers over the strokes, smell the fresh-paint
(the aroma of verity’s obsession),
until the infusion of laughter and tears,
red blood and blue notes, pink mayflower and
violet alfalfa convince the typeWriters the world

Is fuller of Godly creation than their
constitutions and bylaws can
ever contain.