Everything You Wanted

Everything You Wanted

(“No servant can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Luke 16:13)

Have you gotten everything you wanted;
have you wasted your time wanting more?
Have you stashed it away from prying conquest;
have you labeled it for later use?
Sooner or later the accounts will be settled;
credit will be given to the poorest and debts
cancelled in a single
day.

How many days have you set aside:
how many shiny coins are stored in a tin can
in the dark?
Or did you spend it all on diamond swatches
of tomorrow’s greed?
Did the seeds of your discontent
burst like moss too heavy on your winter roof?

What tastes have you acquired:
what timing for this brief untimely stay?
Can we share coffee or give away new
slices of cake?
Can we agree that we want more than will
every satisfy our perceived needs?
Why don’t we leave our opulent windows
and doors
to move outside where the ground is level and
where the poor man sits all alone?
Why don’t we join the resistance,
pool our resources, and swim against the tide?
Why don’t we give away what we will
never entirely consume? Why don’t we
offer our silence against the selfish voices
of rage?

The Dance Had Begun

The Dance Had Begun

You told her she had wasted her days, that she should have
spent more time dancing. But
you failed to ask her, or inquire about her,
why her breath came like gasps of sundown so
early in the morning.
You suggested she could do better,
you commanded her to smile,
and she did, so as not to upset you,
but her feet stay glued under your vision.
Her thoughts wound around her like smoke
from a burned-out village, like the steam from
a circus calliope. The clowns had gone home
before the bigtop collapsed.
You wasted her time with your inquisition,
you stole her soul with your invented advice.
She heard but could not listen; sighs were her
language and you
spoke in unknown tongues.
You could not answer the question in her eyes,
you had no language and made no reply. She
knew,
though untranslated,
you meant well but missed the target, missed the
heart of it all.
She would have cried if you had given her time,
she would have written her pain on a dozen
cocktail napkins.
She wished for semi-darkness, she hoped for
another song to begin. She looked for faces that
read her sadness. She searched for the one hand
that spoke more than
a dozen deductions. She could not move as long as
the suggestions shoved her into corners, over cliffs, and
into canyons while she waited for just one slice of
an
orange from China,
or chocolate from the Mexican coast.

She floated once the silence left her alone with
the one who offered to walk her home and silently
offered her cherries and wine. No one knew it,
but the dance had begun.