Michael T. Smith writes

Idiot (Or, I know why the clipped bird sings)

Bow down to your own feet:

the driver came and watched the homestead burn.

You didn't trust the spring,

but autumn changed your mind in due time.

The false prophets

don't even know they are false nowadays.

I could be your fan but what you did disgusts me

(the world too).

In my mind society is in “anarchy” --  

but only in the lowercase.

The wind from your mouth was a breeze yesterday

but turned into some raging storm.

And your flat head

makes no sense: the harmonics of your lies

only make hatred seem shy, such that

your ruins are more beautiful than the mask you put on.

It’s your goodness that scares me,

being the sinner of stardom.

Because giving a human pride is like giving an infant a gun.

Hence, Imitators paint their lips on the grease of yours.

And now you indent your eyebrows,

looking at me,

but forget the one who set you free.

"How could I say this?" --

is a statement without the slightest weight,

airy like the syntactic cross you bear. 

Michael T. Smith writes

Pink: A poem on death

To the architect of empty spaces, who

tears a lung saying “there must be more than this”

while platitudes collect like old friends

standing in the center of two opinions,

Hear not what we say, but

only what we meant to say -- those dead words

buried in the dirt mound of repression,

upon which no tombstone can be placed,

A sacrifice to the false idols of the past, such

that we may live, such that --

            [here, a stopped breath] –

we don’t even have to think about saying what we want.

Instead, speaking with voices on loan,

we know the world can only spin in one direction.

And that “don’t” is but a word of perspective,
which all of us get on our knees to hear.

For in this temple to nihilism,

we are each of us heathens,

            who would preach what we practice,

only if to practice what we preach.

O, Goddess of Anonymity, hear us now,

speak a theme about being open with oneself.

We have stretch marks on the pregnancy of a thought,

but what does it all matter if there’s nothing more.

Michael T. Smith writes

Silly Clock Faces

Imagine a clock face

marked with things besides numbers,

and you may go far in life:

Instead of the number “4,”

its hands might point to “Soon.”

And at the stroke o’ midnight,

We see a disembodied smile,

and down south is that marker of all maturity. 

And as they wind along the set path,

passing “run,” “coup,” and “lee,”

those feeble hands

soon proceed past the empty hole at ten’s old hut.

And so jump follows fall like cause follows effect

                As it winds around in an unwritten story,

                                past “The Middle” where Nine

                                                had before proudly sat,

for the time now is not measured,

                except by the pictographic sun at former five.

And only with this clock in mind,

watch its hands with a beggar’s drool.

Read the expression

On its silly face,

Knowing that time goes nowhere

But in a circle, stuck in its predictable pace.