Library Brooks

Soaking in stoic meditation during bathtime
has been lost in the sandstorm of our time.
  That cyclone of progress
swept sensational fiction onto the pages of history
leaving an aftermath of stock market anchormen
preaching sensationalism
round the clock
            in their broken woke wake.

This dark age of anxiety
fills pharmacies pushing daisy shaped pills
while parks transform into campsites 
  for the homeless and hopeless
with blurred eyes fixed on needles.

  Warden in a Wolf Suit

  Jesus wept when he met
the light at the end of the tunnel
as visions of men dressed in blue
who swore to serve and protect
took the bait
of payment to deflect and neglect.
  Civil soldiers with two cold shoulders
marching blind on red splattered pavements
left – right – left
step by step with premeditated motives
another grotesque murder of humanities essence.

Starvation befalls the poor
  who pay and get played
while tax evasion raises applause for the top floor
who pay and play the system for sport
never to set foot in court.

Trendy pastors with a rockstar look
fly in private planes on crusades to save
  strutting on arena stages
where bands strum pop hooks
  misinterpreting the book of Luke
as hill songs and forgetting the hill sermon.

  Prison Philosophy

Red stamps deny redemption
for the wisdom
and rehabilitation of grey-temple'd pupils

Witch hunters dig through dust
seeking to find foulplay in archives
buried in universally ignorant times
  stoning the guilty behind glass screens
cancelling the ventilator's power supply.

Beasts let loose in the wild
stand with deer eyed confusion
as natural instinct falls by the wayside
for the years spent eating out of troughs 
leaves the lion soft and lost in his own jungle.

Bubbles of hope float into the sky
bursting before reaching the heights
they set out to find.
      waves of warmth are doused
with a liquid nitrogen concoction
of self-preservation.

    Chess & Mozart

Birds sit perched in hardwired cages
unable to spread their wings
and soar through chalcedony skies
with saffron, cinnabar and amber sunlight
yet tweet a symphonious song of longing.

Launched on a clef
from bars of slave driven staves
above celestial clouds of freedom
in the sanctuary of sound
our surroundings are transformed.
Within the temple of silence
those notes come to life in decibels 
detectable by the deaf.

On the bed of eternal rest
where fate meets checkmate
and the curtains are drawn
  pawns and kings are scored on the same board
and treasure hoarded falls short of life’s true reward.

From obscure caricature sketches
and years of standing on wooden scaffolding
    stroke by stroke Michelangelo’s creation
decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
took biblical form
bursting through the roof
with new hope for art as the centerpiece for truth.

Each part represents a character of the film 'Shawshank Redemption'
1. Brooks
2. Warden Samuel Norton
3. Red
4. Andy