Category Archives: Brendon Behlke

Vultures

We sleep in derelict houses,
haunted by neglect and decay;
our dreams writhing with a disease
that scars our skin in memories
of lives we’ll never achieve.

We are not who we are in this place,
only who they allow us to be.

What they can’t keep from us,
they take from us greedily,
leaving us only these derelict bodies.

Our power, our labor, our passion
snatched from us, vultures on our carcass.

Our bodies left to fester in neglect,
what ravaged flesh that remains,
nothing like who we were in that cramped space.

Like the whole, the parts are just husks,
rags hanging on passively, Spanish moss on dead trees,
indifferent to their existence without purpose,
but not knowing of an end;
such things are their power,
                          their labor,
                          their passion.

Clipped Wings

All greatness we achieve is exploited in the end,
the language we speak used to condemn,
the letters we write now contracts that bind us to them,
and the paintings we scrawl, presentations of our downfall.

If this absurdity had given us large enough wings,
neither you nor I would be allowed to fly freely with those things,
we all know what such power and elegance brings,
a flood of dead president callers, all holding collars.

We would fly, sure, but only if it suited our benefactors,
they’d pay us to stay grounded, keep the lights on, run the tractors,
overwhelm us with gifts of earth born distractors,
ensuring room enough in the sky for those worthy of flight.

Better to sing for yourself and leave them with silence,
write on the walls of your heart, let their pages feel your absence,
paint pictures to paper your home and let them live in blindness,
what greatness is in you, does not need their value.

Maybe we can’t fly,
but we can bound through life as best we can.