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Friday, January 14, 2011

SAD NEWS ON A COLD DAY

by Michael Monroe


A light grey sky
hangs over Baltimore
like a harbinger of snow,
perhaps another white apocalypse

as I read the online news:
Was the killer a left-wing nutjob
impatient with the progress
of promised progress?
Or was he a right-wing tea-bagger
exercising his second amendment rights
to overthrow government?
Or was he just a lone wacko,
a lonely man lost in his
self-created world
of drug-induced delusion?

He didn’t know
that no matter who’s in charge,
the poor stay poor
and the rich stay rich,
the sun still rises in the morning
and falls in the evening,
and nothing can stop the snow.


Michael Monroe is a Baltimore poet whose work has been or will be published in Gargoyle Magazine, the Lyric, Struggle, the Blue Collar Review, Manorborn, the Loch Raven Review, Floiate Oak, and various other publications.  His poems have also previously appeared in New Verse News. Two of his poems were recorded on the Words on War CD produced by Birdhouse Studios and he often does poetry readings with Gimme Shelter Productions to raise money for the homeless in Baltimore.
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