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National Spleen

Mark Fleury

The failing health of a nation
Drools out identical buildings.
The tops of trees, clear cutted
In gravity’s shadows (the end of lives)
Such as the embarrassing
Horror of our own masks
Falling off, pulled downward
By way of the spleen (blood
Filtered, below the stomach)

And before the Cross in the skull,
Like a dying door, a Ring, electric,
Of planet shaped and sounded life,
Surrounding our flesh and
Passions, in between the heart
And its rhythm, such as where

Is a breeze’s beginning? unanswered
By the ruthless, clinical clock.
Blue sky exposed by the trees, felled
For sprawl or prisons: rows of
Beige houses, like painted faces,
With fenced in, dark green grass,
Mowed plush; the scent reaches
A child in a crib, standing for
The first time, arms reaching upward
Behind the wood bars; the parameters
Of the parents’ lovemaking has
Become a pure mind, looking and
Listening undivided, like a death row
Inmate at a table in a library.
Experience, after all, until it dies,
Is our teacher: the top of a fence,
Barbed wire angled inward. Diaphragm
Downward, synchronized with Spirit.
All of our teachers are prisons.

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