Two poems by Ken Poyner

MOTIVATING THE MID-TERM VOTER

I am the flight of your two-dimensional fancy.
I am your irrational hatred.
I am the envy that churns
The catch of your stomach.
I bleed blue blood even though
Yours is a distilled red and
I am your blood. I am
Your wish to be thoughtless action;
I am the thought that
You need no thought.
I carry the world
In a few sentences.
I am a geography
That uses no more than half
A tank of gas. I am the fear
Of what you know: what you do not know
Does not exist. I am
A child playing a game that runs
On batteries. I tweak your nose
At subtle emotions and you do not
Know where you learned to tweak your nose.
I drive the broad gestures
That you execute as detail,
The labyrinth of one straight line.
I have so much to tell you,
So much to tell you that
All you perceive is our rage:
The rage of being you, driven
By me, driven by them, driven
By anyone, hurled like a bowl of
Hunger, a fist in the face
Of something, someone, some now, satisfied
Oh so satisfied.

====================

THE COMMITTEE

We are heading out to town hall
This evening to commit some torture.
There is something we must know
And the pharmacist has buttoned up
Tighter than the seals
On Miss Johnson's mason jar preserves.
He will before the end tell us.
Not that we approve of the method.
It is reserved for only when
Out of the applied process we can see
A specific greater good, when
Sticking to principles might seem
Unprincipled. We can only
Trust in the on-balance outcome.
I admit sometimes the subject
Lies, concocts plans and understands
Beyond his or her abilities, implicates
Everyone and everything, would have you
Arrest your own dog. We keep
And eye out, shake the sieve
To see what falls away and what remains
Settled with the luster of possibility.
What we need is precise and commonly
Verifiable, the sort of truth
That makes itself known by proclamation,
Which has everyone saying, well,
There it is, and I knew all along.
We take no pleasure, no sir.
It is a sorry business, but
The majority vote is to use
All tools and, yes, you can ask
How many blind fish does it take
To make a democracy, but I am
No fisherman, and we are not
Rubes and just what might you know
About this, after all?

Author bio:

Ken Poyner has published during the last forty years perhaps three hundred poems in sixty or so venues, with his latest chapbook being Sciences, Social. He also is doing a bit of short fiction these days. Most recently, he has appeared in Eclectica, Blue Unicorn, Poet Lore, Frigg, Blue Collar Review, Adirondack Review, Medulla Review, Dogzplot and elsewhere. He lives with his world class power lifter wife and a collection of rescue cats in the bottom far right hand stretch of Virginia.