REQUIEM FOR RENÉE

In cities where winter breathes disguised,
and orders come like thunder from marble walls
they told us safety would be there to prevent
instability yet this situation wasn’t a windfall.
Then iniquity looked with its calculated eyes
down the barrel of a mother’s last moment.

The gaze of the bystanders observed this act
witnessing that obviously the law was blind.
Comprehensive spectators did civilly react
yet their senses were shocked and rattled
as the incident was definitely absurdly defined.

Up on the high bench, an oath was meekly murmured
moving slower than fear spreading through throngs.
Rustling their testaments afraid to seek to nurture
the flame licking at their numbed knees and heels
while one more life was extinguished with such torture.

An executive order parades its authority like medals,
but innocence does not stop these masked men’s bullets
nor will they unclench their rigid fists which they peddle.
DJT claims vile threats and grievance are necessary methods
to render dissent powerless for these vigilant freedom rebels.

They the observers, we the scribes and the grieving
are without comprehension why the gunman fired
as we held our language with lanterns in the sinister
night not to soften the blow, nor to excuse its deceiving
but to claim it for what it is before it vanishes in the mire.

Orders written in the corridors of power
cascade like winter floods that plunder.
Unstoppable, heedless, and unchecked
while those meant to balance storm and thunder
are lingering in quietude longer than does the hour.
Here, where a poet fell and children lost their mother,
the Constitution bends, before the wind shipwrecked
our rights as they crumble to dust with the rise of blunder.

The Gestapo agents moved like obscure shadows rehearsing
their blurting insults with their ICE costumes and masked heads.
Memorized through DJT’s Sharpie ink as ultimate directives,
yet every corner they turned did wreak of fright and sweat
attempting to appear useful playing Colombo’s detectives.

A widower’s scream was swallowed by Dorian columns
the courthouse steps stained with their unspoken oaths.
While the Supreme Chamber will find some blatant excuse
to hang its robes on invisible clotheslines with their tidy clothes
watching the sun tilt away from accountability which they truly loathe.

The widower’s angst became a dissonant ledger line,
his grief was immense as he hugged his childrens’ breasts.
Renée’s loss was so pitiful as her offsprings bitterly whined.
Now the executive orders, seals, or voiceless acquiescence
where morality wandered bewildered and lost, fell short.
Showing law was too apologetic to give convalescence.

The cameras lingered, eyes blinking like neon lights,
witnessing the silent parade of a decadent authority
marching over matriarchs, over windows, over conscience.
Silicon Valley typed the calculus of civil disobedience
into dashboards that hummed like Gothic churches
dedicated to their algorithms, not angels or priority.

Still we carefully scrutinize the hornet’s nest.
Scribes, poets, philanthropists and clergy will reveal
holding their oil lanterns through the cracks,
identifying what power would rather conceal.
Tracing the line from order to thoughtlessness
in the decree from the paper to heartbeat,
from the oath to absolute enduring absence.

The frost deepens, and so do the deplorable memories;
the ink remembers what the stamp would perhaps forget,
the streets remember the terribly atrocious jeopardy.
Even the speechless silence of the Supreme Chamber
cannot erase the horrifyingly hideous reverberating echo
of this mother’s life taken through disgusting depravity.
Hence the conscience of a republic is twisting and bending
without an insinuation or an abstract innuendo.

Rosemary’s Baby JD watched from glass towers,
his cradle rocking to the hum of destiny
pixels and memos tracing the shadows which devour
the hands which were cuffed. Alex Padilla’s legacy
stands as heroic before anyone could ask his identity.

Orders fell like snow on frozen streets,
executive ink brushes over human faces,
and he tapped the hollow drum of law beats
like Yankee Doodle Dandy without traces
while columns of justice trembled and rumbled
without ever striking the skins for a single note.

He saw the widower clutched together in his grief
like a lantern that would not dim at the wake of his Love.
Her shadow was mysteriously dancing across concrete
and JD wondered if anyone in the chambers above
heard the echo of her children’s deepened sorrow
or only the silence of his complicity and diabolical cover up.

The Supreme Chamber slept in etiquette,
Their robes hung like laundry in a windless sky,
while Sharpie orders multiplied, multiplying fear,
and JD’s small hands gripped the edge of his fate.
Learning early that self-defense was his detriment
while claiming domestic terrorism would not disappear.

Then in the valley, the demons of capital
typed their dashboards of subservient obedience.
Counting metrics of loyalty to right-wing radicals
and leaving the case with his ultimate beastliness
of what happened on the frozen streets below.
Their prayers were artificial, their compassion unsavable.

JD closed his weary sandman eyes,
as the city breathed beneath him;
full of fear, full of paper, full of ghosts.
He rocked gently, feeling so agonized
knowing some stories would not end
with applause, not with justice, nor pseudonym
only with the memory carried like lanterns
through the frost into the darkest caverns.

Snow gathered in corners of the Supreme Chamber,
frozen whispers tracing the edges of statute books.
The echoes of orders bounced off marble endangered
as then Skull and Bones ceremonies rose and all villains partook.
Carrying names that were never written as they were stranger’s
lives that would not fit the ledger of acceptance like token crooks.
Grimaced faces would be acknowledged within their perverted pattern.

The valley hummed its indifferent psalm,
the cradle of JD rocked like a pendulum,
measuring time in opportunities denied,
and somewhere beneath the frost a memorandum
of a mother’s grief flickered like a candle: DJ was petrified
although he huffed and puffed it continued to qualm.

Hence the poem waits, unfinished,
like justice postponed critique,
like orders still falling from the windless sky,
like a republic balancing on lanterns diminish
carried by Renée’s children who could not yet speak
but whose curious eyes saw everything
that the powerful and narcissistic refuse to see.

Lanterns flicker in the frost,
not the lanterns of men, but of lost angels
who tally names in a ledger of smoke exhaust,
their wings inked with executive orders and fables,
their breath, was the hollow sound of Scotus who slumbered.

A gibbous moon leans sideways over capital valley,
leaving a crescent of righteousness and judgment.
Nevertheless without the courage to strike,
watching the robotic servers hum like altars
where the prayers of the terrestrials who are living right
are converted into charts of subservience which only falter.

JD rocks in the cradle taking his knap,
his eyes reflecting the aurora of lost humanity,
and suddenly he views the rivers run backward then,
the snow climbed fiercely up ancient walls with voracity
the streets were unfolding like origami maps
of those who have departed with the stamp of a pen.

Marble columns now sprout roots and bloom
a forest of law growing toward the firmament.
Their leaves are irreparably misuse of statutes and shame.
All missed opportunities because of divided involvement.
Feel the gusty winds which carry the whispered unknown names
of deceased mothers, widowers, and their hapless children
who in unison speak louder than any decree of doom.

The frost fractures into constellations,
and each star is a life of celestial creation
which DJT’s Sharpie orders could not assimilate
glimmering stubbornly influencing the debate!
Insisting this night remembers the precious late
Renée who will one day in heaven’s realm jubilate.

A shadow of a wolf passes over Silicon Valley,
its eyes reflecting numbers, graphs, and hieroglyphics
yet it howls a canto older than contracts with Vishnu
giving togetherness with tolerance with every issue
a song that says: even power is mortal but Jesus
gifts us with vision as we ponder immortality
in the light of all things as life forever is the promise
with the loss here on Earth from a loved one I wish solace!
Her wonderful memory enduringly persists for an eternity.

While JD dreams in his astral flight,
his cradle is swaying between worlds of might,
linking obedient instruction and bad conscience.
Upon the winter’s rolling frozen streets came light
and the thaw of an unseen redemptive province.
The gusts rock-a-bye Rosemary’s baby and the frost glistens,
the lanterns tremble as the infidels raise their horned ears and listen.
Our quarter of a millennium’s republic holds its bated breath
while the beelzebubs of Sharpie ink and bullets of perverted vision
await the wrath of morrow when DJT neglects Renée’s ruthless death.