hands are tied and dictums delivered
in subtle and effective ways.
Keep it all in check for now,
you’ve made these choices,
these changes of your own free will,
and isn’t life a process of becoming?
Be smart, don’t provide fodder for sabotage.
Instead try the route of tact and diplomacy,
swallow hard the bile that eats at you,
repeats back up from your soul.
Suck it up and take a stab
at stockpiling aspects
that border on controversial,
those steamy sensual passages that raise
eyebrows, blood pressure, temperatures
to an adult fever pitch in a manner
perhaps unbecoming to some.
Offend none for now.
File words away, safe from harm’s way,
gathering dust in drawers as they seethe silently,
building momentum for some distant future,
when drawers are opened again, the words sent out
and shouted loud from unlikely public corners
to shock and awe a waiting world.
That day, they’ll read and weep
and perhaps lose sleep, but for now
that burden rests within, and the
difficult message unstated
is more than understood.
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Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, and teacher. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He recently took part in Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix project. Recent poems are published or forthcoming in; Stone Voices; Emerge Literary Journal; Falling Star Magazine; Flutter Poetry Journal, Four and Twenty, Found Poetry Review, The Bicycle Review; Red Ochre Lit; The Kitchen Poet; Untitled, With Passengers; Chupa Chabra House; Eunoia Review; and Black Cat Lit.
Bay Laurel / Volume 2, Issue 3 / Autumn 2013