We need more folks who pray for leaders
instead of merely mocking;
and men who fight for basic freedoms
instead of simply watching.
Let’s stop thinking presidents will save us
from every evil we perceive;
instead, let’s be a bit more gracious
for what they have achieved.
Hospitals should stop raising bills
just so they can fall
for insured people who are ill,
while others scrimp and scrawl.
Instead of praying when we are alone,
we bow our heads to mobile phones,
and fold our hands for pleasure’s moans
while sprawled at leisure on our throne.
We need more kids who make their beds
and wash their mouths with soap,
so they don’t grow up baking meth
and getting high on dope.
Let’s stoke curiosity
instead of second-guessing;
focus on philosophy
and less on standard testing.
The world needs less people who agree
to call a difference “hate”;
they defend diversity
but dismiss all debate.
The world could do with less pronouns
for male and female persons;
more folks who take pride in hometowns
and not in sex perversion.
Stop tainting groundwater through fracking
and lacing it with lead;
while we can’t wait on package tracking,
orphans can’t get bread.
When we run into beggarmen,
let’s sacrifice, not scrooge –
for though a vagrant may misspend,
we equally misuse.
We should know there’s nothing calming
about the cost of headstones hewn
for boxes filled with poisons for embalming,
leaching toxins from our tomb.
We need a Savior who will free us,
but we stay reluctant;
the world could use a lot more Jesus
and a lot less judgement.
The world could use less fortune tellers
torturing the same poor fellers
already sore from the old hoax
of believing horoscopes.
It shouldn’t take us five degrees
to understand the legalese
when we sign a living lease,
or a property release.
We need apologies for atrocities
like all the corporate monopolies –
placing profit over ideology
and committing highway robbery.
The world could use less drunken dudes
in fewer firewater feuds,
and pols in Cancun like Ted Cruz
while Texas temps are ones and twos.
Congress needs less elephants and asses
campaigning in the corporate plazas,
representing higher classes,
while the rabble work to pay their taxes.
We need less candidates and flacks
committing sex acts in the sack,
and running ads that are attacks
while the country’s at collapse.
O, perhaps our oval bases
would be home to social graces
if the leaders in our races
put away their second faces
when their palm hit open pages,
promising their oath in phrases,
instead of growing their own wages
by striving for their voters’ praises!
The world could use less diet pills
and fancy dermis creams
because our ads are always filled
with man-made beauty queens,
brushed and cropped and finely built
by men behind the scenes
who Photoshop and doctor girls
they throw on magazines!
We need more random acts of kindness,
less Jack Daniels, more Aquinas,
and memorandums that remind us
to stand up for moral rightness.
