A Few Rebellious Pleasures In the Reimagined Now

Poems by V.B. Price

BEING CALM

It’s such a trick to play on power,
seeing through the feeble madness of the news.
What a comforting rebellion to be calm,
to refuse to goose step with the nearest fool.

Calm never lets us forget
how fearlessness is sweeter
than the dearest freedom granted by another.
Only one thing works, and it

can’t really be spoken, except to say
that love will not deplete us, that generosity
is an ease so steely true, it overrides
blank cruelty every time, free as the calmness

of humility taking sides with each of us
who self-righteous stupidity has harmed.

KNOWING WHAT WE REALLY THINK

We are told the world is falling apart,
that nothing will ever be the same.
Don’t believe it till you see it.

Sometimes humor is the only test,
an acid jest. Let’s go see for ourselves
if the joke’s on us:

our own way of thinking spreads out before us;
will we be the first to see its false horizons,
the first to report if the old maps are right,

or criminally charmed and wrong?
What a joke on force it is
to know our own minds. It makes us

like truth is, stronger than the strongest
and stronger than the worst.

KINDNESS

It catches everyone off guard.
It’s an affront to fear.
It pushes the absurd smothering of joy
back out the door.
What a sweet dissent to refrain
from brutal truth.
Honesty for the sake of honor
has ruined everything it’s touched.
Fulminate to yourself, but shut up for a while.
Break the rules. We were made for acts of kindness.
All the rest—the suspicion, the fearful nastiness,
the greed—are bumbling, pitiful frauds,
and even indelible time
just wants to forget them.

WHAT MATTERS?

Us, each one of us, all of us, all humans
of any kind, no matter how we think,
or pray, or how we look or speak
any single one of us who is wronged,

wounded, and maligned, deprived
of chance, good will and hope,
any single one of us forced by hate
to be less than uniquely who we are,

forced to say what we do not mean, forced
to demean ourselves just to make it through the day,
any one of us abused, disrespected and oppressed,
deserves a humble solidarity

from all the rest of us, every single one of us,
no matter who we are, or who we think we are.