Ransom {ex30:12}

Photo © Unsplash/Sharon McCutcheon

Imagine having to pay for your life
the way you pay for your heat
the way you buy your electricity
the way you purchase water and sewer.

Perhaps if we received
a monthly bill for
"Life-Services Rendered"
     breath and
     blood and
     heart beating and
     neurons firing and
     general suspension of the return-to-dust clause

we would remember that
life is a utility we can't generate
and be immune to
the otherwise-all-pervasive plague
of self-sufficiency.

A Rondel on Boys Who Weren't Necessarily Bad {ex12:13}

For where there was no blood on the post,
the Angel brought heartbreak deep in the night.
Those oldest boys may have been perfectly upright;
no wickedness in them had been diagnosed,

no judgment that they were, to evil, a host,
but doomed even if they were kind and polite.
For where there was no blood on the post,
the Angel brought heartbreak deep in the night.

Even a Hebrew who thought smeared blood the most
distasteful and gruesome of any known sight,
who neglected to paint the jambs crimson-bright
would suddenly find his own firstborn a ghost,
for where there was no blood on the post…

Rondel: a French form consisting of 13 lines—two quatrains and a quintet—with a rhyme scheme of ABba abAB abbaA (the capital letters are the refrains, or repeats).