The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Own

Is it the evil of ma and pa ternalism
that renders rational raw ownership?
or some sort of selfishism or unsharing
arrogance dressed in stolen valor?
nor two eyes glaring in the night
before the carnage of a last supper.

The offense is an embrace of littleness
racing from shards of skyfallen fire
an unbegged-for batard for the righteous
hunger of the little children who can't
yet barter or sow or in shadows lie low

Do our lavish pets atone for our cattlity 
our fibs forgiven for shaving the abacus bead
while our economy of foolish speaking drains
our fresh flesh friends to a danse macabre
while our ring finger counts our time asleep

This sky, this earth, this other ocean,
cairns we refuse to see as unscattered skulls
dreams woven from borrowed lessons and careless
abrasions always to end falling upon the scree
of unscried leavings not yet seen smoothly

More specific than dialect or dialectical
words are just feeble foibles as ignoble
as the familiar cave of conceptual campfire
a taut web spanning the emotional maelstrom
unordered, primordial, unborrowed from the blue 
marble, an ineffable cacophony of assumptions
refusing the balm of unvarnished brusqueness
too much borrowed animation to take the nap
and exhale even our solitary personal eulogies.
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©2026 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.