Wall

a poem by Roger B Rueda

A wall made of flat-sided pieces of stone
keeps a tight rein on emotion as if
it was a horse frenzied and out of control
when I’m feeling full of fear or dread.
It shields my body from cruel eyes
when I’m in the buff, and theirs
from mine, dagger-like, so sharp.
It wards off assailants of my poems:
as words surge from my mind
and spill over from my right hand,
nobody can rabbit on about the PDAF
or the DAP or the yellow ribbons,
or the flood in Iloilo City.
No one, even on the justice selling
of the NLRC, where crooked arbiters hole up.
Only the smell of my meals is lost, unbound –
it passes through my neighbours’
imaginings but never their cats,
which snaffle my other neighbours’ viand.
And, yes, when I snuffle but
never their fists or strikes with the foot.