KISS IT

By Marc Kelly Smith

If you need to kiss it,
Kiss it.
If you need to kick it,
Kick it.
If you need to scream it,
Scream it.

But kiss it, kick it, scream it
Now.

If you need to leave it,
Leave it.
If you need to love it,
Love it.
If you need to hold it,
Hold it.

But leave it, love it, hold it
Now.

If you need to squeeze it,
Squeeze it.
If you need to spill it,
Spill it.
If you need to tell the world
You've got more to you
Than the world has as of yet
Allowed you to be,

Then be it, tell it, spill it,
Squeeze it out of each instantaneous moment.
Make the juice, the jive, the jazz, the jism,
The mysticism that ism you!

Grab at the moon!
And hold the stars hot inside your head.

'Cause now is all there ever was
And all there ever will be.

So kiss it, kick it, scream it
Now!

KILLERS

by Carl Sandburg

I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:

Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
and killing.

I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.

I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of
killing.

Sixteen million men.