James B. Earley Poems

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A Congressional...quandary
Where logic confounds
…Bipartisan folks…talking
American boots on the ground
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Having clocked out at the end of that Thursday's work, I entered the Company office along with a co-worker. We were informed that 'Martin Luther King had just been reportedly shot and killed.' My co-worker remarked, 'Good, he was a troublemaker.' I said to him, 'What you've just uttered is among the most insensitive statements I've ever heard spoken.' He immediately apologized, but what had been a budding friendship two or three years in the making, dissipated in a single pained moment of personal affront.

The events of that day have crossed my mind countless times since, and in its wake the co-worker's resonating words. Within ensuing decades, cumulative circumstance has proven my former co-worker's assessment irrefutably correct. As I've come to realize that Dr. King was indeed a 'troublemaker' of the most provocative fashion. The admirable view I held of him, as a 'troublemaker' promoting my idea of justice, was adversarial in fact to others who saw his associated efforts as 'troublemaking' against their own notion of justice; perceptively an immediate threat to Society's established way of life.
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Lone Senator spending hours
..Reading aloud nursery rhymes
Nary a child in the Chamber
...'Tis...insanity's...signs
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Disoriented in the darkness
Momentarily..a bit confused
Claimed the Fox amongst the chickens
....Falsely....I stand accused
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Whatever happened
..To Chairman Gowdy's
'Select Committee'
On Boehner's Benghazi
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July....Seventeen Seventy-Six
Jubilant...folks....celebrating
....Every Fourth of July..since...
Across this land..commemorating
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Twisted logic...stark denial
'No such thing as climate change'
Narrow minded conversation
...Of the borderline deranged
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Owsley County Kentucky
..Delta Mississippi Blacks
Got so much in common
Still so much..out of whack
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Obama...has his critics
..God knows I'm one
I've also reaped benefits
God knows there's some
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