by M. Benjamin Thorne

Words are chimeras of sight and sound,

even dichotomies of being.
The same word sanguine

can mean optimistic or bloody;

indeed one would need naïveté

to think positively of carnage,

as if good change from bad deeds

could yield better than wringing blood

from stone. Such pitfalls can befall

our minds with ease–as in the mine

that claims land and simultaneously

destroys it, or the draft that coldly

sweeps men off to war. And so beware

the bonds that lie within the same words.