As a Cat to Lap

(This is the first poem I ever read at an open reading.)

Audio

There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
What's done is done.
No use crying over spilled milk.
Time is time for moving on.
No use crying over spilled milk.
Here today tomorrow gone.
No use crying over spilled milk.
A present lost, a future won.

There's no use crying.
Tears are bootless, facts are blind.
There's no use crying.
Sadness cannot change fate's mind.
There's no use crying.
Sorrow loses, cheer will find.
There's no use crying.
Be practical, leave tears behind.

There is no use.
This fret and strut achieves the grave.
There is no use.
All is lost, nothing's saved.
There is no use.
The free man's just a shallow slave.
There is no use.
These shadows never leave the cave.

There is.
Not here.
There is.
Not near.
There is,
But cannot be.
There is.
But is not me.



There.
Here, but that which not.
There.
Other in which what.
There.
Now again before ahead.
There.
Another, than from fled.

There's no use crying over spilled milk.
But what if milk should turn to blood?
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
And war's tears rain in dead flesh flood.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
This mother's milk in corpse coughed mud.
There's no use crying over spilled milk.
This saline spite of shrapnel's God.

Milk of kindness, milk of death.
Spilled milk spitting Gatling breath.
Milk of useless, milk of use.
Milk of every profit's truth.

Those are ghosts that were his eyes,
and at his mother's milk-spilled cries,
war's rich banker trembles.
A use without a usurer's prize,
which tyrant heads of state despise,
from which too common truth
dissembles.