Two Poems by Richard Schnap

Waiting for the Angel

I see people with locked hearts

Who have given up believing

That love’s key will ever find them

And I see people with blank minds

Who watched everything they learned

Erased by a tyrannical hand

And I see people with cold souls

Who one day looked in their mirrors

At posters of missing persons

And I see them all gathered

In the ruins of a condemned temple

Hallucinating voices in the wind

Secret Identities

There was the one who became a convict

In a prison of his own creation

Who locked the door behind him

And then threw away the key

And the one who became a convert

To a faith with her as its deity

Deciding who was devoted

And who would burn in Hell

And the one who became a subject

In his own scientific experiment

To see if he could find a way

To learn to love the dead

And the one who became a savior

Who longed to wake these children

But found they preferred bondage

To the terror of being free

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.