Treason

Elite grouped around faux wood,
Fake personalities that outrank
My treacherously dead brain cells.

Wrong place. I scream.
Place. Person. Time. Choice.
Wrong-wrong-wrong.

Screaming and writhing in pain
Under the weighing expectations,
Heavy glances and thick impressions,
Knowing they will fill the world
With positive dronish ideas.

Songs of perfection and patriotic faith,
Philosophy of nothingness and essays on depression,
Pathetic poetic emotions.

I am not
Amazing, they say.
Unique with my thoughtful irony.
An individual soul.

"It is treason," I cry.
And nothing more.

Deviance

Sushi is cold
Foreign, alien
Messy like too much devotion

Not perfect or pristine
An opportunity cased in velvet
But drawn, instead, with an artistic graffiti
On the walls of tradition

I am deviant.
Wrapped in seaweed and passivity
You cannot find me in the denim crowd.

Leave uncertainty to those
Who cannot afford to live otherwise.
Stability is not meant to be
Red, hot, wild.
Passion in a burning fire
Gone like a Roman candle into the night

Predestined slot
Traditional mold
Infinitely small
As the cold entered my mouth,
It spoke of deviance.

My aquarian heart beats
In time with an older rhythm
The stir of bottomless depths
Things lurking in the dark and ancient
Shadow and water
The damp womb of Mother Nature

From thence I came
And yet, trust has fled

Crime? You say.

Punishment. Yes.

Slice and dice me until you understand.

Leftover Brie for Breakfast

If impoverished dreams are soft and malleable
Like brown riverbottom clay in sweet spring
Then, my child, let your heart be unchangeable
And dream not of anything.

Winter's seductive breath comes swift
And disillusionment clouds the mind.
You can practice a life of kingly thrift
If only you will fall in line.

Turn the factory cogs with your father
Let him know you are not afraid
To trudge out a life of bother
And let dreams be just a memory played.

But listen, quick quick, listen here.
All of the world can be lost or gained in a single tear.

Ballad of the Working Class

I started life
In sweet bliss
Free from strife
Nothing amiss

Then I looked around
Saw Father
Working the ground
With fervor

I saw Mother
Toil her day
Over the children
Of another

Then I searched over
For evidence
Of this their labor
Or existence

I found nothing
Not a dime
To show something
For their time

Means of production
Perhaps Marx knew
Effects of reduction
Working class do

To Xander

Degeneration eats away at gear and sinew
All of eternity is held in the sound
The strum of time against our bodies
Cascading in helpless harmony
Like the lowering of a guillotine

I have known your wisdom for years uncounted
The sweet breath of friendship,
eternity's unforgiving loop,
possibly all of time in itself,
has satisfied my ear.

My heart appears through many lenses,
but they have all loved you.

The meaning of cold biscuits sopped in butter,
Soft sand sifting through bare toes,
Crowded brown buses stifling with huddled masses,
Dark nights of loneliness and isolation,
But they have all loved you.

I come to you now
To plunder what I can from your coffin
And then scratch your bones with runes
And cast them to the four winds.
Speak to me one last time, my oracle,
And I will bury you, oh so softly,
In the part of me that time cannot reach.

Despair is coming
Bubbling underneath the shallows
Of this cowardly old world
And I must wade alone
For fear of the damnation of the sloth
A stone sinking in the drowning waters
But when finally this dreadful trudging ends
I will return and revel
In your beauty and music.

Aliens

All I know is what I saw
Lowering themselves from the sky
In a ship made of assumptions
Extraterrestrials, so different
Not worthy of thought or care
So different

Walking in the Woods with My Grandfather

My universe, orange and dead deciduous leaves,
Is coming to a short end,
A phoenix in the ashes of my faith.
I once knew whether this place came from nothing.

He knows
In his deranged mind.
He knows.
There are devils hiding inside of me,
And God was before the nothing.
Only a creator could have brought into existence this,
This black void of static and silence within me.

My grandfather, a man decided in his convictions.
He is too old, too certain
To see his beliefs fall from him
Onto a forest bed like mountain leaves
Preparing for a hard winter of agnosticism.

I am cold and fragile
In the spring of my life
But the fall of my knowledge.
Can I divide nothing into nothing
And still be allowed to make something of myself?

There is no answer,
No answer which is created from thin air,
That can have any grounding
In the here and now.

Here and now
Words of such force
Like trees falling in an empty wood
And resonating power over all that is.

I will be and am and was.
Moving forward toward a past of unbeing.
Dare I disturb the ripples,
Nay the wrinkles, that came before me
And walk beside me now on this bleak path?

Is loneliness destined to be the god of my seasons?

I am brittle and blown by the wind.

To Shirley: On the subject of cleaning toilets

Honor! Honor! The foul fruit of kings!

It has come to this.
To degradation and poise amidst the rain.
Honor! Honor! Dignity, too!

Slight of tongue has turned to sleight of hand.
My name with ramrod posture must stand
In the slowly sinking grains of sand.
With courage, I must face the merging of our families
Joined at hip and curve and breast
I will ignore the manner of digress.
Honor! Honor! It has come to this.

My land is not my own
When such trash as this frequent my home.
It has come to this.
Where my dignity means more to me than your graces,
I will not become one of the Faustian faces
Who turn up their cheek for morsels.
I must challenge to erase this blight.

Honor! Honor! The foul fruit that I bear!
It has come to this.

Thirty Paper Kingdoms

Thirty paper kingdoms
Inked in blood and stressed in soul
Northern lights that beckon me away
Dance in color around the battlements
Of note and text from book
Squiggles out from rigid line

Troops with eyes forward, shoulders hunched
Feral beasts that snarl at me from within
Their cage
Claws scratching across well-noted lines
Screeching the same calls
Same calls that were screamed before them
Babbling about their shrinking bars
Bars that have been there since consummation

But once their shouts have ceased
Once their eyes have stopped their small shifting
They will slip into monotony
Head bent and claws moving toward oblivion

Politics

I am as flat as my straw summer shoes
Held to my feet by a little cloth strap
Red as humor mistaken for passion
For laughter is its own bold cry
I am the color of dull that my father
Splashes across the walls of that house
That took his time away from me
I am like the blank of my applications
That push nothingness into my mind
And the minds of all those
Who pour what they have been onto that paper
Starting anew with a colonizing spirit

What then qualifies me?
Qualifies and quantifies that red humor
Boldness begats opposition which births
Discrimination, disunion, and adversity
Love, they say, passion transcends all
But I believe that blatant disregard of jest
All of which is conquered by humor
Fought away by laughter
And mockery is my weapon
Cannot be the answer to the problem of
Politics

Disgusted

the night, so much lighter than this day,
it is enveloping and safe
thought-provoking

the night, it knows no limits
to its darkness, its evil

the night, i have seen it unfold,
like the oncoming of a storm
so soft and angry
and passionate

the night, seeing the colors of the day fade,
in shadows and grays
i have known the fullness of grays
and taught the darkness to whisper
treading lightly on life

the night, it backdrops
the harshness of uncertainty,
it understands the tilting of the earth
and the questioning of its movements

the night, forever contrasting this light.

The Art of Doing Nothing

There is something free
right
about those stick men marching
in such
regimented
lines
off the
edge
of my desk
Far more orderly than my thoughts
Controlled in their grayness
Walking to eternity
As I sit
and study
the art
of doing
nothing.

Groseclose Window

Window as obsolete as I
With individual panes and portals
Each curved glass carefully placed
Reflecting the inner turmoil
Centered on communication between two halves
Like parts of me that do not see the meaning
Hidden in the prisms of craftsmanship
Tribute to the futility of self-inspection

Window mobilized by ancient ropes
Disguised by the curtain call
Sliding heavenward and hellward
As fluidly as my scandalous moods
Masking the abuse of time

Window of my idolization
Mecca of my pondering
Where natural gods can be peered upon
And dust motes read as tea leaves
Divining the truth of insignificance
Mirroring miniscule infinity
My own abyss is my awareness
The numberless stars I can count

Window, the universe is tiny in your grasp
And yet compared to that universe
You and I are black atoms
Just as replaceable with as easy a division

If man can split I from your dark grains
Then my hold on this world
Is as greased as your mechanisms
Heart’s age is our betrayer

Five Attempts To Understand My Goldfish

1.
Putrid being
too Dumb to stop basking in
Filth,
swimming in Sewage,
grabbing a Imaginary morsels,
Incapable of True Accomplishments.

2.
Quaint and Isolated.
A well match for the-
Less-
Organized and Devoted.

3.
Two quarters per Four grams,
floating in a Dollar gallon,
caged by a prison of Twenty,
consuming One Tenth of a Cent
every time the sun rises,
Costing Two chocolate bars upon expiration.

4.
Orange with Black stripes
like a Tiger in a watery jungle.
darting over Blues, Pinks
Ageds and Fadeds of Indeterminable color.

5.
the muse,
and serving as household god on Fridays,
whose infinite wisdom
is locked behind bulging eyes
that have drained to Pale Yellows
from watching the array of disasters.
pensive in his Teller’s Orb.