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