| Poems: 220517 - May 22nd, 2017 |
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| Robert Morpheal (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2017/05/22 21:43 |
220517A
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What is not broken,
gets discarded anyway.
Pushed and shoved
until all bent out of shape.
Various things cling to fences
until they end torn away.
The ache being so chronic
that you do not feel it anymore.
No need that way for painkillers,
and they leave you wondering
why none of the usual
seem to have any real effect.
They offered to sell you absolutions
that you could never really collect.
You keep the ticket stubs as relics
of some of your pilgrimages.
You try to do all of those things
that you know other people do.
Worrying about any methods deviating
from what is deemed standard practice.
If there was a square peg
to every round hole,
you found it, and read too much
into all that hammering.
Another application for membership
was turned down by a steering committee.
No reasons were actually given,
along with the cancelled receipt.
Information is as plentiful as rice
being thrown at weddings.
Various warnings and cautions
as to hidden terms and conditions.
Various getaways are merely fantasies
that you become too afraid to venture into.
There might be someone watching
on the other side of your mind.
You wrap up what chances to remain,
but never quite make a clean sweep.
You could do it thousands of times
and it would still make no difference.
There are too few coins to fill the slot,
and it all comes rattling out again.
You keep trying to convince yourself
that you are actually getting something.
The transaction is voided,
and you have to start all over again,
after the machine steals your pocket change
and then demands something more.
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220517B
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Most of the medication
is entirely self inflicted.
It never makes the need go away,
and it is purely palliative.
Attempts at killing pain
that cannot actually be killed.
That way it possesses the many
who no longer believe in demons.
Pain is in perpetuity,
while pleasure is only momentary.
The more it tends to hurt
the more you tend to feel alive.
The day feels like a riding crop
down hard across the flank.
Days of that sort make numb,
in their predictable sequences.
Monday is repeat as necessary,
while wondering where Sunday went.
Similarity is always good, and reliable,
and reliable is always fully predictable.
You can follow the logic,
and become forever startled by it
as to where it really leads,
while walking you around in circles.
Patterns need to be cultivated,
eradicating tendencies toward originality.
Hardly anyone wants to be distrusted as much
as to permanently labelled non conforming.
Prevailing quality standards
demand high speed perfect repeatability.
Load, aim, fire, reload is a process,
until you achieve automation.
The mind deliberately busy straying
so as to avoid any real trouble.
Safety is in half hearted attempts
at nothing of any real and true importance.
The sort of thing that no one dares fault,
and that most consider to be entirely solid.
The manuals always being revised
in an infinite number of small ways.
Life is a rearranging of its furniture
for cleaning out the dust behind corners.
Otherwise reminders might be found
in inopportune and strange places.
No one wants to suffer endless reminders,
as to needing to redecorate,
or about what they forgot
until it was far too late to remember.
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220517C
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Some people read obituaries,
and deny that they are always hopeful.
They look for names and faces,
that they otherwise avoid recognizing.
They talk about the six o'clock news
because they have nothing else to say.
They have even learned how to pretend
as if it really matters to themselves.
Language is a crossword puzzle,
building vocabulary that is never utilized.
A highly Scrabbled brain
sometimes considered something enviable.
There is nothing much to really understand,
as long as you remember names and dates.
The life of the latest party
is known to keep all the gossip straight.
You were left out, uninvited,
because someone wanted to talk about you
without your knowing what was said,
and certain the other guests would not tell you.
Success is about changing the contents
of your closet regularly.
Charity is what you throw out,
in the endless efforts to avoid it.
Those who won at anything are nervous
about having used up their luck.
Chronic shortages are carefully maintained
as a primary means to motivation.
Everyone should have been more careful,
knowing that none of them really cared.
Some are failing at being and becoming
the desirable types of simulations.
Robotics now offers more promise
in instances where cooperation failed.
The lines of communication have been cut
by those preventing any sort of revolution.
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220517D
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Those of us who seek something different,
being readily and often perished
into an excess of what is always the same.
We are deemed not predictable enough,
so as to meet any of the requirements,
for knowing anything really different.
A shuffle and deal sort of arrangement,
where every hand is a bad hand,
and the whole deck is always marked.
Thoughts become exceedingly thin
when fed that type of diet,
and being expected to remember it all.
You have to pay heavily for that too,
as if it is a lucrative sort of investment
despite not providing any dividends.
The heaviest penance is to be given
for not having made money at it,
even if you have no idea what it is.
You could never guess in a million years,
as it is never what you would want,
and no one is going to tell you.
Your card is bent. folded, spindled
and ultimately mutilated in response
to anything that you choose to put on it.
Still trying to find the truth about it all
by means of catalogue shopping,
after 44 years of kept to the search.
There is no remaining recognizance
as to the stranger occupying your mirror,
while you imagine finding yourself.
It seems that you hit a detour in a flood,
only to fall off the edge of anyone's map,
into a dead letter office.
You have become a spambot,
of endlessly repeating the same words
as if that will please a fugitive deity.
Nowadays that has to pass as prayer,
which, along with cell phones, are excuses
for talking to yourself out loud.
Whatever you were told to hope for,
the disappointment is guaranteed,
with no refund on any special offers.
You did your best to be convincing,
but no one took you up on it,
that could tickle any of your fancies.
The cave-in keeps caving in
and you can never dig yourself out,
from where you got pinned down.
You are becoming convinced
that it is all still the same “Fat Chance”
and it never gets any better than this.
It seemed as easy as popping a pop top,
as to that urge to get refreshed,
but it was pure Hell deep down inside.
(“Fat Chance” refers to something by Langston Hughes)
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220517E
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It is too close to the same
as to coming back from the dead.
A very uncommon skill.
One that you have not mastered as of yet
but it seems that you ought to have.
You never knew the right teacher,
who could teach you that particular trick,
so you could sleight of hand succeed,
as to working your way up and out
from whatever hole you fell into.
Your mother told you to be careful,
but you were never quite careful enough,
about all the seemingly most trivial things
that you needed to be most careful of.
Not knowing that that is how one gets bitten.
Once that venom is in the wound
it seems that you cannot ever get it out.
It changes everything that you ever knew of
to whatever you do not know anything about.
Then it only gets worse after that.
The replacements that they kept sending
were never the genuine article.
They were only shoddily made facsimiles
that did not meet the contest rules,
and therefore invalidated the entries.
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