121018A
-----------
Put it all in safe mode:
the same safe subjects
discussed in safe places,
and nowhere left to go
as to going any further.
Makes church socials
look like excitement.
That paranoid look
as to their fear of truth serum
laced strawberry shortcake.
Leaves me looking
for variations on way out plots
that we might escape into.
Cheap seat getaways,
into alternate dimensions.
We could create a B movie,
and live in it for a while,
trying out various roles
to see if anything really fits
better than our usual costumes.
Anything is better
than what has been going on,
and on and on,
playing with monkey glands,
in a semblance of perpetuity.
It makes you want to break things
that seem to persecute you.
If you could only get at them,
to tear out their throats,
and shatter their electronic skulls.
It all began with the vacuum tube,
and suck it all back,
inhaling deep, deeper, deeper still,
until float away on a cloud
where hell dub mixes with heaven.
Worn out by our battle
against auto correct,
over writing our intentions,
in its effort to give us meanings
that we could never really share.
The only good poet
is either already dead,
or has an unpublishable attitude.
There is no in between,
as to anything worth reading.
I look at you for a while,
realizing that is as far as it goes,
and it will never go any further.
You are already in safe mode
and I have to write you out.
-----------------------------------
121018B
-----------
The need to conceal the discomfort
that would squirm intolerably
until it slipped out, beneath a door.
Contemplating other forms of suicide,
on absinthe mixed with champagne,
might have seemed more reasonable.
Parties are not what they used to be,
and the guests only bring mess hall manners
to the cacophonous chow downs.
Pigs snorting at the feed trough,
seem to have more gumption
as to having something to say to each other.
If only one could drink as heavily
as the circumstances tend to encourage,
so as to become oblivious to corpses.
Thus becoming sufficiently medicated,
to endure the dead fish demonstrations
of decaying intimacies.
Having evaded most of the memoirs,
one can pretend at being punctuation:
though an exclamation mark seems too violent.
That would cut them all off too sharply
slicing through reminiscences and tongues,
little short of cutting throats.
Making one mindful as to Salome
serving up the head of a John,
as a political appetizer.
A definite reminder
that one ought to never interfere
with other people's business.
It all leaves very little to be said,
and even less of any real consequence,
stripped as it is of any further desire.
The subplots having been edited out,
the main script has no significance,
offering only pointless chronicles.
Everyone would walk out
of the theatre,
after the first ten minutes.
We spent the entire evening
watching confused bits of a rerun
of fragments of old episodes.
I was followed down,
to a ritual good bye at street level,
where I offered thanks and pleasantries.
A sigh of relief at escaping
at a little past midnight,
into a cold shower of night air.
------------------------------------
201018A
------------
You heard about the big opportunity,
to increase your costs as to having faith
in unobtainable returns on investment.
It always costs more than that,
and there is a sucker born every minute
feeling a desperate need to believe.
Believe that anyone can do it,
and they have got you at both ends,
both as to coming and going.
Mounting up gambling debts,
dreaming that your ship will come in,
before all that ignorance swamps your boat.
Everything went crashing down
onto the rocks already,
leaving enfeebled attempts at sparse salvage.
Discovering that no one is ever interested,
and you are reduced to being another number
waiting at the end of an endless line.
You are supposed to change,
same as changing chameleon skin clothes,
only to find you cannot afford the price tags.
Change costs money,
and the more changes the more it costs,
if you want to try to mitigate any risk.
A prognosis of failure,
where only the strong survive,
and you never could fit that definition.
Learn to keep repeating your same steps
until the rut is so deep
that you will never climb out of it.
That empty calendar tells you
that you must have done something wrong,
despite not knowing what that might be.
You have been written off,
and all you really know is being dropped,
for not having the right look.
Only a pain in the neck to anyone,
and best kept in quarantine,
or some similar form of poxed exile.
You become that one leper
that the lepers voted off
their island leper colony.
No idea how to pay the price,
of everything costing exactly enough,
to result in nothing but constant abrasion.
You only know that you never had a chance,
and a million and more methods to rub it in,
finding new ways for getting under your skin.
(Tip of the hat to Langston Hughes on that one.)
------------------------------------------------------
201018B
-----------
To meet someone new,
becomes that overwhelming task
that threatens to eat you up completely.
Perhaps you should have put in an application,
for various types of formal approval
prior to moving forward with that project.
Meeting someone worthwhile,
or at least somewhat interesting,
is a stretching the laws of probability.
As if you are attempting something
that is completely unheard of,
and totally outrageous, at your age.
Feeling the silence
bearing down on you,
with its crushing determinism.
You are that live wire,
that they have cut absolutely loose,
leaving it flailing senselessly about.
You thought you could fight your way out
from being held down, under,
close to nothing more than suffocating.
Seems to be fat chance,
to escape being put off, wasted,
and dragged along the bottom.
No one warned you
as to how bad it becomes,
as to trying to find a way out of it.
Everything reduced down to cravings
tormented , by mental starvation,
as everything ends up beaten down.
It always goes for someone,
but it never goes for you,
abandoning you to routine boredom.
It is not that they are better people,
but only that they got chosen,
by some peculiarly twisted system.
All you want to do is to run away,
but getting nowhere; nothing to run to,
leaving you chasing those tall tales.
Proves that self promotion works
always for some and never for others,
no matter how you turn the cards.
Waste your time reading the news
only to learn you are not being informed,
but you can always be informed on.
There are so many more products
and objects of surveillance,
that most are afraid of giving any attention.
Terror afflicted unpleasant endings
where the story is left dangling,
on that invariably sharp edge that cuts you.
Making you feel cut off,
before even reaching the cut off point,
and being left entirely incomplete.
Not knowing when you will be cut again,
in all the most unfortunate ways of being cut,
that all end up as more bleeding out.
(Another tip of the hat to Langston Hughes.)
--------------------------------------------
201018C
-----------
No one ever backs anything,
leaving a flimsy vestige
of would have gone further.
One's own imagination
proving to be as utterly cruel
as is the endless blockade confronting it.
Makes you very small,
putting the cookie jar far out of reach,
and no way to clamber up to it.
Feeling sanctioned
and penned, middle of a mind field,
in a rusty dead waters harbour.
All there are is the rising threat levels,
along with ethereal red tides,
and schools of dead fish.
Metaphors are a disease,
that leads you to reading in to something
what is actually meant.
You can dream, can you not ?
But never freely,
and not of anything you really want.
Is there anything that you could want
that does not prove forbidden
by circumstances imposed ?
I doubt it,
but I tend to doubt everything,
that the mind chances to expose.
Best to cover it up,
by throwing some more dirt over it,
to bury it deeper than it was before.
Whatever you want to keep alive,
someone else wants to put in a grave,
making you the grave digger.
The idea of freedom
stamped out on a production line,
forever endlessly the same.
Nothing even remotely original
ever seems to have the slightest chance,
for anything other than being snuffed.
If you dare to even try to,
break in, or break out,
they get to laugh at you.
------------------------------
I have seen too much of it happening too many times in too many situations
to too many people.... and so I have to give a tip of the hat to American p
oet Langston Hughes. Sure it never looks that bad, because it is as scatter
shot as a temporally and spatially deranged shotgun blast, but the effects
are ultimately as devastating.
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