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447 · May 2019
Psychic Bureaucracy
A L Landers May 2019
My eyes open in the dim light
You are not there
Old engine oil in my ears
and red tape on the walls and the
Peephole

I am in every cheap hotel across the country
Anything could be outside of my door
I could be in a small town in Idaho
An inlet on the coastal northwestern shore
Minutes from the beach on the southeastern coast
The glorious place where the plains give way to mesas
I am all those places
the ones I've been and will go to someday
Scouting
Searching
Finding my way back to you
Before the diesel fills my mind
And my thoughts leave the rest of me behind
And so at the designated hour
My movement will be swift
My stillness will be complete
Non-doing
Ever prepared
275 · Oct 2019
In stripes
A L Landers Oct 2019
Lay We,
Haste moved to,
A barely find the,
Allow lay there head turtles,
The mating paused And in stripes.
275 · May 2019
Evolt
A L Landers May 2019
Respect is something to be given and earned
But if you've got crosses and money to burn
Y'all ******* are gonna have to wait your turn
Because you've got something to learn

See, I stand with the spurned
Yellow, red, pink and brown
gonna use my privilege
And put my boots on the ground
Revolt, revolver,
fight to turn it around

See you can drone on
With your dog-whistle cries
I'll be teaching my children to see through those lies
You plant bodies
While we plants seeds
Herbicide, genocide resistant weeds
Gonna choke you out
For making us bleed

You keep turning our plowshares into swords
So we ain't gonna work on Sammie's farm no more
So my elders in the hoods in the back of the truck
Drunk on power can all go get ******

There's more of us than there are of you
And when we all wake up,
What you think you gonna do?
We're gonna just keep firing bullets of the mind
And your armies that are fam gonna leave you behind

Or make you think they're yours for true
When their mind is turned on
And it's turned on you
You're in deep **** now
With no canoe

So I ask again, what the hell you gonna do?
269 · Jan 2019
Certain
A L Landers Jan 2019
I will aspire
To make all of my mistakes
Not again, anew
248 · Jan 2019
Unspoken
A L Landers Jan 2019
When mouths professing thoughts grotesque
Not for mere show, or arabesque
May shrug and say It was a joke

But our souls are not our humours
If we beseech the best in all
But in ourselves must build a wall
Between our thoughts and those we feel accepted

One mind, One thought, With blade so keen
Is removed from that which makes it scheme
But also that which makes the whole effective
But how to return what once was stole
Even our kindest have difficulty knowing
190 · Aug 2019
Professor Confessor
A L Landers Aug 2019
Dear Professor Confessor
Articulated processor
Should i saddle my id
And rattle my lid
Reading tea, leaves
And quietly grieves
Carving stones
Rolling bones
Theophrastus
Seer, fast is
Now unstuck
Text informed
And automatic
Dialectic didact
Providing what lacked
In my education
Matriculation
And now free of
A and B
I say to thee
Jai guru deva
Om
181 · Jan 2019
Tan gentle
A L Landers Jan 2019
In opposition
We gain the use of tools
In concert
We harmonize
In art
We commune
In cadence
We fall in lines
In solitude
I contemplate that which is unseen by you or me unfelt by axiomatic axon axed in accessible action

I ask
134 · Feb 2019
Vessel
A L Landers Feb 2019
When I quit filling my mind
With the dreams of others
The wellspring began to pour from me
And I filled it with dreams of my own
For too long
I let it fill without
Pouring my dreams out
Because they were precious
And then the well went dry
No longer being necessary
But then I poured them out
And where they flowed
New things grew
And the spring flowed again
125 · Jan 2019
Dada Arabesque
A L Landers Jan 2019
Among all of that and our on there to kindly bleach it when one in which
We have to say our coming back
Souls say it is accepted that we have begged to have our shoulders to be thought of
We can give one that can give mouths effectively removed others
The one pretending or
Difficult thoughts to it with
Dear our that sharp we also grouper and show wand if you order from
Do not ever build like that have many own thoughts
Schematic felt
Its one to do in arabesque it grotesque
Everyone knows but non-grumpy
State of mind stolen
More we have
Was word
This is my poem unspoken, run through a translator to Portuguese, processed with a dada poem generator, translated to Dutch, run through the dada generator again, and then translated to English.
109 · Jan 2019
Crave
A L Landers Jan 2019
Such morbid fascination
Emotionally flaccid
I've cared so much for so long
While finances have made me prostrate
*******
Institutionalized
Intuition tells me
Sensational lies
And my axions accessed
Axons axiomatic
To touch
To feel
To love
brought to heel
And purposelessness
Accepted
A floating seed
Intercepted
Buried deep within the shallows
Excavated by the hallowed
And used for means unintended
108 · Jul 2019
When I was a boy
A L Landers Jul 2019
When I was a boy
I wasn't
I wasn't a little girl

I was a miniature adult
Who didn't quite understand
Why people said things they didn't mean
And it was to be nice

Why I knew that my friend’s mother had been molested by her father
When I was only eight

I was so afraid of the dark
No one talked me out of it
But I felt it was important to turn off the light
And so I did

There were no monsters
Just people
And they were hell
I learned to defend myself
So that I didn't have to fight

Except against my self

And I keep losing

But at least I can protect everyone else from me
103 · Aug 2019
Noble
A L Landers Aug 2019
I awoke with the words
“I love you”
Still resting on my lips
Like a timid bird
Too afraid to fly
But in desperate need
To set aloft
And tell the Augur
What to divine
101 · Aug 2019
Two wholes not halved
A L Landers Aug 2019
Two souls meandered down the path
Both whole
Without another half
But together they did band
Not obligate
But to lend a hand
Words and thoughts between them flowed
While wary, he caught himself to goad
And she, a freely flying nymph
Who wholly he could but catch a glimpse
Though miles apart, they shared the path
And communed as though both telepaths
He struggled to undo traps he'd made
In beds of others where he'd laid
For to catch this nymph would destroy the beauty
And although he respected this, his duty
He could not help
As he reclined
To think of the two of them entwined
Untangled, and connected by choice
But he found no such desire in her voice
And when he'd rest she would return
With images and lessons learned
And so he let the dreams be read
Satisfied by visions in his head
And so amused by what transpired
She would so gently stoke the fire
With delicate appreciative care
So lightly hung upon the air
A dancing smoke
A dreamed affair
And so still floated in the air
Two souls both whole
Not half a pair
100 · Jan 2019
Persistence
A L Landers Jan 2019
Persistent
And the ring is worn
Tap dripping thoughts
Persistent
And my face loses its color
My *** formless
Persistent
And we have no self
No future past
Mysterious history
Persistent
Will the learned correct
Our essence connect
To sit at the table
Persistent
My I not an object of eye
But a subject of
Why
97 · Aug 2019
Fenestration
A L Landers Aug 2019
How can wholes
Be filled?
A overflowing cup has lost its use
Unless again emptied in another place
And so
I seek to empty myself
And be filled with your mysteries

To once again be emptied
And refilled again
96 · Jan 2019
Insomiacs
A L Landers Jan 2019
Cast adrift
And you an island
Cool fresh water
Fruit trees and heady nectars
But my home is the sea
And the rocking of the waves call me below deck
As the sun rises
Perhaps a dark cave
Somewhere upon your shores
Where I can be rocked to sleep
But I cannot sleep
In the sand
95 · May 2019
Brown
A L Landers May 2019
Words flow like rain in a gutter
Ceaseless
No concern for their path
No intent
Washing seeds away
No focus
Just exist to exist
Why should I care?
My love for humanity in general
Not wanting to be too specific
Hard for a drowning man to help one who is also drowning

I would take us both down

My apathy a kindness
My gruff rejection a concession to the
Material imperialists

And yet I still raise my face and voice in defiance
77 · Jul 2019
Echoes
A L Landers Jul 2019
You are both at my side
Asleep
And i
Awake
Remembering a spider
The first thing I can think of
I see a golden boy at his mother’s breast
Much favoured
As he drinks from her
She drinks from him
His life flowing into her
Her love flowing into him
I want for you to be something else
Not an echo
But a response
And still my daughter
And I the father
I want to give her the things that the matriarchs lack
I want to give her the strength to transcend
I want to give her her brother
But he and I are held by women who would make us their protectors
Their completion
And she and I are somehow whole
51 · Dec 2020
Untitled
A L Landers Dec 2020
The sunlight’s climb
Makes shadows move
And time is kept in angles
While all the mystery left unsaid
Invokes itself untangled
No puddle splash
Or crunch of leaf
Just birdsong, wind
And creak of trees
Alone I am
Adrift an hour
Though not without my thinking
Now I must find some welcome flower
And get back to my drinking

— The End —