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I was playing in the jungle
I was taking lots of risks
I was saying this won't happen to me
I've seen it happening to strangers
But strangers don't exist
I said "I'm too smart, yeah I'm too quick y'see"

I spent more time out in that jungle,
Going once or twice a week,
I was making up excuses to go back,
That snake he was a-watching,
He sensed that I was weak,
he coiled up, preparing to attack...

I made some bad decisions
don't expect you to care
but I'm deep down in the belly of a snake
My friends try to help me,
find my way out of there
But the stomach of that serpent is opaque

his jaws closed around my ankle,
But still I soldiered on,
I can kick him off any time I please,
Before I knew what happened, he had my other leg,
And his scaly maw was up around my knees


People asked about the serpent they said "boy are you ok?"
I didn't have the heart to tell them "no"
Feel digestive juices working,
Yes I'm withering away,
But I tell myself I've some way left to go,

Now that I'm trapped inside,
he takes me everywhere he goes,
As he eats me up he tells me he's my friend
And when I'm inside that serpent,
I don't feel no pain,
And I'm thinking that he was right in the end

Sometimes I get a burst of strength,
and crawl towards the light,
I try to prize those mighty jaws apart
But the outside is so cold and scary,
maybe not tonight;
That I let myself slip down into the dark
Quaint crumbling yellow tower blocks. Heaps of trash and traffic choked streets.
Geckos smiling sweetly on the wall. Cockroaches and rats in the background. Two children. One mischievous toddler and one innocent baby. My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
School aged children laughing and crying.
A laptop in a lonely dark room. Piles and piles of prescription drugs: tramadol , codeine, ******, ritalin. Tubes of corticosteroid and moisturizer creams.


Jolly fat men in their 30s drinking bia hoi, smoking endless cigs. A rock band plays to an inebriated crowd.


Sunlit mountains. Limestone karsts. Emerald rice fields on straight flat roads heading on forever with a fat sunset overseeing the lazy water buffalo wallowing.
The faces of old friends growing hazy.

A gaggle of women, enraged or sobbing.
School aged children laughing and crying.

A heavy lidded eye dropping a tear into a panic stricken and bloodshot one

Aeroplanes heading over the vast sea. My late middle aged parents smiling stupidly.
Various friends smile
A girl looks on with pity, flanked by a hard faced man in a polo shirt.
Why am i waiting
To feel something
Like when I was young
Thoughts and memories
Accumulate inside my head
But still my heart is numb

I feel anguish
And sometimes I might feel some pride
But it's only surface deep
I watch my actions
As though I'm watching someone else
Making mistakes on repeat

Every day I'm
going through the motions
It's all work and it's no play
And when I find the time
To catch up with my old friends
I've got nothing to say.

Neural pathways
Digging grooves inside my brain
Habits getting more entrenched.
Mounting addictions.
I must resist this limbic friction
but I just don't have the strength.

When did my horizons
become so narrow?
Ambitions have slipped out of sight
The future is empty
Just body clinging onto soul
Going gentle into night.
this might become the lyrics to a gloomy post punk song
Janek Kentigern Feb 2022
When the newscaster, he preaches for a war abroad with drones,
And why battle-hardened soldiers must shoot children armed with stones,
They say "Genocide? apartheid? No!
These are strategic goals."
Remember that their wrong.

When you've waited four more years and now finally you can vote,
And you've leafed through manifestos that your favourite party wrote,
They're now in power, but you're just as powerless and broke.
It isn't you who's wrong.

The seas they are a-rising and the temperature's so high,
That the forests are a-blazing and we know precisely why,
Billionaires build bunkers, leave the rest of us to die.
Remember that they're wrong.

In distant mines and sweatshops our nation reaps rewards,
The wheels of commerce greased by blood of poor people abroad,
If you'd rather see their boats capsize than make it to our shores.
Remember that you're wrong.

In misery you've toiled and with anger you have burned,
For security and comfort and some meaning, you have yearned;
If all this has made you hopeless, then forget all you have learned!
The union makes us strong.

By now you are a skeptic of the ideology,
That says serfdom and consumption's all there is for you and me,
The hope that felt like weakness, now's a stark necessity
'Cos the union makes us strong.
I was inspired by listening to "Solidarity" and reading the lyrics. I thought it could do with an update.
Janek Kentigern Jul 2019
Divorce


this time
Don't worry
its your side im gonna take
don't you worry mate.
I'm here for you unconditionally
I know that you loved her
right until the bitter end
right until your dignity was stretched out
over hot coals
Drops of fat hissing and spitting
like a fool
like an utter ****
you deftly ignored all of those negative signals.
all those silent nights in
avoiding the future
avoiding anything
anything might come too close to the truth
the crippling truth
Too large and frightening to look upon
Like the sun
That this time
in all the hundreds of millions of times
that this **** goes down
with romance
and excitement
and everything that for a brief moment justifies all this ******* ****
this neurosis
the moments of utter indifference
when the difference between crossing the road safely
and intentionally hurling yourself under the roaring wheels of an oncoming lorry
grinding up the bones
Splintering through the skin like a hideous pin-cushion
insensate human patty.
The reason you syou do the right thing
the sane thing
is for fleeting moments like these when
for a moment at a time
we can ascend beyond the ordinary constraints of every fuckign thing
at once that was you. You were the thing that gave meaning to the shallow dichotomy between work and friends. Everyone wants something from you
but you stood apart from the din
the unholy din
Of your seams tearing
forces pull you in opposite directions
Janek Kentigern Jul 2019
The next room
I want to Take you into the next Room
Share cynical laughs at their expense
And make a toast to we, the privileged few
And share backhanded compliments

****** your shoes upon somebody elses bed
knock all their possessions on the floor
throw caution to the wind and live the youth you never dared
kiss me till my lips are sore

The bands you loved before the world caught up
they never did improve upon their first
now fading from collective consciousness
cos every album just gets worse

Give me something sweeter than oxygen
from a time when this was all brand new
I'm just trying to feel without thinking
this is too good to be true

Give me something that can satisfy
Give me joy that won't disappear before my eyes
give me something I can taste that isn't ashes on my tongue
instant gratification never took so long

We sigh in mock despair now without hope
Having watched Everything We Love's demise,
And the sacred cows all twitch with BSE now
From the culture they cannibalised
Janek Kentigern Jul 2019
Keep It Light, Keep it light
Keep it light for ****'s sake,
for ****'s sake keep it light

Keep it light, just keep talking about the weather
Don't look directly at the objects weighing on your mind
Identify the myriad peripheral minutiae
And save this sombre revelation for another place and time.

Keep it bright, cos I'm in need of some comic relief
No need to need to state the fact that things are really ******
So keep those stinking bandages wound up nice and tight
Everybody can see but they're just trying not to look

If You're lonely?
Well We're all lonely.
and if you're You're tired
Well so am I.
You wish you had more time to waste
In ways more fitting to your taste
You wish you didn't mind it.
Living life as you find it.

Don't think your the only one who sees the yawning void
Beneath this hideousness and decay
and whilst you cook up artful ways to try and make us see it
All we're tryna do is look away
All we want to do it look away

Keep it light, just keep that unthinking tongue moving
You and I both know there's nothing much to say
Keep doubling those negatives, don't stop your glottle.
Just find meaning in the process, and the keep silences at bay

Don't invite, comparison's between each petty grievance.
Make sacred the fail-safe that disconnects them all.
Tell yourself there's more to this than sum of it's parts.
Keep on counting up the bricks but disregard the wall.

Keep it in, don't think you insights make you special
The self-aware will all still share the empty-headed's fate?
Vibrate the air with sickly cares if you want to.
none of your pretty words will ever hold any weight.
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