Imagination Piranhas

I walk down the street trying to analyze what I see
Two trees in the shadow connected by a power line
A duplex, abandoned, dark and silent
Simple objects that line my path and hold some story
Some deeper truth ready to be unraveled
I try to decipher this meaning
To look passed the tangible exterior
Beyond the cells and through the atoms
For some soul or sentence
Some lost ghost ready to tell a tale
But I can’t
The story is muffled and the meaning is lost
Through the trees, beyond the worn down duplex
I see only more darkness
My senses have been dulled
Overshadowed by a vermin
A sinister parasite consuming the world around me
The imagination piranhas
Callous and cold creatures
They linger in the darkness and drift through the air
Like a cancer they grow, feeding upon the beauty of the world
Made of mortar and brick that house our civilization
They dwell in the steel and noxious fumes of industrial growth
Polluting ears with their diesel engine roar
Corrupting the space between nature and thought
The imagination piranhas
Dominating the atmosphere
Hindering analysis of the universe
With bright lights that blind the story in the darkness
Their shouts and electronic noise drown out the true song
A quiet song
The imagination piranhas…

Two old sailors stared across the knots of dryish land
One could not even see a single grain of sand,
They thought it odd the problem was so very hard to solve.
Do you suppose one sailor said, “that mops had been involved”.

On old mainstreet, sits an old café,
Where home-town-grown musicians play.
Sometimes they like to change its name,
But the clientele stay just the same.
When times are tough down in the town,
You know you can’t get the Black Dog down.

Rednecks and faux-necks and used-to-be-loggers,
Crafters and rafters, and activist bloggers,
And poets and hippies and mystics and fools,
And outcasts from the secondary schools,
And gypsies too: you’ll find them here,
Drowning in local, hand-crafted beer.

At night, locals sip organic tea,
And turn up the menagerie
Of lights and mics from another age,
Pieced together to make a stage.
And there, the guitarists waste their breath
Beating the Same. Four. Chords. To. Death.

There are some new lyrics, there and here,
But all of them memories of yester-year:
A year spent in the same **** space,
With others who’ve never left this place.
They sing of their dear loves and pasts,
And how much longer the wandering lasts.

And on they wail, and on they moan,
And twang the antique, rustic tone,
But their faces show they like it here,
This breaking haunt of yester-year,
And after the set, they carouse with cheer,
And smile contentedly to their beer.

On old mainstreet sits an old café,
Where home-town-grown musicians play.
Sometimes they like to change its name,
But the clientele stay just the same.
When times are tough down in the town,
You know you can’t get the Black Dog down.

In the day spa pool
                     a ******* girl,
              floats half submerged;
two placid white lotus buds,
identical twins,
     cheerily face upwards,
   gleaming, wet.