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great love requires great sacrifice
always has
always will
The Beat of a Different Drum by Geof

He walks where echoes refuse to follow, a syncopated step on puddled glass, soft-footed rebellion, quiet as dusk pressing its fingertips against the day.

No band behind him, no metronome’s kiss, just the pulse of stray thoughts tattooed across his chest like whispered defiance.

The world hums in straight lines, he scribbles sideways. Timbre raw. Cadence cracked. Every silence he breaks rings in technicolour truth.

You call it offbeat; he calls it becoming. In his rhythm, the rules unravel and leave room for the beautiful wrong.


The Different Beat of a Drum by Geof

Not syncopation. Not jazz. Not tribal echo on moonlit skin, but something else: a crackle in the chest when rules bruise the breath.

It starts in the soles, like friction turned gospel. No conductor, no call and response. Just bone vibration and a whisper that won't beg for translation.

This beat, it skews the grid, skips the tidy wrap of genre. It breaks the silence like a grin in a funeral march.

He plays it anyway, thumb on steel, heartbeat misfiring into music. Some call it dissonance. He calls it home.


The Drum of a Different Beat by Geof

It sat in the corner like it knew things, skin stretched tight over secrets, rim worn smooth by the hands of those who didn’t ask permission.

No sheet music. No conductor. Just breath and bruise, just instinct knocking on wood until sound fractured into meaning.

Its beat didn’t match your step. It changed your step. Bent time like a flame licking the wick before the burn.

Each strike: a sideways sermon. Each silence: a dare.

They tried to tune it. Tried to name it. But it throbbed with its own alphabet and whispered in pulses only the wild could follow.
I cuddled up with
a metaphor that was
caught in the corner of
my room.
I dressed it in the
silk of kings, and fed
it from the fractured
trees of innocence.
Low-hanging fruit of
despair gets us
every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwmDj1yF6LA
Here's a link to my YouTube channel where I just put up a video of a poetry reading that I did at the Mason City Public Library.  My books, Seedy Town Blues Collected Poems, It's Just a Hop, Skip, and a Jump to the Madhouse, and Sleep Always Calls, are available on Amazon
I was lost in the dark of forest.
Once a beautiful place to be.
In the shadows of tall green trees.
I felt happy and peaceful under branches wide and strong.
Protecting me.

I often sang the song of lovers
while peeping at a warm sun.
At night I slept the sleep of dreamers
While moonlight kissed me on my cheeks.

During day I kept on dancing
in arms of invisible tunes.
Of a breeze so soft like silk.
My colors blooming
pastel shades, bright and smiling too.
Caressing your eyes, comforting you.

Now it’s another story.
I’m so sad, can’t even speak.
My beautiful forest, gone.
Fires and sour rains took over.
And I,
just a little wildflower,
once happy but now I weep.



Shell ✨🐚
We are all responsible for nature and each other.
Love stripped
Passion enslaved

Brain washed
Head shaved

Thirst for truth
Hunger to repay

March forward
Toward dark days
Dogma, chains, wages, lies...
The faces change, but never the eyes.
Kneeling at an altar to depression
Genuflecting to the ideals of loss
Dreams left behind that eternal question
Beleaguered joy borne, burden, cross

Enshrining truth within a tomb of memory
Monk of a religion that believes in naught
Master of realities adrift in bombastic theory
Servant to whimsies of mercurial thought

Spirit seeking purpose, eyes beseech heaven
The void swells, in answering angelic voice
Alighting the soul with renewal, redemption
And hopeless fantasy becomes simple choice
Ex tenebris, lux.

©2025 Jason R. Michie All Rights Reserved
Its not a good day
if I havent ripped
a thumbnail on
some jagged metal
or stubbed a toe
Its not a good day
if I havent cut myself
on a kitchen knife
or had my heart broken
Its just the
empty space
between
injuries
Intricate labyrinth of neurons
Within whose web I dally, caught
Tangled synapse-bridged *****
Continuously recalling tallied thought

Laser-etched steel-plate memories
Deny wisdom so dearly sought
Reinforcing episodic-twisted realities
Revealing epiphany where is naught

Neuronal circuits staccato-fire rapidly
Tetanizing notions trauma-wrought
Spike-timing-dependent plasticity
Potentiating emotions distraught

Swearing healing by hippocampal oath
Promising surcease to wet-work hard-fought
Neurogenesis rebuilds hope for both
Amygdalan peace and neural-networked bio-robot
Hope this one wasn't too...cerebral. 😉

©2025 Jason R. Michie All Rights Reserved
Life is loss, pain
You move on, push past it
You write subroutines to deal
To ease, to distract, to bypass
Again and again until
You are more subroutine
Than you are yourself
And you wonder
At what point did pain
Become more relevant
To life
Than living?
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