Faith where have you gone?
And God, we haven't talked for so long
What if, what if, what if my life is waisted?
worries, worries leave me alone
you don't deserve to steal my time no more
Fear is me, it turns my back on forgotten dreams and fantasies
Oh forget the painful sorrows of yesterday
And now my feelings, i pour them away
and thats another sip, another sip
Drown my tears into a bottle of gin
Yet i'm still here, i'm still here
And i don't know if i desire to stay
But surely thats for another day
Are we going to die? Thats for certain
One more day won't hurt?

It's two thirty-three-
sleep is not my enemy
or so I had thought

The poet lives two lives.
One on the outside,
And one in their mind.

When you look in their eyes
You could see an abyss.

If you looked long enough
You could sink into it.

But most people don’t see it.

Take the time to read the words, though,
And you would know for sure.

The poet lives in two different worlds.

To write words over and over
To explain what it feels to love you
To express what you mean to me

No words can be enough for that
And so I always end up erasing them

Free will is the will of the free
Freely enslaving their will at will.
A slave has no free will
but believes he has.
Compelled by a will unknown
not his own.
Thus all act freely,
truly or deludedly:
One submissive to a Greater Will,
The other defiant in freedom.
One free agents of the Highest Good,
The other unwitting servants of an unseen hand.

Donald Trump
Is no chump.
Makes America rich,
Without any hitch.

Says what he thinks,
And never even blinks.
Kowtows to no-one:
Just gets the job done.

Paul Butters

© PB 15\10\2018.

We cannot write silence.
The beats.
The pause.
The breath.
The way it aches
and persists

and begs that,

if only for a moment,

our consciousness is only a whisper.
our bodies,
our lips,
the air that passes through falling chests
and stillness.

A melody of emotion.
Sleeping in the quiet of a heartbeat skipped
a word lost to the wind.

The wickedness of reticence
Encapsulated in air and time.

The moment stretched too long.
Hesitation perpetuated in the grip of fingernails
pressed into palms.

We cannot write silence,
but we can try.

to find a way to immortalize emotion
to create space
in the ceaseless drone of words that speak and spin.

I cannot write silence. But I can write
tears and years
and the burn of long-stretched lies.

I can write goodbyes and hellos
And dozen ways to say
I love to hate you
Or
I hate to love you
and sometimes
I cannot tell the difference.
Silence.
The space I have upheld for myself.

I love to hate you
Heart.

I hate to love you too.

I cannot write silence.
But I know it.
and I have held it in my hand.

I'm here sitting
alone,
the smell of coffee runs through
my veins,
some music i probably will forget
in a few years arguing with
the thought of you,

But I'm here,
I'm here,
writing about what's happening

pretty boring huh?

i call myself a poet
but i can't use high metaphors,

i call myself a poet
but i can't describe fully
how you make me feel

i call myself a poet

but what am i?

I'm just a kid
scared of life
finding new ways to cope
searching for someone to love,
desperate,
not holding unto my dreams
how can i choose with my mind
what's right for the heart to choose.

and you see?
don't you see?

don't worry i can't either

i can't see how great i am
i can't see how other people see me
i wish i could.

i want to believe this was a dream
or
a nightmare at that.

But at last.
I'm here wishing that in another life
i could be with you,
or
maybe in other deaths,

i crave your touch,
i crave you..
with coffee waking up my senses
like a kid in summer waking up early
to go play with his friends.

i wish things were different,
so i wouldn't have to wish.

What's it take
These days

To write a poem

That makes the world go mad
That brings the crowds to their feet
That spreads like wildfire
Through a dry winter forest

Is it those excessively long words?
The ostentatiously loquacious
Platitudinous ramblings
Of an insecure mind aspiring
To authentic intellect?

Is it perhaps...
     the "creativity"
               of      varied      spacing
  or...    could it be..... the lack
                              of capitalization
               the loathsome little letters
               screaming out
                         hey, look at us!
         ... or maybe it's
               the punctuation marks,
     littered, haphazardly
          through the text
                    (whether used correctly)
               or, theyre not?!
     despite worrds mispeled
          and a grammar might is broken
   can these gimmicks increase interest
        though miswritten or misspoken?

Is the trick alliteration
Whose bite brightly bids us
To center on the snappy sounds?
Although all along
     unvoiced underneath
Ideas idle in the isles
   (or perhaps the aisles)
Of the mind
To meld and craft and bind
Our thorough thoughts
And worthy words
Into lines
Which
Heard by herds
Raise the
                  Praise for which we
                  Privately, desperately
                  Pray

Maybe it's a magical mix
Of splendid in-your-head rhythm
Marvelous meter that perfectly clicks
Flowing smoothly without schism

Well-spaced stanzas
Well-used time
Well-crafted phrases
Well-thought-out rhymes

Well, maybe not...
     those gems are often ignored
     cast-aside, unread, even abhorred

Why?

Because the modern world
doesn't need your rules
your restrictions
your regulations
your misguided boundaries
your oppression
your antiquated ideas
   of "the right way"
   to write
   to speak
   to act
   to live
   to (fill in the blank)

No, what the modern world needs
is
Negation!
Contradiction!
Resistance!
Revolt!

And poetry whose words
Say the same thing
Repeat the same meaning
Echo the same lyrics
Rephrase the same thoughts
But in an ever-so-slightly
Different
Varied
Altered
Adjusted
Changed up way

Line
After line
Of synonyms
          over
               and
                    over
                         and
                              over
                                   again

-----

What's it take
These days

To not give in
To narcissism's spiral?

But more importantly:
What's it take

To make my poem go viral?