My love cannot heal you
Or save you from this wretched place
It will not save the world
Nor restore the human race
I am just a pebble
Pond’s distance from the end
I am just a droplet in the desert
Deserving a little more then
I began with

My love will not restore you
Or save you from the horrors
But in these softer moments
My love can hold you
Comfort not control you
Cushion you against the harshness
Give you time to find the self
So maybe you can heal yourself

The tear drops don’t stop
Keep leaving wet spots
And I say thank you

For years my fears
Lay hidden in the shadow
Pill bottles I swallowed
I so I wouldn’t have to feel
Something deep and real
Bleeding until I was numb
So now that I can feel again
I am grateful

Even if my eyes blurred
From something I heard
Something that made me disturbed
As the poet preaches to me
Not about divinity
But about our humanity
It reaches deep in me
Stirring remnants of dead flesh
Turning my cold body into a living thing
This living being
Sings
With love
Not ******
Or Demeaning
But with meaning
Returning word for word
Like a blast of healing rain
Washing away the last stain
Till apathy no longer reigns
And I am human again
So I say with joy and with tears
Thank you for giving me
A few more years
Of my own humanity

I never knew a noble sacrifice
I couldn’t use
Couldn’t take
To demonstrate
My point of view
Shroud the truth
To pound the youth
Into my way of thinking
Orwell would have been cowed
By my level of thinking
Hemingway
Would have had to stop drinking
To out-smart our stinking
Propaganda machine
Human beings make
Perfect machines to partake of
More sacrifices
Not to Allah or Yahweh
But to my god of greed
The capitol conquest
My bible to succeed

I send wishes like star light
Praying we will be alright
All night long where we go on
But the darkness is strong
And as deep as the sleep of the ocean
History is cooked in
Gas chambers and ovens
Despite all my loving
I can’t heal history
Still the best of me
All I have left you see
Is telling stories
Compelling strangers in danger of forgetting
To remember what I mean by regretting
Knowing it is not our fault
Doesn’t lessen the pain
Nor uncut the historical vein
I just want to teach them and you to
So those human horrors don’t happen again

Warring walls let men condemn
Other nations we might call friend
Thin boundaries made of leaves and death
Imagined markers that separate state and self
The illusion stands stronger than any borderline
Humanity so easily defined as the other
Cause the enemy outside the gates
Is supposed to be worse than the beast inside that waits
Withering intellects that debate merits and levels of hate
While class warfare does exist
The upper puppeteering the middle class
While the bottom is dismissed

Did you forget too
Thinking time might
Forget you
Forgiving
And for giving

All that is living
Is living
Happiness is not a right
But it should be

We should see
Strangers on these street
Playing joyfully
Laughing freely

Something that we don’t see
Even though I believe
We can be better
And I ask again
My sweet friend
Did you forget to
Love someone Else
Like I love you all of you

Human directives, veracities unverified  
Bellies belching with anger, murderers
Udders dripping hate, foundling banters
Hunters striking the hungered, unfortunate
Glare sight to seek the truth, hold me lets sink
Tear motions and debates of inequality

My Dafur, the realm of the fur, demise
All armed in Sudan, the arid, a battlefield
Emergency alarms sirens from 2003
The indefinite complications and hunger
A land of the displaced, starving nomads
Hear me out in these non-dissolving conflicts

Guantanamo bay detention a prison vicious
A base for “war in terrorism”, reciprocal laws
Inhumane human interrogations persists
A breach, a revolt, the hunger riots devolve
Force-feeding, torturous measures applied
All undressed, humiliated, genitalia exposed

A Rwanda slain in divide and rule
Civil clashes, mashes, all trashed
Swaying war rapes, tapes, the raves
Machetes slashing necks and hands
A lust of power, a genocide slaughter
The Tutsi slewed and unsewn from a patch

Autocratic regime boring divisions
Territorial ethnic cleansing, a holocaust
The oppression of Jews, Romanis, Poles
Homosexuals, the disabled and mentally ill
Indifference pooled in pits and camps
The institutional social indoctrination

The honor and killing to expose shame
The violation and dishonor of moral fabric
For what is “good”, “bad”, fixated moral values
Buried waists and head, awaiting stones to hit
Confessional secrets of only what lays within
A torment watching witnesses, all dangling

Marxists calls ships to stow ashore
Masses kidnapped, confused in deceit
Invalid contracts awaits signatures
The white immigrants to be enslaved
All aboard, now abroad to revolve labor
Wage packages taken to pay for freedom

Humans bought and sold to be owned
Slaves yorked and counted as assets
Bounded to serve plantations and homes
A human, non human, a chattel, a slave
A debt *******, offended and *****
Untamed and made to obey a master

A falling global strings unturned
Tunes strumming hate, war and pain
Human trafficking, violence, inequality
Child abuse, civil conflicts, capitalists
Commercialism, zero hour contracts
For if we have no rights, I have none
For if we have no peace I have none

I’m too tired
I’m too scared
I’m too busy
To freaking care
My kids need food
I’m to poor
And I’m hungry to
Thats why things
Never change
And you know
It’s true
The struggles
Never end
No time to mend
We seldom get second chances
To start again
Life keeps us on
A broken hamster wheel
Round and round until
We feel
Breathless
And
Powerless

I am not innocent
But naïve
Deficient in sufficient
Reasoning
To blind to see
That what I see
Is limiting me
Spiritually void
Not for lack of gods
But for lack of faith
In anything
Except the unknown
My eyes see what they can
But being merely human
There is so much I miss
Being merely man
I will soon be mortally dismissed
Sorely ******
With all of my failures
My ineptitude
Stemming from my attitude
That latitude I give
Giving leeway to myself
The stupor of inaction
Clouded by a false sense
Of satisfaction
I gained by creativity
When these words don’t belong to me
And do little to alleviate humanity’s
Suffering
I sit back and wonder
Why
Chase the tides
And try and fix the ocean
I have no notion
Of success
When I am just a pebble
Barely disturbing the surface
With tiny ripples
Inevitably settling on the bottom
While the levels stay the same

The rat king
Sleeping in sewage
Wasting clean water
Cause profit is better

King of the rodents
Though I would prefer
The rodents are better
Than the man of manure

Garbage maker
Weather changer
Spin doctor

Death dealer
Conscious free
Will live to be
The death of me
And all I love
In our society

(In response to "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg)

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity,
seen bold new visionaries resign themselves to clinical long-haul deaths,
drug-numbed to their own suffering, and everyone else’s;
seen raving revolutionaries give up, retire to minimalist Swedish-designed armchairs,
and never move again;
seen the horizon dim and draw ever closer,
and the tenacious lunatics with the wanderlust to stray beyond
become fewer and further between.

There are uglier destructive forces than madness:
Consider cognitive rehabilitation.
Consider absolutely nothing immeasurable.
Consider utter rationality.

Ritalin, lithium, risperidone, duloxatine. [I thought I heard a man speaking in tongues,
then I realised he was simply reading out loud from a pharmaceutical directory.]
Imagine a generation of loan brokers and loss adjustors;
Hicks gone these past seventeen years and Leary still alive;
sharks floating in formaldehyde;
all true human significance lost in pretentious symbols,
and repetition
and repetition
and repetition,
and no one raging.
No one raging for real.

Where are Plato’s maniacs now?
Where are their lunatic songs?
I hear only the steady, rational tapping of the accountants’ calculators,
occasionally, some lost and lonely *** crying out for one more shot,
and the PA system calling the next patient through, the doctor will see you now,
or asking would the owner of a light blue Honda Civic please move their vehicle,
as it’s blocking in a black Lexus full of lawyers with an ambulance to chase.

Is there really nowhere between here
and the bellow and buzz, the shiver and shriek of the asylum?
Someplace between this sterile, static, silent, windowless room
and the fizzing frenzy of the electroconvulsion suite,
there must be somewhere we might have paused and breathed and set up shop,
where we could have been happy – if we’d wanted to be –
and no more or less sane than we chose.

Dr Thompson saw it coming: the dawn of this new Age of Equilibrium.
He knew that football season was over, for good this time, and made his ballistic decision
to go stalk peacocks and hound Nixon through the Kingdom Hereafter,
assuring us, ‘Relax – This won’t hurt’.
He was right.

Safe and stable and sanitized, we can no longer follow your desperate, ***** verse.
Straitjacketed by reason, we perceive our world only in terms
of quantum and co-efficiency, of the logical and logistical,
of what can be conjured in the duration of the average commercial break,
of what can be computed to at least two decimal places.

We are the chemically castrated.
We are lobotomised by mutual consent.
We are the perfect ones: regular and moderate and so healthy, so functional.
We are the white strobing smiles of the toothpaste ads,
the poster children for good mental hygiene,
the footsoldiers of no more conflict.

We have lost our skill for the alchemy
that once distilled genius from the seething crucible of lunacy.
We medicate those whose vision would otherwise put our own to shame,
leave them as myopic and blinkered as the rest of us,
the breadth and depth and distance of their sight no longer a worry to anyone.

Give us back our madmen: we need them.
Give us back our crazed anthems, our burning shrouds, our leprous one-man-bands.
Give us back the fire and the filth and the fornication that kept us howling through
those endlessly polluted nights of Windscale and Watergate, McCarthy and motorcades, Hanoi and Hiroshima.

Please.  Give us back our madmen.
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity.

It's been a dark and ***** start to the year, and altogether
too many of my heroes are dead.
Too many of the old
villains too; those familiar monsters
are gone, replaced
by new and more appalling terrors,
as fear is rebranded for a freshly emergent demographic.
All the girls are much too young for me. Everyone
is too young for me.
When they speak, I hear
only static, like
the ghosts of extinct, pre-digital
TV screens haunting the
empty beauty of their
dead channel mouths.
In the supermarket, they've taken to
playing songs I like on their
in-store radio, wedged between
corporate jingles and adverts for
two-for-one offers on
hot dogs in jars, and I'm
so irrelevant I could cry.
I'm struggling with the world and my
own inability to find somewhere
I can be in it. I can't relax, can't
stop fighting against inertia, contentment
and any hope of peace. Maybe drugs
are the answer, but I think they'd just
make me forget the question.
I feel the cold, and I
want to sleep too much. I miss
my bad habits, but not enough
to relapse. I'm not
young enough or cute enough
to get away with
this much ******* angst.