Here in the 21st century
People only have time for
4 lines of poetry
Just enough, squeezed into a collapsed facebook post

…Sorry, Walt Whitman.

11pm is when
my brain finally wakes up
8pm is when
I usually go to bed

Which means

I spend most of my waking days
Asleep.

Sometimes I am
Jean-Dominique Bauby
A slack face, without a hint of
The turbulent thoughts that lie
Beneath the skin

I think the root of the wonder of childhood comes from a
Malleability of perspective.
Radically prismatic shifts that
Expose dry truths through a lens of amazement,
Rightly justified
As a young mind recognizes what
Crystallized geriatrics like me can no longer see:
That the bland fundamentals of the world are truly worthy of awe.

Sometimes (such as this time)
I write the title without having a clue as to what I will type next
I suspect the result more often than not
Is a huge rat **** dropped on the page
DIAMOND STUDDED EXAMPLE:
This “poem”

Hi! I’m a hamster on a Wheel!
Gamely running on my bony little legs
[I’m getting somewhere! I’m getting somewhere!]
Every once in a while, I look left or right
See my **** and my compressed pellet food sitting in the same positions
as an hour, a day, weeks ago – and I realize:

IT APPEARS THAT I’M ACTUALLY GOING NOWHERE!!!!!!!

Which surprises me each time it crosses my little hamster brain, until I’m distracted
By my pellet food, the call of the Wheel, and other sundry carnal desires

Roiling superficially in my hamster-angst
While working the Wheel, surrounded by the detritus of my saccharine prefabricated life

I fail to notice

Outside my cage
Hands, lifting, carrying
Thousands of miles traversed
Steaming deserts
Steaming jungles
Steaming cities
Brutality, kindness, sensuality, love, hatred, atrocities, age, youth, heat and cold
All flashing by my glass shell as hands carry me towards a final resting place

Until

A jarring, toppling blast shakes my world
Tearing me from my Important Work on the Wheel
I look up, pellet crumbs falling from my mouth
Just in time to see my cage tumble from hands

Over a rail
Down
Down
Flash of blue
Flash of brilliant light
Flash of blue
Down
Smacking into a vast expanse of water
Unimaginably immense
Outside of my realm of comprehension – I mean, I’d never seen it in my hamster cage before, so why should I even expect it to exist?
What is it’s purpose?
It makes no sense!
It has no place in the world!

And as I slowly drown in the secret withheld from every hamster since the beginning of time
I take one last longing look at the Wheel, the cage, the pellets
And curse them
Curse the Deception that told me they were all that mattered

I typed this question without knowing  what the answer would be. My next sentence will be after I meditate on it for a while.

I feel like I’m on a path that honors ideals I’ve held since I was a teenager.
I feel it is far too easy to unwittingly, even unknowingly bow down to the idol of American materialism.
I have found myself kneeling at the altar more than a couple times.
A large paycheck seems to add to the fog.
Life was simpler, more clear cut, when I could barely pay my bills.

However, at the risk of overquoting (having quoted him already), here’s Bukowski again:

….then he got a bit
Intoxicated.
He bent forward, grinning
Slyly, said
“come on now, you got to admit you probably
Miss the good times you had on
Skid row, on the ***, on the road, all that."

It’s when a fellow talks that
Way, even if he’s not a bad
Sort, you know he’s never been anywhere.

Not that you have to have been there
But if you were
And once you get out
Almost everything that happens after that
Seems blessed.


I hope it never hurts to give away any possession I own.
I hope I don’t hesitate when called to do so.

[Luke 18:22-27}