Marooned

Vapid beauty of this room
Frothing carpet, ocean blue
One wall me, the other you
What lies between is residue

Scribed on soggy, shipwrecked parchment
Questions asked, time forgotten
Who are we?
What do we know?
Into these questions Summer flows
And thrashes at your Autumn’s brinks
Yearlong they torment my brain
Infringing on every season

If not for the manic scheme
To love and having loved be loved
This correspondence to a distant land
With stars, more numerous and brightly lit
Than my burgeoning highway exit
Would by no means have left my hand

But if, against all odds, it will prevail
Extolling truth’s folly, my sorrowful tale
Quells with reason my groundless pride
At having docked on your passionless harbor
Unloading platonic cargo during our youth’s ebbing tide
Must not create union of body or mind
You swallow my horizon, like the sun twilight
Though, one need not chase that orange orb for tomorrow

In this night without fortitude, lewd humor consumes me
Singing with the mouth on my head and your voice inside
I plunge into darkness
Skimming its silky surface
Before zipping it behind me

Shall I drown, as I have lived?
In vain, my dreams your subjects
Taken for ransom in your heart’s Tripoli
Not surmising recompense, I forfeit this
A note belying resonance
Of my heart’s last echoed throe
One desperate effort, giving up
Feed every vestige to the void
Wading, torso encumbered
Each sullen relic of your memory
Falls to the deep’s frigid ebony
Then, only too late am I cognizant
That my own breath is tribute yet spent
Therefore if I were to float or swim
I’d give you every ounce of who I am
Convince you to relinquish me
From your tepid, spurning sea
Then lying beneath moist underbrush
Slowly, breathe no more

There is nothing here
Not the façade of a façade
Can’t you see our idea fading?
We thought we were Hobbes’ Leviathan
The modern alchemists of state
We’re nothing more than rodents!
Scurrilous, maladapted membranes
Spewing from democracy forth
Ought they to encapsulate us?
They must needs encapsulate the naïve!
Whiling away at the trough as though livestock
I’m to be ground on the wheel regardless;
Nay, stretched on the rack of modernity!
By the comforts of progress and superficiality
Sought after as if vital
By the people, “We the people!”
Rallying cry for throngs, imprisoning themselves
With society, a subtle hocus pocus
The trite, aged argument
Of those who’d force you build your very tenement
Paying rent to breathe,
Countless yet believe
Tripartite consumer, greed and slavery
Surrounding you and me
Separating ignorance from squalor
In a ghetto of the mind
You're right, we're alright