My pen is a paintbrush
   My pain is the colors
The void is my wedding
   The stars are my lovers
My vow is unfaithful
   My *** is undead
The rain is my offspring
  The clouds are my bed
My breath is a dragon
  My pulse is a viper
The ledge is an eagle
  The bullet, a spider
My drink is a nightmare
  My drug is a dream
The drought is an ocean
  The flood is a stream
My wit is a dagger
  My grin is a cloak
The story is tragic
  The end is a joke

Even when
I do not
Seem to have you
I do
I step with you in stride
Every day I get through
I contain you inside
My sole essence of being
And restless I think of you
Always as leaving
Me grieving, in search of
The tallest of peaks
To behold of your splendor
It renders me weak
And depleted, worn, weathered
And weary ascending
Still ardently seeking
Your love never-ending

Let’s pretend
We trend to like
We tend to
Mostly
Playing nice
The sprawling
Fallen
Paradise
A part of nature
All its own
We decimate
This one true home
Insisting in the cloud
To save us
As we let the lords
Enslave us
Digging graves
Like Vegas babes
Keep track of time
Like meter maids
Still underpaid
And overworked
And haunted
Everywhere we’ve lurked
By what a curse
It is to live
To be this me
With more to give
Yet gifted with
A lesser power
All the universe
Is ours

My last supper was years ago
Hunger and I go way back
We like watching things burn
And then making dark magic
It’s tragic, really I know
We still see *******
Where you see snow
And sometimes
When the dark closes in at night
We still think to ourselves
How much longer can this war,
This war, this dreadful war
Still go on without end
Without hashtag or trend
Before we realize it’s class
And landowning elites
And the company perks
Who still count our defeats
As a nation of states
When there’s so much more human
We have on our plates
Grabbin’ guns
Shootin’ kids
Perpetuating the races
We run to feel free
From the gods who erase us
With fury and fire
With wrathful sin scorn
Unto those who equate us
Drop bomb gender norms
Like it’s somehow ok
To treat others as lesser
When anything you can do I can do better
My nevermore letter is gone like the weather
And hers is much wetter when we are together
Enduring the cold like two Soviet wolverines
I am the West and the East still just wants to be me

In the lurches of subways
In alleys I’m lurking
In deserts I’m drilling
My evil plan working
And spreading like viruses
Spending and spending and spending
My envy
To no more to gain
Another man’s trash
Is the throne that I claim
And I treasure existence
And covet the stars in the sky
With oblivion
Passions of panic and all I desire
Is Amazon beauty to add to the fire
To dare speak my name
Costs and arm and a leg
And a chemical conscience
To think like my puppets
You’d first lose your mind
Than your shoes and your wallet
Your nickel and dime
And the scene of your crime
Would be questioned
And pondered through all the non-linear
Moments in time
And now as you still read
What possession really means
You come to see my value
Only measured
In your greed

Let me return you to childhood trauma
To monsters and terrors that crept in the shadows  
To growing so old all alone in this homeless
Expanse wilderness of a withering world
To the waking eye comas of numb nevermore
And the bumps in the nightmares you’ve dreamt of before
To the distancing shore where your hope is uncharted
In long, buried chests of cathartic departed
Delusions of love and emotional anything
Silenced and blinded and deafened by everything
Crashing and burning in dead expectations
And gun blasts of nuclear war trepidations
Relinquished to those who command me with skill
As they sow my dominion’s tyrannical will

I devour potential
The pop to your pill
I will **** and grow fat
On your deepest desires
Your secrets are mine
And I know a few buyers
The cold in your spine
Is my warm insulation
Where you see a failed state
I see a great nation
And now in the pensive impermanent pulse
Of your final days fading, do I now reveal
That my true name is fear
And I wish I was real

Peace is of puzzles
All scattered
Before me
When war
Was more formerly
Stories
To bore me
And poor getting poorer
The norm
Uncontested
Made sense
But incensed
Nonetheless
We’ve invested
A fortune
Of favors
Engraved
In our labors
Subjected,
Subtracted,
Enslaved
By day traders
Invaders
Advance
From each angle
Except
When the mangled,
Star-spangled reign
Steps to the left
Because then there’s the problem
We solve them
Unarmed
And we educate,
Raise them
To raze
The alarm
Should its nightmarish
Blaring
Scaremongers
Come knocking,
Its gun-cocking,
Crack-rocking,
Lawbreakers
Mocking
The locked
Ballot box,
The tik-toks,
The youth lost
Yet to feed them
Spare change
Is all that it would cost

A dissident,
Intricate lyricist
Implements
Policy
Volubly
Imposing prose,
And inciting
In writing
Takeovers
In droves,
Turns the drones
Into dawning red rovers
And clones
Who fawn over
The radical zeal
When she feels
Like berating
Opponents'
Ill logos appeal
To pure reason
In teaching it
Languages learn
To articulate grievance
In slashing
And burn

I started with feelings
Then worked my way down
Severing ties with each chord of my heart
And in limited contact with pleasure and pain
I learned how to reform it
And tear it apart
Till the one who first broke it
Sees only my name
And remembers how eagerly
I sat awaiting
Her presence of penance
Allure captivating
My instinctive intrigue
Enveloping entropy
Nevermore sure it was her I’d endure
The way she would dig in my skin with her purr
And her wine glassy shards
Of retractable claws
That bent all of my will
And revealed all my flaws
From another past lover
Who left me my heart
Still intact, beating fast
But as hard to predict
As a weather forecast

The opioid battle droid
Children butchered
Homes destroyed
Can’t go back and face
His nation
State so full of hate
Can’t take it
Great again is just a saying
No amount of pity praying
Seems to stay each day decaying
PTSD noise parading
Medicating, mind grenading
Every step is compound raiding
Waiting for the pain to fade
But they just trade his life away
False promises, he’s led astray
To drone alone and aimlessly
Fight on these Clone Wars shamelessly  
In vein is he
More mech than man
Reprogrammed by
Afghanistan

The optimists are cute
But so incredibly naive
They think themselves
The fullest living
As they’re dying to believe

Not blind,
But perhaps
Blind ambition became
The undoing for which
We remember their name
The ones who inspired,
Commanded great legions
But made far more graves
Than they ever made
Freedmen
With exploits of legend
Like food for the masses
And earth could be heaven’s
Equivalent rations
But flags they were wrapped in
Were packaged for sale
And utopian dreams
Weren't drawn to full scale
Only drawn to the power
Corrupting ideals
And then gone in the flames
Was the heart that it steels

Never was one for the activist,
Always was more of a pacifist
Grabbin this’
Tinkering with all the ins and the out of its
Spittin’ specifics on how to break out of it
Trapped in the bottom of poverty’s shopping spree  
Gravity fadin’ to zero no stoppin’ me
Always want up but no social nobility
Still seein’ oceans as far as the eye can see
Spannin’ each day on the faith of infinity
Home was an island adrift in reality

Altering actions,
Projections,
Directions
Trajectories take
To deliver their lessons
Impose inquisition
Through force
And charisma
Convince you to
Lie, cheat and steal
An enigma
Required
To masterfully wield
The exertion of pressure
Agendas fulfilled
But it doesn’t take geniuses
For me to be
In control of the outcomes
Unanimously

Forget the way she made you feel
As mighty as a mountain
Throw away the memories made
Like pennies in a fountain
See her face begin to blur
And fade into the distance
Never reach her rising sun
That powered your resistance
Tell yourself you weren't worth
An ounce of her serenity
Change your mask until she sees
Your ugliest identity
For somewhere in the wilderness
You've both yet to discover
Could perhaps in waiting lie
Each others' truest lover

Relief is a rare
All too scarce
Food source here
When it’s clear
I can simply say no
And refrain
From more deigning
To bend over
Backwards
In vain
All I gain
Is a thankless
And bankless crusade
And as much as it shames me,
Still going unpaid
Is becoming each zero sum
Dollar a day
An astray-
Course diverting
Me back to the grave
Like a masterless slave,
An unbidden submissive,
An outspoken critic
With no one to listen
To facts and statistics
Concise explications
Disowning the system
Excoriations
I can’t wait
To be free of this place
And be rid
Of the service
I still think
I owe to these kids
Who don’t give
Half a shred
Of the ****
That they live in
If I live or die
Or reply to the piddling
Remarks as I try
To remember alive
Not just how to survive
On this sustenance pittance
Somehow they can thrive
I just work
At this no-purpose
Circus deprived
Of a ring leader,
Just a few teachers
And creatures
All acting like
Shows must go on
When the bleachers
Devoid
Of a care or concern
Like the clown
Who can’t seem
To turn frowns
Upside down,
Is in town

Afternoon thunderstorms
Burst on the scene
But vanish before
But a lightning bolt seen
And all we can do
Is await it to dissipate
Listen to it
Hit the steel roofing corrugate
Anticipate when the sun
Again shows its face
Maybe this evening
A fleeting glimpse setting
And hopefully heralding
Midnight tranquility
No later torrential
Waking calls
Chilling me
Down to the bone
Guaranteeing tomorrow
I can't charge my phone
For the power again
Will be absent 'till when
I know not
Deprivation from
Illumination will end
And then I can pass time
Blankly staring at screens
Until afternoon thunderstorms
Burst on the scene again

Been a minute
Since I took
Half a second glance
And looked
At what resides in each of us
Beneath the surface feature stuff
Reflecting on the one who I
Became, the same brain stimuli
Still unified in all but form
Perplexing, cogent lightning storm
Projected from my eyes, the sun
To wash away what they had done
And none could cast their shade
In my direction
For I was remade
Rejuvenated in the glade
And stayed this way
As far away
From them I journeyed on astray
And lost all track of time
I lost my mind
Intelligent design
Had redefined my evolution,
Elevation
To divine
And the creation
Making gods of us
Revealed itself
As humankind

Not veracity
But frequency
Determining
The truth
And it is just
How many times
The jingle ringing
Ears of youth
Have heard
Routinely
What is schemingly
Alluring
And seductive
And its limiting
Abilities
To reasoning
Deductive
What its function
Is inherently
To pacify
The meek
But in reality
Adherents
Are empowering the weak

Been making a statement
Since chalk on the pavement
Erasing complacent
Content in my basement
Been searching for famous
Since pen hit the paper
A COINTELPRO
Expose’ prose’n muckraker
No stake in your stockholder
Meeting this evening
Just cuttin’ deals laced with
A little left-leaning
Obscene acts of terror
Each letter a crime
A defacement of privatized
Property swine
Dispossessed but of rhyme
Like the spirit of Marti
Till I’m callin’ party boss
Shots of Bacardi

Just try to do some good they say
Just do the right thing
Even if you do it
In the wrong way

Mind
Corporeal shell
Carnal desire cell
Within temporal confines dwell
Imprisoned

She seems to be drawn
To the tricks of my trade
To the art of my craft
To the cast of my shade

Like a moth to the flame
Of my flickering hope
Like a fiend to the drug
Of my slippery *****

Perhaps it evokes
Some chemistry questions
Addicting the senses
To crave my expressions

Reflecting the vision
She couldn't imagine
Would be chasing tales
Of my lurid sol dragon

Abandon the wagon
And blaze your own trail
With no holocaust
To my unholy grail

Come sail the exhale
Of my genesis breath
Come surf across brain waves
Of my ego death

But prepare to be swept
In my undertow's wake
When I rise and I fall
Like the tides of daybreak

Forsaken we'd make it
A night with each other
But no stars could fake it
My true sunlight lover

Lost inside the silent nights
And deafened days
Spent waiting for the end
Of this journey I set out to find
The way out of this maze

Still wandering the corridors
And hallways in the dark
Nostalgic is each move I make
Then out into the light I step
This place has made its mark

On this vagabond unbound
By the shackles of the past
Though the wanderer remains
I have found the will to lead
Me from these shadows that he casts

Type caste system arch villain chillin’ like Ivan
The terrible chemical weapon describin’
The end of the world vibin’ lionized Mayan
Still skyin’ as high as a Lucy blood diamond
Fine dinin’ and winin’ with sabhines and sirens
Declinin’ these Roman Republican tyrants
A stubborn ******* beast of burden survivin’
Like ghosts of the guillotine dreamer revivin’
Enlightenment vivid with livid land minin’
Kaboomin’ the gloom when I see these kids dyin’
Just tryin’ to weather this Stormy norm climate
A violent sea risin’ and still you deny it
The science, in favor of implicit bias
Your nation-hate patriot ******* riot
Your ravenous consumer media diet
Your guns and your slaves, all your property private
Your for-prophet poverty trap spreading virus
Your silence of lambs in the face of Goliath
My sting with that sling got’chu feelin’ defiant

And I brought all the words
That I needed to say
Dare I form them
Some rather
Material way
Some ethereal sway
Taken hold
Of my hand
And with dexterous
Penmanship
Each inky strand
Made its mark on the page,
Freed my soul from its cage
And let spill the life force
By the edge of my blade
Let it flow unreservedly
And
Unrelenting
Instilled
In serenity’s
Solace lamenting
And still
In calamity’s
Calming
Fomenting
A wrath only I
Could begin to describe
And a madness
Of malice
Too warped to decide
Which is which
Who is who
Where to go
What to do
In an infinite void
There is merely
Beware
We are here
We are now
We are locked in its glare

Until final lines
Of dialogue
Eat me alive
May I struggle to find
The right words to describe
Should we come to conclusions
That we’re out of time
May we still take a moment
To savor the wine
And when us
Is but remnants
Of dust
And decay
May our love at long last
In its resting place
Lay

Always the mind
Of a younger man
Mine
Has become suddenly
A much older one’s
Spine

Maybe it’s not meant to be
Monogamy
Or even love
Maybe we’re not supposed to be
The perfect pictures we dream of

Imperial as penguins
Spending half the world away  
And then returning after learning
How to make each other stay

For such a special little pebble
Like a diamond in the rough
But I have lionized my heart
And now this rock is not enough

And so I offer you my Mughal sun’s
Dynastic vagabond
As it sets upon Gangetic plains
Absconding far beyond

My eyes’ unfaithful iron curtain
I am certain
Will divorce us
Intercoursing through the person
Who renews the vows’ resources

What does it all matter
Religion and science
The future is now
And the gods are behind us
Reminding us where we let
Faith conquer fact
And believed only some higher powers impact the track record of humans in union
Just Trumans in ruins
Betrayed constitutions
And freedom illusions
In each revolution

Until at the grass roots we grow a new movement
To rise up and wake up the slumbering giants
The common man’s struggle to topple the tyrants, we’ve done it with violence, but never with silence
But in reconciling the ghosts of our past
With the differences in all the shadows they caste
We can iconoclast the plastic misconception
That all of our saviors need win an election
To bail out oppression with jail cell detention
And hush any mention of selfless expression

When bullets are ballots and money is mallets, then liberty’s truth is injustice for all
We can fall to our knees and praise be to a wall
Or measure the magic in this crystal ball
If we keep seeing fortunes and fame
On the brain, then the lions we tame will in vain take the blame
And all of us lose the food chain waiting game
As I share my Thomas Paine going insane

I am chaos
I am the substance from which your scientists and artists build rhythms
I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy
I am chaos
I am alive
And I tell you
You are free

More passer
Than dribbler
The scritch and scratch
Scribbler
My flow is a river
In come what May
Winters
I swim in the shiver
And even in bloom
All my numinous
Withers
My luminous
Gloom
Still obscured
To the witness
My freakiest nature
Survivalist
Fitness
A wishlist
Of ashes
Compassion
Impulse
And with tact
My collapsing
Synapses
Convulse

Can do
Almost anything now
For a profit
The older I get
The less likely
I stop it
This urge
To encourage
The remonstrance
Resonance
Counter-intelligence
Twisted
Its gifted
Most fervent
Resistance
Enlisting in
Anthropomorphic
Existence

The boots and bombs
First dropped in Nam
By order of the best of us
The king-elect who earned our trust
With pacifistic vision quests
The family values kind of guy
Was old and rich
Misogynist
And still you people wonder why
Demands can not be met with this
Depression-causing
Greatness cyst

Satiate your need for greatness
Not in gilded glory
You must never let society
Best sell your famous story
For no store-bought thought is novel
Lest it come first from the shelf
And no god can be believed in
Lest it come first from the self
For you must look within and then without
Identify the villains
Fight the battles no one has
Against the other billions
Who count upon the dying light
To offer its illusion
To illuminate the hopeless night
Rewriting their conclusion
In a new, exclusive twist of plot
To drop mouths to the floor
When really not-so happy endings
Have been done before
And will be told for eons more
And be forgotten all the same
And so I roar into the cosmos
And I make it fear my name
This epic tragedy, a comedy
I laugh at the abyss unknown
Existence is my kingdom come
Mortality’s my throne
And in remembrance ballads sung
Throughout the ages that proceed them
Are the legacies I leave behind
Now you just have to read them

The wretchedest recklessness civilized savage
Still life of the dead party politic Ba’athist
On acid dispellin’ out
Truth sarin gases
A flask full of blasts from the way passed Jurassic
A passive assassin
Amassin’ a chemical
Weapons grade cache
And then armin’ the youth
With a freshly baked batch
Of this back of the class
To the top of the caste
Stubborn *******’
Cultural iconoclast
Smashin’ bumpkins
And bumpin’ my tunes
On the track
Cashin’ in on the super PAC
Alternate fact
In the ashen green pastures
Of post-truth Iraq
I got stacks of sealed caskets
Of old me’s I buried
And tales of the lost souls
To Hades
I’ve ferried
For taxes from cryptic coin cons
Cemeteried

Look at me
Look at me
Narcissistic
Tendency
Enemies
Nemeses
Everywhere
Dependency
Unfriending
Distant memories
Becoming
Penitentiaries  
To place the blame
In block chain cages
Gamify
The dread AI
Then manufacture
Your outrages
Cheap
From its
All-seeing eye

Look up to the sky
Then close your eyes and see the why
The vivid venal visualities,
As wildest dreams within the heavens
Go to die
In black and white
In yin and yang
In good and evil
Pyongyang
Amidst an endless winter
Dripping red
In Kuomintang
As cherry orchard blossoms wither
In the climates that we change

As I ponder the mysteries
Question the answers
Entranced by enormity’s
Drawn-to-scale terms
They take turns
In their petty,
Pathetic
Concerns
As I’m turning each page
To disturb me,
Disrupt
What I just want to seek
Not to share
Nor explain
Nor would I deign to teach
For to do so
Would merely be
Lessons in vanity
Man in his vapid
Evaporations
Condescendingly
Rising in higher-formed
Hubris delusion
To elevations
Far above
What the students
Of even
The most of well-grounded,
Eclectic
Diverse juvenescence
Have ever expected
Of class is in session
From me
Or the host
Of these Holy Ghost preachers
Pretending
We’re of degrees equal
In kinds
Of mind-bending
The will of the people

Give up and quit
You want to stop writing
Put down the pen and just call it a Nightingale Lightning bolt failure
To spark any bulbs in the attics and
Basement’s creative misplacement
Still can’t seem to find my mind’s
Goodest vibrations

Lacking some vital components
Of sustenance
Constantly grouchy and drowsy
Because of it
Body reduced to
Cadaverous, frail
Lazy muscles but hustle
Do I without fail
At the crack of each dawn
In the dewy, brisk chill
Run an hour on empty
And then get my fill
Of the daily bread rations
Potassium passionate
Fruit satisfaction
With just a few spoonfuls
Of protein combined
With this breakfast of champion's
Everyday grind

Press on
And you may
Live to see
Victory
But defeat teaches more
And comes quite naturally

You know it when you see it
When you reach it
When you be it
Do not chase it
But embrace it
You have just begun to taste it
Let it spiral from the heavens
And consume you in its gaping
Mind-erasing, soul-escaping  
Divination of creation
As you sink into the sands
Of a permanent vacation

What if love
Was just fragments
Mere figments
Imagined
What draws bodies close
To embracing
Impassioned
Would tragic
Just typify
How it concludes
We confuse its temptation  
With swinging of moods
Could illusions
Enamor you
More than a kiss
What possessive delusions
Compel us to this
Missing piece,
Wishing more,
Holding dear,
Longing for
Bore the weight of its loss
Like misplacing one’s mind
And therein
It shall stay
It’s in one
We must find

You know not of the loss I speak
You see only the gain you seek
When little there is left to earn
Success is but a thing to burn
A price tag on your self-absorbed
Unhappiness we can't afford
Yet starve ourselves to replicate
And spite our face to imitate
The yacht club, mansion, model life
Is peanut butter's plastic knife