What to be grateful for,
Thankful for
Oh, I don’t know
I guess life’s not so bad,
Not so drab,
I suppose
There is much to appreciate
Right,
Happy place
With a sumptuous feast,
Elite eastern coast waste
Guess I could’ve been born
To the Neo-World colonies,
Roanoke winters,
Or scorching earth policies
Donner parties,
Autocratic regimes,
Or some lesser known creature’s
Inferior genes
In extremes of extinguished
Existence exposed
To the homelessness
Hope itself
Henceforth foreclosed
To the could’ve been sired
By mired in dire
Straights shot
By the cops
In the ceaseless crossfire
Conspiring to topple
The evil empire
With nothing else left to lose
Her most of all
So I guess I give thanks
It is not that awful

I bump in the night
I creak in the door
I drip in the pipe
I lurk in the floor
Buried
And beating
And drumming of war
My legions will echo
The pulse you ignore  
In your blood
In your veins
I'm a plague you can't cure
So check in your closet
Open each drawer
Look under the bed
I'm not there anymore

You can turn on the light
Then slam shut the door
Fix the drain pipe
And claw at the floor
Buried
And beating
I still drum of war
I still know what you did
I still sing of the gore
In your head
In your mind
As you rot to the core
I will conquer your soul
From your heart I will pour
I will spill from your guts
You are mine evermore

Turn to the tyrants in your desperation
Then bow to the despots who promise salvation
To make a great nation again just be patient
The sickness and hunger and carnage
Is ancient
So just keep on waiting
And praying and voting
For new revolutions
To end the scapegoating
Promoting of puppets who serve in the ranks
Of the NRA super pacs thinking of tanks
Before hospitals, schools and a job on the line
When the self-serving interests know only the grind
Of the country club, mansion and stock-******* life
And the left is in pockets of whites on the right
And now dark is the night and it never sees dawn
Just a loaded handgun to what’s already gone

Can now almost taste
The escape from this place
A fate self-imposed to
Satiate my disgrace
An abatement of seldom
Placated irate
From occasional instants
Without confrontational
Indigents, feigning
Themselves as my equals
And unto my deigning
Accept them as people
If not for refraining
To make me a slave
Then for all my complaining
I'd sooner the grave
Then to lay one more night
In my erudite spite
Rife with try as I might
To look past the disdain
The contempt that we both seem to share
Is the same
And appears to be solely
The only
In common
We have
As I slowly, downtrodden,
Indifferent
Go mad

Cue the routine
Make it new,
Push the product
Green accrue
Sate the craving,
Watch it sell
Expand consumer
Clientele
Persist dependence
On the urge,
The verge of death’s
Euphoric surge
Continuously
Hum the buzz
Nostalgia stuck
In how it was
To feel the instant  
Use ******
The validation
Status boost

You had to go your way
I had to go mine  
Had to let you go grow
In your own place and time
Had to let you be you
Had to let me be me
Had to let myself
Ponder
The great mystery
Had to see what the world
Had to offer
To us
Had to come back,
Regret it,
And regain your trust
Had to question
Why it
And love
Wasn’t enough
Had to answer it with
Miscellaneous stuff  
Had to do with
Two humans
In union
Together
Had to
Misconstrue it
As always
Forever

In being mindful
Not mindful of ourselves
We must also remember
We’re still something else
Something less than a beast
But much more than a god
For to err is too human
We are...tragic flawed

Productive days
Of improv humor
Lately I’m
A real late bloomer
But a tumor
Lurks beneath
Metastasizing
In the deep
The sunset looming
Out of reach
No one to share
Its fading heat
And I fear never
Will return
Shall once more lend her ear
To learn
The myriad
Aways of me
Intricacies
Deceptively
Expressed
In this
Suppressive state
Oasis
‘Bout to immolate
At any moment
But despair
Still constitutes
The everywhere
I go,

No golden fools
Aglow,
Nor soulless ghouls
Sold out for show
Quite artfully enough
Pretense
My shattered psyche
Imp laments,
As I laugh last
At their expense
Though not aghast
At class
Distinction
Just as natural
As extinction
More surprised to find
The kind
Of people
Who see dollar signs  
Can look like me, or you, or us
Just must be someone
I could trust
Like confidantes
No strings attached
Contracted obligation
Scratched

Thus ends my journey
Some evil dies young
When exhausted all words
To convey how I’ve hung
From a rope of indifference
To life
For too long
Barely kicking,
Just dangling,
Suspended in song
Elegiac, I wish
Just constricting
My throat
Squirming vertically,
Gurgling,
In anguish I choke
On another addition
To suicide note
That I wrote
Multitudinous ways
To escape
But my finest
Is yet to come
Just sit and wait

Seems like something's dying
In here
I can smell it
Could be the two mice that I killed
No regret it
In here there is room
For but one vermin's need
To feed freely on misery
That rat is me

Utterly, absolutely,
Completely alone
Learning how to make
This dimly lit cavern home
Which is seldom if ever
Enough to appease
Electricity greed
In the shadows I breed
So illumined is my
Filthy rodent disease
And so clearly they see
The rat
Is in fact,
Me

Save them all if I could
Feed them three squares a day
Then we’d celebrate the union
Of the monkey gods at play

They tell us
They love us
We put them
Above us
And with their
Attention economies
Drug us
And hug us
With warmth
Of embracing
A parent
Society shrugs
Off the bugs
Are inherent
Systemically
Hard-wired,
Virulent
Sentiment
Hasn’t yet made me a patriot
Actor
But rather
Appears
A contributing factor
To war
In its normalcy
All out more
Feeding
Its ravenous industry
Furnaces churning
Out cultural proxies
But all of its gods
Are just monkies
With poxies 🙊

Can’t complain
So they say
Copacetic acceptance
Don’t really want more
But I’m sure I should get it
Before I grow older
And surely regret
What I didn’t acquire,
Attain,
Or achieve
What I spent fortunes to
Live to die
To believe

It’s clear
You don’t care
About people
Still dying
So maybe it’s time
You heard
Animals
Crying
And feel what it’s like
To be trapped in a cage
Pacing back and forth
Back and forth
Listless all day
It’s not natural
Not normal
Not instinct
Not real
It’s like no one else  
Ever
Explained
What they feel
Enough for you
To know
I don’t want to be food
But I also don’t want
To be rude
Telling you
That it’s time to bequeath
That full plate
Full of meat
And stop eating these animals
Clearly replete
With a bevy
Of unhealthy
Parasite
Viruses
Lost in the
No weapons prosper
Against me
My weapon of choice
Is the time race
Commencing  
My voice to say anything
It ever dreamed
Even if
It’s extreme
And no one else
Believes
It could ever be real
I don’t either
Just know
What I feel

Not the faintest idea
Why I’m here
What is clear
Is I am
Theoretically real
So I hear
But I fear
I would rather
Sometimes disappear
Or just fade
Into ethers pervade
Dematerialize
And again be remade  
Like that time
I transmogrified
Couldn’t decide
Between living
As me
Or he already died

Try to write
Something else
Anything different
An inkling appears
And is gone in an instant
With her at the fore
Frontal focus
Fixation
My typical
Ritual
Excogitation
Deflates
Dissipates
And creates instead
This
Then updates the thread
Waiting
The taste of her kiss
My escape from debating
Domestic abyss
Is replaced
And embraced by
It’s her that I’m with

Seeing only red
Dilutes the stop light
Colored
Dread
And all the rest
Is free to go
Into a
Hasty
Guilty
Pled
So slow you roll
Before creating
One more not so
Special ed
Another crime scene to be fled
Another pipeline to aWOKEn
The arrested walking dead
Another anthem of the victimized
To fill your little head
And wedded foremost
To your infantries
You hiss and lash
And shed
The superficial
Artificial
Skin decisions
To conform
To recapitulate
Submissively
And watch
The global warm

Without these machines
There can be no me
Earning
Consuming
Subsuming
The natural world
Burning
Through boundless renewable
Bits of pollution
But only more robots
Can find the solution
And solve the intractable
Heedless conundrum
The needless
Egregious excesses
Must come from
Some source of organic
Emotively
Sentience
But rust in its oil can
Tin man
Descendants

If there are no answers
And there are no truths
Should we look to the heavens
Or dig up the roots
In our quest to find purpose
And meaning, and peace
Is it simply the moment
We let it all cease
When the thoughts slip away
And time drifts into space
Staring at the abyss
Then we exit this place
For a world where the riddles
Don't need to be solved
From some darker matters
These life forms evolved
And join them you shall
In the stardust again
To guide us all home
As a constellation

I don’t deserve to reproduce
To be alive
To even breathe
But don’t feel obligated to
Start holding yours
Until I leave

At least for now
Can claim a living
Earn my girlfriend’s hand
Forgiving
Me for daily
Disappointments
Knows my pointedness
Is poignance
Shrouded,
Hidden
Not for long
I soon reveal
To her
What’s wrong
As if she wasn’t
Here already
In my head
And heartbeats steady
When her voice
Dispels
And quells
All levels of
My inner hells
Then only
Inner peace
Resumes
Where formerly
It just entombs

Reborn into the Aether
After chaos revelations
Quintessential elevations
For the demi-god ascendancies
Transcending divinations
Of Olympic heights
Titanic mights
And Uranus castrations
Spawning Erinyes of fury
In my spartan fights
And Cretan flights
Escaping wings of Icarus
When Helios ignites
Within me, Gaia's chosen sun
Aphrodite is my lover
By her oceans overcome
With a beauty Hellenistic
Making lions of a man
Though Charybdis stirs beneath her
I still sink into the sand
Of her blissful Themiscyran shores
Elysian Fields I've seen
At the end of Trojan wars
Through Iliads and Odysseys

How wise we’d all be
If life was a service
If human the union
Could be how we learn this
Unlimited truth
Is to simply be me
Don’t be her, don’t be him
Just enjoy what you see
As another story
That begins and then ends
With some greater god’s glory
A hunger for power
And global dominion
Though mortals imbue them
With what they envision
As happiness wealth
And more land than they need
For a place for the self
And a garden for Eve

Hallucination detestation
What makes you so real?
If seeing is believing
I say, show me what you feel
We all set sights on something more
Invisible design
But clothe the naked eye should it paint
Dreamscapes of divine
And mystifying possibilities that redefine the mind
Into a monkey god thesaurus
Quite synonymous with time
In of which chakras to unlock
Have no beginning, middle, end
There is merely being present
In the peace you must defend
And the source of its creator?
Is an omniverse immersion
Flowing through the world around you
Bathing you in the conversion
Of obliterated egos
To the one who reigns supreme
A monarch metamorphosis
No lesser king or queen could deem
Unworthy of esteem
Because you are the soul master
Of your consciousness regime

Their radio emanates
Gibberish sound waves
Orations of some
More officious
Drug-peddler
Addressing some far away crowd
Its applause
Periodically
Clapping
When speech takes a pause
And discerning a few words
I listen intently
With nothing else better to do
I imagine
This man
As the next Mengistu
But his politics
Seem to have little effect
On collective lifestyles’
****-poor domiciles
And unemployed peasants
Khat leaf-chewing smiles

Perhaps the crystal clearest pool
Or lake of murky mystery
Is the true source
Of all discourse  
That flows to mouths of history

On lips and tongues of consciousness
We pass its streams to quench our minds
Of knowledge thirst
That lies submersed
Until cupped hands drink from its times

Then question how the river flows
Eternally through all we've been
Finding the source
To change its course
By what we take and put back in

Possibly real
Only makes it uncertain
But go to your graves
So convinced it is worth it
To offer the answer
Without questions posed
To phenomenon
Miracles
Nobody knows
Is humility’s
Most devout
Discipline mission
To see all belief
Not an act of submission
But rather
What matters  
Is just superstition
So listen to voices of gods  
Not religions

Memorize these names
It’s fame
Makes idols of iconoclasts
And critics of acclaim
And so we put them on
This pedestal
Then thin the ranks
To skeletal
Like skewed dysmorphic
Perfect
Happy endings
Unforgettable
But Oedipal
Complexes
Just neglect
Abusing youth
From when they’re groomed
To how they’re broomed
To independently
Produced
When the producer
The seducer
Just reduces them to dust
But not of stars
On boulevards
But merely objects of
Their lust

Strangeness is sameness
We come from
The same place
A rock and sea
Lucid sphere
Green and blue
Space base

End of the line
Am I losing control?
I feel like I have
A black hole in my soul
Now that I've returned
From a different dimension
To find that my home
Was not where I had left it
Instilled on a shimmering lake
In a bog
With my ghosts of the past
Whispering in the fog
How they loom in the gloom
Of this dubious cause
How their vapors exude
My corporeal flaws
Just an occupied landmass
A nut in a shell
A garden of Eden
Surrounded by hell
And I lie awake wondering
How'd I get here
I remember her name
But her voice is unclear
For now gone are the days
Where she keeps me off track
She has stolen my heart
And she's not coming back
So the next time I leave
To go win the space race
Let this now be the time
I forget too,
Her face

Mistaken for an older
Colder
Closer to
Collapsing over
Almost over
Final chapter
Epilogue’s
Not coming after
Nor the sequel
Just forget it
Savor desperation
Let it
Push you to the brink
Of sink
And make your alter-ego
Shrink
Relinquishing the hero’s tale
Accept that by the end you failed
To draw your perfect dreams
To scale

Bible thumpin’
Tractor humpin’
Runs on Dunkin
Country bumpkin
Never seen the world like me
On everything
It seems that we
Do not agree
Can not be free
As equals in humanity

Home was never quite enough
I felt the urge to venture far
Go get lost in a bazaar
And then collapse into oblivion
Just like a dying star

No home was never quite enough
I barely knew my shadow father
Love my mother and his daughter
More than every life itself
Could sooner be
Sheep to the slaughter

Home was never quite enough
No resting place could lull me in
Like the azure allure amphibian
Seductress songs
Could dull my grin

This home was never quite enough
There had to be totality
And end to this banality
In finding misses pieces out there
Scattered in depravity

My home was never quite enough
Eventually disowned
Only concluding overthrown
The global power order forces
Ever etched upon my stone

No home was never quite enough
And even now it yearns me back
How many times have I begun to pack
Retracted in reluctance
Fear facades replace
My foreign mask

For home was never quite enough
The elsewhere still awaited
As the years go by it sated
Wanderlust within
A gust of sin
And swept me on
Outdated

Home was never quite enough
An overstatement of unwelcome  
Overstay-stained cerebellum
Sooner seemed a silent specter
Often gone
But present, seldom

2 years elapses
Right back to the
Lapse in
The facts
In this Pax
‘Mericana
Reacting en masse
To the mass
Paranoia,
Hysteria
Spreading
Like fires
As wild
As isis kids’
Vetting
Regretting
Detention centers
And forgetting
The criminal record
Of liberty’s
Treading
In floodwaters rising
Too toxic to drink
And the carbon downsizing
Too noxious to think
So don’t blink
Or you’ll miss
The disguising
The virus,
The climate crisis
Confirmation’s
Unbiased
Bipartisan
Bickering
Bill becomes law
So you don’t see
The fatal,
Pronatalist  
Flaw  
Just a stimulus package
Diverting the crashing
And backtracking
Taxes
Like trickle down
Fascists

Shapes and perspectives
Form over the room
They dance all around
From an angle of gloom
Unobscured by the blinds
And the puppet stage screens
The art journeys across me
In skeleton scenes
And the messages written
Encoded in time
Are the buzzing brain bumbles
To my hornet mind

Forgive me I’m new to this
Form of survival
Each time I approach
I am dead on arrival
No reasoned and practical
Method
Successful
Attempts to be more
Than myself
Seem essential
In order to turn
Even hi
To goodbye
For eventually
Soon enough
You won’t reply

Stay thinking,
Stay healthy
Stay liberal of consciousness
Be patient,
Be wary
Drinking the substances
Let the kids talk
Let them join
In the learning
Accept the alliance
The second it’s burning
But yearn to get back to her
Still on the mind
She’s still thinking
About you
Can’t stop the rewind
And forget or forgotten
You are still alive
If you want it, go get it
A reason to die

No pessimist skies  
When the sun doesn't rise
Can reign my parades
Or dwarf me in size
With their cynical shades
On my evergreen trees
I'm a jack of all trades
I'm the uplifting breeze
And my ace of spades
Is the heart on your sleeves
So drop the charades
And come jump in my leaves

For life is my game
And my pieces in pain
So I play to win
For all one and the same
And all of you cheaters
Remember the name
For I raise the stakes
From the ones that you claim
All ownership over
The shattered-glass frame

When broken lie dreams
All split at the seems
We condemn our ambitions
To bite all the bullets
Of human conditions
And sentence to death
My master tactician  
Who ceases to fire
In wars of attrition
For I am the peace treaty's final revision

Ignition flames in your engines of trust
In a world made of more than machine cogs to rust
I could be the pebble
That ripples through time
Transforming you into
An optimist prime
I could be the cure
To the most common cold
A lonely lost lover's hands
Longing to hold

Awaiting the day you embrace me again
When the light in the tunnel is distant and dim
When everything falls I'll be there at the end
Since from the beginning
I've been by your side
You took your first steps
With me in your stride
Of your deepest secrets
In me you'd confide
Then I let you drown me
In oceans you've cried
Yet still I resurface
And rise like the tide
At your emptiest depths
I will fill you with pride
And be the surfboard
On these waves that you ride

Though we loosen our ties
When you tighten the rope
And you don't think of me
When you're penning the note
I still send you letters
In sealed envelopes
If you would but open
The ones that I wrote
And read that each one is signed
    
                                                       Your old friend,
                                                                ­        *Hope

Just when it seems hopeless
You find it really is
When caving in upon you comes
The crumbling edifice
And in the midst of utter ruin
All around you lie the pieces
Of foundations and formations
You believed in
But were specious
At their best
Like drawing out your final breath
As if you could inhale
The rest of time
Before you failed
Its test

The all seeing iris imperial city
The swiftest of stylus this side of the ‘sippi
The trippiest spittin’ Promethean hippy
Conspiracy theorist of eeriest verse
The despotic hypnotic black flag bearin’ Hearst
Still immersing myself in a poverty trap
As I grapple with lack of fact check cashing crap
Cryogenically frozen emotion vibes flowin’
From out my funk bunker boombox
Overthrowin’
Your global dominion opinion with ease
Shootin’ breezes with Tirailleurs Senegalese
I’m the kid wicked picket sign paintin’ Tom Sawyer
The ill eagle Taino privilege enjoyer
Still swoopin’ in mean on each **** I make clean
Pick the bones dry of serpentine oil green dreams
Then I bury what’s left of your money machines
With the pharaohs of old’s latest pyramid schemes

Closing walls and shrinking halls
Caffeinated wake up calls
Since satin dreams are just blank screens
And smiles come from ice machines
When Bible nightstand no salvation
For the outside world starvation
Abstract art room service cart
Can't clean the mess that is my heart
So the empty ceiling stares
By these lonely corner chairs
While I find nothing on in there
That would know or even care
For free breakfast care to join
Or just a spot of laundry coin
Before I spend the day in bed
To find no place to rest my head
No early check-out I assume
From Purgatory's hotel room

Stay the same
Let me learn
In burning
Let me turn
Insane
In vain discerning
Love is made
Where none now dare
To enter pain
I see her smiling
At me
Widely
Wildly gleaming
In her eyes
Betrays she might
Assume disguise
To try me on for size
Fits all
To please her
Beckon call

Must be something
About me
Appealing
Revealing
As much as I can
Only yields
More concealing
I’ve got it together
Make money,
Enough
And I’m not the worst looking guy
Life is just rough
If you catch a few peeking
Intuit their thoughts,
Even one in a million
Crack smiles I’ve caught
But as soon as it hits me
I’ve already passed,
And it’s back alone
Back to
What’s under the mask

You live out there
For awhile
And think about
Everything you left behind
When you get down
Below despair
She’s gone
Get over it
Beware
I’m pathetic
I get it
And really high now
I’m the third wheel
My guys
You know
I get down
I get mad
I get dark
I get all these emotions
You know
All apart
From reality
Barely
In gravity
Loved her so much
That I laughed
At her ghost
For the others
My mother
Can’t talk to her now
Don’t make jokes
Or I’ll watch you die slowly
And revel in pain
And feel nothing
Inside
As I burn in the rain

Left to discordant
Decay
Left to disarray
Iron fist’s
Fiscal bliss
Impotent  
Power play
Towers and walls,
Bits of coin
And coal mines
Lots of bribes
Underlying
More sinister crimes
And the party line
Drawing
More polarized
Borderlines
Warning signs
Blinded eyes’
Views of supremacy
Racial in nature’s
Dehumanist tendency
Make nemeses
Of the poor huddled masses
And kindles their fears
Like a downfall of ashes

When she laughs
I collapse
When she takes off my mask
I can’t ask any questions
Just in her muse bask
Hope it lasts
A next day
Though aware we are doomed
To be rock bottom bottles
In trauma entombed
Slip away with her
Maybe
To save me
Tonight
She inspires
These heartfelt emotions
I write
And induces a terror
Of never forever
Like no one I’ve ever
Yet met
And then severs
All ties from attachment
Like none of it mattered
Without even trying
She renders me shattered