A vessel
Inherently
Flawed by design
Or by some divine miracle
Meant to decline
In the wake
Of its rise
Meteoric
Downfall
In the crash
Aftermath
From the ashes
We crawl
And begin
To take shape
To walk upright
And break
Through a cosmic egg
Shell
Through this living hell
Wait

Hire me,
Fire me
Couldn’t inspire me
Just give me something to do
Besides piracy
Get me back out in the world
Be a part
Of some start up
To fill up
My grocery cart
For I’ve taken to heart
Far too many
Investments
Of time
I laid waste
To my rotten intestines

Shrooms in simplicity
Shared synchronicity
Spectrum sensations
Of sol serendipity
Closing my eyes
I see myriad skies
And the waves serenade me
With past me goodbyes
And by setting on shorelines
Beheld its disguise
Whilst immersed in a party
Of similar minds

Sat alone with myself and talked about the relentless power of the human spirit with the ocean. Roaring at my toes. I heard the beach in every moment. Everything was glistening, sparkling love and peace and freedom all together all around me. Coursing through my veins, bathing me

How proud I have been
Have my head in the wind
And have silenced the sirens
With whom I have sinned
And though kindling
These days
Fell, deforested jungles
She has my whole soul
And the hubris it humbles
The thunder upon
The awaiting oasis
Keeps secrets
In seeking
My moribund waste pits
Embraces me
Equally
Scared or supreme
And then beckons my wanderlust
Back to redeem
What remains of my
Virtuous,
Purposeless
Quest
And my failure
To care
If I pass the attest
To some legacy
Memory
Somehow its haunting me
Long before I
Hyper-sleep in the pod  
Having never found
Such a more flawed
Human god

Ahead of myself
Guess she gets
What I’m thinking
Can’t stare at her too long
Without even blinking
Not veering
Nor shying away
From her gaze
Wondering
If she sees me
In all the same ways
But it could be
She happened to speak to me
Kindly
That makes me so hopeless
Romantically
Blinded

Thus rests the former
God king
Mortal man
Had it all figured out
Had the world in his hand
Had a plan
To take over
Destroy
And rebuild
As he willed
Into being
A tiny orb
Filled
With the felling
Of forests
The shelling
Of reigns
And the death knell
Dispelling
All doubt
To his claims
But his influence waned
In the advent
Of tech
And his subjects
Instead
Preferred fools
To elect
And rejected,
Disposed of,
Forgotten
Was he
And the core of him rotten
Could not
Legacy

Get so discouraged,
Demoralized,
Idle
The longer I dwell
On how little is vital
How busy we make ourselves
Fearing reprisal
From any more status
Authority
Idol
Revival,
Restart,
Reevaluate
Where
I could be of most use
Have a reason to care
For a change
Really try
To deserve what I earn
Not just learn to comply
But what more felicitous role
Befits I
A defiant,
Subversive,
Discursive
From birth is
An urchin
Accursed imp
Worthlessness
I am the muse
Once removed
From the nihilist

More time elapses
The moving on fastens
Its buckle up for the ride
Passing back flashes
By in a day blurring
Away in senescence
The youth in decay
Instant joy’s evanescence

Untethered,
Storm-weathered
Returning to sender
Of letters undead
To this nether-world
Feather,
Forever-ascender
Unfettered by turbulent
Shifts in the breeze
Like the falling of leaves
Or eclipsing-moon seas
An ellipse at the end
Of life sentence’s
Penned
I persist in the uplifting
Drift away zen
With devotion
To unflinching
Motionless focus
On hopeless,
Tumultuous
Ocean roars
Stoking this
Flickering flame
In this nimbus-brain’s
Bliss
Ignorance
Of enlightened
In thralls of abysses
Too listless
To wistfully
Wish would vanish
For such impish
Homunculus
Often resist
Mindfulness,
Consummate
Peak-apotheosis
Seeking only to find
Firmaments
Of divining
The epiphenomenal
Peace redefining

Still mystifies me
Denies peace of mind
In defining transformative moments
Confined
To unfortunate
Course of events
And gradations,
The vagaries
Replaying vague
Illustrations
Hallucinations
Just as faint
Of heart now
Just as broken
As spoken word’s
Surety vow
Maybe once upon times
Almost unrecognizable
Some grand delusion
Of love was advisable
But currently
Only counter-intuits
The passion we had
For its toxic pollutants

There once was a world
So green and blue
With skies of clarity
Beneath them which  
All breath of life
Was shared in harmony

Each blade of grass
Fought not for land
To own as property
Each creature knew
Not of to want,
To take, or gluttony

Without language,
Paper, or pen  
They signed the peace treaty
Without a war drum's
Orchestra
It still composed its symphony

No anthems, flags
Or border walls
Need signify such unity
No laws, or kings
Or governments
Controlled Nature's democracy

Until the day
These mortal hands
Picked fruits of its divinity
And biting down
They tasted only
Serpentine theology

Have you found
It yet
I ask
Or found insuperable
The task
Discovering,
Uncovering
The surface layers
Smothering
The truth beneath
The buried past
The everlasting
Shadow caste
On sanctity's
Iconoclast
The temple smashed
The system crashed
The score is settled
In the blast

And so I ask
Again
Have you
Completed what
You set to task
Or just discovered
Some uncovered
Remnants of
The ancient past
Forgotten
Lying eons
Rotten
Not in some
Sumptuous tomb
Of regnant opulence
Exhumed
But in the gloom
Of fell
And fallen
Kingdoms
Mortals
Bow in awe in

So I ask again
Have you
Found any a retelling true
Or just library books
Renewed

And now it comes crashing
Again
It’s like clockwork
A couple months in
And for her
It does not work
A lot left to question
Like why the charade?
Was it all just pretentious
Emotions conveyed
Seemed authentic
Assurances
Future projection
Romanticization
I know it,
I felt it
This time it was different,
She listened,
She cared,
Let me speak
She would seek
To see more of me
Bared
Unaware as it went
By along
Seemingly
To be both what we wanted
Indefinitely
But it’s me
Who can’t seem
To be all she would need
When it’s all said and done
They eventually leave

An entry a day
To the traveler's journal
Demobilized in
A remote sanctuary
Continues momentum
Like pendulums swinging
Since feet remain
Stuck in the muddy
Moors clinging
To boots and to soles
Of his running shoes glued
To the ground
His legs hardly can move
Anymore
But he does
It because
To be stagnant and seated
Just pents up his energy
Not yet depleted
Completely on one more
Delusion crusade
Where these words come to life
Than as all things
Must fade

All invitations stand for you
To step inside my open mind
But I provide no guarantee
That you'll like what you find
Behind closed doors and warning signs
For curtain calls of tragedy
And twisted humor comedies
More Dante than divine
Like a ringwraith, king of nine
In my deepest circle bat cave
I'm the new clown prince of rhyme

So come get on my level
Where I revel in the devil
Turning up the heat on all
The demons who embezzle
While I'm chillin' like a villain
In the egos that I'm killin'
Trippin' slippin' down a thrillin' *****
Just hangin' from a dope *** rope
This **** is tight, it helps me cope
When all of ye abandon hope

Where it all floats, you enter here
Steer clear of gutters, It is fear
My paper boat adrift alone
King Arthur with no Guinevere
I disappear and leave no trace
Erasers in an office space
An empty desk and swivel chair
Still spinning at the same old pace
All carries on without me there
I knew you wouldn't like this place

Messiahs and martyrs
And saviors
And saints
Sacrosanct
Sanctimonious
False idol feints
Behind gates,
Palace walls
Fortified in a lie
An elaborate,
Enduring
Mythos we contrive
And apply
To the lives
Of misguided lost souls
Filling holes
With the answers
Of what never knows
How to be of this world
Without more to assign
What is so picture perfectly
Flawed by design
Intertwined with
The years we spend
Spacing in time
Agonizingly trying
To find
Our own kind
Out among the expanse
Starry satellite trance
Higher intellects seek
And destroy
To advance
The agenda, to claim
A new age
Under orders
Anointed upon
The consent
Of the heaven-sent
Nuclear bomb

I feel such a joyless and reckless, unbridled
Despair of some incessant boredom time trial
So much of it placed in my hands to control
And to bend to my will, but I just do not know
What to do with it all, but imagine a place
Where again reunited within her embrace
It would all have been worth it, to flee undeserving
Of her concerns, left to my morbid devices
observing
The rest of its turning
Without her nearby
Until in her resplendence
She sets in the sky

Where heroes go I may not know
Nor dare I venture even guess
How any of the guilty rest
Within unending Hades woe

Yet wandering the shores of Styx
I’ve written tales of gallantry
Befitting none more valiantly
Resisting this infernal bliss

Still waiting for the veil to lift
On maenads vying for this verse
Compassion is my lover’s curse
To them my empathy a gift

But wicked thieves ensnare my heart
Still stained in shadow’s lyric ink
The instrumental missing link
Is little more than broken art

To after living’s parallel
Bemusing state ecstatic trance
Revealing after second glance
My spirit freed in Asphodel

Tell me how your money tastes
When coal ash is the soil
Salt whatever’s left of earth
With oceans brought to boil
In a neoliberal melting ***
Of glacial-dripping progress
Made of ivory indifference
To an oil-rigged election process
Choking us with demagogic smog
To clog the ballot bog
With gerrymander clans
Of truth deniers
Lie suppliers
And the sycophantic slimers
Of the doomsday dime demisers
So my Nero lyre fire
Is their funeral empyre
I aspire to be Caesar
Of the aether
But the diem of my seizure
Of the power will be Pyrrhic
In its victory
When contras keep restrictin’ me
From socializing all the means
To end the end of history

An infinite formless
Creator created
Some other life forms
When in loneliness, waited
For some mass extinction
Eventful occurrence,
A happening,
Anything,
Purpose in service
To what it had made
Given way
To be free
Though for all its omniscience
Couldn’t foresee
What it would come to be
How apart from the one
Its posterity’s
Prodigal son
Would become

But who’s up to the task
Of unmasking the past
If the present
Sets precedents
No questions asked
And in decadence
Basking away
In our trifles
We cling to beliefs
Like a tweet’s
Assault rifles
So happy to trigger
Emote manufactured
Contrived
Artificial
Pet issues
Have fractured
Our psyches
Identities
Loyalties
Turn
From the bastion we’ve built
To the bridges we burn

Getting the hang of this
Loosening noose
Of this not worth my salt
By default
My excuse
No more use
It’s defunct
A debunked
Absolute
To be what I aspire
An alternate route
Is available
Offered
Contained
In her text
And I anticipate
And await
What comes next

But none of them knew
Really knew
What I’m into
Went through
All the motions
Emotions
In rear view
In hindsight
Behind us
Was fun while it lasted
Though always outmatched
By the shadows I’ve casted

Had it all figured out
On my way up
From way down
Commitments to change
Into willingly bound
Just to meet unforeseen
Redirection
Temptation
Throw it
All away
On a whim’s
Inclination
In case it should vacate
Holistic embraces
The pieces all present
But in the wrong places
Or forced into place
Where they do not belong
Now it’s stuck in my head
Like some kind of love song

What could becoming
Approaching me
Changing me
Ask me ten years ago
Where would the day begin?
Never my answer
In offices spacing
Or running down PCH
Shorelines embracing
The end in its infinite
Solitude version
My pen in its diffident
Strokes of subversion
Immersion in worlds
Of colossal
Impossible
Postulates
Posterity
As unstoppable
Once I can find
The best way I can lead
A brief day in the sun
Then in shadows recede

This dating app
Lack of success
Gets discouraging
Confidence boost
Then reduced
To uncertainty
All of them
Just want to play
Silly games
An inane competition
To power reclaim
But in vain
Even one simple message
Discarded
How could it have been
More appealing
Imparted
The next
Logic step
In conversing equation
I guess I’m just not
Of the sexting persuasion
Nor of this age
Long disengaged
Have I spent
Now this cyclical swipe and like
Does not relent
Just lament
For the genuine love
I have lost
Now I pay for the right
To remember the cost

Now broken
My psyche
No longer excites me
Just seeks to so spitefully
Shatter me nightly
Piece me back together
By day
The day job
Mental health,
Raise awareness,
Dispelling the fog
But surrounded by experts
On shadow self darkness
Still fails to elucidate
My sick at heartness

One person parting
As someone new enters
My life
In an instant
Ensuring us renters
Go on
In our own little worlds,
Private corners,
And niches,
We don’t need the words
To in candor convey
What we think
Of the other
Just text me face values
We’ve yet to uncover

You’d think by now
I’d overcome
My undoing
Reclusive
Obtuse
Of no use
Just consuming
Indulgently,
Carelessly,
Selfishly
Sating
My lust
For the never enough
Stuff I’m craving
But they could all watch me
To no end devour
Avert their gaze
Flee from my gaping jaws
Cower
Before my voracious
Most wasteful
Disdain
In its hungry indifference
Treats them
All the same

Break me down to battered bones
Then stake me through my shattered heart
No wounds you could inflict are worse
Than ways I've torn myself apart

From sleeping with my restless guilt
Awoken by regret
To wasting memories away
Whilst drinking to forget

Then fragmenting my sanity
To diamond shards of pain
So come and take a stab at it
I've tried before in vain

Eviscerate my rotten guts
I've spilt them more profuse  
Asphyxiate my toxic breath
I'd help you tie the noose

Bury me alive with not
But shame and solitude
Spit upon my unmarked grave
I would not deem it rude

For in this dying world I bore
The weight of all enslaved
Yet wore Grim's cloak of darkness as
I reaped the ones I craved

No angels reached my Heaven's heights
No demons breached my Hell
Both gates remained forever locked
Inside my mortal shell

Imprisoned in Pandora's box
No deities designed
No creator gods explained
The chaos of my mind

Just made me to discover how
To understate depression
With all the words I write to you
As overkill confession

Beach is beside us
But this is no oasis
A few steps remind us
Of such private places
The palms are outstretching
To skies of cerulean
The shrooms kicking in
Since I’ve had
Quite a few of them
New, unfamiliar
Surroundings
Confound
But adaption
Comes naturally,
Quickly unbound
Am I free to run into
The distance and see it
Was more than we ever could
Truly believe it

Lacking that quality
Quantity
Haunting me
Won’t let me sleep
It just instigates
Tauntingly
Forcing me back
To the drawing board
Bland
Staring blankly ahead
With a pen in my hand
It just has to be moved,
Be expressed,
Be expelled
All attempts at rebellion
Are ruthlessly quelled
For I've spelled it out
Countless times,
Infinite ways
It still beckons me back
To the halcyon days
Or the tragic,
Traumatic
Past, revisitation
What’s one more
To add to
Its zero summation

Always open
To that notion
The what if
The water
Was drained
From the ocean
I picture some skeletal
Coral remains
Desiccated earth core
Still suspended in space
And the people would gaze
Peering out
Over edges
Of islands still standing
As skyward peak ledges
And coastal shelf
Rifts
Overlooking a chasm
Or gradual shifts
In the tectonic spasm
The treasures uncovered
Where secrets
Once dwelled
In the fathomless depths
Would be priceless
To sell
Yet compelling
Intrepid adventurers
Down
All the same
To the bowels of hell

Mere seconds asleep
But was deep
In the rem
When upon me befell
A malicious demon
And what happened then
Still haunts
My waking night’s pen
At the edge of my bed
It is there once again
Not of form
Nor of feature
A shadowy creature,
Insidious wisp
Wickedness
Its demeanor
Don’t know what it wants,
What it thinks,
What it seeks
I can only grip tighter
The covers and sheets
And replete with paralysis
Fear
Cognizance
I can only succumb to its
Malevolence

Michael
Michael
Archetypal
Archangelic
Vicious cycle
Likening himself
To gods
Yet with himself
Is still at odds
To be so fallible
And flawed
By body image’s
Facade
Yet having ventured
Far abroad
Still gleams and glooms
Inspired awe
And has created
Educated
Darknesses
Illuminated

For shadows are most
Inhospitable hosts
When you revel in devils
And settle for ghosts
You will always see evil
Subsuming the good
And consumed in delusion
Forgetting it could
All quite possibly,
Nay
Almost certainly be
All contained in your head
A threadbare
Lunacy

Anupshahr disharmonies approaching midnight now
A festival, a holiday, perhaps a sacred cow
Is to be venerated piously
As custom will allow
To Mumtaz-Mahal Calliope
That Shah Jahan’s my vow
Unto unveiling a society
That forces her to bow
Her brow, avert her eyes
From thoughts of impropriety
Oh how she tries, but can’t revise
Disguises hiding womanize
Abusing them in privacy
As Durga roars and Sati cries
I’m left to worship silently

No more distractions,
Attachments,
Compassions
Could match with
Some matches
Of ashes fall down
But they wouldn’t be her
And by her am still bound
And I just can’t imagine
A million and one
Beauty pageants
Don’t have it
They wouldn’t be fun
Couldn’t temper the zealot
The way that she could
Center me to expel it
In ways to be good
More conducive to us
And the rest of the world
Could erode into dust
If I must go on bearing
The lust of love lost
Like two names in a heart
In a tree trunk embossed
There was just the implicit
Please stay what I need
Feed addictions
And drink
Until it’s time to breed

Hours evaporate
Outside the box
But I still think in terms
Of inside ticking clocks
What is locked away
Is my creative
Shortcoming
Undone
I forgot what it means
To have genuine fun
Always running to something
And from so much nothing
Or everything all at once
On my trail hunting
Me down with relentless
Pursuit of perfection
I want to be better than best
But still question
Exactly just what
Do I need to be more
Than the same silly kid
I don't know anymore

The all-consuming nothing of the chaos opens wide
And back I gaze into its eyes with no where left to hide
Yet I take fright in not but nights
Spent lurking in my lair alone
From there my home seems otherworldly
She seems farther gone
For long have I forgotten waking moments
Lying next to her
As fleetingly as dreams escape the loves that never were
But I was sure, so very sure, that I had found it and I knew
That all cosmogony mythology
Realities were true  
As based in fact and artifact
As come to past lives can explain
That the meaning of forever
Was she left me in the rain

You made me gentle
And passionate calm
Yet you triggered my spark
Like a riot rhyme bomb
My explosion introversion
Through the netherworld of fear
To wag my tail and show my mane
Every time you would appear
And how I longed to feel your touch
And drink from skulls of your oppressors
I would try to save the world instead
Of leveling your lessers
Into servants that appease you
On their knees to even see you
As I breathe you in these poets
And I teach them how to be you
With your rebel goddess wrath
And your diplomatic peace
And a strength no man could equal
And a ride no man could lease
With all that Mother Nature power
In your elemental waves
So adrift in the emotions
Of clandestine sea floor caves  
Until you leave ‘em on their way
Seeking out the very best
Until they’re rising in the east
As mythic dragons of the west
A restless, willful reminiscence
Of the past you found me lost in
Learning how to make your enemies
The ones I’m Holocaustin’

You doubt me
Forget
I am foremost
A writer
I struggle to speech
As you reach for the lighter
And right here contained
In this page
Is my rage
Is my pain,
Is my stage,
Is my rat in a cage
And I made this for you
When I can’t see your face
When you run
When you hide
And deny my embrace
Only pulling you closer
Not pulling you down
We both see rising seas
But your preference is drown
Where instead I would float
Though albeit, adrift
Even if
My last breath
Was bereft
Of your kiss

Continue to study
The past
And its masters
And clashes they had
With its renegade actors
Maligned in the headlines
Of yellow newscasters
And lost in the Holocaust
Broadcasted after
In spectacles spangled
In spider silk road
2.0's you're entangled
In propagate pussygate's
War on the truth
On the facts
The tax breaks
For the rich
Follow suit
But the lawsuit is null
In the void
Of tabloid
Deployed battle droids
Seek and destroy
Unemployed
All a ploy
Of the toiling
Well-oiled machine
The despotic
Robotic
American Dream

Though I lead a new tomorrow
With a pioneer's resolve
I find that Someday I still follow
In its footsteps of the settler's
Beaten paths of sorrow

Tread upon by kings of old
Who tear my flag to tatters
As they colonize my soul
Then rip my constitutions up  
In favor fortunes stoled

Profiting from trails we blaze
Through fields of labor slaves
Which begs the question arms to raise
And manifests my destiny
In fifty shades of Shay's

No more to pave the streets I've seen
All walks of life share brave and free
Dead-ended by the God machine
Whose forked-road tongues divide these signs
To boulevards of broken dreams

Yes this is where we will declare
The carnage of the despot's sword
To common man's, can not compare
The power of the people's word
Is any tyrant's worst nightmare

So wall us up in torture cells
You can't contain our minds  
Abort the right to wedding bells
Love, like truth, can not be killed
By pockets full of shells

Unloaded in a hail of liar
Mass control of information
Molotov cocktails conspire
To stockpile human lives
To serve the evil empire

As storm troopers deployed
To combat the invasion
Of the aliens employed
By the Death Star super weapons
That will leave all worlds destroyed

When the facts are sold as fictions
That the junkies overdose on
As they pay for these afflictions
No one covers in this system
They just feed zombie addictions

That divide us into factions
In this race of arming fear and hate
With masterful distractions
Misconstruing civil wars
With patriotic actions

My morbid elegy
Drenched in sincerity
Steal me away
In the night
And pretend with me
Play one more
Round this world game
Revolution
Return to me
Having applied
The solution
To share what you found
But not bound to me
Lover
Possessed by you solely
In yet to discover
What aspects
And facets
You still keep concealed
What bemusing
Infusions of us
Would reveal
If it works
If it sees itself
Having in common
More than a just cause
And a living off ramen

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

Lest we forget
We are nothing
In time
We are nothing
Outside of it
Either
Inclined
To resist
The desist
Uneventful
Unyielding
Absurdity
Journey
Its burdens
Unwieldy
Relieving us not
Of its mountainous weight
Buried deep
In a planet
We cannot escape
And most likely
Unsightly
The soul’s
Resting place
Restless waste
Of dead space
Our inherent disgrace
Yet we still place
Our unerring faith
In its gates

Unaccustomed
To trusting
The best have to offer
More characteristics
Than sealed in a coffer
A coffin
Too often
More fiscally sound
To be monetized tiding’s
Safe hole in the ground
Get around
Getting by
Make a name for yourself
Just deny what you used to think
It could be felt
As the tired
Aspiring,
Expired
Potential
Succumb to the worthlessness
Truth existential