Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Michael Marchese Jul 2022
Beginning anew
Passing through
The old haunt
Where I’d go for 8 hours
Of status to flaunt
But all based
On white collar
Delusions of class
Signaling that my virtue
Could for purpose pass
Though the truth was
My uses were few
And far cries
From the life that I wanted
To lead
In disguise
Michael Marchese Jun 2017
A crown of over-confidence
So glistens like the sun bejeweled
In dragon scales and treasure hordes
My mane of roaring lion reigns
Renouncing claims to kingdoms ruled

A shield of perfect hubris
So adorns me in an armored pride
My sword was forged in misery
And sharpened on the jagged ledge
Of selfless ego suicide

A castle of my stoic walls
So rises to repel the siege
In here I will outlast them all
This stone cold keep is now my home
These dungeons I now call my liege
Michael Marchese Feb 2023
On some other level
Disheveled
And gray
And forlorn
In my mourning
My love led astray
Is the way
I was born
Winter storm
Summer haze
And adorned
In light rays
On my darkest of days
Although torn
From the warning signs
Tempting surrender
I passed all the tests
But I failed to remember
The chapter,
The captured
Enraptured
Most turning
Of pages I’ve wept
In the oceans of yearning
For once again home,
One last from it
To roam
And in all of finality
Finally known
Michael Marchese Aug 2019
At first they’ll say
It’s set in gold
Longevity
No growing old
Prosperity
For everyone
As boundless growth
Eclipses sun
And underneath
Utopian
Pretensions
Lies the rot therein
Mutations
Modified to be
Perfection
Specimens to see
What we in all
Our vanity
Have made of genes
And cells
And DNA
And God itself  
Just fades away
Awaiting Brave New Worlds
In which
Our human nature
Is the glitch
And with it switched
For automation
No more signs of life
To station
Out in space
Among the stars
Replaced by colonists
On Mars
And flying cars
Are eco-friendly
All remaining species
Envy
What they promised
Was in store
For those who pay
A little more
Michael Marchese Mar 2024
Maladies
I have a myriad
Period
Free will
Dystopian
Broken
No hope again
Basically
Sad by default
Feeling sick
Of existing
To quicken the pace
I submit
To an overlord
Order
I staunchly oppose
I’d force open
The border
But let the doors
Close
And can’t help
But adore her
As I decompose
Finding some last
Delusional
Semblance
Of purpose
In work
In abstractions
Attempts to
Convert this
Innate worthlessness
To constructively
Gained
From my fate at its terminus
Publicly
Hanged
Michael Marchese Sep 2017
Allow me to dine on your palate of fears
And I'll let you drink from my tempest of tears
Surrender your soul to my spirit's dominion
And I'll let you tell me your worthless opinion

On states of the union and feminist lit
I am ******* immortal, I don't give a ****
I was born to keep peace and be one with the winds
I'm the tyrant king lizard still shedding his skins

So if cold my visage, and disheveled and dark
It is only because I am building an ark  
For extinction is rising, and still we're disguising
The beasts we became when we were synchronizing
Michael Marchese Sep 2020
Perched on a limb
Like a grim
Aquiline
Carven stone
Chill to bone
Upon passerby dine
By design
I am fearsome,
Revered by the spawn
Of the underworld
Dwelling beneath me
Upon
The withdrawn
Abyss paragon’s  
Gothic hell swan  
Monument to the last
Will and testament’s
Moribund
Moral supremacy’s
Edifice
Orotund
Ancient facade
Of the godless in gray
Overseeing eternity’s
Urban decay
Supreme leaders
Schemers
Worst of nightmares
To the dreamers
And the fiends
That they convene with
Filter out
The in-betweeners
With obscenely toxic
Shock and awe
Campaigns
Of more in flames
And the replacement theorists
Still refuse
To use
Their smarter brains
To take a look around
The demographic
Map with all its
Party lines
Redistricted across it
To partition us
Like Palestine
Michael Marchese Jun 2018
Try to understand
There is no distance
You can run
No stoic mountains
You could climb
To harness gods within the sun
So fret about your idle whims
And give yourselves to my distractions
To my propaganda proxy wars
And post-truth imperfactions
I don’t ask for your allegiance
No robotic pledge of trust
I simply augment every dissident
And leave the cogs to rust
In this machine there is no dream
I do not oversee production of
No show trial injustice served
Without the laws I am above
The spoils system you created
In archaic words brittanic
In the butchers venerated
By your livestock market panic
Then the walls to seal you off
So no escapegoating the ******
Then suspicions are diverted
Like a papist in your play list
Now to bow before the master
Whose ancestors were the slaves
While I disown the private property
Amassing in the graves
And in a state of omnipresent
Fear, unending terror reigns
Welcome to the revolution
All you’ve left to lose, your chains
Michael Marchese Aug 2020
No one knows
No one sees
My true form
Elegies
Anonymity is
My eternity
Breeze
Still the chill
That pervades
The warm veins
And intuits
Remains
She so spectrally fades
Until afterlives beckon
And banshees bemuse
As I lose once again
To the mood slayer’s blues
For the soothsayer
Pays me to play
With these words
But it’s to my dismay
They are broken records
Michael Marchese Jan 2018
What I’d give to recall
The name of such beauty
The state of mind-numbing
That she found me in, I’ve been
Thinking about her
Since time it stood still
And now being without her
Still wanting to fill
Every hole in her plot
With my potion in motion
A mile a minute
Spit-swapping emotion
Accented eccentric
She spoke with her eyes
For the roar of the crowd
Stole away my replies
To her pheromone’s modus
Vivendi allure
Flash backing the fragmented  
Memory’s poor
From my wandering heart
And her long journey home
Such a mystery girl
And still onward I roam
Michael Marchese Jan 2023
Longing
Becoming
Inherent
To me
I am yearning
Her turning
Her head back to see
In my imagery
Vividly
Visions of us
In eternally
Wondering
Wandering trust
Reaffirmed in a gesture,
A word
A display
I can’t wait
To embrace you
And next to you lay
Every night if I have to
Be glad to
Awake
To the unruly mess
Of your hair
That we make
To escort you again
To consort with you
Lend
What my pen
Can’t report
In these letters I send
Michael Marchese May 2018
Calamity descends upon
A world pushed to the brink
Of mass starvation
Dehydration
Dissolution of the nation
State of mind
Remaining blinded
By its racial hate creationism
Michael Marchese May 2018
To make wholly the holiest
Mortals I tend to
Intending to be
Something more than a man
But I am
And I long for this biblical chaos
To end
Without care or concern
To seek pleasure whenever
The loneliness yearns
For connection, compassion
Detaching from grasping
The answers so near at hand
Desperately clasping
At nothing to find
Any meaning in time
Any purpose save for the one
Felt at her side
Michael Marchese Sep 2022
Up there immersed
In your ego
Imprisoned
Untethered
Yet bound
By the truth
You envisioned
To be nothing more
Than restorative
Justice
But in your wake
Vengeance
When settled
The dust is
Just envy and wrath
Not benevolent grace
No salvation
You’d sooner
Damnation embrace
Adoration you crave
Affirmation you seek
Exaltation eludes you
The hungry and meek
Do not speak of your feats
Nor retain what you feign
Your domain out of reach
Not a firmament palace
Or kingdom of clouds
Just deluded illusions’
Identity shrouds
So come walk down among them
Again
Now and then
Then return to eternity
Lonely to spend
Michael Marchese Aug 2022
This is my home now
You taught me to seek it
To keep it
To teach it
And need be
To reap it
Of every last drop
Of its lessons refined
And its ocean’s
Emotions’
Unstable
Reminds
This is not paradise
40 million confined
This is not a utopian
Grandeur’s design
This is not an oasis
Of free-flowing rhyme
This is Wild West crime
Within Rome in decline
This is prices will rise
In the flames of the tides
And from not but a gleam
In the stream
Came the dream
And conceived
In its nightmarish traffic
I scheme
Michael Marchese Nov 2023
Not problems
Ideations
More like mental health
Math equations
Wait
Can I say that
It’s not a condition?
Just bury myself
In my work
In my mission
In reason
Still lacking a purpose
But aimed
At the brains
Of the same
Kinda strange
Michael Marchese Oct 2017
My archetypal anima
Could dream a billion dreams
Yet none elucidate my psyche’s
Shadow self-esteem
It yearns to be made whole again
Detaching from the soma
Yet can not mend the mandalas
That fracture its persona
From the superego servant
Of unconsciousness collective
To the individuation
Silent tyrant introspective
Still projecting as the pedagogue
The hero and the saint
But the mystic rebel overlord’s
This portrait that I paint
For I’m an evil genius author
Penning nurseries of rhymes
I am the psychopath symbology
Just read between the lines
Michael Marchese Feb 2022
I know I’m not cool
Like the one of you
Gleaning
The rest of your zodiac fate
From careening  
Into
Dating destiny
Seldom foreseen
But we vibe
And rewind
And defy the machine
When I need you to drift
In destruction
And riff
On the whispering
Bury my life in a ditch
Because she
Still rejects
What the opposite ***
Still expects
From just friends
When the rest all connects
In a way
In some dissonant
Distant decay
There is me
There is you
There is no other way
To continue the carry on
More
Other lovers
Each night
I just write
What the shovel uncovers
Michael Marchese Jan 2018
They say revenge, its own reward
Found at the edge of history
Is best served colder than the war
In discourses of mystery
But tasty nonetheless because the flesh
Is what we bless
And what the West will know as Gilgamesh
If sins of father’s fail to see
That prequel tales of Babylon
Still presage inhumanity
Michael Marchese Nov 2017
Slavish is lavish, just add the s
To the heaps of your Hedonist hordes of excess
So obsessed with the best that the West has to offer
Democracy scales are just nails to the coffer
Just Madoffs and Adolfs still claiming a stake
In banana republics, so let them eat cake
We can wait as we make a land full of their waste
And with fake as **** smiles we’ll spit in the face
Of their race to the bottom of fortune and fame
Where Satan and Jesus are one and the same
When morals are numbers, and justice is banks
And peace is for profit, compulsory tanks
But without them your life is a third world of grief
And your paycheck is merely a futile lord’s fief
Just a thief would I be, with the speech of a beggar
But I’d own these streets with a cloak and a dagger
As you learn to suffer the absence of self
Dematerializing your hunger for wealth
In a union of monkey gods breeding the seeds
Of the gardens of green this earth actually needs
Michael Marchese Sep 2017
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
Michael Marchese Dec 2020
Be right back
Stealing Christmas
Real quick
I’ll be swift
As a flash
Not a light I’ll let flicker
On trees turned to ash
And I’ll stash the cache deep
In my cavernous lair
And it’s there it will keep
Until I reappear
In the new year
To do it all over again
Upend every tradition
And dollar you spend
On material sentiment
Commodified
As this luxury fetishized  
Marketize lie
Michael Marchese Nov 2017
The children of Agni
Still tend to the fields
But they yield to what Shiva’s
Deals hope to conceal
By the bushels of bullets, pork barrels of grease
In the crease of the fingers
And trigger’s release
Of the anger, the rage of this Bengali cage
Made of famines of war
And the textile slaves
With the wage loomin’ over
Their shoulders in pain
From the Kashmiri soldiers
Still diggin’ their graves
And in chains are the children who bear the unfair distribution of loot
Still polluting the air
And I try and I try, and they stare and they stare
But I’m running in circles and getting nowhere

Just making a stand for this Hindustan sand
A mere man of unplanned patrilineal clans
Tryna’ offer a hand to the paving of roads
Without hellish intentions for humble abodes
‘Cuz I know, I’ve been shown where the wild things are
And now my state of mind is the state of Uttar
When I still see the zamindars driving in cars
And the Amritsar crimson Blue Stars from afar
People burning but still full of love and a spirit
That sings of the Ganges, each night you can hear it
It’s clear, without fear and sincere in its praise
For the guru I am, come to learn of their ways
Michael Marchese Aug 2024
Haven’t yet missed
Any more opportunities
Just those eluding me
Never discovered
Developed immunities
Foreign to others
Whose ignorance
Shifted
From bedlam
To bliss
As domestically
Terrorists
Click the death wish

So I say again
I haven’t missed
Any chances
To take aim
And place blame
On bandits of bandwidth
Reframing the digital aging
King’s gambits
But can’t reprimand
Can’t command
We clean house
If they’re making us sick
At the click of a mouse

So I reaffirm I
Do not shy
From my duty
Engage civically
But at times
Rather rudely
When only I venture
To censor
The nemesis
Silicon-based
Artificial intelligence  
Clickbait and switch
The code
Ode to dystopian
Cyberpunk’s pulse
To make nervous
The system
And watch it convulse
Michael Marchese May 2024
Always the mind
Of a younger man
Mine
Has become suddenly
A much older one’s
Spine
Michael Marchese Aug 2023
Citizens
And denizens
Behold the city ruins
Sins
The toxic pit
Of veterans
Overprescribed
Their medicines
Americans
Addictive state
Its own worst enemy
Equate
In theory
Its ideals
Foretold
A sheepish populous
Controlled
And molded by
Their tales of old
The power brokers
Chokehold
Sold
Us all a panacea
To the ills of governed men
Just convince them they are free
Increase the ease
With which they spend
Michael Marchese Feb 2018
Modern warzone I grew up in
Mom and dad were always yellin’
Got the picture perfect family life
In anger I’m expellin’
And unleashing on the precinct
That distinctly told me no
That kept restricting me to breaking up
With women that I know
Before they turn the kitchen knife around
Come at me with the ****
So she can see if it still beats
But that my love for her was none of it
Michael Marchese Dec 2024
Slither and writhe
Selflessness
Just contrived
From a selfish
Revolves around me
Sort of mind
Michael Marchese Aug 2023
In the farthest-flung fringe
A far cry from response
There resides an outsider
Comprised of what haunts
Him, a scribe to his host
To the world
A ghost writer
Askance in his stance
On the evil empire
Exile imposed
On his selfish desire
The ills of his making
Have taken too much
So afflict him with vision
But gift him no brush
For he will just
Depict it
As cognizant dust
As an infinite sorrow
Ephemeral joy
But what else makes a man
Of a scared little boy?
Michael Marchese Aug 2020
To hell with your virtues
Your muse
Philosophic
Your views are as skewed
As foresight
Is myopic
Your moralist
Rectitude
Principles,
Politics
Shrewd stoic fortitude
Couldn’t quite stop it
No certitude
Pseudo-science
Can preclude
Nor exclusive,
Parochial
Faith
Larger loom
Than the shadow of life
Into death
The abyss
All submits to existence’s
Sisyphus myth
God is just
Existence
Speaking
Temptress of
Addictions
Tweaking
Tweeting ego
Complex
Seeking
Ever more
The sleepless
Counting sheep into the bleakness
Where it reaps
Its phantom tolls
Like holy ghosts
Rewrite the scrolls
In keeping
With traditions
Old as time
Just follow money trails
And find
Divine is not the maker
But the makings
Of the mind
Michael Marchese Aug 2017
On the verge of total war
When will you people learn
How many children need to die
How many have to burn

Before we raze our flags in peace
From Hiroshima shadows
Instead of hanging all our dreams
From Nagasaki gallows

How can these shores of liberty
With kingdoms in the clouds
Pretend the stars are reachable
Beyond the spangled shrouds

If they see only crowded beaches
Refuse in the wake
Of the rising tides of change
No plastic in the fake

News anchor's melting guise
No right to speak the truth
If it rebels wiser
Than the ignorance of youth

Do we not feel the frigid serpents
Slithering inside our veins
Do we not envision Edens
With our globalizing brains

Are we just mass-consumption plagues
Still digging pre-determined graves
Are we nothing more than pharaohs
Building pyramids of slaves

For I see strength to bend these chains
And I hear courage in these hearts
And I taste hope in lips of love
And I will teach them of these arts

Of all my muses' mysticisms
Of my power's inspiration
I will be the light to guide them
To a human divination

Where the past's no longer present
And the future is my gift to you
For none shall own the history
I've written as it’s coming true
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
-Plato
Michael Marchese Jun 2023
You can read
Whatever you want
In any font
You write your name
May it contain
The pages waiting
On the narrative to change
Upon the ways
Its flags are waving
Over battlefields of graves,
Beneath its shades
Belies the aisles
Mercantile
Sails of slaves
And if we wanted
To improve it
We would have to let them choose,
Even if it means
The winners
Would have nothing left to lose
Michael Marchese Jan 2022
Still insignificant
Couldn’t have mattered
Could never have felt
What I felt for her shattered
Before me
It all falls apart
On a screen
She believes only evil
Intentions could scheme
To misuse and abuse her
But only I lose
Precious time,
Peace of mind,
And her radical muse
When it changes its tune
With extremes in polarity
Doubts it could work
Due to income disparity
Verity all I have tried
To impart
But to her
There is simply
No love in the heart
Is it just an abyss
Fatalist
All alone
As she wanders and squanders
All place to call home
Michael Marchese Nov 2022
She’s smooth to the touch
In the bubbling temptation
Elation incontinent
Patience negation
Keep inching in closer
Inspecting her lips
Dripping wet
In the steamy heat
Taste of her kiss
And it’s like we’re infusing
Converging
And urging
A surge of endorphins
Then soulfully merging
I feel what she thinks
And she thinks what I feel
And for her
All the stars in the sky
Would I steal
Just to bathe in serenity
There in my arms
An embrace that so warms
Me up more
To her charms
Michael Marchese Jun 2023
And that’s when I wrote you
Came right out
And told you
We were just
Reflections
Of similar figments
Our differences
Deeper than people
Of pigments
Upbringing
Diverges
In privileged
And poor
As the middle class
Widens the rift
Even more
What a chore it’s become
To among them
Reside
When a score
Of conquistadors
Seeks to divide
And presiding
Unprecedential
In his crimes
In his locked box
Of docs
In his Fox
Populies
Is the traitor,
The ******,
The racist
Tax fraud
Still enriching
His image
Like profits of God
Michael Marchese Dec 2017
It’s all in your head
All the people you’ve fed
When really you see them
As better off dead
Than aware of the future in store
For their children
If money keeps killing their dreams
By the billion
Michael Marchese May 2022
Cease your dream
Wandering
Stagnant
Despondency
Go and forget her
Again in disharmony
Build yourself up
Expectation’s
Gradations
Diminished to ashes
Like self-immolations
And hatred invades
Mental illness pervades
And we wade through
The witch of us
Got the best grades
There’s still slaves
At these raves
And you’re trying to change me
Still people in chains
But you’re trying to save me
Reframe me in some
More idyllic potential
But I only bend
If this ****’s elemental
A level I’ve weathered
Like severed headstone
In empyrean storms
Never further from home
So prescribe,
Analyze,
Rectify
What is flawed
I’m a human conditioned
To be the outlawed
For my presence alone
Lingers on like a clue
And my resonance
Revenants
Still plot the coup
Michael Marchese Aug 2022
Still finding my medicine
Feasting on sediment
Scratching a living
Off urban development
Much to the detriment
Of my convictions
When my ideals reap
The for-profit afflictions
Infecting my sturdy
Immunity to
The contagion of aging
A dying world view
Stays alive instead not
For more logical ends
But to bend to my will
What the future impends
Michael Marchese Apr 2018
A humanist thinking these people all equal
Original tops any  
Second rate sequel
And seeks to first understand
How to leak secret plans
Banned from the internet’s
Central core
Banking clans
Signing this peace treaty
Pen in hand everyday
Faded and fated to wait
Half a world away
Chillin’ on villain ambitions
I’ve seen
On the Mad Titan mind-bending
Time-ending
Movie screen
Michael Marchese Sep 2018
Surrender your claims
Or give in to the thirst
Then relinquish your bearings
For I was here first
And I’ve parted the skies
With a dauntless ascendance
And opened third eyes
With enlightened resplendence
In ages now gone
And unknown to us all
I gave rise to each new breed
Of species to fall
One by one
To the one
I so foolishly gifted
With intellect
Then how the paradigm shifted
We make the gods
Michael Marchese Jun 2021
Don’t want to relinquish
Creatively spark
To the mentally-taxing
Evasion of darkness
I feel like a carcass
Just fed
Better than
Contradictory’s
Starkest
Disparity
Paradox
Toxins polluting
Utopian blooms
To a tombstone
Of ruins  
Reduced to
The narrowing focus
Priorities
No more recalcitrant
Question authorities
Just have a seat
Keep your hands busy
Eat
Imperfections,
Correct them,
Delete and repeat
Michael Marchese Sep 2021
Individualist
How you struggle
To coexist
Think yourself
Central
Essential to function
On doses of daily
Devoid of compunction
For lives you have taken,
Time wasted
Encased
In a prism
Reflection
Of cannot relate
To the late
Combined effort,
Collective potential,
Conceptual framework
Of change incremental
Can’t wait for too long
For the others to care
So you tower away
As you let down you hair
But beware
In the dark
We still muse
Of amassing
Within echo chambers
Of poison gas
Masking
Just go get vaccinated already
Michael Marchese Jul 2017
The ceiling above me
Depicts my blank stare
The walls all around me
Are butterscotch bare
There are voices below me
In living lie rooms
And a silence beside me
So restless it looms
There are monsters beneath me
Or just in my head
Though exhausted they keep me
Awake in my bed
To write of the real me
Whom they'll never know
For this coffin conceals me
I died long ago
Michael Marchese Jun 2024
God is just
Your shame
Your insecurity’s
To blame
Not everyone is out to get you
Not a reason to complain
So stop deflecting
And diverting
Only hurting
Your pretension
With each mention
Of the overwhelming
Trauma
You’ve endured
In no dimension
Left conceivable
Will you be reassured
You’re not a victim
Not a target
Just entitlement
Incarnate
But your followers,
Subscribers,
All the eyes on you
Desires
Are made fleeting
And enfeebled
When you’re asked a simple question
Can you really live without it
But a moment’s
Inattention?
Michael Marchese Mar 2018
Bury belief in a tomb of unreal
Just admit you know nothing
Except what you feel
Thought I could make
The world
Spin in reverse
Fly as high
As the sky
Becomes void
To immerse
Me in worsening
Crises
And foreign disputes
For the fringes
My dearest
Were cold
Without boots
On the ground
To be forging
The valleys
Of Kandahar
Into the hills
And the heights
Of Abdul-Jabbar
From what afar
Appeared
More like
The Magic
Intentions again
But the hell is paved
Tragic
And grab it and go
Economics
Can’t prosper
If rattling sabers
Continue to posture
Illegally  
Neutralizing
Perceived threat
With a war to forget,
A tank full of regret,
And a silhouette
Setting sun
Empire’s debt
Michael Marchese Dec 2024
Seed of innovation
Discontentment with my station
With my place
My lot in life
Dissatisfied
A wrong to right
Or opportunity comes knocking
Flickering
Gives way to light
Michael Marchese Dec 2024
I live with the stains
Past mistakes
On my conscience
And even now bleed
With the greed
Of my prophets
Not lost yet
Though searching
Sustaining
Pursuit
Of the purses
Of suits
And laborious
Fruits
For recursive
Reversion
Reflective
Reboots
Institutions
Mishandled
Dismantled
Since youth
But from root
To rerouting
My satellite orbited
All the exorbitant kingdoms
Deforested
Vastly too much
Of the natural
Progression
Made their own
Built their home
Price this possession
On value
Inherently
Lacking the man
To put into effect
An economy plan
Should the whole
Hulking edifice
Green in its gills
Let the market consume him
And claim what he kills
Next page