I am the imminent
Detriment
Human,
The eat the rich
Feed the poor
Final solution
Delusions of grandeur
Commanded
Beside
Shadow valleys
And alleyways
No place to hide
Nor a refuge
Awaiting
My ego escape
Just the alternate one
That looks good in his cape
And the gaping vast maw
Of the void opens wide
And there’s no place to run
And still fewer to hide
Now coerced to confront
Its indulge affirmations
Its many minds,
Many lives,
Infinite faces
I still play the game
And claim victory
Seamlessly
Seizing my darkest desires
Since infancy
Infamy,
Outcast,
Pariah
Expelled
And despite how deep into
The distance
I meld
There is no sanctuary
In which I confide
The unspoken
More vocal
Than no place to hide

Occupy my time
With the grind
Don’t want it for the fortune
Nor the fame
I would decline
No notoriety
Accompanies
Such thankless
Entry level
New positions for myself
Within the status updates
Revel
See for me
It all comes down to
What corroborates my class
That education
Means you make it
Means you fake it
Till it lasts

Tasks and podcasts
What I do for a living
Is can’t help but ask
When I fail,
Be forgiving
Please don’t get frustrated
Irate with me,
Makes me
Go crazy
In shellshocked anxiety
Coming off lazy,
Aloof
Or ungrateful,
Another white privilege kid’s
Pride is disgraceful
But only to eyes
Of untrained
Office spaces,
I see through their looking
Class consciousness
Faces

In ruins of the Roman’s greed
Lies my city by the sea
Where as a boy my joy would cry
To count the blessings green
For Mother Earth was me and we
Built cities by the sea

Until the day I came to lead
This city by the sea
Where as a man I vowed to try
To save her shores serene
From enemies of liberty
In cities by the sea

Free trade could not appease their need
For cities by the sea
Where as a slave I live to die
And feed their war machine
Eroding in democracy
Like cities by the sea

Gambles,
Addictions,
The vice and the *****
The sick
Twisted joke
Token
Go for broke
System,
Stay woke
And carouse
As you Google-eyed
Browse
For the quickest
Rich scheme,
Have a dream
Slot machine
But the 7s are 6s
And god’s
The mob’s green
It’ll rob
And reduce you
Like sirens
****** you
Induce your comeuppance
Then buried in debt
Drinking still
To forget
They persuade you
Upgrade
Or in vain
Place your bet
Like the same
Reservation’s
Pit Boss
Can attest

Ahh there she is again
Still keeping me from being free
I guess my woven word-web wedding cake
Was sweeter than a fantasy
A piece of me, that makes me whole
And drizzled in perplexity
Philosophy in rich indulgent
Influential empathy
Delighted in the penetrating
Crave upon my opal mood
And for the autumn I exude
In comic sands of arctic chill
Alluding to my solitude
My howling to return to you
Across the dimly starlit room
And pull your constellations close
And hold you for eternity
Until my sinking shipwreck ghost
Forgets the anniversary

Though nothing became of us
Crushing on you
Resonates
In my fondest
Of memory’s youth
And you still sneak into
Reveries,
Frequently
And you pleasant surprise
What I guess
I feel secretly
Still unrequited
Though not quite
One-sided
For lip services
We made out
To confided
In each other’s
Tacit, in passing-
Bye passions
We’d hide
From divergent path
Actions
And different friend
Factions
In class where I tried
To sit close to you
Biding
Each second applying
To seeing you smiling
Or making you laugh
Even once
Was worthwhile
And all I desired
Was taking you places
From playgrounds
Abounding
With fifth-grade embraces
To college reunion years’
Intoxications
Awaiting you then
Like I did as a kid
Who’d antagonize you
When I couldn’t admit
To the prettiest girl,
How her loveliness gripped
At my new to emotion’s
Awoken attraction
Unspoken
And now it’s too late
To relocate its fate
Just wistfully wonder
And reminisce how
I fell under her spell
And dwell still in it now

No flag
No anthem
No country
Remains
In the aftermath
Rapturous
History stains
We will just be
Statistics
An unfulfilled
Wish list
Accords
And concurrent
Perfidious
Pacts
Like a carbon offset
In the form of an axe
No more acts
We need action
Not actors
And stages
For theaters of war’s
All our avarice
Wages

If I had nothing more
To say
I would’ve written it
Another way
Grown old
And having been
All out of options
Settled down
Ingest the toxins
Of a modern
Lifeless
Strife
Without a sound
And buried down
Forever deeper
What I never
Wanted found
But I am just
An open book
And readers
Cannot help but look
And what it took
To tell my story
Started with
A simple hook
A line and sinker
Master tinker
Overthinking
Critically
And if you lose me by the end
Well then
There’s plenty in the sea

Slice through the fog
Like a moody
Intruder
My wandering mind
Cannot seem
To elude her
Can’t flood it in tumult
Metallic cacophony
Often epiphany
Specters are stalking me
Once revelations
Divine exaltations
Have morphed into clockwork
Berserk
Demonstrations
Against the machines
And their dream simulations
As much as I feel the peace
Pulsing prevail
I still fail to sale happy
And in it regale
In the love
I have dovetailed
In audio only
So like the Tin Man
I am rusting
And lonely

This is weird no?
I take it,
You don’t want to fake it
But have better things
To be doing
Than making
Me try to feel less
So alone
For so many
Days home
I was solely
Without you already
And though we’ve been further apart
In the past
There was just let you go
Or we’ll grow up too fast
At least once before
Can’t lead you on anymore,
Can’t eventually bore you,
We’re born to explore
And I knew one of your
Adventure
Caliber
Couldn’t wait idly by
And be my
Passenger
Like ambassadors
We represented conventions
Too grand in their narrative scale
Comprehensions
To ever let ours
So submissively sit,
Ponder it,
Then commit
To the lack of Movement

This is the end
Of my life
I’m afraid
Where do memories go
When they cease to be made
Do they fade
Isolated
In coffins contained
Or live on
In some legacy
Shouldering blame
For the cornerstone laid,
For its labor unpaid,
For the road to extinction
For profits is paved

Perhaps you’re expecting
A spectacle
Puppet show
Thespians falling in love
With the undertow
Rowing
And rowing
Your boat down a stream
Always merrily,
Merrily
Living the dream

Of few things am certain
I'm not a good person
I know I will die
And nothing can reverse it
I'm cursed with the passing of time
I don't mind
If a billion and one others
Meet their demise
Before mine
In its lack of fulfilling
Accomplishment
Ferries me off
To the terrors of Tartarus
Martyred by none
I could not liberate
But a single societal
Prison cell fate
Languishing in my own
As I longed to find home
And in so doing entered
Dimensions unknown
To so many untold
Countless souls I don't know
And came out on the other side
Having mine sold

I look back
And wish
It was different
Than this
I don’t want to be old
And alone
Gettin’ ******
At the slightest
Disturbance
Of my peace of mind
By the simpletons
Not seeing my
Eye to eye
When the weather is weird
And bizarre
Is the word
I would use
To describe it all
First
But perhaps
Not the perfect
Conversing
Immersed
More in only more
Mine
Kind of **** to deal with
Since it’s news to me
Cared to share
Its
Acid trip

Wishing you were anywhere
But here
Can be
A decent state to be in
If you can still appreciate
The kindnesses you're gifted
Without so much to part with
Or to donate foreign strangers
Who have been on the receiving end
Of their fair share of dangers
When displaced in distant
Destinations
Illuminations
Of the darkest spaces
All too often getting lost
In what I thought
Might find myself again
In Paradise’s cost
Another fortune
Disproportionately
My prerogative
Compared to millions out there like me
Who may have much more to give
Than take away
From every goodness sake
And goodest grace
The human race
Seems willing to embrace me with
Despite the dearth they make
A common trait among the masses
I am still content
To exploitate

Unruly young dragon,
Recalcitrant, sneers
Disobeys,
Breathing flames
In sheer rage perseveres
On outstretched wings displays
His magnificence,
Marvelous, mighty
Indifference
Impudence
Not so incredulous when
Still untamed he has tempered
His vain fire spin
In ascendency
Soars,
Striking fear when he roars
Indomitable
Kanto kid’s king
Dinosaur

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

Send your soldiers
Send your sentries
Send your messengers of peace
Send your emissaries’
***** deepest secretive
Police
But leave the wars of men behind you
Let us learn each other’s ways
Let us gaze upon the mountains
Whilst conversing of the waves
Between the emanating mystery
Connecting us, dividing us
Uniting us as one
Beneath the power source we share
The mighty children of the sun

Creatures abound
In the darkest
Of hours
And from my own shadow
The one in me
Cowers
Too frightened
To even
Speak truth
To empower
The feeble,
Unfeeling
Attempt at confession
When judgment so often
Proceeds the expression

Been good this year?
More like
Just doing my best
Not to be
Such a wretch,
Make a mess of what’s left
Of the life I aspired to
Like the admired few
Heroes who tried
To revise
Askew worldly view
Misers surmising
It must be a matter
Of fact compromising
For lies we can all
Acquiesce
More or less to
Relying upon
How to live in the present tense
Already gone
How to make it
Make sense
How to fill in the emptiness
Gaps in impermanence
Must be a missing link
In what the past
And its class struggle teaches
In order to pass

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

Oasis of duplicitous plenty
Its criminal overworld
Dripping its leaks
From a rusty, dystopian
Faucet ****’s squeaks
And I sneak
For the scraps
In the back
Making stacks
Of their precious supply of
The liquidized facts
Soon enough
The untenable
Fragile
Facade
Shall come crashing down,
As we drown,
In the mirage

They say
We make better
The world
With each level
We add
To the sky-scraping
Business or pleasure
Purchased
Edifice
Houses us
In its midst
Of a million plus
Hastily
Working bees buzzing
To underground tunnels
Of loveless
Night-clubbing
With parks to roam free
And breathe easy
From smog,
From the dust
In our lungs
Of the rusting
Of cogs
In industrial districts
Resistant to changes
Of carbon foot-prince’s
Monopoly games
Played in technocrat hubs
As rat races in slums
Go unpaid
And still trade
On the stock market’s
Crumbs
But such bums
Are unsightly,
Unseemly,
Untidy
And so
Garbage trucks
Come dispose of them
Nightly
And rightly so
As we go
Higher and higher
To enter a state of mind’s
Timeless empire
Regardless how dire
The subjects below
Are presented on screens
And the terrors
They show
As some
Sanctuary
Reveries
Of perfection
To sympathy’s
Pitifully
Praying pretension
As if it were really
Our kids in detention
Suspended like bridges
Still spanning attentions
Of six-second sexting
Emoticons pressing
More hot-button issues
Than functions
Need stressing
Out more
Than elitists dread eating
And salad un-dressing
Progressing though always
An ever-ascension
These marvelous feats
Of our greatest invention

King of the jungle gym
Under the rubble dim
Light of survival
Is vanishing
Fast
Felt so tall
Just a moment ago
Harkened back
To a time before memory
Anchored longevity
Fleeting few moments
Reflection embraced
Still lamenting components
I couldn’t erase
No escape
From the weight
Of the crumbling facade
No uplifting salvation
To make me a god
Or equate such disgraced
Afterthoughts of creation
To some more outlandish
Evolve explanation
Acceptance of place
Beneath all mortal burden
Bequeathing assumptions
Default to uncertain
This earthen slime mold
Can preserve the self gone
Can deliver me from
The untimeliest bomb

Just tallies
On a census
Still consenting
To a senseless
Lack of conscience
Still ensconced in
An archaic
Hyper tension
Knocking on the door
Extorted
Public swayed
To go to war
And on display
The Desert Storming
Makes conforming
Dying for
The worthy cause
Of their enrichment
Your enlistment,
Your expense
And yet
This peaceful
Demonstration
Is their right
To self-defense

Suppose it comes back  
To us pondering endlessly
Values,
Priorities,
Profligate
Spending sprees
Guess it depends
Where exactly
You are
To have borne
Such a cultural norm
To adorn
What material riches
Could ever surpass
Our empathic
Ability to
Social class

Christmas comes but once a year
Sometimes I wish it less
When no gift could save the world
All I unwrap is emptiness

When good you've been but so much bad
Stuffs stockings full of coal
All I see is greedy children
Melting the North Pole  

When another tree goes up
A million more fall down
Even if it's just a fake
All I can do is frown

When lights aglow and carols ring
And merriness is made
All I want to do is stop
The greenhouse gas parade

When polar bears are drowning
But the turkey's kinda dry
I pass the cranberries and hope
All reindeer learn to fly

So Santa feast your eyes upon
The milk and cookie season
When you have no place to live
You might consider vegan

Weary of watching
The funeral
Clocking
The countdown
To meltdown
With no sign of stopping
Just racing
Ourselves
To extinction
Embracing
No clear-cut distinction
Just surfaces
Facing
Annihilation
At the hands of time
Wasting
Too late to make progress
When profit prevails  
And the crimes against nature
Are tipping the scales

Among birds
They’re the duller
No need to see color
When none of them
Held within
Arms of a lover
Just first to flyover
Marooned in my closure’s
Erasure exposure
And nobody knows
Of the woebegone
Better
Or soothes me
With moody
Tempestuous weather
For islands of paradise
Caged her too long
Until jungles of concrete
Are where she has gone
And she will fly away
You delusional fool
Or be flightless forever
For some
Shiny jewel

Condensed tufts of vapor
Stuff,
Puffs white as paper
Misshapen gas mass
Passing at
Paces glacial
Through spatial glass vast
Cotton swab
Wads of wonder
Thin wisps of my wistfulness
Blissfully dissipate
To the gray
State of mind
Thunder, I ponder
Beyond, float away
And like sunlight asunder
I struggle to breach them
To reach out
And push them aside
And divine
Shining sanctuaries
Behind gates in the sky
An ethereal fortress
Some call it
The heavens
And fewer will glimpse it
With God’s
Omni-prescience
But all in attendance
From righteous ascendance
Believe it to be
Paradise’s life-sentence
Beginning
And ending
With serenade angels
And demons
Descending

But I’ll hold you again
In this life
Or the last
As we live in the future
The now
And the past
And even
If minutes
Elapsing
Collapse
Into somehow
Much longer
I take to my last
Breath exacting
The time I had squandered
Without our hands clasped

It’s like
You get close to it
Make the most
Boast of it
Gloat prematurely
Expecting a raise
But demote insecurely
Your capital gain
You’re worth less
In the game
And identify solely
With figures
Of fame
But attain
Ultimately
No dividends paid
Just a diffident
Dissonance
Caught in the rain
Just an incident
Waiting to happen
In shame
And of innocence
Soaking in sin
Your soul stained
And of fortunes untold
For blood sold
You are blamed
Until all you can do
Cut your losses
And run
Come to terms
With the zeroes and ones
You’ve become

If not alive, than what am I
What is this world if not sublime
It must be real
These places, faces
Human races
Where they go and what they do
I wonder to the point of pain
And spill it from this point of pen
For me and them and her still there
In each full page from her blank stare
Concluding in those eyes is where
I come to know the meaning is
Of meaningless without her kiss
But emptiness is my purpose
It's cancerous, without remiss
Black holes within this plotted course
Yet still my trails are blazed with force
Of suns and skies and mountain quakes
When God beneath my feet forsakes
My brothers, sisters, still they bow
All I can do is question how
And why and what and who, where, when
Does this journey ever end
Or just transcend beyond the tombs
The answers are they set in stone
An epitaph of flesh and bone
Alone I've tread questions engraved
Upon the masses' minds enslaved
Until they deal as I have dealt
Until they dwell as I have dwelt
In universes I have felt
The bloodshed of these battles fought
Eternities in instants sought
Out to share these lessons taught
To will to life my conscious thought

Prove me wrong
I need to know
If all along I've come to grow
Into my own Bushido code
Of conduct guiding me to show
How good intentions paved this road
With my abode's most humble tone
To build a hearth of stone for those
To melt their souls adorned in gold
And sleep in spirit's selfless home

Or just to fill this house alone
With all the seeds we humans sowed
As bombs explode and we foreclose
On bungalows and debts we've owed
To others' woes and sin atones
Colossusses of ancient Rhodes
The person that to be you chose
To roam this earth, renounce the thrones
For all this power shall erode
To nothing more than buried bones

Missed a spot
Washing some dishes
Tonight
For a little chump change
And incentive to write
That I guess I could do it
Each day
The pay’s good
And I’m welcomed by others
As anyone would
Want to be
Received, greeted
Instructed, entrusted
The work is completed
We all go home rusted

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

Imagine that
Warmth drawing near
Another person
Left to fear
Perhaps in understanding them
We could be friends
But so it ends
In just do you
Forgotten who
Could even speak
This language true

One in a billion
Awaiting out there
But I’m certain
In that many years
Can’t compare
To the healing
You were
My affliction, despair
I was barely beginning
To finally care
About what in the world
Wasn’t just me aware
Of your rarity,
Verity
Taken for granted
How much you were there with me
There when I
Ranted
Recanted,
Commanded attention
And by you enchanted
Enamored I guess
Without saying the word
Thought it best
To be best of friends,
Not bridges burned

It walked on water over seas
And lurked within the hold
Deep inside it slept and dreamt
Of glory, God and gold

It raised its sword to take and have
And felled the trees with axe
To claim and own the uncontrolled
Then marked it on our backs  

It spoke in tongues of serpents
And hissed of demon flame
Promising salvation
If we but learned its name

It forced us to betray
And turn against our brother
Condemned us to a barren rock
By ravaging our mother

It offered us the thought of more  
And then reached out its hand
But only shared a sickness
That still spreads throughout this land

Not getting younger
Just aging
Engaging
Increasingly less
With a rapidly changing
World climate
This virus
Has taken its toll
I can see the night sky
Through the atmosphere hole

When did I become
But a shadow to you
But a faint recollection
Of all we’ve been through
Barely anything left
Worth redeeming us now,
Of love, all but bereft
I just can’t fathom how
We could come to this
Bottomless,
Cyclically toxic
Exhaustion
The falling out
Fault lines
Increasingly often
Can’t soften the blow
When it has to be said
Can’t keep feigning alive
When inside
We are dead
And what we can’t control
Tears apart
At the seams
What a future together
Had woven in dreams
Will eternally haunt me
Again, how I fail
So abjectly,
Completely
To build it to scale
What I feel,
What I know exists
Boundless for her
When it keeps on collapsing
In what we once were
Plain and simply
Companions
With more time to spare
But what looms in the distance
Discordant despair

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

Edge of the world again
Jumping back into
A despondent sea
For eventually
Everything ends
With my misery
Close to sustaining
In totality
What just years ago
Seemed
Inconceivably
Distant
Attained,
Reified,
Redefined
Self-sufficient
To then see
Dependency
Forming
Between
I can’t live without you
Can’t make love
To a screen

Young and aware
Of what’s going on here
And you don’t want me telling
The world
I see clear
Through conspiracy theory
To blatant infringements,
Hear populist speech
As elitist enrichment
We get
That this globalized
Laundering scheme
Still comes at the expense
Of a kid’s right to dream
And with dignity,
Eat, play and love
Their identity
Willfully
Deem what their destiny
Ought to be
Sovereignty
Owed an apology
Long overdue
From the old leadership
Still afraid of the new

Excited
Expecting
To be on my way soon
Move into a place
With my friends,
A new commune
To seek opportunity
Knocks at the door
When I answer
Can greet it with
Change in decor
Anything that I want
To no longer feel home
Is consistently roaming
And go it alone