Take it
Wrest it
Rip it
From the clutches
Of my claims
When they are splayed
And splattered
Matters
Of my brainless
Bullet aims
Still fixing
Barrels
To the temples
Self-imposing
Isolation
Making wars
And civil wastelands
Of the isolated nation

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

The words that ignite
From the spark in my brain
Can they not provide warmth
To the cold in each vein
Can but one of these tears
That my pen pours in pain
Not touch upon skin
That I know feels the same

My thoughts into dust
Am I going insane
Am I losing my mind
Were my journeys in vain
To think that these tears
Could cleanse so much pain
Or heal this world's wounds
That I know bleed the same

My ethos to rust
Like chains in the rain
It corrodes in deaf-eared
Close-minded disdain
For a dying world's tears
We could share all this pain
Yet we cry them alone
Powerless, we're the same

Try to change the system
And you’ll fail a million ways
Eventually it will be back
To reinstate its darkest days
Escape it, run and hide
It finds you
Taxes you and tosses you away
Like paper, plastic
Then reminds you how to choose
For who to lose for in the war
Enlists the poor
To fight its battles
Till it’s kickin’ down their door
And all the winners, so much winning
Never read but write the story
So its narrative is simplified
In God’s gold-standard glory
But it’s gory let me tell ‘ya
They’ll show burning baby boomers
They’ll build nations out of hatred
They’ll make zombies of consumers
But the realest of idealists
Keep it Lucy diamond left
On all that it’s my body policy
And corporate theft success
But also know what’s right
What’s good and just
What’s fair and free
Of broken trust

Boy
On his own
Now to find her
A home
Where it goes
From first steps
To the depths
No one knows
And despite how he fails
To exemplify man
She is with him,
She’d miss him,
Beside him
She’d stand
Should the aggregate good
Be excluded
From mind
And we turn
Face to fate
With the end of our time

Compassion is the weakness
Yet also the reward
Sweet surrender to the nectar
Of the gods
Or by the sword

Can only
Return
To inspired
So seldom
We grow old
Withhold
What we feel
Is unwelcome
To others
We may
Trust the most
Confidantes
Who most likely desire
What nobody wants
To impart,
Or apprise,
Or describe
Candidly
When for free
It is offered
So off-handedly
By the back-handed,
Off the cuff,
Tongue in cheek
Flattery
Frenemies cattily
Cat-calling
Blabbing spree
You find amusing
And humorous
Yes?
I guess besties
Just really means
Who wore it best
But at least reflects
Some attempt
Semblance
Expressed
Of two people
As fake
As the real world
Can get

It creeps about seeking
A mouse to devour
Sniffing and pawing
It licks at the air
Half its ear has been torn
In a scrap of claws bared
A brief skirmish
With some
Other feral
Feline
Who might have been set to pounce
On a clean ****
But instead was left hungry
With nothing to fill
Its thin belly
And so
It continues to search
Gleaming eyes in the night
Are as bright
As a star
And I wonder
What goes
Through its mind
From afar
Try to beckon it over
To my open door
So my chronic rat problem
Might soon be no more
But it clings to the shadows
And scans about hawkishly
Prowling and preying
And eyeing me cautiously

Don’t mean to hide it
Preferring to write it
By night
And by day
I would rather recite it
To anyone willing to listen,
Amused
Curious to decipher
The rhymes that I choose
As the interview
Then can ensue
And resume
The perpetual ego feedback
Loop-de-loop
Nom de plume
Just the guise I assume
Is the one that they want
Although not necessarily
In the right font
But as daunting
As being
Some other non-poet
Can be
I just try to be free
To if prompted to
Show it

We've let fear become the novacaine
Like whiskey for the wounds
Swallowing denial pills
For truths that lie ahead
Injecting hopelessness
With needles of realities too real
For optimism's foreign policy
Behind our walls
We alienate the cure
To division's disease

A contagion known by many names
Ignorance is uttered most
A sickness in the veins
Of cancerous medical costs
A pestilence set upon
The amber fields of grain
A plague quarantining classes
In prison-bars and penthouses
A famine on the families
In this minimum cage

Where once we flew with eagles
Now we wallow in the dirt
Born into a dying world
Grown from selfish roots
Watered on pessimism
Bending to the will of hate's
Axe of opportunity
Cutting down the other trees
That dared to share the light of our
American dreams

Immersed in new roles
Disappearing in me
If I get any closer to death
I am free
But I might just keep playing
This game every day
I can meet
And delete you
The same
Unafraid
To be severed
From ties
Tirelessly I knotted
And weathered the storm
Like a pumpkin patch
Rotted
Forgotten again
Is the ink in my pen
And despite how it pains me
I still write its end

Hero in
My own crusade
Delusion
Egoist charade
A cognitively
Dissonance’s
Madness
Is my serenade
And music to my ears
The fear of failure
I won’t live to see
Now spreading rapidly
Beneath the surface
Cut it out of me

All I know is
Nothing
Ever changes
Stays the same
We just revert
To we are worth it
We deserve
To own the Earth
And from rebirth
Temptations
Praying
We are thee
Foundation-laying
We aspire to eternity
Empires of modernity
Like spires in the skies
Re-deify
Its vast absurdity
Just blurring
Its distortion
Geospatial
Disproportion
Of its vaster still
Delusions
Of a prophet
Perpetuity,
Annuities
Reboot
And mass produce
Discontinuities
No please!
No please don’t shoot!

Ask me again
What is wrong,
Favorite song
And I harp on it
Often
You can
Sing along
But presume
I can’t possibly be
Happily
As deluded
As all of the rest of you
Seem
And I’d have to object
My abject
Misery
Comes more naturally
Born
To the world’s
Savagery

Sometimes the attraction
Was solely cerebral
But in the abstraction
Made love to the peaceful
And though I felt evil
Still using such beauty
For personal ends
There was you and me
Truly
As more than just friends
But to look upon you
Through the mind-bending lens
As the conscious
Apart from emotion
Ascends
With you staring right back
Synchronized
In my eyes
And perhaps even far beyond
What it disguised
Was the moment I thought
Only futures could hold
What the two of us
Here in the now
Had foretold
Growing old
Not appealing
No fantasy lands
Could be made to resemble
It held in our hands
When fingertips
Inches away
Stayed astray
And it faded to everything
I couldn’t say
Though you know I have written it
Infinite
Times
I envision,
Revisit it
Lost in these rhymes
And if I can’t return
To unlearn
Grave mistakes
I will take them into
The last one
I awake

And here is where
What I can’t say
Comes to play
With the matches
Of burn it all down
Everyday
What I hate
And what others
Just can’t tolerate
How I love
Her again
Just too little too late
How the weight
Of the world
Is no longer my burden
To bear
I just share with some strangers
Who probably don’t care

But it has to be part of the story
The journey
The squandered and lost minutes
Never returning
Reverting won’t make it
Reverse
Or restore
And the remonstrance
Won’t end
The internal war
So be peace
I’d advise
As an agent of both‘s
Can’t decide
Which demise
I believe in the most

Why not just leave me
Alone all those years
You could see in me
Something
That seldom appears
Rearing its ugly head
Soon of late
On a date
Yet she even sees peace
In my war
Mental state

Warm days receding
This could be the last
One we have
Before winter
Makes gray the sky vast
And it casts such a pall
Of embittered frostbite
Like a knife
The chills spitefully
Razor sharp blight
Vegetation life signs
And what’s left of mine
Frigid
The skin sticks to bone
In unbendingly rigid
Intractable, uncompromising
Position
Opposed to what changes I’m told
I must make
Like the seasons
Defiant
But still in time’s wake
Can’t escape state of nature
The way they were born
Can’t outpace decay rates
In my more human form

All it cost was the solace
I thought that it would
Have brought, sought out the flawless
One’s good personhood
When you asked me decisions I make,
My mistakes
Were to do this alone
Before both of us breaks
The idea of it
More than enough
But it lacked
The surreal admit
It must be love
To impact
Two phenomenon lives
Out of nowhere
Collides
As if muses and fates
Meant them to
Harmonize
For I still hear your voice
In the back of my head
But then why was my choice
To be better off dead?
Only logic
Conclusive deduction
I reach
You were strong,
I was weak
Insecurity freak
And from peaks of my mind
To the depths of my soul
In totality finalized
Just let her go

Need something stronger
A little bit longer
To last
When I’m passed
The returning to
Older me versions
I stashed
In a baggy of buggy
Feel creepy and crawly
Bizarre human oddity
God in its folly

Now it’s your turn
To do the hurting
I suppose
To keep keeping it real
What I feel
And compose
Until all is revealed
And the rest
But shadows  
Of the hold you have over my sol-
ar meadows
And I know
It’s cliché
As I love you’s
Red rose
Or its sentiment’s
Silhouette’s
Withering prose
Even wasn’t quite us
Sappy stuff
Or quite you,
You would say that the bloom
Was the wrong shade of blues
For it cost too much green
And left traces of shoes
And just wasn’t my dripping with
True muses hues
You’d refuse
Such a crimson lust  
Power display
For the impotent gray
Thunderstorms
I convey
But then up to Olympus
Command me to climb
See the world,
Be the gods,
Then return to your side

Buyer beware
Oh, you're in for a scare
When I tell you your hair
Does not need that much care
That your phone
Doesn't need to cost
More than your home
That those things that you own
And you don't even use
Are as faulty and paltry
As what's on the news
That your new pair of shoes
Is the bare feet of poverty,
Your right to choose
Is some Lot in Life's Lottery
Stocking your shelves
With the Keebler Elve's spells
And stuffing your stockings each year,
Jingle bells
Someone else's expense
Isn't worth your two cents
You dispense it like dreams
Of the white picket fence
While the industry picks at your pockets
Unheeded
Insurances claim extra coverage is needed
To breathe and to read
The fine print on the label
Approved FDA chemical
Farm to table
Just turn a blind eye
To the advertise lies
Inundating your eyes
With disguised dollar signs
Like some supersize fries
Fill you up for five minutes
Then leave you as empty
As when you first bit it
The infinite Amazon
Shopping mall pantheon
Built to the corporate gods
Of Emoticon
Keeping you spending, and clicking,
And liking,
And posting,
And boasting,
But mostly just psyching
You out of reality
Plastic-wrapped packaging
Boxed in a fallacy
Now shipping free
Who they want you to be
Just a product to brand
For the others to see
You consuming it all so
Conspicuously

Once again
Is near at hand
A time when time
Ceases to span
The provenance’s
Future tenses
As the here and now
Pretenses
Best of what
Presents the self
Can boast
And its hubris
Claim the most
Enlightened in humility
Empowered in virility
Of pedigree and legacy
Indelible to memory
For all to see
In perfect form
Of imperfection’s
Former norm
No mourn the standard-bearer
Of the pall-bearer’s despair
Or the narrator,
In staring blankly
At these pages bare
Hyper-aware
Of the eternities
And eons
Could be better serving
Justice to in-flux
Of armed-disharmonies
Converging to
This Pax Romana rust
Brand new

Dynamics are changing
The time zones estranging
Decreased frequency
Of these letters exchanging
But maybe it’s me
All too idle
Anxiety
Fearing the worst
She’ll be saying goodbye to me
Unworthy urchin
In lurches
I try to be
Calm and collected
Composed
And aloof
But to lose what this is
Would be rain with no roof
Would be my
Heavy heart
With no burden of proof
Although not as if there
Ever were
Guarantees
Just a world away girl
And a boy’s
Fantasies

Free to make your choices
No matter what the cost
The few grow rich
The most stay poor
The paradise is lost

Locked in a cage
Of a loner
A stray
Reaching out for the keys
Just deceives me the further
Like pleas of the psyche
Diseased
Commits ******
For no one else sees
Worst in me
Quite like me
And deliverance from it
More pricey than free
Elegies
I have lachrymosely
Dedicated
To fallen love’s
Cyclical saga
Abated
At last
She is there
Nearer still  
To renewal
Accrual of wasted years
Seeking approval
From whom I know not
Just a place to belong
To be welcome,
Be valid,
Not once again gone

And there we were
Synergy
You collide
Into me
Moments materialize
Synchronicity
Then the earth shatters
Shakes us to the core
And imploding
In discordant war
We endure
But recede ever further
Cordoned into nations
Partitioned and pawned,
Pacified
On their waitlist
Deprived of the care
The holistic approach
But the first class
Unconscious
Just shoves us in coach
And yet woke
Is the liberalist paradigm
Spinning
The worth on its Axis
And wickedly
Grinning

No plan to back up
All you’d lose
Just haven’t yet
Learned to refuse
The risk adrenaline
Incites you,
Tempers you,
And reignites you
So exciting,
Then it’s not
Now failure
Perforates the plot
And disappointment
Disapproves
Embarrassment
Disquietudes
Can’t even watch the morning news
Without your judgment
And disdain
An older form
Of growing pains
Would not dyspeptically
Emerge
In caffeinated stressors
Surge
Convergent point
Of no return

Currently the clock strikes three
My poetry is presently
The time elapsed
In future's past
Until I'm writing history

Like ravenous songbirds
Discordantly musing
I try to please ears
What you hear
Is confusing
And locked in this paradox
Box
I assess
What contributes
These attributes’
Lack of success
I’m a mess
Of misgivings,
Misdeeds,
Misconceptions
Mistakes,
Misbegotten
Misjudgments
Enmeshed in
Repressed fantasies
And misplaced former dreams
Like a sentience still trapped inside
Minds of machines

Always just had to go
‘Way for a while
The miles I distanced myself
Now compiled
As this abyss lachrymose
Lonely lament
The escape artist
Nowhere to hide
His intent
Anymore
Not to hurt
Or to see us resent
One another
Can’t talk to you now
As a friend,
Nor a lover
Especially not
No, now that ship has sailed
As I passed it right by
Like the life that I failed

I don’t want to hate you
To cringe every moment
In passing you by
And cursing each second glance,
Why even try?
To reply
To be cordial
And humor attempts
To unmake
My acquaintance
If only incensed,
Aggravated,
I break
My precise concentration
Allaying irate
To sate your instigation
For any reaction
Or step I take
Hastens
The pace of which
Mischievous
Cretins
Persist
In a stone’s-throw away
Public-shaming
The lay
Person, not on good terms
With their language
In anguish,
In angst-driven rage
I awaken
To fail yet again
To their testing
My patience
And waiting,
Ignoring,
Is all I can do
To preclude violent urges
To see this thing through
To an end
I approach
With the same
Ardent zeal
That a former me wrote
And believed
Could be real
An ideal
Self-delusion
Concluded since I
Arrived here
And appeared to them
Alien,
Distant
And weird

It pumps blood
But not love
And though flooded
With toxins
Of noxious
Too often
And so like
The forbidden fruit
Becomes rotten
When serpentine
Inamoratas
Besotted
Betray it,
Delay its
Carotid
From reaching the brain
Where innate tendencies
Conflate infatuation
With fate’s
Meant to be’s
And pulse-pounding
Decrees
Of the tightening squeeze
And the ease in which
One more attack
Cardiac
Seems to break it
And render it
Barely intact
But it keeps beating on
With each stroke
Of arrest
Testing it
Till its limits
Burst out of your chest
Or unless
It is ripped from it
Like the Aztecs

The city light stars
Still appear to me scars
On the surface of Earth
More resembling Mars
Than the sapphire,
Emerald
Bejeweled sphere of life
With a white veil of clouds
To shield us from the light
Of the sovereign
Solar glare's
Untimely flare
And the holes
In the ozone
We can not repair
Nor can we reconstruct
Thawing glacial palatial
Ice capitals crumbling
In queendoms of Nature
The nature of humans
To topple it,
Profit it
Then in its place
Build a shining metropolis
Profligate in
Its consumption expansion
Suffusing, subsuming
The entire planet
New homes
From the old
To seek shelter from cold
Are those city light stars
Such a sight to behold

Only human after all
I just want to be heard
By more than inner-monologuing
With existences absurd
I’m just desire courting madness
Pleasure-seeking silly monkey
Easy-speaking vow of silence
Honor-bound to keep it funky
Just a diplomat pragmatic
In conventional futility
The all-consuming ego
In the shadow of humility
Your typical contrarian
Ideal egalitarian
Developing a taste for
Arts and state crafting agrarian
Utopian dimensions building
Bridges into space
Enslaving stars to do my bidding
As the angels fall from grace
I am the single, greatest mystery
Nature herself can not explain
Instinctively returning to
The origins we tame
We are sophisticated, liberated
Envoys of the unifier
Common all denominations
Gifted with the wild fire
Meant to be intentional
Deliberate in simplicity
Complexity compels us to
Explore beyond infinity
To seize the energy within
Without the answers dying for
Remembrance, what we leave behind
Unruly gods of peace and war

And in my
Fetid corpse
I find you
Pondering
The Betty Whiteness
Privilege
Riches
We all die
Who cares if it
Belongs to I
Or I,
A most ferocious
Leftist
Lurk the woods
And train the deftest
Cattle herders
Intellect’s
More written worder
Intro specs
To sharpen
Harps
To pullin’ strings
The arts
To tables
Bounty brings
And should my spirit
Fail to guide me
She is shelter
There beside me
Tried to speak
She'd override me
Pegs the spider webs
Inside me
Knows when I
Am not as lively
Itchin' for
Her poison ivy
Long goodbye'd
She'd still remind me
Sway away
Atreyu boy
The Nothing
You can yet
Destroy

This Poe flows Colder
Than the Winter Soldier’s
Poppy Rocky Mountains
Got these Madoff Hitlers frontin’
Like they cut from different fountains
In the ‘palm of Vietnam
We lit that Hendrix living Dead
Since True man’s ‘zilla psybeam bomb
Where I still pose Socratic **** ed
As the real clown prince of prom
Like how American’t these Laosy liars
Just say Uncle Psalm?
The most Unholy Roman culture
I have ever Lucid Sky Dove on
A liberal artist sculptor
Commonwealth fair sharin’ Guam
To sharpen tigress Lady Ganga’s
For the Partition pogrom
Where my extremist gets its fix
On next-door neighboring Islam
Though not to sink with thinning ranks
But think in ink instead of tanks
‘Cuz I ran-Contras gunnin’ nuns
I’ve chased the dragon’s rising suns
And now I’m building an empyre
For the dreamers I come from

Like Lucy saw Jesus
One day in the woods
No good deed more egregious
Than ghettoes
And hoods
But with armies like these
Who needs even
Have policies
When with ease
Reading
His enemies’
Strategies
Breed,
Outcompete,
Then delete
Actualities
Factual
Lacking,
Class
Gun-blasting
Tragedies
None more conspiring
To firing
Squad
Than the tyrant
Behind it
All’s
Fallout with God

Progress at paces
Soon blurring the vision
And slurring left speechless’
Spurious wisdom
Spurred on by
The burgeoning
Populi schism
A split from traditional
System’s opinion
To one of more info wars’
Mixed-indecision
A rift in the shifting-gear
Fear mechanism
Unbidden to self-driven
God’s algorithm
Aware of itstealth
So beware of the wealth
Of the data it’s raided
To upgrade its health
Beyond mortal’s-reformed
All too normalcy span
Of all life
Time inside
A computer program
As these obsolete hands
Need no longer make art
Only obstacles standing
In Waze to depart
On the path to her heart
A detour
From subjective
Experience love
Becomes numb
To expressive,
Defective,
Just one more
Direction to take
From the makers,
The saviors,
Still ground-breaking
Nature
In favor of flavors
Of labor
More savory
For the wage-slavers’
Outdated chicanery
Like the engrained
Granaries
Of the state-
Controlled bakeries
Stale to the taste