The wind is curiously silent tonight.
Nothing disturbs the deep darkness,
but the wafting scent of madness.

In the desert, captive children
toss and turn, whimper and sleep,
the government their souls to keep.

They will wake to razor wire,
and the company of strangers,
caught in concentration camps
of unknown bureaucrats and guards
blamelessly following the orders
of distant, calculating masters
who play political chess
with the lives of the innocent.

The country that separates
mothers from their babies
will rise and ask no questions,
going about its business,
buying, selling, grasping at more,
untouched by this insanity,
kissing its own kids good morning,
unwilling or unable to feel or see
the malignant cancer eating its way
through the complacent, rotting soul
of what, once upon a time, used to be

the home of the brave,
the land of the free.

"This is the end, my friend…"

Take refuge in the Golden Years.
Retire to an inevitable monastery
plopped on a suburban mountaintop.
Immerse yourself in the lost writings
of Nikita Khrushchev and Harry S Truman.
Learn to cook gizzards and meditate.
Find solace in obsolete atomic weapons,
enlightenment in the raw, butchered
expressions of the naked thermonuclear.
Wangle, ******, fire, and maneuver.
Get in touch with your inner Eichmann.
Devour baskets of tasty deplorables.
Stop clinging to guns and religion.
Love the fascism of the ordinary.
Become content with mere content.
Stop waving daggers at the innocent.
Wash yourself in the blood of the lamb.
Accept that Woodstock was futile.
Admit you can’t get no satisfaction.
Penetrate the goddess of unreason,
and come screaming to your senses.
Declare the dawn of the Age of Onanism.
Keep your fingers out of Pandora's box.
Bid farewell to the ghost of Joe Hill.
Depart the smothering, smooth life
of lust, corn flakes, and competition.
Expand your mind in a mushroom cloud.
Travel upriver to the ****** of Darkness,
legendary source of honeyed generation.
Attain new heights of perfect despair.
Discover the latent bliss of cassowaries,
rooted in their strong disdain for kale.
Play poker with the spirits of the dead.
These are your days of lucky revelation.
Lick magic frogs and witness lost dreams.
Arrive at the perfect wisdom of what is.
Everything and nothing, just what it seems.

I think I am
   finally ready
for that other life.

You know,
   The one without
all the mistakes.

Despair and grief are buddies,
always hanging out together.
Grief is despair's wingman.
Together they always score.
Grief sets despair up.
Despair closes the deal.
Best best friends forever
at the club of how we feel.

"Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky." WHA

Easy to escape what you hate;
difficult to find what you love.

Handsomely equipped to fail,
we sail out into the world.

Disillusion follows disillusion
until disillusion becomes disillusion,
it's own gray Shade of life.

The old know they have failed.
They young suspect they will.

Take wing against the dead.
Craft waxen wings. Seek the sun.
Soar against all despair.

Better to tumble than not to try,
to fall far and furiously alive.

Try to breach that pure, Attic sky
where light and hope may reside,
once before you wither and die.

for KA*

There is something in this for both of us. We have chemistry, let's be lab partners. Help me with problems like which would make a better poem: a pandemic, a wolverine, or a broken heart? You know I only chose you because you enjoy my fondling your blond *** as you lean over the Bunsen burner, because we have flammable *** on the periodic table, but this is more serious than calculations or *******. As a poet, I need to access the deeper moaning of reality, but you are a screamer, not a moaner. Let's experiment anyhow. Lift that skirt and let's explore something elemental, make a new molecule, feel the reaction. Help me probe the fundamentals of creation and I may love you, though surely not enough, as we are both non-valent. Even though we may never bond, we are in this together, partner. Lift your beaker to my lips. Outcomes are never certain.

You know it's over.
Your shoes have walked away.
Your phone dives
into the pit of despair.
Cigarettes have become healthy.
Your knees don't knock, but clap.
The chipmunks have fallen silent.
All the chameleons are gray.
The cat dismisses you and leaves.
Bullets pass through you like prunes.
Love is a forgotten memory.
Everything transforms into other.
You are a stranger growing
stranger by the day.
Over and out good buddy.
You know it's over.