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Owen Phillips Jan 2011
I scribble on
With a half lobotomy;
A radar seeking Hell by looking up
And another dictionary
From another time and place;
An alternate timeline
Reaching right and left
As well as fore and aft;
The beard of a ******
And naïveté too;
Undiscovered depths of emotional manipulation
Unseeing, unthinking,
A new old structural familiarity
To abduct and probe
The time-honored, vacuum-sealed
Ineptitude of ideology
Whose meat is sweet
But suits the skeletons of standardized educational theories
Like a pair of jeans at age eleven that you expect to grow into;
In hope of justifying
Overuse of monetary resource
For the sake of bonus states of mind;
Scouring the depths of discarded everything
With hooks catching on to all the similarly forgotten names
Who live in fear of obscurity
Clinging, not unlike insects
To their sixteenth minute of fame;
Finding in myself no way but out
To understand that which lives inside;
With disregard for any thread which weaves past me and takes no hold,
And loathing for the ones that do but unravel before the eyes;
Lightheaded, ending any sense of continuity
When, prostrate in the comfort of another tapestry
I stand abruptly, let my dreams be drained from me through tendrils
Like the passing of a temporal existence;
Drinking in the dust and glue of crowded bookshops
In fear of losing inspiration
To the insatiable jaws of my consumerist natural state;
Rummaging in a bargain bin
In search of someone to tell me, “Stop!"
With heads in clouds and bodies in ice trays,
Stealing lines of logic and lyric,
Throwing down and hacking into
Elemental bits which fit into my own vernacular
Sacrificing beauty for originality and vice versa;
Choosing idols idly with the tides
Of knowledge and of art
Rising and falling without fail
Never apparent and never blurred by motion;
Searching for a style like an odd-numbered jean size;
Finding greater inspiration in waves of unopened mysteries;
Following examples laid by unsuccessful fictions;
Learning ethics only from the prologues of ****** novels,
Unsuspecting victims snuffed in interesting and lurid ways;
Letting technological distraction detract from the projections of psychological complexity
Which I, from atop the high horse of my own pretensions
Pretended to embrace;
Committing massive acts of thievery, fraud, and infinite lethargy
For the sake of juvenile, illegitimate art forms;
Seeking other seekers who exist autonomously
For the sake of personal independent credibility;
Leading unsuspecting, overreaching, overeating, understanding, undemanding,
Too forgiving, not forgetting,
Victims of domestic warfare
To a loveless watery grave
For the sake of my own loneliness;
Patronizing every segregated buffet
With courage enough only for a small taste of everything;
With the flavors of the day swirling around
For me to shoot them down
And pin their carcasses to elementary school walls
And Mormon tool sheds
And nature centers
And all the forgotten places of summers past
In the hope of rediscovering
Some old buried treasure
Be it wondrous or worthless;
With the uneasy insincerity of a rodent who pretends to understand a city;
With adopted methods
And repeated thoughts
And ideas which came to me in waking dreams of my own retirement;
Sharing, for a captive audience,
The formidable giants which
Inform our common denominator
Searching through myself for only the most indecipherable
With the fear of being understood
And the fear of being ridiculed
And pretensions of some preternatural predetermination for greatness;
With acceptance of predisposition for obscurity,
The cost of the inundation of the new airwaves.
The series of tubes that feed us intravenously
With information, information, information,
Having killed God and left material validation in His wake;
It could be that new gods are born in the minds of the innovators,
Those wonderfully wealthy
Whose social structuralism
Was a beacon to us all;
In the darkness of an architectural anomaly
Where lights extinguish as my body lies dormant
Alone and abandoned
Only by my own subversion;
Confined ever to a convolution of passages
While above me all my peers still carry on;
Overstaying welcomes
And letting emotionality
Color conversation
A sicklier green,
A green of a tree only just sprouted,
A green of a new recruit,
A green of an inexperienced schoolboy
Faced with the daunting and timeless act
Of copulation;
Somehow taking in the sights and sounds and smells
Of advanced mathematics
Even occupied, as I am,
With explaining my actions
Most eloquently;
Devoting myself to another cause,
Another, another, another
Always relaxing my grip by losing focus;
Desperately hoping not to let my fellow travelers
Lose their innocence
While I reluctantly, dogmatically
Keep mine on a leash;
Always keenly aware
Of the universe of worlds
Beyond my control,
And even my understanding;
On the increasingly frequent
Intrusions of risk
Into my significant reality
And the iota of explainable truth which guides the motion of my body but most frequently my mind;
Questioning the meaning of all words
Without thought or coordination;
Considering another restful journey
To clear my mind of human language
And in its place acquire thoughts and emotions from the street;
Without foreseeable direction,
Malice aforethought
Or noticeable signs of critical reaction
Giving birth to litter
Forgetting articles
And floating my sense of time up the Ganges;
Taking only seconds to counter the possibility of
Accepting more responsibility for myself;
Complicating matters with an interesting or bitter goodbye.
Title inspired by Mel Brooks' film *Young Frankenstein*
Owen Phillips Jan 2011
I cannot wait to fill containers with my thoughts and get them shipped away to distant places hidden behind me,
Replace them with a new receptacle whose organic sheen will be a beacon to me in this modern darkness
Where a metaphor can wander free on a range, and learn to be itself
Where new rangers will be hired to scour the tall grass, pull up by the throat any snakes parading as old artifacts
Where new worlds will be built, instead of these failed cities, where famine and mighty winds have kept us from our God-given destiny to conquer
Where the wrath of God will be our own once more, and all within will be pure and flawless, shining gold with the finest inks from all the land, stones of brotherhood and sisterhood stacked within
Where riches wide like Kublai Khan or Charles Foster Kane will stagnate in the basement, gathering more dust for everything we ever duel
All the mountains climbing over people when they reach into the sky and scrape the clouds for their sweet milk
All the deserts flooded in a moment of inattention
The white-hot valleys and dark black peaks enfolded on the canvases of foreign skies, easter-egg shell pieces falling from the stars
Skin of great hands clapping down upon the surface of the sea, stinging flesh and splashing sea serpents from the depths onto the shores of shining cities,
Where young children seek to fly away, and get lost at the precipice of
City life, the streets are shaken, but the people keep on moving, feet unsteady, stumbling along new winding paths leading under basements lain exposed in earthquakes
Underground laboratories sheltering themselves in desperation, they don't know when they'll resume their operation
Satanic possessions buried with the dead and scorched by signals from the clouds that send them sprawling out beyond the old horizon even further to the new one laying vertically against a field of unencumbered time detached from playing fields where rules define the lives of players and their women
Vandalized explosions spreading downward into catacombs where people living in obscurity can see they're just like me and let themselves be herded into tunnels where the darkness is preserved in a more desperate enclosure
Anything and everybody naught but deceiving
Getting to the lessons of our treacherous evening
Watching out for icicles that fall from the ceiling
Knowing that our skin will be removed when it starts peeling
Taking all the batteries so they can't not believe me
Floating all the money down on rafts the beasts are heaving
Quicker down the river while the back seat keeps on weaving
A believable excuse for the aforementioned deceiving
All within the new receptacle which waits for me at home
Believing and conceiving of destruction we pretend to know
When I reconstruct the audience they'll know and start applauding
Now I wile away the time kneading minds in preparation
For the grand beginning of my newest exposition
Where the many riches of disaster and of history
Will stand along with pieces of the funeral we celebrate
On every second Monday of the week of New Year's Eve
And new cases will be sent along with goodwill from hereafter
And together we will party and prevent the next disaster
Don't steal this. Please don't steal this.

— The End —