How I Did It

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.

Request permission to use this poem