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PM Automatic 2

It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer

Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly

The pollen-filled air flies past like the

Pelicans at the edge of the harbor

Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride

Down the corridors of plastic colors

Through the one word answers that bubble forth from

10,000 years away in hyperspace

Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted

That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point

Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure

You remember hating and pinching your nose from

And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it

Just like your addiction to ego games and

Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

 

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say

But I'm an intellectual

Too impatient for meditation

And lost along the way to enlightenment

That I truly want,

But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

 

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool

Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies

The shapes of skydives,

He comes in and out of our dull lives

And there's an electric current that solidifies between

Him, Us, and his music

Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth

A broken paradise

Crumbling in a whisky tumbler

Blackened by fiber filters, creations

Unlocked by flowing ontological

Caricatures, open wounds gnashing

At attention-seeking osteopaths

Fortune seekers clamber down

Soccer field bleachers,

Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods

Once there was a set of barbells along the trail

We fell in line and started

Counting each other

One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall

It was up to us to wait for the shower

It would feed our kin

We'd begin to rise up together

But it could never keep up with our pen

We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes

But we couldn't command the armies of the dead

We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories

We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us

We take a passive role in finding love

And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark

The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old

An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind

Of a hogtied adolescent

Guessing that the course of existence

Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations

Testing the warm water on a naked toe

We could dive in and forget to breathe

And the water could carry us forever

Alleviating gravity

All the obstacles we perceived in past lives

Remain with us like

Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a

Klu Klux **** telephone operator

Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost

And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night

Drinking nail polish and

Obscure references to the films of the

Ancient Greek philosophers, who

Saw the medium as a means to a message

And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes

And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public

That would not outright reject it

But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole

Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures

And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter

And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair

Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches

Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of

New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

 

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we

Had no choice when the government bond expired

And we had only technological solutions left to hope for

And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies

With giant weapons and uncreative slogans

Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime

Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of

Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson

Who gave one final performance

To save himself from what must not be

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Written by
owen-phillips
American
Published
Apr 15, 2013
Lines·Words
90·744
Permission

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