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.