My child,

As you watch your worlds get torn apart
With a malevolence you can’t comprehend,
Please do not throw yourself into the crossfire,
This is a war you cannot mend.

Their anger is too deep-rooted,
Their hurt is much too strong,
They will insist on going down fighting,
And refuse to see where they are wrong.

Find shelter from this constant storm,
Please close your eyes and ears.
They won’t listen to your pleading,
They choose not to see your tears.

Your screams won’t penetrate their spiteful resolve,
Your little voice will go unheard,
You have no choice but to be strong now;
A responsibility so undeserved.

My child, you cannot help them
As they stand firm on this battle site.
You must know this will be one of many,
There is too much wrong to put right.

If they could see how their bellowing makes you recoil,
See you cowering on your knees,
They might take heed of the damage they’re wreaking,
Reconsider this incessant, vindictive reprise.

But this road is far from ending,
So don’t exhaust your resilience here,
You must protect yourself from the barrage,
For they have not the strength to shield your fears.

It will be another long and tiresome night
As you are again dragged through this mess,
Processing all of their vicious accusations
For all that they refuse to confess.

So as you watch the two people you revere the most
Spit venom at volumes you can’t stand,
I beg you not to let it make you hateful -
This is not what they had planned.

I know how you long to fix it,
Desperate to appease their pain,
But my child, too much has already been broken,
Just please know you are not to blame.

I wish I could offer an escape route,
Tell you everything will be OK,
But there is no choice except to ride out this bitterness,
Await the dawn of a new day.

And on that day you’ll find a way to forgive them,
For destroying everything you knew as home,
For their selfishness stealing all innocence
And turning safe places into war-zones.

I miss you
And I know it all
Seems as if its
Just abstract flirtation
And hopeless poetry
For the spirit of romantic gesture
And that it isn't truely...
That deep craving
Of endless oceans
And time weathered shores
Of waves cashing
With every beat
Of a heart
So desperately
And sickly
In love
That it could
Never die
Or be
Broken
And the simple
Madness of the truth
Isn't able to be
Writen or spoken
With any alphabet
Or language
And I could
Never describe
The how or when
Of it all
But I do
Know I will
Always be falling
Here
In this place
Where
I miss you

The tree is a greater artist
Than any man or woman.
Could ever hope to be,
For whereas we sit and strain
Over our words and phrases,
Shaping and revising,
Writing and rewriting,
Ever conscious and ever
Apprehensive of the affects
Which they may bestow
Upon our readers, and
What they mean to us;
The tree simply exists, and
Without judgment, effort
Intention, or pretension
It creates countless patterns of
Incomparable beauty
With the veins of its leaves  and
The grains of its wood that
Even a Shakespeare or Goethe
Could only ever attempt
To describe, however
Brilliantly they may have,
In their tomes.

Ants march to their empire
With the crumbs of giants
Along a riverine path
Sinuous like the forest nymphs.
The leaves gossip with winds
From Earth’s four corners,
Tales of how the mighty have
Fallen to the tides of change.
Fate sisters are dead, no longer
Can they tickle the fickle threads
Which orderly suspend the universe.
Streams of chance revitalize
The mundane gray horizons
That blanket industrial visions,
Where nails and hammers make
Love to each other, the mechanical
Euphoria erecting shanty towers
Bending to the gravity of need.
Pallid faces are mass produced
In the land of milk and honey.
They said this is where dreams
Were born from black ashes,
Yet only meek weeds were able
To sprout in such parched air.
An awakening is imminent,
Whispered the winds to the leaves.
The youth will fertilize the scorched
Earth with soft, tolerant hands.
Callouses will peel off with the
Soothing touch of promise, as
The old dead skin rides the dust.

I love my black cat,
for all his brokenness, his brain
damage, his tendency to
drool and
to fall off
things.  
I love him dearly,
in spite or perhaps because of
these various defects,
and he loves me back
with a fierce and simple purity
like only idiots can.

Still, I
sometimes wish
we could time travel together,
he and I,
and I could take him to Ancient Egypt
and show the Pharoah, the priests, the acolytes and the slavedrivers.
I'd show them my wonderful cat
with his wobbly eyes, his
flailing windmill limbs and
his perfect idiot love,
and I'd tell them all:
'This is your God.
Reevaluate.'

She was young and slim and beautiful,
my first love,
with skin like licked caramel, and
always smelling, always tasting
like peach candy.  But still,
I sort of envy Bukowski his
300lb *****, the painted leviathan that
swallowed whole his virginity and
broke his bed, before falling snoring asleep
on her wide, sea-creature back, because he
probably learned more from that ugliness
than I ever learned from
beauty.

That said, I envy him more the night
the old dog buried his bone
in six separate gardens,
the dark-haired woman who
sent him a photo of  her
self
reading his book
in the  bath, and the two perfect
blonde Dutch girls his editor found on the great man's lawn
when he called by one evening,
the both of them waiting for Hank to
come home from the track
so they could **** him.

(In response to "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg)

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity,
seen bold new visionaries resign themselves to clinical long-haul deaths,
drug-numbed to their own suffering, and everyone else’s;
seen raving revolutionaries give up, retire to minimalist Swedish-designed armchairs,
and never move again;
seen the horizon dim and draw ever closer,
and the tenacious lunatics with the wanderlust to stray beyond
become fewer and further between.

There are uglier destructive forces than madness:
Consider cognitive rehabilitation.
Consider absolutely nothing immeasurable.
Consider utter rationality.

Ritalin, lithium, risperidone, duloxatine. [I thought I heard a man speaking in tongues,
then I realised he was simply reading out loud from a pharmaceutical directory.]
Imagine a generation of loan brokers and loss adjustors;
Hicks gone these past seventeen years and Leary still alive;
sharks floating in formaldehyde;
all true human significance lost in pretentious symbols,
and repetition
and repetition
and repetition,
and no one raging.
No one raging for real.

Where are Plato’s maniacs now?
Where are their lunatic songs?
I hear only the steady, rational tapping of the accountants’ calculators,
occasionally, some lost and lonely *** crying out for one more shot,
and the PA system calling the next patient through, the doctor will see you now,
or asking would the owner of a light blue Honda Civic please move their vehicle,
as it’s blocking in a black Lexus full of lawyers with an ambulance to chase.

Is there really nowhere between here
and the bellow and buzz, the shiver and shriek of the asylum?
Someplace between this sterile, static, silent, windowless room
and the fizzing frenzy of the electroconvulsion suite,
there must be somewhere we might have paused and breathed and set up shop,
where we could have been happy – if we’d wanted to be –
and no more or less sane than we chose.

Dr Thompson saw it coming: the dawn of this new Age of Equilibrium.
He knew that football season was over, for good this time, and made his ballistic decision
to go stalk peacocks and hound Nixon through the Kingdom Hereafter,
assuring us, ‘Relax – This won’t hurt’.
He was right.

Safe and stable and sanitized, we can no longer follow your desperate, ***** verse.
Straitjacketed by reason, we perceive our world only in terms
of quantum and co-efficiency, of the logical and logistical,
of what can be conjured in the duration of the average commercial break,
of what can be computed to at least two decimal places.

We are the chemically castrated.
We are lobotomised by mutual consent.
We are the perfect ones: regular and moderate and so healthy, so functional.
We are the white strobing smiles of the toothpaste ads,
the poster children for good mental hygiene,
the footsoldiers of no more conflict.

We have lost our skill for the alchemy
that once distilled genius from the seething crucible of lunacy.
We medicate those whose vision would otherwise put our own to shame,
leave them as myopic and blinkered as the rest of us,
the breadth and depth and distance of their sight no longer a worry to anyone.

Give us back our madmen: we need them.
Give us back our crazed anthems, our burning shrouds, our leprous one-man-bands.
Give us back the fire and the filth and the fornication that kept us howling through
those endlessly polluted nights of Windscale and Watergate, McCarthy and motorcades, Hanoi and Hiroshima.

Please.  Give us back our madmen.
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity.